“Can the Luftwaffe do nothing to stop the bombers from reaching the city?” Max asked von Woller.
Von Woller looked at him as if he were a fool. “Of course they could, but all our squadrons are needed on the Russian Front. Only a skeleton force has been left here to protect the city. Don’t worry, Herr KapitänLeutnant, we can take it. You front-line soldiers are not the only ones privileged to be brave. It’s a matter of priorities. The Jewish Bolshevik menace comes first and we’ll deal with these terror bombers in our own good time. The Führer and the High Command are laying plans for their destruction even as we speak. See to your own duties, my young friend, and don’t fret over Berlin. I’m told these nuisance raids won’t go on much longer in any case. The English are near the end of their tether.”
Smoke and flame rose to the heavens not three blocks away, and Max could smell the soot of the fires, sewage from the busted pipes, the stink of corpses still buried in the rubble, the tang of the lingering cordite. “I can see that, Herr Ministerialdirektor.”
They detoured around another huge pile of bricks and mortar and steel girders and passed a string of vacant lots where mountains of sand had been heaped for putting out incendiary bombs.
“Still, sir, if I may, it seems as if the capital of the Reich is being pounded into rubble. Might it not be advisable to deploy more fighters for the protection of Berlin?”
Von Woller folded his arms across his chest. “I trust in the Führer, Herr KapitänLeutnant, and I should think a young officer like yourself would know to do the same. He is the greatest warlord of all history. I have complete faith in him, and in the decisions of the High Command.”
Obviously, Max thought, he had never been on the receiving end of the decisions of the High Command. Faith in the Führer and Final Victory. The Jewish Bolshevik Menace. The Jewish Puppet, Franklin Roosevelt. Complete Confidence in the High Command. The war was its own religion. Max wanted to ask the old man, as he had once asked Lehmann, how it was that the Jews could be controlling Communist Russia and capitalist America at the same time.
The driver pulled to the front of the Zoo Tower’s main entrance, Woller’s gleaming Horch with its official pendant drawing a sharp salute from the policeman on duty.
Max was surprised at how quickly von Woller’s reserve broke when he saw his daughter lying in her hospital bed. “Mareth, my dear girl,” he whispered, hurrying to her. Kneeling by the bed, he looked her up and down, as if to make sure she was all still there. “You are feeling well?”
“Father, I’m fine. The doctor says it is not serious. I was just knocked over by a bomb concussion.”
Max shook his head at the matter-of-fact way she said it. Just knocked over by a bomb concussion. Apparently that was normal in Berlin now—being knocked over by a bomb concussion or having your windows smashed, your library blown out into the street, your motorcar overturned, your little girl’s head blown off. It was less dangerous at the front.
Von Woller pulled up a chair and began talking with Mareth about his work, the goings-on in the Foreign Ministry and other parts of the government. Clearly Mareth had taken the place of her mother where von Woller’s professional obligations were concerned. It was Mareth with whom he attended all formal diplomatic functions; his wife rarely traveled to Berlin, preferring to drink away her days in the countryside.
Mareth listened patiently as her father continued. The Hungarians were giving him trouble again—they needed more attention than the Italians. And the Turks, never a straight answer from those people. They would lie to you about what day it was. The Japanese—they promised everything but delivered nothing. Their only contribution to the war effort was the well-stocked bar in their embassy. Finally, after an hour or so, she said, “And so, Father, you have met Max?”
Max had been sitting a few feet away, saying nothing, allowing von Woller to speak freely with his daughter. Now von Woller turned to him and gave him a slight nod, as if he’d forgotten Max was still there. “Yes, I have met the KapitänLeutnant. It was good of him to come and fetch me. A brave officer. He has the Iron Cross First Class, I see.”
“Father, Max is on leave for another week and I wish for him to be our guest while I’m recovering.”
Von Woller lifted his eyebrows. “I don’t know if we have room. I…”
“Then I will have to stay in the hotel where Max and I spent last night.”
Von Woller looked down at his hands folded neatly in his lap. “Mareth, please.”
“Father.”
Von Woller gave Max a brief glance. “Of course. It would be a pleasure to have the KapitänLeutnant as our guest.”
Max thanked him, nodding curtly. The old Nazi surely knew the life of a U-boat captain was not marked by longevity—a little patience now was worth his while because Max would be at the bottom of the Atlantic before year’s end. Nonetheless, Mareth flashed a triumphant grin when he glanced at her and Max couldn’t help grinning back.
_________
A week later, Max made a lonesome return to the Stettiner Bahnhof. Mareth had wanted to see him off but the doctors forbade it. Ordinarily this would have meant nothing to her, but Herr von Woller objected strongly, so strongly he became hysterical. Together he and Max prevailed on her to remain in bed.
