Das Boot

by Lothar-Günther Buchheim

  As yet, the tiny pine trees tell us nothing about the ships’ course. South was only an assumption. The convoy may be heading toward the boat. Or it may just as well be going away. The ships with their telltale plumes of smoke may be moving below the horizon in any direction on the compass rose.

  My glasses remain fixed on our target as the boat slowly turns under me.

  “Rudder neutral!”

  The helmsman in the tower now brings the helm to midship position.

  The boat continues to turn.

  “How far has she swung?” asks the Commander.

  “One hundred seventy degrees!” the answer comes from below.

  “Steer one hundred sixty-five!”

  The turn of the boat slackens until the tiny pines stand precisely over our how. Squinting suspiciously, the Commander inspects the skies with their heavy cover of gray clouds. He tilts his head back and pivots almost a full circle on his axis. Please god, no planes!

  A report from below: “Lunch on the table!”

  “No time! Bring it up,” the Commander orders gruffly.

  The plates are put on small fold-down seats attached to the bridge bulwark. The food just sits there. No one touches it.

  The Commander asks the navigator what time tile moon sets. So he’s going to wait until nightfall before attacking. For tile time being there’s nothing for us to do but stay alert and keep contact—come hell or high water—so that other U-boats can be brought up.

  The smoke clouds gradually push their way higher above the horizon and move slightly to starboard.

  “I think they’re shifting to the right!” says the navigator.

  “A returning convoy,” the Commander agrees. “Probably sailing in ballast. Too bad, really. One headed east would have been better.”

  “Twelve mastheads visible already,” Wichmann reports.

  “That’ll do for the time being,” the Commander retorts and shouts below, “Helmsman, what’s our course?”

  “One hundred sixty-five degrees!”

  The Commander starts muttering calculations. “Convoy bearing twenty degrees to starboard—so its true course is one hundred eighty-five degrees. Distance? Probably average-sized steamers—means about sixteen miles.”

  Our wake bubbles like lemon soda. Little white clouds like bursts of shrapnel are blowing aimlessly across the sky. The boat charges ahead through tile gray sea, wet-muzzled, slavering.

  “Probably close enough now—won’t slip through our fingers!” says the Commander. And immediately qualifies his statement. “Provided nothing gets in the way.” And to the helmsman: “Hard a-starboard! Course two hundred fifty-five degrees!”

  Slowly the smoke clouds swing over until they’re on our port beam. Tile boat is now running on a course we assume is parallel to the convoy.

  The Commander lowers his glasses for no more than seconds at a time. Now and again he murmurs something. I hear snatches. “Never get it… just the way… you want it… They’re going the wrong way.”

  So: a fully laden convoy headed for England would be better. Not just because the cargo would be lost, but also because chasing an eastbound convoy would bring us closer to home. The enormous consumption of fuel at high speed is worrying the Old Man. If the pursuit were to bring us nearer to home base, our situation would look a lot better.

  “Fuel?” I hear tile navigator say. Ordinarily he avoids the word like an obscenity. The Commander resembles a police detective as he confers with him in whispers. Finally tile Chief is summoned. He’s looking bleak.

  “Have everything double-checked,” the Old Man orders, and the Chief nimbly disappears below.

  It must be a good half hour until the Commander orders both engines run at full speed. He wants to be far enough ahead of the convoy before twilight.

  The booming of the engines soars until the repeated firing of the individual cylinders blends into a single rumbling roar. Spray shoots out of the slits in the grating and comes flying at us like shaving lather. The bow wave is suddenly huge.

  The Chief promptly reappears. Worried about fuel.

  “Supplies are pretty low, Herr Kaleun!” is his sepulchral warning. “We can’t keep this up for more than three hours at most!”

  “How much d’vou reckon we’ll need if we really crawl home?” the Commander asks casually. The Chief leans over and cups his hands around his mouth, like a man lighting a cigarette in the wind, so I can’t hear his answer. In any case, he has his figures all ready.

