Decoy (22 page)

But now crouched on the lifeboat thwarts, Sergeant Keeler and him team of professional killers looked just as weary and weather-beaten as the rest: unshaven, faces grey with cold and fatigue, hunched over oars like galley slaves in their tenth year of rowing Barbarossa. They would stand a close inspection through a U-boat periscope: they looked like genuine survivors. Still, Ned thought, after twelve hours in a lifeboat in this weather everyone
was
a survivor.

‘Sergeant, will you deal with the rations?’

For two or three days they would eat well: the chief steward of the
City of Norwich
had put sliced hams and cuts of roast lamb, well cooked chops and steaks in one box: in another were sliced bread, a selection of boiled and roast potatoes, cucumber cut into thick discs, radishes, carrots and hard-boiled eggs, as well as jars of piccalilli and bottles of Lea and Perrins. A third box held a selection of fresh and dried fruit, bought on previous trips to other lands and now stored: dates and currants, apricots, oranges and apples, huge raisins…

As Jemmy watched Keeler begin to hand round the sliced meat and another man passed round bread from the other box, he commented: ‘We’re going to notice it when we’re reduced to lifeboat rations!’

‘Yes, but with this lifeboat gourmet food you all have to stay alert: the quickness of your hands must deceive the Teds’ eyes.’

‘Guaranteed,’ Jemmy said, ‘as long as the cold cutlets last.’

‘The chief steward reckons three days, and the ham longer. The bread was specially baked.’

Jemmy shivered. ‘I’d have thought it was cold enough to keep the meat longer. You didn’t tell me that being in a lifeboat is like trying to get comfortable in a draughty refrigerator.’

‘Ah, thanks Sarn’t,’ Ned took a thick slice of cold lamb and passed it to Jemmy, and then took another piece for himself.

Keeler apologized for the lack of piccalilli. ‘Bloody onions keep rolling off, sir. Thought I’d keep it for calmer weather.’

‘Yes, and when the meat’s not so fresh,’ Ned said.

Ned munched and Jemmy took bites as he moved the tiller with the other hand, frequently having to push with his body to overcome the oars on one side.

‘I’m sure this bloody boat’s warped,’ he complained. ‘It keeps turning to port.’

‘The chaps on the starboard side are pulling harder,’ Ned said, and called them. A couple of minutes later he asked Jemmy: ‘That better?’

‘Yes, Sorry Ned, I’m not thinking too well at the moment.’

‘I’ll give you a spell.’

‘No, it’s the Croupier’s turn.’ He shouted, and the Croupier, sitting in the forward part of the boat beside Yon, heaved himself upright and began to scramble aft, climbing over the thwarts and careful not to get jabbed in the ribs by the looms of the oars as they moved backwards and forwards in erratic rhythm.

‘Not much hope of spotting anything – anything spotting us, rather, Jemmy said. ‘A U-boat would have to have its periscope raised twenty feet to keep the lens clear of this spray.’

‘Wouldn’t it surface?’ Ned asked. ‘Not much chance of being spotted by aircraft out here!’

‘That’d depend on the skipper. What luck has he had so far, how many torpedoes he has left, what fuel, how many days to the end of his patrol. Yes, and crew morale. That’s likely to be a problem for Dönitz these days. Okay, the Teds are winning the Battle of the Atlantic – the figures make that clear enough – but we are sinking quite a few boats. They’re building so many it doesn’t make much difference to the balance, but it does to the men.’

‘In what way?’ Ned asked. ‘They know they’re winning, they know new and better boats are being designed and launched, and according to the Resistance boys, the submariners are the heroes – even to the French girls in places like Brest.’

‘Oh yes, the survivors have a fine time. But I wonder how many officers and men in U-boats on the day war broke out are still alive today? The engine-room artificers of September 1939 who have survived are probably lieutenants (E) by now; the nervous sub-lieutenant who was then general dogsbody is probably one of the ace commanders – if he’s lived this long.’

Ned gave a dry laugh. ‘You sound like a Ministry of Information hand-out to the Press!’

Jemmy slid a couple of feet across the thwart so that the Croupier could sit down and take the tiller. Jemmy, his head jutting out of the hood of his duffel like a hen staring from its nest, leaned across towards Ned.

‘Plain statistics, old boy. Say they had fifty subs then and now have four hundred. What are the chances of those early subs surviving? But even if they do, the best men get moved on to the newer boats. The newer boats get the tougher jobs and (because they certainly have longer range) the most distant ones, with more chances of being intercepted and sunk.

