Last Man to Die

by Michael Dobbs

  ‘OK,’ cut in Captain Eling. ‘Time to get out of here. Bring her up to snorkel height and engines to full!’ he commanded. The air-breathing snorkel broke surface, allowing the powerful diesels to kick in, and there was an immediate surge of power as the Diesel Obermaschinist threw the lever that poured fuel down the throats of the engines. There was a pounding from the propeller shafts, the boat vibrated, even the crockery rattled. The pretence was over.

  Eling flicked a switch above his head and spoke into a mouthpiece. ‘This is the Captain. U-909 is gone.’ A slight pause. ‘Good luck to you all.’

  ‘You marvellous bloody idiot!’ the hydrophone operator exclaimed. ‘Oesten’s boat. He’s making enough noise to wake the Bismarck!’ He bit his lip to control his uncharacteristic excitement. ‘He’s doubled back, bearing north-west.’

  The captain had grabbed the hydrophone headset, listening for himself. ‘He’s trying to draw them off and give us as much cover as he can,’ he said, sharing with the rest of the crew, but quickly he grew silent, unable to find the words as the sacrifice was offered up and greedily accepted. Eventually he muttered between clenched teeth. ‘They’re on to him, caught him in their asdic. Two, maybe three of them.’ The crump of depth charges was faint, in the distance, scarcely audible above the sound of the stretched engines. More minutes passed until he had heard enough. Reluctantly he handed the headset back to the hydrophone operator and moved across to the intercom. ‘Gentlemen, we’re on our own now.’

  They had no time to grieve. It was precisely four seconds later when they heard the sound of asdic pinging across the steel hull of their craft, reaching out for them, grabbing at them, pouring ice into their hearts.

  Josef Goebbels sat stroking the blonde hair of his youngest child, Heidi, not yet six. She had fallen asleep in his arms as he told stories of fiery dragons and shining knights, and she lay with a look of sublime peace, oblivious to the noise. Across the room her five brothers and sisters, directed by the eldest, Helga, were singing to the accompaniment of an accordion, and as their treble voices rose higher and higher the faces of their parents glowed with pride. The mood of celebration was being matched at many points around the Bunker and Reich Chancellery, although nowhere with such simplicity or innocence.

  ‘They sing like angels,’ he whispered.

  ‘Didn’t you once write that children were the bright ideas of God?’

  He looked up to share a momentary smile with his wife, a rare event nowadays. They had long since ceased sharing anything of personal value, beyond the children. And their devotion to the Fuehrer. It was that which had kept them together – or, more accurately, his explicit refusal to allow them to part and his instructions to continue with their hollow form of marriage. He couldn’t afford a public scandal amongst the Party leadership. So their spats and screaming rows and infidelities had been covered up – after all, who better than the Minister of Propaganda to ensure not only what was printed, but what was left out of the newspapers. It had always been an unlikely alliance, the diminutive stump-legged academic with the crooked teeth, pinched face and a body which looked as if it had been squeezed in a vice, matched against the highly-strung society beauty covered in expensive silk from the finest Italian couturière. But there were the children, it hadn’t all been wasted.

  ‘Josef, there can be no doubt, can there?’

  They broke off to join in the singing of the chorus before he answered her.

  ‘No, Magda. I heard it myself on the BBC and the news has been repeated for several hours. The American radio is playing solemn military music. There’s no shred of doubt. Roosevelt is dead.’

  ‘The Fuehrer is so happy, and I am so happy for him …’

  Goebbels had heard the news driving back from an inspection of the front. He had immediately telephoned the Fuehrer, only to discover Magda already with him, celebrating. She often saw as much of the Fuehrer as he did, and had always had a more personal relationship. Again, as he had many times over the years, he wondered whether they had been lovers. He once overheard an adjutant in the Reich Chancellery joking that he could hear Magda’s ovaries clanging every time she entered the same room as the Fuehrer. Goebbels had the adjutant posted to the Russian Front, but he couldn’t dispose of his own suspicions so easily. On another occasion she had come back from one of the intimate tea parties, just the Fuehrer with Magda and one of the secretaries, and she had been flushed with pleasure and physical energy. She had insisted they make love and had been drenched in her own excitement before she had even taken off her clothes. And she had always been viciously jealous of Eva Braun.

