The Trinity Paradox (26 page)

“Captain, we do have three other torpedoes in addition to those new rocket weapons we had installed in Brest. We can make our strike and get away. We’ve done it a thousand times before! There can be no danger to us.”

“Secure all hatches. Prepare to dive. One hundred seventy meters. Engines, all stop.” Werner spoke into the long, echoing dimness, then turned to answer Gormann. “We will not attack. We have strict orders not to engage the enemy, no matter what opportunities present themselves. I don’t like it myself—but those are my orders, directly from Admiral Donitz and Reichminister Speer. Those three rocket weapons in the forward compartment may win the war for Germany.”

Donitz was the man who had conceived and led “wolfpack” warfare in the Atlantic, using U-boats to hunt down and destroy supplies to Britain; as of the year before, he had become commander-in-chief of the entire German fleet. The experimental modifications to U-415 had been pushed through by the Reichminister of Armaments himself. Other U-boats went out to plant mines, or hunt down ships and convoys, but U-415 had a greater mission.

Captain Werner hissed through his teeth. He grabbed the periscope and felt the motor’s vibration through his fingers. Outside, he watched the helpless ships approaching. Two destroyers flanked the convoy, but that would not have bothered Werner; it was all part of the risk. Sinking a few enemy vessels and adding to their tonnage score always relieved tensions aboard the submarine.

But not on this mission. He had to keep repeating it to himself to dampen his own frustrations. “Dive!” Werner said again, “One hundred seventy meters! Do it before they see us.”

The captain grabbed a conduit with one hand and steadied himself against the periscope handle as the submarine canted downward. Waves gurgled outside, then all grew silent as the hull sank beneath the surface. The pounding diesel engines stopped, leaving only the gentle hum of the electric motors.

“Submerged, sir. Approaching a depth of sixty meters ... seventy meters.”

Captain Werner felt the air tighten around his head as the pressure of the water squeezed the hull. ‘ ‘Let me know when we get to one hundred seventy.”

Underwater everything seemed quiet and wonderful, free of the knocking diesel engines and the uneasy swaying of waves. Once each day the captain ordered his boat to do a routine trim dive for practice and maintenance. It allowed the crew to eat without lurching back and forth, to relax and recuperate for an hour or two. Now U-415 moved underwater with glorious grace beneath the approaching convoy. The only sounds were the hum of electric motors and the patter of water droplets condensing from overhead and splashing to the floor plates.

A distant pinging sound echoed through the hull, growing louder second by second. “Asdic pulses, sir,” the third mate said.

“I can hear them myself,” said Werner.

The British “asdic” defense—named after the Antisubmarine Detection Investigation Committee—used ultrasonic waves to search the waters for nearby U-boats that might be hiding like wolves in the water. The asdic pings struck the hull of the boat like metal arrows. Each burst set the men on edge. No one moved more than he had to.

“Depth is one hundred seventy meters, sir.”

“Maintain. Continue silent running. No unnecessary noises—everybody keep still. I don’t want them dropping depth charges on us, especially not before we can sink a few of their ships.”

“Listen to the destroyers, sir,” the soundman said. “Not like one of the freighters.”

They heard the sound of propellers and bows cutting the water above. The destroyers cruised overhead, loaded with canisters of death they could drop at any moment. The passage of the convoy sounded like distant thunder echoing through the steel hull.

“Directly above us,” the radioman called out.

“Keep steady. Nothing to be afraid of.” The thought seemed ludicrous as Werner considered it. Nothing to be afraid of? Two years ago, maybe, but not now.

In 1942 the German U-Boat Force had sunk 1200 Allied ships, seven million tons! Those were indescribable days of glory. But in March 1943 everything had changed. The Allies had brought to bear a battery of new weapons: small aircraft carriers, fast escort vessels, and a new radar device. They wiped out forty percent of the German U-Boat Force in a few weeks. A few weeks!

