An Honorable German

by Charles L. McCain

  Max met the British officers with a rigid salute, nearby German sailors also coming to attention. Langsdorff insisted all prisoners be treated with proper military courtesy, and his men needed little prodding to respect this order. Such courtesy was part of the brotherhood of the sea. Max led the three British officers from the deck to the captain’s formal day cabin. Outside the door stood two sentries, arms crossed, each with a drawn dagger in his right hand, the blade held across his chest. Max ushered the British officers into the well-appointed cabin, its stuffed sofas looking incongruous in a warship, and motioned for them to sit. A bookshelf along the far wall held leather-bound titles in both German and English, including Winston Churchill’s World Crisis in two volumes, prominently displayed. “Gentlemen, if I may,” Max said, “I am Senior Lieutenant Brekendorf, second watch officer of Admiral Graf Spee.”

  “I am Captain Harris and this is First Officer Gill and Chief Engineer Bryant,” said the oldest of the three men, his thick Scottish accent hard for Max to understand. His uniform coat had four gold rings on each sleeve, but the other two men were in shirt-sleeves and bore no insignia of rank. They’d left their ship in a hurry; none of them even had their caps.

  Max ordered Langsdorff’s steward to bring coffee, then offered each prisoner a cigarette. Lighting one himself, he considered Harris briefly through a haze of smoke. The man had taken a pointless risk—the war would be over in a year. Everyone knew it—the British could never hold out against Germany. And this wasn’t even Britain’s fight: the Germans had gone into Poland only to reclaim what had been stolen from them at Versailles after the First War. But the conceited Brits couldn’t stand to see Germany regain her rightful place in the world; Chamberlain had foolishly signed a treaty with Warsaw committing Great Britain to war should the Poles be attacked. Well, now the Germans had Poland and the British had their war. “Why did you run, Captain? You placed your crew in unnecessary danger.”

  Harris stared at him for a moment. “I was a prisoner in the first lot and didn’t fancy spending the second go-round that way as well.”

  “You were captured by Germany in the First War?”

  The captain nodded and puffed his cigarette a few times before speaking. “By the bloody raider Wolf in 1915, on an Argyle and Dundee steamer bound for Calcutta. Bastard caught us at dawn and there was nothing to be done for it but haul down the colors and go over in our boats. I was a prisoner on that damned cow for months.”

  The steward interrupted with coffee, serving the men in china cups. It was good coffee too, bitter and strong, the kind one needed at sea.

  “Of course, we will want your codebooks and cargo manifests,” Max said.

  Harris smiled pleasantly. “Of course, I put them over the side as soon as I saw you weren’t Ajax. We keep them in a canvas bag weighted with a firebrick, just like in the First War. They’re at the bottom of the drink if you want them. I thought you bloody Germans were supposed to be so bloody smart.”

  The other two officers looked away. Blood came up in Max’s face. Arrogant, these British—even as prisoners, sipping coffee in their captor’s ship. He wanted to hit the British captain but squared his shoulders and nodded curtly instead. “Naturally, that is the usual thing,” he said. “What cargo were you carrying?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, man,” Harris snapped. “I’m not obliged to tell you that.”

  The firing gong sounded, cutting the discussion short. The British officers looked quizzically at Max. “The firing gong, gentlemen. I’m afraid we’re going to sink your ship. Kindly place your cups down and brace yourselves.” Max held on to the captain’s desk—bolted to the deck, like all the furniture on the ship.

  A great roar sounded, like dynamite going off in a well. Graf Spee heeled from the recoil, tossing all their coffee cups onto the carpet, the report sharp in Max’s ears, even belowdecks. First Officer Gill leapt to the porthole, followed by the chief engineer. Harris, white-faced, kept his seat, staring at the bulkhead. Max glanced through the porthole but saw no smoke or flame rising from Clement. The abandoned freighter bobbed placidly on the swell.

  “Missed her,” Gill said, almost to himself.

  Max said nothing. Presently the gong sounded and the big guns fired again. This time Max watched the shells fall into the sea, sending up geysers of seawater well short of the British ship. He felt the heat rising in his face again. No one spoke. When the third volley missed, Harris turned and looked at Max.