  About a thumb’s breadth above the horizon the ragged, brownish balls of smoke gradually coalesce into an oily, ochre-brown bank of mist. The mastheads beneath look like slowly-sprouting beard stubble.

  The Old Man puts his binoculars down, pushes the leather shield over the lenses, and turns to the First Watch Officer, who at some point has taken over. “Under no circumstances allow those mastheads to rise any higher than they are now!” Then he disappears through the tower hatch. Not quite as agilely as the Chief, I see. I climb down behind him.

  Down in the control room, the navigator has copied all our maneuvers onto a large sheet of graph paper. He’s just entering a new bearing for the enemy and correcting the distance.

  “Give it here!” the Commander interrupts. “So that’s where he is right now! Looks all right.” And, turning to me, “His exact course will gradually become clear from the graphs in the next few hours.” But there’s an urgent undertone in his voice as he says to the navigator, “Unfold the big chart so we can see where he’s coming from.” Bending over it, he carries on a kind of monologue. “Coming from the North Channel! What’s his over-all course likely to be? Well, we’ll soon have that He lays his protractor between the position of the convoy and the North Channel and reads off the angle. “Two hundred fifty degrees, more or less!” He thinks for a moment. “But they can’t have steered that course straight through. They have to have made a long detour north to outflank suspected U-boat patrols. Didn’t do them much good… that’s the way it goes!”

  The droning roar of the two diesels fills every crevice of the boat. It works on us like a tonic: we hold our heads higher again—our bodies are suddenly more supple. My pulse seems to beat faster.

  The Old Man has changed most conspicuously of all. He looks relaxed, almost cheerful, and now and again the corners of his mouth curl in a smile. The engines are running flat out and already the world looks rosy—as if all we’d been longing for was to hear the muffled roaring throb of the diesels again. For a while no one speaks. Then the Commander says, “In any case, we can’t open up before dark. They may have some surprises up their sleeve.”

  Before dark—it’s hours till then.

  I can only stand being in my bunk for a quarter of an hour. I get up to see how things are going in the engine room, astern. The after hatch won’t open. I have to use the whole weight of my body to overcome the suction of the racing engines. The noise is like a box on the ears. Mouth and eyes open wide. The pushrods on the sides of the diesels are visible only as a waving blur. The needles on the dials of the manometers jerk feverishly back and forth. Oil fumes fill the room like thick fog.

  Johann is on duty. Frenssen’s there too. He gives a broad grin when he sees me—that usual look of weariness is gone. His eyes are proud. Everything in order. Now we’ll see what his two diesels are capable of!

  Johann is rubbing black oil from his hands with colored cotton waste. It’s a wonder he hasn’t gone deaf in here. But this infernal roar is probably like the rustling of trees in a forest to him. He brings his mouth close to my ear and bellows, “What’s up?”

  I roar back right in his ear. “Pro—ceeding against—a—convoy. Waiting—till—dark!” The chief mechanic blinks twice, nods, and turns back to his manometers. It takes me several seconds to realize that the men here in the stern don’t even know why we’re running at full speed. The bridge is far away. When you’re standing here on the iron grids, the world beyond the hatch ceases to exist. The engine telegraph, the sig
nal lights, the public-address system are the only connections with the outside. If the Old Man doesn’t see fit to announce over the loudspeaker why we’re changing speed, no one here knows what’s going on.

  Once again, as always happens when I set foot in the engine room, the uniform rumble of the explosions takes possession of me completely. I’m stunned, and immediately assailed by lurid visions. Obsessive, tormenting images: the engine rooms of great ships—targets for our torpedoes! Huge halls with high- and low-pressure turbines, heavily insulated pipelines under great pressure, highly vulnerable boilers, driving shafts, and the many auxiliary engines. No partitions. If they take a hit, they fill quicker than any other compartment of the ship, and with a flooded engine room, no ship can be kept afloat.

