An Honorable German

by Charles L. McCain

  The coxswain steered the launch under the sling coupling that dangled from Graf Spee’s starboard crane. “Hook on,” Max ordered.

  The sailors nearest the couplings hooked them to the launch. “Hooked on, Herr Oberleutnant.”

  Max tilted his head back and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Give way!” he shouted.

  Gears ground, then caught, and the crane jerked the launch from the water, depositing the boat in its chocks on the deck.

  The British captain stood at the head of his men, ten paces off. Max, enraged, climbed out of the launch and made straight for Stubbs, who turned to meet him, throwing his shoulders back and raising his bearded chin. “You filthy swine,” Max said, pushing his face in very close to the Englishman’s. Max’s hands twitched at his sides; the captain’s sour breath smelled of pipe tobacco. Max balled his right hand into a fist. “You shit! Goddamn you!”

  “Achtung!” a sailor cried. Everyone within earshot came to quivering attention as Captain Langsdorff strode across the deck.

  “Oberleutnant Brekendorf!”

  Max had come to attention and stared silently ahead.

  “You are dismissed,” Langsdorff said.

  “This man almost killed…”

  “Dismissed, Oberleutnant.”

  The discipline of the Kriegsmarine asserted itself. “Jawohl, Herr Kapitän.”

  Max executed a parade-ground about-face and marched to the companionway. Behind him, Langsdorff greeted the British officers with his unshakable calm, his impeccable English, and his drawing room manners.

  Once in his cabin, Max pulled off his uniform, blackened with soot, wadded it into a ball, and threw it against the closet door. He lit a cigarette, filling the cabin with gray fumes much lighter than the ones that had almost choked him on the freighter. Damn that Englishman and damn the dirty English bastards. Damn them all. He burned quickly through his cigarette, stubbed the butt, and walked down to the officers’ lavatory for a warm shower. His heart still beat fast, anger mixed with leftover fear. He breathed deeply, closing his eyes and summoning a picture of Mareth. In August, in Berlin, just two days before Max sailed, the two of them had taken a hotel room with its own private bath for the weekend, and they had put that shower to excellent, creative use. Already it seemed like years ago, but the hot water on his skin helped recall the memory.

  He returned to his cabin and slept, waking at 1800 hours to put on a clean uniform for the evening meal. Other officers had just come off duty and the atmosphere in the officers’ mess was like a slightly raucous gentlemen’s club. Langsdorff dined in his sea cabin, as he often did when the ship was under way. His presence in the mess put his officers on their most correct and formal behavior, not allowing them to relax. Max looked around for Dieter. Some officers were drinking at the bar, others played skat in the back, but he couldn’t see his friend. He found a seat instead with Reinhold, one of the gunnery officers, and Hollendorf, second navigation officer.

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen, guten Abend,” Max said, dropping into a chair. Reinhold was an older man, but Hollendorf—a squat Bavarian—was, like Max and Dieter, a member of Crew 33, the small group of young officer cadets who had come to the Marineschule Mürwik in 1933.

  One of the civilian mess stewards poured Max a cup of coffee. Nigger sweat, the men called it. All the coffee they were drinking and all the fresh food they were eating had come from captured British ships. Fresh eggs from S.S. Trevanion; coffee and tea from S.S. Huntsman; beef, mutton, and chicken from S.S. Newton Beach; potatoes and sugar from S.S. Ashlea. The British fed them well. They had captured nine ships now and sank them all, save one used to house overflow prisoners. Still, with today’s capture, more than a hundred prisoners bunked aboard Graf Spee herself, and a damned lot of complainers they were, too.

  One of the English captains insisted that he had to have Brill’s patent medicine for seasickness, as if such a ridiculous item could even be found on a German man-o’-war. Another, Captain Dove of the tanker Africa Shell, captured off Mozambique, refused to leave his ship without his new set of golfing clubs. “Cost me twenty quid custom made in Mombasa and I’ll be damned if I leave them for you, Fritz,” he said to Max, who threw his hands in the air and let the man bring the bloody clubs across to Graf Spee along with half a dozen bottles of Gordon’s gin. “I’ll not leave good gin for Davy Jones’s locker.”

