Wreckers Must Breathe

by Hammond Innes

  Nobody seemed to think of going to the assistance of the petty officer, so I went over to where he lay crumpled up against the side of the dock in a pool of water. His clothes were already wet through. I felt his heart, fearful that Logan might have killed him. But it was beating faintly and there seemed nothing the matter with him except for the punch on the jaw he had received. In falling against the side of the dock his head seemed to have been protected by his upflung arm.

  I made him as comfortable as I could, and by that time the guard had returned with the doctor. The electric arc lights glinted on his pince-nez as he climbed down the steel ladder into the dock.

  His examination of the man was brief. ‘He’s all right,’ he said in German, and ordered two men to take him to his bunk. As the petty officer was hauled up to the top of the dock, the doctor turned to me. ‘Vat ’appened?’ he demanded. I told him. He nodded. ‘Your friend vill be in troble,’ he said.

  A sudden hush fell over the men on the dockside. I looked up. The Gestapo man—Fulke—had arrived. Like shadows the men seemed to melt away. He descended to the bottom of the dock. ‘I hear that man—’ he indicated Logan—‘has knocked down an officer of the guard. Is that right?’ He spoke in German, and there was a kind of eagerness in his eyes that it was impossible to mistake. The man was a sadist.

  ‘That is true,’ the doctor replied. ‘But he did it because——’

  ‘The reason does not interest me,’ snapped Fulke. He turned to the guard. ‘Take that man to the guard-room. Strap him to the triangle. I’ll teach prisoners to knock down officers of the Fuehrer’s navy. Get Lodermann. He is to use the steel-cored whip. I will be along in a few minutes. And take this man with you.’ He nodded in my direction. ‘It will doubtless be instructive for him to see how we maintain discipline.’

  The guard saluted and turned away, at the same time indicating that I was to follow him. They took Big Logan from his work and marched him along the dock gallery and up the ramp to the guard-room. I went with them, a horrible empty sickness in the pit of my stomach. Behind me, as I left the dock, I heard the doctor saying, ‘You’re not going to have that man flogged with a steel-cored whip, surely? He’s not well, mentally? Anyway, his action was not unjustified.’ There followed a sharp altercation between the two, but I was by then too far away to hear what was said. In that moment I was thankful to know that there was one man in the place with some human understanding.

  But I knew it was useless to expect that he would be able to prevent the flogging. The Gestapo’s commands were law, and I was convinced that this man Fulke wanted to see Logan flogged. I had heard tales from refugees of floggings in concentration camps with this same steel-cored whip. It cut a man’s back to ribbons and he seldom survived the full number of strokes to which he was sentenced. Something seemed to cry out with agony inside me. As I watched them strip Big Logan and tie him to the heavy iron triangle in the guard-room, I think I went through almost as much mental agony as Logan would go through physical agony later. I felt entirely responsible for what had happened, and it was pitiful to see Logan’s docility. He did not seem to understand what was happening. Stripped, his terrific physique was even more evident. I felt that if he cared to let himself go, he could have killed every member of the guard with his bare hands, and I longed to call out to him to do so. But what was the use?

  A big powerful seaman had taken the steel-cored whip from an oblong box. He had removed his coat and rolled up his sleeves. The bristles on the back of his thick neck gleamed in the electric light. He adjusted the position of the triangle so that the whip, which was short and knotted, would not catch the walls. The guard had been augmented to six men. The little Gestapo man whom we had first met had taken control. There was a deathly stillness in the room as the man with the whip made his dispositions. The clock on the wall ticked monotonously on as we waited for Fulke.

  At length he arrived. ‘Close the door!’ he ordered. Then he crossed the room and took up a position on the other side of the triangle. His narrow face shone with sweat and his eyes had a glassy stare. ‘Why did you strike an officer of the guard?’ he asked in English.

  Logan made no reply. It was as though he had not heard.

  Fulke’s hand shot out and he slapped Logan across the face. He did it with the back of his hand, so that a gold ring set with diamonds which he wore on his right hand scored Logan’s cheek. ‘Answer me, you dog!’ he shouted.

