Nigel Cawthorne

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  After this, we drifted off very rapidly … After we had drifted for some time, we saw a second raft with approximately seven men, but we quickly lost track of this raft. We could see Bismarck only when our raft was atop the crest of a mountainous wave. Firing continued. It became silent after an hour. An English cruiser with three funnels passed within approximately 200m after we went overboard. The cruiser was on course for Bismarck … During the day we only saw a single Kondor plane. In the twilight, we were seen by U-boat (U-74) and taken on board.

  Another survivor was Maschinenobergefreiter (Leading Stoker) Bruno Rzonca.

  When the skipper gave the order to abandon the ship and leave the doors open, we looked for an exit. I was looking around and saw men sitting on a bench and I asked: ‘Don’t you want to save yourselves?’ They said: ‘There is no ship coming, the water is too cold, the waves too high, we are going down with the ship.’ A little bit further there was a wounded guy, he lost his heels; I said: ‘Come on, I am going to help you out first and then find me an exit.’ He replied: ‘Leave me alone and don’t step on my feet, I am going down with the ship.’ I couldn’t believe that. A little later we found a stairway. When I came out I couldn’t believe it. The British were still shooting, and we looked for cover behind one of the six-inch turrets. Bodies were piled around the turrets, they were all dead. The whole deck was full of blood and body parts. There were a couple of guys sitting there and said: ‘Help me to get in the water, we can’t walk any more.’ So we help them out into the water. Now the ship started turning over more and more to the port side and I stayed on the starboard side. I took off my heavy leather suit and jumped into the water. I thought this would be the end. I was 23 years old, only starting living. I was engaged, and there was no chance to save myself. You just have to jump into the water and swim as long as you can. That’s what I did. It was at least 50 or more feet to jump into the water. I was 100 feet away when the ship started to turn over to the port side all the way, and then a couple of guys that didn’t get over on time, jumped and slid down the starboard side of the hull until they hit the stabilizer and never came up again. They drowned. Then, we had to swim for almost an hour, the water was 15°C and the waves 30 feet high …

  First I was swimming and I could see nothing, then a guy came by me and held on to my neck and I said: ‘I can’t help you.’ I was looking and I saw a mast coming up. I couldn’t distinguish the ship, and then a while later I saw the flag on it. It was a British flag. I told the guy who was swimming beside me: ‘There is a British ship coming there.’ He said: ‘I don’t want to do anything with the British; they want to shoot us.’ I didn’t see him any more.

  Bruno Rzonca was rescued by HMS Dorsetshire.

  They took my clothing off, dried me up, and gave me a blanket. They brought us downstairs, offered us whiskey. I had swallowed some of the oil in the water and the whiskey was better.

  Matrosengefreiter (Able Seaman) Otto Maus also survived.

  Towards 1100 hours, large numbers of comrades were being washed overboard every time the ship heeled to port; I was among these … After a short time I reached a raft which was already occupied, while being respectively grabbed onto by 40–60 comrades. I grabbed on too. A lot of oil floated on the water. I met the ordnance mate from our turret there. We talked. We could still see the ship which was still firing. But after about an hour we could no longer see the ship … Many comrades became unconscious as a result of swallowing oily water and let go of the raft. Among them was my turret’s ordnance mate. I drifted with five men for about two more hours. The air and the water appeared warm to us. At about 1700 hours the raft capsized.

  Maschinengefreiter (Stoker) Walter Lorenzen was in the same raft.

  Five of us got into the raft. But the raft repeatedly capsized, whereby two more comrades drowned – one a staff officer and one of the mechanics … There were two soldered-shut tin cans and two signal flags in the rubber bag in the raft. One of the cans contained a flare pistol and ammunition, the other a bottle of Schnapps, one bottle of seltzer water, cookies, chocolate, cigarettes and matches. Our joy was great when we opened the tins. But we were to be disappointed. The charged water bottle had burst and the entire contents were wet. We decided to deal very frugally with the Schnapps. After a short time we discovered that the contents of the Schnapps container had leaked out because the seal was defective … We three drifted along during the night. Sometime during the middle of the night as I was woken from drowsing by a breaker, I noticed that the comrade from the prize command’s head was lying face up in the water. He had drowned. We took the dead sailor’s life vest off and cast out the corpse. Now I was alone on the raft with my comrade, Seaman Second Class Maus. In the morning, we again saw, at a distance of 200m, a raft occupied by two men – evidently, it was the same raft we had been alongside the previous evening. But the raft soon disappeared once again from view. My comrade woke me up with the scream: ‘A steamer!’ We fired flares. The steamer instantly veered toward us and took us aboard. It was the German steamer Sachsenwald [a German weather ship]. I found out the following day that we had been picked up about 2300 hours.