  Despite their constant grumbling, Captain Langsdorff extended every courtesy to his British prisoners. He fed them the same rations allotted to Spee’s own crew, supplied them with beer and cigarettes, with English books and magazines seized from captured merchantmen, with copies of newscasts from the BBC, an occasional bottle of whiskey—and for Captain Dove, champagne on his birthday. Langsdorff had even given one of his own pipes and a packet of tobacco to a British captain who had lost his. They even buried one British officer—dead from a heart attack—with full military honors: the body covered with the Red Duster of the British Merchant Navy; a British merchant captain reading the Church of England service; Langsdorff, Max, and other officers attending, each in full dress uniform, backed up by a starched honor guard of German sailors. Max had been required to wear his sword, which he could not abide because it was so easy to trip over. He had tripped over it, in fact, in his cabin as he dressed for the funeral, and banged his skull against the bulkhead. Still, it occurred to him then, and not for the first time, that Graf Spee might be acting with unreasonable generosity toward its prisoners. Military courtesy and the brotherhood of the sea only went so far—the Brits remained the enemy. Standing with Langsdorff on deck after the burial, Max ventured to ask the captain why he felt compelled to be so kind.

  Langsdorff smiled patiently. “International law, Oberleutnant.”

  “I understand, Herr Kapitän, but we go far beyond those requirements. We don’t owe this to the English, sir. You know what they did to us after the First War. They meant to destroy us then and they mean to destroy us now.”

  The captain looked at Max. His smile faded at the edges. Quietly he said, “Who meant to destroy us, Maximilian? The bosun’s mate from Huntsman? The crew of Ashlea? These men are sailors, as are we. They follow their orders, as do we. They love their country, as do we. And they are honorable men, as I hope that we are, too. Do they not deserve our respect?”

  Max looked away for a moment to master his anger, then turned again to Langsdorff. “Proper military etiquette is owed to them, Herr Kapitän, but not our respect. Sir, you commended the wireless operator of S.S. Tairoa for his bravery in continuing to broadcast a distress signal while we machine-gunned her!”

  “Was he not brave, Maximilian?”

  “Herr Kapitän, that doesn’t matter. He’s English!”

  Captain Langsdorff looked calmly at Max for a few moments. “And you are a German naval officer, Oberleutnant Brekendorf, and our country and our navy will be judged by your conduct, which is why you must always uphold the honor of our flag and our navy. Always.”

  _________

  The mess waiter set a large steak topped with fried eggs in front of Max. They spoke little as they bolted the meal. The sea gave a man an appetite, and who knew when he would eat again? Future mealtimes might find you at your action station with nothing save Pervitin and the emergency ration of chocolate bars to keep you going. Crockery and silverware clattered, glasses clinked, a laugh sounded at the card table. They ate substantially better on the war cruise than they had back home, where even men of the Wehrmacht were subject to the hardships of strict rationing. The program had been in place for years, and one had to look high and low throughout the Reich to find a fat man, except for Reichs-marshall Göring—“der dickie,” the Fat One, everyone called him. “Guns will make us strong. Butter will only make us fat,” he said. “That’s because we received the guns and he got all the butter,” so the joke went. The Führer had ordered that, in this war, Germany not be caught short of food, as it had been in the last. The nation had spent most of the previous decade
building up its food stores in preparation for war—an end to the rationing would be one more reward for defeating the Allies quickly.

  After finishing his meal, Max pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette. Steak, eggs, coffee, tobacco; he felt expansive. He clapped Hollendorf on the back. “And so, young Hollendorf, where to next?”

  Hollendorf looked at Max through horn-rimmed glasses. “Sorry, old boy, that’s on a need-to-know basis.”

  “My good man, don’t you think as a deck officer responsible for steering the ship I need to know?”

