An Honorable German

by Charles L. McCain

  It came at last light: all four columns of the convoy executed a thirty-degree turn to starboard in perfect unison, tight as Prussian grenadiers on parade, an intricate and difficult task for forty ships. The Tommies intended for this move to throw off shadowing U-boats, and indeed Max had been snookered this way on his first patrol, but it wasn’t going to happen again. This time he had gotten in close enough to make out the convoy’s new course.

  Lowering his binoculars, he bent to the voicepipe. “Action stations! All ahead full. Right standard rudder. Come starboard forty degrees to zero eight five.” This put him on a converging course. “Attack sight to the bridge.” Max turned to Lehmann. “We’ll go in fast. Be ready.”

  The attack sight—a special pair of binoculars—arrived from below. Lehmann mounted the binoculars on their bracket and watched the convoy. In a surface attack, the first watch officer aimed and fired the torpedoes, while the captain maneuvered the U-boat and selected the targets. Only when the boat attacked from underwater did the captain aim and fire, since only he could see through the attack periscope.

  “Stay alert,” Max reminded the lookouts again. Escorts could charge out of the darkness, and this convoy had plenty of escorts—nine at least, maybe more. “Are they ready below?” Max asked Lehmann. Damn, he was chattering like an old woman. Get hold of yourself.

  “Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”

  “Switch to red,” Max ordered the helmsman below, who passed the order to Georg.

  Inside the boat, the men tensed as they waited at their battle stations. The engineers waited, too, shut away in the stern behind a watertight hatch, their eyes fixed on the signal lights that indicated engine orders. The electric motor men stood by to bring the e-motors on line the instant Max gave the order to dive. In the control room, Ferret and the navigator waited at the firing calculator, ready to punch in whatever firing data Lehmann relayed. Georg and his men stood with their hands on the levers that would open the ballast tanks and get them under when the time came. Forward, in the torpedo room, Carls along with Heinz, the torpedo chief petty officer, stood ready to push the manual firing levers if the electric firing system failed.

  Foam splashed across the tower, rolling across the foredeck and then off the sides. Max felt the wind on his face, colder now. Salt rime covered his leather coat and pants and the salt had worked its way in everywhere—on his hair, on his lips, chafing his arms and ass and thighs, setting off a fierce itch in his crotch.

  Max kept his binoculars on the shadow of the rear escort, now falling astern of the convoy to search for U-boats. He pointed a finger to starboard.

  “I’m going into that gap,” he told Lehmann, shouting over the wind. “Stand by!” Max leaned to the voicepipe. “Helmsman, hard starboard fifteen degrees and come to new course of one zero zero degrees.”

  The boat heeled into the turn and ran full bore for fifteen minutes, racing through the gap created by the escort dropping back. A large blur, two, then three. They were in. Lehmann peered through the firing sight. “The big one,” Max shouted, thumping him on the shoulders.

  “Range, fifteen hundred meters!” Lehmann called out, the information repeated to the tracking team below. “Angle on the bow green zero five.” They could aim the torpedoes up to ninety degrees off the center line. “Set depth four meters.”

  Max glanced around. The lookouts urgently swept their quadrants.

  “Open forward torpedo doors!” Lehmann ordered. Each tube and its precious torpedo were protected from the sea by a heavy steel door. “Range, twelve hundred meters. Angle on the bow zero seven. Depth, four meters. Number one, fire! Number two, fire!”

  With a jolt everyone could feel, the eels shot from their tubes, the chief immediately replacing their weight with three tons of seawater as ballast to keep the boat on an even keel.

  “Request course change to one zero five,” Lehmann shouted.

  Max ordered the helm change, which turned their shark nose to another ship, smaller than the first. Was that the stern escort moving up?

  “Hurry!” Max yelled.

  A blast, bright orange against the darkness, illuminated the hull of the first ship. A direct hit. Good shooting—damn good shooting. Max swiveled his head, scanning the darkness around them. Where was that God damned escort?

  “Range, nine hundred meters! Angle on the bow, green zero one zero. Depth, four meters. Number three, fire! Number four, fire!”

