Captain Adler felt relieved lying in his bunk eating a banana.
Since leaving the pier the men of the U-1055 spent the last several hours or so eating.
They attacked the fresh fruit as if they never tasted anything better.
Funny how such a simple thing as fresh fruit could cure the doldrums of a long voyage.
Now he could smell the lovely aroma of eggs cooking along with bacon.
And milk.
They had fresh milk aboard.
At this point in the war, far from hostile sea traffic, his boat could relax a bit and savor the food haul they made.
Hell, maybe he was wrong about the Gestapo.
Grimme turned out to not be such a bad guy after all.
There was a soft rap at the door of Adler’s cabin.
“Captain, you awake?”
It was his first officer, Willie Hientz.
“Yes, Hientz.
Come in,” answered Adler between bites as he sat up.
“Sir, what are our orders?
I have us on a bearing to the mid-Atlantic but after that nowhere specific.
Our depth is ninety meters.”
“That’s because we have no operational orders as of now,” Adler said looking toward his desk.
“We have not received any communications from Germany since we left.
Even the supply ships we encountered had no contact.
We know the Reich is in shambles.
When we left Germany, the Americans and Soviets were knocking at Berlin’s door.
By now Berlin has to have fallen.”
“Damn Nazis,” said Hientz.
He felt close to his captain.
Close enough to let most of his real feelings show.
Aboard a U-boat they were isolated.
Germany had long since stopped the old procedure of placing Nazi Party representatives aboard U-boats.
Even the Nazis knew they were in trouble.
The radioman stuck his head in the captain’s door.
“Sir, are there any messages to go out?”
“No, not now,” said Adler.
“But we do need to listen for new orders at the scheduled time tomorrow morning.
Let me know immediately when we make radio contact.”
“Yes, sir, I will, of course.
Well then, sir, may I pipe some music through the boat?
The men have asked for music.”
Adler smiled softly.
“Yes. That would be nice.
Go ahead.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The radioman ducked away.
The two men sat silently for a few seconds.
“You think the war is over, sir?” asked Hientz.
Adler looked grimly at his first officer.
“Yes, Hientz, I think it is.
I do not see how we can win.
Right now I’m just worried about our families and those we have left behind.
There is no telling what is happening back there.
I heard that when the Americans found out about the work camps they went wild.
They shot camp guards and punished the citizens of the nearby towns.
God knows what they will do to the general population in Berlin.
Those damned SS generals really screwed things up with Hitler and Himmler’s
get rid of the Jews
politics.
They must have killed thousands.
Now we are going to pay for that crap.”
Hientz didn’t say anything but he knew Adler was right.
He looked at his boots on the deck of the U-boat.
“Actually, looking back, I can’t believe that we fell for all of that master race bullshit.
Rule the world, Hitler said.
Yeah, it sounded great back then but we all should have known that the rest of the world was not going to just stand by and watch us take over Europe, especially after the first world war,” added Hientz.
“Dammit, we should have known.”
Adler shook his head slowly. “Yeah, we should have known.
I never should have stayed in Germany.
I should have taken my family to Switzerland and on to America.”
“If we could only go back in time,” lamented Hientz.
A soothing German ballad began playing throughout the boat.
The two men listened silently.
“Damned Nazis,” Hientz finally hissed.
“Damn them all to hell.
They are the cause of all of this.”
Adler stood and placed his hand on Hientz’s shoulder.
“None of us dreamed it would come to this.
There’s nothing we can do now, Hientz, nothing we can do.
Our job now is to stay alive and get this crew back home to Germany any way we can.”
Hientz pursed his lips and looked down at the deck.
Adler knew what he was thinking.
“Well, what do we do now?” asked Hientz.
“We have no further orders.
The Reich is in shambles.”
Hientz reached over and plucked an apple from a box of food and took a bite.
“Without any orders, we should plot a course back to Germany,” answered the captain looking at his first officer.
“If the war is lost, I guess we should return to port and surrender the boat.
I’ll be damned if I’m going to die here at sea making a last strike for the Fatherland.
I just want to get back to my wife and kids.
It’s been four hard years since I was home... or what is left of it.”
“Very well, sir.
I will have the navigator plot a course to our home port at once.
With a bit of luck we can make it back in a few weeks or so if we do not run across the enemy.
I think that would make the crew as well as the officers very happy.
The faster we get home the better.”