  Logan’s face remained completely vacant.

  ‘Geben Sie ihm eins mit der Peitsche, das wird ihn aufwecken,’ he ordered.

  The seaman measured his distance. Involuntarily I closed my eyes. The steel-cored thongs sang through the air and cracked down with a thud. Three red lines immediately showed on Logan’s brown back. They broadened and merged together into trickles of blood that ran down his hairy buttocks.

  ‘Now will you answer me? Why did you hit the officer of the guard?’

  Still Logan made no reply. In sickening anticipation I waited for the order to give the next stroke. But at that moment the door of the guard-room opened and the commodore came in, accompanied by the doctor.

  ‘Who gave the order for this man to be flogged?’ demanded the commodore. There was an ominous ring in his voice that no one could mistake. A sudden feeling of excitement gripped me.

  ‘I did,’ replied Fulke, stepping forward to meet the other. ‘Do you challenge it?’ There was a veiled sneer in the way he put the question. He seemed very sure of his ground.

  The commodore’s only answer was to order the guard to release Logan from the triangle. Fulke advanced a step. For a moment I thought he was going to hit the commodore. A vein on his temple was throbbing violently. ‘He has struck the officer of his guard,’ he said. ‘He is to be flogged. Order and discipline are to be preserved in this base. Heil Hitler!’ He raised his right hand.

  The commodore seemed quite unmoved by this display. He did not answer the Nazi salute. ‘I am in command here.’ He spoke quietly but firmly. Then to the guard, ‘Take that man down.’

  ‘My instructions are that this man be flogged,’ Fulke almost shrieked.

  The commodore ignored him. ‘Take that man down,’ he thundered, as the guard hesitated. At that the men jumped to it. In an instant Logan had been released from the triangle.

  ‘You exceed yourself, Herr Commodore.’ Fulke was almost beside himself with rage. ‘That man is to be flogged. If you persist in your attitude my next report will be most unfavourable. You know what that means?’

  The commodore turned and faced Fulke. He was completely unruffled. ‘You forget, Herr Fulke—we are now at war,’ he said. ‘For three months you have bounced around this base, over-riding my orders, undermining the morale of my men by your schoolboy ideas of discipline. This is the submarine service, not a Jewish concentration camp. For three months I have borne with you because you had the power to hinder my work. Now we are at war. We have work to do—men’s work. No reports, except my own, will leave this base.’

  ‘You will regret your attitude, Herr Commodore,’ snarled Fulke.

  ‘I think not.’

  ‘I’ll have you removed from your post. I’ll have you discharged from the service. You will be sent to a concentration camp. I will see to it that——’

  ‘You will not have the opportunity. In any case, Herr Fulke, you must realize that men with long experience in the services are indispensable in wartime. On the other hand, the Gestapo is not indispensable. For instance, I cannot think of one useful thing that you can do. Doubtless we can teach you to cook. You will report on board U 24 which leaves for the Canary Islands tomorrow. You will replace their cook, who is ill.’

  Fulke’s hand went to his revolver. The commodore did not hesitate. His fist shot out and laid the Gestapo agent out with a lovely right to the jaw. I do not know how old the commodore was—at least fifty I should have said—but there was plenty of force behind that punch. His hand was raw after it, where the skin had split at the knuckles.
‘Guard! Arrest that man!’ he ordered. The two nearest men jumped forward. He turned to the other Gestapo agent. ‘You are under arrest, Herr Strasser. Disarm him!’

  When both men were disarmed, he turned to his orderly. ‘Fetch Commander Brisek here! You’ll find him in the mess.’

  The orderly disappeared. The commodore rubbed his knuckles gently. There was the beginning of a smile on his ruddy face. ‘I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed myself so much,’ I heard him whisper to the doctor. Aloud he said to the doctor, ‘You’ll look after the prisoner?’ He indicated Logan. ‘Have them both transferred to quarters on the other side of this gallery.’ He stroked his chin gently, and there was a twinkle in his eye. ‘I think we might put Fulke and his friends in the wet cells that he insisted on having constructed. I wonder how they’ll take to the U-boat service—do you think they’ll be frightened?’

