The Odyssey of a U-Boat Commander

by Erich Topp

  Attack! Again the same launch sequence for the torpedoes. Two vessels were hit in parallel columns of the convoy. One of them simply blew up in a red-hot fireball, illuminating the vessels around, which quickly turned away. Then the same fireworks as after our first attack and the same chaotic scene, as described in Terence Robertson's book, Walker, R. N.:

  The chaos became complete when every ship in the convoy began firing snowflake illuminant rockets wildly and indiscriminately, lighting up every column until it became possible for an attacker to take his time about selecting a target. Walker was raging inwardly, and he almost danced in consternation when one of the ships astern opened fire with her machineguns sending streams of tracers in a wide arc behind her, nearly hitting Stork's bridge and moving round to spray the decks of the neighbouring ship in the next column. The latter, thinking he was under attack from the air, fired off everything he had at the nearest star. It was all a bit much for the escorts and, under Walker's orders, they steamed at full speed round the convoy just outside the glare of the snowflakes in the hope of catching a U-boat stalking them on the surface.

  Shortly before 6 A.M. the last two torpedoes had been loaded, but no matter how hard we tried to carry out a third attack against the convoy, the watchful escorts and the breaking day frustrated our efforts. We fought an inner struggle between the desire to strike again and our responsibility for boat and crew, until the daylight hours allowed at best for an underwater attack. Miles away we tried to overtake the convoy and gain a position ahead of it so that we could dive and try our luck. This resulted in another dance with the convoy's forward escorts after they picked us up by asdic. A determined chase and depth charge bombardment caused a crack in diving tank No. IV, which at the time was filled with fuel. Some of the oil escaped to the surface and gave away our position below. Series after series of depth charges followed until we managed to surface briefly and pump the fuel into a torpedo compartment. We then flushed the leaky tank with seawater so that we would no longer trail oil whenever we dived.

  Nine days later we arrived at our base in St. Nazaire. The girls at the Bar Royal could report to their superiors that we had sunk the convoy commodore's flagship, the Pelayo, along with the Etrib and the City of Oxford, all of Liverpool; the Thurso of Hull; and the Norwegian tanker Skindal.

  August 3, 1942: Surprise Attack of the Canadian Corvette Sackville

  We had used up our last torpedo to attack a convoy. All calculations had seemed perfect, but with no results. Torpedo failure. We had one more reserve torpedo in a pressure-resistant tube on the upper deck. We took it into the boat under great risk while being engulfed in a bank of fog that concealed our moment of vulnerability. We were still in the vicinity of the convoy and thus within range of radar-equipped escort vessels.

  We had just taken the torpedo below, removed the gear and tools needed for the transfer, and restored the boat to full combat readiness. After taking a look at the charts, I decided to lie down for a nap while the chief engineer, after long hours of demanding work, retired to the boat's head for some private business. Suddenly a cry comes from the bridge: "Alarm!" The shrill sound of the alarm bell jars everyone awake. I jump up and run into the central control room. When I arrive there the men of the watch are tumbling down the conning tower from the bridge, falling all over one another. What's going on? The technical personnel on duty has already secured the ventilators. A look at the depth gauge shows that the boat is going down slowly. The chief engineer dashes by me to turn one of the valves. I see the terrified face of our chief navigator, the last man to slide down from the bridge into the control room. His only word of explanation: "Destroyer!"

  There is no time to ask questions now. Our bow is raised up instead of pointing down. "All hands to the forward compartment," howls the chief engineer. The men chase down the center passageway to the forward torpedo room. Everyone acts according to our standard emergency procedures, practiced a thousand times and taking but a few seconds. There is nothing for me to do but to go along, especially since I have no idea yet of our overall situation. Our depth gauge shows 30 feet. The conning tower must be above the surface.

  At this moment the boat is rocked by an immense blow. It shakes and then the lights go out. The dim lights of the emergency back-up system reveal that the upward movement of the boat has been arrested and that it has begun to sink like a stone with a strong forward inclination. "All hands aft!" We must regain control. Depth charges! Water in the engine room! The chief engineer at last manages to level out at 586 feet.

