Disguised as merchantmen, the shabbier the better, and loaded with cork or balsa so that it was all but impossible to sink them, these anti-submarine ships carried fast engines, a navy crew, and all the detection gear and weapons that could be stuffed on board. Their general appearance tended to inspire overconfidence and carelessness in an attacker, but if the U-boat commander made a mistake, it was usually his last.
Schulz cursed the ship he had attacked and himself for a fool to blunder into it. Finally, when no counter-attack came, he slowed down to listen. There was nothing to be heard. He ordered the boat to periscope depth for a cautious look around. The sea was empty. He looked again, and saw three small dots in the water where the ship had been. Lifeboats.
Feeling a little foolish after his headlong departure, he surfaced and returned to the nearest dot. The lifeboat was overturned and damaged, and of the men clinging precariously to it, several were injured.
Schulz brought his boat alongside, and his men helped the Britishers on board. The survivors stared numbly at the edelweiss on the conning tower as the Germans moved quickly and efficiently around them. Dr. Goder attended to the casualties while the U-boat crew righted and hastily repaired the lifeboat. The provisions for it had been lost, so Schulz gave them food, water, cognac, and cigarettes, and the exhausted survivors rested on the U-boat deck.
One of the Britishers had suffered a dislocated shoulder and a broken leg. He lay on the deck almost delirious from pain. Dr. Goder was kneeling beside him when the commander came over to him.
"Are you finished?" he asked.
"No, sir," Goder replied. "The muscles won't relax until the pain is relieved, and I can't put the shoulder back in place or set his leg until then."
"How long will that be?" Schulz demanded impatiently.
"Only a minute, sir. I've already given him a shot of morphine."
Dr. Goder waited for the drug to take effect, anxiously looking at his watch. Then he plunged a second syringe into the man's arm. Still the white-faced Britisher moaned in agony, his eyes glazed with pain.
Again Schulz clattered down the ladder. "Doctor," he implored frantically, "for God's sake hurry up!"
"Herr Kaleu, I'm doing all I can," Goder said. "I've already given him enough morphine to knock a horse out. But you can see for yourself it's had no effect."
"We've got the lifeboat fixed, put provisions in it, and rigged the sails. We're just waiting for this man now," the commander told him.
"Herr Kaleu, he should have been unconscious a long time ago," Goder said helplessly.
Then he picked up a third syringe of morphine. "My friend," he said softly, "I'm going to knock you out if I have to do it with my fist."
The German words meant nothing to the suffering man, but the gentleness in the doctor's voice and touch was unmistakable.
The triple dose of morphine had the general effect of being hit over the head with a club, and the man was out cold before Goder pulled the needle out of his arm.
It was then only a matter of minutes until the shoulder was put back in place and the leg set and wrapped securely in splints. The man was lifted gently, still unconscious, into the lifeboat, while Dr. Goder gave instructions for his care to the other Britishers.
The commander gave a course to land to Mr. Baker, third officer of the Tweed, and the Britishers shoved off with grateful thanks to the men on the U-boat.
It had been an episode full of surprises to the British seamen. When told to come aboard the U-boat, some of them had expected to be killed. Others had expected to be taken prisoner. None had expected to be given cigarettes, cognac, and to be treated with sympathetic consideration. After his cold-blooded and brutally efficient torpedo attack, the U-boat commander had deliberately, and paradoxically, placed his boat in danger in order to save their lives. They didn't know, as they pulled away from the U-boat, if they would ever see England again, but they all knew that if they did, it would be because of a U-boat skipper to whom a shipwrecked sailor was no longer an enemy.
As Schulz watched the boat push off, he was sure he had seen the last of her occupants. But after the war, Third Officer (now Captain) Baker, unable to forget the U-boat commander whose compassion had saved his life, was determined to find him if he was still alive.
Knowing neither the number of the boat nor her commander's name, he could only base his inquiries on her edelweiss, which he mistook for a sun or a sunflower. With only this scrap of erroneous information to go on, he managed finally to track down Schulz's name and address in Hamburg, and wrote to him, asking if he were the same captain who had sunk the Tweed.
