He saw a slit trench ten meters away, scrambled up, ran for it, rolled in just as the next bomb exploded. Behind him the Beau
Séjour disintegrated, its wooden splinters cutting down the sentries and anyone else close by. There had been no air raid
siren, no warning whatsoever, but this was hardly remarkable anymore. The RAF’s high-altitude Mosquito bombers were made entirely
of wood and German radar often failed to pick them up. Max watched from the trench as fire spread through the Beau Séjour’s
collapsing frame. If the Tommies had come two minutes earlier, he would have been killed.
This seemed, however, like a trifling stroke of luck since he was sailing off to his death, while his father, racked by bitterness
and heartbreak, waited for word of Max’s death to arrive at the jail in Kiel. How had all this happened? Barely four years
ago, Max had been a promising young naval officer with a beautiful fiancée and the world at his feet. He put a cloth over
his nose to block the stench of the diesel fuel, closed his eyes, and finally dropped off to sleep. It seemed no more than
five minutes before Bekker was shaking him gently awake. “Herr Kaleu?”
Bekker was the oldest man on the boat, a paper-pushing personnel clerk down to his wire-rimmed glasses. He still had the habit
of slicking his hair down with lime-scented brilliantine, as men had before the First War. Max smelled the lime before his
eyes were open. “Ja?”
“Message to captain, Herr Kaleu: ‘Convoy in sight
U-480
.’”
Max came bolt upright at the news. “How long did I sleep?”
“Eight hours, Herr Kaleu. First watch officer reports U-Boat Command is forming a battle line and instructed me to wake the
Kommandant.”
When a U-boat sighted a large convoy, it kept in contact with the convoy at a distance but refrained from attacking while
U-Boat Command summoned other boats to form a wolfpack that could attack in force. Dönitz had developed this tactic in the
twenties after his run as a decorated U-boat skipper in the First War. “Anything for us?”
“Nein, Herr Kaleu.”
Please God that it stayed that way. Loss rates in convoy battles could be as high as four boats in five—so many had gone to
the bottom in the last months that Dönitz had briefly pulled all U-boats from the North Atlantic. Now he’d sent them back
although nothing had changed. British escort ships were becoming more numerous and better equipped every week, with more effective
radar, more highly trained crews, and now continuous air support from Allied planes based in Greenland and Iceland. The swine
flew so high you didn’t even know they were there until an escort charged out of nowhere, guided onto you by the patrol plane.
Everything had changed since 1939, when U-boat skippers owned the seas. Prien sank a British battleship at anchor in Scapa
Flow in the first week of the war, for God’s sake, but now he was just as dead as all the other old bulls who turned down
Dönitz’s offer to become flotilla commanders or staff officers. Going after a convoy at this point was close to suicide. Max
felt shame admitting this to himself, but he wanted to be left alone to complete his mission to America.
He pulled on his white cap and went to the radio station. Bekker worked from a small niche on the starboard side and he handed
Max copies of the messages being sent to other boats from U-Boat Command, ordering them to the scene. Max took the typed messages
and plotted them on his tracking chart. The convoy was four hundred kilometers away. Please God, let that be far enough. Maybe
the little wooden marker that represented his boat on the huge green baize plotting table in Berlin would be overlooked. Maybe
even now someone at U-Boat Command was saying, “What about U-Max?” and the operations officer was replying that they were
too far away, or on a special mission.
