Das Boot

  “You’re great at arithmetic!”

  “So I slammed the package down on the table. The old folks were gaping at me. Then I walked out—end of dream!”

  “You’re crazy!”

  “What d’you mean? Maybe you think I should have invited my Herr Cunt of a brother-in-law to join us for coffee, eh?”

  “Take it easy.”

  “Either—or! There’s no third way as far as I’m concerned!”

  “You’re a nut case! What makes you so sure she really…”

  “Oh come on, don’t talk crap. Do you want me to believe the old man needed them?”

  I turn over again toward the plywood wall but the door is thrown open with a bang and the last man appears, bosun’s mate Wichmann. He slams the door shut behind him and turns on a second bright light. I already know from other nights what will happen next. But some damn curiosity makes me watch again.

  Wichmann strikes a pose in front of the mirror on the door and makes faces at himself. Before bringing his hair forward over his face he runs his thumbnail a couple of times in both directions over the teeth of the comb. After a series of attempts he succeeds in getting the part exactly right. When he takes a few steps back, I can see that his face is shining in an ecstasy of concentration. Now comes the moment when he inspects himself from left to right, his head cocked on one side. Then he goes to his locker and rummages about. When he reappears in front of the mirror he has the tube in his hand. He carefully applies the pomade between the teeth of the comb, then draws it through his hair again and again until he achieves a completely flat surface that’s like a mirror.

  Finally he packs away his utensils, takes off his jacket, removes his shoes without unlacing them, and rolls into bed, leaving the light on.

  Five minutes later I climb down to turn it off. In passing I glance at the bosun’s mate’s bunk: the splendor is destroyed.

  Friday. Fourteenth Day at Sea. I meet the Old Man in the control room. Affable. Apparently happy to have a conversation. This time I make a start by asking his explanation of why so many men volunteer for U-boat service despite the heavy losses.

  The usual minutes for reflection. Then, with pauses: “You won’t get much out of the children themselves. Obviously they’re tempted by the aura. We’re what you might call the crème de la crème, the Dönitz Volunteer Corps. And then, of course, there’s the propaganda…”

  Long pause. The Old Man keeps staring at the floor plates. Finally he’s ready to talk again. “Perhaps they simply can’t imagine what’s ahead of them. After all, they’re nothing but blank pages—three years’ schooling, then drafted immediately, and the usual training. They haven’t seen anything yet—nor experienced anything—and, besides, they have no imagination.”

  A ghost of a grin spreads across his face as he turns halfway toward me. “Footsiogging around with a gun over your shoulder—can’t say I’d find it exactly inspiring either. How would you like to go plowing through the countryside in jackboots? God knows, we’re better off in that respect. They give us a ride. We don’t have to drag ourselves along getting blisters on our feet. Regular meals—mostly hot food. Where else can you find that? Besides, we have real bunks. And excellent heating. And lots of good invigorating sea air… And then shore leaves, with stylish marine uniforms and all the pretty decorations. If you ask me, we’re better off than the ordinary troops: certainly a U-boat crew is way ahead of the Navy shit-shovelers. Everything’s relative, after all.”

  At the word “shit-shovelers” I see myself practicing “individual review with salutation.” The division commander roars the order at the top of his voice. Each roar jerks him up on tiptoe. “Kindly get your goddam rifle up faster or I’ll have the piss streaming out of your nose and ears before I’ve finished with you!”

  And before that, labor service… August Ritter von Karavec was the name of the bastard they assigned to us as chief instructor after he had been transferred several times for disciplinary reasons. “When properly commanded, a division should be distinguishable from the terrain by nothing but the whites of their eyes” was his basic principle. By putting us through wheeling maneuvers and parade march in a bog, he could get us plastered from head to foot with ice-cold mud in five minutes flat; there wasn’t a boot left on anyone’s foot—they were stuck in the slime, and we were soaked to the skin. Two hours later this madman had uniform inspection and found something in everyone to bellyache about. Which meant: Dump all belongings in a single heap in the middle of the room, and then let twenty men sort out their possessions again. As “punishment” there was also the great wheeling maneuver performed on a slope. This was even worse than the bog, because the men on the wings almost burst their lungs racing uphill. And that bastard made sure that everyone had to take his turn on the outside…

  The cynical grin was gone from the Old Man’s face before he picked up from where he’d left off.

