Das Boot

by Lothar-Günther Buchheim

  From the hammocks emerge two men, then a third from a portside bunk.

  “Fuck it all!” That must be Ario.

  Since the boat is rolling heavily, the two of them make a number of fruitless attempts before they succeed in getting their seaboots on.

  “Filthy weather, eh?” one says. “Going to get our feet wet again!” They work their way into heavy sweaters and wrap towels around their necks so that no water can get in under their collars once they put their rubber jackets on in the control room.

  The men of the preceding watch come down the ladder stiffly. They are soaking wet. The navigator has turned up his collar and drawn his sou’wester down over his face. The faces of the others are whipped red by the spray. All of them hang their binoculars over hooks and undress as silently as the new watch dressed, peeling themselves awkwardly and heavily out of their rubber jackets. Then they help one another off with their rubber pants. The youngest member of the watch loads himself with the whole mass of wet oilskin trousers, jackets, and sou’westers, and carries it aft. The spaces between the two electric motors and on both sides of the stern torpedo tube are the best for drying.

  The men who have come off duty gulp down a mouthful of hot coffee, polish their binoculars, and stow them away.

  “Bearing up?” the navigator asks me.

  Bosun’s mate Wichmann moves aft, the navigator with the two lookouts forward.

  For a while there’s only the roar of the sea and the drone of the engines, until the control-room mate turns on the bilge pump.

  All at once there’s heavy traffic in the control room. The new engine-room watch is going on duty. I recognize the diesel stoker Ario and the E-stoker Zörner.

  In the U-room Wichmann has planted himself at the table. Chewing hungrily.

  I climb into my bunk. Now I can hear the waves close to my ear rushing past the boat. There is a long scraping and gurgling that rises and falls and sometimes mounts to a whistling hiss.

  The hatch from the galley is kicked open. Bosun’s mate Kleinschmidt and E-mate Rademacher appear.

  “Leave something for us, you glutton! Whenever I see you, you’re stuffing yourself.”

  “Crap!”

  Through a crack in my curtain I see Wichmann unembarrassedly scratching his crotch. He even lifts himself slightly to get at it better.

  “Get your joystick out of the way, man! This is no place for a hand job.”

  “I’ll fuck you in a minute!” Wichmann retorts.

  This dialogue has apparently aroused a memory in Kleinschmidt. He giggles so audibly that everyone stops to listen.

  “Something happened to me in a Paris bistro. I’m just sitting there at a table and opposite me on a kind of sofa there’s a Negro with a whore and she keeps on feeling him up under the table. In Paris there’s no holds barred.”

  Rademacher nods in agreement.

  “All at once the Negro begins panting loudly and rolling his eyes. I think, ‘This has got to be seen,’ and push my chair back, and I see him just as he comes—all over my shoe!”

  “You’re joking!”

  “What did you do then?” Rademacher wants to know.

  “I just sat there thunderstruck. But you ought to have seen them—they took off like greased lightning!”

  “Holy shit—the things that happen.” Rademacher is still astounded.

  Wichmann has apparently taken till now to digest the story properly. He leans back and announces, “Those French are real swine!”

  It takes another good quarter of an hour for the U-room to settle down.

  In the battle log, the first two days have been recorded as follows:

  SATURDAY

  08.00 Departure.

  16.30 Trial dive.

  18.00 Deep-dive test.

  SUNDAY

  07.46 Aircraft alarm with emergency measures and deep dive.

  10.55 Aircraft alarm.

  15.44 Aircraft alarm.

  16.05 Cruising in attack area.

  “You’ve still got eyes like an albino rabbit,” the Chief needles me. It’s the third day at sea.

  “No wonder—those last days on shore were pretty rough.”

  “That’s what I heard. They say you were right there for the famous brawl in the Majestic. That was the night before Thomsen—right?”

  “Exactly. You really missed something. You should have seen the Commissioner of Works flying through the plate-glass window!”

  “How did it happen?”

