by Richard Snow
These machines, as efficient-looking as bullets, and with the same aura of lethal inertness, were actually as restive as a cargo of live cougars, and the crew had to start tending to their incessant demands just hours after the boat sailed.
Next came the shells for the deck gun, often the famously effective 88mm (virtually everyone who ever came under fire from an 88 remembered the weapon with deep respect and equally deep loathing). Each of the rounds—about 250 in all—came aboard packed in its own watertight container. Well packed, too: recently divers retrieved several from the ocean floor, still potent and full of menace, fresh as the day they were stowed, ready to claw apart a freighter scrapped fifty years ago.
Food followed, the nonperishables first—canned corned beef, powdered eggs, 150 pounds of canned cheese—some twelve tons in all. The third watch officer had to find places for the hundreds of cans and crates. On these most scrupulously designed boats, surprisingly little attention had been paid to food storage; aside from some cramped cupboards and a tiny refrigerated meat locker, the stowage had to be improvised. Once the third watch officer had achieved this, he had to keep his hundred places of sequesterment in mind for the rest of the voyage, shifting their contents about as the food was consumed so uneven weight would not throw off the boat’s trim—that is, the delicately maintained equilibrium that would keep it making its way underwater without bursting to the surface (as it often wanted to do) or plunging to the bottom (as it always wanted to do).
On the third and last day of provisioning, after the diesel fuel had been pumped aboard, the fresh food came on. This went everywhere: through the first weeks of the voyage hams swung from the overhead pipes in the forward torpedo room, and sacks of onions and lemons and potatoes crowded lumpily against the bulkheads. Clusters of sausages dangled the length of the boat, which would set out carrying the curious combined atmosphere of a luxury grocery store doing business inside a gargantuan automobile engine.
“Luxury” because the U-boats got the best provisions Germany had to offer. It made little difference, though, especially with the fresh food. In the perpetual metallic damp, nothing kept for long. The sailors called their bread “rabbits” because each loaf soon grew a coat of white fur, and the men excavated in past this pelt to dig out edible scraps. In days, everything had been basted with the effluvium of the boat. “The food?” said a crewman on U-106. “The food was good—as long as you liked the taste of diesel.”
Before the diesel oil could do its seasoning, it had to drive the engines. The crew called them the Jumbos, and they deserved the old American superlative: eighteen-foot-long, four-stroke, supercharged diesels, six cylinders on the Type VIIs and nine on the IXs, producing fourteen hundred horsepower each on the former, twenty-two hundred on the latter. Kicked into life by a jolt of compressed air, they set up a clamor that could destroy the hearing of those who tended them (the antique name stokers still attached itself to these men), and they threw off enough heat to give the men rashes and boils. They were fickle, too. Although they did little to warm the boat in winter, they could run engine-room temperatures up past 140 degrees in warm weather.
The engines were the province of the Leitender Ingenieur, the chief engineer, who, because of the boat’s importunate complexity, was second only to the captain in the hierarchy of officers. A great deal was demanded of the LI and his “technical branch,” which accounted for a good half of the crew. One is said to have improvised replacement ball bearings by melting pellets out of metal foil stripped from cigarette packs. More common was the quandary that faced Paul Mengelberg, a diesel mechanic on U-26. “We had one time when we were forced to replace a piston pin . . . on the bottom of the Mediterranean, which took us about eighteen hours. It was a problem changing this diesel piston pin because the pin would not budge. . . . So eventually we had an idea. The whole piston was removed and immersed in hot oil, then boiled on the cook’s stove. Then we took it out of the oil, filled the hollow part of the pin with ice from the cook’s icebox to shrink it just enough, and bingo, with a sledgehammer and a bit of luck the pin came out!”
