by Devin Murphy
I steered the Negro to pass through the wake of the troop carrier to avoid any of the wreckage. That’s when a yellow dog swam by me. It barked, and barked, and barked, and the sound of it filled the capsule of my submarine. The dog swam away from the burning surface of this ship, farther from any direction where there could possibly be land. It swam and barked, moving deeper into the ocean. This was something I had not prepared for. The cold language of class, of ship, and of tonnage made it all sound like a game, and removed any talk of people and their lives. I’d been trained to sink floating sections of warehouses and had done so. But the sound of the dog barking, barking like Fergus, barking until the cold pulled it under, coupled in my brain with the images of the burning man jumping into the sea.
A garbled swishing rose in my stomach, then a familiar stabbing pain. Wet heaving noises croaked up from between my ribs. Yellow bile splattered against my lap and ran off in runnels of spew down my thighs. After recovering, I turned the Negro around and set my course for the German battleship’s rendezvous point. I used my neckerchief to clean vomit from my lap, and where it soaked into my jumpsuit down my leg. All the thoughts in my head dissolved into something dark and grainy, and my bowels felt like they were on the verge of collapse.
I lit a cork with a match to mask the smell of the sour bilge.
Heading back to the meeting point with the German battleship, I retraced my exact movements so as not to make the slightest calculation error that might send me off course into the middle of the ocean. It took me six hours to get back, working against the current. By then it was well past sunup, when the sky opened and I hoped that any plane that saw me would mistake me for an algae patch, driftwood, a naiad, the back of a rippling wave. At 0800 hours, I was at the correct meeting point at the meeting time, but the battleship still had not appeared. By 0900 hours my sub was almost out of fuel. I cut the engines and let myself drift, then restarted and worked my way back to the meeting point. With each passing minute came the terror of being in the wrong spot. I checked and rechecked my calculations. As I waited, a profound regret for sinking the ship built up in me, and I realized that it would have been a worthy punishment to be abandoned for such a sin.
Now, I think, perhaps I was cast off.
Then at 1000 hours, with aprons of bright white clouds bordering the sky, the battleship steamed over the horizon toward me with the white waterline pulsing where the bow turned up the swells. It was broad daylight now, a poor time for any motion in these waters, but the ship gave me such a lift of hope. I’d managed to stay alive. A man on the bow used signal flags to communicate with me, but I did not understand what he was trying to say.
When the ship was alongside, they lowered a sailor on a cargo line by crane. When the sailor stood on the bow of my submarine, he raised his hand and saluted me. His body looked like a statue riding on the swells. Then he tied a line off to the bow that the crane pulled into the open cargo bay door, where it was hooked up to more lines and winched aboard. In the cargo bay there were only three other Negro subs. I’d been the nineteenth to launch, so there should have been eighteen boats. The three Negros in the hold had their torpedoes still adhered to the bottom. Crew members unlatched my cockpit cover and pushed it up.
“Ensign Koopman,” Major Oldif said. “Where is your torpedo?”
“I fired it, sir.”
“Did you make contact?”
“Yes, sir.”
“With what?”
“A Class 8 armed troop carrier, sir.”
“Yes. Yes. Yes. You’re the one then. We had radio transmission from the ship that went down. That was you. God damn it, good job, Dutchman.” Major Oldif reached into the sub and squeezed my shoulder and gave it a shake. I wanted to hug him for touching me, for bringing me away from the endless drift. Then he looked at me and noticed the vomit on my clothes. He pulled his hand off my shoulder and wiped it on the leg of his trousers. “Sailors, get this man out of here. He’s a goddamn hero, help him up and take him to the medics.” They lifted me out of the submarine. A heavy-caliber bullet had punctured the forward planking. My legs were so stiff they locked up on me and the men had to drag me to the medic.
“Why are there only three boats?”
“We’ll find more,” the sailor said.
In the medic’s office, Pauwel was lying on a cot and mumbling to himself, thrashing around under a sheet.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“CO poisoning,” the medic said.
Pauwel turned toward me and squinted. “Thank god it’s you. Thank god.”
The medic helped me out of my jumpsuit. On the cot he started checking all my vital signs. He squeezed the black egg of the blood pressure cuff, which inhaled tighter around my arm. There were two other ensigns in the bunks next to Pauwel. One had his hands in a prayer tepee covering his face and the other was asleep on his side with a blanket over his head. After the medic checked me, he told me to go get something to eat and get back to my bunk.
“Pauwel. Are you okay?”
“I will be.”
“What happened?”
“There’ll be time for all that,” the medic said. “Go get something to eat.”
Pauwel nodded his head and waved me away. “I’m fine.”
I was starving, and I got myself a meal. I took a slice of sausage for Pauwel and brought it to the outer deck of the vessel to watch the rest of the Negros getting picked up. The sun was full and rising to the middle of the sky. The open water all around the ship was calm in that dull blue-glossed-brown color. In the distance was a glint of steel, the next Negro to be retrieved. When we got closer what I thought was the glass cockpit of the fuselage I saw to be the long cylinder of the torpedo. The Negro was upside down. When the crane hooked the boat up, I peered over the deck to see them hook enough lines to flip the boat right-side-up. When they did the slumped head of the pilot slapped against the glass. When the upturned Negro was pulled in, the ship picked up its speed to meet the next vessel, which was not there. We slowed for a moment and then moved along to the next.
