TheCodeBreakers
conning tower and leaped into the sea, U.S.S. Pillsbury was lowering a
whaleboat carrying the boarding party.
A few moments later, it reached the abandoned sub, rocking gently in
the long Atlantic swells. Lieutenant (j.g.) Albert L. David, leading the
boarding party, and petty officers Arthur K. Knispel and Stanley E.
Wdowiak slipped through the hatch, raced forward to the radio room,
smashed open a couple of lockers, and grabbed the cryptographic
equipment—the current codebook with superenci-pherments, the
Enigma machine and its list of keys, and hundreds of messages with
parallel plaintexts and cipher-texts. The Germans had apparently never
considered the possibility of a boarding and so had not bothered to
jettison the material. The three Americans hastily passed the items up on
deck so that the team would have something to show for its efforts even if
it lost the sub.
But within fifteen minutes, the team had disconnected demolition