An Honorable German

by Charles L. McCain

  Von Woller rose, crossed the room, and touched Max on the shoulder. “Thank you,” he said. “She’s all I have left, all that remains of my family. After the war, I hope the two of you will give me many grandchildren.”

  “I would like that very much, Herr von Woller. Thank you. But I think it most unlikely.” They fell quiet, staring for a moment at the bookshelf, the polished leather bindings gleaming in the dim light.

  “And what will become of you then, Maximilian?” von Woller said, turning to Max.

  Max looked directly back at the old man, whose Nazi friends had worked so hard to bring the war about. “I will be killed,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE BAY OF BISCAY

  ABOARD U-114

  TWO MONTHS LATER

  DECEMBER 1943

  1400 HOURS

  THE PLANE CAME OUT OF THE SUN, FIRING ON THEM BEFORE THE forward lookout ever saw it, machine guns already rattling by the time he yelled, “Fliegeralarm! Aircraft bearing green zero nine zero!”

  “Emergency full ahead!” Max shouted. Behind him the U-boat’s anti-aircraft guns returned fire with a loud burping sound. Belts of ammunition streamed through the open hatch, replacing the brass cartridges that fell in a bright river to the deck. Beneath him, the U-boat jumped in the water as the engineers cut in the second diesel and the electric motors.

  The plane was a four-engine Liberator from RAF Coastal Command coming at them abeam. Its machine guns raked the water ahead of them, and then bullets tore into the boat itself, walking down the foredeck, splintering the deckboards. Max dropped below the combing of the armored bridge, jerking one of the openmouthed lookouts with him, and tried to meld his body to the heavy bridge armor. Bullets whined around him, some ricocheting off the armor plate.

  “Medic! Medic!”

  One of the gunners had been hit. With a roar like an express train, the Liberator came over them, black canisters falling from its open belly.

  “Emergency right rudder!” Max yelled into the control tower. The depth charges struck the water fifty meters aft and blew towers of spray into the air, some of the foam washing over the bridge. When the shock wave hit, the force heeled the boat over. Max had to grab the bridge railing to keep from being swept over the side.

  “Where is he?” Max asked, hoping someone would know.

  “Coming over again, Herr Kaleu!”

  “Fire, dammit, fire!”

  Again the staccato beat of the anti-aircraft guns, but only six barrels this time. A brace of dual twenty-millimeters didn’t fire, the gunner down and bleeding on the deck. Machine-gun bullets from the Liberator churned up the water around them, leaving white trails in the sea.

  “Got him! Got the swine!” one of the remaining gunners yelled. Smoke streamed from one of the aeroplane’s engines, then it was over the boat again—dropping another pattern. The aircraft banked away as the charges exploded in U-114’s wake, the shock wave jolting the boat.

  Max felt his whole body shaking. He clung to the periscope housing and gulped for air. Since they sailed from France just two days ago, his body had been betraying him at odd moments, spasms of fear seizing his muscles. He was skittish as a cat. Just getting used to it again, he tried to tell himself, like breaking in an overhauled engine. “Aircraft position!” he called out finally.

  “Disappeared over the horizon making southeast, Herr Kaleu.”

  “Get Gerhard below,” Max ordered. “Easy now.”

  Two of the gunners climbed down slowly into the control room, taking their wounded man with them, leaving their petty officer behind to discharge the ammo belts and drop them below.

  “Quickly,” Max said.

  The petty officer dropped through, followed by the lookouts.

  “Prepare to dive!” Max called down after them.

  The boat had held up well so far, but he still didn’t trust the French dockworkers who had repaired her. Too many skippers sailing from Lorient had found false welds that burst when they submerged and allowed water to flood in—and Max knew only of the lucky ones who’d managed to make an emergency surface and struggle back to base. Others had just gone to the bottom.

  “Reporting all outboard vents closed, Herr Kaleu,” the control room petty officer shouted up through the hatch. “E-motors engaged, diesels disengaged and secured.”

