Das Boot

  “Exercise maneuvers,” whispers the Old Man.

  I wouldn’t call them that.

  A gigantic fist comes down and shakes the boat. I feel the thrust in my knees as we’re jolted upward. The needle of the depth indicator jerks back. The light goes out, and there’s the sound of breaking glass. My heart is pounding—finally the emergency light goes on.

  I see the Old Man biting his lower lip. It’s the moment of decision. Does he take the boat down to the depth where the last bombs exploded or up a few hundred feet?

  He orders a turn and a simultaneous dive. Back down the rollercoaster again. One—two—three—but where? Up? Down? Left? The last surge made it sound as if the bombs had been forward and to port of us. But were they above or below the boat? Here we go again. The operator resumes his reports.

  The blow hits me right on the third dorsal vertebra. Followed by another—and another: two straight punches to the back of the head and the neck.

  Smoke is beginning to swirl out from the helmsman’s station. To crown everything else, are we going to have a fire? Are those cables beginning to smolder? And won’t that cause short circuits?

  Calm down! Nothing can happen to this scow: I am on board. I am immortal. With me on board the boat is immune.

  No doubt about it—the instrument panel is on fire! The sign on the Minimax: Keep calm! Fight fire from below. My brain keeps repeating: immune—immune—immune.

  The control-room mate springs into action and almost disappears in the flames and smoke. Two or three men go to his assistance. I notice that the boat is bow heavy—more and more so. I hear, “Valve—bilge duct broken.” But that can’t be all there is to it! Why doesn’t the Chief trim toward the stern? What else are our trim tanks for, if not to act as a balancing rod?

  Although the destroyer must be quite close, the Old Man orders full speed ahead. Of course! We already have too much water in the boat; we can no longer manage to keep her buoyant. We need the power of the screws and their pressure on the hydroplanes to make the boat stern heavy fast. Otherwise the Old Man would never create such a racket: at this speed it’s like having a cowbell around our neck. Dilemma: to sink or speed up. The Tommies up there must be able to hear us—motors, screws, and bilge pump—with their own ears. They might just as well turn off their Asdic and save the current.

  In addition to his complicated course calculations, the Old Man now has to worry constantly about the boat’s depth. We’re in a tricky situation, If it were only a question of surfacing, that wouldn’t take much: “Don rescue gear,” and blow the tanks with everything we’ve got. Don’t even think about it!

  Everything’s wet, covered in condensation.

  “Driving-shaft gaskets making water!” someone shouts from the stern. Immediately followed, from forward, by “…valve leaking!” I’m no longer paying much attention. Why bother worrying about which valve it might be.

  Four detonations in quick succession, then the mad gurgle and roar of the black flood rushing back into the huge hollows torn out by the bombs.

  “Thirty-three—four—five—thirty-six,” the navigator counts in a loud voice. That time it was close!

  We’re now at four hundred feet.

  The Old Man takes us deeper and turns the boat to port.

  The next detonation slams my teeth together. I can hear sobbing. The new control-room assistant? Surely he’s not going to have a fit of hysterics?

  “Nice shooting!” the Old Man jeers loudly as the next detonations surge over us.

  I tense my stomach muscles as if to protect my organs against a ton of pressure. It’s some minutes before I dare release my left hand from its grip on the pipe. It rises of its own volition and brushes across my forehead: cold sweat. My whole back feels equally clammy. Fear?

  I seem to be seeing the Commander’s face through a fog.

  It’s the smoke from the helmsman’s station still hanging in the room, although the smoldering has stopped. There’s a sour taste in my mouth and a dull pressure somewhere in my head. I hold my breath; it only makes the pressure worse.

  Any moment and it’ll be time again—the destroyer will have completed its circle. The pack of hounds has to grant us this brief respite whether they want to or not.

  There’s the Asdic again. Two or three sharp rattles of pebbles. A cold hand creeps under my collar and runs down my back. I shudder.

  The pressure in my head becomes unbearable. What now? Why is nothing happening? Every whisper has died away. The condensation pitter-patters at steady one-second intervals. Silently I count them. At twenty-two the blow lands, doubling me over with my head crumpled against my chest.