Captain Kretschmer, of U-99, the reigning tonnage king who had sunk 325,000 tons on his own, was captured on March 17, 1941. The very same day Captain Schepke, in U-100 with a tally of 250,000 tons, was killed when a British destroyer blew U-100 to the surface, then rammed her. No one could keep track of all the German losses anymore. The bottom of the Atlantic held as many U-boat corpses as it held sunken freighters.

The sounds of the ships passing overhead dwindled in the distance. Captain Werner continued to stare at the ducts and pipes on the ceiling, eyes half shut.
Nothing to be afraid of?
Hardly.

“I believe that’s the last one, sir,” the radioman said.

Werner nodded. His beard felt stiff from salt spray, and itched with unwashed sweat. “We’ll keep running submerged for another hour. Continue present heading at four knots.”

He drew in a deep breath of air filled with the sweat and bad breath of fifty men. He could sense their restlessness. They wanted to attack the convoy that had just passed. U-415 had built up a respectable record of sunken Allied tonnage, which they displayed proudly on pennants strung from the superstructure whenever they came near a German refueling vessel.

“Executive Officer, take command. I’ll be in my bunk.”

Werner went forward, ducking low to avoid a pressure gauge that protruded from the wall in just the wrong place. He would make up for the crew’s resentment when they released their special weapons and caused a greater toll on the enemy than all other U-boats combined.

The submarine hummed as it cut through the water toward its destination, New York harbor.

Captain Werner moved forward, with unconscious care in every movement. Being on board the U-boat felt like living inside a narrow steel corridor with fifty men, cramped on both sides with pipes and ducts, handwheels,
anything to
bang your head on. A sensible person would have considered even a day aboard the mold-ridden, urine-smelling coffin to be an inhuman punishment; but Werner had been aboard submarines since the war’s beginning, first serving on U-557 as an ensign with Captain Paulssen, then transferred to U-612 as executive officer only a month before Paulssen and his entire crew went to the bottom.

In the intervening years, and countless missions, carefully tallied kills, and endless faces of old crews and new crews, Werner grew proud of his duty aboard the submarines. His clothes never dried beyond clamminess, and every metal surface he touched felt cold and slimy. He no longer smelled the stench of close-packed sweating and frightened men.

Regulations demanded that no one bring shaving kits aboard, since the precious fresh water had to be used for drinking and cooking. Werner looked with fondness upon the usual collection of personal belongings held dear by every member of the crew—toothbrushes, writing materials, books, snapshots of family and sweethearts.

Moving forward in the bottleneck, he ducked through the low round hatches in bulkheads that separated each compartment, acknowledging greetings from his men. Many of the off-duty seamen took advantage of the silence and peace of underwater travel to sleep in narrow berths with a swing-up aluminum guardrail that sandwiched them between the edge and the closest wall.

The aft compartment held the machinery and electrical equipment, the air compressor, and three torpedo tubes. Two diesel engines capable of driving the boat at nineteen knots on the surface smelled of fuel oil and grease. Beside them the two electric motors, with their giant storage batteries, now drove the boat while it was submerged. The batteries would need to be recharged after a few hours, and that could be done only by running the diesel generators, which meant returning to the surface. The convoy would be far out of sight by then, and U-415 could continue in peace.

The galley, a single washroom, and the petty officers’ quarters were located between the aft compartment and midships. Werner smiled when he thought of the first time, as an ensign aboard U-557, he had attempted to use the washroom, trying to master the ballet of opening and closing pressure valves in their proper sequence.

The control room in midships was overloaded with pipes and ducts, valves and hand wheels, gauges and switches. The captain had been aboard U-boats long enough to be intimately familiar with everything there, the pumps, the freshwater producer, the periscope, the magnetic compass. A covered lamp let a soft glow fall on the maps on the chart table, but the navigator had left them unattended. U-415 was on a straight course.

Captain Werner undogged the round hatch into the forward section. He nodded to the radio operator, who had nothing to do while they remained submerged; all the other bunks were occupied. One man snored loudly, and the noise echoed in the otherwise quiet boat. The captain’s corner, with a green leather mattress and a green curtain for privacy, lay up front. Executive Officer Gormann no doubt assumed Werner meant to take a nap.

