Now he motioned for Max to sit. Taking a seat himself, Eckhardt leaned in and lowered his voice: “I say, old man, the flotilla engineer assures me that you were damned lucky to make it back alive. Another half meter out of the water and the Brits would have opened you up.”
Max shrugged. He’d been trying not to think about this very fact for nine days now. “I’d prefer to never see a British destroyer that close again, sir.”
“I expect not, Brekendorf, I expect not. But you’re back here in one piece and that’s what counts. I’ve sent your report on to Admiral Dönitz and I know he’ll be pleased with what you and your men have done.”
Max puffed the cigar and blew out a cloud of thick gray smoke. “And helping the British sailors?”
Eckhardt held out his open hands. “Who can say what the admiral will think of that? You’ll have a chance to ask him yourself.”
“Sir?”
“You are to report to him in Berlin as soon as your leave is up.
The ‘Lion’ wants to see you in person.” Dönitz had moved U-Boat Command back to Berlin from France in February after his promotion by the Führer to commander in chief of the Kriegsmarine, replacing Grand Admiral Raeder.
Max felt his stomach tense. A reprimand? Court-martial? “For what, sir? Do you know?”
The French waiter placed a glass of wine before Eckhardt, and he took a swallow, wiping his mustache and smacking his lips. “Good, that.”
“Herr Kapitän?”
He looked at Max. “Don’t worry, Brekendorf—he’s not going to hang you from the yardarm. He’s sending you and a few others to operate off Florida. Think of it as a government-paid vacation to America—a ‘Strength Through Joy’ cruise, yes?” Max laughed. But America was something else altogether. Max couldn’t keep a smile from his face. No more of the damned North Atlantic. He’d heard stories about how good the hunting was off the American coast, how their shoreline was not blacked out. Ships silhouetted against the lights made perfect targets. To be sent on such an assignment meant the High Command had tremendous faith in his abilities. He said, “I am honored, Herr Kapitän.”
“The admiral said he wanted a few young bucks, so naturally you came to mind. I’m certain you won’t disappoint me, Brekendorf.”
“No, sir.”
America. Many on the Naval War Staff had regarded the U.S. Navy with contempt since Pearl Harbor. “They’re inept,” one of the bureaucrats in the Torpedo Directorate had said to Max. “No one could ever have surprised our fleet like that.” Max had been tempted to point out that Germany barely had a surface fleet left to surprise. He did not think the Americans were so inept. He had met U.S. Navy officers on his training cruise when Emden called at the port of San Diego. Max and his crewkameraden were invited aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Saratoga; they watched Saratoga launch and recover aircraft. The Amis didn’t look inept that day. It would be a very long crossing. So much to think about.
Eckhardt put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t plan it out tonight, old boy; tonight is to enjoy.” He signaled the headwaiter to begin serving before the sailors became too drunk to eat. Leh mann took his cue and shepherded the men to their seats. Eckhardt stood, Knight’s Cross gleaming about his neck. The collar of his shirt almost obscured the shoelace he and most other recipients used to keep the heavy medal around their necks. He twirled the waxed ends of his mustache, then took his glass up from the table and raised it in the air. “To my comrades, the gallant crew of U-114.” Everyone drank.
Lehmann stood, too. Max raised his eyebrows, hoping this wouldn’t embarrass him. “To the Führer,” Lehmann said.
Everyone got to their feet, lifted their glasses, and drank.
“Ein Reich,” Lehmann shouted, “ein Volk, ein Führer!” Was he drunk already?
Eckhardt looked angry. Party slogans weren’t to be repeated at naval gatherings. He put his hand on Lehmann’s arm to quiet him. “Men of U-114, under your Kommandant, KapitänLeutnant Brekendorf, you are in the front line of our struggle against the Allies. All Germany speaks of the courage of her U-boat men. Everyone in the Fatherland follows your exploits with pride. For the achievements of your last patrol, for the courage with which you faced exceptional danger and persevered, the admiral commanding Unterseeboote West has directed me to award each of you the Iron Cross Second Class.”
The crew applauded wildly.
