An Honorable German (30 page)

Max bent to the voicepipe. “Make to U-Boat Command: ‘Forty merchantmen. Estimate nine escorts. Grid AK55. Base course zero
nine zero. Speed seven knots. Attacking at dusk. U-Max.’” A slow convoy. Better shooting for him. No group could move any
faster than its slowest ship, so the Allies divided their merchantmen into fast convoys, which traveled at nine knots or more,
and slow ones, which proceeded at seven knots and made easier targets by far.

Max ordered the wheel over, setting them on a parallel course to the convoy at a distance of about seven kilometers. Turning
to the lookouts, he said, “Stay alert, men, stay alert. Watch for aeroplanes.” The Luftwaffe said it was impossible, but after
his experience in Berlin he had little faith in anything the Luftwaffe said. Besides, one of his crewkameraden, the first
watch officer on another U-boat, told him that new long-range Allied planes flying out of Iceland could stay over the convoys
all the way to the western approaches of the British Isles, where patrol bombers from RAF Coastal Command took over. So constant
vigilance was his strictest rule, even when contemplating the impossible. He’d ordered a seaman before a court-martial for
falling asleep on watch; reduced two others in rank for inattention at their posts, then kicked them off his boat. Those who
committed lesser offenses had leave taken from them, or had to do especially dirty cleaning jobs such as scrubbing the bilges.
If his men thought him a martinet, Max didn’t care—his discipline had gotten them through their first war patrol, no small
accomplishment.

He continued to watch the convoy through his Zeiss binoculars. The escort ships swept the flank, the rear escort carving a
wide arc. That was the one Max had to worry about. His profile was low in the water and the gray-black U-boat wasn’t easy
to spot in the dark sea, but its wake, churned up by the sixteen-cylinder diesels, showed white against murky waves. He reduced
their speed to two-thirds and came port five degrees to zero four five, north by east. The wake lessened as their speed fell
off but still seemed like a white arrow pointing at the boat. The course change swung them away from the convoy, putting some
distance between them and the inquisitive rear escort—a corvette by the size of her, as Ferret had said. At least she wasn’t
a destroyer. A destroyer had twice a corvette’s speed, could run down a suspected sighting in a flash and return to the convoy.
A corvette could only steam at sixteen knots—no faster than a U-boat—and hesitated to leave the convoy because getting back
would take too long.

Dusk. The watch changed, Lehmann coming up to replace Ferret, four new sailors with him to replace the lookouts. Max forbade
talking on the bridge because it distracted the lookouts, but the silence also had the added benefit of sparing him Lehmann’s
pronouncements about Final Victory over the Jewish-Bolshevik Menace—pronouncements that had only become more strident since
the massive German surrender at Stalingrad in early February.

“Be alert, men,” Max cautioned the new lookouts. This was the worst time of day. It was hard to see anything in the fading
light and the sailors had a tendency to believe that darkness would protect them somehow. That was false hope. Darkness no
longer protected you. God wouldn’t protect you. Only luck could protect you, and there was little of that in this ocean at
war.

It came at last light: all four columns of the convoy executed a thirty-degree turn to starboard in perfect unison, tight
as Prussian grenadiers on parade, an intricate and difficult task for forty ships. The Tommies intended for this move to throw
off shadowing U-boats, and indeed Max had been snookered this way on his first patrol, but it wasn’t going to happen again.
This time he had gotten in close enough to make out the convoy’s new course.

Lowering his binoculars, he bent to the voicepipe. “Action stations! All ahead full. Right standard rudder. Come starboard
forty degrees to zero eight five.” This put him on a converging course. “Attack sight to the bridge.” Max turned to Lehmann.
“We’ll go in fast. Be ready.”

The attack sight—a special pair of binoculars—arrived from below. Lehmann mounted the binoculars on their bracket and watched
the convoy. In a surface attack, the first watch officer aimed and fired the torpedoes, while the captain maneuvered the U-boat
and selected the targets. Only when the boat attacked from underwater did the captain aim and fire, since only he could see
through the attack periscope.

