by Dudley Pope
Ned had already recognized the subject and as he asked the operator for the Admiralty said: ‘Drawings of the electric wiring of a German U-boat can hardly be very secret, sir, but anyway I have an A1 security rating.’
‘A1? I don’t believe you!’
A distant voice answered and Ned asked for Captain Watts, spoke to Joan and then heard the familiar voice.
‘Hello Ned, arrived safely?’
‘Can we scramble, sir?’
‘Yes. Over we go.’
‘Thank you, sir. Did you speak to a Commander Shoar up here?’
‘Yes, he’s the engineer in charge. You’ve a couple of days on board with technical chaps around to help you.’
‘Did you say how many would be in my party?’
‘Don’t believe so, but you’ve all got the right passes so what the hell does it matter?’
‘Commander Shoar has just ordered us all out of the dockyard.’
‘No sir, he regards us simply as rustic sightseers.’
‘Put him on!’
Ned turned to Shoar, whose face now wore a smug and self-righteous expression. ‘You can listen to this,’ he told Ned. ‘I shall be telling Watts exactly what the situation is.’
He took the receiver and sat down squarely at his desk, straightening his tie and removing his hat to reveal a remarkable head of wavy grey hair.
‘Shoar here… Yes… Yes… Yes, I did… Well, I can’t have a busload of… The First Sea Lord – what, Sir Dudley Pound?… Well, this young fellow claimed he was A1… and the two lieutenants?… The ratings and Marines are all B1? Why, that’s absurd! I’m only B3, so here you have ratings with… Well, look here, Watts, perhaps… Just a misunderstanding… Surely you can see how disturbing it is – I mean, a whole busload… What’s this prying into the boat all about, anyway?… Damnation, it is my business!… What do you mean, explain to Sir Dudley?… Oh, all right; but only two days… Yes, my officers will cooperate…’
He put down the telephone as though it was made of particularly fragile Meissen china. Looking straight ahead he said in a flat voice: ‘Captain Watts has asked me to apologize to you, which I do. But none of you sets foot on board that boat until I know what you are up to.’
Ned gestured at the telephone. ‘I can assure you, sir, that not even Captain Watts is allowed to tell you. Nor the First Sea Lord. May I use the telephone, sir?’
‘Oh well, if you and your men want to swarm over the boat like so many bees, get on with it. The less you delay us the better. Two days and I want you all out of here!’
Chapter Seven
Ned sat in the U-boat’s tiny wardroom with Jemmy and a lieutenant (E) named Heath and was reminded of the stoker’s cubby hole in the boiler room of St Stephen’s Hospital. The wardroom was cleaner but overhead there were dozens of pipes of various diameters and a special metal ducting for electrical wiring. Varnished pine planking hid the welding and riveting of the inside of the hull and the lack of noise was eerie, making it difficult to realize that one was in a ship, albeit a submarine (which was anyway always called a ‘boat’). No generators, no pumps, no voices passing orders over the Tannoy, ghosts with strong lungs.
‘Go over the basic details you gave me, to put Commander Yorke in the picture,’ Jemmy told Heath.
Heath was clearly very impressed by the German technical achievement represented by the prize, and while Ned noted more signs and dials in German, the lieutenant said: ‘I understand you are not a submariner, sir, so I’ll keep it non-technical. This boat has twin diesels which give her nineteen knots on the surface. Submerged and using her electric motor, her batteries give her nine knots for an hour, or she can stay down for three days chugging along at one or two knots. Normally, though, she’d surface every twenty-four hours and run on diesels to charge the batteries. The dynamos that charge the batteries are also the electric motors that drive her submerged, of course.’
Ned nodded and asked: ‘What armament?’
‘She carries fourteen torpedoes. Electric-driven, of course, not compressed air like ours, so they don’t leave a trail of bubbles. Four tubes firing forward and one astern. For surface action she has an 8.8 cm – you probably know it as the 88 mm, which is a fantastic gun with a very flat trajectory and used against our tanks in the Western Desert. Can also be used against aircraft. This sub also has two 20 mm cannons in anti-aircraft mountings.’
