“A what?” Fraatz, Mueller, and Jurgen ask in unison Hans is about to reply when a second distant explosion echoes across the vessel, quickly followed by a third.
“More hits,” says Jurgen, standing in between the captain and the chief, his bald head glistening with sweat as additional explosions in the distance echo across the fifteen or so kilometers separating us. “There must be other U-boats in the area.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” says Fraatz, rubbing his bearded chin. “We were the only ones close enough to the convoy . . . according to BdU, and even then we had to carry out a surface attack or they would have gotten out of range.”
Mueller frowns, and so does Jurgen, but neither voices the concern glistening in their stares. There’s been a recent rumor about BdU occasionally using one or more submarines as bait to lure the escort vessels away from the convoy so that other U-boats could approach it safely for the kill.
The remote sound of twisting metal propagates across the water—the noise of sinking vessels, adding a degree of credibility to the rumor. The sound, however, is mixed with that of the approaching destroyer and the resonant pinging from the search vessels.
“I think there are at least four vessels sinking,” reports Hans, cautiously holding the right headphone to his ear. Acute hearing is not just the lifeline of a U-boat radioman, but it is also the eyes and ears of the submarine. Hans can’t afford to go deaf on us or all is lost. “The destroyer is getting closer. No depth charges yet. Contacts closing in.”
The sonar pinging intensifies. The escorts are still on us, despite whatever damage some of our boats are doing to the convoy. One can only assume that other escorts will deal with them.
“Depth charges in the water,” announces Hans, before removing the headphones.
“Here we go,” Fraatz mumbles toward the ceiling of the vessel while grabbing on to an overhead pipe as the destroyer’s propellers rumble over us.
Wham!
The first is far to the left and many meters above us.
Wham! Wham! Wham!
They are all going off at the wrong depth—
WHAM!
I loose my footing, crash against the instrument panel behind me, nearly impaling myself on a lever at—
WHAM! WHAM!
Rivets pop, sparks fly, flames erupt, light bulbs explode, raining on us, mixing with seawater and—
More explosions rattle the ship, turning everything into an ear-piercing blur. As one blast shoves the vessel—and everyone in it—in one direction, another blast counters it, the acoustic force crushing me like an invisible hammer, pounding every last bone in my body with animal strength.
Then silence again.
I’m on my back staring at the array of pipes and wires running along the ceiling. Sailors are already on the move, some extinguishing the fire, others jumping right over me hauling tools to plug leaks.
“Damage report!” demands Captain Fraatz, holding a bloody handkerchief to the side of his face while standing next to the chief, who appears unharmed, his eyes on the depth meter.
I stand with some difficulty and try to move out of the way—though in such confined quarters you are always in the way and must learn to move aside quickly.
My body is aching all over, but my jaw is really throbbing, and I realize that I’m not only bleeding from my mouth, but there’s something loose in there. Spitting, I see two of my teeth splashing the floor along with a mouthful of bloody saliva. I remember what one submariner told me once about the massive energy of depth charges being capable of dislodging sailors’ teeth.
The U-boat men are already back on top of their vessel, making repairs, going over their damage reports: seawater wetting batteries in the engine room; busted navigation gear; damaged periscope tower; flooding torpedo room; broken gauges, electrical systems, and radio gear.
But the chief is holding his depth, and there appears to be enough juice left in those batteries to keep us running at silent speed for a while, though eventually we will be forced to surface—but hopefully not until we have lost them. I doubt we’d last more than a few moments on the surface before one of those rounds ripped us in half, as Mueller confessed happened to a number of U-boats in recent months.
For a moment the cold streets of Stalingrad don’t seem all that bad. And the streets of New Haven seem even better still.
The mood is a bit jovial as I’m sitting at dinner with Captain Fraatz and his staff. I guess it must be something to do with staring at death in the eye and surviving.