‘Do some sums, Ned. How many of those original fifty young sub-lieutenants have survived? How many commanding officers, and, probably more important, how many engineers? How many of those original crews? More than two years of war, so say half at the most, scattered among the other boats. Each has a memory of Old Heinrich, or Herman, or Ernst, who went out on patrol with U-so-and-so and never came back.’

‘Hold on a moment,’ Ned protested, ‘you make it sound as though they’re losing!’

‘No, I’m not, I’m trying to make you see it through an ordinary submariner’s eyes. Yes, he knows the Reich is winning; he hears of little else but numbers of Allied ships sunk and gross tonnages. He hears that one of the aces has just sunk his hundredth ship. He knows Kretschmer sank 325,000 tons, but also knows that one day Kretschmer didn’t come back. Prien may have sunk the
Royal Oak
in Scapa, but Prien too is dead.

‘So Heinrich, commanding
U-555
at the age of twenty-six, hero on shore, a sub-lieutenant only a year ago, an
Oberleutnant
six months ago, and now making his first trip as
Kapitänleutnant
and with an Iron Cross round his neck like a priest with his rosary, hoping it will ward off the devil in the shape of depth-charges, has his hopes – and his memories.

‘Just as I dream of potting two snipe with two barrels, so
Kapitänleutnant
Heinrich dreams of potting the
Queen Mary
with one torpedo and a battleship with another, and returning triumphantly to Brest or Lorient or Sant-Nazaire, where
B der U
welcomes him with a brass band and the news that an admiring Führer has made an immediate award of the Knight’s Cross with Diamonds, Oak Leaves and Tea Leaves.

‘But – there’s always a but – while Heinrich dreams of sink the
Queen Mary
, he has
nightmares
about a pattern of depth-charges going bang in the night followed by the sound of spurting water as the lights go out and the hull starts crumpling up. Ned, I know how
Kapitänleutnant
Heinrich feels as he tries to sleep in his cabin. I know because my cabin was probably about the same size.’

Ned finished chewing the last piece of lamb and looked round, half expecting to see a black-painted and rust-streaked tube like a drainpipe, with a large prism on the top, sticking up out of the sea and eyeing them, like a giraffe looking over a wall.

‘Yes, I follow all that, but what’s it got to do with Heinrich not thundering along on the surface?’

‘Oh, don’t misunderstand me. Heinrich might be a born killer whose vocation is sinking enemy ships and bumping off survivors, but he’ll probably be the only such man on board. It’s more likely that Heinrich has finally learned he can live without a Knight’s Cross and the Führer’s embrace: he comes up to periscope depth every hour or so in daylight, takes a look round, and goes back to a hundred feet where he doesn’t feel the swell waves.

‘He doesn’t get any dirty looks from his lieutenants, either. The sub-lieutenant might still be inexperienced enough to be breathing fire and Nazi brimstone, but the first depth-charging will cool him off. I’m only saying, really, that I reckon most of the Heinrichs of this world are doing their duty but no more. They know that the Tommies have learned a few tricks about escorting convoys, so the days of easy killings are gone for good. They know they’ll never be a new Schepke, or a Kretschmer.’

The slice of bread passed along by Sergeant Keeler tasted delicious, taking away the greasiness left by the meat, but Ned’s mouth felt dry and salty. Every dam’ thing was salty – his eyelids, lips, hands: rubbing an itching eyelid resulted in a sharp sting as encrusted salt grains caught the eyeball.

Bobbing around this blustery and cold sea in a lifeboat, Ned thought to himself, seems far removed from the bold talk in the ASIU. He took a dipper of water held out to him by Keeler. A dipper a day keeps the doctor away. They had plenty of water, in addition to the two wooden breakers, but it was so cold they were not losing it by perspiration and did not need so much. Dipper – an odd word, but it certainly described the narrow cylinder of metal, closed at one end and with a line secured at the open end so that it could be dipped into the small barrel, quaintly called a breaker. A memory stirred…was not ‘breaker’ a corruption of the Spanish word for a cask,
barrica
? Why the blasted thing was not called a keg he did not know.

As he handed the dipper back to Keeler, slowing swilling the small ration round his mouth as a portly cardinal would savour a rare wine, spray hit him in the face and, as he swallowed the fresh water, the salt trickled inside his jacket and soaked down his spine. His neck was becoming sore from the chafing and his shirt collar did little more than lodge round his neck after he pulled out the stud. Ironically, the fact that he wore a shirt and tie might matter on a calm day, when wearing it was no inconvenience: but it certainly did not matter in this weather, when collar, tie, coat with the four gold stripes and diamond of the master of a merchant ship were hidden under a duffel.