  What had happened?

  The Canadian corvette Sackville had picked us up on her radar while we found ourselves enveloped in the fog bank. Guns at the ready, the enemy had then rushed toward our position. Passing us on opposite courses at a distance of a mere 50 yards, the corvette started firing as soon as we became visible. Fortunately we were too close for her guns to hurt us, the rounds passing harmlessly overhead. But just as the Sackville turned and was about to disappear into the fog again, one of her 4-inch guns scored a hit on our conning tower and blew a hole in the shaft that supplies our diesels with fresh air. One man of the watch on the bridge was hurled against the tower hatch by the explosion, but nobody else suffered injuries. Crash dive! The boat sank like a rock because the air shaft had run full of water, and the usual depth charges were next. We probably trailed some oil, and it was quite likely that pieces of the superstructure had come loose and were drifting on the surface.

  American newspapers picked up the Sackville's claim that she had sunk us, and the story reached Germany by way of Switzerland. Tears and sorrow among parents, relatives, and friends when they got the word. Rejoicing, indeed doubly so, when we turned up after all at our base after the patrol.

  The Sackville's commanding officer, Alan Easton, has described this episode from his point of view in his book, 50 North: An Atlantic Battleground. Easton happened to be eating lunch when first the corvette's asdic operator and later her radar picked up echoes of the German submarine. A dense fog lay over the sea.

  I was craning my head over the dodger trying to see through the murk. My heart was beating fast.

  A dark smudge appeared dead ahead. In three seconds it revealed its shape-long and low, high amidships. A submarine!

  She was crossing our course with slight closing inclination going from starboard to port. Her how wave made it evident she was making eight or ten knots.

  "Hard aport. Full ahead. Open fire!"

  The submarine was on the port bow now a little more than a hundred yards off. The ship was swinging to port-but not fast enough-the U-boat was inside our turning circle; we could never reach her. Would the gun never fire! Eighty yards ... seventy only ... broader on the port bow now.

  At last!

  With the gun on the depression rail and the ship swinging fast, it fired at point blank range, scarcely a ship's length away, two hundred feet, the enemy broadside on to the line of fire.

  On that instant a gaping hole appeared at the base of the U-boat's conning tower, squarely in the centre. It was accompanied by a had of fire from the port point-fives and the Vickers machine-guns. The high explosive shell burst, ripping the near side of the conning tower out. I saw pieces fly and then the yellow smoke of the projectile rising within.

  She was visibly diving. Another round went out of the gun but went over; her how was under water. A depth charge from the port thrower sailed through the air, fell with a splash into the water but was short of its mark. The boat went down fast and was beneath the surface before the fog closed over the place where she submerged.

  The local military administration provided a villa for Endrass and me, beautifully located under pine trees at La Baule les Pins near St. Nazaire. It belonged to a Parisian opera singer and was fully and exquisitely furnished, including paintings by Watteau, Guillaume, and other French artists.

  By then Endrass and I had become the closest of friends. Among comrades we were only referred to as Castor and Pollux. We had b
een executive officers in the same squadron and had received our own independent commands at about the same time: he U 46, a Type Vllc boat on which I had served earlier as a watch officer; I U 57, a small boat. Between patrols we lived together in that wonderful house in La Baule les Pins. We organized parties for our friends and invited our girls there from Paris: Monique, the singer from Belgium, and Pati, the Russian dancer. We had first met them at the Sheherazade, a famous restaurant and nightclub run by Russian emigres. As it turned out, we were two pairs of friends who found each other. Monique was the daughter of a Belgian physician; Pati's father was a Russian general. Both were highly educated; in fact, they knew more about German literature and music than we did.