Canned fish, cheese, rye bread, and black coffee glare at me, but I can’t get myself to eat. Not only is my mouth still throbbing, but my stomach is in knots from the attack two hours ago, soon before we heard our last enemy contact. We’ve maintained silent speed at one hundred and eighty meters while holding a northeasterly heading, away from the convoy and its deadly escorts. According to the captain, we will remain submerged for another three hours. By then it will be dark, reducing the chances of someone spotting us when we surface. Meanwhile the crew has been working on all of the repairs that can be carried out while submerged. The rest will have to wait until we surface.
“What’s the matter, Johan?” the captain asks, calling me by my German middle name—the name I’ve been using ever since leaving America. My friends back in Connecticut knew me as Michael J. Mosser.
“What do you mean, sir?” I ask.
“U-boat food isn’t good enough for a war correspondent officer?”
Everyone laughs. Chief Mueller, sitting next to me, pats me on the back, though the man doesn’t know his own strength, nearly sending me bouncing over the table.
“Ah . . . it’s my mouth, Captain. I lost two teeth back there.” I stretch my thumb in the direction of the control room, where no doubt my molars are still floating somewhere near that poor bastard’s eyeball in the ankle-deep water that accumulated before all leaks could be sealed. Since the main bilge pump was damaged in the attack, we can’t remove the water until we surface.
Oberleutnant Fredric Jurgen, sitting next to Captain Fraatz, grins while hooking his index finger beneath his upper lip, lifting it, exposing the entire left side of his brownish teeth. He is missing roughly half of them. Mueller goes next, revealing four missing molars, and it’s the same with Hans, who has taken a break from his radio duties to have dinner with us.
“What about you, Captain?” I ask, my new battle scars making me feel like a part of his team. “How many have you lost?”
Fraatz smiles and slowly shakes his head, which is sporting a small cut from when he banged his head against a pipe. “I intend to finish this war with all of my body parts.”
Mueller nods and gives me another love tap with one of his gorilla hands. I grimace. Not only is my body aching all over, but now this brute keeps on beating me. He says, “The captain claims to have found a way to avoid losing teeth in the middle of a depth-charge attack, isn’t that right, Captain?”
“It’s all in the laws of physics, Thomas,” he tells Mueller.
“Speaking of physics,” says Jurgen, rubbing a hand over the purple lump he earned on his bald head during the last round, “how many charges did those bastards drop on us?”
“Eighty-nine,” says Mueller without hesitation. “Forty-three in our near vicinity.”
Fraatz nods. “Not bad. Not bad at all.”
I’m staring at him in disbelief. Not bad? We’ve got the living hell kicked out of us and this man across from me says not bad?
“It’s our hull, Johan,” Fraatz explains in reply to the facial expression that I must have made. “The pigs can’t kill us with depth charges unless they can place them within three meters of us. Otherwise our hull will not give.”
“It will bend,” says Mueller, clasping his hands in what looks like a crushing motion, his gigantic biceps trembling beneath his pale skin. “It will twist, and shift, and compress . . . but it will not give.”
“Most of the time, anyway,” clarifies Fraatz.
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“And combine that with our efficient evasive tactics,” says Jurgen, “and what you have is a very unnerving and loud weapon, as you have experienced firsthand, but not a direct threat.”
“Although,” Fraatz says, “we have lost a number of vessels to those charges.”
“True,” says Mueller, “but seldom from a direct hit. It’s nearly impossible to place a charge that close to us. However, many U-boats have sunk because of accumulated damage from repeated depth charge attacks, sometimes as many as three or four hundred charges dropped in a matter of a couple of hours. That’s why it is so important to get away from the threat fast, even if it means diving this deep.”
“Be sure to put that in your article, Johan,” Fraatz adds.
As they all stare at me, the obvious question pops in my mind, and being the investigative journalist that I like to believe I am, I ask, “So . . . how do you kill a submerged U-boat if not by depth charges?”
Their faces become stolid beneath their shaggy beards, and all eyes gravitate to Fraatz, who regards me with his steel-blue stare.
“Have you ever heard of U-335, Johan?” he asks.
Everyone drops their gaze.
