Das Boot

  It takes a while for my eyes to adjust themselves to the darkness so that I can make out the horizon. High in the sky a few pale stars still shimmer faintly. Above the eastern horizon a red band of light is slowly emerging. Gradually the water brightens too.

  I shiver.

  Kriechbaum the navigator comes up. Silently he looks around, sniffs hard, and has the sextant handed up to him.

  “Stopwatch ready?” he shouts down in a hoarse voice.

  “Aye aye, sir!” comes the report from far below.

  The navigator points his instruments at Saturn and puts his right eye to the eyepiece. For a while he remains motionless, then he lowers the sextant and turns the screw: he brings Saturn from the heavens and places it precisely on the horizon.

  “Attention—Saturn—zero!” he shouts below.

  In the control room the time is recorded. The navigator has difficulty reading the figures in the half-light. “Twenty-two degrees, thirty-five minutes,” he announces to the man below.

  From the time of day and the height of the planet a base line can now be calculated. One base line, however, does not give a ship’s position—we need a second.

  The navigator raises the sextant once more.

  “Attention—Jupiter—zero!”

  A pause, and then: “Twenty-two degrees, twenty-seven minutes!”

  Cautiously he hands the sextant down, then follows it. I climb after him. Once below, he takes off his peajacket and pulls up to the chart table. He has no spacious map room such as navigation officers have on the big steamers. He has to make do with the tiny table in the control room, placed to port amid a confusion of switches, speaking tubes, and valves. Above this table is a locker for the sextant and the starfinder and a shelf with nautical almanacs and tables of times and azimuths, navigational handbooks, catalogues of lighthouses, charts of the weather and tides.

  The navigator picks up a pencil and calculates. He is on intimate terms with sines, cosines, tangents, and their logarithms.

  “It’s sort of nice that we’re still making use of the stars,” I say casually, just to put an end to the silence.

  “What’s that?”

  “I simply meant—that with all the technical perfection here in the boat, it’s really astounding that you still use the sextant to find the ship’s position…”

  “How else could I do it?”

  I can see my observations are out of place. Perhaps it’s too early in the day, I say to myself, and perch on the chart chest.

  The navigator picks up the celluloid sheet that covers the chart. The map of our area of the sea is now uniformly blue-gray. No coastal edges, no shallows—only a thick network of squares with numbers and letters on the perpendicular and horizontal lines.

  The navigator holds the dividers between his teeth and mutters, “There it is—a pretty little error, fifteen miles—well, so it goes!”

  With a stroke of the pencil he connects our last position with the new one. He points to a square on the chart. “Things were really wild here once, almost ‘Lash the helm and take to prayer!”

  Apparently the navigator is ready for a little more give and take. He points his dividers at the spot where things were so wild.

  The control-room mate now comes up and looks at the network of squares.

  “That was on the fourth patrol. Typical hallelujah voyage. One attack on top of another. They were after us from the word go. Depth charges all day. You lost count…”

  The navigator keeps his eyes on the dividers as though they still hold signs and portents for him. Then he takes a deep breath, snaps them together, and abruptly thrusts them away.

  “Wasn’t at all funny.”

  I know that he won’t say anything more. The control-room mate also gets back to work. The navigator carefully fits the sextant back into its case. A tiny hole from the point of his dividers remains in the chart.

  Since there is still considerable confusion in the boat I clamber back onto the bridge so as not to be in the way.

  The clouds are now sharply defined mosaics inlaid in the grayblue sky. One of them drifts in front of the sun. Its shadow wipes away the greenish-white radiance from the sea. The cloud is so large that its lower edge dips beneath the horizon, but there are holes in it through which the sun’s rays dart at an angle. The beams seem to come from a projector, traversing the sea; one of them sweeps directly over our boat, and for a while it illuminates us like a huge theatrical spotlight.

  “AIRCRAFT ON THE LEFT!”