  “Hard to find the range in this chop,” Max said, feeling foolish as soon as he spoke. Harris raised an eyebrow. The sea was hardly raging. Graf Spee was heavily armed for a ship her size—too heavily armed—and the main batteries made her top-heavy, which had a poor effect on her seakeeping and, in turn, on the accuracy of her guns. The gunnery officer had managed a perfect warning shot over Clement’s bow during the chase, but Max wondered now if it had been nothing more than luck.

  “Perhaps we should wait until this storm passes,” Harris offered, blinking in the bright sunlight pouring into the cabin.

  “Of course our guns are also not designed to engage a ship at such close range,” Max said. This excuse also sounded foolish, though it was true. Another loud volley missed its mark, sending up more towers of water. At this rate it would be easier to row a boat over to Clement and shoot holes in the merchantman’s hull with a pistol. Max resolved to provide no further comment and the four men fell silent as Spee’s big guns banged away, shaking the cabin, knocking several books from the shelves. Captain Langsdorff became so frustrated that he ordered a pair of torpedoes fired at the merchantman. Both missed. Finally the gunnery officer found the mark and managed to set Clement afire; Max watched the flames spread across her deck. Suddenly the freighter exploded, sending a bright orange fireball high into the air.

  “Gasoline?” Max asked in surprise.

  “Kerosene, sir,” said Gill. “Packed in cases.”

  Max shook his head. Harris had braved Graf Spee’s fire with a hold full of kerosene.

  “Steward, a beer for each of these officers.” Max looked at each one of the three in turn. “I must ask each of you for your word of honor that you will not interfere in any way with the operation of the ship, else I will have to order an armed guard over you at all times.”

  Captain Harris answered without meeting Max’s eyes again. “You have it, laddie.”

  “Then, gentlemen, I must return to my duties. Our captain will be along shortly to speak with you. Please make yourselves comfortable. If you need anything, kindly make your request to the captain’s steward or to one of the sentries outside the bulkhead. Our barbershop and canteen are both available to you and our medical and dental staff shall attend upon your request.” He bowed slightly to the men as he’d learned to do at the Naval Academy, and the two junior officers nodded back. The captain just sat in silence.

  Graf Spee had stood down from action stations; the men had returned to their regular duties. Everywhere Max looked, the crew repaired the damage caused by the repeated firing of the big guns. Doors had been lifted from their hinges, flooring cracked, paint stripped off bulkheads, and light bulbs shattered everywhere by the concussions.

  When Max reached the administrative office, he opened the door to find two clerks wiping ink from the desks and floor.

  “What is this?”

  “Inkwells not secured, Herr Oberleutnant,” the senior rating said. Max frowned. What a mess. He helped the men clean up. By the time they finished his uniform was stained with black ink.

  His bridge watch was over and he’d been on duty since 0200, but before he slept Max sat in the office and read through the radio intercepts of the past hours. Graf Spee had a special staff of B-Service cipher experts whose only task was to intercept and decode as many British radio signals as possible. They spent their time in front of special radio receivers that automatically combed all frequencies and stopped on one when it detected a message being transmitted. And the B-Service men were damned good. The
y had picked up and decoded the signal from the British Admiralty declaring war on Germany three hours before Spee received official notice from Seekriegsleitung—the Naval War Staff—in Berlin. Most of the codebreakers had been mathematicians before the war, others wireless operators aboard merchant ships. Often they could immediately decrypt the ciphers used by the British Merchant Navy. Any code they couldn’t break in thirty minutes was sent on to their parent unit back in the Reich.

  The B-Service men could also put their mathematical skills to more mundane use. They’d recently relieved Max of two weeks’ pay playing cards in the officers’ mess. Max’s father had warned him about gambling away all his money in the service, but the money was gone and there was nothing to be done for it. Still, the B-Service men were good comrades, even though they seemed to do nothing but smoke, play skat, and listen intently to the wireless.