  Endrass fell on Christmas 1941 while operating against a convoy bound from Gibraltar to England. Having learned of his death, Monique refused to perform for three months. When, after returning from my patrol, I heard of Endrass's death, I boarded the train for Paris to report to Donitz at U-Boat Headquarters. I arrived in Paris late that evening. At the station the staff of the Sheherazade was waiting for me, including Pati and Monique. Apparently DOnitz's aide-de-camp, who also frequented the restaurant, had tipped them off. Without saying a word we went to the Sheherazade, which had already closed for the night. Here a Russian love-feast, a lavish banquet, had been prepared, set up under candlelight by Russian waiters in their national costumes. It was a memorial dinner for my friend Endrass.

  Today all that is gone, irrecoverably, forever. "The flames have died away, and so have the tides, the games."

  In their mythology the ancient Greeks developed a powerful symbol for friendship, the Dioscuri. When Castor falls in battle, Zeus decrees that he and Pollux are to spend half their time in Ilades and the other half on Mount Olympus. Only now, in the tension between these two worlds, do they become an immortal pair of friends, just as they still gaze down on us as a constellation from the night sky.

  Pairs of friends and circles of friends are well known throughout history. They have their special place in the annals of our civilization and have always exerted a considerable influence upon those around them. Socrates, for example, was constantly surrounded by a circle of friends. The Greek school of philosophy is a school of friends. Maecenas and his friends, Virgil and Horace, have become part of our language-Maecenas the patron.

  How profound the idea of friendship has been in earlier times-indeed, how institutionalized-we can still see when we study life at the French royal court in the late Middle Ages. Here the mignon en titre represented the notion of friendship alongside that of the authority of the state. Today in our materialistic world, when a storm of opposition threatens to blow away all ideals, friendship has lost something of its former luster but nothing of its meaning and significance. We may be more careful in using the word on a daily basis, yet its significance has not changed. When we call someone a friend we do so as a recognition of mutual confidence, aware that there can be no secrets and no taboos between us, that we can discuss matters without barriers whatsoever, without calling into question respect and tolerance toward one another. I am convinced that being confident about one's friends remains an important commitment, for it offers an island of calm and stability in the quick and shallow currents of our days.

  On September 5, 1984, 1 took leave of another friend, Teddy Suhren. We had shared duties as watch officers in the 7th U-Boat Flotilla, had commanded boats at the same time in the Battle for the Atlantic, and had later trained submarines and their crews for frontline deployment in the 27th (Tactical) U-Boat Flotilla in the Baltic. During all this time we were aware of our differences in character, strengths, and appearance, but our military duties and our common appreciation of how they should be carried out had brought us close together.

  Fate had dealt Suhren a series of harsh blows. Having served as chief of U-boat operations in the Arctic Sea, he suffered dearly under the arbitrary treatment and revenge the Allies meted out after the war. He came to know the inside of Norwegian prisons very well. His wife left him to live with an American soldier who at the time brought home higher pay. His parents and his sister committed suicide rather than fall into the hands of Russian troops in the East. Suhren never talked about all this, but it tore him up inside. On his last journey I wanted to be with him.

  The funeral took place in Hamburg at the Ohlsdorf Cemetery. My train from Bonn arrived late. Under sunny autumn skies and through the cemetery's greenery I walked up to the terrace outside Hall B, where I found other mourners waiting for the ceremony to begin. Halls A and C were occupied, one funeral after another.

  I recognized many of the faces around me: Godt, Kretschmer, Korth, Bargsten, Cremer, and others-after all those years they looked somewhat strange to me. The Knight's Crosses on their gray suits did not quite seem to befit the occasion. Indeed, they looked macabre to me as we took our place in death's waiting line. Here and there I overheard banal comments about Teddy's recently published book, Nasses Eichenlau b. The West German Navy was also represented-their highest ranking officer present being a Flottillenadmiral, the equivalent of a brigadier general.

