by Dudley Pope
Ned shook his head. ‘I had thought of it, but suppose another U-boat finds them, just like this one spotted us? Dönitz would know at once that we’ve got a Mark III Enigma, the Triton manual – the lot. So he’d change the Triton cipher. It’d only take him a month – until all the boats now on patrol get back and are given new books – and we’d be even worse off.’
‘There’s another way.’
‘Yes, I thought of that too.’
‘Why so squeamish?’
‘Putting thirty or forty Teds in a lifeboat and then ramming it is just the sort of thing we’re supposed to be fighting this war to stop, Jemmy.’
‘They were going to mow us down with that Schmeisser.’
‘The Captain and the blond seaman were, and they’re dead.’
Jemmy shrugged his shoulders, his head jerking in twitches which indicated that the depth of his feelings belied his quiet voice. ‘You’re the boss, Ned, but warn the Marines that they should shoot the moment there’s any trouble. A Sten bullet won’t go through the hull plating. Just keep clear of the gauges.’
‘I was going to tell Keeler that anyway. Stopping that crazy First Lieutenant dead in his tracks was a lesson to the Teds: you saw how the Second Officer passed out at the sight!’
‘Yes, but he’s a thinking man. Yon Cassius with a lean and hungry look. Remember Caesar’s warning – such men are dangerous.’
‘The thinkers sometimes outsmart themselves!’
‘By the way,’ Jemmy said, ‘we can put twenty prisoners in the after torpedo room.’
At that moment three thuds and a hail from the Croupier warned that the Marines who had guarded the German seamen as they hoisted the red-headed Lieutenant’s body up the ladder were now back below again.
Ned walked over and told the Croupier: ‘We’re going to dive, and as soon as Jemmy has stuck a trim, or whatever he calls it, we’ll shift the rest of these chaps aft – Jemmy’s offering the after torpedo room.’
The Croupier looked round at all the dials and gauges. ‘What happens if I accidentally put a bullet into one of these dials?’
‘Jemmy will be very cross. I’ve just been talking to him about it. The hull plating is all right, though, but if you shoot as well as you did with our red-headed late friend, the bullets will stay in the target.’
‘Can’t guarantee it,’ the Croupier said cheerfully and then added, an anxious note in his voice: ‘Have you ever been down in a sub before, Ned?’
‘No, and I’m not looking forward to it. Flying in the face of Nature as far as I’m concerned. Submarines and aeroplanes. Fins and wings, ughh!’
Yon came through the narrow space leading from the engine room, a small corridor lined with bunks on each side, and grinned at Ned. ‘All tickety-boo, Ned; both diesels ready to start purring, all the gauges poised to say the right things, ammeters and voltmeters show the batteries are fully charged and topped up. So as far as the engine room is concerned, we’re ready. The Blohm and Voss diesels are fantastic.’
Ned listened carefully. Yon’s voice was confident – in fact this would be how he reported to the commander when serving in a British submarine. Since he too spoke German, he had no trouble reading gauges and labels on valves.
Ned turned to Jemmy, nodding towards the group of Germans who were now sitting in a corner of the control room and watching the Croupier with all the paralysed fascination of a rabbit trapped by a stoat. ‘You don’t think these fellows will try to rush you as you take her down?’
‘No, but let’s see what the Croupier thinks.’
The Croupier was more than confident. ‘I’ve been telling them such horrifying stories that their blood is running cold. So cold it is nearly coagulating. They hardly believed their eyes when I got that red-headed bird on the wing. I gave you credit for doing in the Captain with the Schmeisser, Ned. I’ve told them we are a special anti-U-boat commando, and this is the first time we’ve ever taken prisoners…’
‘Carry on, Jemmy!’ Ned said, grinning at the Croupier’s story.
‘Diving stations!’ Jemmy bellowed, and the seamen among the prize crew went to various levers and gauges at the forward side of the control room.