  The crew understood why Max was being so cautious. He scanned the sky once more to make sure a plane wouldn’t pounce on them as they submerged. “Flood!” he shouted, then dropped through the main hatch into the conning tower. He dogged the hatch shut against its rubber gasket and then they were under, buried in a silence that seemed deafening after the roar of the plane and chattering guns topside. Max slid down the ladder to the control room.

  “Both slow ahead. Chief, take us to thirty meters and trim the boat.”

  The bow angled forward, then the boat leveled off as the chief juggled the amount of water in the trim tanks fore and aft to put the boat on an even keel—something of an art since even one man could throw the trim off by moving suddenly. For this reason, the sailors were forbidden to leave their stations without permission when the boat was submerged.

  “Thirty meters, Herr Kaleu. All stations reporting watertight integrity.”

  So far, so good.

  “Forty meters.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”

  They went slowly to one hundred thirty meters, their operational depth, dropping ten meters at a time, until Max was satisfied the flotilla engineers had missed nothing in their inspection of the boat. “Chief, take us up to sixty meters.” Max examined the plotting chart in the control room. “Helmsman, come port ten degrees and steady up on two four zero degrees. Half ahead, both engines.”

  He was so damned slow underwater. In an emergency, he could go to eight knots, but that speed drained the batteries in four hours, forcing him to surface and recharge whether it was safe or not.

  He ran at depth for two hours; when he surfaced again it was dark and they encountered no more planes. By dawn of the next day, they were in the Atlantic proper, the U-boat taking the long swells in a gentle rise and fall, like a rocking horse moving in slow motion. Max could feel how sluggish she was, packed to the gills with extra diesel oil for the long voyage to America, cans of the filthy stuff stacked in the passageway so the entire boat reeked of diesel. The smell brought him back to the sinking of Meteor, his body covered in oil and Dieter burning to death in a pool of blazing fuel. Max realized that he didn’t think about Dieter much anymore.

  He checked his speed again on the dial in the control room. Seven knots—their most economical speed on the surface—running on one engine at seven bloody knots, slow as a damned tugboat. A clipper under sail could go twice as fast. They switched engines with each turn of the watch to even out the wear. It was going to be a monotonous crossing, poking over to Florida at seven knots. They were supposed to arrive in three weeks, maybe four if the weather kicked up, but now Max would have to pause for a mid-ocean rendezvous with a homebound boat to take Gerhard off so he could be treated back on shore. That would cost them a day, maybe two or three. Few boats in the force still carried a doctor on board. Too many boats sunk. Too many doctors killed.

  Max looked up through the open hatchway. “Bridge!”

  “Bridge, aye-aye.” Ferret came to the hatch and looked down at him.

  “Watch for aircraft.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”

  Max picked his way through the narrow corridor to his small bunk and drew the green curtain behind him. Two months, maybe three lay ahead, confined in this steel tube. Already the boat was heavy with the stink of men on top of the putrid diesel oil. And his damned hands were shaking again. He was like an old woman now. All he wanted was to get off the damned boat and go home, but nothing was the same at home either—Mareth had gone to Mexico, and his father was still locked in the jail at Kiel for another month.

  Buhl had arranged for Max to see the old man, and Max knew it
hadn’t been easy. He’d given Buhl a bottle of schnapps to thank him. The two of them took an early train from Bad Wilhelm, not bothering to buy tickets. Buhl’s Nazi Party uniform was enough. People cleared out of his way when they saw it, some smiling obsequiously, others just scowling.

  Ordinarily a robust man, barrel-chested with the strength of an artillery horse, Johann appeared pale, his blood seemingly drained from him. Max tried not to betray his surprise when the old man shuffled into the visiting room, twenty pounds lighter and moving uncertainly in his shapeless prison uniform. The jailer had the decency to leave them alone. They embraced. Max said, “Papa, you are well, yes?”

  “As well as anyone in this shithole.”

  They talked about life back in Bad Wilhelm, about the store, which Albert, the deliveryman, had taken over for the time being—“I’ll be lucky if there’s any beer left when I get back,” Max’s father said—and finally about the arrest. “Gestapo sent that fool Cajus to come get me. Can you imagine? Cajus? He would have died twenty different times on the Western Front if I hadn’t been there to save his fat ass, and now they send him to arrest me. Cajus. I don’t even think he had bullets in his pistol. I should have let the French shoot him. He couldn’t even put the cuffs on right. I had to show him how.”

