An Honorable German

by Charles L. McCain

  Max reported the course change to Langsdorff.

  “Acknowledged,” the captain said, keeping the binoculars at his eyes.

  Langsdorff made no secret of his dislike for Spiering. Like many of Göring’s Luftwaffe boys, the pilot was arrogant, undisciplined, contemptuous of the navy. He had drawn the captain’s wrath not three weeks before by continuing to machine-gun a stopped freighter for several minutes after Graf Spee had ceased fire. Afterward, brought before the captain in his formal day cabin with Max and Commander Kay present, Langsdorff asked, “You will please explain to me why you fired your weapon on a defenseless cargo vessel.”

  The pilot hesitated. “I—I was attacking an enemy, sir.”

  “Did you see Graf Spee firing?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why do you think Graf Spee was not firing at the freighter?”

  “Because she was stopped and under our orders, sir.”

  “That is correct, Leutnant. She was stopped and under my orders, like you and everyone else aboard this vessel. You were not under attack but you fired your guns on innocent civilians. Such behavior is an affront to the honor of our country and my ship. You should be most thankful no one was seriously hurt.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Before dismissing, Langsdorff had spent long moments with his blue eyes fixed on Leutnant Spiering, staring for a minute or more without so much as a blink. Now the captain’s stern blue eyes continued to peer ahead through his binoculars as brief reports were given to him by the chief navigation officer, whose men were following Spiering’s position on their chart. Around Max, the officers and men adjusted their hastily donned clothing without taking their eyes from their respective tasks. Langsdorff insisted on a neat appearance from his men at all times. Conducive to military discipline, he said. Max straightened his tie. He had learned to dress on the fly at the Marineschule Mürwik, where everything was double time and spit shine. No excuses.

  Graf Spee, now worked up to her full twenty-eight knots, shuddered as she pushed her way through the waves.

  “Oberleutnant?”

  “Ja, Herr Kapitän?”

  “The French flag, if you please.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Kapitän.”

  Max passed Langsdorff’s order to the chief signalman, who took all of ten seconds to produce the tricolor of France from the ordered shelves of his flag locker. He rolled the flag into a ball, ran it up the signal mast abaft the bridge, and with a twist of the halyard, the French colors broke over Graf Spee. As long as the flag was hauled down before an attack commenced, international law would not be violated. To the untrained observer, looking from a distance, Spee resembled the French battleship Dunkurque; the flag would add to this illusion—and because the French had foolishly joined the British in their war against Germany, Dunkurque was a friendly ship to a British merchantman. If the hoax could fool the freighter’s crew until they were under Graf Spee’s guns, the dispatch of a radio warning to the British Admiralty might be prevented.

  Tricolor whipping from the signal mast, Spee charged toward the freighter, her prow breaking the waves, sending towers of spray into the air. Aft, the churning propellers left a two-kilometer wake. Swells advanced at a perpendicular angle and smacked against Spee, heeling her over back and forth. Max swayed like a metronome.

  “Range?”

  “Three kilometers now, Herr Kapitän.”

  “Can you identify her?”

  This time Max had brought his heavy artillery—Lloyd’s Register of Merchant Shipping—which provided the silhouette and essential details of every merchant ship in the world. He leafed through the book, found the page he was looking for, then peered again through his binoculars. “Appears to be a refrigerated ship of the Blue Star Line. Doric Star, I would say, Herr Kapitän. Ten thousand tons, built 1921 in the Lithgow yard in Glasgow. Speed is sixteen knots. Probably running home with a load of Argentine beef.”

  Langsdorff nodded. “Very good.” The bridge fell quiet as they closed in. Apparently their ruse worked; Doric Star showed no signs of being alarmed.

  Two kilometers from the merchant ship, Langsdorff broke the silence. “Come starboard two points and keep us bows on. Run up our flag. Signalman!”

  “Ja, Herr Kapitän?”

  “Signal, ‘Heave to, no wireless transmitting.’”

  The metallic clatter of the signal light sounded through the bridge. “Uncover notice,” Langsdorff said, and Max passed this by megaphone to the sailors on each of the bridge wings, who unfurled the large canvas sign that hung just under the bridge windows: NO WIRELESS OR I WILL OPEN FIRE.