  ‘I have an idea they will,’ replied the doctor with no attempt to conceal his smile. ‘What I know of psychology prompts me to the view that Fulke at any rate will be very frightened.’

  The commodore nodded. ‘I will give Varndt instructions to stand no nonsense.’

  The door swung open and a naval officer entered, followed by the orderly.

  ‘Ah, Heinrich, I have a little commission for you which I think you will enjoy. I have placed these men’—he indicated the two Gestapo agents—‘under protective arrest. Take a guard and arrest the other two.’

  ‘Very good, Herr Commodore.’ Commander Brisek marched out with three men of the guard.

  The commodore turned and went out of the room, followed by his orderly. The doctor went over to Logan and took him by the arm. As he led him towards the door, he nodded to me. I followed him. He took us to a small but comfortable little cell on the other side of the gallery, almost directly opposite the door of the guard-room. He sent a man for his bag and in a very short while he was easing the pain of the cuts on Logan’s back. Almost immediately afterwards our evening meal was brought to us. It was six o’clock.

  When the doctor had finished and had left us, I said to Logan, ‘Well, thank God for that! I didn’t think it would end as comfortably as this. How are you feeling?’

  ‘My back is bloody painful,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But you’re lucky to get away with nothing worse.’ I felt this was ungracious, so I said, ‘Many thanks for doing what you did. I owe it to you that my ribs are still intact. But it was a dangerous thing to do.’

  ‘Ar,’ he said, ‘but it was a real pleasure.’

  I looked at him closely. His eyes were shut and he was grinning happily. There was something very Irish and a little unbalanced about him. I said, ‘Well, for God’s sake leave me to get out of my own scrapes. If you knock any more officers out you’ll be for it.’

  ‘Is that why they were going to whip me?’

  ‘Of course. What did you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I thought it might be their idea of fun.’ He turned over so that he was facing the wall. ‘Good-night,’ he said.

  I stared at him. He just did not seem to grasp things. The old alertness was gone. He seemed dull and slow-witted. I put the light out and climbed into my bed. ‘Good-night,’ I said.

  The warmth of the cell and the darkness were wonderfully comforting after the wet cells in the dock gallery. But even so I found it difficult to get to sleep. My brain was too full of thoughts to be still. The fantastic events of the last few hours ran through and through my mind. I had keyed myself up to see Logan whipped to death before my eyes for something that he had done for me. Miraculously he had been saved from that and now he did not seem to realize what had happened. It was pitiful. But gradually the relief of the changed circumstances—no cold damp cell—no Gestapo—lulled me into a state of coma. I kept on seeing Fulke’s face, shiny with sweat, as he realized what the commodore’s words meant, the loose twist of his normally set lips, his sudden dive for the revolver. In how many sections of the German war machine were service men suddenly throwing off the yoke of the Gestapo? I had seen the relish in the commodore’s eyes as he had hit Fulke. Then his words to the doctor—‘I don’t know when I have enjoyed myself so much.’ If the services felt like this towards the watchdogs of the Nazi Party, how did the German people feel? Was there hope in this for a short war, or merely food for thought? Questions, questions, questions—but no answers.

  4

  U-Boat Base

  IT WAS BREAKFAST at seven next morning and then we were set to work on the hull of U 39 again. Logan worked stripped to the waist because his clothes rubbed against the wounds on his back. But though he moved rather stiffly, he worked with the same methodical speed that he had done on the previous day. My own muscles soon lost their stiffness, and I found the work required less effort.

  So morning ran into evening and evening into morning again with only the routine of the place to distinguish night from day. We worked a ten-hour day, from seven-thirty in the morning until six in the evening with a half-hour break for lunch. Hull scraping only occurred when a submarine came in from a lengthy cruise. If it were a rush job a whole party of ratings was put on to it with us and it only took a few hours. Otherwise, we had the work to ourselves and it took nearly two days. When there was no hull scraping, we worked in the canteen, washing up, peeling potatoes. Sometimes, when a submarine was due to go out we had to help carry provisions from the store-rooms and load them on to the submarine. Every morning, whatever else we had to do, we cleaned out the latrines, which were of the bucket type.

