An Honorable German

by Charles L. McCain

  “We have to at least try and fight,” he blurted out. “The men of this crew may be young, but they are navy men all the same. They have sworn to protect the honor of the Kriegsmarine and they will fight if you will lead them, sir.” He stood and slapped the table with the flat of his hand. “I, too, have devoted my life to becoming a naval officer, and I did not spend all those years studying and training just to blow up my own ship. Has the Royal Navy ever done such a thing? In five hundred years? Herr Kapitän, you know how the British will gloat if we scuttle her. Then who will be the ones submitting like dogs?”

  Langsdorff fixed his stare on Max. “Yes, I know, Brekendorf, and you are so eager to die for valor. Perhaps they will bury you with a Knight’s Cross around your neck, but I have been charged with the care of more than a thousand sailors, so I cannot think only of myself. I know our young crew is brave and I know they will follow me. The question is whether my conscience will allow me to lead them to slaughter for no good reason. Getting us all killed in a pheasant shoot will not help Germany win the war.”

  Langsdorff’s face seemed to have aged ten years in a week; the bones seemed closer underneath his skin. Max did not respond, but neither did he turn his eyes away from the captain’s. He did not want to die—that much was certain—but he was prepared to, as every fighting man must be.

  Ascher said, “You have already made your decision, then, Herr Kapitän?”

  Langsdorff nodded again. A faint, bitter expression—almost a smile—passed like a shadow over his features. He went on nodding, saying nothing, for what seemed like a very long time.

  _________

  Max spent the next two days working in the officers’ mess, assisted by Dieter and two other officers. Gone were the solicitous mess stewards. Around them, Graf Spee had grown silent save for the gentle hum of the engine that supplied electrical current to the ship. No tramp of feet, no chisel against the deck, no cursing petty officers. Only a skeleton crew remained aboard. The ship was not quiet like a tomb, Max thought, but like a museum toward the end of the day when the last group of youngsters has been ushered out and only the charwomen remain to tidy up.

  Dieter rose from his schematic drawing of the ship’s magazine and switched on the large wall-mounted radio. It was their last evening in Montevideo. Above the radio, a faded square showed where the portrait of Admiral Graf von Spee had hung. It could not be allowed to go down with the ship, and so had been sent ashore along with the ship’s bell, its war diary, and most of the men.

  The voice of an American announcer crackled from the radio speaker. Max and Dieter had been listening to the man’s reports off and on for the last two days—listening as his voice alternated between shrillness and ponderous gravity. Tonight it was shrill. “This is Mike Fowler reporting to you live. The scene here in Montevideo is unbelievable, ladies and gentlemen, simply unbelievable. Tensions are at the boiling point here in Uruguay. Thousands—no, it must be tens of thousands—of people are lining the harbor here in Montevideo, waiting to see how this drama will play out. It’s as if all of Brooklyn had gone to Coney Island at once. People are jammed everywhere—on top of cars, hanging from lampposts, leaning out of buildings. Just an incredible spectacle. Below me I can see the entire harbor, a huge circle ringed with docks and hotels and white sand beaches, a lovely sight, ladies and gentlemen. Vendors are doing a land office business in ice cream and soda pop here today. The heat is better than ninety degrees, but everyone is scrambling to get a look at the wounded Nazi battleship moored in the middle of the harbor, and still no one knows what the Germans will do. Many in the crowd are eager to see a real naval battle right here in the harbor. Blood will spill into the South Atlantic…”

  Max got up to switch the radio off, but Dieter stopped him. “I want to listen.”

  “Dieter, please. I can’t work with this racket.”

  “Yessir, ladies and gentlemen, there will be blood in the water as a suicide squad of Nazi fanatics prepares…”

  Max turned it off. “I cannot work with that idiot yelling in the background.”

  Dieter held his hands up in surrender—a fitting gesture. For once he was without a response. Even Dieter’s swagger had dropped away. He wasn’t bothering to hide his depression, his thin face pale from the strain.

  “We have to finish these plans tonight,” Max said, dropping back into his chair.