  “Perhaps you can only do this kind of thing with kids, because they’re still what you might call underexposed. No ties. The one person to make it out of a tight spot is almost always an officer. With a wife and children at home! Funny thing. Once we were picking up seamen from a sunken destroyer—one of ours—pulled them out of the drink. We must have got there something like two hours after she sank, which is pretty soon as these things go. It was summer, so the water wasn’t too cold. But most of the young ones were hanging in their life preservers—already drowned. They’d simply given up—let their necks go limp, although there was only a medium to heavy sea. Only the older ones struggled. There was one of them—over forty and seriously wounded—and he survived even though he’d lost a lot of blood. But the eighteen-year-olds who were completely uninjured—they didn’t.” The Old Man is silent for a few moments, apparently searching for the best words to sum it all up. Then: “The older ones generally get through—the kids would rather give up.”

  The Chief has arrived, and glances at me for a moment in astonishment. The Commander goes on.

  “Actually we ought to be able to get along with a lot fewer men. I keep imagining a boat that would only need a crew of two or three. Exactly like an airplane. Basically we have all these men on board because the designers have failed to do a proper job. Most of the men are nothing but links in a chain. They fill the gaps the designers have left in the machinery. People who open and close valves or throw switches are not what you’d call fighting men. I can’t listen these days when the C-in-C U-boats tries to get everyone all excited with his advertising slogans: ‘Attack—Defeat—Des troy’—it’s all pure bullshit. Who does the attacking? The Commander and no one else. The seamen don’t see so much as a trace of the enemy.”

  The Old Man pauses. No need to say anything now. No prompting necessary today.

  “Damn shame old Dönitz has joined the bigmouths. We swore by him at first,” he says in a low voice.

  I’ve known for some time what’s been eating the Old Man. His relations with the Commander-in-Chief have not been good since his last report.

  “We used to see him as a kind of sea Moltke. But now it’s ‘One for all, all for one’—’One Reich, one Volk, one Führer’—’The Führer has his eye on you’—’The Führer, the Führer, the Führer’… You can hardly bear to listen. Always stuck in the same groove. And then he keeps going on about the ‘German woman, our noblest possession.’ ‘When I leave the Führer I always feel a mere nothing.’ That sort of thing’s enough to floor anyone.”

  The Old Man has talked himself into real bitterness.

  The Chief stares straight ahead and pretends he’s heard nothing.

  “Tsch, the volunteer crews!” The Old Man is back where he started. “Comradeship—the togetherness of all men aboard—’sworn fellowship’—that’s not just hot air, as a matter of fact. It really attracts people. And more than anything else so does the feeling of belonging to an elite. You only have to look at the fellows on leave. They swell up like pouter pigeons with their U-boat insignia on their uniforms. Seems to h
ave some effect on the ladies too…”

  The loudspeaker crackles. Then: “Second watch stand by!” This time the order applies to me too. I’m going to stand one watch as stoker, attending the exhaust doors and the diesels.

  The Chief has given me cotton for my ears. “Six hours of diesel noise is quite enough, I can tell you.”

  The suction of the machines holds the diesel room door so tight that I need all my strength to open it. Immediately the noise of the engines breaks over me like a hail of blows. The staccato chatter of the push rods and rocker arms forms the percussion accompaniment to the contained torrent of explosions within the cylinders and the deep thundering roar issuing, I assume, from the blower. However, only the starboard diesel is running, at half speed, while charging batteries; the port engine is silent. So the deep roar can’t be the blower after all, since it’s only used to increase the air supply when the machines are running at full speed.

  The diesels reach almost to the rounded ceiling. Along the flank of the starboard engine the links between the rocker arms and push rods move in perfect unison, sending out wave after wave of vibrations over the huge machine.