Just aft of the engine room, and usually spared such heroic expedients to keep it functioning, was the electric-motor room. Unlike the hammering diesels, the electric motors that drove the ship when it was underwater were relatively quiet, and duty here was less exhausting, although no less exacting: a failure to shift quickly from diesel to electric power during an emergency dive could mean an instant end to the boat and all aboard it. The motors drew their current from the banks of batteries that ran along the hull beneath them. The formidably successful U-boat skipper Peter “Ali” Cremer, who made it through the whole war (occasionally bringing home his boat under circumstances so difficult that his crewmen had a saying: “Ali’s better than life insurance”), wrote, “If one speaks of a certain superiority of the submarine or Unterseeboot in being able to hide under the water, one must in the same breath mention its weakness.” A main one was electricity. “The electric motors derive their energy from the batteries, which are heavy and bulky, limited in size . . . by the narrowness of the boat. Under heavy loads their energy is soon exhausted and they are obliged to surface to recharge them.” On a type VII this took eight hours running on the surface, with one of the diesels banging away clutched to the electric motor, which, when it wasn’t driving the boat, worked as a generator.
Forward of the engine and motor rooms was what the crew called the Zentrale. The boat’s demanding neurological system was run from this control room. The periscope was here; actually, one of two periscopes: the larger—the crew called it the Spargel, asparagus, for its bulbous head—was used for navigation. It let in a good deal of light and thus afforded greater visibility, but it left a strong, telltale wake. The leaner, more businesslike-looking attack periscope, with its range markings, was almost always the skipper’s choice during a torpedo run.
The LI spent hours in the control room, keeping an eye on the planesmen. The two of them maneuvered the hydroplanes at bow and stern that raised and lowered the boat. Each sat before a burly wheel, but this got touched only in emergencies: if things were going as they should, the planesmen did their job with a pair of electronic push buttons.
Nearby, the helmsman controlled the rudder, also with buttons. During a surface attack, he took another station, directly above in the conning tower. There he followed orders from the captain, who would have climbed the ladder that led through the conning-tower hatch up onto the open bridge.
Forward of the control room were the captain’s quarters. The plural might be misleading: this was a tiny closet entirely filled by its furnishings of a bunk, cupboard, and dollhouse writing desk. Nonetheless, it was shielded by the green felt curtain, which, once drawn, gave its occupant the sole scrap of privacy a U-boat had to offer.
It was of course no accident that the captain lived a few feet away from both the control room and the radio room, the latter as important to a U-boat’s operations as the former. All through the war Doenitz used radio as the reins with which he kept close control over all his boats. This would cost him dearly later, but in the early days was an effective, indeed indispensable, part of what looked to be a winning campaign.
Every U-boat sailor came aboard with a good deal of stiff training behind him, but the amount doled out to the Funker—the radioman—suggests his importance to the enterprise. After taking a series of intelligence and psychological—and, of course, hearing—tests and three months of what was essentially boot camp, he would go to Flensburg for a full half year of naval radio school there. After that it was on to Gotenhafen for the training administered all prospective U-boat crewmen, then back to Flensburg for more specialty work on telegraphy.
Before he could go to sea, he had more courses to take, ones useful in the other “room” near the captain, where the listening devices lived. These could pick up the mutter of a convoy passing sixty miles away, a single ship at twelve miles, and could distinguish between the dutiful turning of
a freighter’s propellers and the higher-pitched whir of a warship’s. Also to the Funker fell the duty of working a keyboard in a wooden box that might have reflected the efforts of a moderately adept weekend carpenter. This was the Enigma machine. It coded and decoded radio messages. At its most operatic, war is a whole city in flames, or two battleships tearing majestically toward each other carrying four thousand souls into combat. But this ratty-looking little shoeshine kit would often be the hinge on which the fortunes of the Atlantic campaign swung.
Its operators occasionally made insectile clickings as they coded or decoded messages, and nobody forward in the torpedo room gave it much of a thought. Here was U-boat life in its swarming essentials. Twenty-five men lived in this chamber, but there were only twelve bunks. These were shared, one watch coming off duty and climbing onto cotton wafers still warm from the previous occupant. Most of the torpedoes—ten out of fourteen in a VII—were here, too, carrying a plywood floor on their backs during the beginning of the cruise. This artificial floor so raised the deck height that the men often had to move about on hands and knees.
