Das Boot

And then, almost subconsciously, I hear, “Seems to be sinking slowly.”

  Yet another! Will that be added to our score? The fog in my head is getting thicker. Weakness in the knees. Just keep on your feet. I hold on to the chart table, work my way slowly to the after hatch. My bunk seems miles away.

  Was it a noise that woke me so suddenly?

  Peace reigns in the petty officers’ quarters. I clamber out of my bunk. Feel my way into the control room like a blind man. Pain in every limb as if I were just out of traction.

  There’s some life in the control room. Tin-ear Willie and the Bible Scholar are fussing about. I still can’t make out what happened. Did I keel over? Pass out? Am I awake or dreaming?

  Then I happen to see the war log. It’s lying open on the desk. 12/13—yes, that must be right. Crazy: in a month Christmas will be long past. No longer any sense of the time of year. Completely lost. I read:

  09.00 Battle-damaged tanker. Running at slow speed, five knots. Course about 120 degrees. Attain forward position to determine firing data.

  10.00 Dive for underwater attack. Tanker turns toward us, making range very close.

  10.25 Fire torpedo. Hit scored amidships. Simultaneous major explosion of fuel oil. Great quantities of smoke and flame. Escaping oil burning on water. Huge smoke cloud in sky. Strong blaze. Steamer sinks deeper but continues to make headway. Some of crew still on board. Three guns on superstructure aft. Cannot be used on account of smoke and heat. No lifeboats visible.

  The fact that the tanker had guns is something the Old Man didn’t tell us. When in God’s name did he write all this? How late is it now?

  10.45 Propeller sounds. Moving forward.

  10.52 Renewed attack. Waiting too dangerous. May be a trap. Hit scored below after mast. Another blaze. Tanker stops. Settles dee per astern. Flank blown out at point of impact. Fire on water spreading quickly. Must reverse engines fast.

  11.10 & 11.12 Detonations on hoard. Apparently compartments exploding. Gasoline containers or munitions. Tanker lying dead in the water.

  11.40 Propeller noises. Turbines. Suspect destroyer. Not visible in periscope.

  11.55 Surface. Tanks not blown. Destroyer lying motionless beside wreck.

  I was present during all that. But tile second torpedo shot… ? Everything is a jumble: just how did I come to be lying in my bunk?

  11.57 Crash dive. Silent running. Retreat.

  12.10 Surface. Intend to remain motionless and wait to see whether tanker sinks. Batteries charged. Destroyer's mast visible on horizon from time to time in neighborhood of wreck.

  13.24—14.50 Remain stopped. Tanker staying afloat. Fire slowly dying out.

  15.30 Decide to approach again and give coup de grace. Tanker is broken in two at point of impact forward of the after superstructures. Parts connected only by gangways. Complete loss certain. Foreship twisted sideways and awash. Lifeboats drifting empty. Destroyer has obviously abandoned tanker.

  16.40 Approach closer and shoot holes in bow and stern with machine gun.

  20.00 Return voyage begun. Other boats in contact. Dispatched radiogram: "Sank damaged tanker 8000 GRT. Returning to base—UA."

  23.00 Radio gram received: "From UX: Two large freighters 00.31 Square Max Red. General course east. Ten knots. Have been out of contact for an hour. Am pursuing. Wind west-northwest 7. Sea 5, barometer 1027 and rising. Use of weapons still curtailed by weather."

  So: three torpedoes for that scow! A copybook periscope attack. Plus machine guns. I certainly heard their chattering. Just when did I pass out?

  I stare at the page. Even the last entry is in the Old Man’s handwriting. Slowly the whole thing begins to seem uncanny. He even had the energy to write up the war log during the night. I can still hear him say: “Nothing more now but home to Kassei,” and his order to steer a course of forty-five degrees. And I realize I knew that we were headed northeast.

  It’s hard, pulling myself together. The diesel sounds… oddly irregular. Of course—economy speed!

  Economy speed! If I understood the Chief correctly, he knows he can do his damnedest to figure out the “most favorable” speed for the return voyage; but the fuel oil still won’t last us to Saint Nazaire.