  At last the gates to Hall B open. We barely hear organ music playing in the background, not live but from a record. I sit down in the third row. The coffin is surrounded by wreaths and flowers and flanked by an honor guard of Bundesmarine officers. The music stops. The representative of Teddy's graduating class, Crew 35, is the first to speak. After a brief, undefinable organ interlude he is followed by the honorary president of the Naval Association whose address seems lively and loud. Then it is the turn of the submarine commander under whom Teddy served as executive officer. He speaks hesitatingly, searching for words, visibly moved. Finally, the spokesman for the Association of Submariners. Using the famous lines of the Flanders Flotilla of World War I, he suggests that on account of Teddy's usually unkempt appearance and overall bad deeds St. Peter would likely send him to a special heaven for U-boat commanders where they can continue their old ways of singing, drinking, and merrymaking.

  For all who spoke, Teddy seemed to be representing the stereotypical Landsknecht, the soldier of fortune of bygone days who made merry with his friends as their drinking buddy, whose sense of humor was legendary, and who did not always stop at the limits of the possible. For example, when entering Brest after a war patrol and approaching assorted dignitaries of the naval base waiting to welcome him and his boat home, no other man than Teddy Suhren could have raised his megaphone and inquired across the water, "Are the Nazis still in power?"

  The picture I had of Teddy was quite different. To me he was a friend with whom I had gone through this damned war, a man marked by the terrible fate of his family. I saw his exaggerated honesty as something designed to hide his true feelings. I listened to his colorful humor, but it too only masked the cynicism of a lost existence, the endorsement of unpopular views.

  The words that filled the room failed to reach me. A trumpeter played Das Lied vom guten Kameraden. When it was over the curtain came down after this last act in the dramatic life of my friend Reinhard Suhren. We mourners left Hall B through the crowd that was already waiting outside for the next funeral. Teddy's relatives left in a car that had been standing by with its engine running. I could not even express my condolences to them. I was told there was to be a get-together of the old-timers. I was too disappointed, too depressed, to participate. Ali Cremer took me back to the station. Eleven hours on the train, Bonn to Hamburg and back.

  I paid my friend Teddy Suhren my last respects. Forget, friend, if you can, what they made out of your last hour.

  No one knows how Endrass fell. But he died in the zenith of his life. He was spared the agony of decline.

  When I reported after my last patrol to Admiral Donitz, the Commander-in-Chief of the U-Boat Command, I used the opportunity to suggest that my successor on U 552 should make the South Atlantic his principal area of operations because it was a region far less dangerous. Donitz accepted my suggestion. My men went out on four more pa
trols, and they survived. Their very last frontline assignment was as a floating weather station in the Arctic. Then the boat returned to Germany and was scrapped in Wilhelmshaven at war's end. One night a naval officer in civilian clothes entered the shipyard and sawed off the head of the boat's periscope to keep it as a souvenir.

  Five years later the man phoned me and said that it would burden his conscience to keep this memento of my boat for himself. He begged me to accept it as a gift. Since that time the periscope head through which I made so many observations during the war has been in my possession. Occasionally my children and grandchildren pick it up and look through it for fun. The world they perceive is so colorful, so different from the one I associate with that periscope, from the haunting pictures of an era long gone by.

  In the fall of 1942 I left the 7th U-Boat Flotilla, their bases in France, and the band of brothers of U-boat commanders who, although operating on practically all seven seas, were never far from us because we knew about them by monitoring their and the U-Boat Command's radio traffic. We lived with them and celebrated their successes. We mourned them when their silence indicated they would not come back.

  Each of them had his own history. I should mention and introduce all of them, especially those whose names are forgotten today but whose faces and words are fresh in my memory. Some of them actually made history: Werner Hartenstein, for example. I met him for the first time in a French bar. He sat by himself, oblivious to those around him. When I sat down next to him, he said in an unfriendly voice, "My name is Hartenstein. I don't care who you are." He was a newcomer in the circle of wellknown names. He did not hesitate to repulse intrusions into his reserved behavior with some vehemence, an attitude grounded more in a sense of humility than a desire to hurt others. His experiences and the way he overcame challenges made him someone special.