  Am I deaf? I see the floor plates dancing, but it’s seconds before I hear their metallic clatter, mixed with a yowling, groaning sound and a high-pitched screech. The pressure hull! It can’t be anything else. The boat heaves and pitches in the rearing eddies. Men stagger against one another.

  Another double blast. The boat groans. Clattering scraping sounds.

  The Tommies are being economical. No more carpeting—instead, always two bombs at a time, probably set for different depths. I dare not relax my muscles—the hammer lands again with enormous force.

  A gurgling, coughing gasp quite close to me turns into a moan. Sounds as if someone has been hit. It confuses me momentarily, but then reality reasserts itself: don’t be crazy, no one gets shot down here.

  The Old Man has got to think up something new. No chance of sneaking away. The Asdic won’t let us go. They’ve got first-class men sitting up there at the controls, and they’re not easily bluffed. How much time do we have left? How much do the Tommies need to circle?

  Lucky for us that they can’t drop their bombs overboard whenever they want. They have to be running at full speed before they fire. If those bastards could use their Asdic to sneak up right over the boat before dropping their cans, this cat and mouse game would have been over long ago. As it is, they have to attack at high speed so as not to blow themselves out of the water when their bombs go off.

  What’s the Old Man up to now? It’s making him frown. I can tell from the way his brows are twitching that he’s deep in concentration. How long will he go on waiting? Can he pull off another last-minute swerve to escape the advancing destroyer?—and in the right direction?—at the right speed?—and the right depth?

  It’s high time he opened his mouth and gave an order. Or has he given up? Thrown in the sponge?

  Suddenly a sound like canvas being ripped. The Commander’s voice crackles out at the same moment: “Bail!—Hard a-port! And gun those goddam motors!”

  The boat leaps forward. The noise of the bilge pump is drowned in the roar that fills the sea around us. Men stagger and clutch the pipes. The Old Man doesn’t budge. The navigator clings to his table.

  The Old Man’s gamble suddenly dawns on me. He’s ordered us to hold a straight course, even though we’ve been spotted. A new wrinkle. A variation he hasn’t tried on the Tommies before. Obvious: The Commander of the destroyer wasn’t born yesterday. He doesn’t come rushing blindly to the spot where they’ve located us. They know our tricks. They know that we know they’re attacking; they know that we know they can’t use their Asdic at high speed, that we’ll try to escape their line of attack and also change depth. Whether we feint to port or to starboard, whether we head up or down is something they can only guess at. They have to rely on luck.

  And so the Old Man stops playing tricks for once and simply holds his course and depth until the next drop. Bluff and double bluff. And just when you think you’re lucky—bang! You get it up the ass!

  “Time?” asks the Commander.

  “01.30 hours,” the navigator replies.

  “Really?” There’s astonishment in his voice. Even he seems to be finding the dance a trifle drawn out.

  “Most unusual,” he murmurs. “But they probably want to be absolutely sure.”

  For a while nothing stirs. The Old Man orders us deeper. Then deeper still.r />
  “Time.”

  “01.45 hours!”

  Unless my ears are really playing tricks on me, even the compass motor has been shut off. Not a sound in the boat. Only the pitterpatter of condensation ticking off the seconds.

  Have we made it? How far have we gone in a quarter of an hour’s silent running? Then the stillness is broken again by the hideous noises that the Old Man calls “creaking in the beams”: Our steel cylinder is being brutally tested for resistance by the pressure at these depths. The steel skin is bulging inward between the ribs. The interior woodwork groans.

  We’re down at 650 feet again, more than twice the shipyard guaranty, creeping along through the blackness at a speed of four knots with this vast column of water sitting on top of us.

  Operating the hydroplanes becomes a balancing trick. If the boat sinks any lower, its tortured fabric may no longer be able to withstand the external pressure. A matter of inches could be crucial. Is the Old Man counting on the Tommies not knowing our maximum diving depth? We ourselves never mention this magic number in feet but say, “Three times r plus sixty.” An incantation. Could the Tommies really not know how much r is? Every stoker knows; probably fifty thousand Germans do, all told.

