Das Boot

by Lothar-Günther Buchheim

  Then there are the Old Man’s compulsive noisy mannerisms: scratching his beard, sucking on his pipe, making the bowl gurgle so that it sounds like fat frying on a low fire, snorting through his nose. Sometimes he forces spittle through a hole in his teeth till it hisses.

  Johann is getting to look more and more like Christ. When he pushes his mass of pale-yellow hair back off his high forehead, he only needs to lower his eyes to produce a perfect likeness of the Holy Handkerchief.

  Ensign Ullmann really worries me. At first I thought he looked full of energy. Now it’s vanished. I’ve seen him a few times crouched on his bunk, sunk in gloom.

  By radio we learn that Meinig’s boat has sunk a refrigerator ship of nine thousand gross registered tons, an unescorted vessel.

  I stare at the radiogram: almost incredible! How the hell could he have done it with his disabled boat? Meinig has reported—so Habermann is alive too. Might have guessed it: Nothing’s going to put him out of commission so quickly.

  “He must have had plenty of luck,” says the Old Man. “You can’t accomplish that sort of thing these days without it. If you’re not lucky enough to be in a forward position and be able to station yourself until one of their scows runs right in front of your tubes… everything that’s going unescorted these days is going fast. Pursuit from astern is pointless. A fast refrigerator ship simply outruns you. I’ve tried to overtake one often enough—but it’s been nothing but a waste of fuel every time. Even if we run at maximum r.p.m. we barely make one to two knots more than a fast, unescorted single vessel—and if she tacks in a favorable direction and we’re too slow in following, it’s all over and done with.”

  Thirty-third Day at Sea. The calendar says Wednesday. At eight in the morning we receive a report: “Convoy headed west to be intercepted Square Gustav Fritz.”

  Bent over the chart table, the Old Man emits a skeptical, “Well now!” Five minutes of reckoning and he says, “Not exactly favorable, but nevertheless—with a little luck—we might get there—just about.” New course, higher speed. Otherwise no change.

  “It’s about time we shoved a few tons toward the bottom,” says the Second Watch Officer, and immediately looks embarrassed, because he realizes that in our present state of irritation his remark sounded much too confident.

  Midday. I climb up behind the First Watch Officer, who’s just going on duty. The air is heavy and stagnant. The sea has subsided under the diffused light and covered itself with a gray skin that only occasionally shows a small buckling or swelling: visual boredom that dampens our spirits.

  That evening, however, during the Second Watch Officer’s watch, color appears. Single flat banks of cloud stretched above the horizon begin to glow like the fire in a forge. The whole sky quickly turns red and the sea is overrun with the magnificent glow. The boat moves with throbbing engines through this blazing hallucination. The whole bodywork gleams. The foreship looks like a huge anvil. The faces of the bridge guards are flooded with red. Two colors—red and black—would be enough to paint all this: sea, sky, ship’s hull, and the faces under the sou’westers.

  For a quarter of an hour sky and sea are in conflagration, then the crimson glow fades from the clouds and they instantly return to a dim, sulphurous gray. Now they look like mountains of ashes covering the glowing heart of a small fire.

  Suddenly a spot flames out in the gray wall directly ahead: bellows seem to fan the glimmer into life. But again, a few minutes later, the red glory shrinks; it gleams for a time like the mouth of a blast furnace and finally is extinguished completely: the sun has sunk beneath the horizon.

  High above the parade of clouds, the heavens still hold a lingering glow. Only very slowly does it grow thin and striated, and in its place comes saffron-yellow, which gradually turns greenish and slowly sinks to the horizon. The sea mirrors this poisonous color. It lies rigid, paralyzed under its sickly-colored skin.

  The Commander comes up and observes the sky. “Gaudy but not beautiful!” he announces sourly.

  When the Old Man isn’t on the bridge, he spends hours like a hermit behind his green curtain or on the periscope saddle in the tower. Sometimes I hear the machinery start up. The Old Man is bored, and is riding his carousel.