“And now, men, to your victory dinner. All of you have earned it.”
The appetizer was a dozen raw oysters for each man with real Spanish lemons for seasoning. Max forked the oysters down. Damn, they tasted good. And the lemons—he hadn’t seen a lemon in years. He sucked the pulp out, even swallowed the seeds. No sooner had he finished than the waiter dropped another dozen oysters in front of him, then filled his glass with champagne. Easy, Max told himself, go easy.
“Will you go on leave tonight, Brekendorf?”
“I will, sir. To Berlin. My fiancée’s mother was just killed in a bombing attack last week.”
Eckhardt put his fork down. “I’m truly sorry to hear that, truly sorry. These damn terror bombers.” He shook his head. “The Allies are so high and mighty about the Reich violating a few rules of war, but they’ve simply torn the rules up. They make war on our women and children—Goebbels is right for a change, they are murderers.” He brought his fist down on the table. “My wife is from Hamburg. She lost both her sisters this summer, most of her cousins. The scene there… I can’t even begin to fathom it.”
Neither could Max. Two hundred thousand people had died in a single night in the inferno that followed a British raid on Hamburg at the end of July. The number simply could not be real. No one could fathom it. The climatic conditions had been perfect over the city that night for the bombers: warm and extremely dry. The Tommies attacked with seven hundred planes and their incendiaries created a firestorm, literally a tornado of flame that tore through the center of Hamburg with winds of better than two hundred kilometers per hour—sucking people into the cyclone, cremating them in the shelters, setting the asphalt afire. The Fire Protection Police could do nothing to stop it. And the next day, the Americans came over and bombed what little remained.
“Where is the Luftwaffe?” Eckhardt said. “I ask myself that every day. I ask Marinegruppenkommando West every day: ‘Where is the Luftwaffe?’ No one knows. If only the navy had some planes of its own, instead of that swine Göring having them all. You know he doesn’t ever fly? He has his own train. Can you imagine? The commander of the air force won’t get in an aeroplane. The damn Tommies are everywhere in the air, the sky is full of them. They’re sinking half our boats as we run out through the Bay of Biscay before we even get to the Atlantic. Half of them! I don’t know how their air force is so strong and ours doesn’t even seem to exist. And now their American cousins have joined in with gusto. The damn Amis.” He shook his head again. “The Führer always says, ‘There is more culture in one Beethoven symphony than in all of America.’ And he’s right, Brekendorf. The Führer is right. But a Beethoven symphony won’t stop a bomber and the Americans aren’t writing symphonies to drop on us. They’re making bombers and bullets and bombs and ships, and they’re damn good at it.”
Max took a gulp of wine to hide his surprise. Half their boats were being sunk from the air in the Bay of Biscay? Eckhardt picked his fork back up and resumed eating. “Don’t worry. We’re tearing out that popgun you have now and putting in some real antiaircraft firepower while you’re on leave: two twin-mounted twenty-millimeters and one quadruple twenty-millimeter. Herr Tommy will have a bear by the ass if he comes after you.”
More armament would be welcome but it would mean a change in tactics. Max would have to run out in broad daylight so they could see the British planes; crossing the bay surfaced at night would be too risky now. And what if more than one plane came at him? What if two or three came at once from different directions? He could submerge and creep out underwater. But he would have to proceed at just two knots. Even
at two knots, he could keep moving underwater for no more than sixteen hours; after that he would need to come back up and run on the surface for six hours so the diesel engines could recharge the batteries. It would take a week to reach the Atlantic that way and Max knew he wouldn’t have a week to spare. Every boat had to make for the front as quickly as possible to stop the Allied ships pouring men and supplies into Britain. Well, he would have his whole leave to consider all the options. For now there were more oysters and fresh boiled lobster with real Normandy butter, and fresh brown bread—not the green mold-covered lumps they’d been reduced to eating on the U-boat by the middle of their patrol.
The waiter brought real coffee and real cream once Max had demolished his lobster. There was cheese and fruit, fresh apples. Max felt bloated. He belched. The champagne went down so easily, like cool water on a hot day. Pray God they had a wheelbarrow on hand to get him to the train.