  A half kilometer from the British ship Langsdorff came hard starboard. As her giant rudder bit the sea, Graf Spee turned broadside to the British ship. The electric motors whined as the main gun turrets revolved on their ball-bearing rollers to face the merchantman.

  “Dead slow!”

  The bridge messengers rang the brass engine telegraphs and set the needles to dead slow. Max watched the revolution indicator to see if the propeller shafts were slowing down. “Making turns for two knots,” he reported to Langsdorff. “B-Service reports no wireless transmissions.”

  “Very well, Oberleutnant. Take the boarding party across yourself and personally search for the ship’s papers, logbooks, anything.”

  This was their ninth capture, but so far they hadn’t been able to capture any British naval codes. The B-Service men were able to break a number of Royal Navy and British Merchant Navy codes, but these changed periodically and capturing a codebook would ease the strain of constant decoding.

  Max quickly made his way to the boat deck, where Dieter had already mustered the boarding party. The older men had grown beards, now bushy and full in their third month at sea. Some of the younger sailors didn’t have enough whiskers for a beard and they looked all the younger for it. Max empathized with them; he couldn’t get the blond hair on his face to grow beyond a few pale strands. So he kept himself clean-shaven but wished he could grow a full beard and mustache like Dieter, who now looked more like a Wagnerian hero than an engineer.

  Max returned Dieter’s salute. “I will command this boarding party, Leutnant. All is in order?”

  “All is in order, Oberleutnant.”

  Each sailor in the party carried a pistol and several potato-masher hand grenades. A piratical-looking lot, Max decided—a crew of Viking raiders. Carls, the senior petty officer in the group, handed Max a Luger. Max jammed the gun down the front of his belt and instantly felt ridiculous. If he removed the Luger, it would look bad to the men. Besides, Carls hadn’t given him a holster. Max knew that as an officer there were times when one had to go along with what the men wanted you to do.

  He ordered his crew into the launch.

  After the crane had deposited them in the water, Viktor, the coxswain, gunned the engine and they moved swiftly toward the ship. Spray flew into the boat and Max could taste the salt on his lips.

  Viktor maneuvered them underneath the rope ladder the Brits had trailed over the side. Tendrils of rust streaked the hull of the ship, belying the neat appearance she had presented from a distance. Many British freighters looked this way. Owners had scrimped on maintenance during the Depression years. Max stood up in the launch and managed only with difficulty to keep his footing as the boat bucked up and down in the swell. As the officer in charge, he went first. On the upswing he jumped for the ladder, caught it, then banged painfully into the side of the ship. The pistol felt cold and greasy against his stomach as he struggled up the rungs. Below, Dieter grabbed hold of the ladder and began to climb, the rest of the crew following after him.

  Three more pulls and Max came level with the gangway, blood pounding in his temples from the exertion and excitement. On his face he fixed his fiercest look, came to attention, and gave a curt salute to the British captain and his officers, who were assembled at the gangway. Max’s crew formed up behind him, pistols drawn.

  “Gentlemen, I am Senior Lieutenant Brekendor
f. You are now prisoners of the German navy,” Max said. “Captain, please assemble your men on the aft deck for transport to our ship.”

  The captain, red-faced, glared at Max, then saluted in return. “Captain Stubbs, Doric Star.” He gave the first officer a grudging nod. “Assemble the crew.”

  Under his prodding, the English crew—more than forty men, rumpled and mostly unshaven—formed themselves up aft of the bridge. Max instructed them to lower the lifeboats. “The first officer will remain aboard to conduct me through the ship,” he told the captain. “You will accompany your men to Graf Spee.”

  “It’s Spee that’s got us then,” Stubbs muttered. “Thought you were Deutschland.” The captain and first officer looked at each other for a moment. “Carry on, Number One,” the captain said, then he turned away and loaded his men into the lifeboats.

  Max turned to Dieter and Carls, both of them with their pirate beards. To this image of fierceness, Carls added a tattoo of the Kaiser’s Imperial Crest on one arm and the crest of the Kronprinz on the other. “Got them in China, sir,” he’d once told Max. “The Chinks do tattoos good.” Carls also had a windjammer tattooed on his chest—a living picture of the first ship he had sailed on. He carried a submachine gun slung across his shoulder with three potato-masher hand grenades in his belt.

