It would be an easy order to follow. All he had to do was go hard-a-port, establish an opposite heading of 275, and ring up one engine slow ahead. That would save him from the scolding that would certainly come if he missed finding the convoy. But Hardegen had a hunch that if the admiral were in his place he would follow the same bold course. It was both a hunch and a hope. He bent over the chart and worried himself through the computations again. Midnight (CET) passed. Then, shortly before 0400 hours the voice pipe from the bridge barked: “Commander to the bridge! Shadows—starboard on the beam!” Hardegen went up like a shot and looked through the glasses. There they were! He counted four large two-funnel steamers and a screen of what looked like three destroyers. “Auf Gefechtsstationen!” (“Battle stations!”)
Hardegen’s sense of relief was matched only by the adrenaline that now pumped through his system. He had to move fast. Such was the convoy’s speed—he estimated fourteen to fifteen knots—he had no chance to hit the first two steamers in line. He went for the third. It was a huge shadow, perhaps 14,000 CRT, zigzagging. Somehow 123 made it inside the escorts’ protective envelope without anyone sighting their distinctive white-foaming bow and long stern casing. One destroyer sweeping perpendicularly to the convoy’s course stood on their starboard side as they closed. Any moment it should see them. Hell was going to break loose. The watch on that quadrant yelled: “Destroyer on starboard lies course zero degrees right at us!” No more stalking—they had to launch now! Hardegen leaned forward to Schneider’s ear:
Feuererlaubnis!
Schneider pressed the launch button—Los!, Los!, Los!—letting loose a simultaneous spread of three eels, two of which he hoped would strike the target, since they were shooting at a distance, 1,500 meters, far greater than Hardegen would have preferred. Normally, like Kretschmer, Hardegen held to the doctrine, “one ship, one torpedo,” but this was a must-sink situation and the Fächerschuss, or fan shot, seemed justified. Schneider had calculated target speed at fifteen knots, angle on the bow eighty degrees, time to target eighty-one seconds.24 While the eels ran Hardegen headed away from the destroyer at top speed and it was not possible to get off a launch from a stern tube at the fourth steamer in line as he had planned. He could only seek the darkness abeam for cover and wait for some sign from the eels. Schneider counted the seconds … fifteen … ten … five….
Officer of the Watch Lieutenant John Binfield, RNR, paced the bridge of the two-funnel, four steam turbine, twin screw HMS Aurania. Formerly a passenger vessel of Cunard White Star, Ltd., launched in 1924, the ship was now outfitted as an armed merchant cruiser (AMC) of the Royal Navy. En route home to the Clyde in Scotland from Halifax she had joined up with convoy SL 89 as one of five AMC escorts in the screen of the twenty-ship formation that steamed in columns five cables apart. Binfield had the ship on zigzag pattern 10, mean course 062 degrees, speed 13.5 knots. He had just paused in his pacing to check time and position—0227 Greenwich Mean Time, 50-45.5N, 18-41W—and to order the heading altered to 040 for the port leg of zigzag when a dull explosion on the port side by Number 3 Hold rocked him off his feet. Pulling himself upright he pressed the alarm rattlers for action stations, stopped the engines, put the wheel hard-a-port toward the U-boat according to standing instructions, sounded six short blasts, and switched on a red light at the yardarm to signal “torpedoed.” Ship’s Captain Ivan Walter Whitehorn, RN, reached the bridge thirty seconds later and found that the ship had taken a twenty-five-degrees list to port. He ordered off the red light, put the engines to Slow Ahead and the wheel hard-a-starboard to get distance from the U-boat. As a precaution he ordered ship’s company to “Turn Out All Boats.” Shortly afterward, finding that the ship had righted to fifteen degrees, he put on revolutions for eight knots and resumed zigzag. In the meantime someone who was not an officer passed the orders, “Clear Everybody from Down Below” and “Abandon Ship.” The result of this confusion was that Gunner Charles Stewart ordered P.2 lifeboat lowered. With him in the boat were Leading Seamen Bertie E. Shaw and George R. Brown and Able Seamen Cornelius O’Keefe, Abed Graves, and Victor A. Pancott. Someone slipped the gripes, the boat swung out owing to Aurania’s list, and Brown went overboard. When the boat hit the water at ship’s speed of five knots or better, it began to capsize and Stewart, O’Keefe, Graves, and Pancott were thrown overboard. Shaw was last seen still in the boat as it was carried astern nearly full of water. Destroyer HMS Croome rescued Stewart, O’Keefe, and Graves. Brown, Shaw, and Pancott were not seen again.25
