Black May (44 page)

C
HIEF RADIOMAN,
SILVAPLANA:
Did you join up voluntarily?

K
LOTZSCH:
If you can call it that, voluntarily, like everyone else. I didn’t want to volunteer, I didn’t want to have myself to blame if anything happened to me. So I waited to be called up.

C
HIEF RADIOMAN:
All the battleships have been put out of service, anyway.

K
LOTZSCH:
These Petty Officers, third class
[Bootsmaate]
are so completely dumb, [and] those who [are] now … noncommissioned officers [
[Unteroffiziere
]—never in all my life have I seen such stupidity.

Recorded 3 May 1943
¹⁸

K
LOTZSCH:
The First Officer of the Watch who left the boat on the last trip, is now in command of a boat himself.
CHIEF RADIOMAN,
SILVAPLANA:
Who is that?

K
LOTZSCH:
Oberleutnant [unclear name]. He was rather effeminate.
In broad daylight once, south of the Azores, he had the port sector [to watch], that is, the sector in which the sun rises—we were on a southerly course—and there he stood on the bridge, singing popular songs and so on. Suddenly the Unteroffizier [in the sector] next to his reported: “Herr Oberleutnant, there is a ship in your sector.” There was a twin-funnelled neutral passenger ship lying there, her engines stopped, and she’d already given the recognition signal. Since they had the sun behind them, they’d seen us for a long time and we’d continued to head straight for them, so they said to themselves: “Here’s a U-boat, she will probably stop us and demand a recognition signal,” so they’d stopped already. All the neutral ships know that, they’ve all been stopped any number of times. He [the First Officer of the Watch] had allowed them to come within eight hundred meters and hadn’t seen them. Just suppose it had been a destroyer or an enemy armed ship—that would have been the end of us, all right! What a peach our First Officer of the Watch was!

C
HIEF RADIOMAN:
Imagine a fellow like that having command of a boat now!

K
LOTZSCH:
I’m sorry for his poor crew. All the things we put up with are still in store for them. Everyone in the boat pitied the crew he’d got.

C
HIEF RADIOMAN:
I shouldn’t like to sail under anyone like that.

K
LOTZSCH:
No more would
I
but what can you do? … Our Second Officer of the Watch, who has now become First Officer of the Watch, once failed to see a flying boat, a huge crate, three hundred sixty miles from land, in broad daylight. We were on a northerly course and it was on a westerly one, which meant that it was at right angles to us, a long way away on the starboard side. The idiot of a Second Officer looked out and saw how the flying boat turned towards us as soon as they saw us, and instead of taking evasive action at high [speed] on the surface, and making off on a zigzag course to allow them to fly over us and drop their bombs, and
then
submerge—because that gives you much more time—he gave the alarm, with the result that everything inside the boat was put out of action and we went down out of control.… It was a bad mistake on the part of the bridge watch, the First and Second Officers of the Watch—people
like that make your hair stand on end! … We were on a homeward course.… Suddenly [an aircraft] approached on the starboard side.… The [helmsman] had … the helm to fifteen port and had gone to sleep. I gave him a kick in the pants, all right. It often happens that the helmsman falls asleep, because he sits in the conning tower and for four hours on end has nothing else to do but steer, and if you’ve got the middle watch, when there’s nothing happening in the conning tower and [only a] few smokers join you—smoking is allowed in the conning tower—

C
HIEF RADIOMAN:
Even when the hatch is closed?

K
LOTZSCH:
NO. In areas where there is danger from aircraft no one is allowed up on the bridge except the four men and the Commander, who sometimes goes up. [In other areas] there are two or three men smoking in the conning tower. When one goes below, the next man may come up; when we’re in the middle of the Atlantic or a long way away, some are allowed up on the bridge.

Recorded 7 May 1943
¹⁹

V
OELKER:
I was going through the Bay of Biscay … [and the order was given] to surface: “Look out!” and we submerged again. After about an hour we surfaced again, “Look out!” and down we went again. It went on like that all night long for two nights. We had only just been on the surface for a minute or two and the top of the conning tower was scarcely out of the water when he [the Commander] shouted: “Look out!” and we submerged again and went to action stations. There must have been one aircraft after the other up there. There is always a commotion when we make a crash dive. There was one man in the boat who had his peaked cap on and it got stuck in the conning-tower hatch and when we submerged he couldn’t close the hatch. All the water was coming in from above, and the water was pressing down on it and it took two men to pull the cap out!

