An Honorable German

by Charles L. McCain

  The fare wasn’t so bad yet, this early in the voyage: the bread wasn’t green, the butter hadn’t gone rancid, the vegetables and meat were still fresh. Tonight they had potato pancakes, applesauce, roast pork with beans, and cake to finish it off, but Max’s appetite was weak; it had been weak since they left Lorient.

  Actually, he hadn’t had an appetite for several months—he’d lost ten pounds off his thin frame since the end of their last patrol. He sat at the head of the small fold-down table that served as the officers’ mess and forced the meal down anyway. The men were watching, and word that the captain was too tense to eat would spread quickly through the boat. He tried to keep his face impassive, wondering as he plowed through the pork whether his poise would ever return—and whether, more immediately, he might puke.

  While the food still had a decent taste, the utensils were already greasy. No freshwater could be spared for washing dishes on the U-boat, so the plates and dinnerware were washed in seawater with a special saltwater soap that didn’t work very well. Max wiped his fork with a napkin as Uwe, the officers’ steward, set a piece of cake in front of him. He took a bite and willed himself to smile. “Better than any cake I’ve had at home,” he said.

  The other officers nodded politely. Max sensed they were relieved, but the meal had still been a quiet one, like every meal since they returned to the boat. They had all lost their starch. Had the events of their last patrol not been enough to do it, the others had returned from leave to find Lorient in ruins, the dockyard leveled, the Beau Séjour reduced to a charred foundation. Of course the staff officers maintained their empty bravado—“All they did was kill some cows and burn up a few trucks that we took from the French anyway”—but everyone knew the Luftwaffe didn’t have the strength to assault Allied naval bases, while the Allied air forces acted with impunity. It wasn’t fair to the navy, having to deal with additional enemies from the sky. Every officer in the U-boat force kept saying to whoever would listen, “Where is the Luftwaffe? Can they do something, anything, to help?” Why did the Führer not get rid of Göring? Was it that the Führer didn’t know? Were these facts being kept from him?

  RAF Bomber Command and the U.S. Eighth Air Force were paving over rural Britain with new runways and covering those new runways with the countless bombers churned out by factories in the United States. America produces a new bomber every five minutes! the Allies claimed in the propaganda leaflets dropped all over the coast of Brittany. Max believed it. He read through the leaflets whenever he sat on the can, and propaganda or no, he was prepared to accept every grim boast they made—the evidence plain to see in the wreckage throughout Berlin. But he was glad to have the leaflets all the same, since their constant supply ensured the UBootwaffe would never run out of loo paper again.

  Despite this windfall, the hotel’s destruction brought a marked decline in living conditions at Lorient. New quarters for the crew were buried in the shelters underneath the giant concrete U-boat pens—sunless rooms full of stale air, dampness, and the reek of petroleum. They barely offered any more comfort than the boat itself, and the men were often stuck in the barracks at night. They could go into what remained of the town of Lorient only in armed groups; the French Resistance grew stronger each week and killed German sailors with regularity.

  _________

  For the next three weeks the boat plowed through the Atlantic swells, taking green water over the bridge more than once. One night it got so rough that Max submerged for six hours to let the crew sleep and have a meal. Trying to eat with any kind of sea running was impossible; most of the food ended up on the deck. Not that this represented any great loss; by the time they were halfway to America, the smell of petroleum had permeated even the canned food.

  But there was something new in the air those three weeks later when Carls woke Max one morning—a heavy warmth that carried with it a breath of seaweed. Florida. The temperature of the water around them had risen perceptibly during the night; Max could even feel it when he touched the steel plating to which his bunk was fastened. “Where does the navigator have us?” he asked Carls.

  “Seventy-five kilometers east of Miami, Herr Kaleu.”

  “Very good. Very good indeed. The crew?”

  “Glad to be warm, Herr Kaleu. But nervous as whores in church. Never been up against the Amis before and they wonder what it’ll be like.”

  “So do I, Carls.”

  “Can’t say as I know, sir, but I did meet some American sailors in Shanghai ten, maybe fifteen years ago. We was on a training cruise aboard old Emden, Herr Kaleu, and ended up by accident in a bar with some American sailormen who were three sheets to the wind.”