“Stay alert,” Max reminded the lookouts again. Escorts could charge out of the darkness, and this convoy had plenty of escorts—nine
at least, maybe more. “Are they ready below?” Max asked Lehmann. Damn, he was chattering like an old woman. Get hold of yourself.

“Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”

“Switch to red,” Max ordered the helmsman below, who passed the order to Georg.

Inside the boat, the men tensed as they waited at their battle stations. The engineers waited, too, shut away in the stern
behind a watertight hatch, their eyes fixed on the signal lights that indicated engine orders. The electric motor men stood
by to bring the e-motors on line the instant Max gave the order to dive. In the control room, Ferret and the navigator waited
at the firing calculator, ready to punch in whatever firing data Lehmann relayed. Georg and his men stood with their hands
on the levers that would open the ballast tanks and get them under when the time came. Forward, in the torpedo room, Carls
along with Heinz, the torpedo chief petty officer, stood ready to push the manual firing levers if the electric firing system
failed.

Foam splashed across the tower, rolling across the foredeck and then off the sides. Max felt the wind on his face, colder
now. Salt rime covered his leather coat and pants and the salt had worked its way in everywhere—on his hair, on his lips,
chafing his arms and ass and thighs, setting off a fierce itch in his crotch.

Max kept his binoculars on the shadow of the rear escort, now falling astern of the convoy to search for U-boats. He pointed
a finger to starboard.

“I’m going into that gap,” he told Lehmann, shouting over the wind. “Stand by!” Max leaned to the voicepipe. “Helmsman, hard
starboard fifteen degrees and come to new course of one zero zero degrees.”

The boat heeled into the turn and ran full bore for fifteen minutes, racing through the gap created by the escort dropping
back. A large blur, two, then three. They were in. Lehmann peered through the firing sight. “The big one,” Max shouted, thumping
him on the shoulders.

“Range, fifteen hundred meters!” Lehmann called out, the information repeated to the tracking team below. “Angle on the bow
green zero five.” They could aim the torpedoes up to ninety degrees off the center line. “Set depth four meters.”

Max glanced around. The lookouts urgently swept their quadrants.

“Open forward torpedo doors!” Lehmann ordered. Each tube and its precious torpedo were protected from the sea by a heavy steel
door. “Range, twelve hundred meters. Angle on the bow zero seven. Depth, four meters. Number one, fire! Number two, fire!”

With a jolt everyone could feel, the eels shot from their tubes, the chief immediately replacing their weight with three tons
of seawater as ballast to keep the boat on an even keel.

“Request course change to one zero five,” Lehmann shouted.

Max ordered the helm change, which turned their shark nose to another ship, smaller than the first. Was that the stern escort
moving up?

“Hurry!” Max yelled.

A blast, bright orange against the darkness, illuminated the hull of the first ship. A direct hit. Good shooting—damn good
shooting. Max swiveled his head, scanning the darkness around them. Where was that God damned escort?

“Range, nine hundred meters! Angle on the bow, green zero one zero. Depth, four meters. Number three, fire! Number four, fire!”

Their last torpedo was in the stern tube. Max didn’t know if he had time to swing the boat and fire it, but he had to try.
It took two hours to reload the forward tubes and they didn’t have two hours, probably not even two minutes. “Stand by stern
tube,” he ordered. “Helmsman…”

A lookout yelled, “Destroyer bearing red two two zero!”

Shit! Through the middle of the convoy. Impossible—but there was no other way. Now the stern escort was moving up.

A white rocket broke over the convoy, the emergency turn signal. All the ships turned thirty degrees to port, away from the
attack. Max had been planning to escape through their ranks to throw the escorts off but they were too close to him now. “Emergency
right rudder!” he yelled.

The men-o’-war were converging—must see his wake. “Emergency full ahead,” he ordered. That would get the electric motors connected
to the propeller shafts and give him another knot in speed. But the warships were gaining—they had spotted him. A tower of
water off the starboard bow confirmed it—they were firing at him. There was no more time. He had to get under or get rammed
by one of the escorts. “Alarm!” Max bellowed.