  The crew doesn’t hear a sound out of him from one day to the next. They could well believe that the boat is voyaging the seas without a commander. The Chief is another one who’s badly affected by all this frigging around. He’s lost a lot of his liveliness, and looks as though he’d put green eyeshadow under his eyes to turn himself into a demon. But the greenish rings are genuine. For a long time now he’s given up puttering around—when he’s not checking his engines, you seldom see more of him than his bowed head with the bright line of the part in his hair: he has succumbed to furious reading. He only lifts his head at mealtimes, and the Commander says, “Good day!” to his pallid face. Sometimes he just sits around and bitches.

  Yet the unspoken understanding between the Chief and the Commander persists despite all the irritability. Between the two of them all tensions have apparently long since been worked out. Seven patrols together already.

  We’re almost three thousand miles away from base. The boat has an action radius of about seven thousand miles. But since we’ve burned up so much fuel wallowing back and forth on patrol, there’s only a small “margin.” With such a reduced supply we could hardly be brought from any great distance to attack a convoy. Our reserves would be barely sufficient for the lengthy positional maneuvering at high speed that’s inevitable when attacking.

  The First Watch Officer makes the Chief nervous, opening and shutting his locker, clattering his keys, and scribbling in his colored looseleaf notebooks. No one knows what he’s putting down in them.

  “He’s memorizing the order of the cathouses for our return to harbor,” is the Chief’s theory, as the First Watch Officer disappears in the direction of the control room. One of his notebooks is lying on the table. I can’t resist the temptation to leaf through it. Personnel Management on a U-boat is the red title on the first page. I begin to turn the pages and can’t tear myself away.

  Point I: Peculiarities of U-boat Life.

  Life on board for long periods is monotonous. One must be able to endure long weeks of lack of success. When depth bombs are added to this, it becomes a “war of nerves” which weighs principally upon the higher-ranking officers.

  More red pencil: The morale of the crew is dependent on: and underneath, point by point, in blue ink:

  1. The discipline of the crew.

  2. The success of the Commander. If the Commander is successful, then he may be a fool, but the crew will always love him more than an unsuccessful one. But it is precisely the unsuccessful Commander who most needs a high level of morale among his crew.

  Red pencil: Discipline; then more blue:

  The Commander’s duty is to ensure that the spirit of the good soldier predominates on his boat and that the opinions of the bad soldier count for little. He must be like a gardener who pulls up the weeds and tends the good plants.

  Another red title: Quotation from a Speech by Lieutenant-Commander L.

  I am well aware that women can destroy the fighting morale of the soldier, but I also know that they can strengthen their husbands in their attitudes, and I have found that married men in particular return from leave well rested to begin the new patrol against the enemy. One must tell married petty officers what they should expect from a soldier’s wife. I was happy to have the opportunity to entertain the wives of most of my men at a coffee party in my home, to come to know them and to be able to tell them that a brave attitude on their part was expected. I believe that many of them gained new backbone from this, and I have requested my wife to write to them and to keep in touch with them.

  Appeal must be made to the iron will to sustain health and overcome small difficulties. If two soldiers are eligible for the Iron Cross and only one Cross can be awarded, I prefer to give it to the man who stays on board and con
tinues to sail rather than to the one whose good luck has made it possible for him to become a petty officer or a sergeant and who must therefore return to land duty. Finally the Iron Cross is no pilgrim’s medal but a reward for bravery in the face of the enemy which, once won, must immediately be earned again.

  I can hardly believe my eyes: so this is our First Watch Officer’s primer! I don’t have to read far to come across another gem.

  On long patrols against the enemy a great deal of crockery is broken by young soldiers. It is well known that admonishment does little good, especially as the sea often makes serving difficult. I now have an inventory of crockery made every week. If too much is missing, the stewards must eat out of tin cans for three days. Another severe penalty is the prohibition of smoking. For card lovers, being forbidden to play for three days works wonders.