  INTO THE U-BOATS

  After the sinking of the Bismarck, there were no more surface actions involving the German Navy. The Bismarck’s sister ship, the Tirpitz, remained hidden in a Norwegian fjord until it was damaged by bombing in September 1944. Meanwhile, the Battle of the Atlantic had been waged by German U-boats. These submarines were metal tubes just 67m (220ft) long, into which were crammed four officers, three or four senior non-commissioned officers, 14 petty officers and 26–28 enlisted men. Around half the crew lived in the bow compartment, where they ate, slept, serviced torpedoes and whiled away their free time. According to Oberfähnrich (Midshipman) Volkmar König:

  They shared their bunk with a comrade who did the same job aboard. While one man was on watch for four hours, another would have time to rest. When the watch changed, the other man would take over this bunk, still warm.

  And with a full load of torpedoes there was nowhere to sit or stand. Submariner Gerhard Schwartz recalled:

  It was awful, one bunk above another. And next to it a small locker. Sometimes there was butter stored in it. And all the food stuff hanging around. It was hard to get used to.

  Not all those who volunteered for the U-boats were hardline Nazis. Radio operator Georg Högel recalled listening to jazz. Some U-boats even tuned into enemy radio stations to hear forbidden ‘swing’ music. Gerhard Schwarz remembered his crew being collectively punished with a reading from Mein Kampf, after a portion of Kujambel – a type of fruit soup – was eaten despite orders that it was to be kept until the end of the next shift. This did not foster a sense of solidarity. Usually people stuck together in small groups, and submariner Herbert Arnecke recalled:

  You did not run to and fro. If you lived in the aft compartment [on board a Type IXC U-boat] you did not know what was going on in the bow compartment unless you talked about it on watch.

  In all weather conditions, the cook managed to produce four meals a day in a tiny galley with a three-ring range, two small ovens and a 40-litre (9-gallon) pot. But this had dire consequences, according to Leutnant Hans Zeitz:

  We were encouraged to eat, because we were living under such unhealthy conditions, without daylight and in poor ventilation. The result was constipation. There was no exercise but plenty of nutritious food. Sometimes we disregarded the bread and spread the butter straight onto the cheese. The consumption of castor oil was considerable.

  On the other hand, going to the lavatory was a hazardous business. Known humorously as ‘Tube 7’, the early toilets could not be flushed at a depth greater than 25–30m (80–100ft), due to the water pressure, and porcelain cracks easily when subjected to shocks from depth charges. Later in the war, lavatories that could be flushed at a greater depth were provided, but special training was needed to operate them, leading to the bogus WC Schein (‘water closet certificate’). But it was no la
ughing matter. Failure to operate the lavatory properly led to the loss of U-1206 off Scotland on Friday, 13 April 1945. An ill-executed flush allowed waste and sea water to flood the forward compartment, and the water-logged batteries gave off chlorine gas, forcing the submarine to surface. It was then bombed and strafed. Three men were killed. The rest of the crew abandoned ship and rowed ashore in what must have been the most embarrassing U-boat loss of the war.

  Generally, hygiene went by the board, as fresh water was conserved for drinking and cooking. U-boat veteran Otto Giesse recalled:

  During operations in the Atlantic or Arctic one simply could not escape becoming encrusted with dirt. At first, I thought a man could get scabies or some other skin disease if he didn’t wash down at least once a day. To my surprise, I soon learned that we could make do by just rinsing off our hands a couple of times a week with salt water. Afterwards, we splashed ‘Cologne 4711’ onto our faces and distributed any remaining dirt with ointment, vigorously rubbing it into the skin. Our hair and beards were soon filthy and clotted from the salt water breaking over the ship, and even the best comb broke when we tried to disentangle the hairy mess. So it was left as it was and sprinkled with birch water to neutralize the odour, which seemed to differ with each man.

