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The Silent Heist of U-110: How Sub-Lieutenant David Balme and a Ghost Boarding Party Raided a Sinking Nazi Submarine and Unlocked the Enigma Code That Saved the Western World
The wartime naval records from the Battle of the Atlantic contain numerous citations for extraordinary heroism, but none match the staggering strategic significance of what took place aboard the crippled U-110. When military intelligence officers reviewed the captured materials brought home by Sub-Lieutenant David Balme, they realized that a single boarding action had completely unmasked the entire German submarine deployment strategy for the next several months.
Balme looked into the dark, flooding compartments of the Nazi vessel and chose to push forward regardless of the immense personal danger, transforming a routine anti-submarine engagement into the greatest intelligence heist of modern history.
His actions earned his crew a permanent place in the shadows of victory but left a legacy that was suppressed for fifty years to protect global intelligence operations. Read the full, incredibly detailed account of how these young British sailors captured the unbreakable Enigma machine in the comments section below!
The Secret Stranglehold of the Atlantic
By the spring of 1941, the United Kingdom was standing on the absolute precipice of total national annihilation. The Battle of Britain had been won in the skies, but a far more insidious, existential threat was systematically tearing at the lifeblood of the island nation from the dark, freezing depths of the Atlantic Ocean. This was the Battle of the Atlantic, a relentless, unyielding campaign of economic strangulation orchestrated by Admiral Karl Dönitz and his elite fleet of German U-boats. Great Britain, completely dependent on continuous maritime convoys from the United States and Canada for its food, fuel, raw industrial materials, and military ammunition, was rapidly losing the war of logistics.
Dönitz had perfected a devastating, revolutionary tactical doctrine known as the Rudeltaktik, or the “Wolfpack.” Instead of operating as isolated raiders, German submarines would deploy in wide, sweeping lines across the known transatlantic shipping lanes. When a single U-boat spotted an Allied convoy, it would not launch an immediate attack; instead, it would shadow the merchant ships from a safe distance, transmitting continuous, encrypted radio signals to update the German submarine command in Lorient, France.
Dönitz’s headquarters would then coordinate a massive, synchronized concentration of multiple U-boats to converge on the target simultaneously under the complete cover of darkness. The results were completely catastrophic. Hundreds of thousands of tons of vital shipping were being sent to the bottom of the ocean every single month, outstripping the combined shipbuilding capacity of the Allies to replace them.
The absolute foundation of the Wolfpack’s devastating efficacy was its perfect, seemingly unbreakable operational security. Every single radio transmission, tactical command, and deployment order sent between the U-boats and their land-based command centers was thoroughly encrypted using an extraordinarily sophisticated electromechanical rotor cipher machine known as the Enigma. To the German high command, and to Adolf Hitler himself, the Enigma code was considered absolutely, mathematically unbreachable by human intelligence.
At Bletchley Park, a secret Victorian estate situated in the Buckinghamshire countryside, a brilliant team of eccentric British mathematicians, linguists, and logicians—including the legendary Alan Turing—were working night and day to crack the German military ciphers. While they had achieved significant breakthroughs against the standard German Army and Air Force Enigma networks, the Naval Enigma variant, code-named Heimisch (and later Dolphin by the British), remained an impenetrable wall of mathematical darkness. The Naval Enigma utilized a more complex set of operational procedures, including an expanded selection of interchangeable rotors and a rapidly changing system of daily key settings books that completely reset the encryption parameters every twenty-four hours. Without direct access to an actual, physical Naval Enigma machine and, more importantly, the highly classified printed codebooks that accompanied it, Turing and his team were fighting a blind, losing battle against time. They were trying to solve a puzzle with billions of shifting permutations while the merchant crews were burning alive in the icy waters of the Atlantic.
