Das Boot

by Lothar-Günther Buchheim

  “They ought to be sending in everything that can move,” is the Old Man’s comment. What he probably wants to say is, “Hell and damnation, when are we finally going to get our orders?”

  Hour after hour goes by, and still no radio message for us. The Commander squats in the corner of his bunk and busies himself with a collection of colored folders full of all sorts of memoranda: secret orders, tactical regulations, flotilla orders, and all the other paperwork that’s always going the rounds. Everyone knows that he detests this sort of official waste paper, that he’s only taken the folders out to hide how tense he really is.

  Toward 17.00, another radio message finally arrives. The Commander lifts his eyebrows: his whole face lights up. A personal message for us! He reads it and his face shuts tight again. Almost absentmindedly he pushes the note over to me: it’s an order to report weather conditions.

  The navigator makes out the report and hands the sheet to the Commander for his signature: “Barometer rising, air temperature five degrees, wind northwest six, cloud, cirro-stratus, visibility seven miles—UA.”

  Not wanting to be infected by the Old Man’s depression, I head for the control room and climb up the ladder. The thin veil of cirrus has grown thicker. The tattered blue gradually disappears behind it. The sky will soon be clothed in gray-on-gray. The light becomes duller. All around, dark clouds have piled up heavily against the horizon. Their lower edges merge shapelessly into the gray of the surrounding sky. It’s only higher up that they’re clearly silhouetted against the whiter gray. I push my hands deep into the pockets of my leather jacket and stand there balancing with bent knees against the motion of the boat while the clouds swell slowly higher as if inflated from within. Dead ahead, the wind tears a hole in them, but more clouds pile in at once from either side to seal the hole again. They form a mighty phalanx that will soon threaten to conquer the whole sky. And then, as if the many collisions and occlusions weren’t already causing enough confusion, the sun comes bursting through a rift: its beams slant down like spears to make a dramatic play of light and shadow on the tumultuous mass. Next, a bright flash touches the sea, broad on the starboard beam; then the spotlight wanders on over a trailing, padded rim of cloud, making it flare into brilliance. It darts back and forth, never lingering anywhere for more than a moment, crowning one cloud after another with a halo of light.

  The Second Watch Officer is not impressed by the transformations of the sky. “Damned flyer’s clouds!” For him the magnificent scenery is riddled with trickery. Again and again he trains his glasses on it.

  I climb down and busy myself with my cameras. Evening comes. Up onto the bridge again. Now the clouds are sprinkled with iridescent colors. Suddenly the light of the sun abandons them, and they immediately revert to their own dreary gray. High in the sky there’s a pale phantom, the last quarter of the waning moon. 18.00.

  After the evening meal we sit tongue-tied, still expecting another radio message. The Commander is uneasy. Every fifteen minutes he disappears into the control room and busies himself at the chart table. Five pairs of eyes are fixed on him each time he returns. Futile. He says nothing.

  The Chief finally makes an attempt to coax the Commander out of his sullen silence. “About time that contact man reported again.”

  The Commander pays no attention.

  The Chief reaches for a book. All right, if there’s not going to be any talk, I can pretend to read too. The Second Watch Officer and the Second Engineer thumb through newspapers, the First Watch Officer immerses himself in official-looking folders.

  I’m on my way to my locker and just passing the radio shack when I see the radioman, eyes half closed in the light of his small lamp, scribbling down a message.

  I stop dead in my tracks. Back into the Officers’ Mess. The Second Watch Officer quickly starts deciphering it. Suddenly a look of consternation comes over his face. Something’s wrong.

  The Commander holds the message in his hand and his face slowly assumes the same bewildered expression you see on boxers after a hard blow to the chin.

  He reads out the message. “Surprised by destroyer coming out of rain squall. Four hours’ depth charges. Contact lost, am pursuing in Square Bruno Karl—UM.”

  At the last words his voice dies away. He stares for a good minute at the radiogram, audibly takes a deep breath, stares again, then finally blows the air out of both cheeks. He also lets himself sink back in the corner of his sofa. Not a word, not a curse, nothing.

  Later we’re sitting on the railing in the “greenhouse” behind the bridge.

