An Honorable German

by Charles L. McCain

  “Bring me the signal light,” Max ordered.

  Carls dropped below, reappearing a moment later with the portable light and handing it over to Max. Bracing himself against the roll of the U-boat in the swell, Max turned the light to the American ships and blinked out his message: “Stand off from me one kilometer and send boats.” No need to let them get too close.

  Two of the destroyers began to circle at a kilometer’s distance while the other destroyer stopped dead in the water parallel to Max and dropped a large whaleboat into the sea, careful to stay wide of the U-boat’s venomous snout. Obviously they had no idea he could fire a torpedo ninety degrees off the bow. “Ready machine guns,” he said to Carls, who signaled the men on the guns. They swiveled their weapons toward the whaleboat as it plowed toward them through the waves. Max counted six men in the boat—five sailors and an officer, all of them armed. Sometime during the evacuation they would rush him and try to seize the U-boat. It was only natural. He would do exactly the same.

  Each of the three warships had every weapon that would bear trained on Max’s submarine to cover the men in the whaleboat. Bekker reported that they were ranging with their sonar, too, just in case there was another U-boat around, perhaps also to let Max know how quickly they would be on him if he attempted to dive.

  Carls handed him a holstered Luger, which Max took and buckled around his waist. It just might come to that in the end.

  “Ahoy, German submarine!” the American officer in the whaleboat called through a megaphone.

  Max looked him over. A youngster, maybe twenty or twenty-one. Each man in the whaleboat had a lifejacket on. The officer wore his khaki uniform and the crewmen looked sloppy in blue jeans and work shirts. “Throw your rope to the sailor on the bow,” Max shouted back. “Load the passengers from there.” He could see the young officer’s surprise at being addressed in fluent English. Max’s father had been right about the language coming in handy, although he hardly could have ever foreseen the present situation.

  Dietrich, one of the deckhands, caught the rope and held it. Others reached down and grabbed the whaleboat’s gunwales, keeping it still and helping the British passengers in. Or throwing them in, really—it was the best they could do in this sea.

  Boats had been dropped from the other American ships and now two more headed in, but from different directions. Conniving, these Amis, worse than the damned Tommies. Max took the light back up. “All boats come in on my starboard bow or I fire,” he signaled. He couldn’t have boats of armed men coming at him from all angles.

  “Carls!”

  “Herr Kaleu?”

  “Cover those other two boats!”

  The gun crew swiveled their machine guns to face the approaching boats and they stopped, bobbing up and down in the swell. After a minute or two they relented, circling around to come in on the starboard bow.

  When those two boats began to load, Max knew it was time to send off some of his crew. The English passengers would provide the best cover for his men. Five went in the second boat, the Americans eyeing them suspiciously, the Brits saying nothing. The engine room crew and the e-motor men went in the third boat, their beards and filthy clothes singling them out from the civilians. When the first boat returned for a second run, he put the torpedo men aboard, along with the cook and the men who operated the diving planes. Heinz gave Max a big salute. Ferret went off, then the chief, then Lehmann, hands tied but still unconscious. Let the Americans deal with him.

  In two hours, only a small knot of British men remained on the foredeck, perhaps ten in all, hands raw from clinging to the lifelines for so long. Max had exchanged no words with the Americans throughout the slow rescue. They just went about their work, occasionally staring up at him as if he were a man from outer space. Max met their eyes from time to time but said nothing. They all seemed incredibly young—faces so fresh, so innocent. Max felt empty and much too old for his years.

  Carls had gone below to set the scuttling charges, leaving Max above with two men on the machine guns. Everyone else in the crew had gone off. The first shot surprised Max because of the Englishmen still on the deck. Where had it come from? Another bullet clanged off the bridge armor, then two more shots and one of the sailors dropped at his machine-gun post. Max drew his pistol. On the bow, the crew of the two remaining whaleboats kicked the terrified Brits into the water and opened fire on the bridge, charging down the foredeck. Max squeezed off a shot and brought one man down as another of the U-boat’s machine guns began to chatter, stitching two Americans across the chest. Then the remaining gunner slumped forward over his weapon. The bastards. Max fired off a clip, dropping another two men, then ducked behind the bridge armor to reload, bullets ricocheting off the thick plating. Crawling on his stomach to the open hatch, he dropped below into the conning tower, pausing to shut the hatch behind him and dog it home. That wouldn’t stop the Americans for long but it might hold them up a little. Carls stood waiting for him in the control room.