Taking up the dividers every half hour, he marked their progress on the chart, trying to will the boat to go faster. He began
to relax when they were five hundred kilometers from the convoy. For the first time that day, he climbed to the bridge and
smoked, leaning against the stern anti-aircraft gun, watching their wake disappear into the twilight, the December wind strong
and cold, tugging at his hat and bridge coat. Whitecaps were everywhere, raised by the wind, and waves slapped against the
boat. The view seemed peaceful to his eyes—the gray-green waves, the clean blue of the sky, the ozone smell of the air, the
sun fading from yellow to orange as it dropped down toward the horizon—but Max didn’t relax. He knew this was an ocean at
war. Lehmann had the watch. He’d been looking on all day as Max marked off their distance from the convoy. Had he seen that
Max was afraid? Had he been afraid himself? Not even the most ardent National Socialist could be immune to the effects of
so many depth charge attacks—not even one like Lehmann, who had attended one of the Adolf Hitler schools designed to groom
young men for future leadership in the party and the nation. Whatever he thought, Lehmann had said nothing to Max about the
convoy. None of the officers had. Everyone wanted to make Florida, to be done with the Brits and winter in the North Atlantic,
where clothes froze to your body on the bridge, where you could never get warm, and where the constant rolling of the boat
left you listless and constipated, your belly full of rotten food. When Max descended into the boat for the evening meal,
he noticed a certain lightness among the men, and he knew they had all been praying along with him not to be summoned to the
convoy attack. They understood the casualty rates as well as he did, and Bekker kept them informed of the four-digit coded
messages he copied and deciphered for Max to read: “Message for captain, signal just received, ‘Liberator. Attacked. Sinking.
U-604
’”; “Message for captain, signal just received, ‘Attacked by aircraft. Sinking.
U-89
’”; “Message for captain, signal just received, ‘Attacked by destroyers. Sinking.
U-844
.’”
The fare wasn’t so bad yet, this early in the voyage: the bread wasn’t green, the butter hadn’t gone rancid, the vegetables
and meat were still fresh. Tonight they had potato pancakes, applesauce, roast pork with beans, and cake to finish it off,
but Max’s appetite was weak; it had been weak since they left Lorient.
Actually, he hadn’t had an appetite for several months—he’d lost ten pounds off his thin frame since the end of their last
patrol. He sat at the head of the small fold-down table that served as the officers’ mess and forced the meal down anyway.
The men were watching, and word that the captain was too tense to eat would spread quickly through the boat. He tried to keep
his face impassive, wondering as he plowed through the pork whether his poise would ever return—and whether, more immediately,
he might puke.
While the food still had a decent taste, the utensils were already greasy. No freshwater could be spared for washing dishes
on the U-boat, so the plates and dinnerware were washed in seawater with a special saltwater soap that didn’t work very well.
Max wiped his fork with a napkin as Uwe, the officers’ steward, set a piece of cake in front of him. He took a bite and willed
himself to smile. “Better than any cake I’ve had at home,” he said.
The other officers nodded politely. Max sensed they were relieved, but the meal had still been a quiet one, like every meal
since they returned to the boat. They had all lost their starch. Had the events of their last patrol not been enough to do
it, the others had returned from leave to find Lorient in ruins, the dockyard leveled, the Beau Séjour reduced to a charred
foundation. Of course the staff officers maintained their empty bravado—“All they did was kill some cows and burn up a few
trucks that we took from the French anyway”—but everyone knew the Luftwaffe didn’t have the strength to assault Allied naval
bases, while the Allied air forces acted with impunity. It wasn’t fair to the navy, having to deal with additional enemies
from the sky. Every officer in the U-boat force kept saying to whoever would listen, “Where is the Luftwaffe? Can they do
something, anything, to help?” Why did the Führer not get rid of Göring? Was it that the Führer didn’t know? Were these facts
being kept from him?
RAF Bomber Command and the U.S. Eighth Air Force were paving over rural Britain with new runways and covering those new runways
with the countless bombers churned out by factories in the United States.
America produces a new bomber every five minutes!
the Allies claimed in the propaganda leaflets dropped all over the coast of Brittany. Max believed it. He read through the
leaflets whenever he sat on the can, and propaganda or no, he was prepared to accept every grim boast they made—the evidence
plain to see in the wreckage throughout Berlin. But he was glad to have the leaflets all the same, since their constant supply
ensured the UBootwaffe would never run out of loo paper again.
Despite this windfall, the hotel’s destruction brought a marked decline in living conditions at Lorient. New quarters for
the crew were buried in the shelters underneath the giant concrete U-boat pens—sunless rooms full of stale air, dampness,
and the reek of petroleum. They barely offered any more comfort than the boat itself, and the men were often stuck in the
barracks at night. They could go into what remained of the town of Lorient only in armed groups; the French Resistance grew
stronger each week and killed German sailors with regularity.
