by H J Weaver
‘I reached the deck just as the fourth round hit No. 2 and No. 3 hatches,’ says Mr Bird. ‘I saw a rain of wooden hatch covers and derricks fly everywhere on the foredeck. I made my way to the port boat station. My job was to sit in the stern with the junior apprentice in the bow. It was his duty to let go the forward fall and tend to the painter while mine was to let go the after fall, ship the tiller and steer the boat alongside to pick up the rest of the crew from the rope ladder and lifelines.
‘But, since we were on the same side as the condenser water discharge, it was essential that the boat should not be fully lowered until either the discharge had been shut off or the special wooden cover had been lowered to cover it and prevent the boat from being flooded. The Third Mate, who was in charge on the deck, was well aware of the danger and had temporarily made fast the falls when we were just above the discharge. I could see the cover being prepared for lowering.
‘At this point, Fireman Woods rushed up out of the stokehold and, either in panic or thinking that we were in shock and did not know what to do, threw the forward fall off the bollards himself. He then jumped over the side, wearing his cork lifebelt. These were made of solid blocks of cork and, if they were not fastened really tightly around the waist, could give you a blow on the back of the head powerful enough to break your neck.32 At this time the boat was still going ahead at some five or six knots. When the bow of the lifeboat dropped we began at once to fill up from the condenser discharge and the scooping action of the bow under the water.
‘Fortunately, the apprentice was very alert. He was able to release the painter and the lower block of the falls which enabled the boat to tow stern first until I could cut the after fall and let us drift clear of the ship. Fireman Woods was then some 150 to 200 yards away from us, quite still, with his face down in the water . . .’
Cadet Bird, who was a strong swimmer, made sure the apprentice was in full control of the situation, then discarded his lifebelt, dived into the sea and swam to Woods’s aid. ‘I had been supporting him for about half an hour, as far as I could judge, when the U-boat came alongside and picked us up,’ he says. ‘I was very frightened, very cold and quite tired – Woods was a big fellow, more than 16 stone – and, while his crew began artificial respiration, the Commander gave me a full glass of brandy, saying I could probably do with it. I thanked him for the brandy and for the efforts of his crew to revive Woods. He passed a remark to the effect that we were silly to think we could run away faster than his shell could travel.’
While these events were taking place, the Norwegian tanker Eidanger was approaching and Captain Poole was still aboard the Bosnia, destroying confidential books by throwing them into the flames. U-47 proceeded alongside the Bosnia’s starboard lifeboat and Lt. Prien ordered the Chief Officer on board the U-boat for questioning. In fact, it was not Chief Officer Richard Turnbull who responded to the command but Second Engineer Tom Bryce, who had changed jackets with the Chief Officer.
‘Captain Poole was a Captain, RNR, and “Dickie” Turnbull was a Commander, RNR,’ Mr Bird explained. ‘Both had had fine reputations as captains of Q-ships’ – merchant vessels with concealed armament – ‘in the 1914–18 war. They believed they were on a list and, if they were captured and their identity was known, they would be taken back to Germany and executed.
‘After a brief conversation, the Commander of the U-boat ordered the Bosnia’s starboard lifeboat to proceed to the Eidanger. Just about this time, Captain Poole was seen to dive overboard from the Bosnia. The Commander of the U-boat instructed one of the Norwegian tanker’s boats, which had appeared on the scene, to pick him up.’
For Captain Poole, once safely aboard the Eidanger, there remained the tasks of recording in the last two pages of the Bosnia’s log the final moments of his ship’s life and the burial at sea of Fireman Woods, the only casualty in the action. The entries read:
1700/5.9.39. 45°27'N, 9°41'W. s.s. Bosnia torpedoed and sunk by German submarine, sinking in one minute, back breaking amidships and vessel disappearing bow first.33
And:
1700/5.9.39. 43°39'N, 9°50'W. The Body of J. Woods, fireman, was committed to the sea in the presence of the Master and ship’s boy of both ships’ companies. Burial service read by myself.
