Das Boot

  Almost without thinking, I’m halfway to the control room: the convoy.

  I’m ahead of the Chief to the bridge. The rain is worse. My sweater is immediately soaked from spray and the downpour. I was in such a hurry, I forgot to grab my oilskin from its hook.

  I hear the Commander. “Hard to starboard. Steer one hundred eighty degrees!”

  A bridge guard hands me his binoculars unasked. I start searching the same area as the Commander. Gray streamers of rain. Nothing else. Holding my breath, I force myself to stay calm, search the righthand edge of this banner of water and then swing my glasses very slowly across it to the left. There—in the streaks of gray—a hairbreadth line that immediately disappears again. An illusion? Imagination? I take a deep breath, relax my knees, give myself a gentle shake, balance the glasses on my fingertips. The boat heaves under me. I lose my bearings, then reorient myself by the Commander. There it is again.

  It trembles and dances in the glasses. A mast! No doubt of it. But—a mast and no accompanying plume of smoke? Only this single hairline? Hard as I look, I can find nothing else; it seems to be pushing its way slowly over the horizon.

  Every steamer is supposed to have a plume of smoke that betrays it long before its radio masts appear. So this can’t be a steamer.

  Hell and damnation—where is it? Now I have it again. I should be able to see it with the naked eye. I put down my glasses and search—there it is all right!

  The Commander is chewing his lower lip. He takes up the binoculars again, muttering half to himself—”Shit! Destroyer!”

  A minute goes by. My eyes are glued to the thin line above the horizon. I’m choking with excitement.

  No more doubt about it: It’s a radio mast, so the destroyer is coming directly at us. Without slow engines there’s no chance we can get away on the surface.

  “They must have seen us. Goddammit!” The Commander’s voice hardly changes at all as he gives the alarm.

  One bound and I’m down the tower hatch. Boots ringing on the floor plates. The Commander is the last in. He pulls the hatch shut. Even before it’s completely sealed he orders, “Flood!”

  He stays in the tower. In a steady voice he calls instructions down to the control room. “Proceed at periscope depth!” The Chief balances the boat. The needle of the depth manometer stops, then slowly moves backward over the scale. Dufte is beside me, breathing heavily in his wet oilskins. Zeitler and Bockstiegel are sitting in front of the buttons of the hydroplane controls, their eyes glued to the water column in the Papenberg. The First Watch Officer bends forward to let the rainwater run off the brim of his sou’wester.

  No one says a word. Only the electric hum of the motors can be heard, as if through padded doors, coming from the stern.

  From above us, the voice of the Commander finally breaks the silence. “Report depth.”

  “Seventy feet!” from the Chief.

  The water column in the Papenberg sinks slowly: the boat is rising. The lens of the periscope soon comes clear.

  The boat is not yet on an even keel, so the Chief orders water pumped from the forward trim tank toward the stern. Slowly the boat attains the horizontal. But it doesn’t stay there. The waves roll us in all directions. Sucking, dragging, pushing. Periscope observation is going to be damned difficult.

  I listen intently, waiting to hear from the Commander, when the hydrophone operator reports, “Destroyer hard on the starboard beam!”

  I pass the report up.

  “Acknowledged.” Then, just as dryly, “Man battle stations!”

  The operator is bent out of the sound room into the passageway, his eyes wide and blank. The direct lighting makes his face a flat mask, the nose simply two holes.

  Along with the Commander, the operator is now the only one in contact with the world outside our steel tube. The Commander can see the enemy, the operator hears him. The rest of us are blind and deaf. “Auditory contact stronger—moving slowly astern!”

  The Commander’s voice sounds choked. “Flood tubes one to four!”

  Just as I thought: The Old Man is going to take on the destroyer. He wants a red pennant. The only thing still missing from his collection. When he ordered periscope after the alarm, I knew for sure.

  His voice comes down again. “To control room—Chief—hold our exact depth!”

  How can he possibly do it, I ask myself, in this rough sea? The muscles in the Chief’s gaunt face tense and relax rhythmically. He looks as if he’s chewing gum. If the boat rises too far, and the upper part of the hull breaks the surface—disaster: it will betray us to the enemy.

