Lieutenant Commander David Balme was credited with helping to shorten the Second World War by two years after he led the boarding party that raided Nazi boat Greenland in 1941.
The Royal Navy Officer who seized a top-secret Enigma machine while storming a captured German U-Boat.
Sir Winston Churchill later credited the code-breaking operation, which sometimes cracked 6,000 messages a day, with saving lives across Europe and giving Britain the crucial edge in battle.
But the top-secret nature of their work meant Lt Cmdr Balme's role in the operation's success stayed on the classified list for decades.
He joined Dartmouth Naval College in 1934 and served as a midshipman in the Mediterranean in the Spanish Civil War before being reassigned to the destroyer Ivanhoe in 1939.
Balme was appointed to the destroyer HMS Bulldog, which he described as a 'happy little ship', as her navigator in the early 1940s. It was while he was serving on this ship that he came across the German submarine.
It was midday on May 9, 1941 when he was ordered to 'get whatever' he could from the U-110.
After rowing across to it, he made his way to the conning tower and had to holster his pistol in order to climb down three ladders to the control room.
Recalling the incident many years later, he said: 'Both my hands were occupied and I was a sitting target for anyone down below.'
Finding no-one aboard, Lt Cmdr Balme and fellow members of the boarding party spent six hours searching the submarine and found a device that resembled a typewriter as well as code books.
The 'typewriter', which was actually an 'unbreakable' code machine designed by the Germans to protect military communications, proved invaluable to Alan Turing and his team of code-breakers at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire.
Lt Cmdr Balme lived in Lymington, Hampshire, before moving to St Georges Nursing Home here in Milford on Sea.
He died here in January 2016 aged 95yrs.
I did not know or meet David but came across his story while reseaching famous people burried in All Saints Church yard in Milford on Sea.
There is plenty of free parking in De La Warr Road or Pay and Display in Paddy's Gap.
Milford-on-Sea, although mentioned in Domesday Book, is the brainchild of a local landowner, Colonel Cornwallis-West.
Cornwallis-West shared an ambition with his second cousin, the 7th Earl de la Warr, to create a seaside resort from his estate. This road is named after him!
Watch out for muggles.
*******************Congrats to 'Pacuk01' being First to Find as well as having the best FTF log I could have wished for************************