From 123 Hardegen and the bridge watch surveyed the scene. Dull red flames glowed against the wounded hull, which listed to port and appeared to go down by the bow. Through their glasses they could see the crew lowering lifeboats. From the steamer’s bridge red lights flashed Morse signals to a destroyer aft, and it hove to alongside to assist. The remainder of the convoy, alerted by the attack, changed course from 062 to 100 degrees, and though Hardegen tried to run beside them and reloaded, their speed and head start made it impossible to catch up. After an hour and a half’s chase, it was daybreak and 123 was getting easy to spot. It was time to break off. When an escort turned back toward his position, Hardegen withdrew and sent a convoy position report to BdU. Perhaps another boat farther north would have a shot. Now he returned to the scene of attack to give his victim a Fangschuss—a coup de grace—if that was necessary. All he found there was a large oil slick, miscellaneous flotsam, and a half-foundered lifeboat. But inside the lifeboat was a survivor. As 123 approached, the sailor, on his knees in the boat, raised his hands in supplication. The crew took him on board and on interrogation he told them that his name was Bertie Shaw, that the ship they sank was HMS Aurania, 13,984 GRT, an armed merchant cruiser, that she had taken one hit in the forecastle and another just in front of the engine room, that the destroyer that stopped to assist had rescued most of the 250-man crew, and that some three-quarters of an hour after being torpedoed the ship blew apart from an internal explosion and sank from view bow first with her propellers in the air. Eins Zwei Drei’s bridge at some distance had seen a tall flame lick the sky at the attack site, and Hardegen wondered if another U-boat nearby had delivered a coup de grace. He signaled news of the sinking to BdU, and Dönitz replied with a “Bravo!” On board the principal emotion was that of vindication.
It was time to get on with their original mission. Hardegen put the boat back on a 280 heading and turned his interest to the horizon where the bridge sighted a Sunderland. They alternately dived and surfaced over most of that afternoon as Sunderlands came and went. Eins Zwei Drei was not far distant from the coast of England, which was one reason for the presence of the “tired bees.” After a brief submergence around dusk that evening, they discovered another reason. Surfacing on a medium sea with a hazy horizon, they found themselves running alongside (but in the opposite direction) a convoy on the identical course as the one they had just attacked. Perhaps, Hardegen thought, this was a trailing element of the same convoy. In any event, it was a stunning sight. With the naked eye he could count twenty large steamers and three destroyers. Ten minutes more, and he would have surfaced directly in the middle of their columns! Now to do his duty—stay above and report. In Dönitz’s system the first boat to sight a convoy did not attack but signaled position, course, and speed to BdU and continued to report while other boats, vectored to the position, undertook the attack. Proceeding ahead at full surface speed, Hardegen sent off the F.T. and awaited confirmation of the signal’s receipt. A destroyer worried him. It came right at the boat. He headed away knowing that the destroyer would have to return to the convoy. But now a Sunderland came out of the haze. Where was confirmation from BdU? The Sunderland would be on them in seconds. The plane was at 3,000-meters’ range and low to the water. Finally the voice pipe from the radio room below sang out: “F.T. acknowledged!” “ALARM!” Hardegen yelled. And down they went just as the Sunderland, having spotted them easily, banked in for the kill. They were just under the surface when the bombs came, o
ne over the foredeck, one over the bridge. They shook the boat badly and did some damage, but none of it was serious. The crew got a laugh out of the experience when, as the bombs exploded, their English prisoner moaned, “No good, no good.” He need not have worried. Their airborne tormentors finally went away and, several hours later when they surfaced, they found an empty sea and sky. They had lost the convoy but in the darkness astern had heard two detonations. That meant that someone had received their report through BdU and had done something about it. (U-82 commanded by Kptlt. Siegfried Rollmann sank two ships from that convoy, SL 89, British freighters Serbino, 4,099 GRT, and Treverbyn, 5,218 GRT, at 2203 and 2231 hours respectively, on 21 October, southwest of Ireland.26)