_________
For the next three weeks the boat plowed through the Atlantic swells, taking green water over the bridge more than once. One
night it got so rough that Max submerged for six hours to let the crew sleep and have a meal. Trying to eat with any kind
of sea running was impossible; most of the food ended up on the deck. Not that this represented any great loss; by the time
they were halfway to America, the smell of petroleum had permeated even the canned food.
But there was something new in the air those three weeks later when Carls woke Max one morning—a heavy warmth that carried
with it a breath of seaweed. Florida. The temperature of the water around them had risen perceptibly during the night; Max
could even feel it when he touched the steel plating to which his bunk was fastened. “Where does the navigator have us?” he
asked Carls.
“Seventy-five kilometers east of Miami, Herr Kaleu.”
“Very good. Very good indeed. The crew?”
“Glad to be warm, Herr Kaleu. But nervous as whores in church. Never been up against the Amis before and they wonder what
it’ll be like.”
“So do I, Carls.”
“Can’t say as I know, sir, but I did meet some American sailors in Shanghai ten, maybe fifteen years ago. We was on a training
cruise aboard old
Emden
, Herr Kaleu, and ended up by accident in a bar with some American sailormen who were three sheets to the wind.”
“Perhaps you made a wrong turn on your way to divine service.”
“I believe that was it, sir. After a time I got to speaking in a way with one of the Amis. I don’t speak any of the English,
but he had a little German and proceeds to tell me that he didn’t think much of our Kaiser Wilhelm, and I’m not one for letting
any man say a word against the All Highest, so I punched him as hard as I could.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing, Herr Kaleu. Absolutely nothing. I had knocked him one on the jaw as hard as I could, but he didn’t move a muscle.
So I raised my hands up in surrender and said, ‘Beer?’ and he didn’t say nothing, but I get us two Tsingtaos and give him
one.”
“And?”
“He drunk his beer in one swig and broke the bottle over my head, Herr Kaleu.”
“Most Americans are more polite than that.”
“Do you think they’ll be as rough as the Tommies?”
Max put on his white captain’s hat. “Nothing could be as bad as the Tommies.”
“I’ll remind the Kommandant of that when the Americans begin dropping depth charges on our heads.”
Max shook his head and smiled. Thank providence for Carls—it would have been hard for him to manage without the big man’s
deft handling of the crew. Senior noncommissioned officers were worth a pocket full of gold, and the Kriegsmarine didn’t have
very many left. “We’re rare birds,” Carls had told Max on their last patrol. “Almost extinct. They’ll have us in the Berlin
Zoo soon.”
“Most of the birds in the zoo have been eaten.”
“Even more reason to put us somewhere safe, Herr Kaleu.”
He got off his bunk and went up to the bridge with Carls following behind.
“Dolphins, Herr Kaleu.” Max looked to the starboard and saw them racing the boat, arching clear of the water with their little
sidelong grins. They seemed to be having a good time.
“Look to your sectors!” Carls yelled at the lookouts. “This isn’t a pleasure cruise.”
Already the sun was hot on Max’s neck, the bridge armor warm to the touch. Was it safe to venture closer to shore in broad
daylight, or should he submerge and wait for nightfall? Maybe twenty-five more kilometers. “Stay alert,” he told the men.
“Stay alert.”
Around them the green water was marked by brown patches of seaweed floating on the surface. Max swept his binoculars in a
slow arc to stern, then to starboard, then past the bow to port, but saw nothing. Everything was quiet except for the rumbling
of the diesels as they turned over at full speed.
Max dropped below for thirty minutes to look over the charts with the navigator. When he returned to the bridge seagulls flocked
in the sky above them. He peered at the birds through his binoculars as they soared up, drifted down, wheeled in tight turns,
chasing one another in slow circles, diving occasionally for fish. In the far distance one of the gulls glided, wings fixed
like a plane.
“Alarm!”
“Go, go,” Carls yelled to the lookouts, almost tossing them below. Max landed on top of him in the control room, water already
hissing into the ballast tanks. Above them, in the conning tower, the helmsman shut and dogged the hatch.
“Hatch secure!” he shouted.
“All hands forward!” Max bellowed. “Get us down, Chief, down!” Red lights blinked up and down the passageway as the crew stampeded
for the bow, piling onto one another, the boat now pitching forward at an angle of fifty degrees.