  Bosun’s mate Dorian’s shout hits me like an electric shock. For a fraction of a second I catch sight of a dark point against the gray background of cloud and then I’m at the conning tower hatch. Its locking lever bangs into my coccyx. I almost scream with pain. As I slide down the ladder I have a clear vision of the leather guard that should be covering this protruding iron handle.

  Below, my leap to the side is too short. The next man is already on his way down. One of his boots hits me in the neck. I hear the bosun’s mate land with a crash on the floor plates.

  “Too damned close!” he exclaims, gasping for air.

  The Commander is already standing open-mouthed under the tower, looking upward.

  “Flood!” the Second Watch Officer shouts down. The exhaust doors are drawn aside. From above crashes a wall of water, out of which the Second Watch Officer emerges dripping.

  The needle of the depth manometer moves very slowly, as though overcoming strong resistance. The boat seems to be glued to the surface.

  The Chief roars, “All hands forward!”

  The men rush stumbling and crouching through the control room. The boat finally becomes bow heavy and tilts forward. I have to hold on to keep my footing.

  Breathlessly, the Second Watch Officer reports to the Commander. “Plane from the left. Out of a hole in the clouds. Type not identified!”

  Once again, through closed lids, I can see the black point in front of the cloud banks. The same sentence goes on repeating itself inside my head—”Now he’s going to drop them—now he’s going to drop them!” And then the word “bombs!”—“bombs!”—“bombs!”

  Gasping breath. The Commander doesn’t take his eyes off the depth gauge. His face is expressionless, almost indifferent. Water drops in the bilge—tip—tap—tip. The electric motors hum very softly.

  The electric motors? Or is that the gyrocompass?

  Nothing?

  “Diving stations!” the Chief commands. The men work their way back up the incline, seeking handholds on either side, like mountain climbers.

  “Both hydroplanes up!”

  I stand straight, take a deep breath. A piercing pain like a hot iron shoots through me down to my feet. For the first time I realize how heavily I hit the hatch lever.

  “It’s gone!” says the Commander. “Proceed to a hundred feet!”

  “Shit!” mutters the navigator.

  The Commander stands in the middle of the control room, hands in his trouser pockets, cap pushed to the back of his head.

  “They’ve spotted us. Here’s hoping all hell doesn’t break loose.” Then he turns to the Chief. “We’d better stay down a while.” And to me, “I told you yesterday—they know exactly when we put to sea. We’re in for trouble.”

  I have my second aircraft scare a few hours later during the navigator’s watch. He roars “ALARM!” and I catch a glimpse at forty-five degrees—a thumb’s breadth above the horizon—of a point in the gray. And I’m already letting myself slide down the metal ladder, guiding my fall with both hands and feet.

  The navigator shouts, “Flood!”

  I see him hanging onto the closing wheel of the hatch cover and searching with his feet for a toehold. Finally he turns the spindle tight.

  “Five!”—“Three, both tanks!”—“One!” A loud gurgling of water rushing into the buoyancy tanks. “Aircraft at forty-five degrees, distance ten thousand feet. Not coming directly at us!” reports the navigator.

  The ventilating shafts
and exhaust vents of the diesels have been made fast and both E-motors are coupled to the driving shafts. They are running at full speed. Instead of the roar of the diesels there is now only their vibratory hum.

  We hold our breath again.

  “Boat plunging fast,” the Chief reports, then quickly commands, “Blow submersion cells!” These cells are flooded when the boat is on the surface, to give it additional weight and to help overcome surface tension during a quick dive. They have a five-ton capacity; the boat is now too heavy by this amount. With an explosive roar, compressed air is released into them, driving the water out with a deafening hiss.

  Still no bombs!

  It couldn’t have taken us more than thirty seconds to submerge completely. But the water at the point where you dive remains turbulent for about five minutes. It is into this surge that the Tommies like to drop their depth charges.

  Nothing!

  The Old Man expels his breath. The navigator follows suit but less violently. The control-room mate gives me a faint nod.

  At 250 feet the Chief, with complete confidence, has the bow first pointed upward by the hydroplanes, then downward.

  “Boat’s in balance!” he now reports. “Close the exhaust vents!”