  “Have them search the ship, as usual. I’ll take the radio room. Stay alert.” Max turned to the British officer. “You’ll show me the radio room, yes?”

  “This way, sir,” the first officer said.

  He led Max below. When they got to the radio room the wooden door was locked. “Key?”

  “I don’t have it.”

  Max scowled at the Englishman. They never admitted defeat, these people. He drew back and gave the door his best soccer kick, bursting it open. The room was in a shambles. Drawers had been pulled out and overturned on the floor, cabinets ransacked, charts and notices ripped from the metal walls, papers strewn everywhere. Pencils rolled to and fro across the deck as the ship wallowed in the swell. The wireless set itself was still on, warm to the touch. Max turned it off and looked at the British officer. “Codebooks?”

  “O-o-overboard, sir.”

  “Cargo manifest?”

  “Overboard.”

  Max frowned. Dammit. The scene in the radio room suggested that the Brits had been looking for something—possibly something they hadn’t found. He sat down in the radio operator’s chair and sifted through the various papers covering the counter and desk at his side. A muffled sound came from belowdecks, but Max ignored it.

  The next explosion threw him to the deck.

  “You bloody English swine!” he yelled at the first officer. Another blast from below. The first officer cringed in the corner, breathing rapidly. Steel plates creaked as the ship began to list. From the shelves above, books cascaded to the desk. Max drew the Luger from his pants and lunged at the Englishman. “What’s happening, damn you!”

  The first officer’s eyes were wide. His mouth opened and closed but no words came out. Max jammed his pistol into the officer’s mouth and the acrid smell of urine filled the cabin. “What’s happening?” He withdrew the gun to the Britisher’s lips.

  “Scuttling charges, sir. In the engine room. Cap—Captain planted them.”

  Max shoved the Luger’s barrel back into the first officer’s mouth. “If any of my men die, I will kill you.” He jerked the muzzle out and ran from the room.

  Almost losing his balance on the listing deck, he flung his free hand out to steady himself. The explosives must have blown open the seacocks, allowing tons of water to pour into the ship. Max smelled burning meat. The cargo had caught fire. He burst out onto the main deck. Dieter was assembling the men by the gangway. Max counted them. Only ten. Shit. Damn these English. “Who’s missing?” he shouted.

  “Carls,” Dieter answered. “He was going to the engine room.”

  “Into the boat, now!” Max ordered. Three long blasts sounded from Graf Spee’s whistle—the recall signal. Except for hand grenades, the boarding party had carried no explosives with them to the British ship, so Langsdorff knew something was wrong. Max dashed to the companionway leading to the interior. “Carls! Carls!” he called down. No answer. He descended to the next deck. “Carls!”

  “I’m down here, Herr Oberleutnant.”

  Max dropped down the ladder. Carls lay in the corridor propped on his elbows, one leg splayed at an unnatural angle. Smoke blew up from below and set Max to coughing.

  “Explosion threw me against the bulkhead, Herr Oberleutnant,” Carls said. “Leg looks to be broke.” His face was ashen, but his voice remained calm. Carls was older than most of the men, a prewar petty officer who had enlisted in the navy in 1915, during the First War. Skillful, reliable, steady in a crisis, good with a knife; killed three mutinous sailors who attacked his captain during the Kiel mutiny in 1918, so the story went. But he was a big man, well over two hundred pounds, most of it muscle. Max wasn’t sure he could move Carls. No time to summon the others.

  “Carls, can you sit up?”

  “I will try, Herr Oberleutnant.”

  The smoke thickened. Max labored for oxygen.

  He knelt between Carls’s legs with his back to the larger man. “Carls, wrap your arms around my neck.” He grasped Carls by the thighs. The petty officer gasped in pain. Max grimaced with the strain. He leaned forward, putting all his strength into his legs, and got halfway to his feet before pitching forward. Carls let out another sharp gasp as the two of them toppled together. Max’s face slammed into the deck beneath Carls’s weight and he tasted blood. He was not strong enough to do this.

  “Go, Herr Oberleutnant,” Carls said, rolling off sideways to let Max up.

  Smoke billowed around them, thick and black. Max hesitated. How would he get Carls to the upper deck? Then he heard the pounding of feet, and suddenly Dieter appeared through the smoke.

