Ena Farrell Edwards — the woman from St. Lawrence who took the now famous photographs of the USS Truxtun and USS Pollux wreckage when she was a young girl — contributed significantly to the erroneous information now in circulation about that 1942 marine tragedy. During the filming of a television documentary to mark the 50th anniversary, Farrell Edwards informed a reporter that, in 1942, a sailor told her “what the Top Secret cargo of the USS Pollux was.” She stated on camera:

The diver that was searching the wrecks told me they were looking for the German Enigma decoder machine that the Americans had captured when they sank one of the U-boats off the coast.

Not only is that information false, it has been perpetuated by her in the films Torpedo Junction and Dead Reckoning: the Lanier Phillips Story, which were produced and distributed by ECO-NOVA Productions Ltd. of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Firstly, no U.S. Navy diver was going to jeopardize any military operations by telling a sixteen-year-old girl about the most top-secret acquisition of World War II. As a matter of fact, ordinary U.S. seamen did not know about Enigma at the time. Only a select few agents of the British and American secret service and the two highest-ranking members of the British and American governments — Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt — were privy to that information. The British captured the first two of the only three German encryption and decoding machines, complete with decoding documents, ever taken in World War II. Regular U.S. Navy personnel had no access to that “Top Secret” information … not until almost a year after the British had shared it with high-ranking U.S. military officials.

Secondly, U.S. Navy did not have an Enigma machine, and there never was one destined for Argentia. There was no need to have decoding machines on any of the American military bases because all code breakers and encryptionists worked in two secret locations. The first one was located at Bletchley Park, about 60 miles north of London, England. The second one was located at the former exclusive girls' school Arlington Hall, which was located at Arlington, Virginia in the United States. The American decoding unit was named after its headquarters in northern Virginia. That particular unit went on to become the most powerful espionage center in the world. Today, it is known as the National Security Agency (NSA).

The “Top Secret” cargo aboard the Pollux was the newly developed radar equipment that was later installed on the ships and planes operating out of Argentia. It was that radar equipment which enabled the Allies to wreak havoc on the German U-boats in the North Atlantic.

The first Enigma machine, along with a full set of decoding documents, was taken from U-110 on Friday, May 9, 1941, after the crews of the British warships HMS Bulldog and HMS Hubrietia of the Third Escort Group disabled and searched the vessel before sinking it. The crew of the HMS Petard took a short weather cipher machine from U-559 on Friday, October 30, 1942. The equipment from both those submarines was shipped to MI (Military Intelligence) Headquarters in London, where it was thoroughly examined before being shipped to the British Intelligence Headquarters in New York.

Members of the U.S. Navy's Task Force - 22.3 took the third Enigma machine, as well as a code booklet and other documents, from U-505 before it was destroyed on Sunday, June 4, 1944. The Germans never knew that their decoding equipment had been stolen and assumed that it went to the bottom of the ocean in the sunken submarines.

When Ena Farrell took photographs of the wrecked American vessels in 1942, the U.S. Navy officials at Argentia, and in Washington, were not pleased. On the direction of Captain Gail Morgan and Admiral Leroy Bristol, several lieutenants from Argentia put pressure on the girl and her family for several weeks after the disaster in order to get them to turn the photographs over to the U.S. Navy. The Americans did not want images of the destruction to be made public, especially since the disaster — which was totally preventable — was the result of incompetence on the part of certain officers aboard those ships. However, Ena Farrell's family disregarded the Americans' pressure tactics and kept the photographs. Farrell later had them published in various newspapers and magazines.