The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf

by Bartholomew Gill

  First, a word about who I am, since beginning in 1945 I had to abandon my true identity, again because of the cargo. I arrived here under circumstances that were, at the very least, covert and perhaps even criminal, when viewed in the light of history.

  I was born in the middle of the First World War in 1916, the son of a German maritime trader and an English woman with whose family he had dealings. With his captain’s license, my father was soon conscripted into the German Navy, serving with distinction during the fateful Battle of Jutland. I grew up in Harwich in Suffolk. English was my first language, although I began speaking German at an early age.

  After the war, my father removed us to his own family’s base on Borkum Island where he operated a legitimate import/export business by day, while he smuggled at night. Petrol, liquor, tobacco—any contraband that was profitable to bring into the Weimar Republic via the shallow water along the Friesland coast and the Ems. The fall of Weimar and the beginning of rearmament brought other opportunities, however, and he began trading with South America for raw materials then in short supply—mostly tin, nickel, bauxite, and manganese.

  Since the tradition on both sides of my family was nautical, I learned to sail as a child. During my summer holidays from mainly English schools, I gradually gained mastery over a variety of vessels of ever greater tonnage, until in my seventeenth year in 1933 I became a fully licensed captain. It was something that my father had wanted me to attain.

  My mother’s traditions were different, however, and a place was found for me at Cambridge, where my maternal grandfather had studied. There I read history, and one of the regrets of my life is that I did not finish. Because of a misadventure in my third year at the hands of some thugs whose political beliefs I did not share, I was injured in a brawl. I had to return to Borkum to mend, and the fate that befell my father at the beginning of the First World War nearly became my own.

  But rather than be conscripted into the German Navy, I decided to join the Submarine Service where lay Germany’s only hope for naval supremacy, as it was apparent even then. Because of my father’s honorable record and my having captain’s papers, the height restriction for submarines was overlooked. I joined the DVC (Doenitz Volunteer Corps, as it was called informally) in January 1936.

  You, who will read this, might know the story. During the early years of the war up until February 1943, German submarine technology was equal to any defenses that Allied convoys could mount against us. In that month our submarines sank 44 boats and 21 ships, a total of 142,465 gross registered tons of Allied shipping. But only three months later, we lost 35 U-boats, 1,026 submariners, and we sank a mere 96,000 gross registered tons.

  As early as 1937, naval planners had known that the superiority of the Type VII subs that became the backbone of the fleet would be short-lived. Even then other larger, faster, quieter boats were on the drawing boards. But instead the High Command, which was dominated by Nazis or Nazi toadies, chose to squander Navy funds on a surface fleet that was doomed from the start and proved to be little more than a fatal grand gesture.

  Suddenly in the midst of fog and darkness, when a submarine commander thought it safe to run on the surface, Allied aircraft began to attack with such accuracy that there was barely enough time to dive. Also, convoys seemed to know of our approach, zigging and zagging away while their escort ships attacked us with steadily increasing success. It was as though the sea were made of glass, and they could see our every wallowing move.

  And yet with its usual Nazi bombast the High Command kept sending us out in the old Type VII iron coffins to die. Over 30,000 of us did, which was a casualty rate of 85 percent. Some 5,000 others were lucky to be captured. By 1944 we had been driven out of Europe proper to Bergen, Norway, with only a handful of active boats, little fuel and spare parts, and a dearth of experienced crew. At twenty-eight I was the oldest living active sub captain, while the flotilla commander was an ancient thirty.

  On 8 May 1945 (the day of Formal Surrender) I returned to Bergen after a run of six weeks, during which I had spent most of the time hiding in the coves and holes of the continental shelf off Ireland and Scotland. I ventured out to attack only twice and was nearly sunk both times. I remember the day of return in every particular, since it is a day that has shaped the rest of my life. It is about this day that I write.

  It began when we passed through the sub nets and surfaced in the fjord to a leaden spring sky. The bridge of my Type VII-C submarine was so beaten that it was a length of twisted, torn steel that was scarcely afloat. From there I saw a strange sight drifting through the icy water of the fjord a few hundred meters off our bow.