  The Commander is astride the periscope saddle in the narrow space between the periscope shaft and the tower wall, his face pressed against the rubber shell, his thighs spread wide to grip the huge shaft. His feet are on the pedals that enable him to spin the great column and his saddle through 360 degrees without making a sound; his right hand rests on the lever that raises and lowers it. The periscope motor hums. He’s lowering it a little, keeping its head as close to the surface of the water as he possibly can.

  The Chief is standing immobile behind the two men of the bridge watch who are now operating the hydroplanes. His eyes are glued to the Papenberg and its slowly rising and falling column of water. Each change in it means the boat is doing the same.

  Not a word from anyone. The humming of the periscope motor sounds as if it’s coming through a fine filter; the motor starts, stops, starts again, and the humming resumes. The Commander ups periscope for fractions of a second and immediately lets it sink below the surface again. The destroyer must be very close.

  “Flood tube five.” The order is a whisper.

  It’s passed on softly to the main motor room. We’re in the midst of battle.

  I sink down onto the frame of the circular door. The whispered report comes back from astern, “Tube five ready to fire when torpedo door opened.”

  So—all tubes are flooded. All that’s needed is to open the doors and release a blast of compressed air to send them on their way. The Commander wants to know the position of the helm.

  Suddenly I notice that I still have a half-chewed bit of bread in my mouth. Mushy bread and sausage fat. It’s beginning to taste sour.

  I have the feeling that I’ve lived all this somewhere before. Images shift about in my mind, jostling, overlaying one another, merging into new combinations. My immediate impressions seem to be being transmitted by a complicated circuit to my brain center from which they re-emerge into my consciousness as memories.

  The Old Man’s mad—attacking a destroyer in this sea.

  But it has its advantages too. Our periscope can’t be all that visible. The streamer of foam that would betray it must be hard to distinguish among the cresting waves.

  The drip in the bilge is deafening. Sounds as if it’s coming over a loudspeaker. Lucky that everything’s worked so far: no problem maintaining depth. The Chief was well prepared, had it all figured out.

  If the Old Man decides to fire, the Chief must flood at once to make up for the weight of the torpedo. Otherwise the boat will rise. A torpedo weighs three thousand pounds—so an equivalent weight of water has to be taken on for each one launched. Multiplied by the number of torpedoes fired—it’s a lot.

  Not a word from the Commander.

  It’s very difficult to hit a destroyer. Shallow draft. Easily maneuverable. But score a hit, and it’s gone in a flash, blown away. The explosion of the torpedo, a geyser of water and torn steel, then nothing.

  The Commander’s steady voice comes down. “Open torpedo doors. Switch on tubes one and two! Enemy course fifteen. Bow left. Direction sixty. Range one thousand!”

  The Second Watch Officer puts the figures in the calculator. The bow compartment reports torpedo doors opened. The First Watch Officer relays the message softly but distinctly. “Tubes one and two ready to fire!”

  The Commander has his hand on the firing lever and is waiting for the enemy to move into the crosshairs.
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  If only we were able to see!

  Imagination runs riot in this silence. Visions of catastrophe: a destroyer swinging until it’s at angle zero. The foaming bow, the white bone in its teeth, towering over us, ready to ram. Staring eyes, the sharp rending of metal, jagged edges of steel, green surge of water through fissures like opened stopcocks.

  The voice of the Commander, as sharp as a descending whiplash. “Close torpedo doors. Dive to two hundred feet. Fast!”

  The Chief is only a fraction of a second behind him. “Hard down both—both engines full ahead! All hands forward!”

  Loud confusion of voices. I flinch, press myself to one side, have trouble staying on my feet. The first man is already forcing his way through the circular door aft, staggers, recovers his balance and rushes, half crouched, past the sound room toward the bow.

  Wide-open questioning eyes fixed on me. Chaos: slipping, stumbling, hurrying, staggering. Two bottles of lemonade come tumbling in from the petty officers’ mess and smash noisily against the wall of the control room.