“A cigar?” Eckhardt said, opening a new tin.
“Thank you, sir.”
He lit Max’s cigar, then offered them around to the other officers. “A woman is only a woman,” he said, “but a good cigar is a smoke. Rudyard Kipling.”
Max grinned. Eckhardt must be drunk as well if he was quoting an Englishman. In front of Max, the relentless waiter placed a brandy snifter half-filled with amber liquid. As he raised his glass, Lehmann stood again. “Comrades! A song!”
The men banged their fists on the tables in approval.
“We are sailing against England,” Lehmann bellowed, starting them off:
Today we want to sing a song,
We want to drink the cool wine,
And clink the glasses together,
Because we must, we must part.
Soon everyone joined in, waving mugs and glasses as they sang, their pale faces now flushed and red.
Give me your hand, your white hand,
Live well, my sweetheart,
Live well, my sweetheart,
Live well, live well.
Because we sail, because we sail
Because we sail against England, England.
The songs and toasts went on for hours:
“To our cook, the best in the fleet!”
“To the brave men of the second watch!”
“To the joy girls of Lorient!”
“Three cheers for the Kommandant!”
“To the joy girls of the world!”
Finally Max stood to leave, bracing himself against the table. Around him, the room had gone blurry at the edges. At least he hadn’t puked. Yet. “God bless you, sir,” he said to Eckhardt. His salute was off-center and then he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to salute without his cap on anyway. To hell with it. “Thank you most kindly for the new anti-aircraft guns, sir. A thousand thanks. Thank you.” Turning to his men, he shouted, “Auf wiedersehen, comrades! May you always have a hand’s breadth of water under your keel!”
Those who heard him answered with drunken salutes. A few already lay facedown in their plates. Others went on singing, pausing between verses to drink from magnums of French champagne. One young sailor stood to salute Max properly but toppled over, clipping a table, sending a half dozen dishes to the floor with a tremendous crash.
When he woke at dawn on the U-boat train, Max felt like there were coal miners at work in his head. His body swayed to the rhythm of the train and the motion put him back to sleep. An hour outside Kiel, Josef, the steward, woke him with a jug of hot water and clean towels. Max shaved and wiped himself down. Josef had also pressed his uniform and even spit-shined his riding boots. “Can’t have you front-line officers looking like a lot of Italians, Herr Kaleu,” he explained. Josef didn’t think very highly of their former Italian allies. Of course, Josef had spent his first ten years at sea in the old Imperial Navy, where every brass bolt sparkled, every deckboard gleamed, and every crease was razor sharp. But Max had a certain fondness for the Italians. He’d been aboard an Italian submarine once. It was much larger than a German boat, and even had a small officers’ lounge with a bar. God bless them—that was the way to go to war. But the Italians were no longer fighting alongside the Reich. The Allied invasion had broken them; they surrendered three weeks ago and were now reportedly preparing to switch sides.
Max smiled and shook Josef’s hand. “Thank you for making me presentable.”
Josef snapped off a parade-ground salute. “Good luck and good hunting, Herr Kaleu.”
Max tried to phone his father from the station in Kiel but no one answered at the shop, which was strange. The Berlin train left in four hours. Max felt guilty for not seeing his father when he was so close, but Mareth needed him now.
Hanging up the phone, he gathered his greatcoat around him. Even in October, the afternoon air had a bitter edge to it. Soon there would be snow, winter would come again to the North Atlantic: unrelenting cold, freezing spray driven so hard by the wind that it split your lips. No dry clothes. The Florida assignment was a miracle, almost a vacation, as far as the weather was concerned. If they drowned off Miami, at least the water would be warm.
Around him the rail station was totally shattered, windows blown out, ceiling beams lying across the floor. No one even used the old main station, its roof now completely gone. Passengers simply congregated on the stone platforms. Max bought a copy of Signal from one of the news vendors and flipped through the pictures of German soldiers and sailors in action. There was a color section about an artillery unit in the East. The men looked so strong with chiseled jaws and fierce eyes. There had been reverses on the Eastern Front, terrible reverses, everyone knew it. And Stalingrad was more than a reverse—it was a calamity, the worst defeat in German military history. But maybe they could still win the war. Max’s father had told him at the beginning of the war that victory was most uncertain, and once they attacked the Soviet Union it was impossible. After the Amis came in, he had written Max and said that his cousin Heinrich was coming to visit very soon. Heinrich had immigrated to America before the First War.
