The High Seas Fleet had spent much of the First War behind a screen of protective mines in its harbors at Kiel and Wilhelms-haven,
keeping a safe distance from the superior forces of the Royal Navy, allowing the British blockade to strangle Germany by methodically
starving her out. In the waning days of the war the admiral commanding the fleet had ordered the ships to sea in a suicide
mission to break the blockade, but their crews mutinied. They refused orders. Killed a number of officers. The Kiel mutiny
spread like a fever to other naval bases and led directly to the collapse of the imperial government, the abdication of the
Kaiser, and Germany’s capitulation to the Allies. Once in captivity in the Royal Navy anchorage at Scapa Flow, the officers
of the Imperial Navy schemed to save their honor by sinking the fleet.
Eight months after surrender, on a signal from the flagship, they opened the seacocks and scuttled their seventy-four ships,
ending the darkest chapter in German naval history.
Max looked down at the table now, too, as did others. When Ascher spoke again, his voice trembled. He said, “It would be better
to die than repeat this act, Herr Kapitän.”
Langsdorff sat silently, face slightly flushed. The cigar burned forgotten in his hand. Finally he said, “It will mean death,
I can assure you of that. In our present condition, with the Royal Navy amassed to meet us, we will have no chance. You may
choose this for yourself, Ascher, and I believe a captain’s fate cannot be separated from that of his ship, but we have given
our lives to this navy already and we are no longer young men. What shall we tell this lot of boys under our command? When
they ask why they are dying, what shall we say? I have already buried thirty-six of them half a world from home. I’ll be quite
sure of my purpose before I bury a thousand more.”
Max glanced up at Dieter, whose face was drawn, eyes burning. It was not a characteristic expression. Dieter’s father had
known the shame of the Kiel mutiny, had watched the ships go down at Scapa Flow; no doubt that terrible moment had been in
his mind when he hanged himself. Dieter had entered the navy to avenge his father, not to suffer his plight all over again.
Max could not hold his tongue.
“We have to at least try and fight,” he blurted out. “The men of this crew may be young, but they are navy men all the same.
They have sworn to protect the honor of the Kriegsmarine and they will fight if you will lead them, sir.” He stood and slapped
the table with the flat of his hand. “I, too, have devoted my life to becoming a naval officer, and I did not spend all those
years studying and training just to blow up my own ship. Has the Royal Navy ever done such a thing? In five hundred years?
Herr Kapitän, you know how the British will gloat if we scuttle her. Then who will be the ones submitting like dogs?”
Langsdorff fixed his stare on Max. “Yes, I know, Brekendorf, and you are so eager to die for valor. Perhaps they will bury
you with a Knight’s Cross around your neck, but I have been charged with the care of more than a thousand sailors, so I cannot
think only of myself. I know our young crew is brave and I know they will follow me. The question is whether my conscience
will allow me to lead them to slaughter for no good reason. Getting us all killed in a pheasant shoot will not help Germany
win the war.”
Langsdorff’s face seemed to have aged ten years in a week; the bones seemed closer underneath his skin. Max did not respond,
but neither did he turn his eyes away from the captain’s. He did not want to die—that much was certain—but he was prepared
to, as every fighting man must be.
Ascher said, “You have already made your decision, then, Herr Kapitän?”
Langsdorff nodded again. A faint, bitter expression—almost a smile—passed like a shadow over his features. He went on nodding,
saying nothing, for what seemed like a very long time.
_________
Max spent the next two days working in the officers’ mess, assisted by Dieter and two other officers. Gone were the solicitous
mess stewards. Around them,
Graf Spee
had grown silent save for the gentle hum of the engine that supplied electrical current to the ship. No tramp of feet, no
chisel against the deck, no cursing petty officers. Only a skeleton crew remained aboard. The ship was not quiet like a tomb,
Max thought, but like a museum toward the end of the day when the last group of youngsters has been ushered out and only the
charwomen remain to tidy up.
Dieter rose from his schematic drawing of the ship’s magazine and switched on the large wall-mounted radio. It was their last
evening in Montevideo. Above the radio, a faded square showed where the portrait of Admiral Graf von Spee had hung. It could
not be allowed to go down with the ship, and so had been sent ashore along with the ship’s bell, its war diary, and most of
the men.
