After a short honeymoon, they spent two months at Neustadt, a village on the Baltic Sea, where Mohr attended the commanders' school. The next cruise was to be Schulz's last, and he had recommended Mohr to replace him as commander. It was an idyllic time for the young couple, who in the two years of their marriage would be together for only about seven months.
The crew came back to Lorient during the first week in July, and left on patrol on the 10th.
Heinz Eck replaced Mohr as I.WO, making only this one cruise on U-124. The II.WO was Hans Köster, a bright young officer with the unlikely nickname of "Umo" (Unser Mop, an affectionate name for a shaggy dog). Brinker as L.I. and an engineer pupil rounded out the complement of officers.
The boat left Lorient on July 10, but had to return to base the next day on account of engine trouble. Repairs took several more days, and she left again on the 15th, heading south as soon as she cleared the Bay of Biscay.
As she cruised along parallel to the Spanish coast, a lookout spotted an object in the water ahead of them. They approached it cautiously, and could soon make out that it was a buoy.
"It must have broken loose from its moorings," Schulz remarked to Köster, "And it could cause a lot of damage if a boat happened to hit it."
He leaned over the conning tower hatch. "Gun crew to the upper deck!" he called.
The target practice was a welcome bit of variety, but was over almost before it began, for the sharp-eyed gunners dispatched the buoy in a matter of seconds.
The commander, in a jovial mood, hastily scribbled a signal to be gotten off at once to the BdU: "Versenkt eine Tonne."
The German word for buoy is Tonne and so is the word for ton.
U-124 was put in a wolf pack along with U-109, U-123, U-93, and U-94, and the five boats cruised in a patrol line southward toward the Moroccan coast. They searched without any success, until on August 10, they received a signal from U-97 directing them to a convoy (HG 69) near Gibraltar.
On August 11, U-79 and the Italian boats Finzi and Marconi, which were also in the vicinity, joined the hunt, U-79 making contact with the convoy that same day. U-124 headed for the reported position, both diesels on full speed.
Just before noon, an approaching plane sent her under in a crash dive. When she surfaced half an hour later, U-331 was in sight. The two boats pulled alongside each other so the commanders could exchange news.
U-331 was under the command of von Tiesenhausen, who three months later would sink the British battleship Barham. He told Schulz that he had received a signal from a Condor giving him a bearing on the convoy, but that he had not found it. About an hour later, U-109 came close by, but her commander, Bleichrodt, was able to offer no further information, and the boats continued their search.
Soon afterward, Schulz received a position report from U-94 as the latter was going in to attack. He set his course to intercept, and reached the convoy's estimated position after dark about three hours later. The only sign of the convoy, however, was a destroyer which headed toward the boat, then turned away to the north.
Schulz and the other boats searched stubbornly for the convoy, painstakingly evaluating, plotting, and following every clue.
The crews, in a constant state of battle-readiness, ate and slept when they could. Convoy battles frequently lasted for days on end, and U-boat men quickly learned to take advantage of every possible minute of sleep, being unconscious as soon as they were horizontal.
Schulz set his course according to the latest information, and for the first time in nearly 24 hours, stretched out on his bunk.
He had been asleep for two and a half hours when Kesselheim shook him gently.
"Herr Kommandant . . ."
A picture of the somewhat more abrupt awakenings in the crew's tiered bunks in the forward torpedo room suddenly crossed Kesselheim's mind—a slap across the backside and a loud shout, "All right, all right, do you want to sleep your life away? Get up and earn your pay, you lazy lout!" and he wondered how Willem would react to a similar greeting.
Schulz sat up, rubbing his eyes, as Kesselheim, finding the notion wildly funny, grinned at him.
"Signal from U-331, Herr Kaleu," he said, trying to stifle the idiotic impulse to laugh as he handed the paper to Schulz.
Schulz, still groggy, wondered what Kesselheim found so hilarious at 1:30 in the morning, but forgot about it as he scanned the message from von Tiesenhausen. U-331 had reached the convoy, but was driven under by three destroyers. He gave his position.
