World War Cthulhu: A Collection of Lovecraftian War Stories

by John Shirley

  Because Long Island Sound is an estuary running into the Atlantic Ocean, it is not unknown for deep-sea creatures to find themselves trapped or beached in the Sound. You therefore get far more unusual carcasses washing up along the shores of Long Island and Connecticut than in many other parts of the United States.

  You’ve probably read in newspapers or seen on TV those reports of the bodies of sea-monsters and mysterious creatures being found on beaches by horrified holiday-makers? And then the remains are removed by scientists and that is the last you hear of the story. A cover-up? No; it is because there is no story.

  When a large sea creature decomposes, it can frequently result in weird shapes. For example, when the blubber has rotted off or been eaten away from a whale’s carcass, you are left with an oddly shaped skull, a long neck and four big flippers. What does that sound like? Exactly: a sea-serpent or the Loch Ness Monster, perhaps even a plesiosaur that somehow survived from the Jurassic era.

  It’s the same with giant squid. Huge tentacles lined with sharp-toothed suckers, truly enormous eyes, a mouth with a parrot’s beak and a barrel-like mantle, or torso, ending in a couple of angular fins. When anyone but a squid specialist finds the decayed remains of one of these on the shore, of course they are going to think it is the body of some kind of alien monster previously unknown to science.

  Hey, have you ever read any of those stories by H. P. Lovecraft? He’s a local hero around here. In one of his tales he has what he calls “Elder Things.” His description of them almost exactly matches what a partially decomposed giant squid looks like. He must have seen a squid washed up on a New England beach and drawn his inspiration from there.

  That said, sometimes these mysterious sea-monsters are just that. Mysterious monsters from the depths of the ocean.

  6

  The Naval Historian’s Story

  The U-857, you say? Yup, that’s one of Hitler’s missing U-boats. There are about 50 U-boats still unaccounted for out of a total of nearly 1200 that sailed with the Kriegsmarine during World War Two. ‘Unaccounted for’ is not really the right term; most of those 50 were sunk by Allied ships and planes or struck mines, but there remains confusion over precisely when and where they were sunk—and who by.

  That said, the U-857 has developed its own cult following. There are plenty of signed-up members of the Nazi weird-science fan club who are better qualified than me—well, the use of the word ‘qualified’ in this context is moot—to tell you about the crazy theories surrounding the fate of the U-857.

  Let’s just say there have been reports of its wreck being spotted at the bottom of the Churchill River in Labrador, over 60 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. There’s another report that it sailed down to South America and then up the Amazon River on a secret mission to locate the lost city of El Dorado, and is now marooned somewhere in the rain forest. And there are reports that it was one of the submarines that fled to a secret base the Nazis built in Antarctica.

  The truth is rather more prosaic.

  During the summer of 1944, Allied intelligence picked up reports that the Germans were experimenting with launching rockets from U-boats. This rumor gained more credence in early December 1944 when the Nazi spies William Curtis Colepaugh and Erich Gimpel, who’d been captured in New York City after being landed in Maine from a U-boat, told their interrogators Germany was preparing a flotilla of rocket-equipped submarines. The following month, Herr Albert Speer, the German Minister of Armaments & War Production, made a propaganda broadcast from Berlin in which he claimed long-range V-1 and V-2 rockets would soon be falling on New York City.

  The U.S. Navy took these threats very seriously, particularly reports of a Nazi secret weapons project involving U-boats towing V-2 rockets in submersible transport containers across the Atlantic to within range of their targets and then launching them at U.S. cities and factories. To counter such a threat, the Navy set up a special carrier and destroyer taskforce, called Operation Teardrop, to intercept and destroy Nazi submarines before they could come within range of the United States.

  The result was that during mid-April and early May, in the very final days of the war against the Third Reich, the U.S. Navy conducted a major campaign off the East Coast that saw a total of five U-boats, belonging to a submarine wolf pack code-named Gruppe Seewolf, intercepted and sunk. Happily for the citizens of the United States, the subsequent interrogation of the surviving members of these U-boat crews revealed that none of Gruppe Seewolf were fitted with missile launching equipment. Indeed, after the war, an examination of Kriegsmarine records revealed that despite some successful trials earlier in the war, the rocket U-boat plan never made it off the drawing board.