In Lisbon on the following day, all the surviving members of the Bosnia’s crew were transferred to the motor vessel Highland Brigade for repatriation to Britain. Cadet Bird had barely reached his home in Birmingham when he was summoned to embark on a new career: a telegram arrived, calling him up as a Midshipman, RNR. By an odd coincidence, in view of what was to happen one month later, he reported for duty on September 13, 1939, to Iron Duke, headquarters ship of ACOS in Scapa Flow.
In the course of research for this book, my path crossed with David Lees, a former British submariner, who has been engaged for four years on a general biography of Lt. Prien. Although in a sense rivals, we frequently cooperated in the face of many difficulties (Mr Lees, whose inquiries were concentrated largely in Germany, found reliable information so scarce in the early stages that he became half convinced that Lt. Prien never existed and was an invention of Dr Goebbels).
Mr Lees agreed that he, too, had been having difficulty with Mein Weg Nach Scapa Flow and reported: ‘The book omits, as you have probably noticed, the sinking of Rio Claro on September 6 and suggests that Lt. Prien’s second victim was the Gartavon on September 7.
‘It describes a voyage to South America by Lt. Prien in a ship called the Pfalzburg when he was a merchant navy officer. I haven’t been able to trace a ship called the Pfalzburg. The book describes a fire aboard the sailing ship Hamburg when Lt. Prien was a member of the crew. The fire is not mentioned in the ship’s log. The Hamburg is supposed to have been wrecked off Dublin in a storm at the end of a voyage from Pensacola. Actually she was wrecked a year later at the end of a voyage from Australia.
‘The names of most of the people mentioned in the book, apart from U-47’s crew, appear to have been invented. There’s also quite a lot of bad language although Lt. Prien did not have the reputation of swearing very much . . .’
Perhaps even more curious in the case of a man who did have a reputation for being meticulous is that the name of von Hennig, who had attempted an unsuccessful attack on Scapa Flow in the first World War, appears as ‘Kenning’ on page 170 of the German edition of the book; and on five occasions, including four times on page 152, the name von Varendorff, one of Lt. Prien’s two watch officers, is spelled with only one ‘f ’. Whatever about other aspects of the book, it hardly seemed likely that Lt. Prien would allow these spelling mistakes to pass him by.
Mein Weg Nach Scapa Flow was published by a Berlin company named Deutscher Verlag, previously, and again now, known as Verlag Ullstein. In the summer of 1978 I wrote pointing out that the book contained a large number of errors and asking if the company could provide any information about how, when and where the book was written: Their reply said:
‘The work was written by Paul Weymar . . . In 1940, when the book was first published, the manuscript had been shown to the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (German High Command) for approval, so there is no doubt that the contents had to be in conformity to the Nazi regime’s ideas.
‘Correspondence between Paul Weyrnar and the Deutscher Verlag shows that after publication of the work it became clear that some of the facts stated in the book are wrong . . .’
10
Neger in The Woodpile34
The publication of Mein Weg Nach Scapa Flow involved Lt. Prien with a writer and a company whose stories typify in their way a sad period in German history.
Paul Weymar, who died a few years ago, is remembered today as a novelist and the author of an approved biography of Dr Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s post-war Chancellor, but when the Nazis came to power in 1934 he was working on the editorial staff of the quality newspaper Vossische Zeitung. His lack of sympathy for the new regime ensured that he was promptly fired and, in addition, banned fr
om the Reichsverband der Deutschen Presse, the journalists’ union. Consequently, he was not only out of a job but had no prospect of finding one. It was only through the help of friends, who gave him editorial work in secret, that he was able to support his family.
Verlag Ullstein had been founded in 1877 by Leopold Ullstein, who was cast in the same mould as Harmsworth in Britain and Hearst in the United States, men of vision who took advantage of the mass readership created by compulsory education to build themselves vast publishing empires. He was aided by his five sons – Hans, Louis, Franz, Rudolf and Herman – and by the 1930s Verlag Ullstein was the foremost publishing house in Europe with a highly respected international reputation.
