by Dudley Pope
Now Ned was actually inside a U-boat, he could better understand why Jemmy in the ASIU office used to dismiss derisively any idea that the Germans after assembling a pack of submarines then put an ace commander in charge. Jemmy had always maintained that the boats arriving at different times and from different directions just waded into the convoy as soon as possible, leaving only when out of torpedoes, running low on fuel or pinned down by an escort for a couple of days so there was no chance of catching up the convoy again.
At that moment he saw the Croupier crowded in the wireless cabin with the German operator and the British. These two had the casing off the transmitter.
Ned caught the Croupier’s eye and the lanky lieutenant came out of the cabin.
‘Where’s your Sten?’ Ned asked. ‘These dam’ prisoners might…’
The Croupier gave a lopsided grin and from each jacket pocket pulled out an automatic. ‘Look at ’em, nine millimetre, hold six rounds each. That means twelve individually aimed rounds, which would pay more dividends with all these pipes and gauges around than a squirt with the Sten.’
Ned nodded. ‘Perhaps Jemmy, Yon and I ought to have one each.’
The Croupier grinned again. ‘I’ve got all the pistols and the ammunition stowed in that drawer –’ he pointed at the Enigma table, ‘and I was going to suggest we issued them.’
‘Now, what about the transmitter?’
‘Our chap, Hazell, is checking it over now. Says the Teds were crazy to sail with only one spare pair of final valves.’
‘When do we know if he can repair it?’
‘He doesn’t think so, but he’ll know for certain in half an hour.’
While sitting in the lifeboat, Ned had found himself dreading the possibility of diving in a U-boat, but now it had happened, now the U-boat was cruising along a hundred feet down, he felt a strange reluctance to go back to the surface, where a sudden attack could come as a passing Sunderland or Catalina or Liberator, or a frigate sighted their grey hull, or the bow wave and spray. Any surface ship had a visual advantage: the higher the eye, the more distant the horizon.
‘We must monitor all traffic once we’re surfaced,’ Ned said. ‘We can read all the signals from Kernével now we have the Triton cipher.’
‘Won’t do us much good except as records,’ the Croupier commented gloomily. ‘If only we could transmit a few bogus sighting reports so that old Doughnuts concentrates all his boats in an empty part of the ocean!’
‘Yes, except the moment Kernével realizes the signals are bogus, Dönitz knows we’ve either captured one of his boats or at least got a Mark III and the Triton manual. Or, life being what it is, we might get all the U-boats concentrated and then one of our convoys really does steam into sight.’
‘Yes,’ the Croupier said sourly. ‘Excuse my mad burst of poor humour: I had thought of all that.’
‘Have you checked what frequencies Kernével used to transmit to the boats?’
‘No, damn it, I haven’t. I thought the receiver would be pre-tuned just for the U-boat frequency.’
‘Or there might be a limited number Kernével uses.’
‘The fact is,’ the Croupier grumbled, ‘that none of the rest of us know a damn thing about wirelesses!’
‘I prefer gramophones,’ Ned said. ‘Come on, we’d better spend some time with that Triton manual; then we can set up the Enigma machine so that at least we can decipher anything we hear tonight.’
He thought for a moment and then said: ‘Leave Triton for a moment. I’m getting hungry and so is everyone else.’ He then explained his intentions about the cook and stewards, and the Croupier went off to find them.
Chapter Sixteen
As soon as darkness fell, unseen but waiting above to hide or trap them, Jemmy prepared for surfacing. Those due for the bridge watch sorted through the grey-green German oilskins and found coats and shoulder-high trousers that fitted. Heavy leather boots, which had thick cork soles as insulation against the steel plating of the deck, were more difficult to choose.