  Now comes a mimeographed page.

  It is a matter of honor, and I regard it as such, that etiquette should be maintained on board. In harbor—more than at sea, naturally, where it must suffice that someone shout “Attention” the first time the Commander enters a room—the senior soldier present should report what is being done, just as the Watch Officer reports on the bridge. In harbor, during refitting, there must be an assembly for inspection at least once a day. I lay especial emphasis on the raising of the flag. At sea the condition of the lockers must also be checked from time to time and neatness throughout the boat constantly maintained …

  At sea I have had one dead man and a couple of wounded. As substitute I secured a volunteer ordinary seaman from a German steamer. He was nineteen years old, had been abroad on German ships since he was under fourteen. He came aboard with a straw hat on his head and said, “ ‘Day, Cap’n, I’m to come aboard here.” He had no inkling of the outer forms of soldiery. I turned him over for guidance to my best petty officer, who taught him to walk and stand, and indoctrinated him with basic principles. After fourteen days we swore him in. For this event we dived, the bow compartment was adorned with flags, and we made the oath-taking a properly solemn occasion. The man had learned the oath by heart in advance. In my address I told him about the duties of a German soldier. The crew sat there in their brown tropical uniform shirts. In honor of the day they had all given one another proper haircuts and had decided in advance on the songs to accompany the celebration, so that the singing really went off very well. In addition we presented the young seaman with “The Duties of a Soldier.” One of the men had written it out in an elegant script.

  The heading Feasts and Celebrations makes me particularly curious.

  At Advent time every compartment glowed with electric Advent candles on Christmas wreaths that had been made by twisting together napkins and toilet paper painted green. The Christmas baking took fourteen days and everyone had a taste of it, just as at home. On Christmas Eve the festively bedecked bow compartment features a Christmas tree made by ourselves. Saint Nicholas appears, wrapped in a simple sheet, since we are in the tropics, and gives every soldier sweets and an inscribed book, all appropriately accompanied by beautiful songs and suitable speeches… on board, we say a great deal with music. If we dive, then the off-duty watch learns about it by hearing the stirring diving march that is played to our Chief when he’s supervising the hydro planes. And when the watch is to prepare for surfacing, they are alerted by the march “Today We Plow Through the Open Sea.”

  V FIRST ATTACK

  The radioman hands a message out of the shack. Nothing on his face but that perpetual, harmless grin.

  The First Watch Officer, all importance, puts the decoding machine on the table, lays the radioman’s strip of paper beside him, cocks his head first to one side and then to the other like a rooster looking for a kernel of corn, checks the alignment, and finally taps the keys.

  During this procedure the Chief manages to look as bored as a British racing-stable owner. The Second Watch Officer, who’s off duty, doesn’t even look up from his book. I join in the general pretense of indifference.

  The First Watch Officer has barely decoded the last word when the Commander snatches the strip of paper out of the machine—with an eagerness that contradicts his look of contempt—reads it with a grim expression, gets up and heads for the control room without saying a word. Through the circular door I see him carefully adjusting the lamp over the chart table.

  The Chief and I exchange pregnant glances.

  “Aha!”

  I control my curiosity for a suitable interval before I go into the Control room after the Commander. The navigator is there already—as if conjured up by magic.

  The Old Man’s torso is bent over the sea chart; in his left hand he has the radiogram, in his right the dividers. He doesn’t look at us.

  “Not too bad,” he murmurs finally. Then he silently pushes the radio message over to me. “08.00 hours convoy sighted Square Bruno Max. Steering northerly course. Driven off by flyers. Enemy out of sight—UR.”

  The Commander points the dividers at Square Bruno Max. Not far from our present position.

  “At a rough guess, we should be able to get there in twenty-four hours at top speed.”

  Now we have to wait and see whether UR establishes contact again: only then would we be ordered in pursuit of the convoy.