Schulz pulled on his boots, and Kesselheim handed him a steaming mug of coffee. Knowing the commander's sleep would be over as soon as he read the signal, Kesselheim had brought the coffee with him.
Von Tiesenhausen's position report indicated that the convoy was close, and Schulz altered course to search the area in wide sweeps. Reports from other boats and an occasional Condor gave direction to the search, but the convoy, frustratingly close, remained out of reach of the pack.
Successive position reports necessitated careful plots and clear judgment to evaluate them, and left the commander no time for even a brief nap. Fatigue dragged at him until his hard narrow bunk a few feet away seemed as grand and remote as a palace.
Long hours of hunting stretched into days, and days and nights ran together in a continuous jumble of intercepted reports, calculations, plots, and guesses—and only the convoy mattered.
On the bridge, Schulz searched the empty horizon in the gathering dusk and puzzled over the convoy's position.
"Aircraft! Bearing one two five!" Hennig shouted behind him.
Schulz found the approaching plane and studied it for a second. The wings were high; it was no Condor.
"Alarm!" he yelled. "Dive! Dive!"
There was no time to wait and see if it had spotted the U-boat. The men on the bridge jumped through the hatch as the boat started down.
A scream of pain from the engine room carried above the ordered confusion of the crash dive and brought Dr. Goder running through the maze of men and machines, struggling against the steep down angle. By the time the boat had leveled off, he had reached the injured Maschinistmaat Struwe.
The little finger of his left hand was badly crushed, and Goder needed only the briefest examination before telling the commander that he would have to operate immediately. Narcotics eased the blinding pain, and Goder worked on Struwe's mangled hand while the boat remained submerged and still. The boat lost her speed underwater, but she rode too roughly on the surface for Goder to have even attempted to repair the man's hand, so Schulz kept her submerged until he had finished.
By 2030 hours, the injured machinist was asleep in his bunk, his hand bandaged and the pain dulled by morphine, and U-124 was back on the surface. A signal from Reinhard Hardegen in U-123 reported contact with the convoy and gave a fix. It was close.
Schulz balanced himself against the rolling motion of the boat as she plowed into the swells. He frowned, fighting back the exhaustion that turned his legs to lead and made every thought and movement an effort. Since they had started after the convoy days ago, his only sleep and rest had been in brief snatches constantly broken by new reports on circumstances that required his decisions.
"Clear the bridge!" he ordered.
If nothing could be seen, perhaps something might be heard. The sound of the convoy's screws might carry through the water to give a fix.
Schroeder sat at the sound gear, slowly turning it around the compass while he strained to catch the faintest sound through the earphones. Finally he looked up at the commander who stood watching him intently, trying to read his face for some sign of the merchantmen.
"Nothing, Herr Kaleu," Schroeder said. "Not a sound."
"Very well." Schulz turned and motioned to Brinker. "Bring her up."
He waited, his hand on the steel ladder as the boat came back to the surface and Brinker said, "Conning tower clear, sir."
Schulz opened the hatch and jumped onto the dripping bridge, quickly scanning the sky and hori
zon before calling the bridge watch up. The moment a U-boat surfaced was always a dangerous one, as she came up blind. So the diving tanks were not blown and the boat remained heavy and ready for an emergency crash dive. The commander, alone on the bridge, took a first quick look for danger while the lookouts waited below him in the conning tower.
A dark shape to the south caught his eye, and he watched as the destroyer wheeled in close, but not directly toward the boat. Schulz waited, his hand on the hatch cover, as a second destroyer swept along close behind.
"Hunting group," he thought, watching the ships as they careened along, wildly zig-zagging. "As long as they don't come much closer . . ."
The destroyers zagged away, and he yelled down the hatch, "Bridge watch up!"
Only seconds after the lookouts were in position, Klein caught sight of two small shapes on the water—U-boats.
"Come to course 300 degrees," Schulz ordered.
The boat had followed her new heading for scarcely a half hour when a lookout shouted, "Convoy!"
Day was already breaking as the boat roared toward the convoy, both diesels on full speed. There was still time to attack.