  A series of pictures rushes through my mind. A hit amidships triggers the chain reaction: the boilers explode, releasing high-pressure steam, and pipelines are torn apart; the ship immediately loses power; the silvery gleaming iron stairs, so narrow there’s only room for one man at a time—but everyone is fighting at once, trying to find a way up them in the dark, through the searing steam, toward the deck.

  What a job! Working in the engine room ten feet below the water line, knowing that at any second a torpedo may tear open the ship’s side without the slightest warning! How often while on convoy the men must measure the thin plates that divide them from the sea. How often they must surreptitiously try out the quickest route to the deck, always with the taste of panic in their mouths, and in their ears the rending scream of iron, the blast of the explosion, and the roaring inrush of the sea. Not one second’s feeling of security. Always scared shitless, always waiting for the clanging of the alarm bell. A hell of fear—three, four weeks at a stretch.

  On the tankers it’s even worse. A torpedo amidships and the boat rapidly becomes a single flaming inferno. Every square foot white hot from bow to stern. If the compressed gases explode, the ship blows up in a belch of fire and smoke—a gigantic torch.

  Something flickers in Johann’s face, jerking me out of my nightmares. His expression of watchful concentration remains for a moment, then dissolves: everything in order. The door to the motor room is standing open. Oil-heavy, hothouse warmth fills the compartment. The motor is turning over without charging. A quick beat indicates that the air-compressors are working. Rademacher is engaged at the moment in feeling the temperature of the shaft bearings. Zörner the E-stoker is sitting on a pile of oilskins, reading. He’s too immersed to notice me looking over his shoulder:

  The Junker was holding the woman in his arms, bending her backward so that the light fell on her face in its circle of black curls; he encountered a look of fierce challenge, such as he felt on his own face burning down on her, as though each of them was seeking assurance that her surrender would sweep them ever more fiercely to the very end, to a roaring destruction, a return to that darkness from which they had emerged into the singing, golden hail of a life menaced on all sides, and the terrible futility of their fleeting moments together. The Junker's features were frozen in a threatening and paralyzing mask of overweaning power, then they slowly and painfully relaxed and he stammered into the roaring stillness, as if his tongue were reluctant to obey him, that he wished to kill her …

  The bridge is a long way off. I have to feel my way back into reality along an Ariadne’s thread. As I let the hatch slam against its frame, the noise of the diesels is cut short as at the stroke of a knife, but in my skull the dull roar continues. I shake my head, but some minutes go by before I can silence the dull thrumming in both ears.

  “They must have a pretty complicated tacking system,” the Old Man says to me when I’m on the bridge again.

  “Astonishing how they manage it. They don’t just run their general course with a touch of routine tacking thrown in. Nothing so simple. They build all sorts of deviations into the system to stop us getting the hang of it too quickly. It’s driving the navigator crazy. Right now he’s working nonstop, poor bastard: presumed enemy course, our course, collision course. It can’t be easy, keeping a circus like that going!” It takes me a few seconds to realize that this last sentence no longer refers to our navigator but to the English convoy commander. “It used to be that they only altered course in regular tacks; never took us long to see what their over-all intention was. But recently they’ve learned to make life tough for us, the bastards. Well, we all do the best we can. Must be a fascinating job, convoy commander. Keeping a herd of sheep like that together straight across the Atlantic, always on the alert…”

  Now we have become the contact boat. We must see to it that we’re neither driven off nor forced to submerge. We have to be as persistent as our ship’s fly. If you strike at her and miss, she immediately sits down again in exactly the same place. The fly—the symbol of persistence, and so a genuine heraldic animal. Why don’t any of us have one in our conning tower? Commanders have had wild boars and snorting bulls painted on, but no one has yet hit upon the fly.

  Ought to propose it to the Old Man sometime: a big fly on the tower! Only not right now. Hands jammed deep in his trouser pockets, he’s doing his lumbering dance around the open hatch. A bridge lookout ventures a bewildered glance. Immediately the Old Man snaps at him. “What’re you doing with your eyes, sailor?”