It employed 10,000 people, it owned vast printing works, and, in addition to the stream of books which poured from its presses, it published the Berliner Illustrierte, Germany’s foremost illustrated magazine with a circulation of two million; a wide variety of other weeklies and monthlies; the Vossische Zeitung, which had been derelict when Leopold Ullstein rescued it at the turn of the century; the popular daily, the Berliner Morgenpost; and the successful evening newspaper BZ am Mittag.
In 1934 the founder of the firm and one of his five sons, Louis, were already dead. What happened to the remaining four brothers and to their respected company was described for me by another Leopold Ullstein, grandson of the founder. Mr Ullstein, who has lived in London since fleeing from Germany shortly before the outbreak of war, explained: ‘By the 1930s we had become largely a Christian family, but the fact that four brothers of Jewish descent should own a big and powerful publishing company was like a red rag to the Nazis.
‘They also disapproved of the family’s left-liberal political views, which were reflected in the Ullstein publications. The Party did not dare attack us openly, but various undercover pressures were brought to bear. Advertisers were discouraged from using our pages, and it was made clear to readers that it was more desirable to be seen with rival Nazi publications rather than newspapers and magazines from Ullstein.’
The success of this campaign can be seen most dramatically in the case of the Berliner Illustrierte, which suffered a 40 per cent slump in circulation – from two million to 1,200,000 – and began to make a loss instead of its former substantial profits. ‘My father, Hans, the eldest son, died in the Spring of 1935 at the age of 76,’ Mr Ullstein went on, ‘and shortly afterwards my three uncles – Franz, Rudolf and Herman – decided that the only sensible course of action would be to try to sell out to the Nazis and salvage what they could.’
The go-between in the delicate negotiations which followed was Professor Karl Haushofer, German originator of the specious ‘science’ of geopolitics. Geopolitics, which purported to explain ‘the dependence of a people’s domestic and foreign politics on their physical environment’, provided, superficially at least, a rational basis for Hitler’s ambition to unite all the German people under one Reich, and, similarly, with its Lebensraum (living space) theory, a justification for his expansionist plans.
Professor Haushofer, who also coined the slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer, was a friend of a brother-in-law of the Ullsteins and, furthermore, of Rudolf Hess, the deputy Führer, whom he had taught in Munich in the 1920s. ‘Eventually a deal was worked out whereby the Nazis acquired the company for 12 million Reichsmarks [around £1 million], which was about a fifth of what it was worth,’ said Mr Ullstein. ‘Unfortunately, the money was tied up in bonds, not immediately disposable, and the family received practically nothing in the end.’ His Uncle Franz and Uncle Herman departed for the United States, his Uncle Rudolf to London, and the name Verlag Ullstein disappeared from the publishing scene. In 1937, when the company had already been turned into an official Nazi publishing house whose profits were used to finance Party activities, all traces of its Jewish origin were removed by giving it the new, and more patriotic-sounding, title of Deutscher Verlag.
Early in 1940, Paul Weymar reappeared openly on the literary scene with an assignment from Deutscher Verlag to ‘ghost’ Lt. Prien’s autobiography. It is not clear whether he accepted the task out of hunger, patriotism or lack of any choice in the matter. Says Hanns Arens, who now lives in Munich but was one of Paul Weymar’s clandestine supporters in the old Berlin days: ‘All I know is that he was no Nazi in his personal outlook’ – and certainly his decision to co-operate in the writing of Mein Weg Nach Scapa Flow was one he lived to regret.
A three-sided contract between Lt. Prien, Paul Weymar and the Deutscher Verlag was signed on February 29, 1940, with each of the signatories receiving an equal share of future royalties. In addition, Lt. Prien was to be paid an advance of 3,000 Reichsmarks (about £150), whose receipt he acknowledged in a letter dated March 4 from his home at 12 Knivsberg, Kiel.
Prien’s widow, now Inge Sturm, confirms how little opportunity he had to write his own account of the attack.
