OBITUARY : Lieutenant Commander David Balme

Sunday 03 Jan 2016

OBITUARY : Lieutenant Commander David Balme
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Leader of the boarding party which recovered an Enigma machine from a 
German U-boat in 1941


Lieutenant Commander David Balme, who has died aged 95, led a boarding 
party which captured the secrets of Enigma from a German U-boat during 
the Battle of Convoy OB138 in May 1941, a turning point in the Battle of 
the Atlantic.

At midday on May 9 1941 Commander Joe Baker-Cresswell, captain of the 
destroyer Bulldog, was about to order the ships of the 3rd Escort Group 
to leave west-bound trans-Atlantic Convoy OB318 in order to refuel at 
Iceland, when two merchant ships were torpedoed in quick succession. The 
torpedoes were fired from U-110, commanded by the U-boat ace 
Fritz-Julius Lemp, who failed to notice the proximity of the corvette 
Aubretia. Before his second salvo of torpedoes struck, Aubretia’s 
Lieutenant Commander Vivian Smith commenced a counter-attack with depth 
charges which blew U-110 to the surface.

The destroyer Broadway attempted to ram the surfaced U-boat and all 
three British ships opened fire with their guns. There was panic in 
U-110 and the crew abandoned ship: 15 men were killed or drowned 
including Lemp, and 32 survivors were picked up and hurried below deck 
in Aubretia. The action was over in minutes, and when Baker-Cresswell 
stopped Bulldog alongside the U-boat he found it wallowing stern-down in 
the Atlantic rollers.

Balme was ordered to row across in Bulldog’s whaler to “getwhatever you 
can out of her – documents, books, charts, and get the wireless 
settings, anything like that”. Jumping on to the U-boat’s outer hull he 
walked, revolver in hand, to the conning tower, at which point he had to 
holster his pistol in order to climb three ladders to the top of the 
tower and down again inside the U-boat to the control room. It was, he 
later recalled, “a very nasty moment because both my hands were occupied 
and I was a sitting target to anyone down below”.

Balme was very frightened; he expected the boat to sink, or scuttling 
charges to blow up at any moment, or to be overcome by chlorine from 
damaged batteries. The inside of the boat was dimly lit, there was a 
“nasty” hissing noise, and he could hear water slopping in the bilges. 
“I immediately went right for’d and right aft with my revolver in my 
hand to see if there was anybody about,” he said later. Noting that 
despite damage the U-boat was clean and well-kept and there was food on 
the table, but finding no Germans aboard, Balme called down the boarding 
party and “started ransacking all the treasures of the U-boat”.

In the wireless office, telegraphist Alan Long found “a funny sort of 
instrument, Sir, it looks like a typewriter but when you press the keys 
something else comes up on it”. Balme recognised this as “some sort of 
coding machine”, which he ordered to be unscrewed, and he organiseda 
human chain to carry the machine and other equipment, charts and 
documents up the ladders and into the whaler.

Balme and Long had found an Enigma machine, the cipher device which the 
German U-boat service used to communicate to its fleet in, as the 
Germans thought, an unbreakable code. Besides that day’s settings they 
also recovered the daily settings until the end of June, which, when 
delivered later to Bletchley Park, enabled Alan Turing and his team to 
read the German naval “Hydra” code, the officer-only code, and, with the 
knowledge and experience gained, to go on to crack several other codes. 
Lemp’s crew were so demoralised and ill-disciplined that later in prison 
camp they talked freely to their interrogators about U-110 and about 
other boats in which they had served.

Balme and his men spent six hours inside U-110, where for some time they 
were left alone in the Atlantic, listening to the distant sound of depth 
charges while the 3rd Escort Group hunted another U-boat. When Bulldog 
returned, Balme passed a towline, and for a day U-110 was pulled towards 
Iceland, until about 11.00 on May 10 1941 when the German vessel reared 
its bows in the air and sank stern-first.

The loss of U-110 enabled the British to throw a cloak of secrecy over 
the whole affair, a cloak so dark that even when Captain Stephen 
Roskill, the official historian of the Royal Navy, wrote about the 
capture in 1959, only those already in the know were able to read 
between the lines and would have realised that the secret of the capture 
was not the U-boat but the Enigma material which was salvaged from it. 
Balme had been told that the truth of his secret capture would be kept 
forever, and was surprised when in the 1970s its secrets began to leak out.

Baker-Cresswell and Smith were awarded the DSO, Balme the DSC, and Long 
the DSM, for enterprise and skill in action against enemy submarines.

There were also breaches of security: Baker-Cresswell had told Balme to 
bring him back a pair of binoculars. Balme brought back two, and he used 
these swastika-stamped Zeiss binoculars in his yacht for 50 years. He 
also pinched Lemp’s cap from his cabin, keeping it as a souvenir until 
he presented it to the Imperial War Museum in 2003.....


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/12078997/Lieutenant-Commander-David-Balme-obituary.html

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