  The navigator has unfolded a big sea chart that shows coastal lines as well. I’m astonished to see how far south we’ve come. The Old Man doesn’t seem to be worried about fuel, or does he really believe that the Chief has secret reservoirs to tap in time of need?

  The green curtain in front of the Old Man’s cubbyhole is drawn. Asleep. Instinctively I start to tiptoe. I have to steady myself with both hands, my limbs ache so.

  The bunks in the officer’s quarters are occupied too. The first time we’ve actually had a full sleeping car. I feel like a conductor, checking that everything’s all right.

  Everyone asleep—that means the navigator has the watch. The third—so it must be after eight p.m.

  My watch has stopped.

  The next compartment is quiet too. Chief mechanic Franz’s bunk is empty. Of course: the engine room watch has been on duty since six o’clock.

  The Old Man hasn’t said another word about the Franz incident. Will he have forgotten it entirely, or does he intend to follow it up with a court-martial?

  Not a sound through the bow compartment hatch,

  A sleeping boat. No one awake, no one to talk to. I sit down on the chart chest, stare blankly ahead, and fall prey to tormenting visions.

  IX PROVISIONING

  Herrmann yells, “Communications Officer!”

  Ordinary signals are deciphered by the radioman, using the code machine, and entered in plain text in the radio log, which is shown to the Commander every two hours.

  When Herrmann put this particular message through his machine, it made no sense. Only the first words, “Officer’s signal,” were comprehensible. Hence the Communications Officer (who is otherwise known as our Second Watch Officer).

  He must have heard the report come in, for he scrambles out of his bunk with tousled hair, looking self-important, and sets up the decoding machine on the table. The Commander gives him today’s code-setting on soluble paper. (The connecting pins of the machine are soluble in salt water too, so there can be no accidents with the enemy.)

  Communications Officer! That’s all we need. It must be about some new and special operation, something really tricky, supersecret.

  “Hurry it up!” says the Old Man.

  The first word the Second Watch Officer deciphers is “Commander.” That means that when he puts the entire message through his decoding machine he’ll get nothing out of it. In other words, this is in triple code. The Commander himself must now do the whole job again, using a setting known only to himself.

  Significant glances: absolutely unprecedented. Never happened before on this patrol. What’s in store for us? The Old Man disappears into his hole with the decoding machine and summons the First Watch Officer. The two rummage about among the papers for a good five minutes. The atmosphere is tense. When the Old Man finally reappears, he says not a word. Everyone is silent.

  “Interesting,” he murmurs finally. Nothing else, though all eyes are fixed on him. Another several minutes go by before he finally speaks. “We’ve been assigned a new port of call.”

  His voice is not quite as calm as he obviously would like. There must be something fishy about this new destination.

  “Really?” the Chief says casually, as if he didn’t give a damn where he was meant to provision the boat next.

  “La Spezia.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Exactly what I said—La Spezia. Have you just gone deaf, Chief?”

  The Commander pushes himself to his feet, steers his way back to his cubbyhole, and disappears behind the curtain. We can hear him rummaging around again.

  I can see the map of Europe—every indentation of it. At school, nobody could beat me at drawing the map of Europe freehand. La Spezia—Italy. What a mess! There’s an empty feeling in the
pit of my stomach. Deep-down terror; I blink and gasp like a fish out of water.

  The Second Watch Officer stammers, “But that means—”

  “Yes, the Mediterranean!” the Chief interrupts sharply. “We seem to be needed there.” He swallows, his Adam’s apple jerking conspicuously. “So it’s off to Gibraltar!”

  “Gibraltar echoes the Second Watch Officer, looking at me open-mouthed.

  “Dshebel al Tank!”

  “What?”

  “Gibraltar in Arabic: Tank’s Mountain.”

  Gibraltar: a rock inhabited by apes. Closeup of an ape mother with infants clinging to her stomach. Glint of bared teeth. A British crown colony. The Pillars of Hercules. A bridge for the migration of peoples between Europe and Asia. Africa olé! Tangier! Tang, tangier, tangiest! The Gibraltar convoys! Half the British fleet is around Gibraltar. Somewhere in my head there’s a phonograph needle stuck in a groove: Gibraltar—Gi-bral-tar—plaster altar, plaster altar, plaster altar.

