War and Remembrance (21 page)

“Seven knots, sir?”

“Are you deaf? Seven knots.”

“Seven knots. Aye aye, sir.”

The decision baffled Byron. Aster’s face went dead blank. At seven knots the
Devilfish
had little more than an hour of underwater propulsion left. Captain Hoban, in an attempt to be cautious, seemed to be invading the last margin of safety.

Plot reported the Japanese destroyer making a turn; and after a short interval, another turn. Sonar announced, “Up Doppler.” The destroyer was now closing the
Devilfish.
The power-consuming time dragged on, while in the conning tower Aster and the captain speculated on the pursuer’s last action. Had the Jap picked up a stray sonar echo? Had he by bad luck gotten an echo from a school of fish, in the submarine’s direction? Should they change course? Hoban elected to bear on toward the entrance. The sonar range gradually dropped to seven thousand yards; twenty minutes later, to six thousand — three miles. If the night was dark or rainy, Byron thought, they still might surface and flee at twenty-one knots. Why didn’t the skipper at least chance a periscope glimpse of the weather? As the range dropped to four thousand, the option to surface was dimming. Sonar pings now began reverberating faintly through the hull itself. Byron’s remaining hope was that the destroyer would pass without picking up an echo; but this faded too, when he heard Derringer announce below, in a sepulchral voice, that the destroyer was turning to a collision course.

Aster came scrambling up the ladder, eyes narrowed, dead gray cigar clenched in his teeth. “Battle stations, Briny.”

“What now?”

“Well, he’s found us, all right. The captain’s going to the bottom.”

“Will that work?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“For one thing, on how good his sonar is. Maybe he can’t screen out bottom return.”

Byron remembered this tactic from submarine school exercises off New London. Echo-ranging on a vessel on the bottom was inexact; the random return diffused the readings. Hurrying down the ladder to his post as diving officer, he saw Captain Hoban staring at the plot, where the destroyer’s pencilled course was curving in, dot by dot, toward the white moving point of the
Devilfish.

“Flood negative! Retract sonar head!” Hoban plunged for the ladder, shouting up through the hatch. “Lady, give me a fathometer reading and pass the word for all hands to stand by to ground! Hard right rudder!”

The submarine mushed downward, slowing and turning. Byron levelled off, well above fathometer depth. Shortly there came a jolt, another jolt, and the
Devilfish
settled, rocking and grinding, on the mud; according to the depth gauges, at the exact figure of the fathometer reading — eighty-seven feet.

Silence, dead waiting silence, in the
Devilfish;
outside, loud long-scale pings, and the mutter of propellers. On the dead reckoning tracer, the destroyer track moved closer and closer to the halted point of light. The propeller noise intensified. Derringer was getting no sonar ranges now, the attacker was too close; he was projecting the destroyer’s track by using his ears and his judgment. As Byron’s breath all but failed him, the pencil line passed the point of light, and slowly moved away. A sharp fall of pitch of the long-scale pings to down Doppler confirmed Derringer’s guesswork plot. All the men in the control room heard it — the young sailors, the young officer, the old chief— and all looked around at each other with wan hope.

How totally a submariner depended on the captain, Byron thought, how crucial was confidence in him! Though he had once hated Hoban, he had never until now doubted his skill; he had in fact resented his crushing superiority. Now the rat of panic was gnawing at Byron’s spirit. Was he in shaky or amateurish hands, after all, a hundred feet down in the sea in a long vulnerable metal tube, waiting for a ship on the surface to dynamite him to a vile death by drowning? Black seawater under terrible pressure gripped the thin hull; one opened seam, one blown valve, and his life would be choked out by flooding salt water. He would never again see Natalie, nor even once lay eyes on the baby he had fathered. He would rot on the floor of Lingayen Gulf, and fish would swim in and out of his bones.

This awareness of being in peril under water, which submariners
suppress but never for a moment wholly forget, was clamping a cold hold on Byron Henry. Not forty-eight hours ago, just before reporting to the Mars-man building, he had been jolting down a Manila boulevard in hot sunshine, perched in the back of a truck on a crated mine, jocularly drinking beer with his working party. And now —

Derringer said huskily, “Mr. Henry, I think he’s turning back.”