  Both hydroplanes are hard down. The boat is already distinctly bow heavy, but the men keep coming from astern. They slide through the tilted control room as if it’s a chute; one falls full length, cursing.

  Only the engine room personnel are left in the after part of the ship. The floor slips away beneath me. Fortunately I manage to grab the periscope stanchion. The sausages swing out at an angle from the wall. I hear the Old Man’s voice from above us, cutting through the scuffling and stamping of boots. “Depth charges next!” He sounds perfectly calm, as though passing on a piece of casual information.

  He climbs down with exaggerated deliberation, as if it’s an exercise. Traverses the slope, hanging on to both sides, and props one buttock on the chart chest. His right hand grasps a water pipe for support.

  The Chief slowly levels the boat out and orders, “Man diving stations!” The seamen who rushed forward now work their way back hand over hand up the slope. The sausages act like a scale: we’re still a good thirty degrees bow heavy.

  Rrabaum!—Rrum!—Rrum!

  Three crashing sledgehammer blows spin me around. Half stunned, I hear a dull roar. Vhat is it? Fear claws at my heart: that roaring! Finally I identify it: it’s water pouring back into the vacuum created in the sea by the explosion.

  Two more monstrous explosions.

  The control-room mate has hunched his head into his shoulders. The new control-room assistant, the Bible Scholar, staggers and seizes hold of the chart table.

  Another explosion, louder than the rest.

  The lights go out. Darkness!

  “Auxiliary lighting gone,” someone calls.

  The orders from the Chief seem to come from a distance. Pocket flashlights cut whitish cones in the darkness. Someone calls for a damage report. The section leaders’ replies come through the speaking tubes. “Bow compartment in order!”—“Main motor room in order!”—“Engine room in order!”

  “No leakage,” says the navigator. His voice is as matter-of-fact as the Commander’s.

  Before long, two double explosions make the floor plates dance.

  “Pump out torpedo cell one!” With a sharp hum the bilge pump springs into action. As soon as the roar of the detonations has subsided, the pump will be stopped again. Otherwise it could supply a bearing to the enemy’s hydrophones.

  “Raise bow!” The Chief to the hydroplane operators. “Boat’s in balance,” he reports to the Commander.

  “There’ll be more,” says the Old Man. “They actually saw our periscope. Amazing—with the sea running this high.”

  He looks around. No trace of fear on his face. There’s even an undertone of scorn in his voice. “Now it’s psychological warfare, gentlemen.”

  Ten minutes pass; nothing happens. Suddenly a violent explosion shakes the whole boat. Then another and another. It quivers and groans.

  “Fifteen!” counts the navigator. “Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen!”

  The Chief stares at the needle of the depth manometer, which jumps a couple of points at each detonation. His eyes are huge and dark. The Commander’s are closed to obliterate his surroundings and concentrate on his calculations: our own course, enemy course, ways of escape. He must react with lightning speed. He’s the only one among the lot of us who’s actually fighting. Our lives hang on the correctness of his orders.

  “Hard a-port!”

  “Helm hard a-port!”

  “Hold zero bearing!”

  The Commander never stops calculating. The basic factors in his reckoning change with each report; he must determine an escape route according to the strength of the sound of propellers and the approach angle of the destroyer. His senses no longer supply him with any immediate information; he must guide the boat like a pilot flying blind, his decisions based on indications given him by the instruments.

  Against closed eyelids I see the gray-black cans twisting heavily as they shoot downward from the launchers, plunge into the water, spin lazily into the depths leaving bubbling trails, and then explode in the darkness—blazing fireballs of magnesium, incandescent suns.

  Water transmits pressure much more strongly than air. If an intense pressure wave hits a boat it rips it apart at the seams. To destroy a submerged U-boat, depth charges don’t have to hit it; they need only explode within the so-called lethal radius. The small depth charges dropped by airplanes weigh about 150 pounds, the destroyer bombs about 500 pounds. At a depth of 350 feet, the lethal radius extends about 275 to 350 feet. Once you’ve learned something, it sticks. I feel a kind of satisfaction that I now know this kind of thing by heart.