‘Bust and hip measurements?’ Ned could not remember the figures Jemmy had given him several days ago.
Heath allowed himself a wintry smile. Obviously the dimensions of a submarine were not figures that he as an engineer could joke about, but he accepted that others did.
‘At full war load – fuel, torpedoes, ammunition and so on – about 770 tons. She’s seventy-five metres over all, and six metres diameter. She can safely dive to 100 metres – that’s 328 feet. Say 300 feet… And the new boats they’re planning will get to twice that, we understand. Takes a long time for one of our present drum type depth-charges to sink to 300 feet. Just imagine a depth-charge sinking 300 feet to a spot from which the U-boat is moving at nine knots…’
Jemmy twitched and jerked. ‘You see, Ned why we don’t sink too many.’
‘I hope the Director of Underwater Weapons is working on more streamlined depth-charges,’ Heath said. ‘They ought to be self-propelled, like torpedoes, only going downwards.’
Jemmy snorted angrily. ‘I put up an idea for homing torpedoes – an escort fires one in the general direction of a U-boat and a sound device like Asdic, or a magnetic device, takes over. You know what they told me?’
‘That you were another genius ahead of your time by two centuries?’
‘No, the bastards,’ Jemmy exclaimed, twitching violently. ‘They said they’d consider it, but reckoned that, if the Germans found one and adopted the idea, it would be a greater menace to us in their hands than vice versa. This despite the fact that Otto Kretschmer is reckoned to have sunk 325,00 tons of our ships in a few months…’
Ned looked up at Heath. ‘Were you on board when this boat was brought in?’
‘Yes. I have fluent German.’
‘Do you know how these things operate?’
‘You’re not going to take this boat, are you? We’ve still–’
‘No, no!’ Ned reassured him. ‘We’re here just to get an idea of the way a U-boat is built and – if you can help us – the way it’s operated. We’re not interested in your baby as such.’
‘Mistress rather than baby,’ Heath admitted. ‘Well, sir, I expect you know the broad details. The Lion roars from –’
‘The Lion?’
‘That’s what the Jerry submariners called Dönitz otherwise
B de U, Commander, U-boats. His headquarters are at a small place just south of Lorient.’
‘By the way,’ Ned interrupted, ‘how many officers in a boat?’
‘The skipper, who could be a lieutenant commander, but because they are losing a few boats now, more likely a lieutenant. The first lieutenant is responsible for torpedoes and gunnery, the second lieutenant for wireless and their code machine, a sub-lieutenant who is the navigator, and an engineer lieutenant who would be the second in command and responsible for all manoeuvring.’
Ned asked: ‘Which bases are most used?’
‘Well, they’re busy building bombproof shelters at Lorient, St Nazaire, Brest, La Pallice and Bordeaux. They use La Rochelle, though at the moment it isn’t bomb proof. Of course, to get into La Pallice or La Rochelle, you pass between the Île de Ré and the Île d’Oleron.
‘We haven’t quite got the drift of the actual control over the boats. Strictly speaking, U-boats and surface vessels come under the Senior Officer, West, but Dönitz and the Kernével people handle U-boat operations. Still, whatever the system, it works!’
Ned phra
sed the next question carefully. ‘How was the wireless traffic handled?’
‘Each boat usually had two wireless operators. They listened while on the surface charging (usually at night) and that’s when they’d pick up the Kernével traffic. They’d get any signals intended for them individually, but since they all use the same cipher, one boat could pick up another’s traffic. They did, too, because it was important for a skipper to have a good idea of what else was going on round him – that Heinrich in U-100 had sunk three ships, Bruno in U-150 had seven and was going home with no torpedoes, Hauptman in U-200 was going home with depth-charge damage – you can guess. Battle gossip, I suppose you could call it.’
‘You know what cipher they used?’