  Their last torpedo was in the stern tube. Max didn’t know if he had time to swing the boat and fire it, but he had to try. It took two hours to reload the forward tubes and they didn’t have two hours, probably not even two minutes. “Stand by stern tube,” he ordered. “Helmsman…”

  A lookout yelled, “Destroyer bearing red two two zero!”

  Shit! Through the middle of the convoy. Impossible—but there was no other way. Now the stern escort was moving up.

  A white rocket broke over the convoy, the emergency turn signal. All the ships turned thirty degrees to port, away from the attack. Max had been planning to escape through their ranks to throw the escorts off but they were too close to him now. “Emergency right rudder!” he yelled.

  The men-o’-war were converging—must see his wake. “Emergency full ahead,” he ordered. That would get the electric motors connected to the propeller shafts and give him another knot in speed. But the warships were gaining—they had spotted him. A tower of water off the starboard bow confirmed it—they were firing at him. There was no more time. He had to get under or get rammed by one of the escorts. “Alarm!” Max bellowed.

  Instantly the bridge crew dropped below, their exit lighted by another explosion, then another. The second ship had been hit. Max dropped on top of the bridge watch without even noticing. All he could hear was water roaring into the ballast tanks. “Get us down, Chief, down! Destroyer! All hands forward!” Sailors streamed into the bow compartment. “Both ahead full. Hard starboard. Come to course one four zero.”

  It was quiet now, the hammering diesels still, the low purr of the e-motors barely audible.

  “Thirty meters,” the chief sang out, “forty meters, fifty meters.”

  Bekker, the radioman, listened intently to his hydrophones, trying to make out the bearings of the ships above. “Wasserbomben!” he yelled. Max braced himself against the periscope at the center of the control room.

  The explosion was unbelievably loud, like a rifle shot right next to Max’s ear. It rolled the boat forty degrees. Light bulbs shattered. A glass dial in front of him burst. Sailors slammed to the deck, some screaming in pain. The dish cabinet in the officers’ quarters sprang open and the crockery shattered against the steel plates of the deck. Emergency lighting flickered on in the control room, powered by the auxiliary lighting circuit.

  Max clung to the periscope housing, feeling it vibrate in his arms. “Emergency left rudder,” he ordered.

  Depth charges created such turbulence in the water that it was possible to sneak away by making a radical course change. But the sonar had them now, the sound like pebbles being thrown against the hull.

  “Both motors to one-third.” Max had to conserve battery power. “Chief, take us to eighty meters.”

  The chief, standing beside the two hydroplane operators, gave the orders to his men, swearing under his breath. One man controlled the aft hydroplanes, the other controlled the fore. They bore down on the buttons that manipulated the planes, eyes fixed on the depth indicator in front of them.

  Another ping hit the boat. It was the second escort, ranging now for the first. Tommy bastards. Max heard the sound of propellers above as the destroyer ran in over him.

  “Wasserbomben!” Bekker yelled again.

  “Ahead full. Emergency right rudder.” Double back on the filthy swine. The explosion of the depth charges often caused escort ships to lose sonar contact. They had to reestablish it after every attack. Sometimes they looked in the wrong place and you could slip away.

  Not this time. The next set of dep
th charges blew out the emergency lighting, leaving the boat black as a cave. A second set exploded over them before Max had a chance to give orders, pushing the boat over and down with such force that his hands were torn away from the periscope and he slid across the deck, banging into the opposite bulkhead. A young sailor wept in the corner.

  “Shut up, dammit,” Max ordered. “Flashlights. Leutnant Lehmann, take that man’s name.” Anything could happen if you let the sailors get out of hand—panic, even mutiny. In Danzig he had heard rumors of captains forcing men back to their posts at gunpoint during a depth charge attack.

  The control room crew switched on their flashlights, illuminating the critical fighting stations. If the flashlights gave out, the men could still function, since each man could perform his tasks blindfolded. To make this possible, each of the small control wheels had a distinct pattern imprinted on its metal surface.

