On This Date In History

On June 4, 1944, one of Adolf Hitler’s deadly submarines, the U-505, is seized as it makes its way home after patrolling the Gold Coast of Africa. The German submarine was the first enemy warship captured on the high seas by the U.S. Navy since the War of 1812.
If ever there was a submarine laden with bad luck it was Germany’s U-505.
Spotted during a sonar sweep 150 miles from the coast of Rio De Oro, Africa by a “hunter-killer” task group commanded by U.S. Navy Capt. Daniel V. Gallery that included the USS Chatelain, USS Guadalcanal, USS Flaherty, USS Jenks, USS Pillsbury and USS Pope, the submarine had been being tracked by Allied intelligence via radio waves.
After the surrendered German survivors were picked up from the U-boat (all but one lived), Lt. (junior grade) Albert L. David led a group of nine men down the hatch of the U-505, salvaging the U-boat and recovering invaluable code books and papers that were used by Allied forces to help in code-breaking.
There were 14 demolition charges onboard the U-505 in the event of a capture, but the charges were never set by the crew.
Yet only 13 demolition charges were found when the U-505 was boarded. It wasn't until weeks after its capture that the last demolition charge was finally found.
The U-505 capture yielded approximately 900 pounds of codebooks and documents, as well as two Enigma machines, making it the largest intelligence seizure in the Battle of the Atlantic. This information saved the U.S. Navy code-breaking team an estimated 13,000 computer hours and greatly aided their decoding work during the rest of the war.
Despite sinking eight Allied ships early in the war, the U-505 was considered one of the unluckiest U-boats during the war. The first captain had to cut a patrol short because of appendicitis. Under the command of a new captain, subsequent patrols were shortened because of mysterious equipment malfunctions, some apparently a result of sabotage. The second captain became an object of contempt throughout the U-boat community, he would commit suicide during a bomb and depth charge attack.
The U-505 was at sea for 81 days and traveled 7,977 miles before its capture.
The capture took less than 30 minutes.
The U-505 was towed to Bermuda and studied under secrecy, painted to look like an American sub and renamed the USS Nemo so as not to alert German intelligence that she had been captured.
Following the end of the war, the U.S., Britain, France and the Soviet Union divided the remaining 153 U-boats among themselves to assess their capabilities.
Split between U.S., Britain, France and the Soviet Union, it was stipulated that the reaming 153 U-boats would be scrapped or sunk within two years.
The Germans commissioned nearly 1,200 U-boats during the war, but only 859 were deployed for operational patrols.
Three hundred and twenty-one U-boats attacked, damaged or sank Allied ships.
David was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions. The 58 captured Germans, deemed prisoners of war, were sent to a POW camp in Ruston, Louisiana, while the U-505 was towed 2,500 nautical miles to Bermuda.
The top-secret capture of the submarine was not made public until 9 days after Germany’s May 7, 1945 surrender, and the U-505 was eventually part of a military fundraising tour. On September 25, 1954, the submarine was named a war memorial and, in 1989, it received National Historic Landmark designation.

On June 4, 1919, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing American women the right to vote, is passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification.
The women’s suffrage movement was founded in the mid-19th century by women who had become politically active through their work in the abolitionist and temperance movements. In July 1848, 240 woman suffragists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, met in Seneca Falls, New York, to assert the right of women to vote. Female enfranchisement was still largely opposed by most Americans, and the distraction of the North-South conflict and subsequent Civil War precluded further discussion. During the Reconstruction Era, the 15th Amendment was adopted, granting African American men the right to vote, but the Republican dominated Congress failed to expand its progressive radicalism into the sphere of gender.
In 1869, the National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was formed to push for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Another organization, the American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Lucy Stone, was organized in the same year to work through the state legislatures. In 1890, these two societies were united as the National American Woman Suffrage Association. That year, Wyoming became the first state to grant women the right to vote.
By the beginning of the 20th century, the role of women in American society was changing drastically; women were working more, receiving a better education, bearing fewer children, and several states had authorized female suffrage. In 1913, the National Woman’s party organized the voting power of these enfranchised women to elect congressional representatives who supported woman suffrage, and by 1916 both the Democratic and Republican parties openly endorsed female enfranchisement. In 1919, the 19th Amendment, which stated that “the rights of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” passed both houses of Congress and was sent to the states for ratification. Eight days later, the 19th Amendment took effect.

On June 4, 1942, the Battle of Midway, one of the most decisive U.S. victories against Japan during World War II, begins. During the four-day sea-and-air battle, the outnumbered U.S. Pacific Fleet succeeded in destroying four Japanese aircraft carriers while losing only one of its own, the Yorktown, to the previously invincible Japanese navy.
In six months of offensives prior to Midway, the Japanese had triumphed in lands throughout the Pacific, including Malaysia, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines and numerous island groups. The United States, however, was a growing threat, and Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto sought to destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet before it was large enough to outmatch his own.
A thousand miles northwest of Honolulu, the strategic island of Midway became the focus of his scheme to smash U.S. resistance to Japan’s imperial designs. Yamamoto’s plan consisted of a feint toward Alaska followed by an invasion of Midway by a Japanese strike force. When the U.S. Pacific Fleet arrived at Midway to respond to the invasion, it would be destroyed by the superior Japanese fleet waiting unseen to the west. If successful, the plan would eliminate the U.S. Pacific Fleet and provide a forward outpost from which the Japanese could eliminate any future American threat in the Central Pacific. U.S. intelligence broke the Japanese naval code, however, and the Americans anticipated the surprise attack.
In the meantime, 200 miles to the northeast, two U.S. attack fleets caught the Japanese force entirely by surprise and destroyed three heavy Japanese carriers and one heavy cruiser. The only Japanese carrier that initially escaped destruction, the Hiryu, unleashed all its aircraft against the American task force and managed to seriously damage the U.S. carrier Yorktown, forcing its abandonment. At about 5:00 p.m., dive-bombers from the U.S. carrier Enterprise returned the favor, mortally damaging the Hiryu. It was scuttled the next morning.
When the Battle of Midway ended, Japan had lost four carriers, a cruiser and 292 aircraft, and suffered an estimated 2,500 casualties. The U.S. lost the Yorktown, the destroyer USS Hammann, 145 aircraft and suffered approximately 300 casualties.
Japan’s losses hobbled its naval might, bringing Japanese and American sea power to approximate parity, and marked the turning point in the Pacific theater of World War II. In August 1942, the great U.S. counteroffensive began at Guadalcanal and did not cease until Japan’s surrender three years later.