When Schulz replied that he was, Baker invited him and his wife to visit him in Poole. So sixteen years after the fateful encounter off the African coast, the two men clasped hands on the dock at Poole.
It was a strange and joyful reunion as the German couple was welcomed and feted by the Britishers. The act of mercy that had for a moment pushed the war aside to save the lives of shipwrecked sailors touched the hearts of the people of Poole, who had for hundreds of years known well the perils of the sea.
Schulz learned from Baker that the Tweed's sudden turn toward him that had alarmed him so was merely the result of loss of steering. His torpedo had knocked out her rudder, and the involuntary maneuver was far from an attack.
Schulz also learned the fate of the three men who had survived the sinking of the Umona only to face a heartbreaking ordeal on a flimsy raft. The man who had a head injury had died a few days later, but the other two reached the African coast after 14 grueling days. Both of them, Edward Elliott and F. Brothers, wrote their thanks to Schulz after the war. Without provisions from the U-boat, they could not have survived.
Shortly before the Tweed sank, her radio operator had managed to get off an SOS. No acknowledgement or reply was picked up by the U-124.
Perhaps the plane had heard and responded to the distress signal, or maybe it was just a routine patrol. Wherever it came from, it spied the U-boat first and came out of the sun to attack.
"AIRCRAFT!"
Werner Henke, who had the bridge watch, decided it was already too late to dive, and it would be better to try to dodge the first rack of bombs.
He had underestimated the initiative of the L.I. two decks below him. When Brinker heard the lookout's frantic shout, he at once put the boat in a crash dive.
While Henke hesitated, the lookouts (knowing Brinker) fled down the hatch without waiting to be told. The last one grabbed the watch officer and shoved him hastily through the hatch while he dogged the cover shut
Henke, confused and off balance, landed like a sack of potatoes on the control room deck. He grabbed the ladder as the boat put her nose down in a 20-degree diving angle.
"What's the trouble?" Mohr asked, laughing uproariously as Henke's feet slid out from under him. "You ought to be used to a Brinker Dive by now!"
"I'm going to break that damned L.I.'s neck," Henke muttered.
The bombs exploded above them with a force that knocked all of them off their feet. The electric motors abruptly stopped, the lights went out, the depth gauge broke, and shattered glass whizzed through the control room like shrapnel. Everything not fastened down was violently thrown about as the boat took the full force of the explosions. The pressure from the concussion jammed one of the forward torpedoes so tightly in its tube that it could not be removed until the boat returned to base.
The bombs had landed exactly where the foreship would have been were it not for the steep down angle, and was as close a hit as she could have taken and survived.
With the motors off, the diving planes could not hold the boat, and Brinker trimmed her by ordering "everybody forward" and "everybody aft," shifting the weight of the men to keep her horizontal.
Obermaschinist Luft, who knew his electric motors better than a housewife knows her kitchen, set to work by the dim light of the emergency lamps. His skilled hands had coaxed them back to life by the time Brinker had trimmed the boat.
/>
The lights flashed on again, revealing the wreckage in the control room. Broken glass and shreds of cork lay everywhere, and the air was thick with powder smoke although the hull was not damaged. It was a phenomenon Kesselheim noted with amazement, having heard about it from other crews but not believing it possible.
The list of kills grew steadily as the edelweiss boat relentlessly hunted and destroyed ships going in and out of the Freetown area. Enemy traffic was plentiful, and although air cover was a constant danger and a nuisance to the U-boat, she still sank the fast, single-traveling ships with torpedoes and her murderous deck gun until her supplies and munitions were nearly exhausted.
An occasional neutral ship, like the Spanish El Montecillo, was stalked by the silent ruthless boat, then left to go on her way when identified. Other ships, not neutral, like the Dutch Atcinous, were lucky enough to dodge the first torpedo and could make good their escapes, meantime broadcasting their plight to other ships in the area. All enemy ships sailed on sharp zig-zag courses.
On April 13, U-124 turned her bow again toward Lorient. But thoughts of home and leave were soon swept away by the familiar cry of "Ship in sight!"