  “One hundred thirty meters,” the chief announced—right at their design limit but the boat would have to hold. Around Max she creaked like an old wooden house from the pressure of the depth.

  “Both engines stop.” He had to spend his battery power like a miser and watch his depth like a hawk—the boat would gradually sink without her propellers turning to keep water flowing over the hydroplanes. It was impossible to establish total equilibrium.

  “Engine room taking water through the propeller shafts,” Lehmann reported. The point where the propeller shafts left the pressure hull was always a weakness in a depth charge attack.

  “Chief!”

  “Bloody hell,” the chief said, banging the wall of dials and control wheels in front of him. “The devil curse all who built this stinking boat.”

  “Chief, check the engine room and give me a report on the leak.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”

  There was not much the chief could do. At any depth below one hundred meters, the packings around the propeller shafts always leaked.

  “Off-duty watch to the bunks,” he ordered. That would get them out of the way and conserve air, but Max knew he couldn’t have done it: lie in his bunk in the blackness, water dripping in, hull groaning from the pressure, depth charges coming down. Not that standing in the center of the control room and barking orders gave him much solace. If a depth charge exploded within ten meters of the boat, the force would crack the pressure hull and the cold black water would spray in with the power of God Almighty. And they would die: screaming, cursing, praying in their last seconds.

  A ping sounded against the hull, now two. The Tommies had found them again. Thank the Virgin Mary and all the Holy Saints that sonar couldn’t detect their depth. On his first patrol, Max had learned that if you went deep you could slip away because the Brits underestimated the depth limit of U-boats.

  The next set of charges exploded over the stern, sheared the mooring bolts off the port diesel, jumped it two inches from its bed, bent the port propeller shaft, and shattered every glass dial in the engine room and e-motor compartment. Now the outboard intake valve—the opening through which the diesels drew air—began to leak. In minutes they were down five degrees by the stern. Max couldn’t run the bilge pumps; that the British would certainly hear.

  He sat on the heavy chart chest in the control room, mentally plotting his position relative to the convoy escorts above. Bekker could give him the bearing of the two ships but Max heard them clearly enough with his own ears when they ran in to attack. It was unnerving—a swishing, drumming sound like rain blowing against the side of a house. A destroyer had to make depth charge runs at full speed to keep its stern from being blown off by the four hundred pounds of exploding TNT, so each run was announced by the high-pitched whine of its propellers.

  Max listened to these sounds for seven hours as the British ships peppered the U-boat with round after round of depth charges. He lost count of how many. Belongings were strewn everywhere, tools and provisions spilled onto the deck, rolling back and forth as the boat rolled. The leak worsened in the stern, dragging them down to one hundred sixty meters—almost their crush depth. Max had to order a burst of power from the electric motors every ten minutes to keep them from sinking any lower. He clung to the periscope housing, hands clammy, darkness all around him except for the unsteady flashlight beams reflecting off the instrument panels. The crew stood to their posts but some whimpered, some wept, some stood rigid as stone, some puked; the smell of vomit thickened the stale air. One of the sailors in the control room filled his pants and the stink of it mixed with the other vile odors.

  A terrible exhaustion gripped Max. All night he had twisted and turned the boat, never knowing if he was right or wrong until the depth charges exploded, and always the ping of the British sonar, the creaking of his battered boat, the hoarsely shouted damage reports. Sweat drenched him completely. Even his underwear was soaked through. Before they sailed, Lehmann had told the crew, “The Führer expects you men to be quick as greyhounds, tough as leather, hard as Krupp steel.” Max liked the sound of that as much as anyone, but after the hours of depth charging it seemed absurd. Half his sailors were terrified and in a handful of moments so was he.

  Every time he heard the barrels drop into the water he shouted out a course change and said a Hail Mary to himself. What kind of death would it be? He just hoped it would come quickly—not drowning, not the awful terror of men clawing at one another, fighting desperately for breath as the water poured in. When he was doing his infantry training at Danholm, the training officer had ordered the cadets to put on their gas masks and run repeatedly up and down a hill. With the gas mask both pulled over his head and fastened tightly around his face, Max could breathe only through the filter and taking in enough air that way was almost impossible. He felt like he was choking to death or drowning; Holy Mary, Mother of God, full of grace—if they were going to be hit, let it be a direct hit.