  Then there was the battle with the elements, recalled by Robert Klaus:

  When on lookout duty, one got terribly wet. The heavy sea crashed over one’s head. We had to get fastened to the conning tower not to be washed overboard.

  After his watch, he would dry his clothes near the engine, but once he found that his dry clothes had been stolen and other wet ones put in their place.

  In the North Atlantic there was also the cold to contend with. Heading into Canadian waters, Erich Topp, commander of U-552, wrote:

  We entered these icy waters and a number of the crew ended up with frozen feet, limbs; we weren’t dressed warmly enough. People were standing on the bridge with icicles hanging off their caps; everything was under ice. The water that came on deck froze immediately; the temperature was minus ten degrees and we had to dive to melt away the ice. That was a bad time.

  In the tropics, though, the temperature inside a U-boat could reach 60°C (140°F), with a relative humidity of over 90 per cent.

  Food was also a problem, particularly when missions went on longer than originally planned. The diet on U-340 became monotonous when its supply boat, U-459, was sunk. One crewman complained:

  We had nothing but macaroni all the way from Freetown back to St. Nazaire. Macaroni with noodles and noodles with macaroni. Macaroni with dried fruit and dried fruit with macaroni. And then macaroni with ham and ham with macaroni.

  However, birthdays and other special occasions were celebrated with tinned strawberries or a cake. In 1942, U-boatman Gerhard Schwartz remembers celebrating Christmas 30m under the Caribbean with a Christmas cake, carols and a paper Christmas tree made for the occasion.

  Then there was the excitement of an attack. Oberfunkmaat (Radio Chief Petty Officer) Wolfgang Hirschfeld recorded in his diary on board U-109:

  Then it is time. The men stand or crouch in tension at their posts. ‘Rohr zwei fertig!’ [‘Tube two ready!’] It is absolutely silent on board. Then I hear the muffled but decisive words, ‘Rohr eins los! Rohr zwei los!’ [‘Tube one fire! Tube two fire!’] The Aale [‘eels’ was the submariners’ slang for torpedoes] leave with a hissing noise … The stop-watch ticks. After three minutes there is the first explosion, immediately followed by the second … Suddenly fierce shock waves hit us like a hammer …

  The captain looked through the periscope to see that the ship had been ripped apart by the explosions. Then came what Werner Kronenberg, the engineering officer on another U-boat, called ‘the death-struggle of a ship’.

  Those squeaks, the bursting of the bulkhead, this noise when she goes down – a noise that gets into your bones. That is not a pleasant sound.

  As sailors, the U-boatmen thought about ships rather than the loss of their fellow seamen. After sinking the Danish-registered tanker Danmark in Inganess Bay off Kirkwall in the Orkneys on 11 January 1940, U-23’s first watch officer, Hans-Jochen von Knebel Doeberitz, said:

  We were very proud and happy. The English didn’t believe we could be so close by in the anchorage, and when the torpedo exploded they searched the air with lights because they thought we were the Luftwaffe. They were even firing into the air. Of course, for me on this first voyage, it was quite an experience. Then we turned back and again we sailed very close to the lookouts, but got out of there in one piece.

  Others grew more aware of what they were doing. Herbert Arnecke recalled:

  The war was ugly … I personally only realized that when I heard people crying in the water, because they were drowning. Until then I really focused upon the tonnage rather than the people.

  Of course, once men were in the water the attitude to the enemy changed. Korvettenkapitän (Lieutenant Commander) Peter ‘Ali’ Cremer said:

  For us U-boat commanders, the humane treatment of shipwrecked seamen of the enemy powers was a matter of course. They were not enemies any more, but simply shipwrecked and had to be helped as far as possible.

  DEPTH-CHARGED

  After an attack, there was always the danger of retaliation and the horror of being depth-charged. Hans Börner recorded:

  After each depth-charge we were so relieved, when it was over, that nothing had happened for now. And you knew that the next would come. Often you heard the splash of it falling into the sea above us. We could hear that. But where was it? In front, aft, to port?