  “Maintain course and speed for the time being.”

  The next couple of hours are rife with speculation: “Looks like the convoy’s heading for America. But then it could always be Gibraltar. Can’t be sure,” I hear the navigator say.

  “UR—that’s Bertold,” says the Old Man. “Good man. No beginner. He won’t let himself be shaken off so easily… they must have put to sea a week after us; they were having trouble with their periscope.”

  An inviting gesture to me to come and sit beside him on the chart chest. Expectancy and excitement have made him cheerful. “Always these shitty airplanes,” he says. “Lately they’ve been working in hunting units along with destroyers, and once a pack like that gets its teeth into you… There used to be hardly any flyers around here—those were the days, all right. All you had to do was keep watch on the surface and you knew pretty well what you had to reckon with.”

  The control-room mate, who is standing at a little desk making entries on the diving log, pauses in his writing.

  “They’re trying everything to shake us off. For a long time now they’ve stopped stationing their destroyers close to the herd of shipping. They’ve got the hang of it. The destroyers patrol at top speed at a considerable distance from their precious steamers. That way, even if we make contact at the farthest limit of visibility, they can force us to withdraw, or go underwater. As for their sweepers, they have them cavorting around way ahead of the convoy… there’s just no more brotherly love these days. They’ve even managed to rebuild big freighters as auxiliary aircraft carriers. And they form protective groups of small carrier-based planes and destroyers that really make things hot for us. All they need is proper training in precise coordination and it’s guaranteed that any boat spotted by one of their busy bees will be worked over by the destroyers till their precious freighters have run so far the enemy hasn’t a ghost of a chance of finding them again. Which means you do nothing but beat yourself to death and burn up a hellish load of fuel.”

  The Old Man seems completely relaxed. Even talkative. “We really should have taken the offensive much earlier—before the Tommies woke up and got themselves organized. Still, when war broke out we had only fifty-seven boats, and no more than thirty-five of them were suitable for the Atlantic. Obviously nowhere near enough to blockade England. Just a tentative sort of stranglehold. And the arguments! To risk everything on U-boats or to build battleships as well. We were never really trusted by the old fogeys in the Imperial Navy. They wanted their proud fleet, regardless of whether battleships were still any use or not. We’re what you might call a con-serv-a-tive club!”

  Later, as I am stretching my legs in the control room, a new radiogram comes in. “09.20 hours dived to avoid aircraft. O
ne hour underwater. Enemy convoy in sight again. Square Bruno Karl. Position of enemy uncertain—UR.”

  “I tell you, he’s not going to let ‘em slip through his fingers. Navigator, does the convoy seem to be running on a parallel course?”

  This time the Commander takes only a few minutes at the chart table, then turns abruptly and orders, “Course two hundred seventy degrees. Engines full speed ahead!”

  Orders are acknowledged. The engine telegraph rings. A heavy shudder runs through the boat, and the pounding of the engines rises to a fierce roar.

  Oho, so the Old Man’s going to get into it! He isn’t even waiting for an order from Kernével.

  The roar of the diesels swells, sings in a higher key, then once again sounds dull and rumbling, almost smothered: the diesel music of the sea. The muffled tone means a big wave meeting the bow, the clear singing that the boat is shooting through a trough.

  Everywhere men are at work reinspecting the connections, as they have so often before. They do it of their own accord, inconspicuously, almost surreptitiously.

  “Permission to come on the bridge?”

  “Jawohl!”

  First I look at the wake. It’s boiling-white, the huge, thick, gleaming train of a dress stretching as far as the eye can see, thinning to bottle-green at the horizon in individual tattered strands, as if it had parted at the seams. Both sides are banded in light green, the shade of translucent beer-bottle glass. Over the gratings drift bluewhite fumes from the diesels. I turn toward the bow and get struck in the face by a whiplash of spray. Sea head-on and the diesels at full speed—should have expected what it would be like.