“Well, I’m happy for you anyway,” Dieter said, “and I hope you go through with it this time. The poets tell us that love is blind, and marriage is a venerable institution. Personally, I’d rather not be blind and living in an institution, but if anyone is worth being married to, it’s Mareth—no matter what her parents think of you.”
Max grinned. Dieter would know. He’d spent a lot of time with them when the two had just begun seeing each other. Dieter was the perfect friend to bring along with a new girlfriend because he was funny and entertaining, but enough of a scoundrel to make Max look a prince by comparison. And Dieter not only understood his role but loved an audience. He kept everybody laughing when the three of them went to the Gnomenkeller, the cadet hangout in Flensburg, also frequented by young women eager to meet a Seekadett. On occasion, Mareth would approach girls on Dieter’s behalf, pretending to be his sister.
One night, she had introduced him to a set of vacationing Bavarian twins, big-hipped mountain girls of the kind Dieter most adored. Mareth told them that her brother had been captain of Germany’s Olympic juggling team at the ’36 games in Berlin, and, of course, Dieter obliged with an impromptu demonstration—using two shot glasses, then three, then four. Max had surreptitiously caught the fourth one when Dieter dropped it, and the girls were none the wiser. The Bavarian fräuleins had been very impressed and shortly thereafter both left with Dieter. Next day, Max had asked, “And what happened with the girls?”
“No one should ask a gentleman a question such as that,” Dieter said.
“Of course not, but then again I’m not asking a gentleman, I’m asking you.”
“I won’t say a thing.”
Max had laughed. “That means you didn’t.”
Now Dieter reached out and shook Max’s hand. “Congratulations,” he said, “again. Sadly, I must leave your heroic presence and return to my duties.”
“You engineering officers actually have something to do?”
“Only keeping the engines running. A modest contribution compared to the mighty deeds of the sea officers.”
Max lay back when Dieter had gone. An Iron Cross. True, only an Iron Cross Second Class—just a small ribbon worn in the middle buttonhole of your tunic—but still, an award for bravery. Mareth’s father could not look down his nose at that. He certainly didn’t have one. Helmuth von Woller had spent the First War sitting on his duff in various diplomatic postings, playing bridge with the other brave diplomats. Helmuth’s brother, Oberstleutnant Ernst von Woller, had fought shoulder to shoulder with Max’s father in the village Landwehr battalion at Verdun—a yearlong siege that was meant to destroy the French but ended up destroying the Germans. In one of those terrible battles, Johann Brekendorf had carried a horribly wounded Ernst von Woller through an artillery barrage to the battalion aid station. Yet when he laid his commander on the ground outside the aid post, Ernst was dead. Instead it was Johann, bleeding from dozens of small shrapnel wounds, whom the medics had bandaged and carried to the hospital train. For this, Johann had been awarded the Prussian Military Cross, the highest award for bravery an enlisted man could receive in the Prussian army. While he did not possess the decoration his father had, Max felt he had proved his bravery to his father and to himself.
By the time Max returned to the bridge, Spee had been out of the storm for some hours. The wind and rain had gone, but heavy swells remained and continued to rock the ship. Max’s wrists ached as he stood at his post, gripping the handrail for balance. The rest of his body ached, too. When he had changed his uniform before coming on duty, the mirror showed black-and-blue flesh in many places. He had refused the surgeon’s offer of aspirin. That was foolish. Now he would have to go back for it, and going back would make him feel sheepish.
An hour after daybreak, they sighted Altmark, squat in the water like any tanker, her crew sporting white American sailor caps, the Stars and Stripes flying from her stern and painted on her sides. “A real Yankee Doodle,” Langsdorff said, “full of good Texas oil.” The two ships closed in to exchange the recognition signals and formally establish each other’s identity. Naval etiquette satisfied, they stood off; the heavy swell made it impossible for Altmark to trail out her fuel hoses or for either ship to launch boats.
“Take station on me,” Langsdorff signaled.