  It was a Walter boat, the most advanced of the new submarines that had been promised years earlier but had never been delivered. “Miracles of German technology,” they had been called, that “would win the Battle of the Atlantic.” As I stated earlier, they had known this eight years earlier.

  Maybe at that time boats like the Walter might have mattered, had we been given the ninety we had been promised. Scanning my crew, I doubted how effective any number of new boats could now be.

  The ragtag assembly of children (I can only call them) were swimming in the long gray leather jackets that had been made for submariners, for men, not the boys before me. They had thin chests, bony arms, and even after six weeks at sea few had beards. For the first time, a boat under my command had gone out without sinking a single enemy ship. The truth was, I had been lucky to get them back alive.

  I can remember feeling hot and bitter anger. My mate had only just handed me the morning radio communiqué from Berlin to all forces in the Atlantic Command. “Be strong,” it said. “Do not falter! The foe, too, is weary.” It was more Nazi bombast and smacked of a passage cribbed from the Edda and “heroic” death. Not only did they not care if we died, they actually wanted us to die to fulfill the necrophilic dimensions of their horrid myth.

  Here was the apparition of a new submarine with its anti-sonar rubber skin and complex radars protruding from its conning tower, arriving among all the shattered hulks of our once proud submarine fleet now at the end of The End, like a macabre joke. See? (Berlin was saying.) We delivered our miracle of German technology, what could have made you invincible. To do what with, now? Well understanding their humor, I had an idea.

  Let me write here for the record, I hated Nazis; in fact, I had fought them since my days at Cambridge. There I had been singled out by the handful of Nazi sympathizers because I was German, I am large, and I did not agree with them on any issue, including (now in 1945) the destruction of Germany.

  “If you hate them so much,” my then wife, Ilsa, once asked, “why do you fight for them?”

  “It’s rather simple,” I had replied. “I am a German man, I am also a German sailor, and my country is at war. My father served in the German Navy and his father before him.”

  By 1945, however, Ilsa too was dead, killed in a bombing raid on Kiel where she had been living with her parents while I was in the subs.

  At any rate, before my battered boat reached the sub pens that day in Bergen, Conrad Geis, who was my chief engineer and the only other experienced man in my crew, appeared beside me with a second message. It was from the flotilla commander, congratulating me since, as the most senior submarine captain, I would now be given the Walter boat. Some hours later, Geis and I went to inspect the new boat.

  She was a fair-sized craft of about 200 feet and, I guessed, 1,200 tons. What I liked about her immediately were her fair, whale-soft lines and her two batteries of 30 mm antiaircraft guns that were fitted sleekly, fore and aft, into the top of the conning tower to reduce drag. I loathed some of the other new designs that lacked a deck gun, for once forced to the surface for any reason, you were defenseless.

  Instead of a submariner to greet us, however, a man in a soft hat and civilian clothes met us on the foredeck, “Commodore Dorfmann,” he called out. “But of course, who else could you be? I was told to find the biggest man in Bergen wi
th a half-pint sidekick.”

  Geis only appeared so in contrast; actually he was of average height for submariners—a dark wiry man whom I considered a technical genius worth two men twice his size. There was nothing he could not fix or fabricate.

  “Who the hell is he?” I asked.

  “Probably some stuffed shirt from the Todt Organization.”

  It was the contractor that had built most of the subs for the Third Reich since 1933.

  “You take care of him, I’ll look round at what they brought us.”

  “And you are?” I stepped up on the rounded, rubber-sheathed foredeck. With the other arm I swept Geis past the man.

  “Axel Schmelling, Todt service director. I’d like to give you a tour of your new vessel, Commodore.”

  It was the second time that the man had overstated my rank, which was merely Kapitän and a giant step from Commodorezursee. But he quickly launched into his speech, calling the Walter boat a true submarine—and not just another submarine-type boat—that could remain submerged for an entire tour of duty, yet maintain speeds of most surface vessels.

