TRIBUTES have been paid to a Hampshire pensioner who helped shorten the Second World War by capturing a top-secret device from the Germans.

Lieutenant-Commander David Balme, who has died aged 95, led a boarding party that stormed a Nazi U-boat off Greenland in 1941 and seized an Enigma code machine.

His mission enabled British intelligence experts to secretly intercept and decipher all the signals sent from Germany to its submarines operating in the Atlantic.

Sir Winston Churchill later revealed that those involved in the code-cracking operation had helped shorten the war by two years.

Lt-Cmdr Balme was serving aboard the destroyer HMS Bulldog when he boarded the German submarine U-110, which, unbeknown to him, had been abandoned by its crew.

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 searched the submarine and found a device that resembling a typewriter but turned out to be was in fact an Enigma machine.

The intelligence coup proved invaluable to Alan Turing and his team of code-breakers at Bletchley Park.

But the top-secret nature of their work meant that Bletchley – and Lt-Cmdr Balme’s role in their success – stayed on the classified list for decades.

In March last year Julian Lewis, Tory MP for New Forest East, presented him with a Bletchley badge and a certificate signed by Prime Minister David Cameron.

Last night Dr Lewis paid tribute to the former sailor.

He said: “Having learned of the vital capture of the Enigma coding equipment from the U-110 when studying wartime history I was delighted to discover that the brave young officer responsible was one of my constituents.

“David had thought that the story of what he had done could never be known.

“Only when the breaking of Enigma was revealed did he get the full recognition, which he richly deserved, for his achievements. He played a crucial role in the winning of the Battle of the Atlantic at a very young age and I am proud to have counted him as a friend.”

Lt-Cmdr Balme, who kept the U-boat commander’s cap and binoculars as souvenirs, lived in Lymington before moving to a nursing home in Milford on Sea.

In 1999 he condemned a Hollywood attempt to re-write history after it was revealed that a £55million film shot in Rome and Malta suggested that the Enigma device was captured by an American destroyer in the Mediterranean.

He said: “Rome and Malta make for better scenery than Greenland and Scapa Flow but Enigma was among the greatest British triumphs of the war.

“It’s wrong to pretend the Americans were responsible. People don’t like that sort of thing.”