The Climax of Convoy OB 318
The historic intersection of destiny, technology, and raw human courage occurred in the turbulent, storm-swept waters south of Iceland on May 9, 1941. A massive Allied merchant convoy, designated OB 318, was carving its way westward through the heavy swells, heavily laden with industrial goods and escorted by a protective screen of British naval warships. Among the primary escort vessels was the HMS Bulldog, a seasoned H-class destroyer commanded by Commander Joe Baker-Cresswell, an experienced, highly capable anti-submarine specialist. Serving as the ship’s sub-lieutenant and secondary watch officer was twenty-year-old David Balme, a poised, sharp-witted young professional who had entered the Royal Navy with a deep, traditional sense of maritime discipline.
Unbeknownst to the lookouts on the merchant vessels, their progress was being carefully monitored through a dual-lens periscope. Operating beneath the waves was U-110, a powerful, modern Type IXB German submarine commanded by Kapitänleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp. Lemp was a highly decorated, aggressive U-boat ace who was already infamous within naval history; on the very first day of the war in September 1939, he had made the controversial, tragic error of torpedoing the civilian passenger liner SS Athenia, killing over a hundred innocent civilians. Lemp was eager to redeem his professional standing with the German high command and had been tracking Convoy OB 318 for hours, waiting for the perfect tactical opening to unleash his lethal payload.
At approximately 11:40 AM, Lemp made his move, penetrating the outer protective screen of the naval escorts and firing a rapid, devastating salvo of torpedoes into the center of the merchant columns. Within a matter of minutes, two large cargo vessels, the Esmond and the Bengore Head, were struck by massive, internal explosions that ripped through their hulls, sending plumes of black smoke and debris hundreds of feet into the air. The convoy erupted into a state of immediate, chaotic panic as the crippled merchant ships began to list heavily, their crews desperately launching lifeboats into the freezing sea.
However, Lemp’s aggressive penetration of the convoy perimeter had exposed his own position to the watchful eyes and acoustic sensors of the British escorts. The corvette HMS Aubretia immediately detected a sharp, rhythmic underwater return on its ASDIC (sonar) equipment, indicating the precise presence of a metallic submarine hull sitting directly beneath the churning wake of the merchant ships. Aubretia raced toward the contact, dropping a precise, devastating pattern of heavy depth charges that detonated with a series of massive, underwater concussions.
The explosions slammed into U-110 like a series of giant, iron sledgehammers. Inside the submarine, the lights instantly failed, plunging the crew into a terrifying darkness illuminated only by the flickering red glow of emergency indicator lamps. The structural bulkheads groaned under the immense shockwaves, heavy steel rivets sheared off and flew through the compartments like bullets, and vital pipe networks ruptured, spraying high-pressure water, blinding oil, and toxic chlorine gas from the cracked batteries directly into the faces of the panicked German sailors. The submarine began to lose buoyancy rapidly, pitching violently forward as the electric motors sputtered and died. Realizing that his vessel was on the verge of a catastrophic internal collapse that would trap his entire crew in a deep watery grave, Lemp ordered the emergency blowing of all ballast tanks. With a sudden, massive surge of compressed air, the crippled U-110 breached the surface of the ocean, rolling heavily into the bright daylight right in the middle of the waiting British destroyer fleet.
The Ghost Ship of the Atlantic
The sudden appearance of the German submarine triggered an immediate, furious response from the surrounding British warships. The HMS Bulldog and the closing destroyer HMS Broadway instantly trained their main four-inch deck guns and heavy machine guns onto the exposed target, unleashing a blistering wall of high-explosive shells and tracer rounds that shredded the submarine’s conning tower and prevented the German gun crews from ever reaching their own deck weapons. Commander Baker-Cresswell ordered the Bulldog to increase speed to maximum, turning the heavy steel bow of his destroyer directly toward the U-110 with the full intention of ramming the submarine and cutting it completely in half.
Inside the shattered hull of U-110, Lemp believed that his vessel was on the absolute verge of sinking. The heavy impacts of the surrounding naval shells and the terrifying roar of the approaching British destroyers created an atmosphere of total, unadulterated panic among the young German crewmen. Lemp gave the definitive, historic order to completely abandon ship. He gave instructions for the crew to open the internal sea cocks and activate the pre-set explosive scuttling charges designed to systematically destroy the submarine’s critical machinery and send it rapidly to the bottom of the ocean before it could be compromised by the enemy.
