Near the end of WWI Germany, was still putting new submarines into the Atlantic. A U-boat called the SM UC-97 was commissioned into the German Imperial Navy but was never used in wartime – it never conducted any patrols nor sank any ships.
In 1919, the UC-97 was sailed by the United States Navy from England back to America. A year before, the Germans surrendered the sub in the aftermath of World War I.
The sub was taken through the St. Lawrence Seaway into the Great Lakes, touring the ports of Lake Ontario, Erie, Huron, and Michigan — all the while raising money in the form of liberty bonds.
But by the end of that summer, the sub’s machinery started to fail. It was unfamiliar to the U.S. Navy officers who operated the vessel.
The crew left for another assignment and the sub was docked in Chicago for a few years — moored off a park bordering Lake Michigan where the vessel was opened to tourists.
It could have stayed as a tourist attraction for a while longer, but a clause in the WWI armistice treaty required all German vessels held by the Allies to be destroyed by 1921.
So, in the summer of that year, the UC-97 was towed out to Lake Michigan and used as target practice. As a summer training exercise, naval reservists shot at it from a gunboat and sank the sub within 15 minutes.
To this day, the location of its sunken wreck has not been found.