  “This is madness,” says the Old Man. “It feels as if we’re bouncing across the Atlantic all on our own. And at the very same time—right now, sure as fate—there are hundreds of ships at sea and some of them are probably not far away. Except they’re beyond the horizon.” With bitterness in his voice, he adds, “Curvature of the earth is something the dear Lord must have invented just for the English. What can we possibly see from way down here? We might as well be sitting in a canoe. Pathetic that nobody’s come up with a solution yet.”

  “But they have,” I say. “Airplanes!”

  “Oh yes, airplanes. The enemy has those. Where are our own sea scouts keeping themselves, that’s what I’d like to know. A big mouth is all Fatbelly Goering supplies. That Reichsmaster of Hounds!”

  Luckily the Chief bobs up. “Just grabbing a mouthful of fresh air.

  “It’s getting a bit crowded here,” I say and disappear below.

  A glance at the sea chart. As usual—the pencil line that records our course tacks back and forth like a folding yardstick out of control.

  The Old Man also comes below. He sits down carefully on the chart chest, and there’s a pause before he takes up where he left off. ‘Perhaps we’ll still be lucky. If they send in enough boats, there’s a chance someone will make contact again.”

  Next morning I read a radiogram picked up during the night. Square Bruno Karl search a failure—UM.”

  The next day is the worst since our departure. We avoid speaking and keep out of one another’s way as though we had scurvy. I spend most of the time on the sofa in the Officers’ Mess. The Chief doesn’t even emerge from the engine room for meals. The Second Engineer also stays with his machines. We three, the First Watch Officer, the Second Watch Officer, and I, don’t dare say a word to the Old Man, who stares holes in the air and only consumes a few spoonfuls of thick soup.

  Silence also reigns in the next door Quarters. The radioman carefully avoids putting a record on the turntable. Even the steward works with downcast eyes as though he were serving at a wake.

  Finally the Commander opens his mouth. “The other lot just aren’t making mistakes any more!”

  Later, Zeitler starts up again with another of his knowing remarks: “Y’know… first thing in the morning’s really the best.” It doesn’t take a genius to know what subject we’re back on. Wichmann and Frenssen are all ears.

  “I was in Hamburg one time… had to deliver a letter for my Chief. It was when I was still serving with the minesweepers. Anyhow, there I am, I ring the bell, and who comes to answer it but this little blond bombshell. Mother’s out, just gone to the post office, back in a minute, do come in… so I do. Inside there’s a kind of hall with a couch in it. I get a scumbag on and her skirt off in no time flat, and just as we finish banging, the door starts. her mother’s opened it and got stuck by the safety chain! Luckily the couch is too far to one side, so she can’t see us through the crack. Missy shoves her panties out of sight under a cushion, but I almost forget to zip up before shaking stinkfingers with the old lady. Zeitler, how d’you do, pleased to meet you, ‘fraid I have to run, due back, you know how it is… and I’m out of there. It’s not till I’m taking a piss hours later that I realize I’ve still got my rubber on. Or rather, it’s not till after I take the piss and I find myself looking down at this huge yellow cucumber. What a mess! And the guy standing next to me is laughing himself sick…”


  The First Watch Officer’s daily shave is the talk of the bow compartment. “Upsetting the whole place—whoever heard of such a thing—spending all your time in the can, shaving.”

  “The Old Man ought to issue an ultimatum.”

  “One shithouse for the whole crew and we have to have a bathing beauty like that on board!”

  Pilgrim pulls some photographs out of his wallet. One of them shows a man on a pier. “My father!” he explains to me. He sounds as if he’s introducing us. “Died in the prime of life—that’s the way I want to go too.”

  What on earth is there to say? I don’t dare look Pilgrim in the face but simply mutter, “Fine photo.”

  He seems satisfied.

  “The emotional life of most of the crew is a complete mystery to me,” the Old Man said to me once. “How can you know what the men are thinking? Once in a while you find out something, and it knocks you right off your feet, like the story of Frenssen’s donna—Frenssen the diesel mechanic mate. He met this lady on leave. Then he left on patrol and she got no mail from him so she went to a fortune teller. Apparently there are still some around. He’d neglected to tell his lady that we don’t often get to the post office. Apparently the fortune teller put on a big act, then gasped, ‘I see water—nothing but water.’”

