PETER HANSEN (251-1987) spent some time working for the ABWEHR during World War II, knew Admiral Canaris personally, and has information for us that is known to a mere handful of people in the world. He tells us:

"When U-353, Oberleutnant Wolfgang Roemer, was sunk by the British destroyer HMS FAME on 16 October, 1942, the surviving German U-boatmen were immediately blindfolded, as was the prevalent English NAVY custom in such cases, and a group of Englishmen went aboard the slowly sinking U-353 and had about five minutes to capture secret documents, which included the new issues of the Short Signals Book and the Short Weather Signals codes.

The importance of these Weather Codes was not the reading of the weather reports that U-Boats were often forced to make, to the chagrin and disgust of their respective captains and crews, because the Luftwaffe demanded them and pressured the OKM to produce same and force the U-Boats to make these weather reports that were the death of many U-Boats. However, because the German NAVY, AIR FORCE and sometimes other organizations, frequently re-radioed such weather reports virtually unchanged in other and much higher secrecy grade codes and on more restricted and complicated networks, such as U-Boats Atlantic TRITON and others, that Bletchley Park could break partially into such higher grade keys, by these insane duplications, due to laziness and stupidity on the part of the stations re-radioing same and re-distributing them to other recipients. Bletchley Park could thereby read and solve some of the higher operational orders and reports in TRITON gradually. Still most of the messages remained unread for ten months in 1942!

On 30 November, 1942, U-559 under Kapitanleutnant Hans Heidtmann, Class of 1934, which had been ordered to enter the Mediterranean together with quite a few others, upon direct orders of Hitler to the OKM, despite the objections of Donitz who lost many of his FrontBoots from the Atlantic in this way, whilst others were ordered through the same channels to be posted into the Barents Sea and to Northern Norway, where they were largely useless for the Battle of the Atlantic. U-559 made a weather report between Haifa and Port Said, which was picked up by a patrol flying SUNDERLAND and its direction and location was fixed and pretty soon, U-559 showed on radar, but dived. Four destroyers were immediately ordered out to search the area in question, among them HMS PETARD, commanded by one of the ROYAL NAVY's "WILD MEN" or "IRON EATERS" LCDR Mark Thornton who already had been awarded the DISTINGUISHED SERVICE CROSS previously, for sinking another submarine with another destroyer. Now he wanted to CAPTURE ONE!

Executive Officer of HMS PETARD was Lt Anthony Fasson, a Scotsman, Thornton drilled his crew in procedure to enter and capture U-Boats and secure secret papers systematically. When the destroyers reached the area in question, the first ASDIC contact was obtained by HMS PAKENHAM, a sister ship of HMS PETARD.

Thornton believed the U-Boat had dived deeper than 500 feet, then the maximum depth setting on British depth charges, so he ordered soap to be placed into the water holes to delay detonation and permit sinking of the depth charges to deeper depth that way. He evidently succeeded and U-559 was hit twice after a total of 228 depth charges had been dropped by the four destroyers during these various attacks on 30 October, 1942 and U-559 rose to the surface with its last pressurized air supply available and having run out of oxygen too. It was almost 11:00pm at night.

The destroyers illuminated the ocean with their searchlights as U-559 appeared at the surface, a white donkey emblem painted on its conning tower. Hans Heidtmann was wounded by the crossfire but survived the sinking together with most of his crew members he became a P.O.W., but seven men were killed and did not make it. Crewmembers jumped into the ocean and the British destroyers opened up with all machine guns. Then Fasson rung the 'CEASE FIRE' bell and Thornton put the boarding plan into effect.

Some German sailors clung to the whaleboats which had been put to water to get aboard U-559 but the British managed nevertheless to reach U-559 quickly. Several trips were made into the interior, breaking open the cabinets in the Captain's compartment and other places that looked like they might contain secret material and brought out all coding material for the Mediterranean U-Boat Key and its machine plus other documents and equipment that looked interesting.

U-559 had leaks from depth charges and gunfire. After ten minutes the water reached the anti-aircraft gun platform to the rear of the bridge of U-559. Yells sounded 'SUB IS SINKING. GET OUT IMMEDIATELY!'

But Fasson was so engrossed in cutting loose some equipment that evidentially Fasson and his helper, a young sailor by name of Colin Grazier, did not hear the warning and went down with U-559 and drowned. Both were posthumously awarded the GEORGE CROSS by the ROYAL NAVY.

The equipment was cleaned up, the papers and documents were dried in Cairo, some of the coding tables were on water soluble paper, then put aboard an aircraft for London and reached Bletchley Park early in December. On 13 December 1942, the six electro-mechanic precomputer 'BOMBES' that were immediately put to work on TRITON with assistance of all this newly captured material, struck paydirt again and current and complete as well as rapid reading of all U-Boat radio traffic was possible again. Because both the Short Signal Weather Key, which still used only 3 rotors, not utilizing the GREEK rotor as yet, information copy transfer was promptly possible and the 4 rotor key traffic could likewise be read also, after ten months of being unable to do this.

HUT 8 in Bletchley Park phoned the Operational Intelligence Center at the Admiralty immediately, and its Submarine Tracking Room where Patrick Beesly, the principal assistant for Rodger Winn, took the call and within an hour their direct line teleprinter spewed out the first new intercepts followed by steadily rising numbers as the 'UNCRACKABLE' messages that had been put aside, got worked on around the clock.

These are the important stages that you did not include for the NAVY 'ULTRA' story, the next essential step thereafter is U-505, as mentioned recently, with the additional material captured which was only recently let out of the back, so to speak.

Again, the British were helped by German obtuseness and laziness, repeating messages in the lower lower grade Weather Key and used as Short Signals in TRITON, and similar higher grade messages WITHOUT ALTERATION OF TEXT, which allowed the British to break into those higher keys by comparing messages intercepted and where the structure clearly showed this being the case because the format was identical of course! But these muddleheaded OKM admirals and Communications Specialists could only think of the mathematical number of possibilities that would make it impossible to crack the ENIGMA machine coded messages as it would take 'years to try all those millions of possibilities'. While this was never done and worse, never necessary either because the British were not inclined to do things the way the Germans decreed as the only way to handle such message solutions, but just with logic, brains and probabilities instead rather than plodding along numerically like horses before some plough in the systematic, orderly German way. The British preferred improvision and new approaches, something simply disdained and 'only fit for civilians' by the German OKM High Command.