Leader of boarding party which recovered an Enigma machine dead at 95

[gary]

The U.K's Telegraph has an obituary today for English Lieutenant
Commander David Balme, born October 1 1920 who died on January 3 2016.

Balme led a boarding party which captured the Enigma coding machine from
German U-boat U-110 during the Battle of Convoy OB318 in May 1941.

Originally Posted by Telegraph

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 organised a 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.

Article here -
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obit...-obituary.html

[I.C.D (Ian)]

What a great day for MI6 and Alan Turing and the war in general because from that machine they could brake other German codes as well