  This brings us neatly back to the U-857. Although not part of Gruppe Seewolf, it had the misfortune to be caught up in the Operation Teardrop U-boat interdiction sweep.

  On Friday 6th April, a German U-boat was sighted on the surface near Devil’s Reef off the Massachusetts town of Innsmouth.

  The following day, a Cannon Class destroyer escort ship, the USS Gustafson, fired a hedgehog of anti-submarine mortars at a target, believed to be the U-857, off Cape Cod. A glutinous oil-like slick was subsequently spotted on the surface; however, a postwar assessment by the Navy concluded that the Gustafson didn’t hit a U-boat, but some other underwater non-sub target, possibly a whale or a giant squid.

  Just over a week later, on Wednesday 18th April, a U.S. Navy blimp airship dropped a homing torpedo on a submarine spotted at the entrance to Long Island Sound, midway between Newport, Rhode Island and New Haven, Connecticut. Kriegsmarine records indicate the last contact with the U-857 was in early April, and the assumption is that the sub was lost with all hands and that its wreck now lies somewhere off the East Coast of the United States between Boston and Long Island.

  So what were Kapitanleutnant Rudolf Premauer and the crew of the U-857 doing on their mission?

  One suggestion was that the U-857 was making its way up Long Island Sound to make contact with Nazi sympathizers. There were rumors at the time that one of the Gold Coast mansions, shuttered up by its owners for the duration of the war, had been taken over by fifth columnists. Maybe the U-boat’s mission was to drop off supplies of weapons, gold bullion, secret agents or even senior Nazis to help keep the cause alive through sabotage and subversion in a North American version of the Werwolf guerrilla movement in Germany?

  Another suggestion was that the U-857 was on a kamikaze-style suicide mission carrying a Nazi secret weapon—perhaps an atomic bomb—and was trying to sneak up the Sound before detonating it as close to New York City as possible in one final act of terror and vengeance against the American people. We know the Nazis had their Uranverein heavy-water nuclear-energy project; maybe they had made more progress than the Western Allies realized?

  And then there is the mystery of the original Devil’s Reef sighting. Why did the submarine need to visit Innsmouth, a town that had never been of any strategic significance? Besides which, the place was pretty much abandoned and derelict after that incident in 1927. If we could ever accurately locate the wreck of the U-857—and some Long Island fishermen have hinted they know where it is but are keeping quiet because the surrounding waters are providing an unusually rich catch in lobsters—we might have a definitive answer to these questions one way or another!

  7

  The Nazi Conspiracy-Theory Blogger’s Story

  Dude! If you want to hear weird stories about weird Nazi science, have you come to the right place. You’ve seen the website, I take it. It’s the global clearing house, portal, forum, whatever for conspiracy theories about Third Reich mysticism and occultism, no matter how wacko they might seem. And, the biggest joke of all is that it’s being run by me, a Jewish geek, operating from a small office over a diner in Roswell, New Mexico. Ooh, spooky coincidence; cue somebody playing a few chords on a theremin!

  So anyhow, here’s your inside skinny on Nazis in Antarctica 101, which will hopefully give you some kosher fat to ch
ew over.

  As you no doubt already know, the Nazis had this belief in an ancient Aryan master race that the present Nordic people of Europe, including the Germans but definitely excluding anyone of a Jewish persuasion, were all descended from. But where did the Aryans come from, and what subsequently happened to them? During the 1920s and 1930s, there were a raft of theories being discussed by esoteric societies with strong Nazi links, such as the Thule Society, the Vril Society, the Ahnenerbe SS division, and Himmler’s Wewelsburg Castle Black Sun outfit, which is where the SS played at being Knights of the Roundtable and were sent off on expeditions to Tibet to look for the Holy Grail and the Spear of Destiny.