  Dieter sighed. He lit a cigarette and ran a hand up through his hair. “I don’t remember much about my father. It’s curious, our mind, our memories—often I’m not sure whether things I remember about my father happened or whether I only wish they had happened. But what I truly remember, and remember so clearly, are the old naval officers my mother boarded in our home. They were bitter men, Max, mein Gott.” He laughed, a bitter sound in itself. “No victory, no glory, and after the war, barely enough money to keep themselves fed. Every dignity stripped away. When I looked at them, I could see why my father had done what he did. At first I was so angry with him. Killing himself—it seemed a terrible mystery to me. Later, I understood.”

  Max lit a cigarette of his own. He didn’t know what to say. “This war will be different,” he offered, “no matter what happens tomorrow. We’re not going to end up like those men.”

  Dieter smiled.

  The two friends sat for a moment looking at each other, Dieter puffing out perfect little rings of smoke. It was a trick Max had never mastered.

  In the morning, they began preparations to weigh anchor.

  It took thirty minutes to unbolt the warheads from a half dozen sleek torpedoes. Max knew the torpedo mechanics could have done the job in a fraction of the time, but they had all been sent ashore. Emil, one of the Dieselobermaschinists, did it instead, whistling tunelessly as he went about his work. Each warhead was set gently onto a small trolley, and Max then led the way to one of the ship’s elevators, his six-man crew following behind in a row with the yellow trolleys.

  They rode the elevator all the way down to the refrigerated magazines on the lowest deck. One magazine, toward the bow, supplied shot and powder to the forward guns, while another, toward the stern, supplied the after guns. Max left three of the warheads in the corridor, then had his men push the other three to the forward magazine.

  He produced the brass key—given to him by Ascher—and unlocked the magazine’s heavy metal door. A blast of cold air hit his face. It felt wonderful amid the heat of the roasting ship. Max stepped through and held open the magazine’s double-sealed door. Still whistling, Emil led the crew inside.

  In the main powder room, wooden shelves—so made to prevent sparks—were bolted to the wall and piled high with silk powder bags. The bags looked harmless, like so many sacks of flour. Max stroked one of them—it felt like lingerie—then jerked his hand away. Each contained enough force to blow a six-hundred-seventy-pound shell twenty kilometers through the air. The sailors looked about the magazine with keen interest. It was a secret, sacred space, strictly off-limits—none had ever seen it before. Yet it was this powder, mixed in just the right way, measured in just the right amounts, that elevated Graf Spee from being merely a ship to a man-o’-war.

  A hand signal set the sailors to work pushing and pulling the torpedo warheads through the double steel doors. Max felt the chill air drying the sweat on his face and back. It was the first time he’d been cool since they arrived in this cursed place, where it was so damned hot that a man could get third-degree burns if he touched the armor plating at midday. Only the giant ventilating fans going full out and blowing fresh air into the ship made it remotely bearable. Hard to imagine what a thousand men locked in a steel ship without ventilation would smell like—not pleasant.

  His sailors manhandled the three warheads into the middle of the magazine. Still whistling, Emil piled powder bags atop the warheads. Then he snapped to attention. “Completed, Herr Oberleutnant.”

  Max nodded. The sailors were in no hurry to leave and neither was he. Oddly, the magazine did not seem like a fo
rbidding place. It was dark and cool, like a root cellar on a summer’s day. As in the officers’ mess, there was no sound this far down in the ship except the faintly throbbing diesels. The bloodthirsty crowds on shore were a world away. Max felt an insane desire to smoke and laughed at the thought. “Let’s get out of here before someone lights a cigarette,” he said, smiling. His men laughed with him and filed out the double doors. Max paused and extracted the timer with the detonator from his pocket. All his desire for glory and it had come to this—sinking his own ship. He set the timer, placed it atop the sacks of powder piled on the warheads, and with that, he turned and left, locking the magazine door behind him and putting the brass key in his pocket.