  “You know all about Scholle yourself—how he considers himself essential to the war effort? Well, this clod starts out by paying for a round of drinks. The men are being halfway polite. Herr Scholle seems to have had a few already and is obviously feeling on top of the world. Nothing can stop him. He’s actually acting as if he belongs—as if everyone has been waiting for him!”

  I see the dueling scars—red whipmarks—on his two hamster cheeks. I see Herr Scholle gesticulating wildly, then wavering slowly back and forth, beginning to orate, beer foam smeared around his mouth. “Fantastic, simply fantastic. This magnificent success! Splendid fellows—sterling characters! Jawohl!” I see the contemptuous glances of the crowd and hear the loud question, “What in hell is this asshole doing here?” But Herr Commissioner Scholle is deaf to everything but himself. “Stiffen your spines—bring Albion to her knees. Jawohl! The fighters at the front can rely on us. Sacrifice everything for the Homeland! Dedicated knights!”

  “He was talking absolute garbage,” I tell the Chief. “The whole propaganda bullshit about unflinching spirit at the front and so on. And obviously including himself right up there. Markus has been boiling for quite a while, but he’s behaving himself. It’s only when Scholle claps him on the shoulder and shouts ‘Up and at ‘em,’ then belches, and to top it all off hollers, ‘Ach, just a few shitty depth charges!’ that Markus blows a fuse. You should have seen it. He went bright red and gagged on his words, as though he’d lost his breath. But the others—they were up on their feet in a single motion. Table and chairs, everything knocked over. They grabbed the Commissioner by the wrists and ankles and off they went through the bar—half dragging him, half carrying him_right down the corridor. The idea was to heave him through the door with a kick in his brass-hat ass. But the bosun suddenly had a better one. Probably because they were holding the Commissioner at both ends like a hammock, the bosun had them line him up, roaring and struggling, parallel to the big plate-glass window, then ordered, ‘One good hard swing and at the count of three, let go!’ They got the idea. ‘One—and two—and three’—you should have seen it. The Commissioner sailed through the air, there was the crash of breaking glass, and he was lying on the street.”

  I can still hear the impact and the splintering of the glass on the pavement and the bosun saying, “That’s that!” But it isn’t. Silently the four about-face, march back through the long room to their places, dust off their hands as though they had been touching something dirty, and reach for their glasses. “Stupid pig!” says one of the crew.

  Suddenly someone else yells, “There he is again!” and points toward the entrance. Through the haze in the doorway looms a bloody face.

  “He’s looking for his Himmler spectacles!”

  They’re on their feet again. Drunk as they are, they’re at the door in a flash and dragging the Commissioner of Works across the threshold. One of them kicks loose the Commissioner’s leg, which is caught in the door jamb. Then the door is slammed. “Perhaps he’s had enough now, the stupid cunt!”

  “And then all that business with the military police?”

  “Apparently they turned up an hour later when only the petty officers and the men were left, and there was a real brawl. One of the police got a flesh wound in the upper thigh.”

  “Throughout the flotilla there was general regret,” said the Chief, “that it was not something else that got hit.”

  I know why the Chief has such a grudge against the watchdogs and all so-called security agencies. H
e was on his way back from leave in Paris on the Admiral’s train and had made himself comfortable for a doze in the midday heat—bottom button of his jacket undone, slumped down in his seat, alone in the compartment with a lieutenant—when the door was pushed open and the comedy began. He described the whole thing to me in the Royal. “Suddenly some sweaty bastard was standing there all in field gray, helmeted, booted and spurred, leg-o’-mutton breeches of course, full war paint—a cannon at his waist. And through the two side windows his two watchdogs staring in like oxen. ‘Your travel orders, Herr Oberleutnant, and will you kindly look to your uniform. You are not on board ship here!’”

  The Chief, according to him, got to his feet but did not do up the button. Instead, he undid all the others, fumbled for his papers, handed them to the steel-helmeted heinie, and shoved his hands down into his trouser pockets.

  “You should have seen him. He almost exploded! He was bellowing like a steer. ‘I shall report you! I shall report you!’”