Yon said: ‘I’ll go and see how my chaps are getting on, and be ready to turn the wick up when you’re ready. By the way,’ he told Ned, ‘this Jerry Engineer is good, and co-operative. Although one of my chaps keeps close to him, I think he’s the sort of dedicated man who doesn’t really care who owns the diesels as long as he’s allowed to look after them.’
‘Mind he isn’t scheming to drop a spanner into a set of vital gears,’ Ned said.
‘He’s been warned,’ Yon said. ‘I told him his only hope of living, let alone ever getting back to Germany after the war, depends on those diesels and batteries. He understands that quite well.’
A klaxon screeched and Yon hurried aft. The group of prisoners looked first at the British seamen at the controls and then at Jemmy who, to their obvious surprise, was commanding the submarine, not Ned.
For a few moments the boat seemed strangely dead; then the conning tower hatch slammed shut, and Ned looked up and watched a seaman securing it. A red light winked out on what seemed to be the control panel, which Jemmy was watching closely, to be replaced by a green beside it.
Jemmy spoke quietly, levers were pulled, valves spun, and a seaman watched what seemed to be an elaborate vertical spirit level, the Papenberg. There was a deep humming noise from aft as the batteries started to turn the electric motors, and Ned heard the screws begin to turn.
Ned said to the Croupier: ‘I want to talk to the Second Lieutenant as soon as you can listen and check my understanding of German: it’s a bit rusty.’
Ned beckoned to the man, who scrambled to his feet and stood uncertainly, obviously alarmed at having been picked out.
‘You speak some English, I believe?’
‘Very little, sir: it is several years –’
‘Come with me.’
Ned led the way to the wireless cabin on the starboard side just forward of the control room. The Marine guard stood to one side as Ned reached for the curtain.
‘You can help guard the prisoners in the control room,’ Ned told him, and gestured to the Second Lieutenant to follow him to the cabin, where the other Marine guard stood smartly to attention.
‘Take over outside for the time being,’ Ned told him, and as soon as the curtain closed sat down on what seemed to be a typist’s seat in front of the Enigma machine, and swung round to face the German.
‘Sit over there, on the wireless operator’s chair.’
The German sat perched nervously on the edge. The colour had come back to his face but his movements were hesitant. Highly strung, or scared stiff, Ned decided. Perhaps both, but much more important, he was not the bluffing arrogant Nazi.
‘Tell me your name and describe yourself.’
‘Heinz Wellmann. Born in Kiel. I’m twenty-six. I studied physics and was teaching until the July of 1939, when I began naval training.’
The man stopped, as though those few words described his life so far.
‘Born in Kiel, eh? So you know the Navy war memorial, and the Tirpitz Pier.’
Wellmann’s face became more animated. ‘Oh, you know Kiel, then?’
‘I’ve been there. Sailing in regattas in Kiel Bay before the war.’
‘It is a fine city,’ Wellmann said nostalgically, ‘particularly with – how do you call the Nord-Ostsee-Kanal?’
‘The Kiel Canal.’
‘Ah, how flattering for us. Well, with the Kiel Canal running through to Brunsbüttelkoog, there are always many ships passing to the North Sea. Until the war, anyway.’
‘Did you volunteer for U-boats?’
‘No. Because of my physics and mathematics I was put down
for navigation and wireless work. I did three cruises in late 1940 as sub-lieutenant in a U-boat; then in 1941 I was ill and missed a cruise from which the boat did not return.’
‘So all your shipmates were lost?’
Wellmann shrugged his shoulders, and Ned was not quite sure whether the gesture meant that he bore the loss stoically for the Fatherland or did not care for his shipmates.
Now the motion of the boat was changing: the slow roll gradually stopped, he felt the bow dropping slightly and the hum of the electric motors took on a deeper note: he thought he could feel rather than hear the beat-beat of the turning propellers.
With a nonchalance he did not feel, he asked Wellmann: ‘Who commanded this boat?’
‘Oberleutnant Schmidt. He was due to be promoted Kapitänleutnant when he returned. We’d done three cruises. This is the third.’
‘These three cruises – you had successes?’