  We stand around in silence for a good five minutes. Finally the Old Man has us brought up to periscope depth. Both hydroplanes are set hard up, the E-motors switched to half speed ahead.

  The next command startles me. The Chief orders flooding in the tanks, although the boat is meant to rise. Admittedly not much is involved; nevertheless the order to flood seems nonsensical. I have to think hard before I remember: if we rise, the boat expands because the pressure on it decreases, hence we lose specific gravity; and that must be equalized so we don’t shoot up too fast. To be able to stop the boat at precisely the desired depth, you have to maintain an exact balance.

  “Perhaps he didn’t see us at all!” says the Old Man.

  The third aircraft alarm comes four hours later. This time it is the First Watch Officer who roars the order to flood. “Came straight out of the sun!” he gasps.

  “All hands forward!”

  More slipping and sliding, wild confusion in the control room. Anything to get down!

  The Chief uses a different trick to get the bow down faster. Only when the boat has been tipped forward by setting both hydroplanes hard down does he order the escape vents of the rear buoyancy cells opened. For a moment he is able to utilize their lifting power to force the bow down more quickly.

  “Third and last strike,” mutters the First Watch Officer when it’s clear no bombs are falling.

  “I wouldn’t tempt Providence quite that far,” the Old Man says dryly.

  “They’re getting ruder all the time!” The Chief. “No manners these days!”

  “We’ll stay down a while. You can’t always count on Kramer’s kind of luck.”

  We move into the 0-Mess. “Good job by the First Watch Officer,” says the Old Man, loud enough to be heard in the control room. The First Watch Officer has earned this by spotting the aircraft in time. Not easy, when a clever bastard sits in his cockpit and flies at you straight out of the sun. Nine times out of ten it’s seagulls. They glide at you with their rigidly extended wings from just above the horizon and the alarm cry is out before you realize what they are. In the glittering, blinding, glassy radiance that dissolves all contours, the illusion is perfect. But the tenth time, the approaching gull turns into a plane.

  “When attacked from the air, always turn to windward,” says the Old Man. “The First Watch Officer did it just right. The plane gets too much wind on its wing as it banks and it’s forced outward. Doesn’t make that much difference, but we need every foot we can get.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  “As for the flyers they’re sending out now, all you can say is—hats off!” The Old Man bites his lower lip, nods a couple of times, narrows his eyes, and says, “There they sit in their windmills, absolutely alone, and yet they attack like Blücher at Waterloo. They could simply drop their bombs into the drink and shoot their machine guns into the blue—who’d know the difference?”

  He continues to sing the praises of the Royal Air Force. “The bomber pilots that attack our bases aren’t exactly lily-livered either. How many was it we brought down last time?”

  “Eight,” I reply. One crashed almost on our roof in La Baule—right between the pine trees. I’m never going to eat calves’ brains on toast again.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There were still three men inside. The cockpit was completely ripped open. They had brought a lot of sandwiches with them. Snow-white bread top and bottom, roast meat and lettuce in between, and all over one of them, the pilot’s brains. I wanted to get hold of the papers—anything at all—but the plane was already on fire and suddenly the machine-gun ammo started going off, so I had to Scram.”

  I try to read a nautical handbook. After a while I just catch the Old Man’s voice. “The pilot that got the Gneisenau must have been quite a boy. No emergency rations in his pocket, just condoms…”

  I put the book away.

  “Obviously he was planning to finish off his mission with a visit to the whorehouses on the Rue de Ia Paix. The Canadians are practi cal about these things,” says the Chief.

  “Alas, that’s where he made his mistake,” says the Old Man. “But what a mad performance! Down in a spiral glide. Nobody noticed anything at first. No flak! No shooting! And then to position himself perfectly and release the bomb. Pure circus stuff! It was a shame he didn’t come out of it! They say he hit the water like a stone. Well, we might as well try again…”

  I climb into the control room behind the Old Man and the Chief.

  The Chief reports, “Boat ready to surface!”