I did some level of research on U-boats before coming aboard, but Germany being Germany, most of the reports I could find were related to successes. Information on U-boat sinkings—and any other type of bad news for that matter—was strictly controlled by Berlin. Being a war correspondent, however, allowed me to gather morsels of uncensored intelligence as it floated through our field offices. I think I remember hearing something about U-335. “Didn’t we lose her during a storm?” I finally offer. Fraatz sighs. “I’m sure that’s what got released at BdU, but any submariner will tell you that the odds of a U-boat sinking because of a storm are as high as our chances of sinking an American destroyer with one of our torpedoes—negligible. If a gale develops, we simply submerge, where all is calm, and then steer away from the storm before resurfacing.”
Now that I think about it I realize how bad a lie that was.
“Then . . . what happened to U-335?”
“August third, 1942, in the North Sea northeast of Faeroes,” Fraatz says. “A British submarine snuck up to it and sunk it with three torpedoes.”
I’m stunned. “A British submarine?”
They all nod slowly, in unison, with obvious respect. “What type of boat was U-335?”
“VIIC, just like ours,” says Mueller, whose cheerful mood has vanished.
I am trying to comprehend how anyone could possibly approach this vessel unannounced. I guess I was under the impression that while the Americans and the British controlled the surface, Germany was still king of the deep. “What about the hydrophone?”
Hans, who is wearing a dark turtleneck sweater, shrugs beneath the dim yellow light from one of our surviving lightbulbs.
“Mistakes happen,” says Jurgen, his tired stare dropping to a creased photograph he has produced from a side pocket. It’s a group of young officers crowding the conning tower of a submarine as it left port. He tosses it at me. “The one wearing the white cap is Kapitänleutnant Hans-Hermann Pelkner, captain of U-335, and an old drinking buddy of ours.”
“We knew most of those men, Johan,” says Fraatz. “Hans-Hermann and I took the same commander’s course back at Danzig. The report we got through the U-boat radio channel, according to a single survivor from the attack, is that following the first torpedo hit, the crippled submarine made it to the surface for a few moments, enough for one man to make it out before two more torpedoes sealed the fate of the remaining crew. Another U-boat in the vicinity reported that the second and third torpedoes didn’t kill everyone aboard U-335 right away. The radioman of the witness U-boat heard the men banging the hull with wrenches and pipes as it sank below three hundred meters, where the hull cracked like an eggshell, killing all remaining hands. BdU censored the report filed by both the surviving sailor and the commander of the witness U-boat, who, in addition to rescuing the survivor, also tried to hunt the British submarine but lost contact soon after the attack. As before, we got the uncensored news through the U-boat channel.”
Silence, followed by, “And that, Johan, is one way to kill a U-boat.”
My mind is now going in different directions. I’ve heard of this secret U-boat channel, which exchanges information using the same Enigma coding system used for official communications with BdU. I intend to get more information on this unofficial—and probably illegal—channel, but at the moment I’m more interested in getting a tutorial on the uncensored threats facing our U-boat fleet. I ask, “Is that the only . . . submarine attack against our boats?”
Fraatz and Mueller exchange a glance, before the skipper nods once, allowing the chief to bring me in the know. “This is strictly off the record,” Mueller starts. “Agreed?”
This not being the first time a source has asked for confidentiality before providing me with inside information, I give this giant sitting next to me a single nod, doing my best to convey the fact that I’m not new to such informal privacy agreements.
“If we find out otherwise . . .” Jurgen says, letting his words trail off while planting his elbows on the table, his oval-shaped face a foot from mine. “You will wish you were never born.”
Mueller rests one of his oversized hands on my neck and gives me his version of a massage, though I get the strange feeling that he can snap my neck at will. “We will find you, Johan,” he says. “We will shove your skinny little ass inside a torpedo tube and blow you into the ocean at one hundred meters so you can experience what those sailors aboard U-335 felt as the pressure crushed them when the walls of their vessel gave, unleashing the fury of the depth on them.”