  But, no, decided Goebbels, it was probably not so, just an affair that had never grown beyond the idea and the wish. In any case, what did it really matter, when he and the Fuehrer were building the greatest Reich Europe had ever known and when, at their desperate hour of need, fate was once again smiling on them?

  ‘It is a sign, I’m sure,’ he continued. ‘Roosevelt choking on all the blood he’s spilled. And Hencke, a German hero about to become folk legend, on his way home. Death and Deliverance, the two mightiest weapons of war, all at once thrust into our hands.’

  He looked at his wife. She was no longer the beauty he had married; the war and child-bearing had taken their toll on her nerves, which had never been robust. The pencil-thin eyebrows were now just other lines on her face, the soft hair which had lain on so many pillows was dull and brittle, and the lips had begun to sag. They had all of them become old and wrinkled, of course, but somehow in women it carried less well. No, if Der Chef wanted her, he was welcome to her.

  ‘What was the Fuehrer doing when you left him?’ Goebbels enquired, as the children struck up a new tune and Heidi stirred. He placed a gentle finger on her lips to soothe her back to sleep.

  ‘He was reading a book,’ his wife replied. ‘Something about Frederick the Great, I think …’

  They were almost home. Only a few hours sailing from the safety of the mainland and its air cover, when the final bombardment began. They had been fortunate up to that point, driven along by the twin screws and their fear, every change in sea temperature and salinity confusing the enemy asdic, throwing him off balance for a few miles more, slowly eating up the distance between themselves and home. Somehow they had survived, the screws had kept turning, and for a couple of hours they had thought the sacrifice of their compatriots might be enough. But, deep down, they had always known it was hopeless. They couldn’t evade the most experienced sub-hunters in the world, not for ever. The nearer they got to home, the shallower the seas, the closer they were forced to the surface and so their last hiding place disappeared.

  The captain had ordered both engines to low revs in order to kill any trace of noise from the submarine, but the steel hull of U-494 had been caught by asdic in coastal waters with nowhere to run. Their hunters were getting closer, the insistent noise of asdic mixed with the thumping of turbines and propeller wash to form a cocktail of madness which each submariner feared would strip him of his courage and make him run screaming through the craft. But no one did, this was Eling’s crew. So they waited to die. There was a crescendo of noise, a lip bitten to flesh, and the hunters were overhead and past. A whispered prayer. Could they have missed? For a moment without end there was stillness. As one, the crew took a sharp inward breath, knowing it might be the last. Instinctively hands reached out for support, a stanchion, a pipe, an instrument panel, anything which might brace them and help guard against the blow. Then it struck.

  Hencke was thrown aside and his arms all but wrenched from their sockets as 250 pounds of amatol exploded 20 feet above the rear torpedo compartment, forcing the stern savagely down towards the bottom of the North Sea.

  ‘It’s OK,’ shouted the veteran, clinging to a bed frame. ‘Most of the force goes upwards. It’s when they explode underneath that you kiss your ring goodbye …’

  But already above the relentless and chaotic singing of asdic they could hear the splashing of further
depth charges being thrown at them. And in spite of the captain’s manoeuvring they were getting closer. Hencke heard one canister bounce off the outer hull with a dull echo like the Devil knocking at the door. They were at 93 metres. The depth charge was set for 105. It detonated directly beneath U-494’s engine compartment. Even so most of the plates and valves held, but most at 93 metres isn’t good enough. The blast caused the craft to heel violently, ripping away Hencke’s purchase on the torpedo rack and lifting him bodily before throwing him across the oily floor. Dials shattered and bulbs smashed as the pressure hull bent inwards, plunging the craft into complete darkness, and there was a ringing in his head so loud that for a moment it was beyond his brain’s ability to comprehend. His ears felt as if someone were trying to drive six inch nails into them. When the auxiliary lights flickered on he found himself staring at the lifeless eyes of the young submariner, blood trickling slowly from the corner of his lips, from his nose and from his ears.