The pinging outside shifted to short scale.

Now fear stabbed Byron’s very bowels. This time the submarine was caught; caught dead on the bottom and almost out of power, and he was caught in it, and all this was no dream, dreamlike though the horror seemed. Death under the sea was now coming at him, screaming through the short-scale pings in malevolent rising glee,
“Found you! Found you! Found you!”

The faces in the control room took on one expression — stark terror. Chief Derringer was not looking at the plot, but staring vacantly upward, his heavy mouth wide open, his big fat face a Greek mask of fright; the man had five children and two grandchildren. The propellers came drumming and thrashing directly overhead once again —
KER-DA-TRAMM! TRAMM! TRAMM!
Morelli at the bow planes clutched his crucifix, crossed himself, and muttered a prayer.

Click, click, click,
like little pebbles or balls bouncing on the hull; it was the arming of the depth charges at their preset depth, though Byron did not know that this caused the noise. He too was praying; nothing complicated, just, “God, let me live. God, let me live.”

T
HE
block leader’s yells and curses rouse the Russian prisoners at 4:30
A.M.
from their uneasy dozing. It is the only sleep they can get, jammed three in a bunk in the cold and stench of the quarantine camp blockhouses, on straw pallets crawling with vermin. Getting down from his upper bunk for roll call, Berel Jastrow murmurs the obligatory
Hear O Israel
morning devotion. He should wash first, but that can’t be done, water is a hundred yards away and forbidden at this hour. He adds the Talmud’s brisk summary prayer for times of danger, and concludes,
“Yehi ratzon she-ekhye
— Let me live.” Next will come an hour or more of standing at attention in ranks, in the icy wind and darkness of the Polish midwinter, clad in a thin prison suit of striped ticking.

“Let me live” is a practical heartfelt plea. What with the heavy beatings at any provocation or none, and the physical drills that go on till the weakest drop, and the starvation, and the long roll calls of nearly naked men, in subzero frost, and the hard work — digging drainage ditches, hauling lumber, dragging rocks, demolishing peasant houses in the evacuated villages, and carrying the materials, sometimes several kilometers, to the new blockhouse sites — and what with the guards shooting on the spot men who falter or fall, or finishing them off with the butt-ends of their rifles, the roster of Russians in the quarantine camp at Oswiecim is rapidly shrinking.

The Soviet prisoners of war are in fact proving a major disappointment to the Commandant.

Draft after draft they arrive sick, emaciated, all but prostrate with exhaustion, in half the promised numbers, the rest having died on the way. With this deteriorated rubbish as a labor force he is supposed to execute not one but several urgent construction projects: to double the size of the base camp, located in the tobacco monopoly buildings and the old Polish army barracks; to lay out and man the ambitious experimental farms and fisheries that Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler plans as the real showpieces of the Auschwitz establishment; to erect a whole new camp of unprecedented magnitude out at Birchwoods, three kilometers to the west, accommodating
one hundred thousand prisoners of war
for labor in armament factories; and to commence surveying and preparing the factory sites! No German concentration camp
until now has held much more than ten thousand prisoners. It is a breathtaking job, an assignment to be proud of, a great chance for advancement. The Commandant realizes that well.

But he is not being given the tools. The whole thing would be impossible, if he did not have a solid base of Polish and Czech political prisoners who can still put in a good day’s work, and a steady supply of fresh ones. Only the strongest Russians, maybe ten percent of each draft, are of any use in the labor gangs. Given any feeding at all, these can still revive and do a job. Hardy fellows! But right there is the big problem: confusion from the top down about the true mission of the Auschwitz Interest Area, these forty square kilometers of marshy farmland allotted to the Commandant’s rule. Conscious of the responsibility entrusted to a mere SS major, he is eager to do a job. For a year and a half he has put heart and soul into Oswiecim. It was just a dismal swamp with a straggle of buildings and a few scattered villages when he came here in 1940 to start the camp up. Now it is looking like something! But what is really wanted of him? Maximum production for war, or maximum elimination of the nation’s enemies? He is still not clear.