‘Yes,’ Wellmann said warily, and seeing that Ned expected details he added: ‘In the Atlantic. Three ships on the first cruise, four on the second and three up to now.’
‘Those earlier cruises in 1940,’ Ned said. ‘What happened?’
‘The usual successes, and on the fourth cruise, when I was sick, the boat lost contact.’
Ned reflected on the phrase ‘losing contact’. It was, of course, quite correct, meaning that the captain no longer signalled his headquarters (presumably still Kiel at that time) listing his successes, and when the wireless operators in Kiel tapped out the call sign of his boat there was no reply. Contact was lost. It was an easy way of saying that the boat had been hunted by the Royal Navy – by the ‘Tommies’, as the Germans called them – dropping depth-charges, and at a certain point the charges had dropped so close that the hull – Ned involuntarily glanced at it, grey-painted and glistening with condensation – was punctured or crushed, and the U-boat filled and slowly sank a couple of thousand fathoms until it settled on the bottom, an intruder among primeval debris.
‘What happened to you then?’
‘By now our boats were moving to bases in south-western France – Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, La Pallice, Bordeaux, La Rochelle. The Lion – this is our nickname for B der U, Admiral Dönitz – moved to Kernével, which is near Brest.’
‘Tell me,’ Ned asked, hoping to answer a question of little consequence, but which had puzzled ASIU, ‘how did the Lion and the SO West work together?’
Wellmann shook his head. ‘The Senior Officer West, as far as I could see, commanded all the surface ships and looked after the work at the ports, like building the concrete bunkers for the U-boats when the RAF began its bombing. The Lion,’ he said proudly, ‘was responsible for U-boats and reported directly to the Führer.’
The U-boat had dived and the lack of motion was uncanny: down here – whatever depth they were at – they were below the surge of swell waves, and he found no difficulty in guessing the number of revolutions at which the electric motors were turning the propellers – about sixty a minute.
There was a knock on the door frame – curtains replaced actual doors – and Jemmy came in.
‘We’re cruising at fifty metres, and she went down very smoothly,’ he reported. ‘Handles very well.’
‘You got over the snags, then?’
Jemmy looked puzzled. ‘But we didn’t have any snags,’ he said. ‘It all went perfectly.’
Ned laughed at the expression on Jemmy’s face, like a child allowed to choose the best chocolate in the box only to have it taken away before he could eat it.
‘I’m teasing. How many knots?’
‘Four kilometres an hour. Actually, I came to ask permission to get rid of the fish.’
Ned scratched his head and then, to warn Jemmy that the German spoke English, introduced the Second Lieutenant.
‘Yes, I’ve been thinking about them. Must we get rid of them?’
‘What good are they to us? We aren’t likely to sight the Bismarck, or the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and with the weight of the fish and all those prisoners up forward I had a hell of a job getting a trim. We’ve got all the rest of the prisoners ready to go aft. If we don’t get rid of the weight of those torpedoes, if we do a crash dive she’ll be so bow heavy that we’ll probably go down like a harpoon and stick in the mud at 2,000 fathoms. That’s four miles deep or thereabouts. This bucket will start springing leaks below about four hundred feet and probably flattens like a squashed can of peas at eight hundred.’
‘We can go down to 100 metres,’ Wellmann said.
‘Oh – ah, yes, thank you,’ said a startled Jemmy. ‘Well now, that’s nearly 350 feet, although it doesn’t affect firing those fish.’
Ned knew he was being absurd: he simply disliked being in an unarmed ship.
‘We can keep the one in the stern tube,’ Jemmy said, as if reading Ned’s thoughts, ‘and we’ve got the guns.’
‘Very well, get rid of the four. But wait ten minutes, I’d like to watch.’
‘You just say when,’ Jemmy said cheerfully, leaving the cabin.
Ned turned back to Wellmann. ‘So what happened to you when you recovered from your illness?’
‘I was promoted to Leutnant and sent to a signals school near Hamburg.’
‘Why? Did you expect it?’
‘Yes,’ Wellmann explained patiently, ‘because I guessed I was to serve as Second Lieutenant in a U-boat and would be responsible for signals and ciphers.’
