A slow chill spread through Max’s body as he watched them struggle in the falling rain. Pulling his eyes away from the scope,
he wiped them with the back of his hand and then looked into the eyepiece again. A throng gathered on the ship’s deck, bodies
rushing up from below, some clinging to the stanchions now. Braver or more desperate souls leapt into the sea as the slant
of the deck increased. People in bright orange lifejackets spread out like a terrible stain from the side of the stricken
vessel. The chill flooded him completely as he realized what he’d done.
He had sunk a passenger ship.
Lehmann touched Max on the shoulder and Max stood back, mouth hanging open in shock. His crew had stopped buzzing and fallen
dead silent, aware from his expression that something was amiss. Lehmann looked through the periscope briefly and then stepped
back. “We cannot help them,” he said. “Strictly verboten.”
Max ignored him, staring through the eyepiece again. In the water, women clutched children to keep them from drifting away.
The three lifeboats that had been launched were packed to capacity.
“We cannot help them!” Lehmann repeated, almost shouting, his voice shrill in the cramped control room.
“Back to your posts!” Carls ordered the men, and even the officers obeyed.
Max continued to stare. How many were there? Two hundred? The steamer was on her beam ends now, stern rising, propeller still
turning, her bottom dirty red. Then she was gone, leaving nothing but a whirlpool of boiling foam behind.
They were over one hundred kilometers from land with a storm kicking up. Max knew all the people in the water would die unless
he rescued them.
He backed away from the periscope and tried to collect his thoughts. They would never fit two hundred passengers aboard the
U-boat. He banged his head against the scope. He couldn’t call out for aid, but neither could he leave so many innocent people
in the water to drown. It was impossible to say which shame would be greater.
Turning around, he saw Carls and Ferret staring at him along with the rest of the control room crew. Lehmann had disappeared.
The lifeboats drifted farther away with every minute he stalled. Perhaps he should just allow that, allow them to drift off
until he could no longer see the people struggling in their lifejackets in the swell, coughing up seawater. When the storm
set in, mothers would be separated from their children, who would float along on the endless ocean until they died gasping
for breath, seawater filling their lungs—the same way Max would die when
U-114
finally met her destiny.
He looked through the scope again, he couldn’t say how long. No one in the control room seemed to be breathing. Max knew what
was required of him, but he would rather die than do it. He wanted just to stand there silently in the limbo of indecision
forever. He wanted to have nothing required of him anymore, but that was not one of the available choices. “Stand by to surface,”
he said. He scanned the sky for planes and, seeing none, stepped away from the periscope. “Chief, take us up.”
“Halt!” Lehmann cried, reappearing with a Luger in his hand.
“Leutnant Lehmann, achtung!”
Lehmann didn’t move. He had the pistol trained squarely on Max’s chest. “We will not surface. I am taking command of this
U-boat now, you traitor. Our orders expressly forbid us from offering aid to the enemy.”
“Leutnant,” Max said, “you are under arrest.”
Lehmann took a step forward and raised the pistol to Max’s face. He was just beginning to say something when the chief brought
a heavy steel flashlight down on the back of his head. “Bloody hell,” the chief grumbled, stepping over Lehmann’s crumpled
body to retrieve the Luger.
“Tie his hands and put him in my cabin,” Max ordered Carls. “Chief, take us up.”
Compressed air hissed into the diving tanks, pushing the water out, and the U-boat broke the surface in a welter of spray,
like a whale coming up for air. Max climbed to the bridge, followed by the lookouts. They were no more than a kilometer from
the lifeboats and the bobbing mass of people in the water. “Left full rudder,” Max ordered. “Ahead dead slow.”
The eyes of the passengers fixed on the U-boat as she approached. Everyone in the lifeboats stopped talking to look, those
in the water stopped their flailing around, terror on every face. Slowly the boat came on. Max reduced power till he lay still
in the water just meters downwind from the lifeboats. Except for the slapping of the waves against his flanks, the silence
was complete. A light rain came down, dark clouds on the horizon threatening more. A warm, damp wind played over Max. The
storm would be on them soon. Time was critical but something still held him back, though he knew the choice had already been
made. This would be the end of his reputation and career; he would become infamous throughout the Kriegsmarine as the man
who scuttled his U-boat to rescue some enemy civilians. What would Eckhardt say? Max’s father? Mareth? Surely she would understand
that he was a warrior, not a murderer. Certainly there was a difference. There had to be.