Soon after the chase began, the boat was forced under by an airplane.
"I think he saw us," Schulz, sitting at the periscope in the narrow conning tower, muttered disgustedly. "I'll take another look in a minute if we don't hear any bombs."
Willi Klein, packed in close beside him as helmsman, turned around and said, "Remember, Herr Kaleu, it was just a year ago today that one of those damn bees got us in the ass?"
"What?" asked Schulz in surprise. "Is today the 13th?"
"Yes, sir," answered Willi, "and it's the same time of day, too . . . 13 hours."
Schulz called down the hatch, "Take her down to 50 meters, L.I. We'll give this bee time to leave."
Ill-concealed grins were exchanged in the conning tower as the men wondered in amusement whether their commander's sudden decision was based on superstition or strategy. He did not elaborate.
A short while later, the boat took up the chase again. The freighter was still in sight, and the plane was gone. By dark, Schulz had narrowed the distance between himself and the freighter, and was racing full speed in order to get in a shot before the ship reached the British mine fields approaching Freetown.
"Herr Kaleu'nt," Rafalski called out from the radio shack. "She's spotted us! I just picked up a signal."
"What does she say?" Schulz called back.
"Says she's being followed by a submarine. She's the Corinthic."
Mohr quickly thumbed through the pages of ships listings. "Here she is, Herr Kaleu. British steamer Corinthic, 4,823 tons."
Through the dark night the two gradually came together; the freighter desperately signaling her plight and the silent U-boat, relentlessly closing in, torpedoes ready.
"Poor old fellows," remarked Kesselheim in sudden sympathy. "It must be hell up there, knowing a German U-boat is chasing them and just waiting for a fish to hit."
"Better them than us," someone replied callously.
"Yeah, sure."
Shortly before midnight, a torpedo sent her to the bottom and silenced her pathetic cries for help.
"Set our course for Lorient, Mohr," the commander said. "Let's go home."
1 Uncle Karl: nickname for Admiral Karl Dönitz.
Chapter Seven
On May 1, U-124 steamed into Lorient at the end of her longest and most successful war cruise. Twelve small flags, each bearing the tonnage of a merchantman she had sunk, floated gaily in the spring breeze alongside the commander's pennant. A crowd of people lined the quay, the band was playing, and girls stood, their arms loaded with flowers to present to the returning heroes. To one side stood the Big Lion, aloof and silent, but with unmistakable pride flashing in his ice-blue eyes.
German fortunes were running high, and the arrival of the victorious U-boat was a further cause for celebration. Greece had surrendered to Germany a week before, and Rommel, in a breath-taking drive, had outrun his supplies to halt at the Egyptian border. The slender grey boat at the pier seemed symbolic of the hard-fighting and victorious German forces everywhere.
Schulz stood with his officers on the U-boat's bridge, savoring the moment of triumph. Within minutes they would be tied up at the dock, and he could relax, relieved for a while of the awesome responsibility of command of a ship in wartime. He could well smile with satisfaction. He had brought his boat and crew safely home after more than two months in enemy waters, 12 ships with some 57,626 tons under their belt. The fighting was over for awhile; it was time now for flowers and medals, honors, and a well-earned rest.
The admiral's aide came aboard as soon as the lines were made fast. As he and Schulz exchanged salutes, his horrified glance fell on the home-made Knight's Cross around the commander's neck, and he said with undisguised disapproval, "Get that thing off immediately! The admiral's coming on board to give you the real one!"
Schulz silently removed the medal, and if he perhaps considered the one from his crew the "real" one, he at least refrained from saying so.
U-124's crew stood at proud attention through the brief ceremony as "Uncle Karl" presented their commander with the Knight's Cross to the Iron Cross, and cheered him when Schulz dismissed them, his eyes shining, the black and silver cross gleaming at his throat.
So now the old man was officially an ace, the crew noted with satisfaction. As far as they were concerned, he had been an ace for a long time, and they were pleased by the official recognition. He was a good commander, concerned with the welfare of his crew, performing his own job always competently, often brilliantly.
