Keith Ogilvie died in 1998. The Ogilvie family spread some of the ashes of the career officer in the rose garden of the chapel at the Biggin Hill airbase in England.
An intelligence officer told Warrant Officer Frank Cauley and his ten crewmates that he wanted them to find a German submarine in the Atlantic, several hundred kilometres off the west coast of Ireland. At a pre-flight briefing session, the officer told the crew that the sub was U-625. He knew its number because the Allies had broken the Enigma code that the German Navy used to communicate with its submarines. He also knew the general area where U-625 was located.
Cauley listened carefully. The crew had to sink the sub because it was close to an American convoy carrying troops and supplies to Britain. The airmen were excited because this was their first assignment as a crew.
Cauley, twenty-two, was the navigator on Sunderland flying boat EK591, flown by the Royal Canadian Air Force’s 422 Squadron. The squadron was based at the Royal Air Force station at Castle Archdale, beside Lough Erne in Northern Ireland. Sunderlands were big, powerful aircraft with a fuselage that was like the hull of a boat. They were ideal planes to search for submarines because they could remain in the air for the long patrols needed to spot subs, and could land on water.
Frank Cauley in 1944.
EK591 took off at 11:00 a.m. on March 10, 1944. The sky was dull and cloudy. However, by the time the plane reached the search area the weather was good and the sun was out. Warrant Officer Frank Morton, who was in the pilot’s seat, flew just a few hundred metres above the Atlantic.
After the plane had been airborne for several hours, Sergeant Jimmy Rushton, a gunner who was in the nose of the Sunderland, came on the intercom. “Hey skipper,” he said, referring to Morton. He told the pilot and the rest of the crew that he could see a submarine on the surface about ten kilometres away, on the port side of the plane.
Because of the length of time the Sunderland stayed in the air, a second pilot, Flight Lieutenant Sid Butler, was on board. Butler went to the cockpit when he heard about the sub.
“Do you want to go ahead and do it?” Butler asked Morton.
“No, I think maybe you better,” Morton replied. Butler had more experience than Morton. He had spent 800 hours in the air conducting similar searches. Morton, in comparison, was on his first trip. Butler moved into the pilot’s seat. As Butler flew toward the sub, the crew electronically rolled out four depth charges on rails under the plane’s wings.
Cauley sat at the navigator’s table behind the cockpit. He was figuring out their position, which he gave to Flight Sergeant Chuck Holland, the wireless operator, to send to their base in Northern Ireland. It was 52.35 north, 20.19 west.
The plane was only fifteen metres above the ocean when it approached the submarine. Cauley, who was watching out of a window, could see more than a German submarine. Sailors were sunning themselves on the hull while others swam in the ocean. A lone sailor holding a machine gun stood in front of the conning tower.
Butler could do nothing to protect the aircraft from the gunner. If he failed to keep the plane flying in the direction it was going, he would prevent the depth charges from dropping close enough to the sub to destroy it.
The sailor with the machine gun sprayed EK591 with bullets. The plane shuddered.
Butler released the depth charges and flew past the submarine. The depth charges exploded, damaging the sub. Spray from the ocean rose thirty metres in the air.
The bullets fired at the plane made holes underneath the galley on the lower front deck. One was large, about fifteen centimetres in diameter. There were also three dozen small holes. Many of the holes were below the waterline, which meant the plane might sink when it tried to land on Lough Erne before the crew could get out.
After the attack, Butler took EK591 to a higher level, out of the range of any guns still active on the submarine. The plane flew above the sub for about an hour. The crew watched the sailors climb into rubber dinghies. The sub then sank. As the plane circled, a member of the crew at the rear of the aircraft took photos of the dinghies.
Holland, the radio operator, sent a message back to the base to say that the crew had completed the attack and that the German sailors were in dinghies. Cauley plotted the course to take the plane back to its base.
A camera on EK591 photographed German sailors in dinghies.
The crew returned to their usual flight duties, but Sergeant Ted Higgins, the flight engineer, had the difficult task of patching up a plane in midflight. His first job was to cover the large hole. He went to the lower deck and patched it with an emergency leak stopper: a piece of metal that covered the hole.
“OK, it’s finished — plugged the big one,” Higgins told the crew on the intercom, but he also had a question: “What the hell am I going to do about the small holes?” The problem was that he had nothing he could put into them. After ten minutes he came back on the intercom with a strange answer to his own question: “Let’s try chewing gum.”
All members of the crew had a package of five sticks of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum in their ration boxes. Higgins asked his crewmates to get their gum, chew it, and give it to him. He then put it in the small holes. Cauley and the other crew members thought that was an unorthodox method of repairing a plane, but they were happy to try it. They didn’t joke about the gum. Their lives might depend on it keeping the plane afloat when they landed at their marine base.
The flight engineer spent half an hour putting the gum in the holes. He used all fifty-five sticks.
By that time, Morton was back in the pilot’s seat. He took the plane up to 3,000 feet (900 metres) in order to freeze the gum. Higgins checked the gum. “It held,” he told the crew.
Morton continued flying EK591 back to Lough Erne. Holland, the wireless operator, informed the base about the damage to the plane. The base launched its rescue boats so they would be ready to help if needed.
As the plane descended, everyone in the crew was nervous. All the airmen at the base went to the shore to watch the plane come down. EK591 landed smoothly. The gum stayed in the holes and the plane didn’t leak.
“Good show!” Morton said to his crew as motorized dinghies approached the plane to take the men ashore.
U-625 was commanded by Siegfried Straub. In his book, Hitler’s U-Boat War, Clay Blair says Straub issued an order to abandon the sub after assessing the damage. He also sent an SOS to the German navy, which diverted two submarines to search for the crew. They found no trace of the men.
At the Castle Archdale base, the crew of EK591 spent two days celebrating their successful attack and their equally successful flight home.
The RCAF decided to promote both Morton and Cauley from warrant officers to pilot officers.
The chewing gum that the crew gave up was quickly replaced. The Wrigley company heard that its gum saved their aircraft, and it sent twenty-four packs containing five