The Whole truth
By actiondesksheffield
People in story: Ken Hoult L/Cp 1908893 JKW Hoult RE
Location of story: Iceland
Unit name: 666 Artisan Works Company Royal Engineers
Background to story: Royal Navy
This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Bill Ross of the ‘Action Desk – Sheffield’ Team on behalf of Ken Hoult and has been added to the site with the author’s permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
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In August 1941, our unit was constructing the shore facilities for the Naval Base in
Hvalfjordur Iceland. Comings and goings were commonplace, but we on shore were
alert to strange happenings on the water. From the mouth of the Fiord came a German
U-boat being towed by an armed trawler. Bush telegraph soon established that it was
a submarine that had been captured by a Hudson Aircraft.
The U-boat was moored alongside the depot ship H M S Hecla. The first day the base
was alive with rumours as to what equipment it was carrying. It was about that time
we were privileged to the fact that H M S Bulldog had captured some secret
equipment from U-boat 110, which later became known as the Enigma Coding
Machine.
The next day, a Hudson Aircraft came at low level over Hecla and with his Aldis
Lamp, signaled, "This ****** is mine."
The U570 created a lot of interest; even I a humble L/Cp made an excuse to go aboard
Hecla. One of our air compressors had broken down and the engineers on the Depot ship were very good at making spare parts. That's my story and I am sticking to it. I can say I have stood on U-570.
It is now well documented that U570 became H M S Graph and although much information was gained from its capture, no Enigma machine was found.
In 2002 a furore was caused when Hollywood made a Film, U571. The film portrayed
the Americans as having captured the Enigma Coding Machine, which was a distortion
of the true facts. There was a U571 but it was never captured and saw service with the
German Navy until 1944. Words are still been bandied about: "U571 Lies! Damn Lies.”
Tony Blair made comments in the House of Commons and said the film U571 made a
mockery of British history. I had a letter published in the Daily Mail pointing out the
error of the filmmakers’ ways.
I tell this story so that in years to come, whoever reads this will understand that the
Americans had nothing to do with the capture of U570 and the film U571 was pure
fiction.
I and many more, had a grandstand view of “the whole truth.”
Pr-BR