The voice of an American announcer crackled from the radio speaker. Max and Dieter had been listening to the man’s reports
off and on for the last two days—listening as his voice alternated between shrillness and ponderous gravity. Tonight it was
shrill. “This is Mike Fowler reporting to you live. The scene here in Montevideo is unbelievable, ladies and gentlemen, simply
unbelievable. Tensions are at the boiling point here in Uruguay. Thousands—no, it must be tens of thousands—of people are
lining the harbor here in Montevideo, waiting to see how this drama will play out. It’s as if all of Brooklyn had gone to
Coney Island at once. People are jammed everywhere—on top of cars, hanging from lampposts, leaning out of buildings. Just
an incredible spectacle. Below me I can see the entire harbor, a huge circle ringed with docks and hotels and white sand beaches,
a lovely sight, ladies and gentlemen. Vendors are doing a land office business in ice cream and soda pop here today. The heat
is better than ninety degrees, but everyone is scrambling to get a look at the wounded Nazi battleship moored in the middle
of the harbor, and still no one knows what the Germans will do. Many in the crowd are eager to see a real naval battle right
here in the harbor. Blood will spill into the South Atlantic…”
Max got up to switch the radio off, but Dieter stopped him. “I want to listen.”
“Dieter, please. I can’t work with this racket.”
“Yessir, ladies and gentlemen, there will be blood in the water as a suicide squad of Nazi fanatics prepares…”
Max turned it off. “I cannot work with that idiot yelling in the background.”
Dieter held his hands up in surrender—a fitting gesture. For once he was without a response. Even Dieter’s swagger had dropped
away. He wasn’t bothering to hide his depression, his thin face pale from the strain.
“We have to finish these plans tonight,” Max said, dropping back into his chair.
Dieter sighed. He lit a cigarette and ran a hand up through his hair. “I don’t remember much about my father. It’s curious,
our mind, our memories—often I’m not sure whether things I remember about my father happened or whether I only wish they had
happened. But what I truly remember, and remember so clearly, are the old naval officers my mother boarded in our home. They
were bitter men, Max, mein Gott.” He laughed, a bitter sound in itself. “No victory, no glory, and after the war, barely enough
money to keep themselves fed. Every dignity stripped away. When I looked at them, I could see why my father had done what
he did. At first I was so angry with him. Killing himself—it seemed a terrible mystery to me. Later, I understood.”
Max lit a cigarette of his own. He didn’t know what to say. “This war will be different,” he offered, “no matter what happens
tomorrow. We’re not going to end up like those men.”
Dieter smiled.
The two friends sat for a moment looking at each other, Dieter puffing out perfect little rings of smoke. It was a trick Max
had never mastered.
In the morning, they began preparations to weigh anchor.
It took thirty minutes to unbolt the warheads from a half dozen sleek torpedoes. Max knew the torpedo mechanics could have
done the job in a fraction of the time, but they had all been sent ashore. Emil, one of the Dieselobermaschinists, did it
instead, whistling tunelessly as he went about his work. Each warhead was set gently onto a small trolley, and Max then led
the way to one of the ship’s elevators, his six-man crew following behind in a row with the yellow trolleys.
They rode the elevator all the way down to the refrigerated magazines on the lowest deck. One magazine, toward the bow, supplied
shot and powder to the forward guns, while another, toward the stern, supplied the after guns. Max left three of the warheads
in the corridor, then had his men push the other three to the forward magazine.
He produced the brass key—given to him by Ascher—and unlocked the magazine’s heavy metal door. A blast of cold air hit his
face. It felt wonderful amid the heat of the roasting ship. Max stepped through and held open the magazine’s double-sealed
door. Still whistling, Emil led the crew inside.
In the main powder room, wooden shelves—so made to prevent sparks—were bolted to the wall and piled high with silk powder
bags. The bags looked harmless, like so many sacks of flour. Max stroked one of them—it felt like lingerie—then jerked his
hand away. Each contained enough force to blow a six-hundred-seventy-pound shell twenty kilometers through the air. The sailors
looked about the magazine with keen interest. It was a secret, sacred space, strictly off-limits—none had ever seen it before.