‘It’s all right, I’m B1, like your chaps: I checked before you came (there’s no need to mention that to Commander Shoar, by the way) and we’re all cleared for Enigma. You know all the U-boat traffic is Hydra. One of the wireless operators would take down the signal and report it to the second lieutenant. The Enigma machine was usually kept in the wireless room, because of course the lieutenants slept in these bunks we’re sitting on. Well, the lieutenant would tap out the ciphered signal on the keyboard, noting down the deciphered message letter by letter – you know the drill, I’m sure – and probably the skipper would be breathing down his neck, reading it as the letters lit up.
‘Come along, the wireless room is just here.’ He led the way to a tiny cabin and pointed to a small table which was no more than a sheet of metal welded to a bulkhead. ‘The Enigma sat there – you can see the holes for the holding bolts, just four of them. Here’s the swivel chair –’ he spun it round. ‘Here is the drawer with a special lock. A bit flimsy, the whole thing. The Hydra manual was kept there or in the captain’s safe. This little shelf was probably made specially for a particular officer – it holds signal forms, pencils and a sharpener.’
‘You’re fairly sure the Enigma would be in this position in the boats in service?’ Ned asked. ‘With four nuts and bolts?’
Heath shrugged his shoulders. ‘I can’t guarantee it, but it’s a fairly obvious place, in the wireless cabin, and looking at the construction drawings, I’d say they’ve evolved an effective accommodation plan that’d suit any new design. It’s a damn good one, isn’t it?’ He looked at Jemmy who nodded. ‘But don’t forget the Enigma is portable, with its own battery. The second lieutenant could work it while sitting in the head with it balanced on his knees.’
‘Yes’ Jemmy admitted, ‘except for the skipper being up there with his periscope, like the rear gunner in a bomber, it’s well designed.’
‘You had better take me on a conducted tour of the rest of this bucket,’ Ned said.
He followed Heath, crouching as they went through the oval-shaped watertight hatches, the actual doors now clipped back but able in an emergency to be slammed shut and clamped tight, dividing the boat into watertight sections to isolate a flooded compartment.
Then he finally recognized why the inside of a German U-boat seemed so strange. He had been on board British submarines many times before – visiting friends, usually – and he could understand the comradeship that set submariners apart from the rest of the Royal Navy: a feeling of being different and living in a long and narrow cylinder compared with the comparatively spacious destroyer or cruiser. Cosiness – an odd word but yachtsmen would understand it. In a similar but wooden shell, the yachtsman (in peacetime) drives to windward in showers of spray and discomfort: a mug of tea put down for a moment leaps up and spills over; a plate left for a second slides off the table or hits the fiddles and bounces over; hot soup in basins pours into the laps of the unwary who do not anticipate the next lee lurch. Those yachtsmen in soaking wet clothes thrashing along for days rarely enjoyed it moment by moment; but arriving at some distant port, the satisfaction was in having achieved it, and there were the occasional splendid dawns and sunsets. And in the same perverse way the submariners enjoyed it. Perhaps both came nearer to understanding ‘the wonders of the deep’.
But the differences on board this German boat from what he remembered of the British: well the obvious and first one would be common to both – no machinery running, lying afloat alongside with only a dozen or so men working on board during the day, she was cold and damp; hot diesels warmed the boat and drove out damp, and there was usually the almost indescribable smell from batteries being charged, damp smells of wet woollen clothing, diesel fuel, damp or wet leather gear, oil – oh, dozens of things. Even the damned dials and the electric switchboards gave off their own smell, and the galley would forever be boiling cabbage – and occasionally baking bread and treating the boat to a welcome change of odour.
But this German boat? There was a pervasive and strange, sweet yet hospital-operating-room-antiseptic smell everywhere. He commented to Jemmy who, twitching as he ducked through a doorway, said: ‘Ersatz. German for “substitute”.’
Heath overheard him and stopped. ‘If anyone’s been wondering what IG Farben and the other big German chemical firms have been doing, I can tell ’em.’
Ned said: ‘Well tell me. I’ve heard plenty of gossip.’