Carls cleared his throat at Max’s side. “Shall I rig lifelines on the deck, Herr Kaleu? With so many people…”
“Very well. And bring up pistols for the bridge crew. No enemy men below, only women and children. Understand?”
“Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”
Carls shouted orders down the hatchway and coils of bright manila rope were soon coming up through the hatch. Then the Lugers
were handed up and Max passed them out to the lookouts along with his instructions. Never give any man a gun without instructions
on when to fire it, they’d always told him at the Marineschule.
The people in the water and those in the lifeboats continued to stare at the U-boat with uncertain faces, less terrified now
because Max hadn’t machine-gunned them yet. He wiped the rainwater from his brow and cupped his hands around his mouth, feeling
the roughness of his patchy whiskers. “What ship?” he yelled.
Nothing. He could hardly believe what he was doing. He didn’t want to die, but at least death would be over quickly enough.
This was a shame that would follow him forever. “What ship?” he yelled again.
A man stood in one of the lifeboats, showing the blue tunic and gold rings of an officer. “R.M.S.
Dundee
, Red Star Line in passengers and mail for Kingston.”
They were British. Of course they would be. These same damned people were obliterating Berlin with their bombs, massacring
women and children, and now Max was wrecking his own life to save a few hundred of them.
The officer continued to stand, looking up at Max. The rain was coming thicker now and if he didn’t get the passengers aboard
soon they would all be lost. Nothing reduced visibility at sea like rain. He had to do it now—there was no going back. “Are
you in command?” Max asked the officer.
“I am. First Officer Wilkes, sir. Cap’n’s wounded, unconscious, sir.”
“I want these people in the water to swim to the U-boat. Understand?”
“To the U-boat, sir?”
“That’s right.”
“You—you’re rescuing them, sir?”
“Correct.”
The officer nodded slowly but said nothing, seemingly shocked into silence.
Max called for the megaphone to be sent up. “Attention those in the water,” he shouted into the mouthpiece. “Swim for the
U-boat. I repeat, swim for the submarine.”
At first no one reacted, but Carls and his men were stringing lifelines from the bridge to the bow and throwing rope ladders
down the side, and gradually some of the passengers began to move. The first man reached the boat and climbed one of the ladders,
two crewmen pulling him up onto the deck. Carls pointed to the foot of the bridge tower and the man walked there and sat like
an obedient schoolboy.
Max wondered how many people he could fit along the foredeck. Maybe a hundred, and another hundred on the aft deck. He just
might be able to get everyone aboard if he put some of the women below.
Seeing that the man who’d come aboard had not been shot by the German sailors, the other passengers in the water approached
the boat en masse. Waves knocked some against her battered hull and they were cut by the rough metal. One small boy bashed
his head and Max had to summon the medic, who sewed the lad up as he wailed from the pain.
Carls hung from a ladder, pulling other children from the water with one hand and setting them on the deck. Adults climbed
the rope ladders themselves and sailors posted along the deck helped them up. More and more people crowded onto the foredeck
in their orange lifejackets, creating a solid block of color. No one seemed hysterical, Max noted, though many were shivering,
soaked and crowding together in the rain as the storm moved in, the waves growing larger, slapping the boat and rolling her
in the seaway. Without the rope, some of the Brits would have been pitched off the deck.
The foredeck filled and Carls began leading people aft, passing down the side of the bridge. Many of the faces turned up to
Max as they went by. Some nodded. An RAF man gave him a stiff salute; a woman with a child in her arms held his eyes with
no expression; a man in a brown suit gave him a toothy smile and two thumbs up. Max just stared down from his place on the
bridge, unsure of how to feel. He could see that the passengers were still tense. To them he was the Hun, the devil incarnate,
one of the sea wolves. No doubt these same people cheered when they heard that some German city had been pounded flat by British
planes. He wondered what any of them would do in his place, if they were in command of an Allied sub and the water were full
of German civilians.