Yet it was this powder, mixed in just the right way, measured in just the right amounts, that elevated
Graf Spee
from being merely a ship to a man-o’-war.
A hand signal set the sailors to work pushing and pulling the torpedo warheads through the double steel doors. Max felt the
chill air drying the sweat on his face and back. It was the first time he’d been cool since they arrived in this cursed place,
where it was so damned hot that a man could get third-degree burns if he touched the armor plating at midday. Only the giant
ventilating fans going full out and blowing fresh air into the ship made it remotely bearable. Hard to imagine what a thousand
men locked in a steel ship without ventilation would smell like—not pleasant.
His sailors manhandled the three warheads into the middle of the magazine. Still whistling, Emil piled powder bags atop the
warheads. Then he snapped to attention. “Completed, Herr Oberleutnant.”
Max nodded. The sailors were in no hurry to leave and neither was he. Oddly, the magazine did not seem like a forbidding place.
It was dark and cool, like a root cellar on a summer’s day. As in the officers’ mess, there was no sound this far down in
the ship except the faintly throbbing diesels. The bloodthirsty crowds on shore were a world away. Max felt an insane desire
to smoke and laughed at the thought. “Let’s get out of here before someone lights a cigarette,” he said, smiling. His men
laughed with him and filed out the double doors. Max paused and extracted the timer with the detonator from his pocket. All
his desire for glory and it had come to this—sinking his own ship. He set the timer, placed it atop the sacks of powder piled
on the warheads, and with that, he turned and left, locking the magazine door behind him and putting the brass key in his
pocket.
They repeated this procedure in the second magazine and Max emerged on deck afterward, blinded by the brilliance of the sun.
He blinked like a lizard. The sea of people along the harbor shore seemed to still be swelling, as if nothing this interesting
had ever happened in Uruguay before. They would get their damned show soon enough and to hell with them. Beneath his feet
the teakwood planking had become so hot that the varnish began to peel. Damn this forsaken place.
He motioned for his men to follow him to the stern of the ship, where one of the main fueling ports was located. Dieter’s
engineering crew, stripped to the waist and running with sweat, had wrestled the cover off the port and attached a coupling
that connected to a set of emergency fueling hoses.
Max set his men to work pulling the hoses along the deck to the aft companionway. There he stationed Emil and Krancke, a deckhand—son
of “the best-known taxi driver in all of Leipzig,” he liked to claim. They pulled each hose hand over hand and let the forepiece
with its brass cap play out down the metal stairs behind them. Two more sailors waited at the bottom to pull the hoses through
to the next stairway, at the bottom of which Dieter had posted two additional men. In this way each hose made its way down,
deck by deck, until it reached the top of the staircase descending to the lowest deck, where the magazines were located.
Only the morning before
Graf Spee
’s decks had been scrubbed and mopped, as they had been every morning during their war patrol. This was a German warship—no
dirt allowed—but soon the gleaming decks would run black with stinking fuel oil. The very thought provoked Max and made his
temples burn with anger.
Once the hoses were in place he assembled his men on the main deck and turned them over to Dieter. They came to attention
and saluted, sweat glistening like mineral oil on their bodies. Max was soaked and bedraggled, too. Sweat had leached all
the starch out of his white uniform. Unlike the men, orders forbade him from removing his shirt or tunic. Even his shoes were
damp, so much that they squeaked when he walked.
He climbed the narrow outboard staircase to the bridge and found it still and hot, even with the windows open. There was no
breeze in the harbor. The men in the engine room must be close to fainting.
Langsdorff stood alone on the bridge wing, smoking his cigar, watching the thousands of people on shore. The crowd’s buzz
drifted over the water, distant and indistinct, like the roar from a soccer stadium blocks away. Max came to attention and
saluted when the captain turned to face him.
“Completed, Herr Kapitän.”
Langsdorff touched his gold-braided cap in acknowledgment. “Prepare to get under way.”
Max saluted again, then picked up the engine room phone. “Order from captain: prepare to get under way.”