An Honorable German

by Charles L. McCain

  “Fire!” Max yelled at the gun crew. “Fire!”

  “Destroyer bearing green zero nine zero!” the starboard lookout screamed. Max turned and saw the ship coming right at them out of the night, her foaming bow wave stark against the dark water. Urine ran hot down his legs. Mother of God. The gun crew abandoned their weapons and jumped overboard.

  “Alarm!” Max screeched, his voice gone thin and high. Two of the bridge lookouts dropped down the hatch with him, the other two leapt overboard.

  “Get us down!” Max yelled, voice cracking. Men sprinted for the bow as the boat began to dive. “Radio! To U-Boat Command: ‘Rammed. Sinking. Grid AK57. U-Max. Collision alarm!’” He gripped the periscope, eyes clenched shut.

  The destroyer hit them forward of the bridge with a sound like a locomotive slamming on its brakes, rolling the boat ninety degrees. Metal shrieked against metal. The force slammed men to the deck. The impact on her bow forced the U-boat down at a sharp pitch and she plunged out of control toward the bottom.

  Max, on his hands and knees in the control room, vomited onto the deck plates. Around him men screamed, hysterical in the darkness. “Blow tanks amidships!” he ordered. “Blow diving tank forward! Blow forward trim tank! E-motors full astern!”

  They had to stop the boat from plunging to the depths, but no one responded to his commands.

  “Chief!” Max shouted into the blackness, sliding on the slime of the control room floor. “Chief!” There was a rumble from the forward compartment as one of the spare torpedoes broke loose, followed immediately by a violent wail.

  “Chief!” Where in the hell was the man?

  “Herr Kaleu.” A hand touched him. Flashlights came on, weakly illuminating the control room. Max saw Carls at his side.

  “Carls! The bow compartment—we have to get the hatch closed!” That’s where the water would be pouring in from the gash opened in the collision. If they could get the hatch closed, maybe they had a chance to surface.

  “Herr Kaleu! Herr Kaleu!” one of the hydroplane men shouted. “One hundred fifty meters.”

  “Planes to hard rise,” Max shouted back. “Carls! Close the hatch!”

  “Herr Kaleu.” Carls pulled him up from the deck. “Herr Kaleu, the pressure hull was not breached.”

  “One hundred seventy meters, Herr Kaleu!” the young hydro-plane operator sang out.

  “Blow tanks amidships. Can you do that?” Normally it was the chief who blew the tanks, but all the control wheels were in full view of the boy.

  “Ja, jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”

  “And blow the diving tank forward, understand? First amidships, then forward—not at the same time.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”

  Blowing the tanks increased their buoyancy and allowed the weight of the U-boat’s keel to right them.

  “Good lad.” Max’s breathing slowed and he relaxed his grip on Carls as the boat settled onto an even keel. “No damage to the pressure hull?”

  “None, Herr Kaleu.”

  The U-boat had two hulls. The watertight pressure hull encircled all the vital machinery and living areas. Saddle tanks for ballast, extra fuel, and water were attached outboard and covered by a separate outer hull, which was not watertight. The boat could withstand a tear in the outer hull as long as the pressure hull wasn’t breached. The chief must have had them under by just enough for the destroyer to scrape across their foredeck without tearing into the bow compartment.

  “One hundred ninety meters!”

  A rivet blew with the sound of a gunshot from the pressure, then another and another. Max felt like he was standing on a pistol range. They had to come up on their depth. More flashlights switched on—Lehmann was up and the emergency lights flickered to life. The machinists must still be alive.

  “Lehmann, trim the boat.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”

  All through the boat Max could hear the crew returning to their stations. He made his way aft, helping men up as he went. The depth charges had not yet begun again, and he wanted to show himself to the crew and inspect the boat during this lull.

  “It’s the Kommandant! Herr Kaleu!”

  “Eh, a little roughhousing from the Tommies,” Max said, smiling. The boys smiled back at him, some of them too young to shave, their dirty faces blemished with pimples but all grinning now. “To your posts, men.”

