For all the crew believed about Neuerburg’s character, they knew almost nothing about his life. He had flown as a navy pilot—that much he had told them—and had only recently transferred to the U-boat service. Some crewmen speculated that perhaps Neuerburg had joined the U-boats to treat a “sore throat”—slang for an officer’s desire to win the Knight’s Cross, which was worn around the neck—though Neuerburg did not discuss his motivations. Some had seen his wife, a strikingly beautiful woman, on the grounds one day, though Neuerburg never spoke of family. His privacy did not undermine the men’s confidence in their commander. But if there was a mystery among the crew of U-869 in the early days of training, that mystery was about the life of the man who had been chosen to lead them.
At age nineteen, Helmuth Neuerburg of Strasbourg decided to join the marines. The choice might have surprised those who knew him. As a young man, he had displayed a natural talent for the violin and a great facility for drawing caricatures, several of which lampooned the adults in his life. He had passed his Abitur, a prerequisite for higher study. Those closest to him expected that he might pursue a career in the arts. This was likely Helmuth’s intention even as he joined the marines; he knew that if he committed to a few years of service, the military would pay him a lump sum upon discharge, money he could then invest in his higher education. He never considered joining the U-boat force. As boys, he and his older brother, Friedhelm, had talked about submarines, but neither of them had been awed by the legend. “There is a big price behind that stardom,” they’d reminded each other. “You become a victim very fast in a U-boat.”
And so Helmuth became a naval cadet, class of 1936. (The student’s class was designated by year of enrollment, not year of graduation.) He scored high in most subjects, posting his best marks one year in machinery and English. He formed a band while in the service and, as graduation neared, composed a class song, for which he was given a special award by Erich Raeder, the head of the German navy. Upon graduation, he began pilot training as part of the naval air arm. By 1940, he was an officer flying North Sea reconnaissance missions near England, even strapping his beloved German shepherd into the cockpit for one mission. For the next three years, he continued to fly, to train other pilots, and to earn excellent reviews. But if Helmuth’s military career looked to be the National Socialist ideal, his heart and mind told a different, more secret story.
While Helmuth did not dare speak against the Nazi regime publicly—an officer could be executed for such a crime—he had no such reservation when speaking to Friedhelm, a tanker in one of the army’s panzer divisions. During visits, he told Friedhelm that he believed the Nazis to be authoring the downfall of Germany. Friedhelm recoiled at the public nature of his expression.
“Are you crazy talking like that in the open?” he asked Helmuth whenever such conversations unfolded. “People are listening everywhere! What you are saying is very dangerous!”
Helmuth continued talking. On one occasion, after he spoke to a Nazi official near Nuremberg, Helmuth told Friedhelm that the man’s anti-Semitic beliefs were “appalling” and “sickening.” Friedhelm begged his brother to stay quiet.
“The walls have ears, Helmuth!” Friedhelm warned. “Everyone listens. Please, be very careful with what you say. Simply uttering such ideas aloud can be the end of you.”
In 1941, Helmuth married twenty-two-year-old Erna Maas, the daughter of a brewery owner. Bright, beautiful, and energetic, Erna was also passionately antimilitary. The two loved each other deeply. At home, Helmuth collected American jazz records, a music form forbidden by the Nazis, and tuned to enemy BBC radio for news of the war—another wartime offense. One morning, while shaving in front of the mirror, he heard a BBC report of America’s entry into the conflict.
“We have lost this war already,” he told Erna.
He continued to see Friedhelm whenever possible. He continued talking. “After the war I will get rid of the skirt,” he told his brother, referring to his uniform.
In 1943, Neuerburg and others were offered a choice: they could remain with the naval air arm or join the U-boats. Those who stayed with the air force would go into combat immediately; those who transferred to submarines might spend a year or more in training before going to battle. Neuerburg was father to a two-year-old son and a one-year-old daughter. He chose the U-boats, though he harbored no illusions about their safety. When informing Friedhelm of his decision, he said that he believed U-boat service to be a Himmelfahrtskommando—a command to report directly to heaven.