The Commandant considers himself a soldier. He will do either job. He cannot do both at the same time! Yet contradictory orders come down in a steady stream. Take the very matter of these Russian POWs! In retaliation for the inhuman treatment of German prisoners in the Soviet Union, they are to be used “without pity.” For those with any trace of political responsibility, execution at once; for the rest, swift working to death, at slave labor on rations below what dogs need to survive.

…
Very fine, Reichsfiihrer Himmler; but how about the hundreds and hundreds of barracks, just by the way, that you’ve ordered me to build out in Birchwoods (Brzezinka, in the uncivilized Polish spelling adapted into smooth German as Birkenau). Oh yes, the barracks; and oh yes, the experimental farms; and oh yes, the factories! Well, well, let Sturmbannfuhrer Hoess worry about all that. Hoess is a chap who delivers. He complains, sends long pessimistic reports, declares assignments are impossible. But in the end Hoess carries out orders. There’s a chap you can rely on…

The Commandant values this reputation of his. Even in these heartbreaking conditions he means to maintain it, or kill himself trying. Like the next fellow, he wants to rise in the service, do well by his family, and all that. But Reichsfiihrer SS Himmler is taking advantage of his outstanding conscientiousness, and this sinks him in depression. It just is not fair.

In a cloudy noonday, shielded from the knifelike wind by a heavy greatcoat, the Commandant waits in the snow outside the crematorium for the arrival of the three hundred Russians. Combed out of several drafts as political officers or ratings, they have been sentenced to death by the military circuit court from Kattowitz. The Commandant has no quarrel with the
sentence. The life-and-death struggle with Bolshevism is what this war is about. If European culture is to be saved, no mercy can be shown to the barbaric eastern foe. It is just too bad that some of the condemned appear so ablebodied.

At least their deaths will not be a total waste. They will yield important information. Major Hoess accepts no optimistic reports of subordinates. He learned the hard way, as Rapportfuhrer in Sachsenhausen, to see things for himself. The tendency in a concentration camp chain of command is to lie, to cover up, to pretend that things are more efficient than they are. Reports on a previous gassing with the camp’s strongest insecticide of some condemned Russians in the cellar of Block 11, while the Commandant was off reporting to Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler in Berlin, have been contradictory. One subordinate, whose idea it was, claims they all died almost at once. Others say that it took forever for the Russians to croak; that they rushed one door of the cellar and almost broke it down, even as they were being gassed. What a hell of a mess, if they had actually forced their way out and released a cloud of that smelly poisonous blue stuff all over the main camp!

Just the usual thing, inattention to detail. The door wasn’t reinforced enough, and the supposed airtight sealing of the cellar was done with clay; what stupidity! This experiment in the morgue room of the crematorium is being run under the Commandant’s personal supervision. Airtightness has been tested with chlorine under pressure; satisfactory, just a faint sort of swimming-pool odor near the door, which has since had its rubber gaskets doubled up. The crematorium is off in the grassy area beyond the camp, not smack in the middle of the main buildings like Block 11. Just a little common sense!

The Russians approach — drawn, ghastly, with white-rimmed sunken eyes, in their ragged uniforms marked
SU
in huge black letters. They are flanked by guards with tommy guns. Their faces show awareness that they are going to their deaths. Yet their formation is good. Their wooden clogs squeak in the snow with a ghostly echo of military precision. Strange people! He has seen them in their work area, fighting like wolves over a dump of garbage from the SS kitchen, grasping each other by the throats for a rotten potato, snarling and cursing; he has seen them wandering like sleepwalkers, skin and bones, dead on their feet, impervious to the blows and threats of guards, crumpling and falling bloody to the ground without complaining. But put them in a formation, give them an order, a sense that they are in a group; and feeble and terrorized though they are, these Russians come to life and work and march like men.