The Croupier said unexpectedly: ‘Thank God for duffel coats.’

‘Wrong chap,’ Jemmy growled. ‘They’re Spanish.’

‘Rubbish!’ the Croupier exclaimed. ‘Did Ferdinand and Isabella give Columbus one to wear on his first voyage to the New World?’

‘They might well have,’ Jemmy retorted. ‘It started life as a huntsman’s coat in Brabant – which, I am sure you don’t know, was a Spanish province in what is now Belgium – and gets its name from the town of Duffel.’

‘Coo!’ the Croupier said in mock amazement. ‘And to what do you owe this erudition?’

‘Reading guide books. I was taken to Belgium on holiday as a child. Pouring with rain, no toys in the bloody hotel, father in a temper – I retreated and read a guide book. Hence Duffel, in Brabant.’

‘And wet duffels, as in lifeboats,’ said the Croupier and in the few moments before he drifted into unsettled sleep Ned remembered his earlier thought that he hoped the inventor of the coat had become a millionaire.

Daybreak on the third day confirmed what they had felt and hoped during the dark hours of the night: the weather was improving. The heavy, grey nimbus cloud had lifted; patches of pale sky appeared fleetingly, like a teasing girl at a window. The sea was slowly easing, freed from the urgent thrusting of the previous week’s strong winds.

The oars had been shipped; they were lashed down along the centre-line of the boat, which drifted like a large piece of flotsam, sometimes rolling heavily as it twisted beam-on to the waves, sometimes pitching.

As Ned watched the men eating what passed for breakfast (the last of the bread and meat from the
City of Norwich
, followed by sections of concentrated chocolate from the lifeboat rations, and washed down by a dipper of water), he took stock. All the men needed a good shave: the bristling chins made them look like a gang of cut-throats, or maybe a guerrilla band operating in the mountains, busily blowing up bridges and generally irking the enemy. For three days their only rest had been sleeping where they sat, in sodden clothes. But they were no longer numbed by the cold. It had not become warmer, but after the first day and night the cold no longer soaked into their bodies and occupied all their thoughts. They were still cold, but they accepted it as though it was normal, and few could really remember what it was like to be pleasantly warm. Ned found himself trying to recall life in the Tropics: wearing white shorts and shirt, white cap cover and epaulettes and cursing them all because they were too hot now seemed an absurd reaction. In fact the phrase ‘too hot’ was absurd: nothing could be too hot. In the past he had complained of a cup of tea or coffee being ‘too hot’. Just let them try to serve it too hot now! Anyway, that was the first problem overcome, the cold.

The next was morale. The third and fourth, hunger and thirst, would come later, but morale was good. Not just good but almost absurdly good. Even though wet, cold and tired the men were cheerful, teasing each other as if they were in Chatham barracks, making private jokes, swapping their slices of meat because some preferred a fatty piece, others wanted lean.

Their morale was high because…? An interesting point. They were trained to kill effectively and usually silently – not skills that helped you keep cheerful in a lifeboat. None of them came from the Marines, a corps famous for its comradeship, and ten were RN petty officers and seamen, yet the strongest comradeship did not help you keep dry and warm, or stop you getting cold and wet. The officers – yes, Ned admitted he was lucky. Both Jemmy and the Croupier were as much ‘at home’ in the boat as Yon, who although a newcomer fitted in perfectly with the ASIU trio.

How would survivors from a torpedoed merchant ship be feeling three days after they had abandoned her in a near-gale? Well, it would take a couple of days to get over the shock – more for the nervous or imaginative. Not the incapacitating white-faced, pain-deadening shock from being wounded, but the dazed, almost numbing feeling after discovering that what cannot happen has just happened: that one’s ship is not immune, but like other ships in the convoy she can be torpedoed, and indeed just has been.

Real survivors would be rowing, and several of them would be imagining the time before the hit: when that periscope was watching in the darkness, unseen by them, but seeing. The German captain at the periscope would have been calling ranges and bearings and speeds, and other men would have been calculating the speed of the target (their ship) and the number of degrees the torpedo would have to be ‘aimed off’ to intercept the ship at some point along her course. That thought alone, that an unseen hunter had been watching from the darkness, had aimed and fired and hit, could leave men lethargic from this particular form of battle shock.