Just now, the light from the navigation table illuminated his face from below, concealing the baldness, emphasizing the man’s deep-set, unnaturally brilliant eyes. He looked like Faust working on some magic spell. In fact, he was writing a letter about yet more torpedo failures, to be delivered over the next few days by one of the Abwehr ring in East Africa, for onward transmission to Kiel. Duchene did not send information by radio to U-Boat Command, even in an emergency. He was willing to accept orders that way, by Morse, from Germany, but the sad example of others had taught him that radio silence was necessary for survival, whatever Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz and the rest of the top brass might think.
Duchene suspected that by some means, the enemy had broken their codes. What assuredly was true was that those boats which obeyed Dönitz’s order to report to the Kriegsmarine high command regularly were the ones that died, regularly. Duchene did not propose to take the ultimate, eternal dive before he was ready, and when it happened, he would be in control. “Our little home under the sea is not a coffin,” he would tell his men. “It is the womb in which we lie, warm and secure. The sea is your mother. And I am your father.” His men, with one exception, believed him.
Duchene’s approach to silence in the matter of signals did not please his radio officer, Oberleutnant zur See Hanskurt von Bremen. Robbed, as he thought, of his role in the war, Bremen brooded. His only visible joy came on those rare days when the rule of silence could be forgotten and he could unpack his gramophone, to play such stirring marching songs as “Wir fahren gegen England” and, of course, the Horst Wessel anthem. His shipmates groaned at such times, for, as chance would have it, Bremen was the only Nazi amid a cheerfully irreverent seagoing and totally apolitical crew. Small, sinuous and—like most others obliged to live without washing—bearded, Bremen now lay on his front, one arm protectively over his face, dreaming of the day he saw the Führer. Unique among the thousands below the podium in Nuremburg, he knew that the Leader was looking directly at him, at little Hanskurt, with that special look Herr Hitler had when directing one of His chosen ones toward destiny. He had confessed this vision only once to his shipmates. They, derisively, said they wished the Führer had directed them to the Nuremburg brothel or better still, to one of those Aryan breeding centers. The girls at those places, it was said, were something else.
Officer of the Watch Leutnant Willi Schultze completed the ship’s log in a neat, square version of the Old German script in which an s and an / were near twins. He logged the time/date group, the boat’s position, surface weather, sea state, distance sailed, and time submerged. There was little else on this long, top secret mission to record. They were not supposed to engage the enemy.
Schultze was left-handed. As he wrote, his gold wedding ring, on which was inscribed the word Immer—Forever—caught the light. He regretted that the only way to divest himself of the ring would be to have the finger amputated. One of these days, he would do just that, at her grave, with his own ceremonial dagger. He would never forgive Ilse. The log done, he quietly rose to do the rounds of the boat. He and the skipper exchanged glances, silently.
As submarines went, U-181 was a large vessel. She was a new type, IX-D, an oceangoing boat displacing 1,430 tons submerged, and 76.5 meters from stem to stem. The crew, fifty men plus agent-passengers, crammed into whatever comer they could find. There was only one lavatory that worked. The hull stank of diesel oil blended with human waste, and the heat was suffocating. Schultze trod carefully.
Obermechaniker Heinrich Bohm, the boat’s hydroplane operator, was curled up in a sleeping bag on the floor, his long hair flowing like a girl’s beneath the array of polished wheels and dials known as the Christmas Tree, which was his small empire. In spirit, Bohm was now in the Black Forest, gun under arm, his dog Snatch padding alongside. It was the best dog he’d ever had. In his dream his wife repeated: “But Snatch is dead, didn’t you know that, Heinrich?”
Their passenger, the agent, lay screened in the skipper’s berth to ensure that he saw and heard nothing to compromise the boat if (or more likely, when) he was taken prisoner and obliged to plea-bargain for his life. There was a further complication, as the boat’s Nazi, Bremen, saw it. “He is black, not so? He will contaminate all of us!” Black skins were one of the radio operator’s many phobias.