  They repeated this procedure in the second magazine and Max emerged on deck afterward, blinded by the brilliance of the sun. He blinked like a lizard. The sea of people along the harbor shore seemed to still be swelling, as if nothing this interesting had ever happened in Uruguay before. They would get their damned show soon enough and to hell with them. Beneath his feet the teakwood planking had become so hot that the varnish began to peel. Damn this forsaken place.

  He motioned for his men to follow him to the stern of the ship, where one of the main fueling ports was located. Dieter’s engineering crew, stripped to the waist and running with sweat, had wrestled the cover off the port and attached a coupling that connected to a set of emergency fueling hoses.

  Max set his men to work pulling the hoses along the deck to the aft companionway. There he stationed Emil and Krancke, a deckhand—son of “the best-known taxi driver in all of Leipzig,” he liked to claim. They pulled each hose hand over hand and let the forepiece with its brass cap play out down the metal stairs behind them. Two more sailors waited at the bottom to pull the hoses through to the next stairway, at the bottom of which Dieter had posted two additional men. In this way each hose made its way down, deck by deck, until it reached the top of the staircase descending to the lowest deck, where the magazines were located.

  Only the morning before Graf Spee’s decks had been scrubbed and mopped, as they had been every morning during their war patrol. This was a German warship—no dirt allowed—but soon the gleaming decks would run black with stinking fuel oil. The very thought provoked Max and made his temples burn with anger.

  Once the hoses were in place he assembled his men on the main deck and turned them over to Dieter. They came to attention and saluted, sweat glistening like mineral oil on their bodies. Max was soaked and bedraggled, too. Sweat had leached all the starch out of his white uniform. Unlike the men, orders forbade him from removing his shirt or tunic. Even his shoes were damp, so much that they squeaked when he walked.

  He climbed the narrow outboard staircase to the bridge and found it still and hot, even with the windows open. There was no breeze in the harbor. The men in the engine room must be close to fainting.

  Langsdorff stood alone on the bridge wing, smoking his cigar, watching the thousands of people on shore. The crowd’s buzz drifted over the water, distant and indistinct, like the roar from a soccer stadium blocks away. Max came to attention and saluted when the captain turned to face him.

  “Completed, Herr Kapitän.”

  Langsdorff touched his gold-braided cap in acknowledgment. “Prepare to get under way.”

  Max saluted again, then picked up the engine room phone. “Order from captain: prepare to get under way.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Oberleutnant.”

  A deep hum sounded through Graf Spee as four of the mammoth diesel engines were fired off and hooked to the propeller shafts. Max, hand on the bridge rail, felt the vibration pick up. Aft of the bridge, black diesel smoke began to waft from the funnel. Normally Oberbootsmann Carls would have his men swab the diesel particles from the deck, but Graf Spee was through with all that now. Max supposed he could actually spit on the deck if he wanted to, though it was a serious offense. In the British navy, he knew, sailors used to be flogged for spitting on the deck since it was held to be the same as spitting against the King.

  “Up anchors,” Langsdorff ordered.

  Because the telephone talkers had already left the ship, Max lifted the megaphone against his lips and shouted through the open window, “Up anchors.”

  On the bow, Carls saluted, then, drawing on his gauntlets, he threw the lever on the anchor motor, which began to grind away as it pulled the wet black chains from the harbor’s muddy water. A loud thump sounded as the anchors were drawn flush to the bow. The aft anchors had been raised before the crew had gone ashore.

  “Anchors secured, Herr Kapitän.”

  “Hoist the battle ensign.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Kapitän.”

  Max made his way to the bridge wing, then across the metal catwalk to the signal deck. The signalmen had left the ship too, but the chief signalman had attached the battle ensign to the halyard before he went. Max gripped the rough hemp in his fingers and hauled the flag up. It hung limp in the heat but he came to attention and saluted. He could barely look at the captain when he returned to the bridge.

  Langsdorff said nothing, only continued vacantly puffing on his cigar. A slight breeze ruffled the harbor waters, and that along with the lazy current of the harbor caused the huge ship to begin a slow drift. Max glanced at the captain but stayed quiet. The almost imperceptible movement of the ship finally seemed to shake Langsdorff from his reverie. “Ahead dead slow,” he ordered.