Four torpedo tubes ran thirteen feet into the room. The cruise began with each one charged, and its inhabitants wanted plenty of attention. This meant that every couple of days every torpedo had to be drawn from its tube and gone over. And here was an odd contradiction of U-boat life: on the most mechanically sophisticated vessels yet built, the men often had to work at the level of Incas prying a boulder out of a swamp.
The torpedoes were moved by hand, and they weren’t small. Out the missile would come from its tube (or, with even greater effort, up from beneath the decking), each one weighing some two tons and costing, Captain Cremer said, “in present-day terms [as much as] a medium-sized house.”
Like a medium-size house it had a multitude of systems that had to be kept in order. Some “eels”—their universal nickname among the men who served them—ran on compressed air; others, the G7es, were electrical, like their mother boat carrying a hull full of batteries. These latter were preferable, for they left no wake at all, nothing to tell their targets they were coming. Every torpedo came to the boat having run sea trials conducted by—a word remarkable even in German military vocabulary—the Torpedoespruslungkommando, and accompanied with its own logbook, conscientiously maintained. It had to be. A torpedo was delicate, always “treated like a raw egg,” Cremer wrote, and with its hydroplanes, rudders, and such, a simulacrum of the submarine that bore it. But unlike its parent, it could run at thirty knots. And unlike its parent, its bow was full of torpex, a compound of TNT and cyclonite salted with aluminum flakes and packing enough of a wallop to sink anything afloat.
But what a job to get it to its target! Once a torpedo had laboriously been exposed, the “mixer”—as a torpedoman was known—would fuss over its mechanisms, setting aright anything that had worked its way loose or out of alignment during the missile’s brief solitude. Then it had to be slathered with grease, hoisted up, and swung back into its tube while men not on duty squirmed out of the way. The torpedoes were so precious, so sedulously maintained, that it is not surprising the men managing them would sometimes instinctively reach out an arm to try to protect one from the boat’s lurching and get the arm broken. When this happened, the Funker was summoned. U-boat crews were so sparse for the jobs they had to do that the radioman doubled as doctor. This meant he’d read a book or two and had charge of some bottles of medicine. The thinking seems to have been that someone with a delicate hand on a telegraph key would be equally deft with a severed artery. One Funker had to amputate a crushed foot while a fellow radioman relayed instructions from a surgeon two thousand miles away.
This was exceptionally demanding duty, but so were all the other duties on a boat. Only the Smutje, the cook, whose job kept him busy pretty much around the clock, was excused from standing watch.
Whenever the ship was surfaced, four lookouts posted themselves in the tight horseshoe formed by the bridge railing (with sardonic wistfulness, this platform had been christened the Wintergarten). Standing back to back, shoulder to shoulder, each man was responsible for scanning a quarter of the horizon. Sometimes the sea would be calm and the weather mild and the work thus only deeply boring. But it was the Atlantic after all, and the lookouts’ perch was only a few yards above it, fastened to what was essentially a big cylinder. In heavy weather the rolling, corkscrewing boat would put the watch neck-deep in water so that the men had to hold their binoculars aloft until they got a chance to put them back to their eyes for a few seconds. If the streaming glasses showed an airplane, everyone scrambled off the bridge, dispensing seawater among all down below, and wheeled shut the hatch as the air came blasting out of the ballast tanks.
Cremer described diving with a pro’s precision: “When the boat is surfaced, the bottom of the ballast tank is open and air, kept in from above, prevents the water entering. The boat is floating on an air bubble. To dive, the air is allowed to escape at the top through vents. Water takes its place—the boat sinks and disappears.” And best do it quickly. Not that any activity aboard a submarine was cavalierly conducted, but no drill was taken with quite such ferocious seriousness as the one that got the boat out of sight. No captain was ever satisfied with the results, either, although thirty seconds seems to have become the standard on a VII, thirty-five on a IX.