  He opened the watertight hatch to the engine room and drew back as a thick cloud of steam poured out. Water leaking in had sprayed on the hot diesel engines. Max coughed as he waved the steam away. He stepped through the hatch and into the engine room. Three mechanics were elbow deep in the starboard diesel, furiously checking all the cylinder rods.

  “All is in order?” he shouted to the chief Dieselobermaschinist.

  “As close to order as we can get, Herr Kaleu.”

  Max continued through the steam, undogged the hatch to the e-motor room, and stepped through. He snapped a salute to the Elektriker Obermaschinist, a prewar petty officer, still at his post, wearing the protective leather gauntlets that were the badge of e-motor men. “Wittelbach, now you have a war story to tell the folks back home.” The man smiled, said nothing. “How much power do we have left?”

  “Ten percent, Herr Kaleu.”

  “Both motors dead slow then.”

  “Only have the starboard motor, Herr Kaleu. Port propeller shaft is bent.”

  “Very well.” Max had forgotten about that. “Any batteries cracked?”

  “Inspecting for that now, Herr Kaleu.”

  “Carry on.”

  Wittelbach saluted as best he could, and Max returned to the control room. Lehmann had trimmed the boat and they were on an even keel at one hundred seventy-five meters—way too deep but good enough for the moment. At least until the depth charges started falling again. “Sonar on us yet?”

  “Nein, Herr Kaleu.”

  “Steady on course one zero five then.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”

  A moan from the bow drew Max’s attention and he made his way forward, stepping over the tools and the cans and the shattered dishes littering the deck. Equipment had been thrown everywhere, smashed and dented from the jolt of the collision. Even the porcelain commode had cracked. Well, they were accustomed to shitting in cans—you couldn’t use the toilet below twenty-five meters anyway. Without it the boat would smell even worse, but that would only be a problem if they survived. A twist of his body and Max was through the hatch into the forward torpedo room, which also served as the crew’s quarters. Blood covered the starboard bulkhead where the torpedo had come loose and pulped two sailors, breaking the arm of a third. Each torpedo was seven meters long and weighed a ton and a half. When they came loose of their moorings the result was always the same: men died.

  Carls had covered the faces of the dead men with towels, but their bodies lay twisted at unnatural angles. The injured lad sat rigid in pain against the bulkhead, holding his broken arm, the white bone sticking out. Heinz, the torpedo chief petty officer, tended to the youngster since Bekker had to stay on the hydrophones. The medical kit lay open, Heinz rummaging through it while the young sailor, desperate not to moan in front of Max, compressed his lips till they went white.

  “Heinz will fix you up, lad. He doctored the pigs on his grandfather’s farm, didn’t you, Heinz?”

  “I certainly done plenty of that and there ain’t a lot of difference between a pig and a man, Herr Kaleu. Only pigs is smarter. They doesn’t go to war with each other.”

  Max couldn’t help but smile and even the youngster seemed to calm down.

  He turned to Carls. “Damage?”

  “Close on everything, Herr Kaleu.”

  Max looked around. Bunks had been torn from the bulkheads, lubricating oil had sprayed over part of the compartment, spattering the letters that were strewn about. The winch that hoisted the torpedoes had been pulled loose from the overhead; tins of food, most of them dented, were everywhere. “Clean it up,” Max orde
red. Best to keep the men busy.

  Once back in the control room, he asked Bekker if he’d picked up anything from the escorts on the hydrophones.

  “Nein, Herr Kaleu. Nothing moving toward us.”

  Strange. Very strange. Maybe the ships had hove to while they brought up more depth charges from their magazines—not an easy job under any circumstance, Max knew. But an escort would never stop dead in the water to do that—she would present a perfect target to a U-boat. “Herr Kaleu,” Lehmann called.

  “Ja?”

  “The fuel gauge on the starboard diesel tank, the saddle tank—it’s showing empty.”

  Max shook his head very slowly from side to side, then broke into a smile. Maybe the British ships weren’t hove to. Maybe they were gone. The chief had finally woken up and was sitting on the deck by the hydroplane controls, blood matted in his thick beard, but he was smiling, too, when Max looked over at him. “You know what that means?” Max asked him.

  The chief nodded. Half his face was swollen, his cheek already turning a deep purple. He said, “It means the bloody Tommies think we’re already sunk.”