  Max read carefully through the new messages but none of the ships broadcasting were anywhere near Graf Spee. Damn. Finding a transmission from a ship close enough to intercept would be a lot quicker than this endless patrolling, roaming back and forth across the empty South Atlantic like Flying Dutchman. Traffic was sparse now in this, the third week of the war. British merchantmen were under strict Admiralty orders to maintain radio silence. Except for occasional lapses, they did so. Max wondered if Spee’s sister ship, Deutschland, was having better luck on her assignments farther north, along the trade routes that crossed to England from Canada and the United States.

  He replaced the messages in their notebook and returned to his cabin, stripping off his ink-stained uniform and stuffing it into the laundry bag at the foot of his closet. Tian, head of the six Chinese laundrymen on board, would retrieve the bag in the morning and return the uniform, starched and pressed, by midafternoon. All German naval ships employed Chinese laundrymen, though Max could hardly imagine where on earth they came from. Probably the old German concession at Tsingtao—another piece of German territory stolen by the Allies after the First War, along with the Germania Brewery that made Tsingtao beer.

  Max massaged his neck, muscles still knotted from the tension of the morning, then reached for the picture on his small desk. The frame had been cracked by the gun blasts. Mareth stared out from under the spiderwebbed glass. Max had taken the photo himself on a dock in Kiel two summers ago. Mareth’s face was tilted slightly downward and she looked askance at the camera with a close-mouthed smile, shy but crafty. A breeze off the water rippled her long blond hair. One of the navy’s new destroyers crossed the harbor behind her. What time would it be in Berlin now? Night. She would be getting ready for bed—letting her hair down from its ponytail, slipping on her silk pajamas. Or maybe one of his old cotton jerseys. Max smiled to himself. Was he homesick after only three weeks at sea? Get a hold of yourself. Still, how he wished he could tell Mareth in person about the excitement of finally sighting a ship, about the capture and even the embarrassment he’d felt with the British officers as he constantly made excuses about Graf Spee’s lack of accuracy. She would laugh at that, and then Max would be able to laugh at it himself. He put the picture back on his desk and climbed into his bunk.

  Enough sleep was hard to come by on combat assignment. He tried to get some after his morning watch and then a little more late in the evening. Like the crew of any warship at sea, the men of Graf Spee moved in the strict routine required for keeping a third of them on duty at all times, but this routine was frequently disrupted by the call to action stations, drills, and other essential tasks. So Max had learned to take sleep when he could get it. Porthole covered, lights out, the droning of the ship’s massive engines soon lulled him to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE SOUTH ATLANTIC

  DAY 102 OF THE WAR CRUISE OF ADMIRAL GRAF SPEE

  2 DECEMBER 1939

  MAX WOKE TO THE FOUR SHARP BELLS OF THE FLIEGERALARM: SHORT, short, long, short. He jerked open the door of his closet, snatched a uniform from its wooden hanger, and had a leg into his pants before he stopped. He felt no increase in the deck’s vibration beneath his bare feet; the ship was not working up to her full speed, as she would immediately begin to do if a plane really attacked. Then he remembered the orders of the day: Anti-aircraft guns will be exercised at 1400. Damn. He folded his pants and climbed back into his bunk.

  Odd that the launching of the floatplane had not wakened him. Usually the steam catapult made hell’s own racket when it shot the Arado into the air. Max didn’t envy the pilot—Spiering, a Luftwaffe man. He had to stream a target three hundred meters aft of the plane, then fly around and around the ship for hours so the anti-aircraft gun crews could practice their spotting and tracking skills. Max knew the endless circling would make him sick; Spiering didn’t seem to mind, but pilots were daft. They’d do anything to be up in an aeroplane—even one like the Arado, which looked to Max like nothing more than a pile of aluminum and wood cobbled together with glue in someone’s cellar. Sailors called it “the ship’s parrot”; they loved to tell youngsters fresh from boot camp to go and find the ship’s parrot. The new sailors would search for hours while the older men watched and had a laugh. Captain Langsdorff enjoyed the joke as well, though he would often be the one to finally let the youngsters off the hook by telling them where the ship’s parrot was: on the catapult.

  Max slept again, but it seemed only minutes before the action station alarm sounded, the bells shrill and demanding. Conditioned by countless drills, Max’s body moved before his brain began to operate.