“All day, like this,” a watchman standing by the 16mm guns said. “All day these subs aren’t there.” The man wore a leather jacket and a fur hat with long ear flaps cinched tight by a thin cord tied in a bow under his chin. His fur collar was pulled up high over his neck.
The rest of the afternoon the ship picked up seven more Negros. Two had dead pilots from CO poisoning. One of the Negro pilots poured yellow dye into the sea to make himself more visible. It was only to be used if we had drifted off too far, out of reach of the support vessel. The pilot must have been frightened out there waiting for the missing ship. He must have deployed the yellow dye, which in turn hailed an Allied plane out of the sky that strafed it with machine-gun fire. A stripe of fighter plane bullets ran up the length of it and had shattered the pilot’s lap, chest, and head. The next stop had a loosening slick of yellow without a sign of a sub. That made eleven survivors from the forty-nine that had set out. When the battleship spent the rest of the day doing another circle to check for lost boats, I went back to the medic’s office to sit with Pauwel.
He opened his eyes and looked at me. “If I’m dead, you’re one ugly angel.”
In the medic’s office the pilots discussed what happened to the rest of our rank. Some pilots were lucky, they decided, as they probably fell asleep through strain or lack of oxygen under their tiny glass domes. The vessels had been tested for making headway against the current so that the sub could go out on the ebb tide and return home on the flood, but in the open waters, some of the boats would have made no progress and, sooner or later, would be lost. All of us in the medic’s office who had returned had not submerged our ships. We figured some that had submerged never came up. Others may have fired their torpedoes but the clasps failed and they were carried along on the backs of their own bombs. We each sat in our own bunks and talked of the ways the lost men did not come back.
“I thought they figured out
the CO problems.”
“Apparently not.”
“What about the ones that are left out there?”
“They’re smart. They’ll send a recon plane out for them.”
“Yeah, but the recon plane will probably make sure they sink so that no one else gets their hands on them.” This made everyone quiet for a while.
Then one of the pilots confessed. “I didn’t go anywhere. I circled the same spot over and over.” He gave us a nervous smile and kept rubbing the palm of his hand over his chin so his fingers squeezed into his cheek. Then he shook it off as if it were a joke.
“Didn’t they want to know what happened?” I asked.
“I told them it was a technical fault and that I had to turn back early.”
None of us questioned why he had done this as on the battleship’s third loop around, no more Negros were found.
On the final evening of the two-day trip back to Kiel, Major Oldif sent a sailor to bring me to the bridge. In the conning tower, the major paced back and forth, and looked out at the water. Low growls of static trundled from the radio console. A machine beeped every twenty seconds. Soft. Steady. I counted to twenty. To twenty. To twenty, until Major Oldif turned and waved me forward.
“Ah, Ensign Koopman. Good, good, come in. Are you feeling okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good, that’s good. I want to congratulate you, son. You made this mission a great success. That ship you sunk was a big victory for us. Do you know how much manpower and effort it would be to deal with those soldiers and supplies once they landed in Europe? Every ship we take down is the equivalent of a land battle won. And you won a big one for us, ensign.”
“But the lost subs, sir.”
“Yes, a shame, but you’re not seeing the big picture. We tested the Negros and they work. They will work better running along the shores. When the Allies mount an invasion force, we now know we have these weapons to use against them. Now, maybe we can get you some publicity for your success, and we can use that to round up some more fine Dutch to come captain for us.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, feeling sick all over again, knowing this meant the pilots who spent the night circling the same spot of ocean would have to go out again. This would become a tactic now. The major made to squeeze my shoulder, but maybe the memory of seeing me covered in vomit made him stop short.
17
The morning after the battleship returned and disembarked at the training center in Kiel, Major Oldif ordered me to report to his office in my full dress uniform. A film of dust coated the lamp on his desk but there was an oyster blue porcelain vase with three red tulips that looked fresh and new. A man with a camera had draped a dark sheet against the major’s office wall.
“Stand here, please, ensign,” Major Oldif said, pointing to the front of the sheet. “Take one of just him first.”
The photographer, who had a thick, scissor-trimmed beard, moved in closer to me and told me to stand straight and look at the camera, then he took a picture. The shutter clicked. Then clicked again. Each time the camera flashed, I hoped it would bleach out my skin, blot out part of me so the images would eventually show some unidentifiable, nondescript figure. “Good, now take one of us.” Major Oldif stepped next to me, and we shook hands for the next picture.
“Son, I’ve arranged for you to receive the Knight’s Cross for your work on our mission. It’s the highest honor you can receive. We’re going to make a great example out of you, ensign. A Dutch boy does good for the German navy. We’ll put it in the papers to sign up more of your countrymen.”
“The papers, sir?”
“You’re a hero. We’re going to treat you like one.” Major Oldif patted me on the back and led me out of his office. “You keep up your good work.”