  At which point I said to the Chief, “That so? Maybe that’s why they decided to replace you and send us that Hitler Youth as your understudy. U-boat Headquarters probably decided they could no longer regard you as the kind of model our Führer wants for the crew!”

  I can still see the Chief gaping in astonishment. But then he began to glow like a lighted Christmas tree. Apparently I’d said the right thing.

  Monday evening in the Officers’ Mess. 20.00. I can’t grasp the fact that this is only our third day at sea. The land lies so far astern that we could already be hundreds of miles away. I have to make an effort to convince myself that it was only last Friday evening at this time that the brawl was beginning in the Bar Royal.

  “Deep thoughts?” inquires the Old Man.

  “No, not exactly. I was just thinking about Thomsen.”

  “That uniform! He’d better get rid of it,” says the Old Man.

  Tuesday. Fourth Day at Sea. The Chief is strolling about, apparently at leisure. A good opportunity for me to coax some technical information out of him. All I need to say is, “It’s all so damned complicated,” and he’s off. “You can say that again. A damned sight more complicated than ordinary steamers, which simply float out to sea on the same principle as a washtub on a pond. They’ve all got their own characteristic trim and their own constant buoyancy. So-and-so-many gross registered tons and so-and-so-many tons of cargo. And if they load more on, the scow just sinks a little lower and the water comes up over the Plimsoll line. That’s all there is to it, nothing to worry about. At worst it’s a matter for the Maritime Authorities. But with us any excess weight demands special countermeasures…” The Chief stops, nervously hoods his eyes. I’m afraid he may not go on, and keep staring at him. He lets me wait.

  Floating, being borne up by water, is a phenomenon I’ve always found hard to grasp. Not wooden rowboats—but iron ships seemed like a miracle to me as a child. Iron floating on water! I even saw concrete ships with sides as thick as bunkers on the Elbe one day, and I couldn’t believe those vast masses would float, let alone carry cargoes.

  Although I understand the functioning of the ship’s equipment and the sequence of maneuvers, diving and resurfacing continue to baffle me. The fact that a U-boat can eliminate its own buoyancy and get it back again at will never ceases to fascinate me.

  When the Chief starts up again he sounds like a lecturer. “The so-to-speak fundamental difference is this: we achieve our buoyancy not like ordinary scows, through the water we displace, but through the air in the cells. So what keeps us on the surface is a kind of life preserver. When we blow the air out, we sink.”

  The Chief stops until I nod.

  “We have to watch our weight like hawks. It must always remain the same. At an alarm, there’s no time for fumbling around. Everything goes insanely fast. So we have to trim the boat for diving in advance—that is, while we’re still traveling on the surface. This means we must keep the weight steady by means of the trim cells. Then when there’s an alarm, all we still have to do is eliminate the lift in the buoyancy cells. Once the boat is underwater, its own weight doesn’t tilt it up or down.”

  The Chief pauses to inquire, “Got it?”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  “At the desired depth, the weight of the boat must exactly equal that of the water it’s displacing, so that the boat hovers perfectly, ready to react precisely to the smallest push from the propellers and be easily maneuvered up or down, right or left, by the hydroplanes or the rudder. It mustn’t have any tendency to sink or to rise. Unfortunately the boat’s weight changes every day, through the consumption of provisions—water and fuel, for example. The crazy thing, however, is that not even the weight of the water displaced by the boat remains constant. So everything is always changing. You can never stop calculating. You hardly dare to cough.”

  He pauses for breath. Gets a bottle of apple juice from the locker. Pulls the tin cap off on the hinge of the locker door and raises the bottle to his mouth.

  He has hardly wiped his lips when he starts up again. “The thing that gives us the most trouble is the changing specific gravity of water. If we were diving in fresh water everything would be simpler. Then all we’d have to do every day would be to add the same weight of water to the trim cells as we used up in food, oil, and water, and that would be that. But in salt water it’s very tricky. There’s no getting away from it. In this pond, water is not just water. Our buoyancy changes from day to day—even from hour to hour.”