Neuerburg spent the next twenty-one months in U-boat training, using leaves to take his two-year-old son, Jürgen, for sailboat rides and bounce his infant daughter, Jutta, on his knee. Just before U-869’s commissioning, he spoke to Friedhelm. This time, he mentioned nothing of the Nazis. He simply looked his brother in the eye and said, “I’m not coming back.”
Classroom instruction complete, the U-boat loaded with food and supplies, the crew of U-869 pushed out of Bremen in late January 1944 and steered to the Baltic Sea for several months of training. From this point forward, there would be no true home base; instruction would be on board the boat, with stops at various Baltic ports.
By now, word of Black May—the month in 1943 when Allied forces destroyed forty-four U-boats—had trickled down even to the enlisted men. Dockworkers whispered about the scores of U-boats that never returned from patrol. Rumors of Allied technological superiority wafted through the naval barracks. Though few spoke of it, the crew of U-869 almost certainly knew that the world had shifted for U-boat men.
Early training on U-869 included testing of the sub’s underwater noisiness, the repair of its periscope, and practice with its antiaircraft gun. (While U-869 had been built without a deck gun for engaging enemy warships, it retained its antiaircraft weapon.) They practiced “roll training,” the complex art of turning and diving, until the men were so sick of it—and so good at it—that they believed they could maneuver the 250-foot U-boat through a creek. Some on board vomited until their innards acclimated to underwater life. Others took sick from diesel fumes and noise. Experienced men like Guschewski knew that the worst was still to come.
The men used February to get to know their jobs and one another. Torpedo operators generally socialized with torpedo operators, machinists with machinists. In the radio room, Guschewski and Horenburg groomed two Oberfunkmaate, or radiomen, one of whom was eighteen years old, the other nineteen. Though Guschewski still felt a bit wounded that Horenburg outranked him, he found him to be an excellent radioman and a personable fellow. Before long, the two had become synchronized in their teamwork, one coding Neuerburg’s messages and the other transmitting them. They also became friends.
In addition to his other duties, the radioman played phonograph and radio music for the crew. One day while in port, Guschewski found a wonderful radio station playing Glenn Miller music, the kind he knew the crew loved. He turned up the volume. Feet began tapping and fingers snapping. Then, without warning, a radio announcer interrupted the music and said, “One of your U-boats recently left on patrol and two days later it went missing. We found body parts and pieces of the wreck. In a few days we will know the names of the commander and crew.” Guschewski lunged for the radio dial—he knew this to be Radio Calais, a British-run propaganda station designed to wage psychological warfare on the Germans. As Guschewski cut the sound, Neuerburg stormed into the radio room from his quarters across the hall.
“Are you crazy?” Neuerburg exploded. “You are listening to an enemy radio station! The entire crew heard this! How can you possibly do this?”
“I tuned it in because the music was good,” Guschewski answered. “By the time I realized what was happening, the message was out.”
“I will tell you this,” Neuerburg fumed. “You will not do this a second time.”
Neuerburg turned and returned to his quarters. Horenburg drew close to Guschewski and rubbed his shoulder.
“Don’t feel badly about this, He
rbert,” Horenburg said. “Radio Calais can move anywhere on the dial—you never know where it will be. They even play German music; they know the songs we love. Don’t get gray over this, my friend. This could have happened to any radioman, even one as excellent as you.”
If Neuerburg struck his men as strict and unyielding, few seemed to resent him for it. Each day in the Baltic added to the crew’s appreciation for the dangers they would face in battle, and as their imminent war patrol drew nearer they found themselves watching Neuerburg—anticipating his moves, learning his instincts, studying his eyes for the kind of courage that could inoculate nearly sixty men as depth charges exploded around them and enemy airplanes attacked. Few could deny that in their commander they saw a sculpture of might, right, and duty, a man who demanded excellence not just that his crew might survive, but because he believed that this was the way a man should live.