  “Charges set?”

  “Jawohl, Herr Kaleu. They’re wired together. Just push the detonator and they’ll blow in fifteen seconds.”

  “Hold them off as long as you can.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.” Carls saluted and drew his Luger.

  Max ducked down the narrow passageway to the stern. The signs of the quick evacuation were everywhere: drawers opened and rifled, a deck of cards spilled across the deck, clothes strewn about. Behind him, he heard the Americans pounding on the hatch as they struggled with its metal wheel. He had to blow the charges now but didn’t know if he’d be able to get out in time. No matter.

  Carls had placed the charges in the engine room around the packings where the propeller shafts left the boat. Max went down on his hands and knees, grease staining his pants, and crawled behind the massive diesels, both engines quiet now, the lights running on battery power. He would have only fifteen seconds to get clear of the space once he pushed the detonators. Gunshots sounded toward the bow. He had to do it now but the charges were hard to reach. More shots—the Americans were in the boat. Stretching as far as he could, his shoulder straining at the joint, he touched the detonator, feeling for the switch. A bullet ricocheted off one of the diesels. Max pulled the switch and scrambled out from behind the engine.

  Another shot, the bullet shattering the glass of the engine telegraph at his back. Max dropped to the deck, crawling along the cold steel plates, slick with grease beneath him. The explosion blew the breath from his body, its shock wave compressing him to the deck plating. His ears rang so badly that he couldn’t even hear the water jetting in, but he felt the boat beginning to incline.

  More gunshots. They sounded far away. Carls was firing steadily at the Americans. Good for him. Kill the bastards trying to take his boat.

  Max crawled forward down the passageway, struggling over the hatch combing, feeling the boat sink beneath him like a slow-moving elevator. She was down five degrees by the stern now. When he reached the control room he found Carls, shirt soaked with blood, taking cover on one side of the half-open hatch that could seal off the aft compartments from the control room.

  “They’re in the boat, Herr Kaleu. Hit me in the arm, the dirty swine. Couldn’t stop them.”

  “I want you to surrender, Carls.”

  “Herr Kaleu?”

  “Surrender now. Get out. She’ll go any moment. Get out.”

  Carls tossed his Luger through the hatch and it clattered across the control room floor. “Kameraden!” he called.

  “Come out, you no-good son of a bitch!” one of the Americans called back.

  Max would be damned if he was going to leave the boat with enemy sailors on board. Kriegsmarine tradition dictated that a captain had to be the last one off a sinking ship. He knew the Americans must be searching for codes, but Bekker had thrown them all overboard hours ago at Max’s direction. A ten-degree slope now and listing to port. The green sea was sluicing into the stern like water through a millrace.

&
nbsp; Carls crawled into the control room and was helped up by two American sailors in their strange white hats. “She’s going, Lieutenant!” one of them yelled.

  “Okay, you guys, beat it and take this Kraut with you.”

  The list increased. Seawater reached the batteries and blew the lights as the Americans escaped. Only the emergency lanterns in the control room stayed on, casting a dim glow. The boat lurched and Max jumped for the ladder. She started her final plunge, stern dropping rapidly, bow rising out of the sea. A trickle of water streamed into the boat from the open main hatch. He removed his white U-boat captain’s hat and threw it to the deck, then grasped the rungs of the ladder, pulling himself up, fighting against the water. A torrent of brine cascaded over him, clawing at his fingers, trying to tear them loose, then forcing itself into his mouth. Only a few more rungs to the top but the water held him down. Maybe it was for the best. He began to relax his grip but a hand came down and grabbed his collar. Carls. The big man used his good arm and his massive strength to jerk Max up through the hatch. They rolled off the bridge into the sea and U-114 sank beneath them with a final sigh.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CAMP TAYLOR

  PRISONER-OF-WAR STOCKADE

  NEAR JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI

  SIX MONTHS LATER

  7 JULY 1944

  0300 HOURS

  THE GUNFIRE JOLTED MAX FROM HIS SLEEP—TWO SHOTS, THEN A machine-gun burst. Lights snapped on throughout the camp. Four of the Afrika Korps men had gone over the wire.