  “Surface!” orders the Commander and climbs up the ladder.

  “Blow the tanks!”

  The Chief stares at the sinking of the water column in the Papenberg, then reports, “Conning tower hatch clear.”

  The Commander’s voice comes from above. “Tower hatch being opened!”

  “Equalize pressure!” calls the Chief.

  “Let’s hope those damn mosquitoes leave us alone now,” I hear the navigator say.

  The control room a half hour before midnight. The soft humming of the ventilators. Through the open tower hatch the diesels suck in a stream of fresh air. The few lights are shielded so that no rays can find their way upward and betray us to a night flyer. The darkness extends the room to infinity. Out of the uncertain depths of the shadows gleam the green phosphorescent arrows that direct us to the tower hatch in moments when all lights fail. These indicators are fairly recent. They were installed only after the disaster on Kallmann’s boat. In the fall of 1940 in the Brunsbüttel channel, Kallmann collided with a Norwegian freighter. His little boat, without watertight bulkheads, was hit directly behind the control room and split open so completely that it sank in seconds. Only those on deck escaped. When the boat was raised—Kallmann had to be present—some of the crew were found in the control room crowded together not under the tower but on the other side of the periscope shaft. In exactly the wrong place.

  But are our green arrows really any use? If the boat sinks here, it will sink thousands of feet and the pointers can go on gleaming till Doomsday.

  In the semi-darkness the control room is huge. The only gleam of light is forward, where it sharply defines the circle of the hatch opening and the other end of the compartment. The light comes from the radio shack and from the lamp burning in the passage to the Officers’ Mess. I can make out two men in the glow. They’re sitting on the chart chest, peeling potatoes. Dimly visible, the officer of the watch in the control room is leaning against a stand-up table and noting down in the daily log the contents of the trim tanks. Gurgling and hissing, the bilge water sloshes back and forth under the floor plates. The two closed hatches beyond the petty officers’ quarters lessen the noise of the diesels; it sounds filtered.
The waves running alongside the boat fill the control room with a fluctuating roar.

  I climb through the forward hatch. The radioman, Hinrich, his headset on his ears, is deep in a book. He’s supporting himself with his elbows on the tabletops, right and left, that hold his apparatus. He looks as if he’s on crutches. The green curtain has been drawn in front of the Commander’s bunk opposite the radio shack. But a narrow slit is emitting light; so the Commander is not asleep either. Very likely he’s writing in bed as usual, letters he won’t be able to send until we return to base.

  With no one sitting at the table, the 0-Mess now seems unnaturally large. The Chief is asleep in his bunk behind the table. Close above his face, his watch dangles on its short chain, a random pendulum swinging in all directions.

  In the lower berth to port, behind the curtain, the First Watch Officer is sleeping before going on duty. The door to the bow compartment opens with a crash. The Chief turns over with a grunt and goes on snoring, his face toward the lockers. A man with a rumpled topknot of hair comes in, mutters a sleepy greeting, blinks uncertainly for several seconds, and then resolutely draws back the First Watch Officer’s curtain. “Twenty minutes to, Herr Lieutenant,”

  The sleep-fuddled face of the First Watch Officer emerges into the light from the deep shadows of the bunk. He works one leg out from under the covers, pushes it stiffly over the bunk railing, and rolls his body after it. The whole performance looks like a slowmotion film of a high jump. I don’t want to irritate him by watching, so I go on forward.

  In the bow compartment the master mechanic Johann is sitting at the table with a woeful expression on his face. He yawns and says, “Morning, Herr Lieutenant!”

  “Bit early for that!”

  Johann ignores this and slowly raises himself to his feet.

  Two weak bulbs provide the bow compartment with no more than half-light. A heavy, sour fug meets me: sweat, oil, bilge, the smell of wet clothing.

  Here, toward the bow, is where you feel the rolling of the boat most. Two shadowy figures are staggering back and forth in front of the torpedo tube supports. I hear them cursing. “Anti-social bastards! Enough to drive you to revolution. Middle of the night!”