  The chief mechanic Johann is on duty. For the time being he pays no attention to me. He’s concentrating on the behavior of the tachometer; its needle is moving sharply. All of a sudden it will jump several marks on the scale and shiver nervously as our screws meet varying resistance in the rough sea. Even without the tachometer, I would be more aware here in the after part of the ship than in the control room of how the waves cling to the boat, then release it and hurl it forward again. The screws labor at first, then the boat fights its way free, and they race all the faster.

  Johann checks the oil pressure and the cold-water pressure, one after the other, then with the abstracted look of a lab worker he reaches for the fuel oil line, which branches off under the lubricating pumps, and tests its temperature. Finally he mounts the silvery, gleaming step that runs along the side of the diesel and touches the rising and falling rocker-arm hinges: all with very slow, precisely calculated movements.

  He shouts my instructions at me: see to it that nothing gets too hot, keep feeling the cold-water pipes and inspecting the rocker arms on the push rods, the way he’s just done it. And if he gives the sign, shut the exhaust gas doors. I’ve watched this procedure often enough.

  Johann returns to the control station, cleans his hands with brightly colored cotton waste, reaches into a chest beside his small standing table for a bottle of juice, and tilts his head back to take a couple of deep gulps.

  The vibrating joints drip with oil. I feel them one after the other, absorbing the heavy impact through my hand. All of them are uniformly warm. The explosions in the cylinders follow one another in uninterrupted sequences. I repeat to myself: intake stroke, compression stroke, power stroke, exhaust stroke.

  After a quarter of an hour Johann opens the door to the galley and turns a hand wheel on the ceiling. At the same time he roars an explanation. “I’m closing—the—bottom valve of the diesel—now it’s—drawing air—from inside the boat—gives a fine—through draft!”

  An hour later the chief mechanic leaves the control station and comes along the gangway between the two engine blocks. One after another, he opens the inspection petcocks on the side of the diesel that’s in use. Each belches a stream of fire. Johann nods, reassured: ignition in all cylinders, everything in perfect running order. Funny, I think to myself, smoking is forbidden, but this flame-throwing is all right.

  Swaying like a tightrope walker, Johann makes his way back again to the control station—rubbing a few oil flecks from a polished surface in passing—and cleans his hands again with a handful of cotton waste. The waste is tucked between the pipes near the door. After a while he reaches over his head and turns on a high-pressure valve to increase the flow of fuel oil. Then he glances at the electrical telethermometer, which registers the temperature in all the cylinders and the combined exhaust pipes. Using a pencil stub so short that he has to hold it with the tips of his fingers, he makes his entries in the engine-room log: consumption of oil, temperatures, variations in pressure.

  The helmsman, just off duty and both arms full of wet oilskins, comes crashing through the door more by suction than his own momentum, squeezes past me, and works his way aft along the support bars of the diesel toward the E-motors, where he hangs the dripping clothes around the stern torpedo tube to dry.

  The diesel mate is sitting on a low tool chest opposite me in front of the port diesel control station, poring over a battered book. His machine is idle so he has nothing to do. He has to stay on duty, however, because the machine may be called upon at any moment.

  Again and again I sway along the polished iron runway on the side of the starboard diesel. The gauges show normal pressure.

  The chief mechanic signals to me: I am to sit in the doorway to the E-room. The brown bags with the escape gear hang close to the door on switchboxes. They are an oppressive reminder that the control room and the bridge are a long way off. A long escape route to the tower hatch. Not a pleasant post for someone with a lively imagination. You can tell yourself a dozen times that it makes no difference whether the escape route is long or short once the boat has been sent to the bottom. The feeling of being shut up all the way in the stern eats away at your nerves just the same.

  Besides, the boat can just as easily be wrecked on the surface—by being rammed, for instance—and in that case everyone knows that the guards on deck and the men in the control room may be rescued, but the engine-room crew, never.