  The Old Man was doing both voices: the fortune teller’s and the lady’s. “’And no U-boat?’ ‘No, water—only water—nothing but water!’ The donna, who considered herself our diesel mechanic mate’s fiancée, started screaming, ‘He must be dead!’ The fortune teller remained as silent as the Oracle itself. D’you know what happened next? The donna put her hands to her head and wailed, ‘Oh god—and I’m still wearing red!’ Wrote one letter after another to the flotilla. To me too. I had the rest of the story from Frenssen. He didn’t go to Paris on his last leave. He’d had enough!”

  I’m sitting alone with the Old Man in the Officers’ Mess. We pick up a radiogram addressed to Bachmann. It’s the third time in four days that Bachmann’s boat is being ordered to report.

  “All quiet on the Western Front,” murmurs the Commander. “Very likely he’s caught it too. The shape he was in, he should never have been allowed to put to sea.” The old story: When does a commander become “ripe” for retirement and have to be relieved? Why are there no medical men to make sure that the boats don’t put to sea with commanders on the verge of total breakdown?

  Ziemer sailed with Bachmann as First Watch Officer. Ziemar drowned? I see him with the waitress from the flotilla mess, lying in the sun. Always eager to learn, he was having her anatomy explained to him in French. Practicing on a live model. First he took hold of her breasts and said, “Les dunduns.” “Les seins!” the waitress corrected him. Then he pushed his hand between her legs and said, “Lapin!” Whereupon she put him right: “Le vagine”; and so it went.

  From next door we can hear the First Watch Officer giving a class in security precautions. “They’ll gabble just the same!” the Old Man comments. He broods for a while, then: “This whole secrecy business is a farce. The Tommies have had an undamaged boat of ours for ages now.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, one that surrendered. Ramlow’s boat. South of Iceland in the open sea; all our secret material, all the codes, everything—the Tommies got all of it in one fell swoop!”

  “That must have made the C-in-C happy!”

  “When you think that Ramlow may even have been a secret agent—you can’t even trust your own right hand. He managed to talk his officers into it—hard to believe!”

  Only one more day at cruising speed till we reach the new field of operations. A radio message is picked up. Tension while we wait for it to be decoded.

  It’s addressed to Flechsig. Ordered to shift his position seventy miles westward. Apparently a convoy is expected to pass through at that point. The navigator shows me the spot on a small-scale chart. It’s close to the American coast, I.e., many days sailing away from us. A little later we pick up a radio signal directed to a boat stationed near Iceland, Böhler’s boat; and to a third operating near Gibraltar—UJ—-that’s Kortmann. Kortmann, who was involved in the foul-up with the Bismarck tanker.

  A boat reports that it’s unable to dive. Meinig’s. Foul-mouthed Meinig. If it’s unable to dive, a boat is practically lost,

  “Shit!” says the Old Man. “Not even pursuit escort—too far away. All we can do is keep our fingers crossed.”

  He bends forward and raps three times underneath the table. “Let’s hope he makes it. Meinig, it would be Meinig!”

  We all sit there silent. The Old Man’s lips move noiselessly. Perhaps he’s figuring out how long it will take Meinig’s boat to reach Saint Nazaire at cruising speed.

  A cold shudder runs down my back: Just what will they do if the Sunderlands appear? Or destroyers? As a surface vessel the U-boat is hopelessly inferior to its opponents. Too little engine power to get away, no armor, guns too small. More vulnerable than almost any other ship: a single hit on the pressure hull and that’s it.

  “Boy, oh boy!” is all the Chief can say. It’s obvious how completely he’s identifying with his colleague on the other boat. He’s actually gone white.

  “Meier Two or Three is with Meinig, isn’t he, Chief?” asks the Old Man.

  “Meier Two, Herr Kaleun—in my class at the academy!”

  No one opens his mouth. We stare at the table as though there’s something—anything—to be seen there. I can hardly breathe. I also know one of the men in that boat—Habermann—the Bait Habermann who was with me on that wretched inspection cruise to Götenhafen: midwinter, twenty-five degrees below zero and an east wind.