Finally, adopting the German method of controlling the boat during surfacing, Jemmy went up into the conning tower to use the periscope, Ned standing by him and acting as the first lieutenant, with Yon down in the control room ready to give the orders which would blow compressed air into the ballast tanks, driving out the water and making the boat buoyant. The German Engineer stood close by, a Marine guarding him, but it was clear by now that his first concern was for the boat; he was determined that mechanically everything should continue to function smoothly and did not seem to realize that he was now collaborating with the enemy; that if ever the Gestapo caught him he would be shot out of hand.
Yon had already checked on one of the U-boat’s most valuable commodities, compressed air. Earlier the electrically-driven air compressor had filled all the tanks, those for blowing the ballast tanks and the others which would start the two 9-cylinder diesel engines, letting great blasts of air into the cylinders to get the crankshaft turning until the cylinders had enough compression to ignite the fuel spraying in through the injectors.
When running under water using her electric motors, the submarine was controlled by two sets of hydroplanes, one forward and one aft, like stubby narrow aircraft wings, or fish fins. Each pair turned together so that when those at the bow were angled up they steered the boat towards the surface like an aircraft climbing; angling them down drove her deeper. The pair right aft did the same to the after part of the boat. Two rudders, one abaft each propeller, steered the boat whether on the surface or submerged.
Surfacing was not just a question of blowing water out of the ballast tanks and blundering up like a clumsy whale. That could be done in an emergency, but normally the boat was kept carefully trimmed and brought up to within thirty or forty feet of the surface. The Papenberg showed the final precise distance from the submarine to the surface so that the periscope could be raised only enough for the commander to see over the waves, with him using a control on the periscope itself allowing him to raise or lower it completely or just a few inches.
The electric motors had to be used until the big vents could be opened to allow the diesels to suck in the huge quantities of air they needed. It was important for the men’s eardrums that the air pressure inside the boat was equalized with the atmospheric pressure outside, before the hatch between the conning tower and bridge was opened.
Jemmy had decided that he himself would stand the first watch. Normally the commander did not stand a watch but, as he explained to Ned, he wanted to get the complete feel of the boat.
Four seamen now waited in the control room, towels round their necks, bulky in oilskin suits and sou’westers, and each with a pair of binoculars slung round his neck. As lookouts, each would be responsible for a quadrant of the horizon, reporting any object in a particular way. Facing forward, the port side of the ship was divided into 180 degrees from dead ahead round to the left to a point dead astern. The other side of the ship was divided into a similar semicircle comprising 180 degrees and referred to as the starboard side. In peacetime, when ships carried navigation lights, that on the port side was red while the starboard one was green, so the lookouts now used these same colours in their reports. An object on the starboard beam would be ‘green nine oh’, something half-way between dead ahead and abeam would be ‘green four five’, an object half-way between abeam and astern would be ‘green one three five’, while ‘red’ before the bearing warned it was to port.
The German cook had worked with a will, although the Marine guard reported that he ate ravenously as he cooked. The prisoners were fed first, then the prize crew.
Jemmy looked at his watch. Ned had noticed that, ever since they boarded the U-boat and he had become responsible for her, Jemmy’s twitch had vanished. He walked around the boat, in the Croupier’s words, like the lord of the manor inspecting how the f
ruit was ripening and paying special attention to the pheasant chicks.
The German wireless operator was now aft with the other prisoners: he and Hazell had tried repairs, but even Ned, looking at the blackened valves and smelling the hard but sweet smell of burned-out electrical fittings, could see there was no hope.
Just before joining Jemmy in the conning tower Ned had what seemed such an obvious and practical idea that he grabbed the Croupier’s shoulder and hissed: ‘We’ll use the lifeboat suitcase wireless with a big aerial! Five hundred metres, the distress frequency: everyone listens. We’ll get hold of that corvette in a few days – she’ll be listening for us! Send her a jumbled-up signal to be forwarded to the Admiralty. Watts will catch on!’
The Croupier said nothing; his eyes dropped to the steel plating forming the floor – the control room sole, if one wanted to be accurate, Ned thought, though not one in a hundred seamen (or officers) would know what you were talking about. The Croupier was behaving most oddly. Ned knew that, if he had to describe it in one word, it would be ‘shifty’.