"U-boat zero degrees!" reported a lookout.
While Schulz watched the boat ahead of them, a shout of "Aircraft at 180 degrees!" spun him around.
"Sunderland!" he yelled. "Dive! Dive!"
The U-boat was already starting to submerge as the lookouts scrambled through the hatch, Schulz on their heads. He held onto the ladder under the hatch, waiting to see if the plane would drop bombs. There were none. Perhaps she had not seen them.
The U-124 came back to the surface and resumed her course of 300 degrees. In rapid succession she met the Italian boat Finzi, another German boat that was surfacing, and the Italian Marconi.
A few minutes later a Condor flew over and gave the boats a new bearing for the convoy. After steering 340 degrees and 315 degrees for some two hours, a lookout spotted the mast of a destroyer, followed by smoke. The convoy.
Schulz closed in on the merchantmen, avoiding the destroyers that zig-zagged around them. For the first time since the hunt had started for this elusive convoy, he was close to an attacking position. But again a destroyer came toward the boat, and he was forced to give way. Before he could get back to the convoy, another destroyer had come up with a searchlight. Baffled and exhausted after five days virtually without sleep, Schulz again lost the convoy.
On the morning of August 15, the wolf pack, still doggedly hunting, was still without success. Although the convoy, moving like a will-o-the-wisp, gave only occasional and insubstantial glimpses to its enemies, these waters, some 300 sea miles west of Finisterre, were well populated. U-boats met each other, Italian boats, British destroyers, the Luftwaffe Condors, and RAF Sunderlands with almost boring frequency. U-93, U-79, U-331, U-371, U-94, U-123, U-126, the Italians Finzi and Marconi, and U-124 all had been repeatedly chased and forced under or off course by destroyers. Signaling sighting reports to each other to keep the convoy under surveillance, the wolf pack hunted like the well-trained team they were and stuck to the merchantmen with obstinate perseverance. But they still found it impossible to attack.
Finally the wolves were called off and the convoy operation broken off as a total failure on the 16th. The radar-equipped escorts had kept a whole pack of experienced and battle-wise U-boats at bay for a week without losing a single ship from the convoy. Although the drained and disgusted U-boat commanders did not know it, it was a preview of the difficulties and dangers that would beset the U-boat force when practically all escorts would be so equipped.
After the wolf pack was dispersed, U-124 made a short foray around the Azores and Cape Finisterre. Here again her luck was nil, as she managed to get a shot at only one freighter and missed that. Then she was ordered back to Lorient, where Dönitz would speak sympathetically of the bad luck on the operation, but would still give Schulz a rap on the knuckles for not reporting his own contacts with the convoy sooner and more frequently.
They came through the Bay of Biscay in the usual manner, submerged by day, surfacing only at night to recharge the batteries. Brinker had instructed the engineering pupil to hold the boat on 30 meters, and he and Schulz sat in the wardroom playing chess.
Suddenly the chessmen fell over as the boat rolled, and for a split second the commander and L.I. stared at each other. A U-boat at 30 meters does not roll.
Brinker jumped to his feet in a headlong dash to the control room where the manometer duly registered a deep wet 30 meters. He spun around and jerked up the periscope. All around them was the bright sunny Bay of Biscay.
"My God!" he squawked, "we're on the surface!"
Schulz had run into the control room right on Brinker's heels, and now he shoved him roughly aside while he scanned the sea and sky around them. Nothing was in sight, and Schulz wondered painfully how long they had been cruising along on the surface, blind and exposed, without a soul on the bridge.
"Now if you please, Herr Brinker," he said, turning around. "TAKE HER DOWN!"
The trouble with the manometer was quickly cleared up. Someone had mistakenly closed the valve, so that no matter the depth or pressure, the gauge would register 30 meters.
Schulz and Brinker returned to the wardroom, but both of them had lost all interest in chess. Preoccupied with the picture of their boat running blind on the surface in these most heavily patrolled waters, they both wondered how many boats and they crews had gone to the bottom through just such a trivial mistake. It was a depressing line of thought, especially for a pair of tired, discouraged officers returning from an unsuccessful cruise.