Before the world had gone to hell, it took no more than twenty minutes on the U-Bahn to reach the station, but he took leave of Mareth three hours before his train’s scheduled departure. Though he was in the capital of the Greater German Reich itself, Max could count on little. Trains never came on time. Nothing worked. Everything was broken—the U-Bahn cars themselves dented and scorched, seat cushions torn, windows cracked, floors filthy, no heat. Heating took electricity and electricity required coal and coal was in short supply. There was barely enough electricity available to power the underground trains. After pushing his way aboard, Max pulled his greatcoat closely about him and stamped his feet to fight the cold. That also kept his mind off the odor. Like most enclosed spaces in the Reich, the subway car smelled like a public latrine; bakers used large amounts of bran to stretch the flour supply and the high bran content of the bread ration caused widespread flatulence. As they moved slowly toward the Stettiner Bahnhof, Max watched gangs of Russian POWs working on the rail tracks. They were needed because the German track workers had been drafted into the army and sent to Russia, where they spent their time working on rail tracks. Max wondered if anyone but him saw the absurdity.
After reaching the station, he hurried across the platform toward his train, passing dozens of soldiers huddled with their girls, whispering to them amid the steam and whistles, the sighing air brakes of the trains, the shouts of the NCOs, the loudspeaker announcements of arrivals and departures. He was glad Mareth couldn’t see him off. He could not endure another farewell. It seemed as if the whole war was bounded by tearful goodbyes on rail platforms.
He boarded his train, hefted his suitcase into the rack above, then took his seat and stared straight ahead, not speaking to anyone, working to keep his expression steady, to keep the tears from welling up in his eyes. U-boat commanders—recognizable to any serviceman by the white officer caps that traditionally only they wore with their blue uniforms—were not permitted to weep on trains, but the young troops around him were hardly so constrained. Edelweiss patches on their sleeves identified them as mountain troops, perhaps bound for the Norway garrison—or for Russia, God forbid. Most of their faces were drained of blood, pale from the effort of telling mothers and sweethearts goodbye. Many wept openly. Boys, most of them. One of their Feldwebels began to sing very softly, many of his soldiers joining in. Max closed his eyes, giving himself over to the terrible sadness he felt having said goodbye to Mareth. Were he not an officer, not a U-Boat captain, not a man who had led others in battle, he would have wept when the youngsters began to sing “Lilli Marlene,” a song of two lovers seperated by war.
As the train gathered speed every man in the car raised his voice: an artillery captain by the f
ront entrance, a group of veterans from the Russian Front, the weeping mountain troops, construction engineers from the Organisation Todt, even a prim major wearing the red stripes of the General Staff. Deep and slow they sang, about a girl they loved named Lilli Marlene, who stood waiting in the lamplight outside the barracks, as did a thousand girls outside a thousand barracks, all longing to see their soldier boy.
Mournful now in the fourth year of the war, men with their eyes to the front like Max’s, gazing without seeing into the distance, remembering times before the war, when every parting wasn’t thought to be the last, when the Allies and the Soviets and the Feldgendarmerie did not separate them from the girl they loved, when the sound of an aeroplane engine did not send them diving into the nearest ditch.
Full voices now for the last verse, the sadness nothing to feel shame over. Everyone wanted to go home—go home to the girl they loved, a girl like Lilli Marlene, who waited for them under the lamplight, a light slowly dimming as the war continued. How often they dreamed of her warm nearness, but she was a will-o’-the-wisp—for when morning came each soldier found nothing but a rifle in his embrace.
Because of an air raid, they were four hours late arriving in Kiel.
CHAPTER TEN
THE NORTH ATLANTIC
DAY 28 OF THE SECOND WAR PATROL OF U-114
20 SEPTEMBER 1943
1500 GERMAN WAR TIME
“KOMMANDANT TO THE BRIDGE!”
Max heard the shout over the dull throb of the diesels, came upright in his bunk, and stepped out onto the deck. No need to worry about getting dressed. Like everyone else on the U-boat, he slept in his clothes.
“Smoke in sight, bearing green one five zero!” the watch officer barked through the open hatchway.
Max felt his pulse pick up. Finally, a ship. The war patrol had been a bust so far, they’d sighted nothing but seagulls. Their first patrol had hardly been any better—all fourteen torpedoes fired and only two small freighters sunk. Max jackknifed through the control room hatch and scaled the ladder to the bridge. Blinking in the bright sunlight, he brought his binoculars to his eyes and followed the lookout’s pointed finger to starboard. Smoke in sight? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it was a forest fire out there. What were the lookouts doing up here anyway? “If you can piss standing up you can get in the navy now,” Carls had told him. Max believed him.
He bent to the voice tube that led to the conning tower, from which the helmsman passed his orders through the boat. “Make to U-Boat Command: ‘Convoy sighted grid AK55. U-Max.’”
In radio transmissions, U-boats referred to themselves by their captain’s name rather than by their number, hoping to confuse British Naval Intelligence.
“Starboard the helm to zero five zero degrees. Both engines ahead full.”
Taking his white cap by the bill, Max fastened it firmly to his head so the stiff wind wouldn’t blow it off. The pitch of the diesels increased behind him as they went to full speed.
First he must discern the size of the convoy and send regular reports of its course and speed to U-Boat Command in Berlin, so they could gather the wolfpack. It would take Max several hours to come into attack range, so he didn’t order the crew to their battle stations now, though he knew word of the sighting would spread through the ship and the men would take up their action posts anyway.