The German sailors flooded out of the narrow conning tower hatches, diving frantically into the freezing, oil-slicked waters of the Atlantic without life jackets or winter gear, their hands raised in a desperate plea for surrender. As Commander Baker-Cresswell guided the HMS Bulldog into its final ramming turn, he made a sudden, brilliant tactical calculation. He noticed that the German crew was abandoning the vessel with extraordinary haste, leaving the submarine sitting remarkably level in the water, and more importantly, he saw that the German deck guns were completely unmanned. Recognizing a once-in-a-lifetime intelligence opportunity that defied every standard rule of naval engagement, Baker-Cresswell threw his engines into full reverse, avoiding a fatal collision by a matter of mere yards, and bellowed an urgent command through his megaphone: “Away boarding party! Away boarding party!”
Sub-Lieutenant David Balme was standing on the bridge when the command was issued. At just twenty years of age, he was suddenly thrust into the role of field commander for a mission that carried an unimaginable weight of historical responsibility. He rapidly assembled a skeleton boarding party consisting of eight young, raw British sailors, including an experienced naval telegraphist named Claude Wileman and a rugged engineering petty officer.
The men scrambled into a small, fragile wooden whaler boat that was lowered into the heavy Atlantic swells. They were armed only with standard-issue Webley revolvers and Lee-Enfield rifles, completely unaware of what they would find across the open water. As they rowed desperately toward the drifting, silent shape of U-110, Balme looked at the iron hull and felt a profound sense of chilling apprehension. The submarine was a phantom vessel, riding low in the waves, surrounded by the bobbing heads of its crying crewmen, and completely devoid of any visible signs of life. It was a floating booby trap waiting to detonate.
Plunging Into the Iron Tomb
When the wooden whaler finally bumped against the slippery, rust-streaked saddle tanks of U-110, David Balme was the very first man to scramble onto the wet steel deck. He stood alone for a moment, his boots sliding in the thick fuel oil that coated the superstructure, his revolver drawn and ready. The silence aboard the submarine was absolute, broken only by the continuous, rhythmic slapping of the cold Atlantic waves against the hull and the distant, fading screams of the swimming German sailors who were being systematically rescued by the other British escorts.
Balme moved cautiously toward the open hatch of the conning tower, his heart hammering against his ribs. He had no way of knowing if a fanatical German rearguard was waiting in the shadows with machine pistols, or if the internal scuttling charges were ticking down their final seconds beneath his feet. He took a deep, steadying breath, climbed over the lip of the hatch, and began his slow descent down the vertical steel ladder into the claustrophobic belly of the iron monster.
The interior of U-110 was a scene of total, apocalyptic devastation. The air was thick, heavy, and hot, smelling strongly of burnt insulation, hydraulic fluid, stale sweat, and the pungent, chemical tang of battery acid. The emergency lighting system had completely failed, leaving the long, narrow corridors bathed in a pitch-black darkness that was broken only by the narrow, dancing beams of Balme’s hand-held naval flashlight.
As he moved deeper into the control room, the visual environment was profoundly eerie. The deck was littered with shattered glass from gauges, scattered navigational charts, abandoned personal clothing, half-eaten meals, and thousands of floating papers that drifted through the rising pool of oily water that had already begun to flood the lower deck plates.
Balme’s immediate priority was to determine if the submarine was on the verge of a sudden, catastrophic sinking. He navigated through the maze of valves and piping to the central control station, checking the primary water level indicators. To his immense relief, he discovered that although the German crew had opened several minor vents, the primary internal sea cocks had remained closed, and more importantly, the anticipated explosive scuttling charges had completely failed to detonate due to the extensive water damage to their electrical firing circuits. The vessel was flooding slowly, buying the British boarding party a precious, highly unstable window of operational time.
