An Honorable German

by Charles L. McCain

  Using a handheld Morse lamp, the sailor signaled the ice-breaker, which quickly blinked a response.

  “Signal acknowledged, Herr Kaleu. Their response: ‘Signal to Kommandant U-114: take station two hundred meters aft of me.’” They followed the stubby ship out of the frozen harbor and into the Baltic proper, which never froze. “Good luck and good hunting,” the icebreaker signaled to them.

  “Port the helm fourteen degrees to new course two nine five degrees, west by northwest,” he ordered. The helmsman in the conning tower repeated the directions, then pushed the metal buttons that controlled the rudder. Max surveyed the Baltic. Chunks of ice bobbed around like apples in a barrel. Wind from the Russian steppe kicked up the water and it sloshed along the submarine’s gray flanks, sometimes foaming over the foredeck. The two diesels rumbled behind him in the cold, their exhaust blowing over the bridge in the following wind. Max turned and watched the sun go down. It didn’t give much warmth anyway, but the Baltic looked even more desolate once it was gone.

  Lehmann had the watch. He stood bundled up with the three sailors and a petty officer who comprised the bridge watch. Each of them was responsible for a quadrant of the compass. No talking allowed and keep your binoculars to your eyes—these were Max’s strictest rules. As Kommandant of the U-boat, he stood no routine watch. He did whatever he thought best, which meant on combat patrol he’d be spending twelve to fourteen hours a day on the bridge, sometimes more. Because he knew this was coming, he decided to rest now and let the officers get used to their responsibilities. “Stay alert, men,” he cautioned. “Leutnant, you have the bridge.”

  With that he dropped into the humid interior of the boat. Georg helped him pull off his heavy bridge coat and leather jacket. “Switch to red,” Max ordered. Georg switched the control room’s lighting from white to red to preserve the men’s night vision in case they had to suddenly go on deck.

  Max pulled aside the green curtain and heaved himself onto his bunk. He alone had any privacy. Everyone else slept on bunks arranged in tiers along the central corridor that ran the length of the boat. As soon as one man went on watch, another climbed into his place and slept. Only the officers and the chief petty officers had exclusive bunks, and only the captain’s came equipped with a curtain and a small folding desk with a saltwater washbasin underneath. He folded his arms over his chest, reviewed the day, and then let the gentle throb of the diesels lull him to sleep.

  They steamed into the Bay of Kiel thirty-six hours later. Max stood on the bridge, guiding the boat into the harbor, breathing morning air rich with the harbor’s tang—tar, oil, seaweed, salt—a bouquet compared to the smell inside the U-boat. Several warships rode at anchor, outlines blurred in the mist. Sweeping the harbor with his glasses, Max immediately recognized Admiral Scheer, sister ship of Graf Spee. He shivered and closed his eyes for a moment; it felt like he’d seen a ghost.

  “Dead slow,” he ordered.

  The helmsman moved the levers on the engine telegraph in the conning tower. Identical repeaters registered the orders in the engine room and activated light signals specific to each command—necessary because the noise in the engine room was too loud for the men to hear the bells that rang when the engine telegraph transmitted a new order. The engineers communicated with one another using hand signals.

  Max surveyed the bay, silver in the morning sun, across which he’d first watched the Kiel Week races unfold those dozen years ago. His navy dreams were born that week aboard Emden, and he’d come here as a cadet to board the naval training barque Gorch Fock, a three-masted sailing ship, named for a sailor-poet who perished in the Battle of the Skagerrak. On the surface, Kiel didn’t look so different, but when he looked more closely, the presence of the war became evident. Anti-aircraft batteries covered with camouflaged netting had been set up everywhere, manned by sailors who stamped their feet in the cold of the early morning. Max scanned the shoreline with his binoculars, stopping on the huge covered sheds of the Deutsche Werke shipyards. A year ago the roofs of these sheds had been glass. But Allied bombs dropped in the last months had shattered all the glass. Now camouflaged tarps covered the roofs. U-boats were being built everywhere he looked. He’d watched U-114 come together in these same yards. The men in the yards were German master craftsmen, the best in the world. The Allies had no one like them.