  For a while all is quiet. I strain my ears. No propeller noise, no splashing of bombs. Only the thin humming of our electric motors. Not even the sound of breathing. The Commander suddenly seems to remember that we’re here. He doesn’t move, but he glances around and whispers, “I could see them clearly. They were standing on the bridge, gaping straight at us. There were three men in the crow’s nest. A corvette!”

  He bends forward and whispers through the circular door to the sound man, “See if they’re going away.” Still bending forward a minute later, his question becomes more urgent: “Louder or weaker?”

  The operator answers immediately. “No change.” It’s Herrmann: face like a Noh-mask—colorless, eyes and mouth thin lines. The Old Man orders us down farther.

  Our pressure hull can withstand a good deal. But the flanges, all those damned pierced sections, are our Achilles’ heel. And there are too many of them.

  The most dangerous bombs for the boat are those that explode diagonally under the keel, because the underside has the largest number of flanges and outboard plugs. The deeper you go, the smaller the lethal radius: the water pressure, which is itself a threat at such depths because of the overloading on the seams, also limits the effective radius of the bombs—at 130, it’s perhaps 160 feet.

  Suddenly a handful of pebbles rattles against the boat.

  “Asdic!” I hear a voice from the stern end of the control room. The jagged word suddenly stands out in my head in glaring capitals.

  A shudder runs down my spine: Anti-Submarine Development Investigation Committee; the supersonic detection system!

  It’s the impact of the directional beam against our side that produces this low tinkling, chirping sound. In the absolute silence it has all the force of a siren. Time between impulses: about thirty seconds.

  “Turn it off!” I want to shout. The chirping grates on my nerves. No one dares so much as lift his head or speak, even though it will find us even if we remain as silent as the grave. Against it, silence is useless. So is stopping the E-motors. Normal hydrophones are outclassed by the E-motors, but the Asdic isn’t dependent on sound, it reacts to our mass. Depth no longer affords any protection.

  The nervous tension is infectious. My hands are shaking. I’m glad I don’t have to stand up; instead I’m able to sit in the frame of the circular doorway. I try out actions that
require no major bodily movement: swallowing, blinking, grinding my teeth, making faces—a crease to the right, a crease to the left, forcing saliva between my teeth.

  The operator whispers, “Getting louder!”

  The Commander frees himself from the periscope shaft, makes his way past me almost on tiptoe. “Any change in direction?”

  “Bearing still two hundred ninety-five degrees.”

  Four detonations in quick succession. The roaring, gurgling surge of the explosions has barely subsided when the Commander says in a low voice, “She was well camouflaged, a fairly old ship, rather squat.”

  A hard blow against my feet jolts me badly. The floor plates rattle.

  “Twenty-seven—twenty-eight!” the navigator counts, trying to imitate the Old Man’s elaborate casualness.

  A pail goes rattling partway across the floor plates.

  “Hell and damnation—quiet!”

  Now it sounds as if the pebbles are in a tin can, being shaken this way and that; in between is a louder, singing sound, with an underlying quick, sharp chirping, like crickets—the whirling propeller blades of the corvette. I stand rigid, frozen. I don’t dare make the slightest movement; it’s as if any motion, even the smallest slithering sound, would bring the beating propellers closer. Not a flicker of an eyelash, a twitch of the eye, not a breath, not a quiver of a nerve, not a ripple of the muscles, not even a goose pimple.

  Another five bombs! The navigator adds them to the total. My expression doesn’t change. The Commander raises his head. Clearly emphasizing each word, he speaks into the echo of the crashing water. “Keep calm—calm, gentlemen. This is nothing at all.”

  His quiet voice does us good, eases our jangled nerves.

  Now we are struck by a single ringing blow, like a giant cudgel on a sheet of steel. Two or three men begin to stagger.

  The air is hazy, hanging in blue layers. And again the heavy explosions.

  “Thirty-four—thirty-five—thirty-six!” This time the counting comes in a whisper.

  The Commander remains firm. “What in the world—is bothering you?” He withdraws into himself once more, calculating courses. It’s deathly still in the boat. After a while the whispering voice comes again. “What’s his bearing now?”