  I can remember him sitting on the cold linoleum—stark naked—legs stretched out stiff in front of him, back braced against the silk-covered wall of the Cap Arcona, head on his chest, dribbling. No respect for the impressive interior appointments of the former luxury liner now a floating barracks.

  I am overtaken by a nervous fit of the giggles: old barefoot Habermann—that was when he’d just got over his third dose of the clap.

  Later he told me that he’d been looking for the washroom and had lost his way. Naked and desperate, he had just sat down and waited for a rescuer.

  Pneumonia? Not a chance! Never one for domestic comforts, he couldn’t be knocked out by spending hours sitting on his naked ass. Not even ten doses of clap could do that. But now it looks as though the Tommies have managed it. A three-star announcement will be coming up. Flemming, Habermann—there aren’t many left!

  The Old Man is the first to speak. He means to change the subject but actually stays with it. “A proper submarine, now that would be something. We’re not really a submarine. All we have here is a diving boat.”

  Silence. Only after a surprised look from me does he explain, between pauses, “after all, the capacity of our storage batteries is only enough for short attacks at periscope level or a quick run underwater to escape pursuit. Actually, we’re completely dependent on the surface. It’s impossible to do more than eighty miles underwater even when we’re conserving power as much as we can. If we run underwater at our top speed of nine knots, the batteries are flat in one to two hours. Not exactly luxurious. And yet the batteries are an enormous dead weight. Those lead plates weigh more than all the rest of the boat’s machinery put together. Now a real submarine would be able to travel underwater, with no diesels requiring air and producing exhaust gas. It wouldn’t be as vulnerable without all the equipment we need now—all those openings in the pressure hull. What we need is some form of engine that’s independent of the atmosphere.”

  We have barely reached the new area of operations when a radio message comes in. We are to be marshaled into a group with other boats, I.e., form a reconnaissance patrol. The area to be covered lies a good distance farther to the west. It’ll take us two days to get there at cruising speed.

  “They’ve christened the group ‘Wolf Pack’—marvelous!” says the Old Man. “Apparently they have
a kind of court poet at Staff Headquarters who thinks up this bullshit—’Wolf Pack’! ‘Daisies’ would have done just as well, but no: keep banging the drum…”

  To the Old Man, even “area of operations” sounds too highflown. If he had his way, the usual naval rhetoric would be thoroughly deflated. He himself can spend hours thinking up the worst possible banalities for his entries in the war log.

  I read over what I’ve written in my blue notebook:

  Sunday. Sixteenth day at sea. Report of convoy headed east. We are on course at ninety degrees to direction of convoy.

  Monday. Seventeenth day at sea. Given new base line. Farther south. Dragnet being drawn that way. Probably only five boats in our new patrol—some dragnet!: either the mesh is too big or the net is too small. Speed eight knots. Let’s hope the ship’s positions tally. Also that the General Staff has taken due account of the unfavorable weather conditions in our area.

  No machine-gun practice because of bad visibility. “Might just as well throw it away.” We dive to listen.

  Wednesday. Nineteenth day at sea. Another new tack. Only slight groundswell, no artillery practice possible. The weather must have joined the Allies.

  Thursday. Twentieth day at sea. Radio silence except for enemy reports. More than five boats now assembled in our area. The enemy mustn’t learn that we’re gathering. Results of search: nil. Moderate sea. Light wind from northwest. Strato-cumulus clouds. But heavy layer of mist down close to the water. No trace of convoy.

  Friday. Twenty-first day at sea. We’ve been assigned yet another new outpost patrol.

  “God knows where the bastards are bucketing around!” growls the Commander.

  Twenty-second Day at Sea. The watches seem to go on forever. Sky like beef suet. All day long, this huge heavy dome of fat weighing down on the dark sea—and no sun to melt it.

  Today we have a superb, unbroken horizon. Nothing on it. Not a single bristle of a mist. Nothing. If only we could get up higher! That, of course, has often been tried. Take the kite experiment. They sent a man up on a kite back during World War I, but apparently it wasn’t much of a success.