  “His leg,” Max said, nodding toward Carls.

  Dieter understood at once. They each draped one of the big man’s arms around their shoulders and got him up. Moving sideways down the passageway, they reached the ladder to the upper decks and Carls, with help, pulled himself up the ladder with his burly arms. In two minutes they emerged, gasping for air, onto the main deck, faces black as coal. Clouds of oily smoke billowed out behind them as Max and Dieter dragged Carls to the rail. Max glanced around. A length of manila rope lay on the deck. Max snatched it and tied a bowline around Carls’s waist. “Viktor,” Max shouted over the roar of the fire, “bring the launch close abeam. We have to lower Carls over the side.”

  “At once, Herr Oberleutnant,” Viktor shouted back.

  As they lowered Carls, Max felt the heat of the burning ship baking his skin. The charred meat in the hold sent an acrid odor down his throat. In the distance, the insistent whistle of the recall signal sounded again, deep and loud. Below them, Viktor worked to maneuver the launch under Carls. Swells tossed the launch up and down, the crew fighting to keep from being dashed against the freighter’s hull. Carls made no sound as he hovered above the water, lips compressed to whiteness so as not to cry out from the pain. Max’s arms burned. Cords of muscle stood out on Dieter’s neck. Slowly they lowered Carls until his torso reached the outstretched arms of the crewmen in the launch.

  “Untie him!”

  They quickly released the rope and Max hauled it back up, tied a double half hitch to the rail, and handed the line to Dieter.

  “After you,” Dieter said, handing it back.

  Coughing from the smoke, Max slipped over the side and down. Dieter followed, tumbling into the boat.

  Without waiting for the order, Viktor put the wheel hard over and turned the launch toward Graf Spee, Langsdorff still sounding the ship’s whistle. The British lifeboats had reached Spee, and the crew had been fetched up on deck, where they stood under armed guard. In Max’s own boat, the British first officer cowered in the bow.

  Spray thrown up by the speeding launch again wash
ed over Max, but this time the salt burned his lips, chapped from the heat of the fire. He turned to Dieter, who sat beside him in the stern. Black streaks covered his face like greasepaint, but Dieter smiled broadly, as if they were on some kind of pleasure cruise. “After you?” Max asked him, raising his voice above the engine.

  Dieter laughed. “Age before beauty.” They were both twenty-five, but Max was older by all of ten days.

  Max shook his head. He would thank Dieter later; when they weren’t in front of the men. Behind them, the merchant-man blazed, flames now engulfing the rail where they had stood only minutes before. The fire threw an eerie reflection across the choppy gray waves, casting a dull yellow light on the face of the British officer, who watched his ship burn with a pathetic expression of grief.

  Max wanted badly to draw his pistol and kill the first officer—though he had never felt such an urge before. When Graf Spee fired her guns, he didn’t make a personal connection with the shells. Being a naval officer involved shooting big guns at other ships from time to time, but the combat was detached. They hadn’t even been in a battle yet; the ships they’d sunk had all been unarmed merchantmen. And firing the guns was actually just a small part of their job. They spent most of their time simply moving Graf Spee from one location to another. Firing at another ship was a relatively rare occurrence.

  Like all German naval officers, Max was forbidden to join any political party, including the Nazi Party, so he wasn’t swayed by fiery speeches about blood and iron, but now he felt a blood-lust, that breath of rage the Führer called for, the Teutonic fury. These treacherous British swine—you didn’t have to be a Nazi to hate them. Everyone knew how the Royal Navy had maintained its blockade of Germany during peace negotiations after the Armistice that ended the First War. Food and medicine were allowed through only if the Germans could pay in cash, of which they had none, and carried in German merchant ships, which had all been seized. All over Germany, people who had survived the brutal war years starved in the streets in 1919; they died in droves from Spanish flu. Max’s mother fell sick that May, and they took her off to a quarantine hospital in Kiel. She never came back. His father was no Nazi, he cared nothing for Hitler’s rhetoric, but Johann Brekendorf knew how to despise the British. It would be the easiest thing in the world, Max realized: pull the gun from his belt, point it, squeeze the trigger. Instantly, the trembling Englishman in the bow would cease to exist. It frightened him, the ease.