‘Well, our blockade cut them off from natural rubber, so they went ahead and made a chemical version which is as effective as natural. Buna rubber, I think they call it. Doesn’t last so long – but if it lasts four years and the war is over in three…
‘Oil and all its byproducts: well, their hydraulic fluids and the like are artificial. And why waste steel and aluminium in making boxes, lockers and so on, when you can use a sort of Bakelite… These are the odd things you can smell.’
He pointed to the thick gasket round the edge of the watertight door. ‘Look at that and feel it. Shinier and more slippery than you expect rubber should be? The answer is that it’s not rubber, it’s Ersatz. Does the job. Where they can save weight or scarce raw materials, the Jerries have invented a substitute.’
‘So our blockade may not be all that effective,’ Jemmy commented.
‘It doesn’t seem to be slowing them building subs and planes, no, but having to invent substitutes must make problems.’
Ned commented on the number of different smells.
‘Ah,’ said Heath. ‘I was on leave in Sussex last year and a German fighter crashed into a neighbour’s field. Piled in from about ten thousand feet: just left a hole about the size made by a five hundred pound bomb and sprayed out hundreds of small bits of wreckage. I went over within a few minutes and the smell was extraordinary: not burned oil that you’d expect from the engine – that was buried a dozen feet in the ground. No, sickly sweet smells. I picked up a couple of feet of ribbed hose from the oxygen mask. Ersatz rubber. A small section of the instrument panel – made of some Bakelite material with an odd smell. A piece of flying jacket – Ersatz leather, again with a curious odour. And this collection of unusual odours was the first thing I noticed when I came on board this bucket. If I had not seen the way some of it is used and works, I’d say Ersatz is another word for fake, but now I know it isn’t. After the war we may find shoes made of Ersatz leather last longer than real leather. The Jerry scientists are creating a new fake world over there, Ersatzburg.’
With that he walked through to the engine room. ‘Presumably I’ll be spending a while here with your engineer, but you’d better know what makes it all tick.’
Below gratings were the great banks of batteries, and right aft the single torpedo tube, what Heath called ‘the sting in the tail’. Working their way forward again, they inspected the captain’s tiny cabin, the length of a bunk and little more than its width, the control position with all the diving controls, past the tiers of bunks fitted in every available inch of space along each side of the gangway, like metal frame cots in a busy corridor which ran almost the length of the boat.
Finally, right forward, was the torpedo room: several torpedoes, glistening steel cigars, were
still in their racks – Heath explained that four had been taken away to a research establishment, to be stripped of their secrets – and Ned stared at them. Electric torpedoes: the first the merchant ship know of an attack was usually the deep boom as the torpedo exploded after its invisible approach.
The Royal Navy – Britain in fact – was paying a high price for Asdic, Ned reflected. Their Lordships had apparently regarded submarines as obsolete: Asdic had made submarines, submariners, torpedoes and underwater warfare in general as outdated as an aquatic dodo. So submarine design had been neglected and torpedo design relegated to a pigeon-hole. And now the Germans were winning the war with the same weapons with which it had nearly won the First World War and on the same battleground: U-boats in the Atlantic. The Navy in peacetime had suffered under a succession of mediocre time-servers as First Lords at the political and First Sea Lords at the naval head of the Admiralty. With the other two service ministries they provided convenient jobs for the various Bugginses that the party had collected, and the official residences became social centres dominated by the various Mrs Bugginses, all vying for minor titles that would, theoretically, make each of them a lady. Buggins was ‘just the man’ for First Lord of the Admiralty, War Minister or Air Minister. Buggins, in his various guises, was worth a fleet, an army or an entire air force – to a potential enemy. Leslie Hore-Belisha was remembered for his orange-topped beacons, telling pedestrians where to cross the road. How much better if he had (as War Minister) given his name to a tank. He was an exception who had the energy, but the generals were against him and the politicians deaf.
When they walked back to the wardroom, Ned said to Jemmy: ‘Time for you to get the lads to begin the games. Pass the word for the military police to close off the dock.’
Heath looked puzzled, and Ned said: ‘What you are going to see now must never be discussed with anyone. It may seem childish games to you, but it’s highly secret. If you are working on board, keep away from the hatch.’