  “Perhaps you made a wrong turn on your way to divine service.”

  “I believe that was it, sir. After a time I got to speaking in a way with one of the Amis. I don’t speak any of the English, but he had a little German and proceeds to tell me that he didn’t think much of our Kaiser Wilhelm, and I’m not one for letting any man say a word against the All Highest, so I punched him as hard as I could.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing, Herr Kaleu. Absolutely nothing. I had knocked him one on the jaw as hard as I could, but he didn’t move a muscle. So I raised my hands up in surrender and said, ‘Beer?’ and he didn’t say nothing, but I get us two Tsingtaos and give him one.”

  “And?”

  “He drunk his beer in one swig and broke the bottle over my head, Herr Kaleu.”

  “Most Americans are more polite than that.”

  “Do you think they’ll be as rough as the Tommies?”

  Max put on his white captain’s hat. “Nothing could be as bad as the Tommies.”

  “I’ll remind the Kommandant of that when the Americans begin dropping depth charges on our heads.”

  Max shook his head and smiled. Thank providence for Carls—it would have been hard for him to manage without the big man’s deft handling of the crew. Senior noncommissioned officers were worth a pocket full of gold, and the Kriegsmarine didn’t have very many left. “We’re rare birds,” Carls had told Max on their last patrol. “Almost extinct. They’ll have us in the Berlin Zoo soon.”

  “Most of the birds in the zoo have been eaten.”

  “Even more reason to put us somewhere safe, Herr Kaleu.”

  He got off his bunk and went up to the bridge with Carls following behind.

  “Dolphins, Herr Kaleu.” Max looked to the starboard and saw them racing the boat, arching clear of the water with their little sidelong grins. They seemed to be having a good time.

  “Look to your sectors!” Carls yelled at the lookouts. “This isn’t a pleasure cruise.”

  Already the sun was hot on Max’s neck, the bridge armor warm to the touch. Was it safe to venture closer to shore in broad daylight, or should he submerge and wait for nightfall? Maybe twenty-five more kilometers. “Stay alert,” he told the men. “Stay alert.”

  Around them the green water was marked by brown patches of seaweed floating on the surface. Max swept his binoculars in a slow arc to stern, then to starboard, then past the bow to port, but saw nothing. Everything was quiet except for the rumbling of the diesels as they turned over at full speed.

  Max dropped below for thirty minutes to look over the charts with the navigator. When he returned to the bridge seagulls flocked in the sky above them. He peered at the birds through his binoculars as they soared up, drifted down, wheeled in tight turns, chasing one another in slow circles, diving occasionally for fish. In the far distance one of the gulls glided, wings fixed like a plane.

  “Alarm!”

  “Go, go,” Carls yelled to the lookouts, almost tossing them below. Max landed on top of him in the control room, water already hissing into the ballast tanks. Above them, in the conning tower, the helmsman shut and dogged the hatch.

  “Hatch secure!” he shouted.

  “All hands forward!” Max bellowed. “Get us down, Chief, down!” Red lights blinked up and down the passageway
as the crew stampeded for the bow, piling onto one another, the boat now pitching forward at an angle of fifty degrees.

  The first depth charges detonated far in the distance. Max listened intently as he clung to the periscope housing, trying to gauge their position relative to the explosions. “Right full rudder! All ahead full. Go to one hundred meters.” No use holding the same course with the wake pointing at them like an arrow.

  Another explosion, also well off the mark, but the sound unnerving all the same. The control room crew stared upward as if they would be able to see the depth charges falling.

  “Look to your stations,” Max snapped. Like a damned bunch of conscripts gawking at the Eiffel Tower. He resisted the impulse to look up himself. How did the Americans attack? Were they dogged like the British, or did they get impatient and go charging off in every direction? Certainly they couldn’t drop depth charges with any accuracy.

  The next two explosions were even farther away and Max knew they were out of danger. Carls looked at him and Max put his palms out as if to say, I told you so. They smiled at each other. These Americans didn’t have the Tommies’ experience—soon enough they would. “Both engines ahead one-quarter,” Max ordered. “Resume base course.”