I try to reply. The words form in my mind but are choked in my throat as I shift my gaze between the officers, who regard me with the same dead calmness that I saw earlier today, when I thought the world was collapsing over me.
After a seemingly endless awkward moment, Fraatz grins, then Jurgen, Hans, and the others. Mueller gives me another one of his love taps while making a sound that resembles a train engine pulling out of station. He is laughing.
“Did you see his face, Captain?” says Hans, slapping the table with mirth. “I thought Johan was going to piss on himself!”
They are all laughing very hard now at my expense, and a moment later I join them, nodding before saying, “All right, all right. I’m glad I could provide you with some entertainment.”
“I like you, Johan,” says Mueller, clamping my neck again while shaking it, his eyes wet with amusement. “Can I keep him, Captain?” daughter explodes again, but quickly dies down when Fraatz says, “Including U-335, we have lost six of our boats to submarines. This fact, of course, is kept as secret from the public, as are also other very effective enemy weapons, like the Hedgehog.”
“The Hedgehog?” I ask, gently moving my head away from Mueller to get his hand off of me.
Mueller sets it on the table and says in the engineering tone that he takes when explaining anything technical, “The Hedgehog is a projector-type weapon that launches many small projectiles hundreds of feet ahead of the suspected location of the submarine. After entering the water, these projectiles arm and explode either on contact with the U-boat or when they reach the bottom of the ocean. They look like needles in the ocean, which is how the name was derived. We have lost a considerable number of boats to them, as well as to Fido.”
I’m beginning to have difficulty keeping track of all the facts and hope to remember everything later on—not that I can really reference any of this directly in my article. Even if the torpedo-tube threat was an idle one, my superiors in Berlin would have me shot for writing anything that would stain our national pride. But as a journalistic reporter, it is my job to get the full picture prior to writing an article. “What is Fido?” I finally ask.
“A new type of torpedo that uses sonar technology to home in on a submarine,” explains the chief engineer in his lecturing
voice. “We suspect that the British submarines are using them—and in fact that’s how U-335 might have been sunk—but what makes this weapon particularly deadly to us is the fact that it can also be launched from an airplane. There is no known evasive technique at the moment. All a captain can do is dive hard and hope to lose it in the thermal layers. BdU, however, is working on a decoy system.”
Fraatz and Jurgen shake their heads before the latter says, “Thomas you know quite well that if those decoys are as good as the damned Zaunkoning, we might as well take our chances without decoys.”
“What is a Zaunkoning?” I ask.
Fraatz frowns. “I’m disappointed at the level of knowledge of our war correspondents these days.”
All I can do is shrug.
After letting his comment hang in there for another moment, the captain nods at the chief engineer to continue my education.
Mueller says, “The Zaunkoning, or T5 torpedo, was advertised by BdU scientists as the ultimate escort killer, fired from any depth and designed to lock on to the loudest noise after a run of four hundred meters. Problem is that the loudest noise sometimes turned out to be the U-boat itself.”
“You mean the torpedo would double back and . . .”
“Yes, Johan. Kaboom,” says Fraatz extending his arms. “We lost three boats to our own T5s before we came up with a change of strategy when firing it and passed that information to the fleet through the U-boat channel. But by then the British and the Americans had deployed a noise-making decoy that they now tow behind their vessels, confusing the T5s. There is a lot of technology being developed by the enemy to hunt and kill U-boats that the BdU, by orders of our Führer, does not distribute to U-boat commanders right away, thus depriving crews of valuable information. So we rely on our informal channel to let each other know what we have experienced—of course that’s when the crew survives the attack, or, like in the case of U-335, when someone witnesses the kill.”
When I signed up for this submarine mission in November of 1942, I was under the impression that Germany still had a chance to win this war, even with the less-than-stellar Russian Campaign. After all, we did control all of Europe. What I have just heard, however, makes me wonder if we even have a chance anymore, reinforcing my fear that I made a paramount mistake by coming here rather than remaining in America.
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