As he moved stealthily forward, it struck Schultze, not for the first time, that there were no secrets, however intimate, that could be kept in a U-boat. Seaman Otto Zurn, the boy who had joined U-181 at Tirpitz Quay, Kiel, for a two-day sea experience, was obliged to stay on board for the long voyage when Cap’n Ahab opened the sealed orders. There was no way they could put the child ashore. He was, at most, fifteen years old. The boy, as they called him, suffered from every sort of sickness, from sea to home. There was talk, in jest, of pushing him into one of the torpedo tubes to send him off to the British, but the grizzled coxswain, Hannes Limbach, who had seen it all, adopted young Otto. Now, as usual, the boy slept in Limbach’s hirsute arms, his cheeks innocent of hair. The arrangement, naive in its simplicity, like some classical painting, seemed perfectly natural. And innocent. Ahab would not have tolerated it otherwise. As he told the crew when he took command: “You have the right to be yourself, under my command. I respect you all. You will respect one another. We are a family. . . .” Then, grinning ironically: “No incest. Understood?”
Schultze’s odyssey through the boat, navigating his way through the exposed dreams and secrets of his fellow crewmen, continued for another half hour or so. Here was the bespectacled, curly haired Hans Kronenbitter, fingers in mouth, tears filling his beard, haunted still by his experience in U-156. The story of that voyage was a bitter legend within the service.
About nine months after the U.S. came into the war, U-156, commanded by Werner Hartenstein, sank the British troopship Laconia off South America. It was the start of a macabre story. As the Laconia went down, U-156 came to the surface. Hartenstein was mortified to discover that as well as British troops, his target had also carried Italian prisoners of war and civilians, including women and children. Some of the terrified Italians tried to jump from the sinking vessel and were bayoneted by their Polish guards. Hartenstein, a humane man, started to pick up the Laconia’s survivors. He arranged first aid for the Italian wounded and some of the civilians who had been bitten by sharks as they screamed for help.
Soon the deck was crammed from stem to stem with survivors. The boat could not dive again. Two other friendly U-boats, one Italian, the other Vichy—proGerman—French, joined the rescue operation. Hartenstein then took the most controversial decision of the entire U-boat war. He sent out a broadcast in clear, in English as well as German, disclosing his exact position and giving his word not to attack any ship, whatever the flag, that joined in the rescue. After some hours, U-506 and U-507 turned up and also collected survivors. Hartenstein, meanwhile, began searching for the Laconia’s many lifeboats, crammed with terrified civilians.
Four days later, as the rescue continued, an American B-24 Liberator flew over the scene. Hartenstein placed a Red Cross flag over his main gun and signalled to the aircraft that he had picked up Allied personnel. One of these was a British Royal Air Force officer. Using the U-boat’s signal lamp, the Englishman warned the aircraft that they were carrying civilian casualties. Then the bombing began. Having discharged one load, the B-24 went to its base and collected more bombs. Then it returned to attack a second time. Hartenstein ordered the survivors back into the lifeboats, closed the conning-tower, filled the dive tanks and left the survivors to their fate. Admiral Dönitz was persuaded, with difficulty, not to court-martial Hartenstein. The story was perfect for the propaganda war, all the more potent for being true, repeated with relish by the likes of Bremen. U-boats took no prisoners after that.
Kronenbitter, as watch officer, was the man who had fired the torpedoes that sank the Laconia. He never talked about the episode, except in his sleep.
At 0230 hours, Schultze did the rounds a
gain. This time he touched the sleeping bodies, bringing them back to the grim claustrophobia of life aboard U-181. In the stem the duty petty officer started the electric, virtually silent engine they used when submerged. An acoustic check confirmed that all was clear above. As seawater was pumped out of the dive tanks, the boat rose smoothly. At this depth only a ton of water had to be discharged. The hull then expanded under the changing pressure, and, as she started to move, the hydroplane operator at his Christmas Tree took her to periscope depth. No orders were necessary. Everyone knew the drill. Ahab, eyes piercing the periscope, saw no hint of a threat, but still he waited ten minutes or so before signalling with one hand, like an orchestral conductor, that they were to break surface.