Adler looked his first officer in the eyes and smiled weakly.
“Do that, Hientz… Let’s go home… it has to be over by now.”
“Yes, sir,” answered Hientz with a smile as he turned and walked away toward the navigation room.
The music was still playing and the captain could still smell the eggs and bacon.
He could hear the laughter of his men even over the music.
Several congregated around the galley just down the passageway from the captain’s cabin, all waiting intently on the eggs and bacon.
Smiles were everywhere.
Damn, it felt good to be going home at last.
Adler grabbed his cap and stepped out into the passageway toward the galley.
Funny, he thought.
It seemed as though the weight of the world was just lifted from his shoulders.
Adler met his second officer as he entered the galley.
“Captain, we are seventy-five nautical miles to sea at a depth of ninety meters in 2,100 meters of water.
Mr. Hientz has us on a course of 060 degrees at seven knots.”
“Very good.
Tell Mr. Hientz to maintain that course until further notice.”
The captain stepped over to the intercom, reached up and turned on the microphone.
“Attention, Crew.
This is the captain.
I have an announcement to make.”
The music, singing and laughter stopped.
The only noise was the hum of the engines.
“Gentlemen, I have just given the order to return to port in Germany.
We are going home!”
The silence was immediately broken by a great roar from the crew.
It was a collective cheer that made Adler smile.
Now it was official; they were going home.
He turned the microphone off and stepped into the galley.
Adler had a huge smile on his face when he looked over to the cook.
“How about some of those eggs and bacon, please.
They smell great!”
“Yes, sir,” answered the cook, grinning ear to ear.
“Sir, I can’t believe we are going home.”
“Yes, we are,” answered Adler with a smile.
Adler sat on a small stool and took a mug of coffee from the cook.
The coffee was hot.
It tasted great.
Just like home.
Oh, how he missed home.
This would probably be the longest two weeks of their lives.
The radioman walked into the galley.
“Sir, our next scheduled radio contact is at 09:00 tomorrow morning.
Do you still want to make contact for orders, sir?
I mean after what you just announced?”
The captain sat there with his coffee for a few seconds.
The radioman was right.
What use was contacting headquarters?
Those assholes are liable to order them to make some kind of stupid suicide run to uphold the integrity of the Reich.
Yeah, Adler smiled to himself; fat chance we would follow that order. He wasn’t about to make that mistake. But he did not want to openly disobey a direct order just in case some semblance of the Nazis survived and they decided to go on some kind of blame vendetta.
Not him.
But what if he never got that order?
No one could blame him for that.
That was his way out!
Adler looked at the radioman and said, “No.
We are headed home.
We have our orders.
Surfacing to make radio contact may tip the enemy off to our location and heading.
Until I tell you different, there is to be no radio contact until we reach Germany.
Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir!” answered the radioman with a huge grin.
“I absolutely understand.
Sir, that suits me just fine.”
With that he was gone, literally running down the corridor.
Two other crewmen stepped into the galley for coffee.
“Thank you, sir,” said one man.
“Thank you very much for the news, sir.”
Adler lifted his coffee cup in a sort of a toast.
This was a great crew.
A second later, the force of the huge explosion ripped the U-1055 completely in half, peeling back both open ends of the U-boat like a blooming flower.
Since the four bombs were packed in the food taken aboard, it was stored in the lockers beside the galley near the center of the boat.
The captain, the cook and several men in the galley area were obliterated instantly.
They never knew what happened.
The rest of the boat was caught completely off guard.
All water-tight hatches were open and the boat filled with water in less than five seconds.
First Officer Willie Hientz felt the explosion and was hit in the face with a steel hatch that was blown off its hinges.
The impact crushed his face and drove him into the bulkhead, splattering his brains across the cabin all over his men a millisecond before a wall of water crashed in on them.
The entire crew was dead before anyone could react. The U-boat was now well below 500 meters and plummeting toward the bottom to an unknown watery grave, thousands of meters at the bottom of the Atlantic.
Yes, the war was over; both for the U-1055 crew and for Germany.
But not the way Captain Ernst Adler, First Officer Willie Hientz and the crew had planned.
But it was over.
Back in Brazil, Karl Grimme checked his watch and smiled.
By now there was one less U-boat full of witnesses.
Twenty-two other U-boats who delivered gold had suffered the same fate as the U-1055.
More would follow.
The secret was still intact.
Present Day
Saturday, July 2, 2011