  Hollendorf laughed. “All right, El Maximo, but only because of all those times you polished my shoes before inspection. We are to rendezvous with Altmark in three days to take on fuel and stores, and then we’re bound for the estuary of the Rio Plata to pick up merchant traffic outbound from Uruguay and Argentina.”

  Altmark belonged to the Secret Naval Supply Service. Disguised under neutral colors, she served as a supply ship to U-boats and surface raiders like Graf Spee.

  “And then?”

  “To London, where we bombard Buckingham Palace, of course.”

  “If you can find it.”

  “I have a Michelin guide,” the navigator said.

  They laughed. It was a running joke—the deck officers claimed the navigators never knew where they were going, and the navigators said the deck officers were always steering off course, doing such things as turning the ship to avoid hitting a porpoise.

  Lempke, one of the supply officers, came and sat in a vacant chair. “Anyone for bridge with your brandy and cigars?”

  “I can’t,” Max said. “Paperwork.”

  “And these other young officers?”

  “I fear the complexities of the game are beyond these simpletons.”

  His friends laughed and tossed their napkins at Max. He smiled and rose from the table. “I bid you fine gentlemen good evening. Some of us have important work to do.” He bowed low to his colleagues and made for the administrative quarters.

  The passageways of the ship were deserted, the men either on watch or still eating. A sad blue gleam illuminated the passageways—the interior of the ship lighted this way after sundown to protect the crew’s night vision. Max returned the salute of the armed sentry on duty and entered the administrative office. The sentry stood guard over the ship’s payroll. Inside, Fest, the chief paymaster, labored over his accounts. He nodded at Max, his bald head gleaming in the light from the lamp above his metal desk. Odd that in the middle of a war such details as calculating men’s pay went on. Max had almost been killed today, and here sat Fest, doing sums and consulting wage tables. And he would have been doing it just the same even if Max had died.

  Sailors were paid monthly in accordance with the number of specialties they’d mastered. The calculations necessary to determine the wages for everyone on a ship the size of Graf Spee were incredibly complex. Every man in the Wehrmacht carried a paybook in which his wage calculations were entered, along with a detailed catalog of additional information: what equipment he had been issued, what decorations he was entitled to wear, the units he had served in, how many wounds he had sustained. The list went on and on. The paybooks doubled as identity papers. “Produce your paybook” was the only phrase those blockheads in the Feldgendarmerie seemed to know; Max had seen them drag soldiers off trains all over Germany for not having their paybooks in order. Even an officer could be arrested for a discrepancy in his paybook. Rank mattered little to the Feldgendarmerie because they reported outside the chain of command. Even at sea, the men checked their monthly pay carefully, scrutinizing the calculations, and delighted in finding errors that could be called to the paymaster’s attention.

  Max sat at the desk he shared with some of the other officers and read through the intercepts. B-Service had not yet cracked the most secret codes of the Royal Navy, many of which were employed only once and then discarded, but they had broken the one used for giving orders to convoys. From this they had learned the call signs of a number of British men-o’-war. Urgent messages had been flashed that day to Ajax, Achilles, Exeter, and dozens more British warships. These messages, like many others sent by the British Admiralty in the last ten weeks, contained a single order: sink Graf Spee. And so the Royal Navy stalked them, scouring the ocean south of the equator for any sign of Spee. How close were these ships? Max had no way of knowing.

  Here, sitting behind a desk in the quiet of the evening, the soft drone of the engines in the background, the sea hissing gently alongside the hull, it seemed possible to imagine that the war was very far away, or even that there was no war on at all. Yet he could just as easily have gone down with the British merchantman; he probably would have if not for Dieter. But he would be back in Germany soon enough, hopefully by Christmastime. He and Mareth had let their engagement continue for years, hoping her family would eventually accept Max, which they had no intention of doing. But somehow since the war began, their displeasure seemed to matter less. Christmas would make a wonderful time to get married—and it was only three weeks away.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ABOARD ADMIRAL GRAF SPEE

  FOUR DAYS LATER

  6 DECEMBER 1939

  WITH THE SWELLING OF THE STORM, MAX HAD MANAGED NO MORE than ten minutes of rest in the last four hours. The largest waves heeled Graf Spee over thirty-five degrees from the center line, giving the sensation that she was about to capsize. Max would defend his ship to anyone, be they army, navy, or air force, but truth be told, Spee rolled like a pig in a barnyard. Most of the young crew had never been through a Force Ten gale. Max knew many younger sailors were puking their guts out, convinced Spee would capsize at any moment.