  The desert veterans had been in the camp only two weeks. Prior to their arrival, Camp Taylor had been home to just Max and Carls, who were lying low, and a few hundred men from one of the Wehrmacht’s stomach battalions who didn’t want to escape since each of them suffered from chronic digestive problems that had made them ineligible for military service at the start of the war. As losses on the Eastern Front mounted into the millions, the German army called up every man who could hold a rifle. Those with stomach ailments were mustered into their own units where they could receive a specialized diet and were assigned to work in support capacities such as field post, which is what the stomach battalion had been doing when captured in February 1943 by the Allies during their campaign in North Africa.

  At first they were as deeply apprehensive as any captured soldiers, but after a few weeks at Camp Taylor they felt themselves living in Elysian Fields. Not only was there more food available than they had ever had before, but the stomach battalion mess sergeants finally had the proper ingredients—such as butter and cream and milk—to turn out dish after dish of very bland, highly digestible food. Many of the men began to gain weight, some for the first time in years.

  “Out, out, you guys! Move it, you Nazi pricks,” the guards yelled. “Line up, line up, move, move.”

  Max slipped on his pants and boots and followed the other officers into the assembly area in the middle of the floodlit yard, which was covered with a thick pad of pine straw. Lieutenant Colonel Stoddard, the camp commander, stood in the square, face grim, hands holding a riding crop behind his back. Stoddard was a reserve officer from the First War who had been recalled to the colors and given command of this backwater POW stockade—hardly a distinguished assignment.

  He was rarely on post anyway since he spent most of his time at a barbeque restaurant he owned in Jackson. “Best goddamn barbeque in six counties,” he’d told Max defensively, as if Max might have heard otherwise. “Whites lined up in front, and niggers lined up in the back.” Max had nodded, not sure of what to say.

  Gunshots continued to sound in the deep pine woods that surrounded the camp. These American troops had no fire discipline. Once they opened up, they didn’t stop till they’d shot away all their ammunition. They were ill-disciplined and disorganized in everything they did. It galled Max to take orders from such men, to be a prisoner under their watch, to be losing the war to them.

  Max stood with his hut mates, all army officers, while to his left the three hundred men from the Afrika Korps formed up under their sergeants, the Americans having sent their officers to a separate camp fearing they would make mischief if confined with their men. But Max had been separated from his crew for a different reason. The Americans sent him to Mississippi after just a week in the transit camp in Virginia, because Lehmann was working to bring Max before a secret Court of Honor for rescuing the enemy and scuttling his U-boat. No one else from U-114 was involved in the plot, but Lehmann found friends among other Nazi fanatics in the camp. The situation had grown very dangerous for Max by the time he received the transfer orders.

  “Achtung!” the Oberfeldwebel called.

  Max came to attention with the others. Major Hessler, senior German officer at the camp, smoothed his Wehrmacht tunic into place, looked around, then came to attention and saluted Stoddard.

  “I’m surprised at you, Major Hessler,” Stoddard said. “No escape attempts for six months and now a few of your boys decide to up and go over tonight.”

  Hessler straightened up; he had a tendency to droop. “It is the duty of every POW to escape, Colonel. Those men are veterans of Rommel’s Afrika Korps and tough as leather.”

  Stoddard laughed. “So tough, they surrendered. Listen up, Major, I appreciate their heroic resolve, but it’s a bunch of bullshit and you know it. Your duty is to convince these men not to get themselves killed for no reason, because they got no chance to get away nohow. The only thing any of you will accomplish by trying to escape is making me look bad, and I won’t have that. It’s bad enough I gotta spend the war babysitting you Krauts. I will not let y’all make a fool out of me, understand? I’ll do whatever I have to.”