  In the control room a few yards away he could hear the captain screaming for a damage report and feet began to pound along aluminium gangways; from above came the fading noise of the hunter completing its first pass. But there was another sound, as unmistakable as it was insistent. The sound of the craft dying. The savage hissing of gas escaping under pressure from somewhere nearby, the crackle of flame as smoke billowed from a control panel where the electrical circuit had shorted out, the explosive sound of bolts shearing, a raised voice reporting irreparable damage to two hull valves mingling with the cries of the injured and the hammering of tools on paralysed controls. And beneath his feet Hencke could hear the terrifying noise of water beginning to slop its way through the bilges.

  But he could hear no shouts of terror and panic as he might have supposed. Instead there were only shouts of instruction and command as the submariners, fear tempered by years of experience and discipline, scurried to salvage their crippled craft. Men began hurtling like acrobats along the gangways and through the small circular hatchways, there was the sound of banging metal as leaking seals were retightened and closed, and within seconds he could hear the drubbing of hammer on wood and steel as a team struggled to shore up buckled plates and stem the flood. Already the water was bubbling above the metal floor grille on which he was standing and the submarine had adopted a strange, unnatural posture, leaning to one side. Then another lurch, gentler this time, accompanied by the sound of compressed air being forced into the tanks as the screws beat desperately to gain purchase and force the submarine upwards, but the hydroplanes had gone.

  For an agonizing time the boat seemed to hang suspended as the upward thrust of the engines was cancelled out by the weight of water pouring into the hull. Hencke’s lungs were frozen, his body was no longer his possession and belonged to some other entity which was deciding his fate. And it seemed to be an age making up its mind. Slowly, imperceptibly at first then with painfully increasing confidence, the craft gained stability as the nose of the boat forced its way upwards. They were going to make it after all! The tension in Hencke collapsed and he began to breathe in deep relief, but he saw the veteran still clinging like a man possessed to the bed frame. He was shaking his head. He knew what was yet to come.

  Perhaps the captain of the frigate was a touch too eager. Had he left it a few seconds longer there could have been no doubt but, in his anxiety to ram the submarine, he hit her just before she was fully surfaced. The bows sliced across the forward hull tearing a great gash, but the submarine bounced rather than being ripped instantly in two. She would die, of course, but slowly rather than in a moment.

  Through the pandemonium Hencke could feel the craft beginning to settle rapidly bow-down. And still the water rose, up to his calf now, pulling at him and the others, trying to drag them under.

  A face forced its way through the hatch which led from the control room. It was a sub-lieutenant, with blood running from a gash on his forehead.

  ‘Hencke to the control room!’ he screamed. ‘And secure all watertight doors!’

  So that was it. The bulkheads were being sealed, the six compartments around which U-494 was built were being shut off from each other, transformed into their own private coffins. The most experienced hands prayed she would flood quickly and put an end to their inevitable agonies, the less experienced with their naive hopes of survival hoped it might flood more slowly, but everyone knew it was only a matter of time. Yet still the order of duty and command prevailed. The veteran grabbed Hencke by the arm and thrust him towards the hatch. Unceremoniously he was bundled through, smacking his head against some sharp metal edge, and as he picked himself up and turned he could see the veteran about to close the bulkhead door, with water already beginning to spill over the sill. The submariner’s eyes were raging with anger.

  ‘I wish to God you hadn’t come,’ he swore.

  Then the steel door slammed shut, the wheel which secured the watertight seal was being turned, and he saw the veteran no more.

  Inside the crowded control room Eling was standing by the intercom, barking instructions, eyes fixed on the dials and gauges as he listened to replies. But already he was giving instructions to sections of the boat from which no reply was forthcoming. As the chief engineer shouted in his ear that both aft torpedo hatches were flooding and water began seeping down an instrument panel, there was the unmistakable sound of the electric motors complaining, complaining again, and falling silent.

  ‘Engine room! Report!’ Eling shouted into the mouthpiece, but there was no response. He looked imploringly at the chief who stood soaked in a torn singlet beside the far watertight door, shaking his head.