Max knew of America’s strength. He had seen it. And as each weary day of the war passed into the next, everyone could see with their own eyes that it wasn’t German bombers dropping incendiaries on Washington, or New York, or Los Angeles; it was American planes bombing Berlin, the Ruhr, and whatever remained of Hamburg. But maybe they could still win the war if they just kept pushing. It would take longer than anyone had thought, but still—in another year or two they might be able to win, or at least fight the Allies to a stalemate. He just had to keep going, stay alive until then. Could he stay alive for two more years? He tried to put the question out of his mind because the answer was plain: he could not. Living two more months would be an accomplishment.
He tried his father’s shop again a half hour before the train left for Berlin. Still no answer. Six in the evening was his busiest time of day, with people stopping by for groceries on their way home from work. Buhl, the party Kreisleiter, would know where Johann was—Buhl was forever keeping tabs on everyone, writing things down in a little tan notebook embossed with a swastika. Max took another fifty-pfennig coin out of his pocket and dropped it into the phone. The operator put him through directly.
“Buhl?”
“Ja?”
“Maximilian Brekendorf.”
“Max, our brave warrior of the deep. A pleasure to hear from you. You are well?”
There was static over the line, and Max had to raise his voice. “Very well, thank you, Buhl. I’m trying to get through to my father but can’t find him. I thought perhaps you—”
“I did everything I could for him, Max, you know that I would.”
Max felt a chill race through his body. “What are you talking about?”
“You don’t know?”
“Know what, dammit?” Max yelled so loud that two old women on a nearby bench startled and stared up at him in fear.
“Your father was arrested by the Gestapo.”
He should have never helped those English swine in thei
r lifeboat. “For what, Buhl? Surely not for anything I—”
“For sleeping with the Polish girl.”
Max came up short. “Buhl, the Gestapo arrested my father for sleeping with his maid?”
Again the static. It crackled over the line and then cleared: “… against the racial laws of the Third Reich.”
Max bellowed into the phone with his best quarterdeck voice: “Are you out of your mind! My father is a decorated veteran of the Prussian army! He’s been arrested for screwing his maid?”
The two old women got up from the bench and shuffled away as fast as they could on worn house slippers stuffed with newspaper.
“I did everything I could, Max, everything. I had warned your father about this. Someone reported him—a customer perhaps, I don’t know. The Gestapo office in Kiel received an anonymous call. I even wrote a letter on his behalf to the Gauleiter detailing your gallant service to the Reich. There was nothing more I could do. But it’s only a four-month sentence and he’s been in for one month already. Three more and he’ll be out.”
Had the world gone mad? His father obviously bribed half the party officials in the district to overlook his activities on the black market, but disobeying the racial policies of the Nazi Party was apparently unforgivable. Something you couldn’t bribe your way out of even with an entire storeroom of Persil. “May I see him, Buhl?”
“I—I don’t know. Perhaps I can arrange it. They’re holding him at the city jail in Kiel. Max, I’ll try to see if I can arrange it. For old times’ sake. Can you phone me in three days?”
“Yes, yes, of course. I’m on my way to Berlin now. And Buhl, thank you—I’m sure you did what you could.”
“Heil Hitler!” Buhl shouted.
“Heil Hitler,” Max said quietly.
He replaced the phone on its hook.
Max stood on the platform in stunned silence until it was time to board the train, a sloppy mixture of banged-up Reichsbahn rail cars and cars confiscated from France and Belgium, with the occasional Dutch car sandwiched in. WHEELS MUST TURN FOR VICTORY had been chalked in prominent letters on the side of each rail car. That was a great slogan. What was it supposed to mean? Don’t be late for the train?
An Honorable German Page 26