  Somewhere along the way, the Nazis also picked up the idea that the foundations of the Aryan race could be found at Ultima Thule—or Hyperborea, as the Ancient Greeks and, coincidentally, Conan the Barbarian referred to it—a remote island located at the ends of the Earth surrounded by ice and snow.

  The next thing you find is the Nazis have blended the Thule legend with the holweltiehre Hollow Earth theory, which is another idea that goes back to the Ancient Greeks but crops up in mythologies from all across the world. Remember those Nazi expeditions to Tibet in the 1930s? They were also trying to find an entrance in the Himalayas that would lead into the Hollow Earth. You can see where we are going here, can’t you? We just need to toss in Indiana Jones and have Led Zeppelin on the sound system cranking out Kashmir and the Immigrant Song, then turn up the dials to number 11 to feel properly at home!

  Eventually, so the rumors go, the Nazis did find the entrance to the Hollow Earth. Seems it was in Antarctica all along, which is why you have so much U-boat activity taking place in the Southern Ocean during World War Two. But, and get this, not only did they find the way into the Hollow Earth, but they also found the home of the Aryan master race who, believe it or not, turn out to be a species of giant space aliens—called the Elder Race—who are prepared to help the Nazis save the Fatherland. Yes, we’ve even got a taster of the Ancient Astronauts myth in here, much favored by Erich von Daniken and others in the post-war years.

  These aliens arrived on Earth from the Aldebaran system about 500 million years ago and initially settled on the now-lost continents of Lemuria and Atlantis. When they sank beneath the seas, the Elders moved to Mesopotamia and became the gods of the Sumerians, in the process jump-starting Mankind’s first civilizations. They spent most of their time dwelling in temples, pyramids and ziggurats (I love the dwelling bit; mere mortals like thee and me only get to live in places) pausing only to break the monotony by doing the wild thing with Earth women. The progeny of these couplings would become the original Aryans. After a time of living on the surface of the Earth, the Elders became worried that our Sun’s rays were causing them to age prematurely, so some of them flew off to a base they already had on Jupiter’s moon Europa, while the remainder moved to the South Pole to build the legendary city of Kadath in the Cold Waste. It was some time after this that the Elder Race began tunneling beneath the Earth’s surface to create the huge subterranean complexes in which they now live.

  Now we fast-forward to 1943, where we find the U-boat supreme Grossadmiral Doenitz— and he was one of the saner members of the Nazi elite—claiming that the German submarine fleet had built “in another part of the world, a Shangri-La land, an impregnable fortress.” Later still, during the Nuremburg war-crimes trials, when you maybe would have thought he had more serious things to worry about, Doenitz spoke of “an invincible fortification in the midst of the eternal ice.”

  Within conspiracy-theory circles, this has become synonymous with the legendary Base 211, the Nazi’s own Antarctic equivalent of Area 51.

  This is also why from the late 1940s onwards you get a surge in reports of UFO sightings. These flying saucers were not visitors from the stars but Nazi craft built using the alien technology helpfully provided by the Fourth Reich’s new allies! There is even a suggestion that by using one of the Elder Race’s many tunnels beneath the Earth, they were able to burrow into Hitler’s Berlin bunker in April 1945, so that he, Eva Braun, Martin Bormann and the rest of the senior Nazis hierarchy could escape to their Antarctic redoubt.

  Perhaps they are still there, with Hitler having lived out his days painting watercolors of snow scenes and icebergs? Maybe they’ve all gone off in flying saucers back to Aldebaran? Perhaps the place is like those old Doug McClure movies The Land that Time Forgot and Warlords of Atlantis? You know, populated by improbable dinosaurs, cavemen, and hot chicks like Caroline Munro? Or maybe the Elder Race just got fed up with Hitler’s rantings and turned him and all the surviving Nazis into a bunch of penguins?

  Right, my friend, I don’t know about you, but I think it’s Margarita o’clock.