Recorded 4 May 1943
²⁰

R
ADIOMAN FROM THE SURFACE TANKER
GERMANIA
: What else were you attacked by?

K
ALISCH:
Destroyers, corvettes and those fast bombers too.

R
ADIOMAN:
Fast is a slight exaggeration.

K
ALISCH:
At sea they always seem to be fast. Believe me. We detect the aircraft and they’re over us in no time. You’ve hardly started … before they reach you.

R
ADIOMAN:
Where would you be now, if you hadn’t been captured?

K
ALISCH:
In the North Atlantic. We should be homeward bound now.

Recorded 13 May 1943
²¹

V
OELKER
: [Re: sinking of U-175]: They had caught sight of our periscope and had also DFed us. We were at a depth of twenty meters and then dived and stayed down. The blast from the depth charges was terrific; we lost control of the boat, everything was smashed. The water was coming in and everything was creaking, groaning, and crackling. We were at a depth of two hundred thirty-forty meters. It was pure chance that we were able to get ourselves up again, pure luck.

When we dived the bow caps were open and we couldn’t shut them again. They had been bent by the depth charges, so we went down to two hundred meters.

N
AVIGATOR FROM THE
REGENSBURG
: Wouldn’t it have been better to have fired them [the torpedoes] out quickly?

V
OELKER:
That can’t be done. You can’t get them out.

N
AVIGATOR:
The water pressure was twenty atmospheres.

V
OELKER:
We fire at fifteen atmospheres. [Pause] The poor fellows who are now at sea! In the old days it used to be pleasure trips, even in the little two hundred fifty-ton boats, but now—!

Recorded 9 May 1943
²²

R
OSS:
In the Bay of Biscay we proceeded submerged during the night. It used to be the other way around. When you’ve been on duty for four hours in the U-boat and then suddenly come into the fresh air, your strength seems to ebb away. You go quite limp and don’t feel like doing anything; you just lie down. When you submerge normally—it’s simply called “submerging”—it’s exactly like a crash dive and is
done just as fast, the only difference being that the bell is not rung. They keep on bringing in something new, until the word
submerge
will simply be forbidden. However, when the command “submerge”
[Tauchen]
or “crash dive” [
Alarm]
is given, or “Action Stations,” or some such thing, you know at once, you hear that even in your sleep.

In the Bay of Biscay every day at two o’clock … punctually at two o’clock, another day it might be five minutes past or five minutes to, but the fellow [enemy aircraft] was always there about two o’clock. We were proceeding along the coast of Spain and the Commander would say: “We’d better look out, he must be coming soon.” The Commander went on to the bridge and then he gave the alarm. They had … already seen … [the aircraft]. Schultze [Kptlt. Heinz-Otto Schultze,
U-432]
had wonderful eyesight.

M
ARCH:
It was the same in our boat. You might have seen nothing at all, but the Commander would have already sighted something long before.

R
OSS:
His eyes are keen after years at sea.

Recorded 29 March 1943
²³

P
LNZER:
On the long Africa patrol … I was looking round and suddenly I saw a destroyer. You could see her with the naked eye.… When we submerged we were forty-five degrees down by the bows. In the electric motor compartment there were sacks of dried potatoes and they suddenly burst. They lay strewn about the Petty Officers’ quarters and all over the whole galley, the whole diesel compartment and the bow compartment were full of dried potatoes. In the wardroom as well.… All the kitchen utensils got piled up forward in the bow compartment.

R
LCHTER:
… On the very first patrol. A devil of a sea. The old hands who were with us said they had never before experienced such seas. It was just about Christmastime. We were proceeding between Iceland and the Faroe Islands on Christmas Eve.

P
LNZER:
When, this last Christmas?

R
LCHTER:
Christmas Eve. I was as sick as a dog.