  Dead ahead lay the Tirpitz Pier, named for Admiral von Tirpitz, founder of the German navy. It was a long concrete jetty stretching far into the bay. U-boats were tied up two and three deep on either side, boards laid deck to deck to make gangplanks, armed crewmen stationed on the deck of every boat.

  Lehmann had the docking crew ready with the lines. As Max steered for a gap where only one other boat was tied, two of its crewmen straightened up from their tasks and stood ready to catch U-114’s mooring rope. Docking this way was a delicate maneuver and Max didn’t want to make a hash of it here in the middle of the naval anchorage with God knows how many eyes on him. He approached so carefully that he came to a perfect docking position—except for the three meters of water between him and the other boat. Well, better than ramming the bitch. “Pull us over,” he ordered Lehmann.

  That would give his men something to shake their heads over while on leave. “He’s great at torpedoing ships, our Kommandant, but he can’t dock a U-boat.” Yet, better that kind of talk than ramming another boat and being called on the carpet by the admiral commanding.

  “All secure, Herr Kaleu,” Lehmann called from the deck.

  “Finished with engines,” Max said. The throb of the diesels faded away. After securing the boat, Carls mustered the crew on deck and Max faced them, hands clasped behind him like Captain Langsdorff. “Men, for the next three weeks we will remain in Kiel taking on supplies. Half of you will be on leave for the first ten days, and the other half for the second ten. Quarters have been prepared for you at the base.” The men never stayed aboard the U-boat in harbor. Besides being too cramped, it had no bathing facilities and smelled like the devil’s outhouse. Hygiene could not be maintained on the boat; the crew grew dirty and foul after just a few days at sea. “Men of U-114, remember you are German sailors and members of a proud service. While you are on leave, I expect each of you to conduct yourself with the strictest propriety so as not to bring the navy into disrepute. Leutnant Lehmann has your leave papers. That is all.” How many times had he heard that speech from other captains? Thirty times at least. Yet it sounded strange from his own mouth. The speech would have little effect on the sailors. In a few hours most of them would be drunk as lords.

  Max reported in aboard the steamer Lech before leaving for Bad Wilhelm. The ship served as headquarters for the 5th U-Boat Flotilla in Kiel, which exercised administrative control over all U-boats in the harbor. A nice way to fight a war, Max thought. Never leave the dock, regular meals, white jackets in the officers’ mess each evening. Drinks on me, I insist. Toasts all around. Rumor in the UBootwaffe had it that the captain of Lech turned the vessel around once a month so everyone aboard would qualify for supplemental sea pay. But this life never would have done for him, Max knew—he would have been disgusted with himself for sitting on his backside in Kiel drinking schnapps. He stayed aboard only long enough to make his supply arrangement and send a telegram to his father, telling him when to be at the station.

  The train was packed—every seat occupied, the aisles jammed with young soldiers sitting on their packs, smoking, laughing, most of them just boys, all headed to the Russian Front. They seemed cheerful enough, but tens of thousands just like them had been surrounded in Stalingrad by an overwhelming Soviet force for the last eight weeks—hungry, cold, sick, no way to break out or get food. Surely the Führer had a plan. He wouldn’t leave Six Armee to die. Max’s father had written that three families in Bad Wilhelm had sons at Stalingrad. How would it end? Not well. Most alarming, a few days after Christmas, in his evening radio address, General Dittmar, the voice of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, had begun to speak of “heroi
c resistance” by Six Armee’s brave troops—never an encouraging sign. Everyone in Germany had learned to decipher the High Command’s euphemisms: “grim and sanguinary fighting increasing in violence” meant the line had collapsed and troops were being pushed back under murderous fire with terrible casualties; “bitter and prolonged fighting” meant you were hopelessly surrounded; “heroic resistance” meant you were already dead.