Then back to the surface, and the watch back out on the bridge, and remember, always, no matter what the weather, to strap yourself into the lines and harness that will keep you tied to the boat. The Atlantic could get the better of such measures, though. On U-653, butting its way west through bad February seas, the first watch turned out in its heavy rain gear. The men they were relieving saw to it that they were properly buckled up, then gratefully went below. Hours into the watch Heinz Theen, the navigation officer, became aware of a diminution in the noise of the sea. The helmsman told him that the watch had closed the conning-tower hatch a few minutes earlier. “I was puzzled,” said Theen, “and climbed up to open the hatch and was startled to find nobody on the bridge. I could see no one from the first watch. The bridge was empty! U-653 had spent seven minutes sailing blind. Despite well-fastened harnesses, four seamen had been snatched to their deaths by the cruel sea in an instant.”
For the first years of the war, the men who endured this life—and death—were volunteers. In time, crewmen would be drafted into U-boat service. What never changed was the men’s willingness to go back out. At the end, when the chances of living through a war patrol were perhaps one in four, the boats still sailed, the crews determined as ever to serve their nation, and their torpedoes, of course, every bit as dangerous as they had been in the summer of 1939, when the long campaign had begun.
The End of the Athenia
The sea war begins, 1939
Fritz-Julius Lemp, commander of the U-30, opened the U-boat campaign. He had been at sea for nearly two weeks when he spotted his target. On August 22, propelled by the pressure of the coming war and ordered to maintain strictest secrecy, he had taken the U-30—one of Doenitz’s “excellent” VIIs—from Wilhelmshaven and headed north in a wide circle that brought him close to arctic waters, up around the Shetland and Faroe Islands before swinging down into the Western Approaches, the vast stretch of Atlantic through which almost all traffic coming to Britain had to pass. There he waited, day after mild, quiet day, restless and eager. On September 1 the boat’s radio operator brought Lemp a signal and the captain entered its message in his log: “Negotiations failed. Hostilities against Poland.” Three days later word came that Britain had declared war, and an hour later Lemp received his orders: “Do not wait until attacked. Make war on merchant shipping in accordance with operational orders.”
The envelope containing the orders was in his quarters. He got it, broke the seals, and there, over Doenitz’s signature, were his instructions: he was to fight, but to do it following the rules of engagement that had come out of the 1930 London treaties, which included the old Article 22 tha
t so limited the blow from nowhere that was the U-boat’s greatest strength. Germany went to war agreeing that no merchant or passenger ship could be sunk out of hand. This mandate allowed many exceptions, however. Any merchantman sailing in the protective presence of an escorting warship was fair game, as was any troop transport. If a submarine captain suspected a merchant ship of carrying war materials, he could order her to stop and be searched. If the ship fled or uncovered deck guns, it could be sunk. So, too, could it if the search turned up contraband, but only after everyone aboard was safely off and assured of rescue.
The U-30 was lying on the surface. Lemp went up to the bridge and stood with the watch while a lovely late-summer afternoon waned. He was twenty-six years old, sturdy, quick-tempered but humorous, and popular with his crew. Like everyone else aboard, he had trained for years to be able to achieve just one thing.
By 1900 hours—seven o’clock—the wind had begun to rise, and a haze came down with the dusk. An hour or so of daylight was still left and was more than sufficient to show Lemp the ship—the big ship—that was coming his way. It was steaming west at about fifteen knots. Lemp called his gunnery officer to the bridge, and the two of them tried to figure out what they were looking at. Or perhaps they were trying to convince themselves that what they were looking at was what they wanted to be looking at.
The size: it had to be a troopship. But doing what? Rushing reinforcements to Nova Scotia in the opening minutes of the war? But wait—it could be, probably was, an “armed merchant cruiser.” Doenitz, who throughout the war would meet with his captains every chance he got, had done so with Lemp just before he sailed and had warned against these innocuous-looking vessels that nonetheless mounted guns powerful enough to do in a submarine if they caught it on the surface. Moreover, the deepening dusk made it clear that this ship was running without lights. Why do that if she had nothing to hide: an ocean liner went about its proper business lit up like an amusement pier.