  8

  The Antarctic Explorer’s Story

  Oh, the Nazis in Antarctica! That’s a myth that is never going to go away, despite the fact there is not one shred of evidence to suggest they built a secret base there during World War Two. And I can also assure you that if there were a gateway to some underground civilization or the ruins of the lost city of Kadath, the number of ground-based expeditions, aerial photography missions and, more recently, satellite mapping activities over the past 100 years would have most certainly found them.

  The bald facts are these: in 1938, Nazi Germany sent an expedition to Antarctica, where they laid claim to an area they called Neuschwabenland—or New Swabia—although most of the territory was already administered by Norway under the name of Queen Maud Land. But (here the but is a big but) after 1939 the Nazis didn’t take the venture any further, and to this day the area continues to be known to the wider world as Queen Maud Land and is still run by Norway. In point of fact, Germany had no permanent presence in Antarctica until 1981, when it established a research facility.

  The one contribution the Nazis did make to Antarctic exploration was to take over 16,000 aerial photographs of the region and in the process identify and name a number of geographic features, including peaks, valleys and mountain ranges. Most of these names are still in use today, and quite rightly so, as some of the older informal names were really rather silly.

  For example, what the Nazis christened the Penck Trough had previously been known as the Plateau of Leng. And the adjoining Muhlig-Hofmann Mountains used to be called the Crazy Mountains, and before that, the Mountains of Madness, which just sounds like something out of a Victorian melodrama. Seriously, we shouldn’t laugh, as those mountains are where the ill-fated Pabodie Expedition from Miskatonic University came to a sticky end in 1931.

  One thing the Germans didn’t spot in 1938, not altogether surprisingly, since nobody had the technology to detect such phenomena—in the 1930s anyway—was that part of New Swabia included what is now called Lake Vostok, the largest sub-glacial lake in Antarctica.

  Over 160 miles long and 30 miles wide, the lake lies beneath 13,000 feet of ice and its waters are believed to have been isolated from the rest of the Earth for 20 million years. The Russians are only just starting to get probes down through the ice and into the lake water itself but the theory is that the environment could be similar to that of the ice-covered oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa.

  9

  The Landlady’s Story

  He’s a lovely man. Never caused me any trouble. Keeps himself to himself in the cottage he rents at the bottom of the yard. Always pays his rent on time, and if he sees me, he is always friendly and happy to talk a while—I’m a widow, you know—or come in for a cup of coffee.

  Researching a history book he is, about the Gold Coast houses during World War Two. Last time I saw him, he was really excited. Said he was on the trail of a conspiracy involving the Nazis and some secret society. He didn’t tell me the full details but said he’d met a fisherman down from Kingsport way who knew the location of a U-boat wreck and was planning to scuba-dive the site.

  I know he often works late into the night, typing up his notes and doing online research, so he often sleeps in late o
n a morning, and sometimes you won’t see the curtains pulled back till the afternoon.

  However, I grew concerned when I realized there’d been no signs of life at the cottage for the best part of three days, yet his car hadn’t been moved from the driveway. When I went over to investigate, I found the front door partially open. What tipped me off that something was wrong, which is why I dialed 911, is that not only was he missing but all his research notes and manuscript printout notes had gone, along with his computers and tech equipment.

  He was meticulous about his files and, while it isn’t unusual for him to be away on a trip for a night or two, he was in New Mexico recently; he’d always leave his stuff here. But now … it’s all gone, yet his clothes and personal possessions are still here.

  It’s not like him to do this. He’s a considerate young man. I’m worried about him.

  10

  The Medical Examiner’s Story

  The deceased John Doe is a white non-Hispanic male, found wearing the remnants of a neoprene diver’s wetsuit. I’d estimate his age at the time of death to be somewhere in his mid-thirties, but a more precise figure is impossible, given the damaged and decomposed state in which the remains were delivered to the autopsy rooms.

  Positive identification of the body is not yet possible, as most of the flesh on the face has been either eaten or dissolved away. The impression is that the skin and muscle tissue has been sucked clean from the skull. I have been able to obtain a partial fingerprint, so there is a chance that a search of the IAFIS fingerprint identification database may produce a match.