Submarine Surfaces Underground

It was a sailor’s nightmare during World War II. Leaning against the ship’s rail, binoculars scanning the cold, Atlantic waters, a sailor spots a foaming white wake that’s streaking through the waves and heading broadside for a direct strike against his ship. Torpedo!

With alarm bells ringing, there wasn’t much to be done except brace for contact, and pray. Torpedoes meant submarines, and, in World War II, German submarines exacted a horrific toll against the American convoys and task forces cruising through the Atlantic and European waters.

Capturing the U-505

On May 15, 1944, the USS Guada-canal Task Force Group 22.3 sailed from Norfolk, VA, for an anti-submarine patrol near the Canary Islands. On June 4, 1944, a member of the task force, the USS Chatelain, reported a sonar contact. Soon after, the task force swiftly attacked with explosives and depth charges, which eventually forced the German U-boat, the U-505, to surface.

When the U-boat surfaced, the Chatelain and the USS Jenks picked up survivors. The USS Pillsbury sent its whaleboat to the U-505, where its nine-man boarding party prepared to take possession of the submarine. The crew’s mission: to board the U-boat, overpower any remaining German sailors and take control of the submarine.

The U.S. Navy boarding party climbed down the hatch and disconnected scuttle charges, closed valves and bundled up charts, code books and papers as quickly as possible. Having secured such a prize, the capture of the U-505 became a classified secret during the remainder of the war.

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Once declassified, in 1954, the U-505 found a home at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, a museum that specializes in interactive and experience-based exhibits. The museum exhibited the U-505 outside, where it sat for the next 50 years. Museum guests walked its interior length for a firsthand look at how its crew lived and worked in the ocean’s briny depths. The U-boat, from propeller to prow, was 250 ft. long, weighed more than 700 tons and stood approximately three stories tall.

In this original exhibit, the submarine basically spoke for itself. Little signage described its history and capture. The U-505, which became a national historic landmark, proved to be one of the museum’s most popular exhibits. Throughout five decades, approximately 22 million people walked through the submarine’s main passageway.

Time and weather, however, took their toll on the submarine’s hull. A typical German sub was built to last four years. Fifty years of turbulent Chicago weather may have been the U-505’s most brutal enemy. Left untreated outdoors, it would’ve been unsafe for tours by 2010. Thus, in 1997, the museum launched its largest exhibit-conservation project to preserve the U-505 and move it indoors to a climate-controlled environment. Ultimately, more than two years were needed to ensure that the U-505 was structurally sound and prepare it for its new exhibit hall.

The museum decided to create an underground exhibit hall in front of its main building. The submarine was transferred into a large trench, and, once it nested inside its new space, a roof was placed over the 35,000-sq.-ft. exhibit. The new space’s average daily attendance of approximately 7,000 visitors includes people circulating through the exhibit area and those touring the U-boat’s interior passageway.

Sub signs

Ed McDonald, the museum’s director of exhibit projects who oversaw the submarine exhibit’s transformation, noted that the U-505’s original signage was at least 50 years old and looked it, despite one or two updates.

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The museum’s new exhibit space features new graphics, pictures and ways of telling the story about the submarine’s capture and importance during the closing years of World War II.

McDonald said, "The original outdoor installation of the U-boat was a presentation of the boat. In the submarine’s new incarnation, the museum exhibit is now the story of the capture."

The signage brings a segment of U.S. naval history to life as an immersive museum experience. McDonald said the museum itself produced a few signs, but subcontracted most production and installation (see sidebar, page 81). The museum created the sign content, designed each sign face (including the format, size and look) and created the production-ready files, which were sent to fabricators. Installers then placed the completed signs onsite.

Various sign formats support the exhibit narration, including interactive signage; interpretive graphics labels; a large-scale photo mural; custom, dimensional letter forms (ranging from plastic to stainless steel); backlit, translucent signs; applied-vinyl text; large-format lenticulars; and direct-print-to-glass and large-format digital murals.

Each sign was designed according to the story segment it describes. Large-format images create a bigger-than-life presence of these historic, World War II moments. For example, four huge murals depict the German U-boat in wartime contexts.

One example of this "in your face" signage was the World at War exhibit, a collage of super-enlarged newspaper headlines calling out the horrors of the Axis advance on Europe.

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"To dramatize the impact of World War II prior to the United States’ entry," McDonald said, "we gathered a series of newspaper headlines from around the world from 1939, 1940 and 1941, leading up to the final headline, ‘Pearl Harbor Bombed.’"

To produce the graphics, the headlines were photographed and scanned into Photoshop