  “Jawohl, Herr Kapitän.” There were no sailors on the bridge so Max rang the engine telegraph himself.

  Her bronze propellers bit the water and Graf Spee moved slowly toward the harbor entrance. Max peered through his binoculars at the people on the shore. Many waved white handkerchiefs and many, members of Uruguay’s German community, gave the stiff-armed Nazi salute. They’d been standing out there in the sun all day. More than a few must have fainted. Seventeen hundred hours now and the air had cooled by a few degrees but the bridge plating was still too hot to touch.

  The sound of one of the phones startled Max, so quiet and gentle was the ship’s motion. He picked it up. “Bridge.”

  “B-Service here, sir. Observers report two British cruisers have moved into the Rio Plata and are steaming upstream at flank speed.”

  Max repeated this to the captain. “Acknowledged,” he said. It was only what they had expected—the little barking dogs sent in to nip at their heels while the capital ships waited over the horizon, shells loaded in the breech of every cannon, ready to discharge an immense broadside against Graf Spee. Langsdorff withdrew the cigar from his mouth and gave an order so quietly that Max had to have him repeat it. “Left standard rudder,” the captain said again.

  Max bent over the speaking tube and passed the order to the helmsman. Langsdorff let her swing until her raked bow almost pointed toward the channel that led out of the harbor, into the river beyond. “Rudder amidships,” he ordered.

  Max passed this order, too. The ship steadied up on the new course and headed into the channel followed by a long motorized barge. Max turned aft and gazed at Montevideo. So many people had turned out to see their final voyage. Most of them just wanted to watch death on the water, as if warships were bulls in a ring. He turned his back on the harbor and cursed them.

  Slowly Graf Spee moved through the channel and into the Rio Plata, fifty kilometers wide at this point, the water stained khaki by the silt carried down from the mountains. The sun moved lower now, the breeze picking up. How long before the British cruisers arrived? Two hours? Maybe three? Because ships of one belligerent nation were not allowed to sail from harbor within twenty-four hours of a ship from another belligerent nation, the cruisers had been forced to wait beyond the river’s mouth—outside the territorial waters of Uruguay. But they were coming hell for leather at Graf Spee now that she was under way, and they would let the diplomats sort it out later.

  Langsdorff stood on the bridge wing and took careful bearings from the land with the mounted compass. When he was satisfied that the ship had c
ome far enough, he said, “Stand by to disembark.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Kapitän.” Max took up the P.A. system microphone. “Achtung! Achtung! All personnel not on the special detail, report to boarding ladders on the port side.”

  Spee continued to glide slowly through the river, followed obediently by the barge. By now the two vessels were five kilometers out from the crowded harbor.

  “All stop,” Langsdorff said.

  Max passed the order and the vibration died away as the engines went to standby. Graf Spee drifted to a halt in the muddy river.

  Langsdorff stood for several minutes without speaking, then turned to Max. “Commence.”

  Max again picked up the microphone for the loudspeaker. “Commence disembarkation.”

  Almost everyone still aboard would leave the ship now. They gathered quietly by the boarding ladders and climbed down into the barge, which had come up alongside. Langsdorff watched his men go, each sailor giving the captain a respectful salute. The barge was loaded in ten minutes. It cast off and moved away, leaving only a tiny detail of officers and men behind. Langsdorff came inside and ordered the ship to proceed ahead, dead slow.

  The diesel smoke began to trickle again from Spee’s lone funnel as she started to move, her propellers churning the brown water under her stern into a froth. Aft of them, the barge had anchored itself in the middle of the river. Max followed Langsdorff back out onto the bridge wing, wrinkling his nose at the muddy stench of the Plata. He could see the lights of Montevideo beginning to flicker on in the blue twilight. Sailors on the barge had come to attention to salute their receding ship.

  Max took his binoculars and peered out ahead of the bow. They were alone on the wide river, which stretched away to the horizon. He hadn’t really expected to see any British ships, but you never knew about the British. If they came upon Graf Spee now, Langsdorff’s plan would be ruined.