  They sank the first freighter at dusk, three torpedoes hitting her broadside. She was gone in less than ten minutes. Two lifeboats were launched as the ship went down, and Max was happy to see it. At least he hadn’t killed everyone aboard—save for a handful in the engine room. A twenty-five-kilometer sail to land was all the survivors would have to manage, then a hot dinner and tall tales. If ships had to be sunk, he supposed sinking them inshore, where most of the crew could get away, was the humane way to do it—if launching torpedoes at a vessel with no warning could be called humane.

  The second freighter, two hours later, was more difficult. She saw the U-boat in the moonlight just before Max launched his torpedoes, and the ship’s auxiliary gun crew took him under fire with an antique deck gun from the First War. Shells came over the boat with the high whistle he remembered from battles aboard Meteor and Graf Spee.

  “Dammit!” He pounded the bridge railing with his fist. “All ahead full. Lehmann, shoot, shoot, shoot!”

  Another shell from the freighter. This one plowed into the sea about two hundred meters abaft the starboard beam. At least they were no more accurate than the American patrol plane had been.

  “Herr Kaleu,” Bekker called from below, “she’s sending a distress signal.”

  Suddenly the freighter’s searchlight fell directly on the bridge, illuminating them for any aircraft or destroyer to see. Max threw a hand up to shield his eyes.

  “Tube one, fire!” Lehmann yelled. “Tube two, fire! Tube three, fire! Tube four, fire!”

  “Helmsman! Right full rudder,” Max ordered, shouting through the open hatch to the helmsman just below. “Emergency full ahead.”

  Another whoosh overhead, followed by another explosion in the sea as a shell hit the water, closer this time. They were finding the range, even with their old gun that belonged in a museum.

  “Thirty seconds,” Lehmann called as the U-boat turned away, propellers roiling the green water as the diesels breathed a throaty rumble, blowing exhaust across the bridge.

  “Twenty seconds!”

  Max fixed his binoculars on the ship, seeing nothing, blinded by the searchlight.

  “Ten seconds!” Lehmann shouted. “Five, four, three, two, one.”

  Nothing. The first torpedo had missed and still they were fixed in the searchlight’s glare as the ship’s gunners fired another shell. Max wanted to submerge but it would take too long. He kept going hard starboard, bringing the boat stern to so she would show her smallest silhouette.

  “Number two missed,” Lehmann shouted above the growling diesels.

  Number three did not.

  It struck the freighter square in the stern and ignited with a terrible blast that threw the sailors manning the deck gun into the air. Max breathed a grateful sigh of relief and watched the ship begin to list. Boats dropped over the side and men did the same, too panicked even to climb down the rope ladders. A high-pitched whine pierced the night like a long banshee wail as the engineers blew the steam remaining in the boilers. The searchlight went out as the ship lost power, and by the time Max’s eyes readjusted fully to the darkness there was nothing left to see: the freighter had vanished beneath the waves.

  The distress call was sure to bring American warships to the scene, so Max decided to take the U-boat a hundred kilometers out, to lie there on the bottom for a day until the search for him had died down.

  His men welcomed the respite when they finally submerged; they always seemed exhausted after an attack, and certainly Max was exhausted himself. Leaving only essential crew in the control room, he dismissed both watches and soon the sailors were sleeping everywhere—in bunks, beside the spare torpedoes, in the galley, one beneath the chart table—all of them slack-jawed from fatigue. Max hadn’t heard snoring so intense since his cadet days aboard the sailing ships, where they’d all slept together in hammocks on the mess deck.

  At 2100 he surfaced to recharge his batteries and ran south through the night, maintaining a distance of one hundred kilometers from land, until he reached a spot that seemed right for picking up Caribbean-bound traffic. Then he submerged to wait for morning; he could see nothing in the dark and did not want to be surprised at dawn, when patrolling planes or ships were hardest to see.