Instead, he wanted another look at the deadly rockets.

The foremost compartment normally held four standard torpedoes. Now the captain stopped and stared at the sleek, ominous rockets. They had been installed in a submarine bunker at Brest on the Normandy coast. The modifications had taken months, but no other U-boat in the German fleet had weapons such as these. If he could succeed in this one mission, Captain Hans Werner and his U-415 would be remembered long after the end of the war.

The rockets, painted with alternating red and black triangles that arrowed toward the snub nose, looked similar to torpedoes, but much larger. Stabilizing vanes made of dull black carbon angled outward. The forward compartment seemed cramped with only three of them and the machinery for launching the missiles.

Captain Werner had never seen such devices fired before, though he and the exec had been tediously briefed on their operation. Werner remembered the frustrated-looking man in his gray civilian suit walking among the construction bays in the echoing submarine bunker. He had introduced himself as Professor Abraham Esau. Esau had steel-colored hair oiled back neatly, and his face looked as if it did not know how to smile. An ugly scar twisted his upper lip into a threatening expression. Professor Esau made sure he had Werner’s attention and began explaining how the weapons worked and what they would do to the enemy.

The front third of each missile had been filled with deadly radioactive dust. Neither Werner nor Executive Officer Gormann understood the details about nuclear physics, but the captain also knew that Germany had claim to the most brilliant scientific minds in the world. Germans had repeatedly won Nobel prizes for their astonishing successes. Werner could not doubt they might use their new discoveries to develop a weapon that would terrorize the Allies into immediate surrender.

His U-boat would launch that weapon.

The captain had not commanded U-415 in its previous mission, when his predecessor had narrowly escaped destruction from British depth charges. The boat had been undergoing routine structural repair in dock when Admiral Donitz forwarded the order from Reichminister Speer. U-415 would undergo new modifications, for a new mission. Professor Esau had stood on the quay at Brest, looking across the dock to where U-415 lay under the arms of two cranes lowering steel plate down to its deck.

“These three rockets will fill the enemy with terror beyond anything seen in the Blitzkrieg, or even in your earliest days with the U-boat wolfpack.’’ Esau spoke without turning. The exec scowled at what seemed to be an insult, but Captain Werner waited for the professor. Sounds of construction reverberated in the long bunker, and gentle lapping waves splashed against the metal hull of the submarine. Dim light slanted through the narrow windows along both walls of the bunker.

“This assault will be invisible and deadly. The Americans will have no way to defend against it, no place they can hide. It will continue its effects for years to come. A fitting lesson, don’t you think?” Esau asked.

“If it works,” Captain Werner answered.

“It will work—if you get it to your target intact.”

Now, in the foremost compartment of U-415, the rockets took up space that would normally have been filled with smaller torpedoes. As it was, since these rockets would not be launched until they reached New York harbor, the crew members did not need to keep the area ready for firing; they could use the precious storage space for piling supplies that would otherwise have cluttered the rest of the ship.

Special compartments held shells for the 8.8-centimeter cannon and the two-centimeter antiaircraft gun, but the foodstuffs could go up front with the missiles. This also meant that the crew could free up the second washroom, which was usually used for storage until midway through the mission, when the supplies had been consumed enough to clear it out. The opening of the second washroom normally provided a minor celebration after weeks at sea, but Captain Werner felt the overall morale would be better if his crew had use of both washrooms from the beginning of the voyage.

The rotting smells of damp bread and fruit hung in the air, mixed with the oil and grease of mechanical parts in the new front section. Cans, barrels, and crates of food were wedged along the wall and placed alongside the radioactive warheads. In a locked front compartment, to which only Werner had a key, were stored the most precious supplies such as butter, whipped cream, coffee, and tea, beside a strictly-against-regulations bottle of brandy, which Werner planned to open after they had successfully launched the rockets. From pipes above the rockets hung smoked hams and rolls of salami. For weeks the loaves of bread had escaped the feathery blue mold, a fact so remarkable that some of the seamen considered it a miracle.