  Max laughed out loud. The destroyer had torn open the starboard diesel tank, which left an oil slick on the surface when the boat submerged. That was usually the sign that a U-boat had sunk and its oil tanks had ruptured. Seeing that, the Tommies would have slapped one another on the back and steamed happily away. Looking around at the littered deck, at injured men waiting for medical care, the scene illuminated by the pale emergency lights, Max couldn’t stop smiling. He turned his grin back to the chief. “Exactly.”

  The chief dabbed at an oozing gash on his forehead. “Well, bugger you, Mr. Tommy.”

  Max surfaced three hours later to an empty sea and the faint smell of petroleum. Maybe the Brits had picked his men up. He hoped so, prayed so. Better a POW camp than drowning in the North Atlantic. The lookouts were wrong to have jumped, but the gun crew had been right—the deck gun was gone, sheared off by the bow of the destroyer. All the wooden deckboards that covered the steel upper deck were splintered or torn away, the starboard diesel tank gouged open, metal plating ripped and bent. Max crossed himself. Had they been just a bit higher in the water, they would have been sunk. Thank you, Holy Mary.

  Yet now they faced a new, perhaps more arduous task, one both difficult and not without great danger: their return to Lorient, a voyage of a thousand kilometers. He had lost eight men from a crew of forty-six but was lucky not to have lost them all. He was lucky to be alive himself. Maybe all the good-luck charms the men brought on every patrol had worked: Lehmann’s diminutive porcelain gnome, the chief’s green sweater, the five-mark coin Wittelbach had taken from a fountain in Paris, and the aluminum canteen token from Graf Spee that Max was never without.

  He bent to the voicepipe. “Engage starboard diesel. Blow through.” Below, the e-motor chief cut the electric motors, then the Dieselobermaschinist gently started his engine and blew the exhaust through the ballast tanks to expel the remaining sea water. This saved compressed air and helped preserve the tanks from corrosion.

  “Control,” Max said into the voicepipe.

  “Control room, aye.”

  “Have radio make following message to U-Boat Command: ‘Rammed by British destroyer. Eight casualties. Port diesel out. Extensive damage. Two ships sunk. Estimate tonnage 15,000 grt. Returning to base. U-Max.’”

  Let the staff figure it out. Ferret had the watch. “Keep on the lookout for aeroplanes,” Max told him. “Can you do that? Are these men alert?”

  “Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”

  Max looked at the men, their faces fish-belly white, sporting whatever kind of beards they could grow. Shaving was forbidden on the boat because freshwater was always in short supply. The eyes of the men were sunken and red. Their condition hardly inspired confidence, but none of the crewmen below looked any better. Besides, Ferret was a good officer and a captain had to trust his officers. He said, “As soon as the batteries are fifty percent recharged I want you to submerge for six hours so the men can rest and take some food. Once you submerge, stay on this heading with the starboard e-motor slow ahead. Understood?”

  Ferret nodded and Max patted him on the shoulder, instead of cursing him for not saluting. “The bridge is yours,” he said.

  Max dropped below, repeated his orders to Lehmann, then withdrew to his cabin, closed the green curtain, and stripped off his clothes. He soaked a towel in the lemon-scented cologne issued to U-boats and wiped the dirt and sweat from his body. Also the dried urine from his legs. That had been shameful but he wasn’t going to berate himself about it now. He lay on his bunk after cleaning himself and shook uncontrollably. The spraying water, the screaming men, wanting to scream yourself as your mouth filled with the freezing black sea—they had been no more than a few centimeters away from all of it, and the depth charges would still be raining down if not for the happenstance of the ruptured fuel tank. Eventually, he grew weak from trembling and slept.

  A few minutes before dusk they surfaced and Max returned to the bridge. He swept the area with his binoculars and saw nothing at first. Then his eye caught a small white flash in the dying sun—maybe one kilometer off the starboard beam, bobbing on the swell. “Right standard rudder to course one five zero,” he ordered.

  Lehmann had the watch. Max pointed out the object. “Can you tell what it is?”

  Lehmann peered through his heavy binoculars for a long moment. “I believe it is a lifeboat, Herr Kaleu.”