  A bell shrills above the noise of the diesel. A red lamp goes on. A stab of fear. The diesel mate is on his feet. What’s up? Johann makes a reassuring gesture. I understand: the port diesel has been ordered into action. Now I have something to do: open the exhaust gas vents for the port diesel. The diesel mate couples the engine to the driving shaft. Compressed air hisses into the cylinders. The chief mechanic has already opened the fuel-oil throttle. Rockers click, and there is the crack of the first explosion. The push rods begin to move: the port diesel is roused from inactivity. Ignition of all cylinders, and already their noise is blending in with the sound of the starboard engine. Another stretch with nothing to do. The gauges show that the engines are getting all they need: fuel, air, and water for the cooling system.

  Three hours of the watch are over: halftime.

  The air has become rapidly hotter and heavier since the port diesel has been running.

  At ten o’clock Cookie brings around a pail of lemonade. I drink thirstily out of the ladle.

  Johann jerks his thumbs up toward the ceiling: time to shut the exhaust gas doors. We don’t dare neglect them. They cover the exhaust lines from the diesels while we are submerged, and they must be absolutely watertight to prevent any flooding of the engines. When we’re traveling on the surface, however, there’s incomplete combustion in the engines. This leads to a buildup of carbon deposits and could prevent the doors from shutting tight during a dive. At the beginning of the war, as a matter of fact, boats were lost simply because the doors were jammed open by the residue, and water rushed into the boat. To prevent this we “grind in” the doors every four hours.

  The red light flashes on again. The engine-room telegraph jumps to half speed ahead. The chief mechanic pulls the throttle up. Less fuel is reaching the cylinder pumps and the starboard diesel begins to turn more slowly as the rhythm of the combustion falters. Johann puts the throttle at zero and the diesel stops. He raises his fist, signaling me to close the outer gas exhaust door by turning the big hand wheel on the ceiling. I seize the spokes and turn with all my might, driving the exhaust-door plate back and forth against its housing to scrape off all the carbon deposits. Back and forth, back and forth, until Johann lets me stop.

  Bathed in sweat and panting hard, I stand there as the starboard diesel springs to life again. Shortly thereafter the port diesel is stopped and the same procedure begins again. I now have no real strength left an
d have to use every muscle to turn the spokes. Sweat is streaming down my face.

  The two diesels haven’t been running long when the chief mechanic’s face goes tense. He listens to the pulse of the engines as if turned to stone. Reaches for pocket flashlight and screwdriver and pushes his way past me. Close to the after door he lifts a floor plate, shines his light down, and beckons me closer. Underneath is an even wilder confusion of pipes, filters, valves, and faucets, This is part of the water-cooling and oil-lubrication system and the fuel supply.

  Now I see it too: one of the pipes is releasing a fine spray of water. Johann glances at me eloquently, then works his way between the pipes, twisting like an acrobat, and is at the trouble spot with his tools. After a while he hands me some nuts and bolts. He’s removed a packing from the pipe. I can’t understand what he’s roaring at me; he has to raise his head from the tangle of pipes before I get it. The diesel mate is to cut a new packing. Suddenly everyone has something to do. The repair is not a simple one. A large black patch of sweat appears on Johann’s back. Finally he hauls himself out of the jungle, smeared with oil, and winks—so whatever he did has worked. But how did he detect the fault in the first place? He must have a sixth sense for his engines.

  At five minutes to twelve the new watch comes in. One last mouthful of apple juice, rub the hands with cotton waste, and then no thought but to get out of this cave of an engine room and into the control room for the first gulp of fresh air.

  Fifteenth Day at Sea. Two weeks. The waves today are low. They collide helter-skelter without any clear sense of over-all movement. The boat rides them uneasily, unable to settle into any rhythm. An old groundswell, which can be felt at long intervals under the choppy surface, adds yet another variation to the motion.

  For days we’ve seen nothing except one barrel, a few boxes, and, once, hundreds of bottle corks—a sight that baffled even the Commander. “Can’t be left over from a binge—just corks and no bottles—it’s crazy!”