The ships steamed in a wide circle all day—a bothersome delay but one welcomed by the crew of Graf Spee. A warm, bright sun shone upon the ship and most off-duty sailors rigged their hammocks on deck and had their first good sleep in days. Others put on their swimming trunks and sprawled over the teakwood deck, using their towels as pillows, and took the sun. Even Captain Langsdorff indulged in sun worship, although in uniform. His steward set up two deck chairs by the aft torpedo tubes where Captain Langsdorff and one of his prisoners, Captain Dove of Africa Shell, took the sun and had one of their many private talks. Curiously, they had become friends of a sort and often talked for hours.
Max found it hard to understand. Did they just avoid the obvious? Perhaps the captain enjoyed Dove’s bold personality. If the meek shall inherit the earth, then Captain Dove was certainly not going to get anything.
When he had first come aboard, Captain Dove insisted that his ship had been in the territorial waters of neutral Portuguese Mozambique and that Langsdorff violated international law by seizing his ship. Langsdorff insisted that Dove was still in international waters and thus liable to be sunk. Then occurred what Max had thought of as the “Battle of the Charts” because each man produced his own nautical chart and they dueled for two hours, their weapons being dividers and compasses and finally cigars and scotch. They never did agree about the exact position of their ships at the time Graf Spee took Africa Shell as a prize of war. The battle ended when Langsdorff suggested Dove write up a document of protest, which both Dove and Langsdorff later signed, although Captain Langsdorff’s signature simply affirmed that he had officially received the protest, not that he agreed.
But that had been three weeks ago, and now, safely out of the storm, Max, too, welcomed the short break from the ship’s routine that gave him extra time to rest. He slept like a dead man between his watches, despite Spee’s constant rocking, and felt close to his usual strength again by the next morning when the swell began to die away. Two hours after dawn, the waves had settled, and the men went to work.
Max supervised a loading party. With another day of bright sunshine, his men again took off their shirts to feel the warmth on their pale skin, while they worked to strike a mound of 105-millimeter shells belowdecks. Altmark had sent the load of shells over in Graf Spee’s launch, and, using a block and tackle, Max’s crew hoisted the shells one at a time and lowered them into the refrigerated magazine. Cordite, the propellant used to blow the shells from the guns, deteriorated and became unstable at high temperatures.
“Easy, easy!” Max shouted as one of the shells swayed over the access hatch. “It’s slipping!” The words had barely left his mouth when the shell slid free of the harness and dropped six decks to the hold. Max shut his eyes and jammed his fingers into his ears. Nothing. The sailors grinned at him—everyone, from the assistant cook on up, knew the shells could not explode without their detonators, which were not inserted until the shells were about to be fired. Without the detonators you could drop the shells from an aeroplane and they wouldn’t explode. Max had to laugh, too, even if he was embarrassed.
A series of curses drifted up through the hatch from the deck below. “Back to work,” Max ordered, “and be more careful!”
Three boats from Altmark and two launches from Graf Spee hauled a warehouse of provisions to the big ship. Canned food, boxes of macaroni, crates of apples, tins of pickled cabbage, dried fruit, coffee, cigarettes, cases of Beck’s beer, slabs of frozen beef, all piled up on the teak deck boards. Along with the food came supplies to run the ship: jerry cans of lubricating oil, cylinders of carbolic acid for the refrigeration plant, replacements for burnt-out engine parts. In turn, the men fil
led the unloaded boats with most of their British prisoners. They looked bedraggled and moved slowly into the launches, gripping their small suitcases and kit-bags. Max wondered what being a prisoner of war would be like. No action, no job, no responsibility. Crushing boredom.
Sweat streamed from his men as they wrestled the stores below. Officers ran around yelling orders, sailors muttered under their breath, winches screeched, cargo nets rose into the air, swayed over the deck, then down into the holds. Commander Kay, Graf Spee’s executive officer—a thin, fussy martinet of a man—darted among the stacks of supplies urging everyone on. “Keep those men working,” he said to Max, whose bare-chested sailors already pushed and hauled cargo with all their strength.
When Kay saw something he didn’t like, he blew a silver whistle that dangled from a string around his thin neck. By late morning, Max wanted to grab the whistle and throw it overboard along with the commander.