  Max raised his own binoculars again, but still could hardly make it out. His eyesight was always poor at dusk, while Lehmann had excellent vision at any time. “Is there anyone in it?”

  “I believe so, Herr Kaleu.”

  “Control room.”

  “Control room, aye.”

  “Tell Carls to come up with a magazine for the machine gun.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”

  The U-boat had a twenty-millimeter anti-aircraft gun mounted on a small platform aft of the bridge—the Wintergarten, the men called it. Max motioned toward the platform when Carls came up and the big man attached the magazine to the gun and swiveled it to point at the lifeboat as they drew closer.

  “Stay alert,” Max cautioned the bridge watch. “Look to your sectors.” Lookouts had a tendency to turn away from their quadrants when something more interesting was happening out of their field of vision. That was an easy way to miss an approaching enemy ship or aeroplane. “Stop engine,” Max ordered, and the throb of the diesel died away to a quiet idle, momentum carrying them to within a few meters of the lifeboat.

  There were nine men inside—no, ten. One was lying in the bilge, probably wounded. Maybe dead. It was a big lifeboat, too, built for forty or fifty people, the name of its ship sanded off as the Royal Navy had ordered at the start of the war. One of the men stood. He wore no cap, but gold rings looped around the sleeves of his blue jacket. An officer. Max cupped his hands around his mouth. “What ship?” he shouted.

  No reply. The officer looked around at the men huddled at his feet against the cold. He was young, no older than Lehmann.

  “What ship?” Max said again.

  “D-D-Duchess of Berwick.”

  “Bound for?”

  “L-Liverpool.”

  The officer shook. Carls had the machine gun pointed right at him. No doubt the Brits thought they were about to be shot by the bloodthirsty Huns. Turning to Carls, Max ordered him to point the gun aft of the lifeboat and stay ready, but it was just a precaution.

  “When were you sunk?”

  “Early last evening, sir. Right as we were sitting down to tea.”

  Tea. At sea during wartime and they were sitting down to tea. But Max had sunk this ship and they weren’t so arrogant now. Many times during his training at U-boat school, he’d wondered what he would feel after he sank a ship, and now he could say he was so exhausted he really didn’t feel anything. Every motion had been rehearsed and practiced so often that it felt autom
atic when the time came, and the distance of warfare at sea kept him from having to think too much about the men he might be killing. Besides, he had seen what the British did to Meteor, and what they were doing now to Berlin, and he didn’t mind the idea of killing Englishmen. But these men in the lifeboat looked bedraggled, cold, defeated. Their boat was almost the same size as the one in which Max had floated around the Indian Ocean. “Do you need any provisions?” he asked.

  The young officer looked at him in confusion, trying to decide whether Max was making a joke. Finally he said, “Water and food, sir. We need both. Provisions locker was almost empty when we launched and some of the water tanks had been stove in.” Max knew all about that problem—he supposed it was no surprise that British sailors stole lifeboat provisions, too.

  “Stand by then.”

  Max called down the hatchway. “Tell the cook to come to the conning tower.”

  “Herr Kaleu,” Lehmann said, “I must protest. It is expressly forbidden to give aid to shipwrecked men—expressly forbidden in Admiral Dönitz’s standing orders.”

  Lehmann was right. Max hesitated. What would happen to him if he did this? Lehmann would surely report him. But to the navy or the Gestapo?

  “Herr Kaleu,” the cook called from below. “Herr Kaleu, you wished to see me?”

  “A moment, Cook.”

  Could he really afford another altercation with the Gestapo? Max looked at the ten British sailors shivering in the evening cold of the North Atlantic, cold that would grow worse before dawn. Much worse. Lehmann stared at him. Beneath his feet, the U-boat rocked in the swell, wavelets lapping rhythmically against the hull. Max had spent many harsh nights shivering in the bilge of a lifeboat, cold, hungry, throat burning with thirst.

  “Cook.”

  “Herr Kaleu?”

  “I need ten of the big five-liter cans filled with freshwater. And what do you have extra tins of down there?”

  “Ham, sir. And tinned beans. Plenty of tinned beans.”

  “Good. Get me all of that and be quick about it.”