  No reports from the operator. I can’t believe we’ve escaped. The bastards are probably lying in wait, engines stopped. They know that they were almost directly above us. The only thing they couldn’t calculate was our depth, and the Old Man has taken extreme measures about that. The Chief moves his head back and forth uneasily. Nothing seems to rasp on his nerves so much as the creaking in the woodwork.

  Two detonations. Bearable. The gurgling is cut short at a stroke. But our bilge pump keeps going for several seconds more! They must have heard the damn thing. You’d think someone could build quieter ones.

  The longer we remain at these depths, the more tormenting the thought of how thin our steel hull is. We aren’t armor-plated. All we have to withstand the pressure of the water and the shock waves of the explosions is a mere inch of steel. The circular ribs—two every three feet—are all that give our thin-walled tube the meager powers of resistance that enable us to stay alive down here.

  “They’re taking one helluva time to get ready,” whispers the Old Man. We must be dealing with some really clever bastards if even he admits it.

  I try to picture what’s going on up there. I have my own memories to help me, for after all it’s not so long since I was one of the hunters, on a destroyer myself. It’s the same game on both sides except that the Tommies have their highly perfected Asdic and we have nothing but our sound gear. It’s the difference between electronics and acoustics.

  Listen—make a run—drop the bombs—circle—listen—make a run—drop more bombs—try setting them for shallow depths—then for deeper ones—then the star act: the spread—launch at least a dozen canisters simultaneously—like drumfire. The same thing the Tommies do.

  Each one of our depth charges contained four hundred pounds of amatol. So a dozen bombs had more than two tons of high explosive. When we had a good directional indication on the S-apparatus, all the ejectors were fired at once: starboard, port, and aft. I can still hear the Captain’s voice: “Not very sporting, this king of thing.”

  Very odd that nothing is happening. Marking time—given up? Perhaps I can ease the tension in my muscles. But careful—mustn’t jump if it begins again. Annihilation by whirlpool, with time out now and again. Fear of the next onslaught begins to grow. Quick—think about something else.

  The time we made sonar contact close to the southwest corner of England. On the destroyer Karl Galster—nothing but guns and machines. The frightened voice from the starboard wing of the bridge: “Torpedo trail three points to the starboard!” The voice still rings in my ears: hoarse, yet piercing. Unforgettable, if I live to be a hundred,

  The trail of bubbles—crystal clear. An eternity before the pale track of our wake finally curved to one side.

  I have to swallow. Fear grips me by the throat—double fear—both remembered and actual. My thoughts race. Must be careful not to get them mixed up. “Torpedo trail three points to starboard.” That was on the Karl Gaister. The overpowering, mind-numbing tension. And then the voice of salvation. “Torpedo trail passed astern!”

  Just endure, last out each round. How long has it been so far? I still don’t dare move. This time I’m one of the hunted. Trapped in the deep. On a boat with no more torpedoes in its tubes. Defenseless, even if we manage to surface.

  How the Captain of the Karl Galster pulled it off! He must have got clear by a matter of inches. Full rudder and engines going full speed until the ship swung round parallel to the torpedo’s course. The vibrations! As if she were about to fly to pieces. And then the shrill bell: a warning for the men in the engine room to expect an explosion. Then the torpedo officer’s voice on the ship’s phone: “Fire two charges!” And the breathless waiting, until a double blow made the ship shiver in every seam. Nothing to be seen but two white, shimmering splashes astern, to left and right of the fading glimmer of our wake—as if two great lumps of rock had fallen into the water.

  Then the order: “Hard a-port!” And the Captain reduced speed so that the men below in the belly of the ship could get a more accurate bearing: the same tactics used by the Tommies, precisely the same. Full ahead again—a perceptible leap forward—and off toward the echo we’d picked up on our sonar.