They had sometimes heard other crews say contemptuously of their own skippers that "he has a sore throat," an infrequent but not unknown malady among U-boat commanders that could only be relieved by prompt application of the black and white ribbon of the Knight's Cross around the neck.
For Schulz there remained only one hurdle, and it was at hand as he stepped aside for the admiral to precede him into the little wardroom. It was time now to tell the admiral that he, a trusted U-boat commander wearing a shiny new medal, had deliberately disobeyed orders and placed his boat in considerable jeopardy to rescue British survivors. He did not know how Dönitz would react, and he made no effort to justify himself, but simply and briefly told him what had happened.
The admiral's penetrating blue eyes probed deeply into his own while he asked question after question about the encounters. "Had the ships gotten off signals giving their positions?" "Yes." "Had he noticed many patrol planes in the area?" "Yes." "How long did he have his boat stopped?" "Too long."
Dönitz sat quiet and thoughtful for a moment. The risk had been too great. Nevertheless, Schulz had acted correctly. The admiral approved.
The tension suddenly drained out of the commander and he smiled with relief. Disobedience did not come lightly to a man of his background and training. He poured cognac for the admiral and himself and they drank to the successful cruise just completed.
Next day a parade was held to present other decorations, and Rolf Brinker was awarded the Gold Cross, the first man in the flotilla and one of the first three or four in the entire navy to receive this high-ranking medal.
The commander went home on leave, and the rest of the crew was soon scattered over Germany for six weeks while the boat underwent a much-needed overhauling.
Brinker and Goder left together that night on the train to Kiel, the first stop on their way to Berlin where the entire crew of U-124 were to be guests of the city and attend the premiere of a movie about U-boats. After that, they planned to go to Mohr's wedding.
The three young officers, all the same age, were close friends. As shipmates on U-124, they had come to know each other intimately, and watch-free hours were filled with outspoken conversation ranging from the overall stupidity of war to the most satisfactory ways of spending a leave in Berlin. There were few subjects that failed to intrigue their
keen and inquisitive minds, and none that escaped the sharp edge of Mohr's wit. Bold and self-assured, they talked and laughed, their discussions spiked with wit and strongly underlined by Mohr's penetrating sense of the ridiculous.
The bond of affection, especially between Mohr and Brinker, was grounded in a shrewd and accurate appraisal of each other's temperament and ability. This mutual confidence and rapport would serve U-124 well in months to come.
Goder had recently married, so he was pleased to give Mohr multifarious advice, helpful and otherwise, and he and Brinker were to be with their comrade as he took this momentous step into matrimony.
When the train left Lorient, the air was warm and sticky, and Goder had opened the window in his sleeping compartment. As they sped north during the night, the weather changed abruptly, and long before they reached Kiel, a cold rain had set in. Goder, in an exhausted sleep under the open window, had taken a severe cold by morning. Furious, but too ill to make the trip to Berlin, he remained in Keil while the others went on without him.
The U-124's crew was loudly cheered by the enthusiastic crowd at the theater, but the overdone and melodramatic heroics of their counterparts on the screen left them all feeling somewhat silly, and they were glad when it was over.
This had been Werner Henke's last cruise on board the U-124, and he said goodbye to his shipmates. This handsome blue-eyed blond departed on his leave full of anticipation and happy plans that would further enhance his well-earned reputation of devastating success with the ladies.
Henke,1 like Schulz, Gunther Prien, and several other well-known U-boat commanders, had come to the navy from merchant ships, having been a sailor since he was 15. Like them, he would prove himself a consummate seaman and a bold and skillful commander. And as the veteran ace skipper of U-515, he would wear the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves.
Dutifully accompanied by Brinker, the beaming Mohr was married to his Eva, a beautiful girl with pale golden hair and fascinating green eyes. He had proposed to her on his previous leave in the preposterously inappropriate setting of a sidewalk café along the Kufurstendamm in Berlin at high noon, shouting to be heard above the traffic noises around them.
Grey Wolf, Grey Sea Page 12