While Neuerburg commanded respect and even a measure of fear, his first officer, twenty-one-year-old Siegfried Brandt, was growing beloved by the crew. In many ways, Brandt was Neuerburg’s opposite. He was small of stature, perhaps five foot seven, with deeply warm and quiet eyes, and a measured voice flecked with humor. He nearly always seemed to be smiling. In a U-boat culture that shunned close personal relationships between officers and crewmen, Brandt seemed most in his element among the enlisted men, joking with them while on bridge watch, asking important questions about their families and girlfriends and hometowns, listening to fears and concerns they were officially not permitted to have. While Brandt was fully conversant in military protocol, he rarely insisted on it during downtime, preferring the meaningful conversation and sense of brotherhood that resulted when soldiers believed they could exhale beside superiors. Once, when Guschewski told a popular joke about a blowhard military officer, Brandt laughed so hard that Guschewski and the others present believed he might pass out. When he caught his breath, he begged, “Oh, please repeat that! I’ve never heard that one before!” Guschewski told it again, all the while thinking, “I would never dare tell this joke to Neuerburg.”
While Brandt seemed at ease among the enlisted men, he undertook his duties with a palpable gravity. The first officer arranged the boat’s bridge watches, kept the sub’s torpedoes primed and ready, and directed all torpedo attacks made while surfaced. If the commander died or became incapacitated, the first officer would assume command of the submarine. A good first officer was often rewarded with command of his own U-boat. In his work, Brandt demanded an unrelenting excellence of himself, and by example rather than voice he asked the same of the crew. Perhaps more than anyone, Neuerburg appreciated such dedication and competence. In planning or conversation, the two officers seemed in sync and of a single mind. If Neuerburg had reservations about his first officer’s closeness to the men, he betrayed them to no one, so that as the weeks passed, many of the crew came to feel close to Brandt, and many wondered about the life of a twenty-one-year-old man who seemed ready to bear the fears of so many. None could have imagined that Brandt, with his easy smile and ready comfort, considered himself to be training in an iron coffin.
Even before he joined the marines, young Siegfried Brandt of Zinten, East Prussia, was known in his town as an “aufrechter Mensch”—a genuinely good person. “Siggi,” as he was called, had been raised an observant Protestant and a constant gentleman, the eldest of three brothers born to parents open to the world of new ideas and different people. The family believed strongly in their religion, which stood starkly opposed to the Nazi faith in the Thousand-Year Reich. When the Brandts walked to church the Nazis poked fun at their faith and reminded Siegfried’s father, Otto, that on Sundays Siggi was also required to attend Hitler Youth leadership meetings. Otto told his son, “You may go to your leadership three times a month, but on the last Sunday, you go only to church.” The instruction infuriated local Nazi Party members, who might have imprisoned Otto for such insolence had he not served Germany so nobly—and so obviously—in World War I. Otto had lost his left leg fighting for his country. He still had a wound in his chest.
During high school, Siggi and his two best friends had sworn an oath—an odd and even risky pact at a time of crescendoing Nazi power. From this point forward, they vowed, they would conduct themselves according to Prussian principles: discipline, order, honesty, tolerance, reliability, and loyalty. Those things, and not any other ideology, would guide the rest of their lives. As Siggi’s high school graduation drew near and Germany prepared for war, the Nazis became even less patient with the Brandts. The family continued to worship at their church. Otto had refused party membership. And now, Siggi’s mother, Elise, was telling the local Nazi Party members to back off about Norbert, her middle son. Norbert, unlike Siegfried, was a bit slow academically, perhaps the victim of a learning disability. To the Nazis, such a weakness in the Aryan gene pool could not be tolerated. They told Elise they planned to sterilize Norbert. She told them, in so many words, to go to hell. They threatened to send her to a concentration camp, even though she was married to a war hero, even though her eldest son, Siggi, was preparing to volunteer for the navy. She held firm. The tension between the Nazis and the Brandts grew hotter.
After high school, Siggi volunteered for the navy. In 1941, he began his naval officer training. During his visits home, Siggi’s youngest brother, Hans-Georg, eavesdropped and heard Siggi making jokes about “Adolf”—sarcastic snips about how Hitler is “the greatest” and how Hitler “knows everything” and how Hitler “knows more about the navy than the admirals.” Even at eleven, Hans-Georg knew that his brother neither liked nor trusted Hitler.
