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Comment by SEJeff | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, there is another captured german Uboat at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, U505, where they also captured an Enigma machine. This mission was also secret, and this was actually captured by American sailors, not british ones.

http://www.msichicago.org/whats-here/exhibits/u-505/

The tours are absolutely fascinating. Anyone visiting Chicago who is a history buff should check it out.

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Actually they captured two. I posted about this in this thread earlier only to find my comment at -2. Not sure why the sudden downvotes, especially considering I posted about the U505 before you did. Regardless, here is the link:

http://www.msichicago.org/whats-here/exhibits/u-505/the-exhi...

Yes, MSI has one of the Enigmas on-premises and can be viewed if you pay for the tour (U505 tour is not part of standard admissions and sells out everyday). I'm something of an MSI junkie and can't recommend this enough. Its an incredibly under-appreciated museum. If it was in LA or NYC it would probably be world famous. Being 25 minutes south of Chicago's downtown seems to have hurt its prestige. Its too far for tourists to go without a car unless they really want to hoof it via public trans, which takes almost an hour from downtown.

Interestingly enough, its on the site and housed in a building (The Palace of Fine Arts) built for Chicago's infamous Columbian World's Fair from 1893 where guys like Edison, General Electric, Tesla, Westinghouse, and others showed off the new technology of various electrical innovations (neon light, long distance power transmission, powerful electric motors, etc) for home and industry.

This is the location of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. This was one of my favorite family vacation destinations as a child (around 1960).

The 1893 Columbian World's Fair is written about in the fascinating book by Erik Larson, Devil in the White City.

I grew up in Chicago, and I must second this. The tour is amazing.

The U505 initially was outside the museum, but a few years ago they moved it into its own beautifully done concrete hall [1]. I highly recommend it if you're in town and have the time.

[1] http://www.msichicago.org/fileadmin/Exhibits/permanent/u505/...

Wow this looks great, I'd love to visit if I came to Chicago some time. Here in Liverpool we have a U-Boat but it's cut into cross sections with transparent panels so that you can see inside. I think actually being inside the thing would give you a better idea of the atmosphere and what it would have been like.

http://www.u-boatstory.co.uk/

It is a shame Hollywood has a tendency to portray the successes of the Allies in general as being conducted purely by American citizens.

Of course it doesn't help that the other nations don't actively promote their forces in the same manner the Americans do - perhaps good, perhaps bad.

There are some splendid UK films about the Battle of the Atlantic - my favourite being The Cruel Sea.

NB The author of the novel on which the The Cruel Sea is based, Nicholas Monsarrat, wrote a moving account of his own service - Three Corvettes - which is one of the few books that has reduced me to tears. Funnily enough I happened to read the book while flying over the North Atlantic...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Monsarrat

> NB The author of the novel on which the The Cruel Sea is based, Nicholas Monsarrat, wrote a moving account of his own service - Three Corvettes - which is one of the few books that has reduced me to tears. Funnily enough I happened to read the book while flying over the North Atlantic...

Alistair MacLean's HMS Ulysses is another of those. I read it as a teenager and a couple of scenes are as sharp in my mind as the day I read it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Ulysses_(novel)

That is a fantastic book indeed. It's on the Combat Studies Institute reading list, and rightly so.

That narrative worked 50 years ago but not anymore.

The serie Foyle's War has excellent details about the impact of the war on normal citizens of southeast UK. I grew up in Normandie, on the other side of the channel, and heard the same stories from my grand-parents.

While he was still alive, a crew member of U505 actually did the tours. Talk about surreal...

the story of how they got the craft indoors is pretty neat too.

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