I know that everyone here has tickets to visit The Obama Presidential Center in Chicago (don’t forget to show ID if you want to pay the Illinois resident rate). While visiting this celebration of our greatest president, don’t forget to walk a few steps to the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry and see U-505, one of only two German U-boats captured and towed away by the Allies intact during WWII.
First, why did Ken Griffin abandon Chicago due to crime and disorder and then give the museum, renamed in 2024, $125 million? The gift was in 2019 and Griffin began moving during coronapanic and the mostly peaceful BLM protests of 2020. Proving just how wrong Griffin was about crime and disorder in Chicago, the police send three officers, each with a firearms and explosives-sniffing canine, to the museum all-day every day:
The sub, launched in 1941, is enormous (251′ long):
The torpedoes are also huge and, unlike U.S. WWII torpodoes, weren’t incompetently engineered. The German torpedoes were undersea Teslas, powered by batteries, and were guided by acoustic homing.
If you want to feel better about your job, the U.S. Navy guys who forced U-505 to surface off Cape Verde raced into the sinking vessel as soon as the Germans had evacuated. They expected 12 timed explosive charges to be set and also a massive pipe letting in seawater. Their heroism is explained in Codename Nemo. A big part of the solution, after the pipe hatch was closed and the timed charges were diarmed, was to let the propellers spin while the sub was being towed. This charged the batteries and, thus, enabled the sub’s own pumps to clear out the water.
After some years in now-tax-free New Hampshire, the sub was towed past Maine on her way to Chicago and they picked up some Graham Platner campaign items:
The museum also has a good exhibit, including original artifacts, of Enigma machines.
Capturing a submarine turns out to be a great way to start a birdwatching club:
What’s it like inside? Photos from the guided (by Jessie, who was awesome!) tour:
One thing that we learned on the tour: the U.S. violated the Geneva Convention by not allowing the captured crew of U-505 to send letters back home nor notifying their relatives that U-505 had been captured rather than sunk. The Red Cross was not allowed to visit the 58 prisoners in Ruston, Louisiana. We wanted to keep the June 4, 1944 capture a secret so that the Germans wouldn’t know that we had their codebooks, etc.
Where did the museum folks get the money to build an underground bunker big enough to preserve the submarine from the Chicago weather? From a foundation established by Robert R. McCormick, founder of the Chicago Tribute and famously opposed to U.S. involvement in Europe’s second huge war within one generation. The bunker celebrating U.S. involvement in WWII is named “the McCormick Tribute Foundation Exhibition Hall.”
You can spend an entire day in this museum. I’ll write some more about it.
Loosely related… the 2020 Tom Hanks movie Greyhound, about the poor chances that Allied convoys had of crossing the North Atlantic in early 1942.
See also Baltimore bridge destruction reading: a biography of Rudolf Diesel for some history regarding the man (and MAN, the company that Diesel first worked with and the company that made the engine for U-505) who made modern submarines practical.
If Peter Sellers were German prisoner:
“It was just their way of having a bit of fun, the swines. Strange thing is they make such bloody good binoculars”.
From the temple on the hill:
“You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be. For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, there is new ground to cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. America is not the project of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘we.’ ‘We The People.’ ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ‘Yes We Can.’ That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.”
What a crock of shit. “The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘we.’” I thought it was “money”, bro. I could spend a whole day disarming this delusional torpedo of words. He could have used his Harvard education to translate this to Latin, so I would have to work a little to be nauseous. I hope when that ugly brutalist building crumbles from shoddy construction, they turn it back into a much needed park.
Thanks for posting about the Griffin Museum, Phil. I’ll have to tour it when I visit my in-laws in Riverside, one of the first planned communities (by Olmstead, of Central Park fame). They are being hit with giant property tax bills, just as their daughters are going to college. Their neighbors shun them because they aren’t woke enough.
“‘We The People.’ ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ‘Yes We Can.’”
We The People: Source, U.S. Constitution
We Shall Overcome: Source, civil rights anthem, from a religious hymn
Yes We Can: Source, pithy, constructed campaign refrain from a declawed corporate liberal (“We” being campaign donors, enumeration of whom left to the reader as an exercise)
(Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Most of my resistance is used overcoming my unencumbered-ness.)
That museum has a reputation of hassling photographers. A gootuber was trying to go beyond the drive by phone snaps & document the quality of the welds. He found the germans went great lengths with inferior stick welding technology to match modern amerikan MIG welding. Greyhoud featured U-107, the boat that tried to end all future blog commenting.