  Now that we were no longer under the control of the Gestapo we had less supervision. So long as we did our job and kept to the times laid down for us, chief of which were to rise at seven in the morning and return to our cell at seven in the evening, there was little fear of trouble. But we remained under a guard. The officer of the day was responsible for us. He was in charge of fatigue parties. Fatigue parties were provided as required by the submarines in the base, so many men being detailed from each boat. No man went on fatigue more than once until every other rating from his own boat had also done his turn. The whole point of the base, so far as the crews of the U-boats were concerned, was to provide the maximum relaxation—a thing that was very difficult to achieve in view of the cramped quarters which were really very little different from quarters in a U-boat. The main trouble, of course, was that the men never saw the light of day in the base. It was all underground, and, with the constant sound of machinery and the queer echoes, the place was apt to get on men’s nerves.

  These fatigue parties worked on more or less the same basis as we did, though they were free to do what they liked when they came off duty at six. Like ourselves, however, they had to hold themselves ready for duty when a submarine was coming into the base or leaving it. This meant that the fatigue parties were often called out in the middle of the night as it was only during the hours of darkness that the boats could get in or out of the base.

  Thus it was that I was present when U 24 left the base. This gave me great joy for it enabled me to watch Fulke’s arrival in charge of two guards. Until then I do not think I had ever seen real panic in a man’s eyes. He was struggling like a madman and I was certain he would prove quite useless as a cook and be an infernal nuisance to every one on board. The crew lined up to watch him come on board and there were broad grins on their faces. It was plain that the men of the German submarine service had no use for the Gestapo. It is not altogether surprising. Fulke demanded complete and absolute obedience to every petty and arbitrary rule he made. This may be all right in the army and possibly in the big ship navy, but it does not work in submarines.

  The submarine service is probably much the same in all countries. It differs from every other branch of the services because of its danger. It is not a question of tradition or the honour of the service. To be of the service is in itself to be a hero. And a hero is above discipline. Throughout the service stress is laid on efficiency—nothing else. It is a questio
n of existence. Each man has in his hands the fate of the whole ship. In these circumstances discipline is automatic. But when they return to base, especially a base like this, the crews want to relax, not to be pestered by petty disciplinary regulations.

  And so Fulke was given a warm welcome by the crew of U 24. I don’t know what the man had originally been. Some thought he was one of the Munich Putsch crowd. I doubt it. But at any rate, he had apparently been with the Party since 1933 and had wielded for a sufficient length of time the power of life and death to have become completely callous to his victims’ feelings. And now he was scared. I heard one man on the dockside say that he had been in the submarine that had brought Fulke to the base. ‘He looked pretty scared then,’ he said. ‘And he’d been drinking heavily before he came on board. He’s a coward—no doubt of that.’ And he spat. Then in a whisper he added, ‘I wouldn’t wonder if most of the Gestapo aren’t afraid as soon as they get the wrong end of the lash.’

  Perhaps they did Fulke an injustice. Perhaps he had second sight. At any rate, U 24 was sunk by a seaplane in the Bay of Biscay two days later.

  Before U 24 went out the commodore walked down with her commander, Varndt. Whatever time of the night a submarine left he always accompanied the commander to his boat. It was a ritual. I saw Varndt’s face as he went on board. It was set, but cheerful. Before descending the conning tower, he saluted, then waved his hand. They were all the same, these U-boat commanders—their men, too, for that matter. Most of them were young. They knew what they faced. The chances of death at that time were only two-to-one against every time they went out. The odds were short enough. They had responsibilities thrust upon them at which much older men would have blenched in peace-time. Yet they accepted these responsibilities and the danger without question, and with set faces and sublime cheerfulness went out to almost certain death.