Ned felt his sudden elation disappearing, like a barrage balloon punctured by friendly anti-aircraft fire and slowly deflating and falling with all the dignity of an old dowager in the private bar who had drunk too many port and lemons.
‘What’s happened to it?’ Ned asked.
‘You remember we told some men to collect the duffels and the suitcase wireless, and then cut the lifeboat adrift.’
‘Yes, just before we dived. I saw the duffels being dropped down the hatch.’
The Croupier looked up. ‘If any of us had been watching from the bridge, we’d have seen the bloody fools accidentally drop the suitcase wireless into the water…’
Now Ned felt not just despair (and fear, he had to admit to that), but anger. ‘Why wasn’t I told at once?’
The Croupier shook his head. ‘Sorry Ned. Fact is, none of us – you, me, Jemmy, Yon or Hazell – remembered the dam’ thing at the time. We’d been so cold and wet so long, I suppose we thought only of the duffels. It wasn’t till after we finally gave up on the transmitter that Hazell said we could use the suitcase one, and he’d rig up a better aerial. Then we started wondering where the set was. I started asking questions… I hadn’t reported to you yet because I only found out an hour ago, and reckoned you had enough on your plate.’
‘Why didn’t the men report the accident?’
‘Well, they were so excited at capturing this bloody boat, and then seeing the big insulators on the stay-cum-aerial running up the conning tower, they didn’t think the lifeboat transmitter was of much importance: as one of them said, they thought we were just going through the drill in bringing it on board because it was government property. And the thing looks so like a bloody suitcase…’
Ned grimaced and said ruefully: ‘What we need is a tom-tom: I knew there’d be trouble when they gave them up.’
‘I’m inclined to agree with you. I know Hazell is so frustrated I’m sure you’ll be getting a request from him to transfer to the catering branch.’
‘He’ll lose his trade pay.’
‘I’m sure he’s considered that and reckons it’s worth it.’
The Croupier pointed to the gridded chart on the chart table and the ordinary navigational chart, folded in half, beside it. ‘Seriously, Ned, we’ve got a dam’ long way to go.’ He looked round to see if any of the men handling the hydrophone controls, watching gauges or just passing through the control room on their way forward or aft, were within earshot, before he lowered his voice and added: ‘I’ve been thinking about it. Unless we can send a signal to the Admiralty telling ’em that we’ve captured this bloody boat and telling everyone to hold off sinking us, I don’t think we’ve a snowball in hell’s chance off getting back.’
‘Don’t forget that Germany claims – and Britain believes it – that she’s wining the Battle of the Atlantic!’
‘Come off it, Ned. No U-boats operate within a couple of hundred miles of the British Isles, and very few inside the range of Coastal Command planes. It’s only out here, at the extreme range of our aircraft, that they slaughter the convoys.’
Now, standing in the conning tower talking to Jemmy, no longer surrounded by gently swaying German sausages and hams, lulled by the whine of the electric motors, Ned felt completely defeated. Thanks to a burnt-out wireless part, ULJ and the British and Germans in her were so many Flying Dutchmen. For lack of communication and the speed of a diving plane or an approaching destroyer or frigate, they could call no man friend and expect him to listen: instead there would be a hail of bombs, shells, bullets or depth-charges. The White Ensign or RAF roundels belonged, for all intents and purposes, to the enemy. No white flag would be acknowledged – RN ships and RAF planes would (quite reasonably) assume a trick or a trap and carry on an attack.
Ned was startled suddenly to find himself in the dimly-lit conning tower and with pins and needles in his left leg. He also had an increasingly urgent desire to relieve himself (with thick woollen full-length pants, trousers and oilskin trousers made of Ersatz rubber, achieving that relief, he thought, would be like searching for a needle in a haystack), so he tried to focus on Jemmy.