  Dressing quickly, he stepped into the companionway, the river of sailors dashing for their battle posts parting to let him through. Some ran barefoot, shoes hanging around their necks by the laces. Others carried shirts or pants they hadn’t had time to struggle into. Petty officers hurried the few laggards. “Schnell! Schnell!” Men of the gun crews wore black anti-flash overalls and looked like running bears as they barreled their way through the ship. The five short bells of the action station continued to sound: “Action stations! All hands to action stations!” the loudspeakers blared.

  Lights flickered on and off as the electricians tested the circuits. Pictures were snatched from walls, deck rails removed, scuttles screwed tight over portholes, ready boxes of ammunition broken open at the anti-aircraft posts. One of the gunnery officers walked quickly past, face lathered with shaving cream. As soon as the engineers below saw the action station alarm begin to blink, they cut all unnecessary ship’s water to give more pressure to the firefighting mains.

  As Max hurried up the ladder to the bridge, two burly gunner’s mates pushed him aside. “Warschau! Warschau!” Gangway! Gangway!

  Max reached the bridge two minutes and ten seconds after the alarm sounded. Unlike the barely controlled bedlam on the decks, the bridge was calm and quiet. Captain Langsdorff insisted on it. No shouting, no idle talk. Several other officers had just arrived, breathing hard. Max pulled his binoculars from their bracket and took up his post in the middle of the bridge with a telephone talker and a bridge messenger on either side of him. As second watch officer, he passed the captain’s orders to the rest of the ship during battle. The first watch officer, the senior navigation officer, and others took their positions toward the stern of the ship in the aft controlling station. From there, the first watch officer would assume command of Graf Spee if the captain was killed.

  The hollow drone of the ventilating fans sounded as they sucked air into Spee’s mighty engines. Beneath Max, the ship began to vibrate terrifically as she went to her full speed. “Making turns for twenty-eight knots,” Max told the captain, his voice rising over the fans.

  On either side of him, the telephone talkers reported the ready status of the ship as it was relayed to them.

  “Fore and aft engine rooms manned and ready.”

  “Main gunnery command manned and ready.”

  “Aft damage control station manned and ready.”

  “Aft controlling station manned and ready.”

  “B-Service standing by.”<
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  Max heard the reports out, mentally checking off the departments, and then looked at his watch. “Ship cleared for action, two minutes, fifty-three seconds, Herr Kapitän.”

  More than a thousand officers and men had taken up their action stations in that brief time. It was as if an anthill had been kicked over, then perfectly reestablished in three minutes. This efficiency came from incessant training. Max could not count the days, the weeks, they had steamed back and forth in the Baltic running to action stations, to firefighting stations, to anti-aircraft stations, day and night, under the gaze of Captain Langsdorff and his stopwatch; ship starting and stopping, slow ahead, all ahead full, all back full, all ahead emergency. Man overboard. Swing boats out! Fore engine room shut down. Steam on two engines, on one, on eight. Maneuver with engines, no rudder orders allowed. Steer from aft controlling. Junior officers taking charge while their seniors ground their teeth. Lights put out. Damage control parties finding their way in the dark. And always, always, the alarm bells with their different sounds for different emergencies: five short bells for action stations; short, short, long, short for anti-aircraft; two long bells for man overboard. Eventually he had wanted to smash every damned bell on the ship.

  “Leutnant Spiering believes he has sighted a merchantman to the east of us,” Langsdorff said. “Come hard starboard thirty degrees to a new course of zero eight five. Let’s see what he’s found.”

  Max leaned forward to the voice tube. “Helm!”

  “Helm, aye.”

  “At right full rudder, come thirty degrees to new course of zero eight five degrees.”

  A moment passed and then the answering hail: “At right full rudder, coming thirty degrees to new course of zero eight five, Herr Oberleutnant.”

  At that rudder deflection, Spee heeled sharply to starboard as the helmsman brought the ship around to a course of almost due east. He had no bulky wheel to contend with; Graf Spee’s rudder was operated by push-button control. Because enemy ships aimed for the bridge in a sea battle, the helmsman sat in the heavily armored wheelhouse below the navigating bridge itself. If he were hit and killed, the standby helmsman in the aft controlling station took over.