Recognizing that every second was a direct gamble against death, Balme poked his head back up through the hatch and hollered for the rest of his boarding party to descend into the hull. He divided his small force with absolute, military efficiency. The engineering petty officer was directed to lead a team into the forward and aft engine rooms, utilizing manual wrenches and wooden plugs to systematically isolate the flooding valves and stabilize the submarine’s buoyancy.
Meanwhile, Balme took Telegraphist Claude Wileman and moved directly into the highly classified operational heart of the vessel: the wireless telegraphy room and the captain’s private sea cabin. It was here, amidst the silent, abandoned instruments of Nazi naval power, that the true purpose of their mission would be realized.
The Holy Grail of Bletchley Park
As Balme and Wileman entered the compact, wood-paneled wireless cabin, their flashlight beams illuminated a highly sophisticated array of radio transmitters, receivers, and acoustic equipment. But Balme’s eyes were instantly drawn to a strange, heavy object that sat prominently on a small steel operator’s desk, looking remarkably like an oversized, polished typewriter enclosed in a sturdy wooden case. Balme approached the desk cautiously, reached out his hand, and lifted the lid of the box. He found himself staring down at a complex keyboard of brass-rimmed keys, a corresponding panel of small glass windows containing individual letters of the alphabet, and a highly intricate series of three rotating aluminum wheels nestled deep within the internal mechanism. Without realizing the immense, world-shattering significance of what he was looking at, David Balme had just become the first Allied officer to lay eyes on an operational, pristine German Naval Enigma machine.
Balme did not touch the keys or attempt to alter the current alignment of the rotors, demonstrating a rare, instinctive intelligence discipline that saved the entire operation from failure. He recognized that the machine’s exact physical state—the precise way the rotors were currently set and the specific path of the patch cables on the forward plugboard—carried an invaluable cryptographic meaning. He immediately ordered Wileman to locate a dry canvas sack and carefully lift the entire machine from the desk, handling it with the absolute reverence one would accord a religious relic.
But the capture of the machine itself was only half the victory. Balme understood that a cipher machine without its corresponding operational instructions was nothing more than an uncrackable mathematical riddle. He began to systematically ransack the entire wireless cabin and the captain’s adjacent private cabin, ripping open steel desk drawers, clearing out personal lockers, and emptying storage bins.
What he uncovered was an absolute cryptographic goldmine that exceeded the wildest dreams of the Allied high command. Hidden beneath a false bottom in Lemp’s personal desk was a thick, highly classified printed document bound in a bright red cover: the Kriegsmarine Naval Enigma Operational Manual.
Adjacent to it were stacks of thin, water-soluble paper booklets printed with columns of blue ink. These were the highly guarded Naval Enigma Settings Keys—the absolute holy grail of Allied intelligence. These booklets contained the precise, day-by-day rotor configurations, plugboard connections, and internal settings that every single German U-boat commander across the globe was required to utilize to configure their Enigma machines for every single twenty-four-hour period over the next three months.
Balme and Wileman worked with a frantic, feverish energy, their boots splashing through the rising, cold water as they stuffed the priceless codebooks, secret navigational charts, tactical grid maps, and internal logbooks into every available canvas sack they could carry. They formed a human chain along the narrow, vertical steel ladder of the conning tower.
With the muscles in their arms burning from exhaustion and their lungs burning from the toxic fumes that were slowly accumulating in the lower compartments, the young British sailors manually hauled the heavy canvas sacks and the wooden Enigma case up through the hatches, passing them onto the deck and lowering them down into the waiting whaler boat. For nearly six consecutive hours, this skeleton crew systematically picked the brains of the German submarine fleet, working inside an unexploded, sinking booby trap while the heavy North Atlantic swells continuously threatened to roll the vessel over and drag them all into the abyss.