  I’ve never seen him like this before. He keeps slamming the tower bulwark with his fist, a regular drumroll, until the bridge resounds with it. Then he roars, “Navigator, have to have the radio message ready. I’ll take another quick bearing so we can give them an accurate general course report.”

  The direction finder is brought onto the bridge. The Commander places it on the bridge compass, takes a bearing on the smoke trails, and reads off the degrees. Then he calls down, “Navigator: True bearing one hundred fifty-five degrees—distance fourteen miles!”

  After a while the navigator reports, “Convoy course two hundred forty degrees!”

  “Well, just as we suspected,” the Commander says to himself and nods at me, then calls below: “Can you make any estimate of speed?”

  The navigator’s face appears in the hatch. “Between seven point five and eight point five knots, Herr Kaleun!”

  Hardly a minute passes before a slip with the radio message is handed up. “Convoy in Square AX three hundred fifty-six, course two hundred forty degrees—speed about eight knots—UA.” The Old Man signs the radio message with a stump of a pencil and hands it down again.

  The Chief comes on deck, looking worried, and peers up at the Commander like a kicked dog.

  “Here you are again!” The Commander’s trying to head him off. “Whoever wants to play has to pay! Or are there any serious problems?”

  “Not on account of the diesels, Herr Kaleun! Only the voyage home.”

  “Ach, Chief, stop your Doomsday nonsense! Praise the Lord and keep your powder dry. Or don’t you believe in the Lord God, Father of Heaven and Earth? She’s running pretty, isn’t she?”

  Once the Chief has disappeared, however, the Commander does start doing some calculations with the navigator. “When will it be dark?”

  “At 19.00.”

  “So we won’t have to run full speed very much longer. At least we’ve got enough for the first attack! After that we’ll have to draw on the secret reserves that Their Highnesses the Chiefs like to keep squirreled away.”

  The smoke clouds now look like captive balloons on short strings, stretched out along the horizon. I count fifteen.

  With forced indifference the Commander says, “We’d better give some thought to their protective screen. Edge up a bit closer. It could be very useful tonight to know what kind of escorts we have to reckon with.”

  The First Watch Officer immediately shifts course two points to port. Number One, who has charge of the forward starboard section, mutters audibly, “This time we’re about due for something…”

  The Commander really cuts him short. “Careful, gentlemen! Anything can happen between now and dusk!”

  Taking
the dim view. But I’m convinced that down deep the Old Man is absolutely confident. The old superstition: don’t jinx the attack.

  The C-in-C’s radiograms reveal that five boats in all have already been turned loose on the convoy. Five—that’s a real pack. One of them, as we discover from his position report, arrived during the night. It’s Flechsig—and he’s to the west of us.

  The First Watch Officer is sitting in the Officers’ Mess, and it’s clear that he’s nervous. I see him moving his lips noiselessly. Probably memorizing his “prayer before battle,” the words of command for firing the torpedoes. Since no enemy came within torpedo range on his last patrol, this is his first attack. In any event, we’re safe from his typewriter for the time being.

  I bump into the Chief in the control room. He may be looking quite self-possessed, but he’s on hot bricks. I watch him silently but with a meaningful grin until he inquires furiously what I find so interesting.

  “Come, come,” says the Old Man, suddenly bobbing up out of nowhere.

  “Let’s hope the gas exhaust pipes hold up,” says the Chief. “There’s damage in the one from the port diesel.”

  It’s only a few hours since Johann was telling me a story. “We were keeping contact once on UZ, when the diesel exhaust pipes broke. God, what a shambles! All the exhaust gas was venting into the diesel compartment. Couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Had to get the hell out of there and come back with escape gear. Two of the stokers keeled over on us. Had to be relieved. The Old Man himself came down. Question was: Give up and let the scows go or put up with the gas until we attacked? It was touch and go—for three whole hours! The walls were completely black and we looked like niggers.”

  The Chief gets restless. He disappears aft without a word. Five minutes later he’s back again.

  “Well, how does it look?”

  “Comme ci, comme ça,” is his sibylline reply.