I had been up all night thinking of the yellow dog in the water. Hearing it barking. Barking. Barking.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
I held back from revealing any of my hesitation. This was something I was becoming an expert at. Still deep down, I doubted everything. And my voice, that voice, my real voice that had not breached the walls of meekness, fear, rancor, and subordination I had boxed myself in with, was still incapable of saying what I really felt then. Weak. Insignificant. It was hard to put into words that smallness, but it made me hate myself.
I had another checkup with the medic that morning and then a mission debriefing after that. At the briefing, Pauwel and I and the other remaining crew members joined in a meeting with a new wave of recruits. Major Oldif stood in front of us and told them all about our previous mission with the Negros. He said it was a great success and what we learned had already begun being implemented by the engineers into upgrades. Then he had me stand, and he told everyone that I was to be awarded the Knight’s Cross. Everyone in the tent clapped for me. Even Pauwel, who still looked pale despite being back on land.
The next day my picture was on the front page of the German newspaper Der Strosstrupp. Major Oldif was quoted praising me, the young Dutchman, as a “credit to his country, whose lead more men should follow and join the German fighting forces.” It talked about the award ceremony to be held for me and mentioned how I couldn’t wait to go back out and fight. It mentioned that from March 16 through the 20th, German naval forces sank twenty-seven Allied ships. “Ensign Koopman was part of our great success,” Major Oldif said at the end of the article.
After we returned, Pauwel moved into my bunkhouse. He hadn’t been able to sleep one night since our mission. I woke in the middle of the night to find him sitting up in his cot, his hands kneading his hair back, tapping some beat on his scalp. Each night Pauwel had been like this, and the deep bags under his eyes were getting darker by the day.
Then, because he was the longest tenured among us, Pauwel got pulled from the midget-sub training group and placed on a U-boat crew that was outbound for a seven-day trip.
“I hope I see you again,” he said before loading onto the U-boat.
The ceremony was set for me to receive my award. Everyone at the base was invited into the tent. There were full steins poured from wood casks of wheat and dunkel beer. Rations of brandy. The cooks made pretzels we dipped in spicy mustard, and we had schnitzel, some of the first meat we’d eaten in a month. I wore my dress blue uniform and was called to the front of the room to stand next to Major Oldif for the ceremony. The major gave a speech about how fine a Dutchman I was and a fine example to other Dutchmen considering joining.
Who would take my lead? If Ludo was alive, as I often imagined him stumbling from the ash of the factory, would he join the Third Reich’s navy because I’d shown him the path? The image of myself being a Dutch hero once the Germans won the war ran through my mind. It wasn’t hard to do with the whole troop of men there to cheer me on. It was the second time in my life I was lauded by a group of Germans. My daydream lifted and dipped on the major’s words. Then I looked out over the crowd of soldiers.
In the back of the room there was a man much taller than everyone else. I squinted to get a better look. He had a German naval hat with the brim low over his forehead and a German jacket with the collar popped up enough that it would have hidden the fine line of tattoo ink I knew rose over his shoulder and up his neck.
Uncle Martin looked right at me, inside of me, at the blood flowing in my veins. Tears started forming in my eyes.
“And so with no further ado, I present our highest honor and these papers of valor signed by the Führer himself, to one of our own, Ensign Jacob Koopman.” Major Oldif clicked his heels together and saluted me. Then he fastened the Knight’s Cross on my chest. It was a large iron cross-shaped brooch with a tree molded into the middle.
“I know. I know,” Major Oldif said and patted my shoulder when he realized I was crying. Then he stepped back and raised his palm up flat to me again.
I looked down at the broad cross, hanging from a thick black and red cut of ribbon. It had small shards of diamonds studding the outer edge of it, which refl
ected the tent’s overhead lights.
“Face them now, ensign,” Major Oldif said.
Everyone else in the tent stood with their arms raised straight out and over their heads, except for Uncle Martin, whose finger pointed right at me. More fear shot through my body. What decision had I really made? Had he come to kill me? If I pointed to the back of the room and cried out that there was a traitor in our midst, could I save myself—from getting killed, from looking into my past and seeing what had been taken from me since the war began.
The medal lay flat upon my chest, opposite my heart, and hung there like a cold omen. A photographer snapped another picture. If I could have made my own headline at that moment, I would have changed the names, changed the story, changed everything.
Major Oldif led me to several photographers, who took more photos of us shaking hands. Then the major walked me through the tent, introducing me to other officers and telling them my story of downing the troop ship. All that time my uncle circled the tent, probably dropping explosives under each empty seat. Major Oldif handed me a tin cup of dark roasted coffee with whiskey in it, which warmed me on the way down but burned once it hit my stomach.
When there was a break from shaking people’s hands, Major Oldif leaned into me. “You have earned the right to test our new midget submarine. It is called the ‘Beaver’ and should perform better than the Negro. We’ll start testing in a few days.”
My uncle circled the room with a noticeable limp, shifting from corner to corner opposite me. When the major retired for the night, Uncle Martin walked across the room to me. I was surprised all over again at how much he towered over me.
“I thought you may have been smart and run off to save yourself, or even been killed, but it turns out you’re a German war hero now. You’ve got a medal there to prove it.”