The Death of Fritz-Julius Lemp
While David Balme and his men were risking their lives inside the flooding hull of U-110, a brief, dramatic tragedy was unfolding in the open waters surrounding the submarine. Kapitänleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp was swimming in the freezing ocean alongside his surviving officers, watching with a sense of profound, growing horror as the HMS Bulldog positioned itself alongside his abandoned command. To his absolute disbelief, he realized that the British destroyer had not rammed his submarine, and more importantly, he saw that no internal explosions had torn through the hull. His scuttling charges had failed.
The realization of his structural error struck Lemp with a devastating, paralyzing force. He understood with perfect, terrifying clarity that if his submarine was captured intact, the British would secure the Enigma machine and the codebooks, permanently unmasking the entire German naval encryption system and delivering a fatal blow to the entire war effort of the Third Reich. He knew that the ultimate responsibility for this catastrophic security failure rested entirely on his shoulders.
Driven by a sudden, frantic desperation to rectify his error at any cost, Lemp turned away from the British rescue lines and began to swim furiously back toward the U-110. His intention was clear to those who watched from the water: he was going to re-board the submarine, locate the manual scuttling valves, and manually send the vessel to the bottom of the ocean, even if it meant trapping himself inside.
However, as Lemp scrambled toward the low saddle tanks of the submarine, a watchful British boarding sentry stationed on the deck of the closing destroyer spotted the swimming figure approaching the hull. Recognizing that an enemy commander attempting to re-board the vessel represented an immediate, catastrophic threat to the ongoing salvage operation, the sentry raised his rifle and fired a series of warning shots into the water.
Lemp refused to halt, his fingers clawing at the cold steel of the submarine’s outer casing. A final, precise shot struck the water near his head, and the cold, exhausting reality of the Atlantic winter finally claimed him. Lemp slipped beneath the waves and vanished into the dark depths of the ocean, his body never to be recovered. He died in a desperate, failed attempt to destroy the secrets that David Balme was already carrying up the conning tower ladder.
Operation Primrose: The Shroud of Total Secrecy
By the late afternoon of May 9, 1941, David Balme’s boarding party had successfully evacuated the final canvas sacks from the hull of U-110. Commander Baker-Cresswell ordered the Bulldog to attach a massive, steel towing cable to the bow of the captured submarine, attempting to drag the prize back toward a secure naval port in Iceland under the complete cover of darkness.
However, the structural damage inflicted by the initial depth-charge attack had proved too extensive; early the following morning, on May 10, the internal bulkheads of U-110 finally gave way under the immense water pressure. The submarine reared its dark bow high into the air and slid silently beneath the waves, plunging to a permanent resting place over two miles beneath the surface of the North Atlantic.
But the submarine itself was no longer needed. The true prize—the Enigma machine and the heavy canvas sacks containing the pristine codebooks—were securely locked inside the captain’s safe aboard the HMS Bulldog. Baker-Cresswell immediately implemented an extraordinary, near-total communications blackout across his entire fleet, designated under the highly classified operational code name Operation Primrose.
He issued a strict, ironclad directive to every single merchant sailor, naval officer, and German prisoner who had witnessed the engagement: absolutely no mention of the submarine’s capture could ever be transmitted over the radio, written in personal diaries, or spoken aloud in conversation. To the rest of the world, and to the German naval command in Lorient, U-110 was officially listed as having sunk with all hands during a routine depth-charge engagement. Admiral Dönitz remained completely convinced that his precious Enigma code was entirely secure.
When the HMS Bulldog quietly slipped into the naval base at Scapa Flow in northern Scotland, a team of armed military intelligence officers from London was already waiting on the pier. The canvas sacks were transferred directly into their custody under heavy guard and rushed via a high-speed express train straight to the gates of Bletchley Park.
The arrival of Balme’s material at Bletchley Park was greeted by Alan Turing and his fellow codebreakers with an absolute, near-religious ecstasy. For months, they had been staring at an impenetrable wall of shifting variables; now, they were handed the definitive master key to the entire German universe.