  Losses on the Eastern Front staggered the mind. The Russians, they could absorb endless casualties. Wipe out one group and the Red commissars simply rounded up another and another and another. If you wouldn’t fight, you got shot. Making it incomparably worse for Germany were the Americans coming in a year ago—the Americans with their farm boys and their dollars and all the resources of their vast continent. The odds against every man on the crowded train grew longer by the day. But Max knew he was no better off than the boys around him. Loss rates in the UBootwaffe were beginning to rise and getting worse.

  The train drew in and halted in a cloud of steam. His father waited on the platform. “Papa!” Max called as he stepped out of the rail car.

  His father marched up to him, smiling like a child, pushed away Max’s outstretched hand, and gave him a bear hug. This embarrassed Max—here, like this, in the station, in full view of all the soldiers on the train—but his father paid no mind. “Maximilian, what a surprise to have you here, my boy. A wonderful surprise to see you.”

  “I would’ve given you more notice but we’re not allowed to contact anyone before going on leave.”

  The old man grabbed Max’s suitcase. “Yes, yes, ‘the enemy listens.’ I know it from the First War. Come, come.” He led Max to the old Ford delivery truck, tossing the suitcase in back. “A beer, yes?”

  Max shrugged. Not every shopkeeper had a naval officer son to show off, and certainly not one with an Iron Cross First Class. His father glanced down to examine the medal gleaming on the left pocket of Max’s tunic. He quickly unpinned it, polished the medal with his handkerchief, and pinned it back in place. “You were half a centimeter off,” he said, smiling at Max, who shook his head. “Always the sergeant major, Papa.”

  They walked across the town square, past the monument to the dead of the local Landwehr battalion from the First War. Names from every family in the village were engraved on the plaque—among them, Ernst von Woller’s, their much-loved and respected commander who was killed at Verdun.

  In trying to save his commander’s life, Johann had carried Ernst through an artillery barrage to an aid station. But Ernst was dead and Johann nearly so. For these actions, he received the Prussian Military Cross, the highest honor awarded by the Prussian army to an enlisted man. On ceremonial days after the war, Max would finger the medal hung around his father’s neck. “There is no glory in it, Maximilian,” Johann always said.

  _________

  A roar of welcome greeted them now as they entered the tavern. It was early evening and most of the regulars were there: Jupp, the butcher; Immelman, the petrol station owner; Zeeger, the apothecary; and Cajus, the town constable (“I saved his fat ass more than once on the Western Front,” Max’s father always said). Bruno, the tavern keeper, brought over a rank of foaming beer steins. “Comrades, a welcome to our brave warrior of the deep.”

  Max drank, his beer bitter and slightly cold. God in heaven, he hadn’t had one in weeks. His father gave him a cigar and Max wondered where it came from in the midst of the very strict rationing. Probably the same place his father got the real coffee and the real butter and the cream, wherever that was. Max lit the cigar, adding to the smoke in the tavern, some of which came from the dried dandelion cigarettes people rolled now to eke out their tobacco ration.

  Bruno kept looking at him expectantly. He didn’t want to disappoint anyone, certainly not his father. Max stood and looked around the small taproom at these faces from his youth. What kind of toast did they want to hear? Death to England? Volk and Führer? These were older men; they had been through a war themselves and knew nonsense when they heard it. Max raised his mug. “Let us drink to the memory of Herr Oberstleutnant Ernst von Woller. I hope to defend my country with the same courage he displayed.”

  Everyone stood and drank. “Prost,” Bruno said. Max’s father nodded in approval. And it was good, too, for Max to show everyone that he bore no ill will toward the von Woller family. Everybody in Bad Wilhelm knew they opposed his marriage to their daughter.

  Buhl, the local Nazi Party functionary, came in a few minutes later. In addition to serving as Kreisleiter, he was the mayor of Bad Wilhelm, a patronage position controlled by the Nazis. Buhl wore a patch over his left eye, which he claimed to have lost in a clash with the Red Bolsheviks during the struggle for power. More likely in a whorehouse brawl, the locals said. Buhl’s father had been the village gravedigger, something other children teased him about in school. But Max never teased him; the two of them were even friends of a sort. Buhl had a red face pitted with acne scars, and big ears that pointed outward. He could be full of himself at times but he wasn’t a bad man. He smiled as he walked over to Max and gave him a warm handshake. “Another beer for our hero,” he called to Bruno. “So they still haven’t made you an admiral yet?”