Their prisoner was Bertie Edward Shaw, forty-eight years old, home address 60 Wyndham Road, Kingston-on-Thames, England. His rank was Leading Seaman, pensioner rating, Naval Reserve. Once the crew got him into dry clothes and gave him some cognac he told them more about his ship and about himself, although his accent and use of slang made it very difficult to understand him. Aurania had been well armed, he said, with six 15.2-centimeter guns and two Lewis antiaircraft weapons on the stern. The captain was named Whitehorn. Shaw did not know his first name. The crew were mostly naval reservists. Shaw was the oldest petty officer on board. He had joined the Navy as a young man to avoid a prison term resulting from a fight. Shortly before the war he was discharged and spent a number of peaceful years with his family working as a postman. When war came he was drafted back into the Navy and served all his time on Aurania. This was to have been his last voyage: He was due to be relieved of sea duty and assigned to a nice soft job with the Coastal Forces. Unfortunately for him, while he was asleep in his bunk, this U-boat interrupted his service record. When the torpedoes hit, Shaw himself sounded the signal to abandon ship. As he helped lower R2 lifeboat, it became stuck and he went down by ladder to undo the ropes. While he stood in the boat it slipped the ropes and fell into the sea, where it nearly capsized because Aurania was still making about five knots. Carried astern, his boat half full of water, Shaw shouted for help but no one heard him. The wind and swells quickly separated him from his ship. Several times the rescue destroyer passed close by his boat but failed to hear his cries. After three-quarters of an hour, he said, he observed a mighty internal explosion on Aurania— which was already very low in the water—and after that the steamer passed from view. There was no question about the sinking.27
After a long voyage westward, 123 took up her assigned station as part of a patrol line called Gruppe Schlagetot (Group Hacker) south of Greenland. Shortly after reaching the rest of the pack, she received an FT from BdU detaching her from the rake and posting her independently to intercept ships emerging from the Strait of Belle Isle between Newfoundland and Labrador. But the boat found no hunting at all in the thick fog of the strait, leaving Hardegen frustrated and provoked, although he took some satisfaction in hearing battle sounds from other, luckier boats through the vaporous whiteout to the east.28 Later he was reassigned to the southern coast of Greenland off Cape Farewell. The Greenland coast was a spectacular sight for the crewmen, especially for those who had never seen an alpine mountain range. Even the engine room detail was invited up to see it. Romantic and beautiful, the tall snow-covered mountains and glaciers fell sharply to the sea. Now and then the bridge sighted massive blue-white icebergs floating south with the current. It was sufficiently cold that the boat began to take on its own coat of ice, and when it got so thick that it threatened emergency readiness, or when, as happened once, the weight of the ice broke one of the antennas, Hardegen had to submerge the boat in order to melt off the crust.
Twice, south of Greenland, 123 encountered other U-boats and exchanged light-signal greetings with them—cheery and all-too-brief moments that lifted the boat’s loneliness far from home. Once they were badly depth-charged by the British and had to dive so deep to avoid the Wabos that they feared the surrounding water pressure would crush them like an eggshell. But the fierce detonations finally ceased and just before their batteries were exhausted they made it to the surface safely. The most relieved man on board was their prisoner, to whom the underwater bombardment was a new and fearsome naval experience. On signal from BdU they then began the long return home, surfaced all the way, with no further incidents, which was a disappointment, for they had hoped to chance upon a convoy or a straggler. Plenty of eels were left. Though they crossed all the known steamer lanes, they failed to see a mast top. It was as though all the merchant ships had been vacuumed from the sea. For U-boatmen it was “sour-pickle time.” They did find some pleasure in observing their prisoner, to whom the crew had become quite attached although they could hardly understand a word he said. “Bernhard” they called him. He gladly performed seamen’s work on board and, to the delight of the cooks, freely undertook the jobs of dishwasher and potato peeler. Hardegen speculated that on future missions the cooks would look back longingly to “Bernhard” and to the free time he afforded them. The Tommy missed his cigarettes and chewing tobacco. Since the boat’s tiny canteen carried some of the former, from time to time Hardegen let him go on top to smoke. “Bernhard” found the German brands just barely tolerable. The Englishman was not exactly notable for his habits of personal hygiene. When one of the crew offered him a toothbrush he refused it, saying that he had only two teeth in his mouth. By the time 123 reached her Atlantic base, “Bernhard” had a full white beard. He seemed to have thought that when they reached the English Channel his captors would free him, but as 123 moved up the Scorff Estuary toward the pontoon Isere, he recognized an old French warship at anchor and knew then that he would not see England again during the war. Hardegen thought he saw resignation on his face, as though “Bernhard” was reciting to himself the old German soldier’s maxim: Besser ein paar Jahre gefangen als das ganze Leben tot— “Better a prisoner for a few years than to spend one’s whole life dead.” It was a moving moment when he took his leave of the crew members. Each of them wondered if he would see Bertie Shaw again.