  To hold himself in his narrow bunk, Max sat cross-legged, knees braced against the special storm railing, hands grasping the railing as well. In this position he tried to sleep. While the ship rolled from side to side, she also plunged up and down, sometimes in a violent corkscrew motion. Several times during the night, Max lost his grip and slammed against the bulkhead.

  His entire body felt black and blue from two days of pounding by the storm. He had been in rough weather before, especially in his sailing ship days as a Seekadett, but nothing this bad. Graf Spee, big as she was, shipped green water over the bow, burying her foredeck repeatedly into the sea, spray reaching over the fore turret and striking the ports of the navigating bridge. One of the lifeboats had been carried away, smashed to matchwood by the force of the waves. Sleeping, relaxing, having a shit—all were impossible. Eating was out of the question. There had been no hot food since the storm set in, only sandwiches and the emergency rations of chocolate bars.

  Belowdecks in the large compartments where the sailors lived—bedlam. Gear had come loose and flung itself in all directions. Pea jackets, socks, underwear, playing cards, movie magazines, letters from home, strewn everywhere. Water leaked in from the ventilator shafts topside and sloshed around the decks, the tossing of the ship so brutal that the petty officers had been unable to organize cleanup crews. But at least the sailors—the Lords, as they were known in the Kriegsmarine—could get some rest, except for those who were violently seasick. Unlike the officers, the men slept in canvas hammocks that simply swayed back and forth to the motion of the ship. Max envied them, snoring away like so many fat sausages hung from the ceiling.

  The officers’ steward rapped on his door. “Herr Oberleutnant, zero three thirty.” Max had the watch at 0400.

  Spee heeled over again and plunged into a wave, the vibration strong even this far back in the ship. Max gritted his teeth and held on. He waited for Spee to right herself, removed the storm railing, and slid to the deck. Around him the ship creaked like an old coach and four. From time to time, the turbines raced as the screws came temporarily out of the water, the powerful sea lifting the stern of Graf Spee clear of the surface. From his porthole Max could see nothing, but he felt the waves pounding against the ship’s hull.

  He pulled himself up and wedged his body between the sma
ll desk and closet. His closet door was secured with special fasteners to prevent it from swinging loose and banging against the desk. He reached up and jerked it open. Max didn’t dare report to the bridge in the wrinkled clothes he’d worn to bed. Pulling on a pressed uniform was half wrestling match and half gymnastics. The worst part was tying his shoes. Sitting on the deck, feet against the bed, he flexed his legs to keep his back fast against the closet door, freeing both hands to knot the shoelaces. Damn it all. He winced, feeling his bruises.

  A sailor’s life. Clean air, brilliant sunshine, dolphins leaping clean from the water as they raced you kilometer after kilometer; starched uniforms, brass buttons, gilded dirk at your side, bands playing, men saluting, girls throwing kisses—what the recruiting posters did not show was the ship wallowing like a North Sea trawler in a Force Ten gale, heeling over, whipping back, now plunging down, a wall of white water breaking against the base of the bridge tower. Max shook his head. To hell with it. No hot food, no word from home, the bloody Tommies scouting for them everywhere, endless work, no sleep, no hot water for shaving. Which reminded him that he’d forgotten to shave. It was a good way to cut your throat in weather like this, and Max barely had any growth to begin with, but Langsdorff would disapprove if he noticed the blond fuzz on Max’s chin and upper lip. On Graf Spee you either had a proper beard or mustache, or else nothing.