  “Well, the war’s not over, Buhl.”

  Buhl smiled but, when he dropped into a chair next to Max, his face became serious—the expression of official party business. “Max, how are things out there? Are we going to stop all those American supplies from getting to the Tommies?”

  Max drank, wiped the foam from his mouth with the back of his hand. He answered with care. His comments would end up in a report to the Gauleiter in Kiel. “It’s difficult, but we’re getting stronger in the North Atlantic every day. My crew is young but they have spirit.”

  “Can we drive the Tommies back?”

  Max nodded. “Certainly we can drive the Tommies back.”

  Buhl slapped him on the back as if that settled it. “I knew it.” He stood, neat in his tan party uniform, the bright red party armband with the black swastika on his left bicep. “And I know, too, that we’ve sent our best man to defend our Reich and our Führer.”

  “Thank you, Buhl.”

  “I mean it.” Buhl glanced around the taproom. “A toast to the KapitänLeutnant.”

  No one would argue with the local party man anyway, but it didn’t take any coaxing to get an enthusiastic cheer for Max. After all, he was one of them—not an aristocrat—and the villagers took great pride in him.

  He drove the truck home later, the old Ford sputtering along because of the wood burner, which his father had mounted in front of the radiator shell a year back when the petrol shortage had become dire. You saw wood burners all over the Reich now, mounted on cars, trucks, tractors, even buses; it had become impossible for anyone outside the military or the highest levels of the party to acquire petrol, even for a man with as many connections as Johann. Some of the burners were designed to fit discreetly beneath the hood, while others took up space in the backseat or the cab, and some were even pulled along behind on a small trailer. They worked well enough. The burners trapped the wood gas under pressure, and when it was released into the engine, it propelled the vehicle at a moderate pace. But this method supplied much less power than diesel fuel, and the Ford’s cylinder heads had to be cleaned every day to prevent the buildup of soot and ash—quite an annoyance, Max’s father complained. Fortunately, fuel was easy to come by. If you ran out, you could just chop down a tree. But most drivers kept bundles of wood on the tops of their vehicles since one needed a permit to cut down a tree.

  But tonight Johann didn’t worry about the truck or the wood or the cylinder heads. He sat beside Max on the bench seat, belting out an old marching song from the First War about the Kaiser and his glory. They were silent when the old man had finished, bouncing through the darkness on the truck’s worn suspension. “We believed it back then,” Max’s father said quietly. “Only two important things in the world then: God and the Kaiser.”


  “And now, Papa?”

  “Only God now, Maximilian.”

  As Max helped him into the house, straining against his father’s bulk, a young woman appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Max came up short.

  “Katrina,” his father said.

  She was thin, a few wisps of dark hair trailing out from under the kerchief she wore around her head. Max could see she was quite lovely, with a fine sharp nose and gray eyes. She said, “To bed, yes?”

  “Katrina,” Max’s father said, “this is my son, Herr Kapitän-Leutnant Brekendorf.”

  She smiled at Max. “Mein Herr,” she said, giving a quick bow of her head. Her German carried a heavy Polish accent. “To bed, yes, Herr Johann?”

  “Yes, let’s get him to bed,” Max said.

  “My housekeeper,” his father whispered. “Did I not tell you about her in my letters?”

  He had not expected to find a Polish forced laborer in his own home. The Reich was overrun with them, but in this house? Katrina shooed Max aside and slipped under his father’s arm, guiding him gently to the stairs. “I do,” she said. “Is fine, let me.”

  Max watched them disappear up the staircase. His father murmured in her ear and let his hand linger on her shapely rear. The two of them laughed, then turned at the landing and disappeared. Max shrugged. His father got lonely. Katrina was hardly the first. Max’s mother had been dead more than twenty years and no one, least of all Max, cared if his father carried on with Katrina. Still, it was against the racial laws of the Third Reich to be sleeping with her.