  Max smiled at his father’s telling. “Cigarette, Papa?”

  “Yes, but you smoke too much, Maximilian, I’ve been meaning to tell you. But I guess you earn it, trapped in that damned U-boat of yours.”

  Max shrugged. He slid the pack across the table. “Keep it,” he said. “Maybe you can barter them for better food.”

  His father nodded, looking down at the package.

  “And the girl, Papa?”

  The old man didn’t answer. He went on gazing down at the table and a silence developed.

  “Papa?”

  A single tear fell from his eye and landed on the paper wrapper of the cigarette pack. Max tried to remember if he’d ever seen his father cry.

  “Papa.” He reached out and touched his father’s shoulder. “Tell me.”

  His father brushed Max’s hand away and began to weep openly.

  “Papa, what happened to her?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Max stared. “Were you in love with her?”

  His father shook his head. “Yes, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t even know what that means anymore—at my age, in the middle of this war. It doesn’t mean anything.” He sat up ramrod straight, bracing his shoulders back like the Prussian sergeant major he had once been, and looked up at Max. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Max didn’t know what to say. He took hold of his father’s rough hands and said nothing—Johann’s grip was forceful and he didn’t let go for a long time. Finally they nodded at each other and Max stood, turned to leave. At the door he turned to salute but his father had buried his head in his arms, his body trembling with quiet sobs. On the train home, Buhl told Max that the Polish girl had been shot.

  Back in Lorient, Max spent his days supervising the extensive repairs on U-114 and returned each night to his small room at the Hotel Beau Séjour. Armed naval sentries now stood guard outside the hotel and patrolled the inside halls as well, so Max didn’t have to worry about French assassins. Every evening, after luxuriating in the bath, he drank himself off to sleep—not a good idea, he knew, but the only way he could ever sleep. Hopefully he wouldn’t become like the three town drunks in Bad Wilhelm. All three had served under Johann at Verdun and he often gave them money. “Why do you do that? They just use it to buy more schnapps,” Max had asked his father. “Because they saw such terrible things in the war they cannot face life sober.” Locked away in his room at the Beau Séjour with its sparse personal effects for company—his sextant, his books, his rosary and photo of Mareth—he could relax after a bottle or two of wine. After a bottle or two of wine, the room felt like the last safe place in the world.

  Only that was an illusion. Max had been back in Lorient for just ten days when the whistle of a falling bomb sent him sprawling to the ground, his body reacting from instinct before his mind had registered the threat. He’d been walking from the hotel to the giant concrete bunkers, their ceilings seven meters thick, that protected the U-boats from Allied bombers. This bomb hit no more than five hundred meters away, its shock wave washing over him, knocking his breath out and almost bursting his eardrums.

  He saw a slit trench ten meters away, scrambled up, ran for it, rolled in just as the next bomb exploded. Behind him the Beau Séjour disintegrated, its wooden splinters cutting down the sentries and anyone else close by. There had been no air raid siren, no warning whatsoever, but this was hardly remarkable anymore. The RAF’s high-altitude Mosquito bombers were made entirely of wood and German radar often failed to pick them up. Max watched from the trench as fire spread through the Beau Séjour’s collapsing frame. If the Tommies had come two minutes earlier, he would have been killed.

  This seemed, however, like a trifling stroke of luck since he was sailing off to his death, while his father, racked by bitterness and heartbreak, waited for word of Max’s death to arrive at the jail in Kiel. How had all this happened? Barely four years ago, Max had been a promising young naval officer with a beautiful fiancée and the world at his feet. He put a cloth over his nose to block the stench of the diesel fuel, closed his eyes, and finally dropped off to sleep. It seemed no more than five minutes before Bekker was shaking him gently awake. “Herr Kaleu?”