  A tap on his shoulder. The chief. “Only fifteen percent battery power left, Herr Kaleu.” All of Max’s twisting and turning had drained the batteries. He nodded to the chief. Paint flecked off the bulkheads as the pressure of the water compressed the boat. The hull would crack right open if they went much deeper. They were at one hundred eighty meters, a handful of meters from their crush depth. Max could go no lower—this was the absolute limit. The depth gauge didn’t even register any deeper. Max drew in a lungful of the fetid air. “Leutnant Lehmann.”

  “Ja?”

  “Gun crew stand by.”

  “Herr Kaleu?”

  “Dammit, I said tell the gun crew to stand by.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”

  Damned insubordinate Nazi prick. Put him in the guardhouse if they ever got back to Lorient.

  The U-boat had a 105mm gun on her foredeck—not a match for a destroyer but it was something. Here, below, they had no hope at all. At least if they fought from the surface until the U-boat sank, the men might have a chance to abandon ship. Or some of them might—the engineers would never make it out, but they never did. Still, Max owed his men whatever chance he could give them; and you could usually count on the Tommies to rescue survivors after they sank a U-boat. So some of them might make it. But pray God the Brits would be so surprised when he surfaced that the U-boat could simply get away in the confusion.

  The gun crew assembled in the control room, their faces pinched and drawn, eyes bulging, sweat running down their cheeks. Max looked at them. Several trembled uncontrollably. All of them panted in the thin air, their lungs struggling against the rising CO2 levels.

  “Battle surface. We practiced this in the Baltic. First man out take up the deckboards and open the ammunition boxes. Second man, unscrew the plug in the barrel. Third man, aim at the nearest British ship. Fourth man, load the shell. Understand?”

  They nodded.

  “You trained for this, remember?”

  None of them said anything. They had trained for this in a calm sea with their wits about them and no Royal Navy escorts dropping depth charges.

  “Chief!”


  “Herr Kaleu?”

  “Can you give me full power when we surface?”

  “Starboard engine, Herr Kaleu. Port engine is out.”

  “Then give me whatever you can, but do not leave me lying dead in the water.” Max looked again at his sailors, their eyes all seeming to ask the same question. What did they want from him? Was he supposed to reassure them that they weren’t going to die?

  “Good luck, men. Stand by. Activate all bilge pumps. Blow all tanks!”

  A thin whine sounded as compressed air blew into the ballast tanks. Max pulled himself up, clinging once again to the shiny metal tube of the periscope. They weren’t moving, still down at the stern.

  “All ahead full!” He heard hysteria in his voice.

  Sluggishly the boat began to rise, hesitating, then moving faster as she shook off the terrible pressure of the depths and the weight of the water she’d taken on.

  “One hundred fifty meters.”

  Max closed his eyes. They weren’t dead yet.

  “One hundred ten meters!”

  “Gun crew, stand by.”

  “Seventy meters.”

  Max began to say the Hail Mary again.

  “Thirty meters!”

  “Stand by!” Max yelled, his voice hoarse. He climbed into the conning tower.

  “Ten meters. Tower clear. Hatch clear!”

  Max opened the hatch, the unequal pressure tearing it from his hands. Air—humid and sweet, dense with oxygen—enveloped him. Overcome by the richness of it, he sagged on the ladder for a moment, seeing red. Then, eyes clearing, he hoisted himself onto the bridge.

  Behind him the gun crew came up, jumping quickly to the foredeck, followed by the lookouts, who assumed their posts on the bridge. One diesel rumbled to ignition and the boat began to move forward. A light drizzle, wet on Max’s face, reduced their visibility. He took up his binoculars. To port, he saw the dim outline of a British corvette perhaps a half kilometer distant. No sight of the destroyer.

  A bang and flash from the corvette, then a geyser of white water three hundred meters off the port beam. Even in the darkness and the rain, they had been spotted straight away.