  One of the American officers handed Colonel Stoddard a clipboard. “Four unaccounted for, sir.”

  The colonel looked at Major Hessler for a long moment without speaking. Finally he said, “You may dismiss from parade, Major, but remember what I said.”

  _________

  Max woke early the next day—Sunday, a day he enjoyed because of the Lutheran service offered in German at the camp by a minister from Jackson. He loved to sing the old hymns, to hear the Bible readings in High German, but most important were the quiet moments of contemplation when he prayed for the comrades he had lost, for his father, for Mareth, for Germany, for himself. As he stepped into the yard after the service, Max saw a corporal’s guard of American soldiers leading the four escaped soldiers through the camp gate. Two had black eyes and swollen faces, another held his arm at an unnatural angle. The fourth had blood all over the front of his shirt, a split lip, a broken nose.

  “Doktor!” Major Hessler shouted.

  Stoddard came in behind his men and ordered them to let the four Germans loose.

  Hessler advanced on him. “These men are prisoners of war and must be treated as such under the terms of the Geneva Convention!”

  Stoddard nodded. “Now listen here, Major, these boys got a little bruised up running through the woods, that’s all. My men didn’t lay a finger on them.”

  A mass of Afrika Korps men, still lean and hard from their months of desert fighting, formed up in back of Major Hessler. The American soldiers in the guard towers swiveled their machine guns toward the yard.

  “Colonel Stoddard, I shall make a full report of this reprehensible behavior to the Swiss government.”

  “Major,” Stoddard said, “your men fell down while they were running through the woods. I think that’s plain as day.” Without waiting for a response, he turned and left through the front gate, a flimsy structure of two-by-fours and chicken wire. The Americans hadn’t wasted a lot of effort building an escape-proof camp. Why should they? Where were the Germans going to go?

  Hessler was angry, but the Afrika Korps men were seething. They had learned to hate the Americans in combat at Tunis, and they didn’t think much better of their comrades from the stomach battalion, whom they regarded as slackers. Still, Major Hessler had been a regular infantry officer in the Prussian army before ulcerative co
litis had forced him into the premature retirement from which he’d been recalled; he was not a man to stand for insubordination, and he could hear the desert troops grumbling all around him. “Oberfeldwebel!” he called.

  The senior noncom of the Afrika Korps detachment stepped forward and snapped a salute. “Ja, Herr Major?”

  “Dismiss these men at once!”

  “Jawohl, Herr Major.” The sergeant spun on his heel with parade-ground precision. “Achtung!” he bellowed, the three hundred soldiers of the Afrika Korps coming immediately to rigid attention. Damn but their discipline was impressive, Max thought. “Dismissed!”

  Max returned to his tin-roofed hut.

  Besides reading books and newspapers from the camp library and teaching a course in English, Max had little to do but think of Mareth. He had already gone nine months without seeing her, and the pain of her absence seemed only to sharpen as the days and weeks piled up behind the camp wire. It had been bad enough when he was at war, but he’d been preoccupied then with his own survival. Now there was nothing to take his mind off the lines of her body he was unable to touch, the sound of her voice he was unable to hear, her sly humor, the comfort of how well she knew him.

  A knock on his door.

  “Permission to enter, Herr Kaleu?”

  “Carls, of course—come in.”

  Max looked at the big man. Carls had been very loyal to him—too loyal, perhaps.

  “News from home? About the others? The crew?”

  “Yes, sir. I has a letter from my mother here,” he said, clutching a small envelope. POWs were not allowed to write each other directly but sent news to one another through their families back home. “Most are still in Maine, cutting timber same as us, Herr Kaleu, only it’s cold there and the men like it better. My mother didn’t want to put no details down on paper, but she says Leutnant Lehmann and Bekker got into some sort of trouble. They got sent to a special camp out west. A place called New Mexico. A camp for troublemakers, she said.”