Heroic Royal Navy officer who seized the Enigma machine from a raided German U-Boat and helped end WWII has died aged 95

The Royal Navy Officer who seized a top-secret Enigma machine while storming a captured German U-Boat has died aged 95.

Lieutenant Commander David Balme, who died on Sunday, 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.

He was said to have had no idea what the 'funny' instrument was when he initially picked it up - but his mission enabled British intelligence experts to secretly intercept and decipher signals sent from Germany to its submarines for the remainder of the War.

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.

David Edward Balme was born in Kensington, west London, on October 1, 1920.

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.

After the war, Lt Cmdr Balme married his wife Susan in 1947 and they had three children. He was said to enjoy hunting and was also a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron.