Black May (5 page)

Rather quickly, the vessel listed to port and settled by the bow. Leggett ordered Abandon Ship. About twenty-five men made it off in the starboard boat, but as the starboard raft became waterborne its painter (the bowline used for tying up) carried away and the raft was lost. There was trouble with the small port boat as well: it got hooked upside down to the davit for the accommodation ladder, and could not be forced loose. Leggett therefore shouted, “Every man for himself!” and the remaining crew, with the exception of the Third Officer, who was injured and would not be seen again, jumped over the side. Just before Leggett himself jumped, the ship shuddered, throwing him against hatch coamings, but he made it safely into the water, from
which he watched his ship sink within twelve to fifteen minutes of being torpedoed. With a great amount of wreckage floating about him, Leggett was able to grab hold of a wood plank for buoyancy. He was soon joined by Gunner Stuart Carnelly, “but for whose strenuous efforts in keeping me afloat until help came, I should undoubtedly have drowned.”

Help arrived after two hours in the form of
Birdlip,
which, with the addition of Leggett and Carnelly, had thirty more souls aboard her narrow decks. Five crewmen were rescued just before sunset on 1 May, and, about the same time, four more were sighted clinging to wreckage by an RAF aircraft, which dropped a rubber dinghy close to their position. Two of the men, Donkeyman William Kelly and the Cook, J. Brown, were badly injured. When the inflated dinghy splashed nearby, the other two men, Radio Operator Stuart Byatt and Second Steward George Newton, swam to retrieve it, and gave up their own places in the dinghy so that the injured men could rest more comfortably. Byatt and Newton took turns swimming and splashing around the dinghy to keep sharks and barracuda clear. And, thus, they passed the night of 1/2 May, until picked up the next morning and taken to Freetown. Altogether, nine crew members from
Corabella,
including the Cabin Boy, were dead or missing.
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At 0130 GST on 1 May, Henke surfaced to search the area of his attacks. What he saw in the lightning-lit night was sea wrack and deck debris stretching across the swells east to west, numerous lifeboats and rafts showing lights, and then a large
Bewacher
(the trawler
Birdlip)
picking up survivors. Unaccountably, because it was not U-Bootwaffe practice to target survivors, Henke attacked the rescue vessel; exactly how, he did not say in his KTB. Also unaccountably, he failed to sink her, though she was probably stationary in the water.
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Documents presented after the war to the International Military Tribunal at Nürnberg disclosed that Hitler had several times insisted that U-boats should kill survivors by shooting up their lifeboats, as a means both of denying those crews to new ships and of intimidating other crews from going to sea.

No formal order to that effect was ever traced to Admiral Dönitz,
although, where “rescue ships” were concerned, in autumn of 1942 he had stated in an order: “In view of the desired annihilation of ships’ crews their [rescue ships'] sinking is of great value.”
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Apparently, to sink a warship containing survivors was understood by Dönitz to be of a different moral character from the sinking of survivors in a lifeboat. Not exactly a directive to do so, his ambiguously worded order could nonetheless be interpreted by a Commander as permission to sink a rescue vessel, if the opportunity presented itself, and that may have guided Henke with respect to
Birdlip.
On balance, Dönitz seems to have resisted Hitler’s pressure to engage in
Schrecklichkeit
(terribleness, dreadfulness), on the grounds that it violated international conventions governing sea warfare, that it compromised the honor and integrity of the U-Bootwaffe, and, more practically, as the German Naval Staff expressed it on 16 December 1942, that: “The killing of survivors in lifeboats is inadmissible, not just on humanitarian grounds but also because the morale of our own men would suffer should they consider the same fate as likely for themselves.”
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At Nürnberg the only documented incident of incorrect behavior toward survivors presented by the Allied prosecutors was a machine gun attack on the merchant crew of S.S.
Peleus,
a Greek vessel, in the Indian Ocean on 13 March 1944. The boat responsible was U
-852,
commanded by Kptlt. Heinz Eck. Captured after the war and placed on trial together with his officers by a British court-martial, Eck denied that he had received any orders, directly or ambiguously, from Dönitz to shoot at shipwrecked survivors. The Commander, his I.W.O., and the ship’s doctor, both of whom had joined in the shooting, were executed by firing squad on 30 November 1941.
²⁹
(An example of “inadmissible” behavior exhibited by United States Navy submarine officers toward Japanese survivors in the Pacific is provided by the historian of that underseas war. Particularly relevant is the incident on 26 January 1943 when the submarine
Wahoo
[Lieut.-Cmdr. Dudley Walker Morton, U.S.N.] spent an hour shooting Japanese survivors of a torpedoed troopship as they floated in the water.
³⁰
) In the main, existing records support the contention that German U-boat conduct toward survivors was correct, even on many occasions solicitous when crews provided
them food, water, medical supplies, compasses, position, and course to land. Werner Henke’s biographer describes his subject as similarly “humane,” though in the particular case at hand Henke may be said to have backed into the compliment by his failure to destroy the rescue vessel
Birdlip
and her human cargo.
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That incident closed, and with three new Etos in the bow tubes, Henke called for
A.K. voraus
—“Both ahead full!” He would pursue the convoy north and see what damage he could do to its remaining ships. At 0513 he sighted its trailing edges, and twenty-seven minutes later, with the air still very dark and visibility down to medium, he nosed his way into the convoy columns, as before, from astern. First Watch Officer Sauerberg took a reading on three separate ships to port that were steaming, he estimated, at 7 knots. Three Etos in the bow tubes were set to run at 7 meters depth, Pi 2 pistols fixed for magnetic detonation. Henke’s KTB:

By 0549 the sky was alive with starshells and white rockets that illuminated two nearby “destroyers.” There were three RN destroyers that had come on the scene belatedly from Freetown: H.M.S.
Rapid, Malcolm,
and
Wolverine.
Henke crash-dived in the shallow (80 meters, 250 feet) coastal water, seeking temperature gradients and varying density
layers that abounded there as a protection against the inevitable British sonar detection pulses (called asdic). Taking a southwesterly course toward deeper water, U-515 again succeeded in eluding her pursuers. The sounds of depth charges and of ship hulls fracturing receded astern.

Henke’s rampage was over.
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And this time his observations were all correct. During one remarkable night he had equaled the record seven sinkings [plus one damaged] in a single twenty-four-hour day achieved by U-boat “ace” Kptlt. Joachim Schepke (U-100) against Convoy SC.II on 23 November 1940. And he had exceeded the earlier
best night
of six sinkings (one damaged) posted by Kptlt. Otto Kretschmer (U
-99),
the “tonnage king,” on the night of 18/19 October 1940, one of three nights (17–19 October) during which nine U-boats savaged Convoys SC.7 and HX.79 off Rockall Bank near Ireland—nights that came collectively to be called in Germany
die Nacht der langen Messer,
“The Night of the Long Knives.”
³³
(This phrase, earlier used to describe Hitler’s bloody purge of Ernst Rohm and his SA ["storm troopers"] leadership in 1934, originated in a medieval legend, known in both Germany and Britain, that told how Saxons who invited the British king Vortigern and his leaders to a banquet slaughtered three hundred of the leaders with their long knives.)

There was no glory for the merchant seamen, of course. Though their cost in lives was less in Henke’s second fusillade, the newly afflicted seamen of Convoy TS.37 experienced anyone’s full share of “peril on the sea,” which, it must be added, they managed with commendable composure. First hit this time was the Belgian freighter
Mokambo,
4,996 GRT, out of Matadi and Takoradi for Freetown and the United Kingdom with a cargo of 1,139 tons of palm oil, 1,520 tons of kernels, 440 tons of copal, 2,000 tons of cotton, 2,000 tons of copper, and 38 tons of wolframite.
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Other than that the weather at the time was cloudy and showery, that the sky was still very dark, and that there was a slight sea with a west wind, Force 3 on the Beaufort scale, there are no surviving details of her sinking.

Henke’s second victim was the British steamer
City of Singapore,
6,555 GRT, which was sailing from Calcutta and Takoradi for Freetown and Liverpool. Her cargo was 9,000 tons, which included 2,750 tons of pig iron, 2,750 tons of general cargo and mail, and, the remainder, jute, linseed, and groundnuts. The ship was hit by a torpedo that exploded just abaft the mainmast on the starboard side, throwing up a tall column of water but showing no flash. The hatches and beams from No. 5 hold were crushed; No. 4 hold flooded; the deck gun was blasted off its platform onto the deck; one of the six lifeboats was rendered useless; and the remaining boats, like the ship as a whole, were completely covered with oil from the tanks.