Ned waved to the Enigma. ‘And this machine?’
Wellmann’s eyes dropped.
‘This is your first cruise with the Mark III, I suppose,’ Ned said conversationally. ‘Have you had any trouble with the extra rotor? An extra rotor and a new cipher – we were surprised Admiral Dönitz took a chance trying out both at once.’
‘That’s true,’ Wellmann agreed, nodding his head. ‘But he was right – we’ve had no trouble with the machine or Triton –’ he broke off, appalled at having used the word.
‘Yes, Triton isn’t really any more difficult than Hydra,’ Ned said easily. ‘Really, it was just the extra rotor. Having more to choose from is no problem?’
‘No,’ Wellmann agreed, apparently reassured. ‘And of course it is much more secure, giving us four settings, three of which we change daily, and the fourth changing with every message, and a choice from eight rotors. So we have a theoretical choice of more than 150 trillions. It’s completely unbreakable, a cipher and a machine like that.’
Ned said nothing, and Wellmann stared at the steel deck for a full two minutes before looking up again, his face once more pale, and pinheads of perspiration suddenly leaking out on his brow and upper lips. ‘But it is completely unbreakable,’ he repeated. And then, still trying to reassure himself: ‘The Lion would not continue using the machine with a new cipher if it wasn’t, would he…?’
Chapter Fourteen
‘Give me your keys,’ Ned said quietly, and when the bemused man handed them over, added: ‘Where is the manual giving the Triton settings?’
‘In the Captain’s safe. Behind the aftermost panel in the Captain’s cabin,’ Wellmann said and then, as if excusing himself to an invisible Gestapo witness: ‘You’d have found it anyway, now you have the keys.’
‘Of course,’ Ned agreed. ‘Now, you must have the easiest job on board the boat! What do you do with your spare time – read books?’
‘Spare time!’ Wellmann exclaimed. ‘I have to stand a watch, so I have no spare time. Well, not until the transmitter broke down.’
Ned felt his body chill. ‘The transmitter does not work?’
‘No. About four days ago something burned out. A pair of final valves. We had a spare pair and, because the operator was in the middle of transmitting an important signal, he fitted them and started transmitting without waiting for them to warm up.’
>
‘So that’s how the spare pair burned out, too?’
‘Yes,’ Wellmann admitted shamefacedly. ‘I had enciphered the signal on the machine and given it to him, and he was sending it to B der U. I suddenly needed –’ he stopped, trying to find the phrase.
‘To relieve yourself.’
‘Exactly, otherwise I should have insisted that we find out what the fault was. It is routine. The man was excited.’
‘Why?’
‘We – well, we were reporting.’
‘On an attack?’
‘Yes. We had sunk two ships,’ Wellmann added defiantly, ‘which made a total of three for the cruise so far.’
‘With five torpedoes still left.’
‘Exactly. We could hope for at least one more.’
‘But with no transmitter?’
‘B der U might wonder if we had been lost, but breaking off suddenly like that in the middle of a transmission – the receiving operator at Kernével would probably guess something had gone wrong with the transmitter.’
‘The receiver still functions?’
‘Oh yes. We can receive orders but can’t acknowledge them. Or we could until now, rather,’ he corrected himself.
‘What time does Kernével come on the air each night?’
‘I do not feel I should be talking so freely.’
‘The Gestapo would make you talk.’
‘Yes, but…’
Ned let the pause hang in the air, with its implication that the Royal Navy and the Royal Marine commandos could teach the Gestapo a thing or two.
‘Well, I suppose you’d find out from the wireless log since it gives all the times of origin,’ Wellmann said. ‘We listened at midnight Greenwich to see if we were on the traffic list. If we were, we listened three hours later and took the signal.’
‘What if another U-boat sighted a convoy and wanted reinforcements?’
‘We’d pick up his report and decipher it with the Enigma, but of course we would not change our position until we had orders from B der U.’ His smile was superior as he added: ‘We have so many boats in the Atlantic now that he has no trouble in assembling a pack.’