Ashore, a mere four hundred meters away, a single orange light identified the rendezvous: a silver beach under still and silent moonlight, between two natural sentinels of tall rock. It took only ten minutes more—for this was a carefully rehearsed drill—to manhandle the collapsible, canvas canoe up through the conning tower and onto the top deck. The deck of U-181 was unusually wide. This was ideal for the job in hand but not so good if the boat had to dive suddenly: the wider the deck, the longer it took, in a situation where every second counted, to flood the dive tanks and disappear. Bremen, the signaller, was one of the deck team. He shone a red light briefly, three times, alerting the reception party ashore. Coxswain Limbach, a Luger pistol tucked into the belt below his life jacket, with two others, eased the canoe into the water and prepared the paddles. Only at the last moment was the agent led up. His escorts removed his blindfold as he was about to step into the tiny craft. Then Limbach’s team paddled quietly away, a black silhouette on a black sea, the faintest hiss of phosphorescence around the paddles.
Ahab, on the tower, sniffed the air. A slight offshore breeze carried with it odors of life ashore: dry seaweed, fresh vegetation, animal dung . . . and something else he could not identify. There were also the sounds of an African night: squeaks, honks, snorts, the creaking of cicadas, the roaring timpani of bullfrogs, and the gleam of giant glowworms among the trees above the beach. Ahab, a creature of the ocean, was unimpressed. He was made uneasy by this proximity to land. He waited, reflecting that not even Dönitz could overrule the intelligence moguls if they chose to put an entire submarine crew at risk because the Abwehr wanted to run a taxi service into enemy territory for reasons that were never explained. It was a necessary precaution, while carrying these spooks, to hide the codebooks and even remove the numbers on the deep-depth gauges so as to keep an unwanted passenger in ignorance of what was going on. He checked his watch. Twenty minutes had passed and no further signal. They had one hour of darkness left. By dawn, he wanted to be far from here.
Another thirty minutes passed. Ahab and his deputy, Schultze, stood silently together on the conning-tower bridge, watching the beach through binoculars. There was nothing there except a pale line where a black sea kissed white sand. Ahab turned his thumb down, shrugged, then ordered those on deck—Bremen, with Bootsman Schnell, whose heavy, slow body denied the speed his name implied, and Steuermann, navigator, back below. Somehow, the boy had wriggled his way aloft also. He stood rock-still, near the prow, hands clasped as if in prayer. Schultze squeezed his arm, whispering “Unter.”
“Where is Limbach?” the boy asked. His voice rose above a whisper, driven by anxiety.
“Unter!” It was an order.
“No! My Uncle Limbach! We are not leaving him here!”
This bay was an amphitheater, a natural echo chamber. The childlike voice cut across the darkness within it as clear as a chorister’s in a cathedral. Schultze wrapped one arm around the boy’s body and gagged his mouth with the other. Then he hauled him, kicking, back to the conning tower. Schultze was tempted to dump this human excrement into the sea, but if by chance it survived, they were all done for. Bremen, seeing his chance, turned back and joined in the struggle, his hand searching in the darkness between the boy’s legs.
They finally subdued the boy by putting a safety belt, usually worn on deck when the boat surfaced in rough water, around his chest. His arms pinioned, voice stifled with an oily rag, he was pitched headfirst onto the floor of the conning-tower compartment. Dazed, bleeding from a head wound, he was hauled down one level to the central control room, then dragged aft, to the brig. By the time they had him manacled to a strong point in the rear torpedo room, U-181 was sliding away, stem first, still surfaced in this shallow water.
Ahab gave the order to dive to periscope depth as they cleared the bay. He chose to use the shorter navigation periscope, with its wider field of vision. When daylight came, they would have to dive deep again and lie low once more until dusk. As they slid underwater, the acoustic operator reported that he heard something like shooting, but it was all over in a few seconds.
Ahab knew that their desertion of Limbach and the others would come as a shock to the rest of the crew. He would have to explain to them why it was necessary. They had to save the boat and the mission. Agentrunning was always a risky affair. He knew also the questions they would ask themselves, even if they did not dare to ask him. What had happened to prevent the shore crew from returning? Were they alive or dead? If they were taken prisoner, wouldn’t the boat be compromised anyway? And what about the boy? He could be forgiven for his stupidity. A token punishment of some sort would suffice. But he would have to grow up, and fast. If he could not, who knows what might happen. . . .