Still the supplies kept coming to fill Graf Spee’s empty storerooms. A thousand men consumed enormous amounts of food. Even with the provisions captured from the British ships, Spee was running low on almost everything. Sacks of dried beans, of flour, cases of tinned milk, boxes of dried eggs, all came aboard in massive quantities. Freshwater was one of the few items they did not need from Altmark. Graf Spee’s desalinization equipment produced the fifty tons of water required every day by the crew and the huge diesel engines, which could not be cooled with salt water because salt corroded their inner parts.
At 1200 Langsdorff passed the word for everyone to put their shirts back on. Several of Max’s men were already a bright shade of pink, and Max’s own face felt burnt from the morning sun. November was summer in the Southern Hemisphere but it was easy to be fooled by the wind. A strong southerly breeze kept the air cool, masking the strength of the sun’s rays.
Half the working parties were sent below for lunch but the other half remained on deck. Everyone had been rousted out to load supplies, even the paymaster’s assistants and pipefitters and dental assistants. Only the band members were exempt, entertaining the sailors instead. Every hour, the band left its perch aft of turret Bruno and marched twice around the deck, picking its way through the mounds of supplies. Max pushed his men, now working to unload a net filled with tins of jam. The sun had heated the teakwood deck planks, and Max shifted from foot to foot—though it was still better than standing on steel. Wood gave the men better footing, and teak didn’t splinter when hit by a shell. Wooden splinters could be deadly; in the days before ships were made of steel, the majority of casualties in sea battles had come from flying splinters.
By 1630 hours the sailors were exhausted, their beards dripping with sweat—many bent over, hands on their knees, gulping air. At 1700 a silence not heard for months came over the ship—the diesels had been stopped, Langsdorff had brought Graf Spee to a complete halt. Max and the other men on deck paused and looked to the bridge. The order came over the loudspeaker: “By divisions, on the starboard side, swimming until dinner is piped.” A cheer went up among the men.
Oberbootsmann Carls and his men dragged cargo nets to the starboard side and hung them down to the water. Max went quickly to his cabin, put on his swim trunks, returned to the deck, and climbed down one of the nets. The ocean water was cold on his skin, and the salt stung the bandaged cuts on his wrists, but it felt good. He dived, went under, came up and shook the water from his head. Damn it felt good. Men poured down the nets, spreading out before the ship’s towering hull. Wagner, one of the bridge messengers, swam over laughing and dunked Max. Soon all the officers were being dunked by the men. Max laughed too and splashed the sailors around him. Two days ago going over the side meant certain death. Now they played in the ocean, surrounded by comrades, a brilliant red sun sinking behind them. The war seemed a rumor from a place far away.
CHAPTER FOUR
ABOARD ADMIRAL GRAF SPEE
13 DECEMBER 1939
EARLY MORNING
MAX SIPPED COFFEE AND LISTENED TO DIETER EXPLAIN ANOTHER one of his get-rich-quick schemes. They sat in the officers’ mess, preparing to go on duty.
“After the war is over, there will be a big demand for glass eyes, you see, tens of thousands will be needed, maybe even more. And how many glass-eye factories do you think there are in the Gross-deutsches Reich?”
“I don’t know,” Max said, “how many?
Dieter furrowed his brow. “I don’t know either, but there couldn’t be many or you would’ve heard about them. So I propose to set up this venture and all I need is a few farsighted investors, if you’ll excuse the expression, to come up with twenty thousand reichsmarks.”
“Perhaps your friends will help you.”
“Exactly. Now I know why you’re an officer—such perception.”
Max laughed. He was tightfisted; his father had drummed that into him. It pained him to waste money as he had with the B-Service cardsharps. Save two, spend one, his father always said.
But Dieter spent two, then spent two more, then borrowed a few and spent those as well.
An officers’ steward interrupted them. “Zero three forty-five, Herr Oberleutnant.”
“I have to go relieve the watch,” Max said, “and so I must take my leave from the future founder of Germany’s great glass-eye empire.”
Dieter grinned behind his dark beard. “They laughed at Krupp when he said he could build a better cannon.” Of course Krupp, the great arms dealer, was now the biggest supplier of cannons to the Wehrmacht. His name could be found on every one of the huge naval guns on the deck of Graf Spee.
“When you are rich, mein Herr, remember me.”
“I will, I will. What was your name again?”
