<p>I grew up in Northern Indiana and for a while my father would commute into Chicago on the South Shore Line. When we would have a day off school, my dad would take all six of us in on the train, give my oldest sister twenty dollars and tell us to meet him at the train station at 5:30. The six of us would roam around the museum all day. It was a great baby sitter. My brother used to spend hours trying the break the piece of plexiglass with the weight and I was fascinated by the ultra-thin slices of human being that used to displayed in one of the stairwells.</p>
<p>The new exhibit has many galleries of buildup telling the whole story of the battle for control of the Atlantic. You walk through the exhibit learning how at first, the U-Boats were destroying Allied shipping at will. Through code-breaking and tactics, the Allies figured out ways to evade and destroy the U-Boats. Finally, one American ship detected a U-Boat and forced it to the surface with depth charges…</p>
<p>And you turn the corner, and THERE IT IS. A block long, three stories high.</p>
<p>There are many artifacts and exhibits surrounding it, showing tiny details of the sailors’ lives. There’s clothing, cigarettes, gas masks, sandwiches, letters home, everything. The Enigma machine that controlled the Nazi code the Allies broke. But if you take the inside tour, you hear the diesel engines going, see the tiny racks the sailors shared with the torpedoes, feel the claustrophobia and fear and smells. And they explain the huge risks the Americans took boarding the booby-trapped sub, the little twists of fate that saved it from being scuttled, etc.</p>
<p>It’s really a tour de force.</p>
<p>“Up until 1991, admission to the museum was FREE”</p>
<p>Yes, and we fought to keep it free. My mother grew up down the street from it in the early 1950s, and she believes her frequent visits during elementary school helped her make it to medical school. But they started charging not only to raise money, but because many unsupervised kids were making trouble, and it was too hard to keep them out. Parents used it as a DAILY substitute for a babysitter, and these kids were not interested in learning about science. I remember this being a real problem on weekday afternoons.</p>
<p>I was so excited and interested in the sub exhibit that I was thrilled to find a little bookstore at the end of the tour. I was planning to buy something to read more about it, but the selection was… awful. The books were generically about submarines, but nothing about this actual sub and its story. </p>
<p>When I got home I went poking around online looking for books, and ended up reading “Twenty Million Tons Under the Sea”, written by Dan Gallery (the captain of the ships that captured the U boat). It may be out of print, but I would think they would print another run to stock in that bookstore! I was able to get it through an interlibrary loan at my public library. I also read a biography of Dan Gallery, but thought the book written by Gallery was the better of the two. Again, the biography was not available in the bookstore, either…</p>
<p>One of my favorite parts of the exhibit was where you can pick up a phone receiver and hear the voice of each of the people who were in that first small group that boarded the submarine tell their story about it. There is a row of receivers (maybe 5 or 6 of them), and each one has the voice of a different member of the US crew boarding the ship.</p>