  As he spoke I turned my back to him and climbed the ladder of the conning tower. Apart from brief furloughs, I had lived on submarines and survived the experience for nine years, and I could see at a glance what the boat contained. Also I was in no mood to suffer a fool who had spent the war constructing a weapon, no matter how superior, that had arrived too late. Not when so many of my comrades had gone to the bottom.

  The interior of the tower stank of fresh welding scars, new paint, and all the artificial rubber of gaskets and seals. When my eyes had accustomed themselves to the shadows, I discovered that the Walter had been built in two tiers, the lower given over to a massive battery.

  “On one charging she can produce a submerged speed of five knots for four days or sixteen knots for an hour,” Schmelling said over my shoulder. “With snorkeling she will cruise at twenty-four knots submerged, which is faster than most Allied antisubmarine craft.”

  He who had only ever to outrun a sub-chaser on a drawing board.

  “In that mode, the boat need never surface. As well, the engines are whisper-quiet turbines that run on peroxide, which eliminates the problem the Fatherland has of obtaining petrol-based fuels.”

  The Fatherland? I decided Schmelling must be a Nazi, which was how he, and people like him, had kept themselves out of the war. Nazis fought best with their mouths. He proved it. As I climbed to the second tier, he went on about the boat’s radars and its capability of sensing when it was being tracked by enemy radar.

  “And finally there is the new ‘Lut’ torpedo that’s impossible to defeat.”

  Or, at least, there should have been Luts.

  Geis appeared in an open forward bulkhead and signaled me to follow him. The torpedo storage bay was empty. Cranking the wheel of the air lock of a torpedo tube, he bade me look in. Nothing. And another. Still nothing.

  “No eels.”

  When I turned back to Schmelling, there was another man, who was dressed like a soldier, behind him.

  “Where are the Luts?”

  “They’ll be here shortly.”

  “You mean—you ran from Bremen to Bergen defenseless?”

  “Without incident. There’s nothing out there that can track or catch this boat. And we figured we’d better get it out now.”

  While we can, was implied.

  Geis and I looked at each other; things must be worse at home even than was reported.

  “That’s fine if you’re in a race,” I said. “But this is war. How do you expect me even to defend myself, much less hunt and defeat the enemy?”

  “That’ll be all, Schmelling. I’ll take over now.”

  Without another word, Schmelling left, and the other man stood there, as though waiting for us to recognize him and make the first move. His uniform, however, was a distraction; also it had been ten years since I’d last seen him. I felt older than time.

  He was wearing a long gray raincoat that was open, and the flying blouse and baggy jump trousers of a paratrooper. The color, however, was not the dark blue of the Luftwaffe, but rather the gun-metal gray of the army. With a difference—on the officer’s cap was the skull and crossbones of the SS along with his rank badge, which was Standartenführer, the German equivalent of colonel. His jump boots were polished to a mirror sheen.

  “Don’t you recognize me, Klimt?”

  Only then, when he said my name, did I; it was Angus Helmut Rehm, a Scottish national but also a Nazi zealot who shared with me a German patrimony and who had been in my college at Cambridge. Enraged that I had rejected everything about National Socialism and Nazism, and had once cruelly branded him “Der Scots’ Rump Führer” during a public debate (a name that was quickly adumbrated to a derisive “Dour Rump” and became Rehm’s unshakable monicker), he and three others equipped with cudgels had attacked me on a Cambridge street. It was those injuries that kept me from finishing my degree.

  “Don’t tell me I’ve changed that much.”

  In fact, he had not; it was as though he had not aged a day.

  “You haven’t.”

  It was a lie. My knees were shot; I now had a permanent stoop. Little sleep, poor food, bad water, and foul air had taken a toll.

  “You only look more…mature. I know I certainly am. Much has happened to mellow us. I hope you’re willing to let bygones be bygones, I know I am. And I’m here to apologize.”

