On this day in military history…
On the night of 30 October 1942, three men from the British destroyer HMS Petard boarded a sinking German submarine in the eastern Mediterranean. Inside its flooding hull lay secret documents that would help Britain’s codebreakers read German U-boat messages again. Lieutenant Anthony Fasson, Able Seaman Colin Grazier and teenage canteen assistant Tommy Brown recovered vital material, but only Brown escaped. The other two men drowned when the submarine slipped beneath the sea.
Their target was U-559, a German submarine hunted by Royal Navy warships north of Port Said, Egypt. Following a prolonged depth-charge attack involving Petard, Pakenham, Hero, Dulverton and Hurworth, the damaged U-boat was eventually forced to the surface after dark. As the German crew abandoned their vessel, the British recognised an opportunity to recover confidential equipment and papers before everything disappeared beneath the water.
The secrets they sought were connected to Enigma, the German cipher machine used to scramble military communications. Resembling a typewriter in a wooden case, it employed electrical circuits, wired rotors and a plugboard to turn ordinary text into apparently meaningless letters. Reading a message required the correct machine settings. Capturing an Enigma alone therefore did not provide permanent access to German communications: the operating procedures, codebooks and changing settings were also crucial.
Earlier in 1942, the introduction of a four-rotor naval Enigma had shut Bletchley Park out of an important U-boat communications network, known to the British as “Shark”. Recovering documents associated with that system offered a possible route back into messages whose contents could help protect Atlantic shipping.
Fasson, Petard’s first lieutenant, and Grazier entered the abandoned submarine, while Brown helped carry recovered material out to the waiting British boat. Brown was a NAAFI canteen assistant, only sixteen years old. His ordinary duties involved serving the ship’s company, but that night he joined a search inside a vessel that could sink at any moment.
Below the conning tower, Fasson found confidential documents in the captain’s accommodation. These were passed to Brown, who carried them up through the hatch. Among the papers were two exceptionally valuable publications: the Short Weather Cipher book and the Short Signal Book. These helped the Germans compress reports into brief coded messages before encryption, reducing the time their submarines needed to spend transmitting.
With seawater rising inside U-559, Fasson and Grazier continued searching. Accounts describe their efforts to free equipment while Brown brought further papers out. The danger became increasingly urgent, and Brown called down for them to come up. Before they could escape through the narrow conning-tower hatch, the submarine suddenly foundered. Both men were still inside and were carried down with it. Brown escaped and was recovered by the waiting boat.
The incident is sometimes described as the capture of an Enigma machine, but the decisive material successfully rescued was the collection of cipher documents. The machine itself was not brought out before U-559 sank. The codebooks reached Bletchley Park on 24 November 1942 and supplied crucial assistance in breaking back into the four-rotor U-boat cipher. Their recovery did not instantly solve Enigma, but it gave the codebreakers information they urgently needed.
Fasson and Grazier were posthumously awarded the George Cross, while Brown received the George Medal. Tragically, the young survivor also died before the war ended, losing his life in a house fire in North Shields in February 1945 while attempting to rescue his younger sister. Wartime secrecy meant the wider importance of their actions remained hidden for years. Today, the three men are remembered together: two sailors and a teenage canteen assistant whose courage preserved secrets that helped save lives at sea.