  While the crew ate their lunch of blood sausage, canned brown bread, and fruit juice, Max worked over the chart table in the crowded control room to fix his position as best he could. When they surfaced again, he and the navigator would use their sextants to take a sun sight. A glance at the almanac told him that sunrise would be at 0618. Twenty minutes, then. That gave him time for some lunch of his own, though he had no stomach for blood sausage in this heat. Powdered eggs would’ve been better but the U-boat always stayed on German War Time—Berlin time—during combat operations, and that made it the lunch hour, even though Max and his crew lay on the seabed a hundred kilometers off Miami with twenty minutes to sunrise.

  When Max sat down at the officers’ table, he found Lehmann up to his old tricks again, providing the National Socialist perspective on the latest war news. Bekker took down the late-night Wehrmacht communiqué whenever he could and passed it along to the officers. Lehmann usually tried to intercept it so he could put a good face on the latest grim reports from Russia. Now he was saying, “Of course, the Russians are taking fearful casualties and our retrograde movement is only meant to straighten out our lines.”

  Max listened without comment. He was a sailor, not a soldier, but he doubted that a retrograde movement was good, especially since it was the only type of movement the Wehrmacht had been making since the Battle of Kursk in July—an immense struggle that had gone on for days. In Lorient the flotilla commander had told him that at one point, over three thousand tanks had engaged, firing into enemy tanks at point-blank range. The news from Russia was an endless source of discouragement. All through last year and the first half of this one, Max had gone on praying that the Führer still had some trick up his sleeve, a secret plan that would turn the tide on the Eastern Front, a mighty blow he was holding back until the time was right to strike. But Hitler had nothing. Maybe Lehmann had the right idea; perhaps the war news needed a little dressing up, not that intercepting the communiqué before the men saw it did much good. Ferret tuned in the BBC for news reports every hour when he didn’t have the watch. He put it on the speaker for everyone to hear and usually left it on, so the men could listen to jazz and American big band music—all strictly verboten in Germany. Lehmann protested, of course, reminding him that listening to the BBC was a capital offense in the Third Reich, but Max doubted any of them would live long enough to be shot by the Gestapo. The British newsmen, in any case, did not describe the Wehrmacht retreat as a “retrograde movement,” and never speculated that the German army was s
imply attempting to straighten its lines.

  Max looked at his watch: 0630. He pushed the plate of sausage away. What he really wanted was a cigarette, but for that they would need to surface.

  Entering the control room, he straddled the small seat of the sky periscope. Like all boats of its class, U-114 had two periscopes. The sky periscope was used to reconnoiter the sea and air before surfacing, while the attack scope in the conning tower above was fitted with special lenses to register angles and range.

  “Periscope depth,” Max ordered.

  Muttering to his planesmen, the chief brought the boat up. “Sixteen meters, Herr Kaleu. Scope clear.”

  Peering through the lens, Max slowly turned the right handle, manipulating a small mirror that allowed him to look upward of seventy degrees above the horizon. His left hand operated the control that moved the scope up and down to compensate for the action of the waves and motion of the boat. Because it was heated to prevent its delicate lenses from frosting, the periscope was warm against Max’s body, like Mareth sleeping against him in bed. He used the foot pedals to rotate the scope through the compass. Nothing but the empty Atlantic. The sea was covered by gray mist, a fine rain falling. Then he saw it in the last ten degrees of his circle.

  “Down scope!”

  Who knew how alert their lookouts might be? It seemed impossible to Max that a periscope would ever be spotted in the water, but Dönitz had personally assured him that it happened.

  “Action stations!” he shouted. “All tubes stand by!”

  Lunch was forgotten as the sailors bolted for their posts, dishes breaking as they fell to the deck. Red lights blinked but the men needed no prodding. Everyone knew they could go home as soon as their torpedoes were expended. In ninety seconds the boat was quiet again, all stations manned. Max took up the P.A. microphone. “Achtung! We have sighted a large enemy ship. I can’t make her out in the mist but she looks to be a freighter of fifteen thousand tons. The ship is coming directly over us, so we will execute a submerged attack. Stand by.” He climbed into the conning tower and took up the handles of the attack scope, then called down to the chief. “Up scope.”