But damn this wind, sharp and cold even in September and kicking up waves, rolling the boat back and forth like a pendulum in the seaway. The U-boat sat squat in the water, her open, horseshoe-shaped bridge no more than four meters above the surface. They were constantly sending up leather cloths from the control room for the bridge watch to wipe the spray from their binocular lenses. Max licked his. It was quicker.
Binoculars still balanced on the tips of his fingers, he kept his gaze fixed on the distant smoke. He saw masts now, like match-sticks on the horizon, and as the U-boat drew closer, the hulls of the wallowing merchantmen came into view. God and all the Holy Saints above, there were one hell of a lot of ships out there. Max made a rough count, turned to Ferret, the officer of the watch. “How many do you make out?”
Ferret said nothing, continuing to peer at the distant convoy, lips moving silently as he counted to himself. “Forty merchantmen, Herr Kaleu. Three men-o’-war this side, corvettes most likely, sir, maybe one frigate. Same on port side, I would guess. One corvette astern. Probably two destroyers ranging ahead.”
The Allies were getting stronger by the day. A year ago, no convoy would have had so many escorts. The “happy time” when all the old bulls had run up their scores was over, and the end had come fast. Sinkings of Allied ships had peaked in May, and Max and other U-boat skippers now faced far more effective and more deadly Allied countermeasures. More than half of all U-boats were sunk on their first patrol. Every skipper wanted to be an ace, to sink the kind of tonnage Prien and Schepke and Kretschmer had managed earlier in the war, but that was before the Allies had gotten radar, before they had built enough escort vessels to truly protect each convoy, before they had thousands of planes in the air searching for U-boats. No one would ever match the old records now, and the men who had set them vanished one by one. Prien and his boat had just disappeared one day in the spring of ’41. Schepke was killed in action ten days later in the most gruesome way imaginable: the destroyer H.M.S. Vanoc rammed his U-boat in the mid-Atlantic, its bow pinning Schepke to the periscope housing and mashing him to a pulp. And “Silent Otto” Kretschmer, the highest-scoring ace of all—forty-six ships sent to the bottom—had been blown to the surface that same day by a Royal Navy destroyer and captured along with his entire crew.
Max bent to the voicepipe. “Make to U-Boat Command: ‘Forty merchantmen. Estimate nine escorts. Grid AK55. Base course zero nine zero. Speed seven knots. Attacking at dusk. U-Max.’” A slow convoy. Better shooting for him. No group could move any faster than its slowest ship, so the Allies divided their merchantmen into fast convoys, which traveled at nine knots or more, and slow ones, which proceeded at seven knots and made easier targets by far.
Max ordered the wheel over, setting them on a parallel course to the convoy at a distance of about seven kilometers. Turning to the lookouts, he said, “Stay alert, men, stay alert. Watch for aeroplanes.” The Luftwaffe said it was impossible, but after his experience in Berlin he had little faith in anything the Luftwaffe said. Besides, one of his crewkameraden, the first watch officer on another U-boat, told him that new long-range Allied planes flying out of Iceland could stay over the convoys all the way to the western approaches of the British Isles, where patrol bombers from RAF Coastal Command took over. So constant vigilance was his strictest rule, even when contemplating the impossible. He’d ordered a seaman before a court-martial for falling asleep on watch; reduced two others in rank for inattention at their posts, then kicked them off his boat. Those who committed lesser offenses had leave taken from them, or had to do especially dirty cleaning jobs such as scrubbing the bilges. If his men thought him a martinet, Max didn’t care—his discipline had gotten them through their first war patrol, no small accomplishment.
He continued to watch the convoy through his Zeiss binoculars. The escort ships swept the flank, the rear escort carving a wide arc. That was the one Max had to worry about. His profile was low in the water and the gray-black U-boat wasn’t easy to spot in the dark sea, but its wake, churned up by the sixteen-cylinder diesels, showed white against murky waves. He reduced their speed to two-thirds and came port five degrees to zero four five, north by east. The wake lessened as their speed fell off but still seemed like a white arrow pointing at the boat. The course change swung them away from the convoy, putting some distance between them and the inquisitive rear escort—a corvette by the size of her, as Ferret had said. At least she wasn’t a destroyer. A destroyer had twice a corvette’s speed, could run down a suspected sighting in a flash and return to the convoy. A corvette could only steam at sixteen knots—no faster than a U-boat—and hesitated to leave the convoy because gett
ing back would take too long.
Dusk. The watch changed, Lehmann coming up to replace Ferret, four new sailors with him to replace the lookouts. Max forbade talking on the bridge because it distracted the lookouts, but the silence also had the added benefit of sparing him Lehmann’s pronouncements about Final Victory over the Jewish-Bolshevik Menace—pronouncements that had only become more strident since the massive German surrender at Stalingrad in early February.
“Be alert, men,” Max cautioned the new lookouts. This was the worst time of day. It was hard to see anything in the fading light and the sailors had a tendency to believe that darkness would protect them somehow. That was false hope. Darkness no longer protected you. God wouldn’t protect you. Only luck could protect you, and there was little of that in this ocean at war.
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