Instantly the bridge crew dropped below, their exit lighted by another explosion, then another. The second ship had been hit.
Max dropped on top of the bridge watch without even noticing. All he could hear was water roaring into the ballast tanks.
“Get us down, Chief, down! Destroyer! All hands forward!” Sailors streamed into the bow compartment. “Both ahead full. Hard
starboard. Come to course one four zero.”

It was quiet now, the hammering diesels still, the low purr of the e-motors barely audible.

“Thirty meters,” the chief sang out, “forty meters, fifty meters.”

Bekker, the radioman, listened intently to his hydrophones, trying to make out the bearings of the ships above. “Wasserbomben!”
he yelled. Max braced himself against the periscope at the center of the control room.

The explosion was unbelievably loud, like a rifle shot right next to Max’s ear. It rolled the boat forty degrees. Light bulbs
shattered. A glass dial in front of him burst. Sailors slammed to the deck, some screaming in pain. The dish cabinet in the
officers’ quarters sprang open and the crockery shattered against the steel plates of the deck. Emergency lighting flickered
on in the control room, powered by the auxiliary lighting circuit.

Max clung to the periscope housing, feeling it vibrate in his arms. “Emergency left rudder,” he ordered.

Depth charges created such turbulence in the water that it was possible to sneak away by making a radical course change. But
the sonar had them now, the sound like pebbles being thrown against the hull.

“Both motors to one-third.” Max had to conserve battery power. “Chief, take us to eighty meters.”

The chief, standing beside the two hydroplane operators, gave the orders to his men, swearing under his breath. One man controlled
the aft hydroplanes, the other controlled the fore. They bore down on the buttons that manipulated the planes, eyes fixed
on the depth indicator in front of them.

Another ping hit the boat. It was the second escort, ranging now for the first. Tommy bastards. Max heard the sound of propellers
above as the destroyer ran in over him.

“Wasserbomben!” Bekker yelled again.

“Ahead full. Emergency right rudder.” Double back on the filthy swine. The explosion of the depth charges often caused escort
ships to lose sonar contact. They had to reestablish it after every attack. Sometimes they looked in the wrong place and you
could slip away.

Not this time. The next set of depth charges blew out the emergency lighting, leaving the boat black as a cave. A second set
exploded over them before Max had a chance to give orders, pushing the boat over and down with such force that his hands were
torn away from the periscope and he slid across the deck, banging into the opposite bulkhead. A young sailor wept in the corner.

“Shut up, dammit,” Max ordered. “Flashlights. Leutnant Lehmann, take that man’s name.” Anything could happen if you let the
sailors get out of hand—panic, even mutiny. In Danzig he had heard rumors of captains forcing men back to their posts at gunpoint
during a depth charge attack.

The control room crew switched on their flashlights, illuminating the critical fighting stations. If the flashlights gave
out, the men could still function, since each man could perform his tasks blindfolded. To make this possible, each of the
small control wheels had a distinct pattern imprinted on its metal surface.

“One hundred thirty meters,” the chief announced—right at their design limit but the boat would have to hold. Around Max she
creaked like an old wooden house from the pressure of the depth.

“Both engines stop.” He had to spend his battery power like a miser and watch his depth like a hawk—the boat would gradually
sink without her propellers turning to keep water flowing over the hydroplanes. It was impossible to establish total equilibrium.

“Engine room taking water through the propeller shafts,” Lehmann reported. The point where the propeller shafts left the pressure
hull was always a weakness in a depth charge attack.

“Chief!”

“Bloody hell,” the chief said, banging the wall of dials and control wheels in front of him. “The devil curse all who built
this stinking boat.”

“Chief, check the engine room and give me a report on the leak.”

“Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”

There was not much the chief could do. At any depth below one hundred meters, the packings around the propeller shafts always
leaked.

“Off-duty watch to the bunks,” he ordered. That would get them out of the way and conserve air, but Max knew he couldn’t have
done it: lie in his bunk in the blackness, water dripping in, hull groaning from the pressure, depth charges coming down.
Not that standing in the center of the control room and barking orders gave him much solace. If a depth charge exploded within
ten meters of the boat, the force would crack the pressure hull and the cold black water would spray in with the power of
God Almighty. And they would die: screaming, cursing, praying in their last seconds.