Some – but by no means all – of the flaws in Mein Weg Nach Scapa Flow must have arisen as a result of the speed with which the book was written. The contract called for Paul Weymar to deliver the manuscript by April 15, which gave him only six weeks to obtain his raw material and turn it into an autobiography. During this period, Lt. Prien was available to be interviewed for little more than a week. U-47 sailed from Wilhelmshaven on March 11, returned on March 29, sailed again four days later, on April 2, and arrived back in Kiel on April 26.
There appears to be no evidence to indicate exactly when Paul Weymar completed his manuscript, but it was some time in the summer of 1940. After making alterations to the account of the Scapa Flow mission, the German High Command returned one copy, officially approved, to Deutscher Verlag on August 23. A second copy, approved by the Propaganda Ministry, was despatched to the publishers on August 27.
U-47 had up to this point had a fairly quiet summer. Apart from one patrol, which lasted from June 4 until July 7, she lay at Kiel, and during these weeks in port Lt. Prien also received a copy of the manuscript. He put to sea out of Kiel again on August 26 and returned to a new base, Lorient on the west coast of France, on September 25. U-47 carried out two more patrols (October 14–October 23, November 3–December 6) from Lorient before the year was out. It appears that Lt. Prien did not set foot in Germany between his departure from Kiel on August 26 and the second half of December.35
But I did not know any of this background in the summer of 1978 when I asked Verlag Ullstein if I might see the file on Mein Weg Nach Scapa Flow.
The brothers Franz and Rudolf Ullstein returned to Berlin at the beginning of the 1950s and worked with a number of faithful former employees, including Herr Cyrill Soschka, head of production in 1940, to try to restore Verlag Ullstein to some semblance of its former greatness. The task proved impossible and they sold out eventually to the mammoth Axel Springer organisation.
The Axel Springer headquarters today are in a modern block which towers over the Berlin Wall, close to the celebrated Checkpoint Charlie. A couple of hundred yards away, out of respect for the firm’s past eminence and achievements, the name of Verlag Ullstein is preserved on a smaller building, still surrounded by the weed-covered scars of Berlin’s wartime devastation.
The correspondence which made it obvious that some of the facts stated in Mein Weg Nach Scapa Flow are ‘wrong’ proved to be an extremely unhappy letter of protest from Paul Weymar, dated June 4, 1955, shortly after he had learned that the book penned by him 15 years earlier was being published, unaltered, in an English edition. His protest, which is a remarkable rejection by an author of his own work, can best be allowed to speak for itself.
News of the English edition, he wrote, had come as ‘an extremely disagreeable surprise’ and his letter went on: ‘In my view a new edition of such books can be justified only when they are placed firmly on the basis of historical truth . . .
‘In Prien’s case, one is duty-bound in my opinion to correct demonstrably false facts – the account of the Scapa Flow mission was “touched up” in 1940 on understandable mi
litary grounds – and also to clarify those other aspects of the war at sea which are given insufficient expression, to say the least, by the juvenile and aggressive style of this book for boys, the hardships and horrors of the U-boat war, which Prien also discovered but was unable to voice at that time.
‘I recall one statement which he made to me in confidence: “When I saw the first burning tanker in front of me and thought of the wretched hundreds of men perishing in this dome of flames, I felt like a murderer before the scene of his crime.” It should be an obligation to include this and similar utterances in a new edition, also from the point of view of Prien’s memory.’
Paul Weymar then made the point that he looked back on his ‘co-operation in a type of war literature, the manner in which they presented Prien in the original version of the book, with heavy feelings of guilt. For through such a one-sided representation of real events, romantic illusions about the nature of war are given support and young people are put into an adventurous mood which can only lead to a monumental hangover. I should not like to lay the same guilt upon my shoulders today for the second time . . .
‘In the meantime, the three copies of the English edition promised in your letter have come to hand. I was, without exaggeration, horrified. On the back of the book, a swastika, and on the wrapper the announcement that more than 750,000 copies of this book have been sold in Germany. No intimation that this figure was achieved entirely in the Nazi time and through suitable political support, and that the book cannot therefore be regarded as a true publishing success.
