The premier artifact at the Museum of Science and Industry, a captured U-505 German submarine, will resurface June 5 in a $35 million subterranean room of its own, going back on public display for the first time in three years in dramatic fashion.
Since it arrived at the museum 51 years ago, 24 million people have toured the 252-foot U-boat. But being stored outdoors through the city’s cold winters and blistering summers took a serious physical toll, and the submarine was closed in 2002 to prepare for its move to a new underground, climate-controlled home.
Even regular visitors to the former exhibit are likely to look with new eyes upon the old war trophy, presented now in a 300-foot room built to resemble a drydock and enriched with custom-made new features that give its story visceral impact.
“We realized we were going to have to put the U-505 under the protection of a roof, or we were going to lose it,” said David Mosena, the museum president.
“The issue was whether it was worth saving by spending so many millions on preserving it. That seemed easy to answer. It has incredible value as a teaching tool for science, history, technology and exploration, and in the new exhibit we wanted to do a better job with that.
“But I also wanted it to be a real memorial to the men and women of World War II, not in the staid, somber sense, but to turn it into living history with real people and their stories.”
Well before visitors get to see the sub itself, for example, they can watch a 5-minute play on a life-size set of a World War II naval intelligence war room. It is acted out continuously by ghostly, projected images of actors portraying characters including the female radio traffic analysts who guided a Navy anti-submarine task force to the U-505 on June 4, 1944.
Another Hollywood-style set re-creates the bridge of the USS Guadalcanal, the command ship from which Capt. Daniel Gallery, mastermind of the sub’s capture, directed his task force of destroyers and an aircraft carrier to attack.
Sitting in his command chair on the bridge is a mannequin of Gallery, whose likeness was replicated by New York studio craftsmen who consulted scores of photographs and old film footage of the Chicago native. The mannequin appears to stare tensely through the window of the bridge, where images of the capture are projected–a combination of archival footage and dramatic re-creations filmed in California.
Elsewhere there are moving first-person accounts of the capture recorded by surviving members of the boarding crew that stopped the scuttled sub from sinking. High-tech simulators allow visitors to try to dive and maneuver a sub under water and to use periscopes to fire torpedoes and locate safe havens to surface.
The real star of the show, however, remains the U-505 itself. It looked big when it sat outside the museum for 50 years. Now completely enclosed in a great, vault-like space near the museum’s northern facade, it looks enormous.
The new exhibit gives a visual perspective on the vessel few have had before, as the visitor passageway begins high above its wooden deck, accentuating its graceful, clean lines and the scars of war it suffered. Those include numerous holes punched through its superstructure by U.S. cannon and machinegun fire on the day it was captured, killing one German and causing the amputation of the sub commander’s leg.
From this high vantage point, visitors follow a ramp that gradually descends along the length of the boat, winding nearly around the entire vessel.
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Admission into all but the sub’s interior is free with regular museum admission, but the guided tour inside the vessel will cost $5.
Several new books in recent years by U-505 crew members and scholars have greatly added to the lore of the colorful sub’s troubled war history.
The Nazi strategy to win the war, which nearly succeeded, was to flood the Atlantic Ocean with packs of hunter submarines to chase down freighters carrying war supplies to its enemies. The idea was to sink the supplies and starve the enemy into submission.
The most successful model of submarine the Nazis built was the Type IX class–big, long-range and heavily armed, designed to travel and operate as “lone wolves.” The U-505 is the only Type IX submarine left.
From the German perspective, the U-505’s glory days were in 1942, when it sank eight ships, seven while the sub was under the command of Capt. Alex-Olaf Loewe.
After Loewe was taken critically ill and removed from command, he was replaced by the young, high-strung Capt. Peter Zschech. He oversaw the sinking of one ship in November 1942. From then on, the U-505 hit a string of mishaps and never sank another.
In one subsequent attack, the sub nearly sank under Allied bombing and limped back to its home port in L’Orient, France, with a ruptured hull. French dockworkers–perhaps intentionally, perhaps from lack of resources–repeatedly bungled repairs for months, so the U-505 rarely was operational.
And when it was, the Allies had so perfected anti-submarine warfare that it was subjected to withering attacks. One depth-charge assault on Oct. 28, 1943, was so intense that the stressed-out Zschech killed himself in front of his horrified crew by shooting himself in the head in the submerged sub’s control room.
He was replaced by a German naval reservist, Capt. Harald Lange, who lost his leg during the sub’s capture the next June.
“We wanted to re-create what it was like to be a crew member on the U-505 on June 4, 1944, just before they realized they were surrounded,” said Kurt Haunfelner, the museum’s vice president for exhibits and collections, who was charged with staging the new exhibit.
In preparing the sub to be redisplayed, nothing was done to visibly alter its interior from how it looked in the old exhibit, he said. Workmen did install additional hidden interior lighting that is designed to subtly highlight interior gear and spaces that help tell how German sailors lived in and used the boat.
They also added 48 hidden speakers to the interior that re-create the sounds of life in the crew’s cramped quarters, from the sailors’ favorite French music on record players and the sounds of food preparation in the galley to engine roar and pings of enemy sonar on the hull.
“Surviving German crew members have been generous in making donations to the exhibit,” said Haunfelner, referring to more than 200 personal artifacts in exhibit cases installed in the hall around the sub.
Because Gallery’s men discovered top-secret German code machines on the U-505, the capture was kept secret until the end of the war to conceal the find from German intelligence. The German crew was sent to a secret POW camp in Louisiana, and the sub was reported simply as “missing.” The crew’s families thought the men had perished at sea until after the war.
At least two surviving U-505 crewmen are expected to come to a special June 4 preview tour of the new exhibit. It will be the first viewing, too, for an expected 100 or more surviving American veterans of the task force Gallery commanded in the sub’s capture.
“They have been coming here for years to hold their annual unit reunion,” Haunfelner said of the American vets. “They really are looking forward to seeing how the new exhibit turned out.”
If you go
What: The revamped
U-505 exhibit
Where: Museum of Science and Industry, 5700 S. Lake Shore Drive
When: Opens June 5
How much? Exterior free with regular admission. Interior tour for additional $5.
Information: Call 773-684-1414 or go online to www.msichicago.org.
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