  With the dying of the engines and the closing of the hatches, a relative quiet descended over the craft. Metal was still pounding against metal in a distant forward compartment, but soon that also stopped. The craft was settling nose-down in the water, and they listened to the submarine’s death throes. A groan here, a creak there, the crying of tortured metal, the cracking of the internal wood fascias as they buckled and split, and always the slow, deadly sound of gurgling water. But from the crew there was only silence, the silence of men fallen to despair. The captain’s gaze was fixed unblinkingly on the depth gauge, watching its hypnotic fall, great beads of perspiration trickling down his forehead. Then there was a heavy bump, hands once again reached out for support, and the submarine settled on the bottom.

  The captain tapped the gauge. ‘A hundred and twenty metres,’ he announced, his eyes glazing. ‘Could be worse …’ There was silence as everyone calculated the odds. ‘Chief! Damage report,’ the captain instructed.

  ‘Engines dead, rear compartments flooded. I can’t raise the forward torpedo compartment. The bilges are flooding so the batteries are gone and if they’ve not yet drowned they’ll be choking on chlorine gas in next to no time … Sorry, Captain,’ the chief apologized as Eling’s stare gave him silent rebuke. This was still the Kriegsmarine, and there was a proper way to die. ‘The control room is the only watertight compartment. For now.’

  ‘How many men do we know for sure are still alive?’

  ‘Just what you see, Captain.’ It made a total of fourteen. Fourteen out of fifty. No, out of a hundred and fifty.

  ‘Looks like we have them surrounded, eh?’ Eling said grimly. He turned to Hencke. ‘I’m sorry, Hencke. It seems we failed. I’ve got a dead craft and fourteen men left. As far as we can tell all other compartments are flooded, which means that anyone behind those doors is already dead. I am sorry.’

  Hencke marvelled at this man who had been ordered to sacrifice his craft and most of his crew in order to bring one passenger home, yet who still felt the need to apologize.

  ‘Is there anything to be done?’ Hencke was surprised how calm his voice sounded, betraying none of the turmoil and twisted nerves within.

  Before Eling could answer, from no great distance away came the echoing sound of an explosion, not a depth charge but something big. A grim smile of satisfaction flickered around the captain’s
mouth. ‘So the dying’s not yet done, and maybe the surviving too … That was a mine. One of ours. Ripping the bottom out of a ship. One of theirs. I took us into a minefield,’ he explained. ‘Seems to have paid off.’

  ‘What will happen now?’

  ‘They’ll have trouble locating us on the bottom with all the junk and other wrecks around here. And now they’ve lost one of their own …?’ He shrugged. ‘They’ll probably call it a day. They won’t want to thrash around in a minefield, particularly when they know there’s a 95 per cent probability they’ve sunk us already.’

  As if in confirmation, from nearby came the explosion of a clutch of depth charges, one final gesture from the Royal Navy planted along the huge oil slick which was forming on the surface and which they hoped marked the tomb of another U-boat. One for luck, and farewell. The violent rocking cast the craft into darkness yet again and when at last some source of light was restored, even the rueful smile which the captain had managed to manufacture had been wiped away.

  ‘Further damage report, Chief! Chief?’

  But the chief did not respond. He was staring transfixed at the cabinet where the emergency breathing gear was kept. ‘They’re gone. There’s not a single one left …’ And with those words, each man knew, had disappeared their last chance of survival. The chief turned in desperation towards the captain. ‘The maintenance crew, at Kiel. They were stripping the boat down for overhaul, started here in the control room. They were unloading everything. Then we got orders to turn around, I threw them straight off board …’

  No one spoke. What was there to say? In spite of the angry looks cast in his direction, it wasn’t the chief’s fault. On arrival in Kiel after weeks at sea they hadn’t even had time to break wind let alone check stores before they were ordered back out to sea. How could anyone have reckoned on some half-witted fitter forgetting to replace the breathing gear? On all the emergency supplies in other compartments being cut off behind flooded bulkheads? On being caught out playing taxi at the bottom of the North Sea?