It was time for Bekker to send out the signal, but again Max hesitated. The rain felt good on his face. He thought about his
days at the Academy, about standing rigid in formation in the quadrangle for inspection in rain just like this, but much colder;
about the many times he’d fallen asleep in geometry class; about the night he and his crewkameraden had silently carried the
Kommandant’s small BMW down to the waterfront and left it. He thought of going aloft with Dieter on their training barque
in the Baltic to reef the sails, and of those days aboard
Graf Spee
, the great ship buffed and gleaming. The impending order cast a shadow across these memories. When he was first admitted
to the Marineschule, his father had been required to post a bond of eight hundred marks, subject to forfeit if Max didn’t
perform to the required standard. He hoped the old man had gotten the money back because, if not, he’d certainly not see it
now. Finally Max called down the hatchway: “Radio.”
“Ja, Herr Kaleu?”
“Send on the six-hundred-meter band: ‘Have torpedoed British liner R.M.S.
Dundee
. Many passengers in water.’ Give our position. ‘Commencing rescue operations. Require immediate assistance. Will not attack
provided I am not attacked. German U-boat
114
.’ Keep sending.”
“Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”
He got them all aboard in the next hour, most squatting on the deck now, jammed together like spectators at a soccer match.
Room had been made below for a handful of the women and children, strange visitors aboard a U-boat, and they stared quietly
around, eyes wide with fear. Cigarettes had been distributed on deck, by whom Max didn’t know, and some people huddled together
smoking under their sodden coats. It seemed that once he’d made the terrible decision, the sailors had taken over. Certainly
they had performed the whole operation with few orders from him. Blankets appeared on deck, along with hot coffee. Iodine
came up from below. Towels were brought up, too, so the people covered with fuel oil could begin to scrub it off. Fortunately
the oil slick had been on the far side of the ship and most of the passengers had avoided it. The rain was steady now. They
clung to the lifelines to keep from sliding off the rolling deck.
And so the long wait began. Max held his place on the bridge and tried to think through their surrender. The Americans would
get him and they would get his men, but he would see them all in hell before they got his boat. But he knew it would be difficult
to prevent. Scuttling charges would have to be set in the engine room to blow the packings out from around the propeller shafts.
A massive jet of water would then pour in and the boat would go quickly by the stern: four minutes or less. The timing would
be critical. First the passengers would have to be taken off, then most of the crew. Then, under the guns of a U.S. Navy warship,
he would have to hold off a boarding party and blow the charges. Whoever was left on the boat would have to jump for it. He
would have to quickly make his way from the stern to the main hatch of the sinking U-boat, or he’d never get out.
Max smoked as he considered these variables. They had scuttling charges on board and had practiced the procedure, but the
Naval War Staff had never planned for anyone to scuttle a boat under these circumstances, so there were no contingency measures
for him to look up in any manual. In war, despite training, improvisation proved to be the most crucial skill. Nothing could
actually prepare you for the absurdity of war. In any event, none of his men betrayed any hostility toward Max. They probably
realized he was saving their lives. The arithmetic of the U-boat force’s current loss rates was a secret to no one. The crew
understood that, if they weren’t killed on this patrol, they’d almost definitely be killed on the next one. Life as a POW
would be no holiday, but neither would it be a watery grave.
Four hours passed. The rain fell off, finally, and the cloud cover moved away, but the sea still pounded them, passengers
clutching the ropes for dear life. Max felt his heart jump as usual when the port lookout shouted, “Aircraft bearing green
zero nine zero!” His pulse raced, adrenaline shot through him, his knees went to jelly. But all he could do this time was
watch the plane through his binoculars as it came in. He just hoped the pilot wasn’t bent on blowing them up.
Sunlight gleamed on the fuselage as it began circling at a distance, drawing slightly closer when the U-boat did not fire.
The plane must be guiding the rescue ships to them. Its bomb bay doors remained shut. Before long the first destroyer appeared
on the horizon, smoke billowing from her stacks as she raced toward Max at full speed.