The Master, Captain A. G. Freeman, followed the book: He stopped engines; sent out wireless messages, which were acknowledged; fired two white rockets and showed the red light; and, when the ship had almost lost headway so that boats could be lowered without fear of their capsizing, he threw the Confidential Books overboard and ordered Abandon Ship. Freeman left last in No. 2 boat after making certain that no one remained on board. By that time, the ship was quickly sinking aft and the poop was awash. Fourteen minutes after the torpedo hit, Freeman heard a loud report, which he assumed was the No. 4 deep tank bulkhead collapsing, following which the vessel folded in two and disappeared. An hour and a half later, the survivors were picked up by
Birdlip
and by the convoy’s second trawler, H.M.T.
Arran,
and taken by them to Freetown. Not one of the eighty-seven-man crew and two gunners had been lost. Freeman reported: “I consider this Convoy was inadequately escorted.”
³⁵

The last ship to be hit by Henke, who had expended only nine eels to cause seven sinkings—an unusually successful economy of firepower—was the British freighter
Clan Macpherson
, 6,940 GRT, out of Calcutta, Durban, and Takoradi for Freetown and the United Kingdom with 8,421 tons of general cargo that included 2,750 tons of pig iron, plus zinc, mica, jute, linseed, tea, and groundnuts.
³⁶
His crew, including gunners, numbered a large 140. No one saw the track of the torpedo, which exploded, “not violently,” in No. 2 hold on the starboard side. Knowing that the hold was 100 feet in length and 134,000 cubic feet of space, and fearing that it would fill quickly, the ship’s
Master, Captain E. Gough, immediately ordered Abandon Ship. He switched on the red light, fired two white rockets, sent out a W/T message, and threw overboard the Confidential Books.

“All my men lined up like soldiers,” Gough reported, “no one attempted to do anything without orders, and within ten minutes the five lifeboats and the one small boat were clear of the ship,” which, they saw, did not go down as expected. The men on the small No. 2 bridgeboat were taken on board a freighter,
Silver Ash,
and the occupants of the other five boats, keeping in contact with each other by means of flashlights, had the opportunity of being rescued by
Arran;
but, instead, Gough asked the trawler to stand by them until daybreak, when he and the crew from the five boats reboarded their still floating vessel. The pumps were put on and all the engineers went below to raise steam. By 0920 the ship was under way doing twenty revolutions, and Gough had her under helm on a course of 047° toward Freetown, some 67 nautical miles distant. But, after a short while, it became apparent that No. 1 hold was filling, and some measure had to be taken to balance the ship.

Accordingly, Gough ordered the Chief Engineer in the engine room to fill tanks Nos. 4 and 5 in an attempt to bring the boat down by the stern. When that action was completed, though, the ship was listing to starboard, and the sea was lapping at the fore deck. Gough rang the engine room: “Finish With Engines.” He thought he might take a tow, stern first, from
Arran.
But it was no use.
Clan Macpherson
was not going to make it. He again ordered Abandon Ship and personally phoned the engineers and engine room crew to order them out. Unfortunately, two minutes after the boats were away, the ship suddenly upended, hung there in that state, quivering, then sank in a frothy gulp, and there was no sign in the boats of Chief Engineer Neil Robertson, or of the Second, Fourth, and Fifth Engineers, “who were just a little slow in leaving the engine room.”

In his report Gough complimented a half-dozen Lascars (East Indians) in his crew who had gone into No. 1 hold and, working up to their waists in water, tried to build up a bulkhead with bags; had the bulkhead collapsed, “all would have most certainly been drowned.” The boarding party reached Freetown Harbour at 2015 GMT on 1 May, where the Europeans, including Masters and Officers, were assigned to
the ghastly Grand Hotel and the native crew were placed in even grimmer boardinghouses. By 10 June, so far as Gough knew, the natives were still housed in squalid conditions, with awful food, if any, and no water for bathing, most of them afflicted with boils and diarrhea. The extent of the suffering caused by U-boat warfare was simply unknown to its perpetrators.
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