Only one success pennant flew from the extended Spargel (asparagus), as U-boatmen called the periscope. During this last long patrol, 123 had sunk only one ship. But it was a warship, and thus the pennant was red. One red pennant was worth four or five whites: Hardegen was content.
Envoi
It would have come as a great shock to Hardegen had he been present at a board of inquiry held three weeks later, on 10-11 November in the wardroom of HMS Cyclops, docked in the Clyde Estuary near Glasgow, Scotland, and seen through the portholes HMS Aurania moored smartly alongside. The board, which had been convoked to investigate the torpedo hit on Aurania and the loss of three ratings, listened to Captain Whitehorn’s explanation of how he had stabilized the ship on an even keel about fifteen feet down by the bows, held her at that with pumps, and in calm weather, escorted by HMS Totlund, proceeded without further incident to the Clyde, where Aurania safely made port on the afternoon of 23 October.
“Bernhard” had proved his mettle in the cook’s gallery; as an observer and reporter his credentials were less impressive.
That Aurania, at nearly 14,000 GRT the largest of the twenty-nine ships that Reinhard Hardegen would torpedo as a U-boat commander, did not in fact sink he would not learn until January 1987, when he was shown the minutes of the board of inquiry conducted on Cyclops.
After repair to her damaged hull, Aurania sailed again as an escort of convoy until war’s end, when she was decommissioned and scrapped.29
In 1962, at his father’s request, Hardegen’s eldest son Klaus-Reinhard visited Bertie Shaw’s home in Kingston-on-Thames, outside London, to pay his father’s respects. Mrs. Shaw stated that Bertie was dead and said that she would not speak further with Klaus-Reinhard “because Bertie [had] had a very hard time in POW camp.”
Although Hardegen would never see the warship HMS Cyclops, he would very soon encounter a British freighter of the same name. It would be the same SS Cyclops that Admiral Dönitz t
hought he personally had sunk as a U-boat commander in 1918 and for which he received the Knight’s Cross of the order of the House of Hohenzollern.
In early December, Hardegen and his wife, Barbara, went on leave to Italy. As he rode the Milan-Turin train over the sun-drenched Po Plain it was difficult for him to realize that just weeks before he and his crew had been dodging icebergs in the grim cold of a near arctic world. Now he was caught up in the surrealistic experience of a land-bound train clacking rhythmically along iron lanes without roll, pitch, yaw, or navigational error, from one warm city to another. Soon the mulberry and rice fields were behind him, and the steam locomotive wheezed and braked into the Turin station. Here, as in Milan, he was expected by BdU to give an inspirational lecture on the U-boat war to German locals. His was a working leave, though the speaking chores were really not so much work as fun. Hardegen enjoyed the notice and he enjoyed the talking. A welcoming delegation from the German population of Turin rushed forward as he and his wife stepped down to the platform, he with his tall, thin, erect frame; angular, even gaunt, face and penetrating blue eyes; smartly dressed in his blue naval uniform with U-boat and Air Force badges on the left breast and the gold sleeve rings of lieutenant commander rank on his jacket sleeves.
“Well, what do you think of it?” one of the delegation asked him excitedly. Hardegen answered, “Italy is wonderful.” “No,” his wel-comers explained. “We mean the speech—Japan—Hawaii—the Führer—Roosevelt—.” Hardegen had heard nothing. As he listened he was able to put together the disjointed pieces: Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, and the Führer had declared war on the United States! Finally the frustrations of U-boat commanders unable to shoot at U.S. targets had been removed. And what an opportunity, he thought, especially for someone like himself who commanded a long-distance boat, an IXB. With luck he could be among the first to voyage to the United States. If only he had a map, a globe, anything! He could hardly wait to measure the distance from Lorient to New York, Cape Hat-teras, and Florida. He had visited New York City several years before when in training aboard the cruiser Karlsruhe. Unbelievable! At the newsstand in the station he purchased Italian newspapers, and his German hosts translated for him the accounts of the attack on Pearl Harbor, of the Japanese sinking of the British battleship Prince of Wales and battlecruiser Repulse, and of Hitler’s declaration-of-war speech to the Reichstag. As he walked out of the station to a waiting car, now very keen about the talk he would give that night, Hardegen took his wife Barbara by the arm, smiled, and said, “Du, auf der nächsten Fahrt besuche ich Roosevelt!”—“You know, dear, on my next patrol I’ll visit Roosevelt!”30
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