Utilizing the captured daily settings keys books, Turing’s team was able to calibrate their massive electromechanical code-breaking computers, known as Bombes, with absolute precision. Within days, the brilliant minds of Bletchley Park achieved what conventional military science considered completely impossible: they completely broke the Naval Enigma code.
The intelligence harvest from Operation Primrose, classified under the absolute highest security designation of Ultra, permanently altered the entire strategic trajectory of World War II. For the remainder of 1941 and throughout 1942, British naval intelligence was able to read Admiral Dönitz’s encrypted operational radio traffic in near-real-time.
When a German Wolfpack assembled to intercept an Allied convoy, the British Admiralty knew the exact coordinates, the exact number of submarines, and the precise timing of the planned attack before the U-boats ever arrived. The Royal Navy was able to quietly reroute hundreds of vulnerable merchant convoys entirely around the hidden submarine lines, ensuring that millions of tons of vital food, fuel, and weapons reached the factories and communities of Great Britain completely unscathed.
Military historians have universally concluded that the intelligence secured by David Balme and his brave young boarding party directly shortened the duration of World War II by a minimum of two full years, effectively saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers, sailors, and civilians across the globe. It was a victory of pure intellect and raw tactical execution that broke the back of the Nazi war machine without firing a single shot on land.
The Long Silence and the Post-War Legacy
Following his extraordinary, historic exploit aboard U-110, Sub-Lieutenant David Balme was awarded the prestigious Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) for his gallantry in the face of the enemy, while Commander Baker-Cresswell was honored with the Distinguished Service Order (DSO). However, because the entire operation was shrouded in the absolute highest level of wartime secrecy, there were no public parades, no front-page newspaper profiles, and no international media celebrations for the young men who had saved the western world. Balme was ordered to return to active sea duty, his lips sealed by the Official Secrets Act, unable to share the true nature of his achievements with his friends, his colleagues, or even his own parents.
Balme continued to serve the Royal Navy with a quiet, exemplary professionalism throughout the remainder of the global conflict, eventually transferring to the Fleet Air Arm, where he qualified as a skilled naval pilot and commanded an active squadron of torpedo bombers during the final, victorious campaigns in the Mediterranean and Pacific theaters. He retired from active military service following the conclusion of the war, transitioning into a successful, quiet civilian career as a respected professional manager within the traditional British wool industry.
For over fifty consecutive years, the incredible story of the raid on U-110 remained completely buried deep within the ultra-classified archival vaults of the British Ministry of Defence. Balme lived his life in absolute, unassuming modesty, never boasting of his past or seeking recognition for his raw physical courage. It was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the British government finally began to systematically declassify the monumental achievements of Bletchley Park and the true extent of the Ultra intelligence program, that the veil of secrecy was finally lifted.
The world was completely stunned to discover that the turning point of the entire naval war had been engineered not by a massive fleet of battleships or an ambitious grand strategy, but by a twenty-year-old sub-lieutenant climbing down a dark, toxic ladder into a sinking submarine. Balme was suddenly inundated with requests from international historians, documentary filmmakers, and military institutions eager to preserve his unique, firsthand testimony. He responded to the sudden public attention with a characteristic, graceful humility, always insisting that the true credit for the victory belonged not to him, but to the extraordinary brilliance of the codebreakers at Bletchley Park and the quiet, steady discipline of the young sailors who had accompanied him into the hull.
David Balme passed away quietly on December 26, 2016, at the advanced age of ninety-six, leaving behind a legacy that continues to inspire generations of naval professionals and intelligence officers worldwide. Today, the pristine, wooden-cased Enigma machine that he manually hauled out of the wireless cabin of U-110 sits prominently on display inside the museum at Bletchley Park, its brass keys and polished aluminum rotors reflecting the soft lights of a peaceful world.
It stands as a permanent, timeless monument to a fundamental truth of human history: that the ultimate course of global conflict is not decided by the sheer volume of a nation’s wealth or the terrifying power of its industrial weapons, but by the raw, unpredictable flash of human courage that drives a young man to plunge into the darkness of an enemy tomb to steal the secrets of the future.