  Depth-charging took a terrible toll. A submariner from U-37 wrote home from captivity in the Tower of London:

  This is what happened. After an attack, we were simultaneously pummelled for three hours with terrible little depth charges by seven destroyers. The charge goes off with a most uncomfortable bang. Near the boat, they change the nature of material which breaks up into the form of atoms. We came to the surface, damaged and we were all saved by the British destroyers … Our treatment is good, and there is no need to worry. This is in itself astonishing, given the anti-German agitations stirred up in the English people by their newspapers.

  Men endured depth-charging for two or three days. Kapitänleutnant (Lieutenant Commander) Hartwig Looks, commander of U-264, which was sunk on 19 February 1944, described the loss of his vessel:

  We got around two hundred depth charges and they exploded beneath the U-boat. We were accustomed to depth charges exploding above us, but the full wave of the explosion came from below. I tried to shake them off by taking evasive action, but that didn’t work. Equipment broke away from the pressure hull, and there were various leaks. The water reached above our ankles and a fire was reported in the electric motor room, and when you are submerged and there’s a fire on board that’s the end. I thought, ‘There’s nothing for it – we have to surface.’ We shot out of the water like a champagne cork and found ourselves inside a circle made by Captain Walker’s submarine chasers. The crew jumped in the sea. I was on the tower holding on to the antenna to stop my legs being pulled into the tower hatch, where a whirlpool was forming. Then the U-boat sank below me.

  Looks was rescued by a British rating:

  I was hanging on the scramble net limp as a lettuce leaf. Then a British sailor jumped over the rail, climbed down the net, got hold of my collar and said, ‘Come on, sailor!’ and hauled me up on deck.

  The entire crew of U-264 was saved, but of nearly 800 U-boats sunk during the Atlantic campaign, most went down with all hands.

  3

  HOLDING THE LINE: ATTRITION ON TWO FRONTS

  During 1942, the Germans suffered further reverses in North Africa. In the summer, Hitler ordered an advance on Cairo. But Rommel found his supply lines overstretched and complained that ‘support only arrives when things are almost hopeless’. On the night of 1 November 1942, the British, under General Bernard Montgomery, stopped the German advance with a counterattack at El Alam
ein. Two days later, Rommel wrote to his wife:

  Dearest Lu,

  The battle is going very heavily against us. We’re simply being crushed by the enemy weight. I’ve made an attempt to salvage part of the army. I wonder if it will succeed. At night I lie open-eyed racking my brains for a way out of this plight for my poor troops. We are facing very difficult days, perhaps the most difficult a man can undergo. The dead are lucky, it’s all over for them. I think of you constantly with heartfelt love and gratitude. Perhaps all will yet be well and we shall see each other again.

  Unhelpfully, Hitler sent a signal saying:

  The situation demands that the positions at El Alamein be held to the last man. A retreat is out of the question. Victory or death! Heil Hitler!

  It made no difference; the German army was soon fleeing back towards Tripoli, then on to Tunis. During the battle at El Alamein, Leutnant Heinz Schmidt’s Special Group 288 was left out of the fighting:

  We listened to the heavy battle going on a dozen miles to the east of us, while our weapons lay idle and there was nothing for us to do except swim or lounge in the sun.

  But they became Rommel’s rearguard. Schmidt described the conditions they then faced:

  We went without sleep, without food, without washing, and without conversation beyond the clipped talk of wireless procedures and orders. In permanent need of everything civilized, we snatched greedily at anything we could find, getting neither enjoyment or nourishment … The daily routine was nearly always the same – up at any time between midnight and 0400; move out of the lager [camp] before first light; a biscuit and a spoonful of jam or a slice of wurst, if you were lucky; a long day of movement and vigil and encounter, death and fear of death until darkness put a limit to vision and purpose on both sides; the pulling in of sub-units which had been sent out on far-flung missions; the final endurance of the black, close-linked march to the lager area; maintenance and replenishment and more orders – which took until midnight; and then the beginning of another 24 hours.

 

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