For a time, Siggi served aboard a minesweeper. Twice he saw battle action, the second occasion resulting in the sinking of the boat and requiring him to swim to safety. Later, when naval brass asked for volunteers for the U-boat service, the young Brandt raised his hand.
In February 1943, Brandt’s submarine—U-108—was bombed by onrushing British airplanes and destroyers in the Atlantic west of Gibraltar, its conning tower severely damaged, its ability to dive erased. Crippled, the U-boat limped along the surface toward a base in Lorient, France, a sitting duck for enemy aircraft or ships that happened into the vicinity. The sub made it safely back to port, but the experience left a deep impression on Brandt. During the attack, he had begged the commander to dive, but the man had chosen to wait. As the enemy bore down, Brandt observed the commander looking at photographs of his children, an example of how U-boat combat could paralyze even the finest officer’s nerves.
During home leaves, Brandt and his friend Fritz played their jazz and swing and talked about the hopelessness of the war. They continued to crack wise about Hitler and to question his leadership and decision-making abilities. If anything, since becoming an officer, Brandt had grown even more scornful of Hitler. Increasingly, however, he seemed resigned to the idea that he and so many others in the military were just cogs in a massive machine.
Brandt spent much of the rest of 1943 in U-boat training. Around this time, his brother Norbert—the one the Nazis had threatened to sterilize—joined the army. Zinten’s Nazi Party members continued to harass Otto and Elise over their church worship and their refusal to join the party, despite the fact that Siggi was a U-boat officer. Always, the threat of deportation to a concentration camp loomed over the Brandt household.
Around October 1943, Brandt was made first officer of U-869, a brand-new Type IX being built at the Deschimag yard in Bremen. He met the boat’s commander, Helmuth Neuerburg, and its chief engineer, a vaguely melancholy man named Ludwig Kessler. During training, Brandt was the consummate professional, duty-bound and willing to die for Germany. During his visits home, he referred to U-869 as a “Nazi Tauchboot”—a Nazi diving boat—his emphasis on the word Nazi sarcastic and derogatory. Sometimes, thirteen-year-old Hans-Georg heard his brother call the U-boat an “iron coffin.”
The U-869 crew continued its training into spring 1944, anxious for the first of several tests by inspectors—ca
lled the “Agru-Front”—near the Polish fishing peninsula of Hela. At sea, First Officer Brandt took one of three watches, while Commander Neuerburg joined any of the watches that he pleased. The two men appeared strong and experienced to their men, though Neuerburg continued to struggle to squeeze his tall frame and broad shoulders through the narrow deck hatch that led to the control room.
U-869 would go through Agru-Front testing five times between late March and October. Each time Neuerburg performed excellently, controlling his boat and firing his torpedoes with a marksman’s precision. Deadly aim with torpedoes inspired confidence in a U-boat crew, and as the men of U-869 watched Neuerburg kill practice targets, their belief in him as a leader deepened. In alarm, or emergency, dive training, the crew was quick and nimble, a single organism of unified reflexes built from relentless training and a sober understanding of the odds they faced. In every phase of the Agru-Front, Neuerburg betrayed not a sliver of fear or apprehension. Like the famed U-boat aces who had become legend by casually perusing a novel as depth charges exploded around their subs, Neuerburg stayed cool no matter how threatening the moment. His crew grew to respect him even more.
Despite their growing proficiency and cohesion as a unit, the men of U-869 remained realists. They knew that only a handful of them had previous U-boat experience. Most knew or suspected that the Allies owned antisubmarine technology for which the Kriegsmarine had no answer. While Guschewski and the U-602 crew had laughed often in 1942, he found little levity aboard U-869. Monte Cassino had fallen. The Allies had landed at Normandy. Crewmen’s hometowns were being bombed. Scores of U-boats went missing or killed in enemy waters. Germany, it was clear to many, was falling.
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