If you saw that
Matthew McCohnaughey movie, U-571, you’d think that it was the Americans who managed to grab one of the German’s Top Secret Enigma Code Machines…but when the actual event took place, on this date in 1941,there were no American accents present. The relatively new German Boat U-110 was attacking a convoy in the north atlantic just south of Iceland when it was crippled by Depth Charges dropped by a british destroyer. The submarine surfaced, and Captain Fritz Julius Lemp ordered german sailors to abandon ship and scuttle the boat. Well, they heard the first part, and abandoned the ship…but as damaged as it was, it failed to sink. Lenk tried to swim back to the boat to scuttle it, but the story has it a british sailor picked him off before he made it Crewman from the HMS Broadway and the HMS Bulldog scrambled aboard the U-110 and took just about everything portable in the ship…it was Scots Sailor and Signalman William Stewart Pollack who nabbed the Enigma. This capture of the German Secret Code Machine was one of the biggest secret successes of World War II and even Franklyn Roosevelt didn’t hear about it for months, until Winston Churchill quietly told him. The secret information gathered By British Codebreakers and the capture of the Enigma were crucial to the war effort…Churchill himself estimates it took two years off the war. There was no part for Matthew McConaughey.
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Album Notes: Grateful Acknowledgements to Mike Koenig, and Drum 8. “Anxiety” Written and Performed by Kevin McLeod. Licensed under Creative Commons “Attribution 3.0″ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ and used here by permission, and with appreciation and thanks.
The Scotsmans name was William Stewart Pollock -not Pollack. I know this as he was my father…