The submariner’s greatest, most necessary virtue was stability, self-control. The enemy demonized U-boat sailors as bloodthirsty pirates. They were the very opposite. To succeed in this war zone, they needed cool heads and superhuman, clinical judgment of the odds against success and the right time to attack or, more often, not to do so.
There were now several possibilities, none of them enticing, when it came to the possible effects of the shore party’s disappearance. If the missing men were dead, then that would cause no instant problem. He had insisted that Limbach and the others wore old clothes of the sort that civilian fishermen might use, and carry no identification. If they were captured, then he hoped they would obey his order to stay silent for forty-eight hours. Beyond that, most prisoners could be broken, one way or another, by a skilled interrogator. After two days, however, he would have found somewhere in the vastness of the Indian Ocean beyond the enemy’s reach.
The dangerous time was now. He could not stay submerged for more than one more day. He would have to surface and run the diesel engines so as to recharge the batteries that powered their twin sisters, the electric motors. To use the diesels while submerged was to offer an acoustic signal to an enemy that could prove lethal. In addition, the heat generated by a diesel when they were below the surface was an insufferable 120 degrees Fahrenheit. At such times, thirst among the crew became a real problem. Sometimes he had to remove the handles from water taps to control this. The supply of fresh water was the greatest single obstacle to prolonged sea voyages.
Yet another reason why they could not stay below for too long was the awkward fact that the batteries powering the electric motors were of lead/acid design. They released explosive fumes that combined oxygen and hydrogen. The ventilation system aboard U-181 had given trouble from the moment she was commissioned. All things considered, he had to hope, on balance, that the missing men were dead. He would write his condolences to their next of kin without delay.
When they next rose cautiously to periscope depth at dusk, Bremen donned headphones, switched on his radio, and waited for signs of life beyond the hiss of static. In Kiel, far to the west, people were taking lunch. Every day at this time, unless they were submerged, he followed orders—orders from High Command, not Ahab—and came up on the net to collect messages in coded Morse. When the heat was off, he was also able to listen to voice radio. This provided songs and news from home. Submariners were even allowed access to British transmissions, introduced by the drumbeats that signalled the letter V—three short, one long—for victory
. To tune in to enemy broadcasts in Germany was, of course, treasonable. The British, by using such a distinctive and resonant cue, compromised many of their secret listeners, whose neighbors detected what was going on and promptly filed a report to the local party gauleiter.
This evening the message addressed to Silverfish—U-181—was graded “IA/IR,” one demanding instant action and instant response. Such signals were rare. The Morse delivery, at a mere twenty words a minute—about one sixth of normal conversational speed—made it easy for Bremen to note exactly what was transmitted. The words would mean nothing until they were decoded, and Ahab allowed no one else, except Schultze, access to the Enigma decoding machine, the settings for which were changed every few weeks. Bremen’s radio room was on the opposite—starboard—side of the hull from Ahab’s own accommodation, the door to which was usually left open. The radio officer’s fertile, underoccupied mind saw this situation as a challenge. In his self-appointed role as political commissar of U-181, anointed by Hitler, he had collected scraps discarded from earlier messages and left in the skipper’s garbage box. These items, though tom to shreds, could with patience be reassembled and compared with the original, coded version. This personal, secret project—like several others, including the notes he kept on any unguarded, antiparty comments by his shipmates—he could run undetected sitting at his radio, inside his own small room, where no one interrupted him. He transmitted a routine acknowledgment in a burst of Morse so fast that no direction finder could pick it up, then took the message to Ahab.
“Wichtig—important—Meinherr Kapitänhe said, placing the signal on the navigator’s table. They were now on the surface, diesel engines running, making fifteen knots and sailing east. Duchene, dressed to go aloft, pursed his lips in irritation, then took the signal to his cabin. Even after it had passed through the decoder, the order was still opaque enough to puzzle an enemy.
Crash Dive Page 17
