SHREVEPORT -- Dive into World War II military history with author Charles Lachman, who will be the featured writer for the event Authors in April on April 5.
The topic of Lachman’s newest book is literally underwater in “Codename Nemo: The Hunt for a Nazi U-boat and the Elusive Enigma Machine.”
The luncheon at Sam’s Town Hotel & Casino costs $55 and serves as a fundraiser for the Pioneer Heritage Center at LSUS. Contact Marty Young via email at marty.young@lsus.edu or at 318-797-5339 for more information and to purchase tickets.
Tickets purchased after March 22 will be $65 and will be in limited supply.
“This is our big annual fundraiser for the Pioneer Heritage Center,” said director Marty Young. “It’s a way for us to get extra funds we might need for educational programming, smaller restoration projects and items for the preservation of our artifacts.
“The event has also become an anticipated staple of the Shreveport literary calendar.”
German U-Boats terrorized merchant ships and war ships across the Atlantic Ocean as the United Kingdom depended on U.S. shipment of supplies before America’s entry into the war.
U-Boats used their new wolfpack tactic against Allied convoys with spectacular success.
While British and later American ships did have some success in combating the German U-boats as the war continued, the American Navy delivered the final blow to U-boats’ operation in the Atlantic with the capture of U-505 on June 4, 1944.
Just two days before D-Day, an aircraft carrier and its fighter planes battled a U-boat off the coast of West Africa and had the foresight to capture instead of sink the boat, which yielded all the U-boat’s secrets (encryption codes and books, an Enigma cipher machine, and other technology).
The book delivers a blow-by-blow recount of the conflict, and how Captain Daniel Gallery conceived the plan mid-battle.
Once aircraft and carrier weapons forced the damaged U-boat to surface, nine U.S. sailors bravely boarded the U-boat and saved the ship to be towed back to a U.S. naval base – all without the Germans finding out.
Fifty-nine captured German sailors were held in a prisoner of war camp in Ruston until after the war ended.
The U-boat’s capture allowed Allied ships to locate, avoid and even redirect German U-boats, which allowed a heavy flow of Allied troops to Europe and hastened the end of the war with Germany less than a year later.
Lachman expertly tells this story from both the perspective of American and German sailors.
The veteran newsman (executive producer of the nationally syndicated news magazine program Inside Edition on CBS) uses his journalistic and story telling chops to provide a 360-degree of one of the seminal events that brought about the end of World War II.
The boat’s capture was the first time an enemy warship was seized on the high seas since the War of 1812.