  This won’t go down very well with the Old Man either. He can hardly be itching to explore the Mediterranean. Let alone a trashy harbor somewhere in Italy. The Führer decrees—and we’re stuck with the consequences! That’s the motto we need: it should be burned in capital letters on the lid of a lemon crate and hung in the control room.

  Now I begin to make sense of the radio news reports of the last few weeks. North Africa, the heavy fighting at Tobruk. The British advance westward along the coast road. The Mediterranean must be teeming with British convoy freighters and fighting ships. And now the U-boats are supposed to go in and mop up?

  I visualize every detail of the map of the Strait of Gibraltar, and on it I project a hideously tangled system of direction finders, antishipping nets, dense cordons of patrol boats, mines, and every imaginable kind of nasty surprise.

  I’m still stunned, unable to think straight. But repeating themselves somewhere in the back of my head are the persistent words: DUE FOR REPAIR. Our scow is certainly due for repair after all the punishment we’ve taken. What can be the meaning of this madness? If only the Old Man would be frank for once.

  “Fuel oil—fuel oil,” is the next thing I hear from the control room. And again, “Fuel oil.” Once from the Old Man and once from the navigator.

  Then, “New course ninety degrees!”

  Ninety degrees? Due east? I don’t grasp that at all.

  When the Old Man comes back from the control room and sits down at the table with a scowl on his face, as though he’s still lost in his course calculations, it should be up to the Chief to ask the question we all want answered: Where do we get the fuel oil?

  But the Chief’s mouth might as well be closed with surgical tape. The Old Man spends a good five minutes clawing at his beard. Then he growls, “Provisioning at Vigo.”

  Vigo—Vigo—Vigo! Why there? Vigo—that’s in Spain, or is it Portugal? Where the hell is Vigo?

  The Chief is sucking his lips so hard that he’s making creases in his cheeks. “Mhm,” is all that comes out of him.

  “Very considerate of High Command,” the Commander says derisively. “They think of just about everything, after their own worries, that is. Two hundred fifty miles—or thereabouts. I suppose we can manage that without sails—eh, Chief—what do you say?”

  The calendar shows December 14, the day we were supposed to put in at our base port. Now, instead of returning in French they want us to do it Spanish; after that, in Italian. Real cosmopolitan stuff. Reception with castanets instead of with Greater Germany’s brass band; hundred-year-old sherry instead of beer.

  Spanish gardens, Spanish fly, what else is there that’s Spanish?

  “Impeccable arrangements,” says the Old Man. “No need to goggle like that, Chief. You’ll get plenty of fuel oil and torpedoes. And food, of course—a full-scale provisioning, just like home port!”

  How does he know all this, I wonder. After all, the coded signal was quite short.

  “What More Could Heart Desire?” says the Chief.

  The Old Man merely looks at him disapprovingly.

  It occurs to me that this was to have been the Chief’s last patrol. It’s certainly his twelfth, and this is his second boat. There aren’t many these days who’ve survived twelve patrols. And now—at the very end_they’re offering him a special treat. Let’s call a spade a spade: It’s a superb chance to drown—one minute before closing time.

  I pull myself together and climb through the hatch.

  As yet the crew has no notion of what lies ahead. They’ll be pretty goddam surprised. Instead of the channel at Saint Nazaire and a brass band, a Macaroni port with a whole load of trouble and grief before we get there.

  But the “lords” seem to have got wind of the fact that something’s up. Suddenly every face is tense, questioning. The silence after the signal could only mean that some crucial message had come in. And the order to the helmsman soon after would be perfectly self-explanatory to anyone who used his head. In any case, we’re no longer on course for our home port.

  All conversation ceases immediately whenever I enter a room. Anxious faces. But as long as the Old Man makes no announcement, I must do my best to look casual.

  His expression is eloquent enough: Is it even possible to break through into the Mediterranean in the first place? And if so, what next? The enemy has the advantage of a number of nearby land bases, which means that its aerial surveillance over the Mediterranean is incomparably tighter than over the Atlantic. Can boats operate there at all during the daytime? Given really good lighting conditions and angle of vision, they say a plane can spot a U-boat as much as two hundred feet down—as a kind of shadow.