  Out came his hand, which—after a moment or two of reflection—I took. We had both been rash and callow youths whose beliefs were yet to be tempered by experience. War, of course, is the great forge; at that moment in Bergen I think I believed in nothing but survival.

  And there was something wrong with his hand. I looked down.

  “A thousand pardons.” Rehm raised it. All the fingers of his right hand had been cut off down to the second knuckle. The grafted skin on the stumps was a bright pink color.

  “Stalingrad. Or, at least, retreating from Stalingrad. My battalion got overrun and captured. For a time.”

  He waited, the clear blue eyes and handsome face assessing if we understood that he was a fighting Nazi soldier, an officer of the Waffen SS, and not just another Nazi. Also he wanted to make sure that we had noticed the medals that were visible on his chest, now that the raincoat had opened more completely.

  I glanced at Geis who looked away. Among us submariners it was bad form to speak of our victories, especially when we were losing the war.

  “I see you have Lieutenant Geis with you.”

  Rehm was a short, strongly built man; the blond hair showing below his cap was clipped short.

  “I’ve heard a great deal of good about you too, Lieutenant. I’m sure both of you are wondering what brought me. Let me put your minds at ease—I’m here to deliver you these.”

  From his pocket he pulled out an envelope and handed it to me.

  “Along with the new ‘Lut’ torpedoes. Most are already here in Bergen. The last four are being flown in perhaps sometime today. We’ve had some problem with…logistics, let us say. Things are rather problematical these days.”

  Again Geis and I traded glances. As far as either of us knew, nothing had been flown in or out of Bergen for months now, because of the lack of air transport planes and the constant presence of Allied fighters. Also conventional torpedoes weighed three thousand pounds apiece, and the “Lut” was reported to be heavier still. And finally, since when was the SS in charge of arming submarines?

  “Everything will be in order by tomorrow, you’ll see. In the meantime, I was hoping to have a word with you, Commodore. And the lieutenant too, of course. Could there be some place close by we might get a good meal and a few drinks? My treat of course. You might open up that envelope, Klimt. I know you’ll like what’s inside.”

  In it were the badges of a Commodorezursee, along with a letter promoting me to that rank.

  McGarr glanced up from the pages to check on Maddie and
the other children who were now playing in the gentle waves. It was a peaceful scene to be sure, compared to what he was reading.

  Certainly Ireland had experienced her troubles, to say nothing of the War of Independence and eight hundred years of British domination. But because of the isolationist and anti-British policies of Eamon De Valera, the regnant politician of the time, twenty-six counties of the country had the good fortune to avoid the cataclysm that had so decimated most of the rest of the continent.

  She did not go unscathed, however. Attempting to punish Ireland, Britain kept her in economic thrall after the war until she joined the Common Market in 1973 and was able to trade directly and freely with the Continent. And accept twenty billion in “backhanders,” according to Fergal O’Grady. McGarr glanced up at Croaghmore, before returning to Clem Ford’s—was it?—confession.

  Bergen during the war was not much more than a large Nordic fishing village of wharves, canneries, and smokehouses grouped round the harbor with ranks of timber-built houses stacked up on the surrounding hills. Even in May of the year there was snow on the mountains and bits of ice in the fjord.

  I remember noting how many SS were about the area that fateful day. As few as six weeks earlier, an SS officer had been a rarity; now Rehm’s maimed hand kept flapping up and down as we passed one after another group of storm troopers who seemed to be gathered at key streets and intersections.

  I took Rehm to one of the grog shops that had sprung up round the harbor in Bergen with the arrival of the Atlantic Command. In Norway, making a profit by serving liquor to the enemy was rather less dishonorable than in other occupied countries. Most Norwegians considered drinking bad for everything, including the health; thus plying us with alcohol was in a small way a subversive act.

  But no sooner were we through the doorway than I was surrounded by other submariners who rose from their tables to welcome me, since it was seldom now that a boat actually came back.

  “Wolf!”

  It was my nickname.

  “You’re back! How many did you get?”