The man, still with no sign of a twitch, was embracing the thick, shiny steel bulk of the periscope as though it was a passionate woman; he was sitting on the seat with his legs wide apart, each foot alternately touching the pedals which revolved the periscope and seat. Jemmy’s face was almost completely hidden: the large double eyepiece hid most of the upper part, reminding Ned in a bizarre thought of a masked highwayman bestowing a farewell kiss after relieving a lady of her gems. More than gems, in this pose.
Jemmy suddenly stood up, slapping at the two wood-covered handgrips, and the periscope motor hummed as the tube was lowered.
‘Nothing in sight; wind is west about Force 3, sea almost flat, seven-tenths cloud, vis may be a mile. Permission to surface, sir?’
A startled Ned agreed, and then realized that both Jemmy and the Croupier had automatically put him in his place in the hierarchy of the U-boat: he was like an admiral flying his flag in, say, a battleship: he was the ultimate authority for every major move made by the ship (and the fleet), but the battleship’s captain and ship’s company actually steamed the flagship wherever he directed.
The prospect of being in a similar position to an admiral lasted only a few seconds: Jemmy and the Croupier could not be expected to stand watch and watch about; Ned would have to take his turn. His initial alarm that he knew nothing about submarine procedures was eased by the knowledge that the Croupier did not either. In fact, running the boat depended on Jemmy and Yon.
‘Take her up!’ Ned said.
Jemmy checked the helmsman’s course and then called a stream of orders down the circular hatch to the control room. There was a rumbling below, like a complaining stomach, as compressed air drove out the correct amount of water from the ballast tanks to bring the boat to the surface.
Jemmy stared at the depth gauge, and Ned felt the slight motion of the boat increase as she broke surface and began to roll.
‘Must equalize pressure,’ Jemmy grunted as he reached up to a valve in the hatch. ‘If there’s more pressure in here than outside, I’d fly out through the hatch like a champagne cork.’
He unlatched the hatch while shouting ‘Lookouts!’ and scrambled up the aluminium ladder, followed by Ned and the four lookouts coming up from the control room.
The blast of air down the hatch startled Ned, but as he heard the whining of fans he guessed Yon had switched on powerful ventilation to force fresh air through the boat.
Jemmy had not ordered the diesels to be started, and for the moment the U-boat continued moving slowly under the electric motors. Ned’s shins bumped painfully against strange fittings on the bridge: he felt rather than saw Jemmy’s bulk and moved to one side as four cursing
, night-blinded lookouts fumbled their way out of the hatch, oilskin pockets, binocular straps and shins catching on a bewildering number of projecting lugs and sharp corners all apparently specially designed to injure the unwary.
Ned’s eyes grew slowly accustomed to the dark as he gripped the forward side of the tiny bridge – like a midget inside a large dustbin, he thought inconsequentially. Gradually the forward section of the U-boat took shape, a long and narrow wedge of deep black slicing through a grey sea flecked with white.
‘Horizon clear,’ Jemmy commented to Ned and turned aft to snap at the lookouts: ‘Come on, some reports. A quid for the first man to spot Southend pier.’
‘Wigan’s bearing red nine oh,’ muttered one of the men, and Jemmy laughed.
‘That’s the spirit, but if you don’t see a destroyer until it’s too late, my ghost will haunt your ghost.’
Jemmy then shouted down the hatch: ‘Start both diesels!’
There were muffled thuds as vents opened, deep coughing as though a score of bronchitic bulls were clearing their throats, and then Ned felt the vibration in the thin plating of the conning tower start coming through the clumsy cork-soled high boots as the cylinders began firing. He caught the sudden sooty smell of exhaust fumes from cold engines, swirled forward by a random gust of wind, and heard the roar of air going into the air intakes each side of the cockpit.
‘How’s your heading?’ Jemmy called down the hatch to the helmsman in the conning tower, and as soon as he received the answer, shouted: ‘Half ahead both!’
