David Balme, the Royal Navy officer who seized a top-secret Enigma machine and codebook while storming a captured German U-boat, died Sunday at age 95.
Balme, a lieutenant commander, was credited with helping to shorten World War II by two years after he led the boarding party that raided U-110, east of Cape Farewell, Greenland, in 1941.
David Edward Balme was born in Kensington, west London, on October 1, 1920.
He joined Dartmouth Naval College in 1934 and served as a midshipman in the Mediterranean in the Spanish Civil War before being reassigned to the destroyer Ivanhoe in 1939.
Balme was appointed to the destroyer HMS Bulldog, which he described as a "happy little ship," as its navigator in the early 1940s. It was while he was serving on this ship that he came across the German submarine.
On May 9, 1941, U-110, under the command of Kapitanleutnant Fritz Julius Lemp, had been attacking a convoy in the Atlantic south of Iceland together with U-201 when Lemp left his periscope up too long. The escort corvette HMS Aubretia sighted it and rushed to the scene and began using depth charges.
The HMS Bulldog and the HMS Broadway followed, and U-110 was forced to surface. HMS Bulldog immediately set course to ram the U-Boat, at which point Lemp gave the order to abandon ship.
But the U-boat did not sink. According to the former crew, he tried to swim back to U-110 to destroy the top-secret Enigma machine and codebooks that were left behind, but he wasn't seen again.
Balme was then ordered to "get whatever" he could from the U-110. After rowing across to it, he made his way to the conning tower and had to holster his pistol to climb down three ladders to the control room. Recalling the incident many years later, he said: "Both my hands were occupied and I was a sitting target for anyone down below."
He was said to have had no idea what the "funny" instrument was when he initially picked it up — but his mission enabled British intelligence experts to secretly intercept and decipher signals sent from Germany to its submarines for the rest of the war.
Sir Winston Churchill later credited the codebreaking operation, which sometimes cracked 6,000 messages a day, with saving lives across Europe and giving Britain the crucial edge in battle.
But the top-secret nature of the codebreakers' work meant Balme's role in the operation's success stayed on the classified list for decades.
The typewriter-like machine, which was designed by the Germans to protect military communications, proved invaluable to Alan Turing and his team of codebreakers at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire.
Balme had three children with his wife, Susan, whom he married after the war in 1947. He was said to enjoy hunting and was also a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron. His significance in the Allies' victory was not revealed until the 1970s, when the secrecy shrouding Bletchley Park and the codebreakers' work finally began to lift.
He was presented with a Bletchley badge and a certificate signed by Prime Minister David Cameron and local MP Julian Lewis. On Thursday night, Lewis paid tribute to the former sailor, who kept the U-boat commander's cap and binoculars as souvenirs.
He said: "Having learned of the vital capture of the Enigma coding equipment from the U-110 when studying wartime history I was delighted to discover that the brave young officer responsible was one of my constituents."
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