  He pauses again and glances at me to observe the effect he’s having.

  “The specific gravity of salt water is influenced by every imaginable factor. Depth, temperature, the time of year, the various currents. Even the sea life—plankton, for example—affects it appreciably. A little more plankton in the water and we have to pump. And it depends on the sun as well.”

  “On the sun?”

  “Yes, the sun causes evaporation, which increases salt content. Greater salt content in the water and the specific gravity goes up.”

  “But aren’t the differences minimal?”

  He ponders for a while, frowning deeply. “A difference in the specific gravity of the water—well, let’s take a really minimal one, of one one-thousandth—that means that the weight of the boat, to maintain its balance, must also be changed by one one-thousandth. Now assume that the boat weighs eight hundred and eighty tons. So: a change of one one-thousandth gives us a bit over sixteen hundred pounds. That much of a difference would make for a serious mistake in calculating the content of the trim cells. To keep the boat adequately poised, we have to weight it out with the help of the trim tanks to within eleven pounds. I say adequately because in practice it’s impossible to weigh out the boat so accurately that it remains poised without the help of propellers and hydroplanes. Even a pint—as a matter of fact, even a thimbleful—too much of water in the tanks would make it rise. So every day that God the Cloudmaker allows to dawn, we have to use the densimeter to determine the specific gravity of the seawater around us.”

  The Chief is enjoying the sound of his own eloquence. He’s blossoming, as though the whole science of submarining had originated with him.

  The Commander, who has been listening for some time, goes by and asks, “Well, professor, is all that stuff really true?” as he climbs through the forward hatch.

  Immediately the Chief is disconcerted. When he begins again, it’s in a plaintive tone. “All the Old Man’s interested in is balancing the boat precisely—not a quart too much, not a quart too little…”

  The Chief seems to have finished. However, I can see he’s searching for a suitable closing sentence.

  “Hell,” he says finally, “the fact is, we put to sea with a lot of physics…”

  “And chemistry.”

  “Yes, and chemistry too—that we don’t really use. Keep your fingers crossed,” says the Chief. “If it ever really does come down to chemistry, we’ll be needing psychology too. And at that point we’ll be right up the
ass of the Prophet!”

  He suddenly has to leave. I have no chance to ask him what he means.

  At the noon meal the Old Man looks merry. No one knows what’s cheered him up so. He’s even joking in a way I haven’t noticed before. The Chief appears at last.

  “Well, Chief?” he asks in a self-satisfied undertone.

  “All in order, Herr Kaleun!”

  The Commander cordially invites him to sit down on the corner of the bunk. This deliberate friendliness alarms the Chief. Furtively he peers at each of us. I can imagine what’s about to happen: as I was coming through the control room I saw the Commander secretly slip a small note into the hand of the control-room officer.

  Within a few minutes the alarm bell peals. The Chief has difficulty scrambling to his feet. On the ceiling the flooding valve rods begin to turn. The plates on the table start slipping.

  “Hold tight!”

  The Chief shoots an embittered glance at the Old Man, but it does no good—he has to struggle into the control room.

  “Very good. Quick as a weasel!” the Old Man jeers after him.

  The uproar coming from the control room confirms my belief that this is not a simple test alarm; it sounds very much like a disaster exercise.

  Everything on the table skids forward, crashing and clattering—I’m already stepping on splintered plates.

  The bow is getting steadily heavier.

  A questioning glance from the Second Watch Officer. But the Commander continues to behave as if all this had nothing to do with him.

  From the control room comes the alarm cry: “Breach above the water gauge!”

  Instead of leaping to his feet, the Commander favors the Second Watch Officer with a broad grin, until the latter finally grasps that this is a carefully prepared accident.

  The Old Man takes fiendish pleasure in the curses and uproar coming from the control room. He gets heavily to his feet and lumbers his way there like a cautious mountain climber. Rattling and tinkling everywhere, then a loud crash. Some massive object must have tipped over. The boat is now attempting a headstand.