For Schulz, it was the last war cruise, for he was being transferred to La Baule as commander of the 6th U-Flotilla.
Saying goodbye to his boat and crew in Lorient was an unexpectedly poignant moment for the commander. Many of the men had been with him since the ill-fated cruise of the U-64, and several more had come aboard on the U-124's first cruise. They had been through so much together, and he realized for the first time at this moment of parting how close he was to his crew.
They presented him with gifts, mementos they had carefully made from scraps of wood and metal and polished until they glowed, and tiny pennants, each marked with the name and tonnage of a ship he had sunk. He looked at their faces, so familiar to him, and found that he had to choke back the tears as he whispered his thanks. When he left the boat for the last time in Lorient, he took with him these small treasures along with his pennant.
As he gave his patrol report at headquarters, he was suddenly interrupted by the question, "Now what was this you sank? You never mentioned it again, and we cannot figure out what it could possibly have been."
"Sank?" Schulz asked, puzzled. "I didn't sink anything."
"Then what about that signal?"
Schulz shook his head in confusion. "What signal?"
"This one!" And the scrap of paper was waved under his nose. "Sunk one ton!"
Schulz looked at it and burst out laughing. "That's one buoy," he explained, delighted by the uproar his signal had caused at headquarters as the perplexed staff officers tried to imagine what sort of one-ton vessels their U-boats were sinking.
1 On the night of April 8—9, 1944, Henke was surprised on the surface near Madeira by U.S. Naval aircraft from the escort carrier USS Guadalcanal. He crash-dived to escape the bombs, but the planes from this hunter-killer group were already alerting Captain Dan Gallery on the Guadalcanal, and within minutes he had the destroyer escorts Flaherty and Pillsbury speeding to the position. Pillsbury soon had a sonar contact, and made two hedgehog attacks. The other two DE's in the group, Chatelain and Pope, arrived a few minutes later, effectively boxing in the U-515, which was soon forced to surface under the plastering from the four destroyers.
Henke, however, was not through fighting, and his own deck gunners opened fire about the same time as the destroyers. It was a fierce battle, with shells flying thick and fast, but the U-515 was hopelessly
outclassed, and sank only a few minutes later, following an internal explosion. Thirty-seven of the crew and all six officers, including the commander, were picked up by the destroyers.
Henke was later shot and killed in a suicidal attempt to escape from a POW camp near Washington, D.C. Even today, there is bitter and perplexed speculation by those who knew him as to the reason for his foolhardy flight which he must have known would almost inevitably result in his death.
Chapter Eight
Mohr had said goodbye to his weeping bride, and returned to Lorient to take command of the boat he knew and loved so well. Recently promoted, he now held the rank of Kapitänleutnant (full lieutenant), the youngest one in the navy at 24. His youth, however, and the fact that the officers who were now under his command had known him familiarly and well as a fellow junior officer was to prove no obstacle. These officers and the crew, many of whom were years older than their new commander, accepted his leadership confidently and wholeheartedly.
Mohr had a quick and brilliant mind, and his natural impulsive and rash tendency to plunge headlong into any situation, no matter how dangerous, was tempered somewhat by sound training and an instinctive grasp of U-boat tactics. His flair for leadership was phenomenal, and his crew was totally under the spell of this smart and sunny commander who seemingly could do no wrong and on whom the Fates seemed to lavish every gift.
Mohr, for his part, received the legacy of a sound and sturdy boat, hardened by battle in the bloody Atlantic sea lanes, and a crew superbly trained and molded together into a sharp and beautifully disciplined unit by Wilhelm Schulz.
The crew, as tough and battle-seasoned as the boat herself, was a reliable group of individuals who had learned not only to stand firm and steady in an emergency, but also in which emergencies they must act instantly without orders, or even in defiance of orders. Mohr was sure there was not a better crew in the entire U-boat service.
On September 16, U-124 left Lorient along with U-201, commanded by Addi Schnee. Soon after clearing the Bay of Biscay, both boats were directed onto Convoy OG 74, from Gibraltar to Great Britain,
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