  The Captain ordered a spread to be dropped at the point where the equipment reacted most strongly. Canisters all set for the same shallow depth. Short, sharp thunderclaps. Then a rumbling as if we’d hit a mine. I can still see the huge, gleaming white geysers standing poised majestically for seconds before they collapsed in spray. And the foam that came blowing over us like wet curtains.

  The Old Man keeps staring at the manometers, as if his eyes could control the play of the needles. But the needles don’t move. No Asdic either. The sound man looks like someone lost in pious meditation. I wonder why they’re not on the move up there, why nothing is happening. At four knots per hour we can’t possibly have escaped the net of their direction finder.

  “Steer two hundred twenty degrees,” the Old Man orders.

  More silence.

  “Heading two hundred twenty degrees,” comes the helmsman’s whispered response after a considerable lag.

  “Propeller sounds bearing twenty degrees, fading,” is the next hushed report. It brings a mocking grin to the Old Man’s face.

  I put myself back on the bridge of the Karl Galster: pale moonlight on cold, expressionless faces. No matter how hard we stared, no sign of the enemy. Just orders, the splash of the canisters, the third of the explosions. Cross-bearings and new drops. Seething white patches disrupting the pale filigree of our wake.

  And then an oil slick on the black water. Once again I see the sharply-etched, thin white finger of the searchlight pointing it out. The ship swings toward it. There’s no mercy: “Port bombs away! Starboard bombs away!”

  All guns trained on the oil slick, muzzles lowered.

  I can still see all the fish with ruptured air bladders floating on the surface of the water in the beam of the searchlight. Fish and more fish—but no sign of wreckage, only the fleck of oil. Suddenly our sound equipment fell silent.

  No time for a search. Cruisers might appear at any moment and bar our passage home. The Captain had to head for Brest whether he wanted to or not. And that was when he said, “Not very sporting, this kind of thing.”

  The operator’s voice suddenly penetrates my consciousness. If I understood him correctly, the destroyer is swinging toward us. So they’re attacking again. They were just playing us on a line. Cat and mouse stuff. No hope of escape. We didn’t fool them.

  The operator is grimacing again. I start counting silently, and then the blows begin, one after the other. We’re flung around, jolted. The whole sea is a single exploding powder keg.

  And again the gushing roar that will not stop, and more propeller noi
ses! But why no pause between them? Where are the propellers coming from again so quickly? That’s the easygoing paddling of slow screws, not the quick ringing whirl with its wicked, whistling, underlying howl that indicates top speed.

  In the back of my mind I realize what’s been going on: this can’t be the destroyer that attacked us first—she couldn’t be back so soon. She needs time to circle. After all, she can’t be coming at us sternfirst…

  There’s no delay about the next bombs. They come in triplets.

  The light has gone out. Someone calls for emergency light. The Chief shines the beam of his pocket flashlight on the depth manometer. He doesn’t dare let his eyes leave the dial for so much as a second: We’re so deep that any further descent is dangerous.

  “Report sound bearings!”

  “Nine points to port,” the operator replies.

  “Hard a-starboard, steer three hundred ten degrees.”

  The Commander is trying to make use of our narrow silhouette, exactly as he did on the surface. He wants to present our stern to the enemy so as to give the Asdic beams the smallest possible surface to work on.

  “Propeller sounds bearing two hundred degrees—getting stronger!”

  The directional beam hits us again. I’m rigid, totally unable to relax; my head will soon crack like glass. My skull seems under the same extreme pressure as our steel skin. The slightest touch now would be too much. My heartbeats ring magnified in my ears. I try shaking my head, but the pounding goes on just the same.

  “Brace yourself,” I whisper to myself. Fear bordering on hysteria seems to be literally destroying my mind. Yet at the same time it’s sharpening my powers of perception. I see and feel everything going on around me with astounding clarity.

  “Range?… And what about the second sound?” The Old Man’s voice is no longer indifferent.

  So—I wasn’t making it up. Damn, damn, and double damn, the Old Man’s calm is gone. Was it the second sound that disconcerted him? But everything depends on him keeping a clear head. Instead of working with precision instruments he has to use his own system of perception, which is probably located in the seat of his pants, or in his stomach.