Recorded 2 June 1943
²⁴

E
LEBE
[U-752]: Our morale was about as good as if we were being led to the slaughterhouse. You must remember it was the first patrol and when we saw something we submerged immediately. The Officers of the Watch had a regular slanging match [drag-out quarrel]—it’s a wonder they didn’t come to blows.

K
EITLE
[also from U-752]: Yes, that’s quite true.

E
LEBE:
Our officers never dared open their mouths because they knew nothing about it [the boat] and all our Unteroffiziere … were old experienced men.

K
EITLE:
That was the sad part about it: “I’m an officer, you can tell me nothing.” Yet what could you say to the lad, he’s nineteen—.

GRATZ
: They wouldn’t have got away like that with us.

K
EITLE:
That was some boat! It was bound to sink! We all said that on the first day.

E
LEBE:
We said that right from the beginning.
“They
put the boat into commission—
we’ll
put it out of commission again.” That was obvious from the beginning, first as a joke, and afterwards—my God, how we dreaded this patrol, we older ones. “They should skip this patrol and go straight on to the next.” That’s more or less how we were talking. And that turned out to be correct, as they introduced a sort of military atmosphere in our mess, with physical training every morning and other such nonsense. We definitely didn’t make faulty trials, as normally the engines ran quite well. To think that that damned aircraft had to drop its nice little bomb right where the outer tanks on the pressure hull are! … Put out of action immediately as the safety valves in the diesel were smashed, and the fuel began to run out. Up by the outside locker a stream of water came from the Chief Engineer’s cabin. Had it only been water which got in, the Chief Engineer could have held the boat, but it was fuel. It was already over the deck plates in the control room—that’s practically half the boat—and it began to run into the batteries. Already some of the cells in the battery had broken. And what an atmosphere in the boat! It was icy cold. It felt like minus sixty degrees centigrade, and then we were down by the stern … three quarters speed, dead slow. The main air valve was blown off.

Recorded
31
May 1943
²⁵

S
CHAUFFEL:
What wonderfully smart boats the [Type] Nine-C boats are!

N
OWROTH:
That’s true.

S
CHAUFFEL:
They’re superb, absolutely superb! What is their diving time like—good?

N
OWROTH:
It was very good.…

S
CHAUFFEL:
Before you can say Jack Robinson the boat has disappeared.

N
OWROTH:
… But the best time we ever made was thirty-six seconds.

S
CHAUFFEL:
Good, very good.

N
OWROTH:
Henke’s boat is supposed to have reached thirty-two seconds.

Recorded 1 June 1943
²⁶

S
CHAUFFEL:
I’ll tell you about us now.

N
OWROTH:
Who was the Commander?

S
CHAUFFEL:
[Karl-Ernst] Schroeter [U-752], who has the Knight’s Cross. Aircraft forced one boat to submerge.

N
OWROTH:
Was that in daylight?

S
CHAUFFEL:
It was at night. We never saw anything, the whole time. We’d already been at sea for five weeks. Afterwards [a message] arrived from a U-boat, I don’t know which one. Forced to submerge … bearing so-and-so. “The enemy is making off in such-and-such a direction.” ‘We’ll see,” said the Commander, “I don’t believe it, but we can set off now and be there early tomorrow morning.” … At eight o’clock in the morning aircraft forced us to submerge and we remained submerged until eleven.

N
OWROTH:
At what latitude was that, roughly?

S
CHAUFFEL:
It must have been around fifty degrees.

N
OWROTH:
And the longitude?

S
CHAUFFEL:
Roughly forty degrees. We surfaced at eleven. I was on watch.… When suddenly an aircraft approached on the port side. We didn’t stand a chance.… He started dropping his bombs.… I went to the machine gun and started firing, but it was too late. It [the plane] was flying at forty meters—just imagine it. I don’t know where their eyes were. So we had to submerge. We did so … and surfaced
again.… We should have shot the aircraft down.… Two rounds of ammunition misfired. It was impossible to give any sustained fire and then suddenly there was [a] fighter [aircraft] there and he swept our bridge clear … everybody killed. I was sitting right in the center. The aircraft fired to the right and to the left of me, but I wasn’t hit.