  The bosun’s broad forehead is distinguished by a diagonal scar running from his right eyebrow to the base of his nose. It turns reddish whenever he’s excited. Right now it’s gone puce.

  The navigator has no such reliable “index of emotions.” He’s got the perfect poker face: a classic example of a fixed type. He changes places with the Commander at the chart table and starts behaving like a tiger with his prey, growling at anyone who even comes near him, so no one can see which chart he’s working on with his protractor and dividers.

  “We’ve been running on a different course for the last hour now,” says Turbo in a low voice as he comes through the control room from astern.

  “Bright boy, you don’t miss a thing!” Hacker sneers. “They ought to use you for airplane cover.”

  An hour already! A whole hour, sixty minutes? Don’t make me laugh! What does an hour mean to us? How many have we spent wallowing around aimlessly, how many have we wasted just to get us through the routine. Of course, their value began to rise the moment we started for home. Right now it would still be a hundred forty hours before we put in—assuming normal conditions. A hundred forty units of time—sixty minutes each—at fuel-hoarding cruising speed, and always hoping there’ll be no enemy aircraft. At full speed we’d probably make it in no more than thirty. But full speed is out of the question. Everything’s out of the question, as a matter of fact—gone to hell. Change of plan!

  Cruising speed. The crew spends the second hour racked with nervous curiosity. The Old Man continues to maintain his silence.

  On my way into the petty officers’ quarters to fetch some writing materials I hear, “Funny kind of course…”—“Well yes, maybe the powers-that-be want us to admire the sunset in the Bay of Biscay.”—“Putting it to a girl in Saint Nazaire, a really good fuck; you can write that all off. The whole thing’s beginning to stink.”

  Silence.

  Then I hear the familiar crackling of the loudspeaker. Finally—the Commander!

  “Attention. We’ve been given a new port of call. La Spezia. As you know, that lies in the Mediterranean. Provisioning in Vigo. On the coast of Spain.”

  No comment, not a syllable of explanation, no excuses—nothing. He simply says, “End,” and there’s another last crackle.

  The off-duty mates stare dumbly into space. The E-mate R
ademacher looks at his piece of buttered bread as though it had been forced on him by a stranger. Finally Frenssen breaks the spell. “Oh, shit!”

  “My ass!” is the next exclamation.

  The meaning of the order is gradually dawning on them: no return to the base that has become a second home to them all. No chance of a stylish landing maneuver, to show off in front of the the news hounds and the carbolic brigade all standing there waiting with big bunches of flowers clutched in front of their stiffly starched aprons. Christmas leave? That’s overboard too.

  They’re getting angry. “A helluva way to treat us!”—“What they need is a kick in the ass!”—“If you don’t like it you can get out and walk!”—“Jesus, who’d have thought it!”

  I look for the ensign. He’s crouched on his bunk, hands hanging down between his knees, face as white as a sheet, and eyes staring vacantly in front of him.

  “It’ll make the Chief happy,” says Frenssen; “we’ve used up almost all our supplies. Almost no oil left and practically no fish, so why should we fuss?”—“But Spain’s neutral.”—“Drop it. Someone else can worry about that!”—“Looks like red tape to me!”—“You could tell something like this was sure to happen just by sticking a finger up your own ass!”—“We’re going to have some real fun!”

  Stricken silence still reigns in the bow compartment. The rattling of a bucket between the torpedo tubes sounds unnaturally loud.

  “It simply won’t work,” Ario says finally.

  “Don’t try to do the thinking for High Command,” replies Dunlop. “Have you never heard of provisioning?”

  “But what’s it all got to do with Spain? What’s the name of that dump?”

  “Vigo.”

  “Shit!” says Bockstiegel. “Shit, shit!” And then, “Shit on horseback.”

  “But they’re—they really are—stark, raving mad!” The Gigolo is stuttering with indignation. “The Mediterranean!” He puts so much disgust into the word you’d think he was discussing a stinking sewer.

  Turbo is worried. “They’ve probably written us off completely in Saint Nazaire. What’s to become of our duffel bags?”