  Bekker was the oldest man on the boat, a paper-pushing personnel clerk down to his wire-rimmed glasses. He still had the habit of slicking his hair down with lime-scented brilliantine, as men had before the First War. Max smelled the lime before his eyes were open. “Ja?”

  “Message to captain, Herr Kaleu: ‘Convoy in sight U-480.’”

  Max came bolt upright at the news. “How long did I sleep?”

  “Eight hours, Herr Kaleu. First watch officer reports U-Boat Command is forming a battle line and instructed me to wake the Kommandant.”

  When a U-boat sighted a large convoy, it kept in contact with the convoy at a distance but refrained from attacking while U-Boat Command summoned other boats to form a wolfpack that could attack in force. Dönitz had developed this tactic in the twenties after his run as a decorated U-boat skipper in the First War. “Anything for us?”

  “Nein, Herr Kaleu.”

  Please God that it stayed that way. Loss rates in convoy battles could be as high as four boats in five—so many had gone to the bottom in the last months that Dönitz had briefly pulled all U-boats from the North Atlantic. Now he’d sent them back although nothing had changed. British escort ships were becoming more numerous and better equipped every week, with more effective radar, more highly trained crews, and now continuous air support from Allied planes based in Greenland and Iceland. The swine flew so high you didn’t even know they were there until an escort charged out of nowhere, guided onto you by the patrol plane. Everything had changed since 1939, when U-boat skippers owned the seas. Prien sank a British battleship at anchor in Scapa Flow in the first week of the war, for God’s sake, but now he was just as dead as all the other old bulls who turned down Dönitz’s offer to become flotilla commanders or staff officers. Going after a convoy at this point was close to suicide. Max felt shame admitting this to himself, but he wanted to be left alone to complete his mission to America.

  He pulled on his white cap and went to the radio station. Bekker worked from a small niche on the starboard side and he handed Max copies of the messages being sent to other boats from U-Boat Command, ordering them to the scene. Max took the typed messages and plotted them on his tracking chart. The convoy was four hundred kilometers away. Please God, let that be far enough. Maybe the little wooden marker that represented his boat on the huge green baize plotting table in Berlin would be overlooked. Maybe even now someone at U-Boat Command was saying, “What about U-Max?” and the operations officer was replying that they were too far away, or on
a special mission.

  Taking up the dividers every half hour, he marked their progress on the chart, trying to will the boat to go faster. He began to relax when they were five hundred kilometers from the convoy. For the first time that day, he climbed to the bridge and smoked, leaning against the stern anti-aircraft gun, watching their wake disappear into the twilight, the December wind strong and cold, tugging at his hat and bridge coat. Whitecaps were everywhere, raised by the wind, and waves slapped against the boat. The view seemed peaceful to his eyes—the gray-green waves, the clean blue of the sky, the ozone smell of the air, the sun fading from yellow to orange as it dropped down toward the horizon—but Max didn’t relax. He knew this was an ocean at war. Lehmann had the watch. He’d been looking on all day as Max marked off their distance from the convoy. Had he seen that Max was afraid? Had he been afraid himself? Not even the most ardent National Socialist could be immune to the effects of so many depth charge attacks—not even one like Lehmann, who had attended one of the Adolf Hitler schools designed to groom young men for future leadership in the party and the nation. Whatever he thought, Lehmann had said nothing to Max about the convoy. None of the officers had. Everyone wanted to make Florida, to be done with the Brits and winter in the North Atlantic, where clothes froze to your body on the bridge, where you could never get warm, and where the constant rolling of the boat left you listless and constipated, your belly full of rotten food. When Max descended into the boat for the evening meal, he noticed a certain lightness among the men, and he knew they had all been praying along with him not to be summoned to the convoy attack. They understood the casualty rates as well as he did, and Bekker kept them informed of the four-digit coded messages he copied and deciphered for Max to read: “Message for captain, signal just received, ‘Liberator. Attacked. Sinking. U-604’”; “Message for captain, signal just received, ‘Attacked by aircraft. Sinking. U-89’”; “Message for captain, signal just received, ‘Attacked by destroyers. Sinking. U-844.’”