Max grinned and shook his head as he left the officers’ mess. Dieter was a reckless schemer, but he came by it honestly. He was third-generation navy—his father, too, had been an engineer, and the lone heir of an old and prominent family in Kiel. But the mutiny of the High Seas Fleet at the end of the First War had destroyed Lothar Freiherr von Falkenheyn emotionally, and postwar inflation had wiped out his fortune. His circumstances much reduced, the Kaiser in exile, the aristocracy abolished, the navy he loved now nothing more than a glorified coast guard, he hanged himself from a crossbeam in his dining room in 1922.
Max knew that Dieter’s bravado was a front, and that his dreams of easy money carried with them a bitter edge. With her husband gone, her jewelry pawned, Dieter’s mother had been forced to turn their home into a boarding house for retired naval officers trying to survive on military pensions, pensions rendered almost worthless as the terrible inflation of the early Weimar years destroyed the finances of all but the wealthiest. Not Dieter’s father, nor his mother, nor anyone they knew could ever have imagined that the First World War would bring such catastrophe and that every single pillar of their stable lives would collapse. And the fall had been precipitous. To Dieter and his mother and to so many others this bitterness became the dominant emotion of their lives.
Coming out onto the deck, Max paused and breathed in the clean night air. This war would be different; it would end in no such disgrace, but rather in triumph and pride, and Germany would take back all that had been wrenched away from her two decades before. Above him, a blanket of stars spread across the blue-black sky. He picked out the Southern Cross, shining bright in the Southern Hemisphere. Like every sailor for a millennium, Max knew the night sky by heart; the unchanging position of the stars was still a crucial guide in the navigation of any ship, be it merchantman, man-o’-war, clipper under sail, or even one of the new cruise liners that sailed to exotic tropical locales. Maybe he and Mareth would take a cruise someday, if he could ever bring himself to step off a dock again once the war was over. On a calm, clear night like this, it seemed a pleasant idea. Mareth had been on several cruises with her father around the Mediterranean, but Max had only heard her stories. Together they could do the Hamburg-to-Rio run on the Hamburg-America Line. Tea at four on the deck. Dining at seven—gentlemen in d
inner jackets, please. Dancing at nine. Cigars and brandy. Reading in a deck chair, legs wrapped in a blanket, and then a brisk turn around the deck, nodding to the officers.
Sailors brushed past Max in the dark on the way to their posts. He climbed quickly up the three flights of exterior stairs to the navigating bridge.
Gerhard stood on the starboard bridge wing, leaning against the metal plating with the vast sky stretched out above him and a gentle breeze in his face. Max went over and saluted. “Sir, I am ready to relieve you.”
Gerhard returned the salute. “Seas are calm. Wind is three knots coming due south from one eight zero degrees. Barometer is steady. We are steaming south-southeast on a compass heading of one five five. We are two hundred forty-five kilometers off the mouth of the Rio Plata. Making turns for twelve knots. Engines one, three, five, and seven are on line. Shafts are revolving at one hundred twelve revolutions per minute. All equipment is functioning. The captain is to be called for anything not strictly routine.”
Max stood at attention. “Sir, I relieve you.”
Gerhard saluted and they ducked inside to sign the log. This done, Max went back out to the open wing alone. He licked his lips and tasted the salt. A breeze cooled his face, the wind clammy with moisture. Graf Spee’s wake glowed wide and bright at her stern as her propellers stirred up the phosphorus in the water. The diesel fumes wafted strong from the funnel abaft the bridge.
Graf Spee was darkened, no lights to give her away to her enemies—of which she had many, especially in the estuary of the Rio Plata. The wealth of South America flowed from the Plata—wealth measured in tons of frozen meat, hundredweights of creamy butter, cargo holds filled with grain, ingots of steel, all bound for England. The river’s very name gave notice of the riches that flowed down its waters to the broad Atlantic: Rio de la Plata—the River of Silver. Of course, the Tommies knew all this as well as Max did. Indeed, they probably knew it better since British investors owned everything worth owning in Uruguay and Argentina. The Royal Navy constantly patrolled the estuary of the Rio Plata; they would be on high alert for Graf Spee. She would have to slip in like a fox, take some fat merchantmen, and be quickly on her way.
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