Hard as life was on the tossing, relentless Atlantic, these young men had ample rewards, Hoffmann pointed out. Money, for one thing. Their base pay increased by 1.5 to 4 Reichsmarks each day that the boat dived, and once the boat passed twenty degrees longitude and became a Frontboot, a hazardous duty bonus in French francs about doubled that pay and made it possible on their return to Lorient—as the saying went—“to live like a god in France.” Here on the boat, despite the long hours and sacrifices that crewing entailed, they had three hot meals a day, more than the poor footsloggers in Russia, Hoffmann ventured, and real bunks, also hot. Hoffmann laughed as he said it. For those interested in machine tools and technical careers the boat offered training in the use of some of the most advanced technology from Germany. Then, once they returned to base from a war patrol and went out on shore leave in groups, you could readily see the pride they had in themselves as members of the U-boat arm. The way they carried themselves, swaggered about in their marine uniforms with Iron Cross ribbons, and partied with keen abandon—all bespoke their awareness that the rest of Germans viewed them as an elite of the fighting forces. That status might be challenged by Luftwaffe crews, but Hoffmann doubted it now that Göring’s boys had been bested in the skies over Britain. And certainly no surface naval crews could make such a claim, since all their ships were long frozen in harbor. And forget the Wehrmacht in Russia—God save those poor bastards this winter. No, these lads were Germany’s favored heroic types, though Hoffmann was sure that that favor hardly extended to British opinion. The Tommies might salute our army and air officers when captured, he suggested to Tolle, and might sing “Lili Marleen” as lustily as any German seaman, but when it came to U-boat crews, British military respect and courtesy probably broke down, if one could judge from British propaganda, which uniformly portrayed U-boat crewmen as fanatical, vicious, sneaky, murderous villains. If the Tommies ever got their hands on us, Hoffmann speculated, they might not be able to restrain themselves. He didn’t know about the Americans.
Did these men look like fanatical villains to Tolle? Hoffmann pointed toward a group of mixers crawling out of the forward torpedo room. Answering his own question, he said that these men were pretty much blank pages where villainy was concerned and not imaginative enough to be fanatical. And too young, probably, although Hoffmann had to correct himself on some of the ages. It was true that as a rule the ratings were eighteen to twenty-three years old, and that some of the officers were also quite young—von Schroeter, the commander’s number two, for example, who knew the crewmen personally better than he, Hoffmann, did, was only twenty-two—but some of the men, particularly the petty officers, were a good deal older than twenty-three. Karl Latislaus, for example, chief diesel mechanic, whom the crew called Karlchen (Little Karl), was thirty and the oldest man on board. He had served on the pocket battleship Deutschland, where he once met Hitler. Almost all the petty officers and ratings had nicknames, by the way. Twenty-three-year-old Richard Amstein, one of the control room machinists, was Kraxel (“climber”). Petty officer Rudolf Fuhrmann was Kutscher (“coachman”). Seaman Second Class Max Hufnagl was Lackl (“roughneck”). Klinger was Icke (“I-guy”). He was from Berlin and had responsibility for cleanliness and hygiene on board. Holz was Kapitän, Biegerl was Groschengrab (“miser”) and Karl Fröbel, the youngest on board, everyone called Langspleiss (“long splice”). So thin and six feet tall, he looked to everyone else like two lengths of rope spliced together. And no one had to duck more than he in order to keep his head from denting the overhead pipes and food stores!
Latislaus: I volunteered.
Amstein: Me, too, but not because I wanted to be a warrior. If I hadn’t gone to the Navy, though, I would have ended up in the Army. And I didn’t want to do that. In the Navy you had everything with you—the bunk, the food, the supplies—and you didn’t have to walk or anything.
Latislaus: I also volunteered for the Navy, in 1928, because my father had been in the Navy, and my brother died in the Navy. And I was pleased to serve in that branch. I’ve got to admit, the highs and lows were frequent, but the highs outweighed the lows.
Barth: I didn’t regret that I went to the Navy. At the start of the war I was on a destroyer. We laid mines in the Dogger Bank. A lot of freighters and steamers ran into them. I didn’t want to go to U-boats. And yet one day I ended up or. a U-boat. I was simply sent to school. There was nothing you could do about it. But talking about 123, about being confined in such a little area—a pipe—with fifty or so other men, and there you were for days, and weeks, you developed a camaraderie, a forged unit that you can still see in us today. But I never thought that we would get together like this—still today.
Barth: We were young men. It was our job.
Latislaus: We were sailors. Just like career sailors all over the world. And we had no political direction whatsoever. We didn’t even vote.
Lorenz: The relationships between crewmembers were very good.
Seigel: Yes, good, otherwise the boat would never have survived the war.
Lorenz: Yes, we all got along well, no fights, and we all did our jobs.
Fröbel: We lived in close proximity on the boat for twelve weeks. The first weeks we’d have to go about on our knees in the forward torpedo room.
Kaeding: That was hard living. And naturally when we returned we celebrated with great parties. So it wasn’t that we were hard men on board and mommy’s babies on shore. We partied hard, too.
Fröbel: On shore we U-boatmen received special treatment. When we misbehaved the military police looked the other way.
Kaeding: Well, when you spend three months at sea, when we came home we partied, naturally. But I wanted to say something else. At that time we felt that we had to sail to serve our fatherland. We didn’t think of Adolf Hitler. We didn’t think about any specific political party. We simply thought that there was no other way—we had to go. This common experience, of course, held us together and helped us through the tough times. You must be clear on this: Serving on a U-boat was no easy task. And it certainly wasn’t for those who had their hearts in their stomachs. To be a U-boat crewmember on an enemy mission—that was something!
Watch your footing and your head, Hoffmann cautioned Tolle as he led him aft over and around sacks and boxes and below the hanging hammocks full of perishables. Under these deck plates they were walking on, he told the struggling Tolle, was Battery Array Number 1. These and Number 2 storage batteries under the deck just aft supplied energy to the electric motors in the maneuvering room. Those motors were engaged now, propelling the boat forward at four knots—economy speed. The boat was putting out no exhaust and was completely independent of the surface atmosphere. The batteries made that possible. Each of the pasted-plate-type batteries had sixty-two cells. Switching panels enabled the electricians to use an individual battery, or batteries in series or in parallel, and to obtain voltages ranging from a low of 110 direct current for most on-board purposes to a high of 340 d.c. for powering the propulsion motors. The lead plates in the battery structures were an enormous dead weight, close to sixty tons. On a strictly observed schedule, battery technicians checked the batteries’ acid levels and their possible contamination by saltwater in order to prevent buildups of chlorine gases that could lead to poisonous fumes or to explosions and fire. Here was another example of how the entire crew owed their safety to two or three men. Hoffmann could not stress the point enough: A U-boatman’s first loyalty was to the rest of the crew. And that was why Tolle, with no essential boat duties to perform, could best serve the rest of the crew by simply staying out of the way, especially when the boat dived or came under attack. In an emergency dive, Hoffmann said, the LI and the chief bos’n might order all hands to the forward compartments to provide down weight to the bow. If that happened Tolle was to race to his bunk, climb in it, and stay there. Hoffmann did not want him to block the crew, nor did he want him killed in the stampede.
A few crouching steps more and Hoffmann took To
lle into the galley on the starboard side of the fore-and-aft passageway. Notice, he told Tolle, that everything in a U-boat was to port or starboard of one central, narrow, single-level gangway. Four bulkheads divided the gangway, but their hatches were always open, except—for reasons of noise—the one between the control room and the engine room. Here, then, was the realm of Hannes, the cook, who was off somewhere retrieving groceries. Hannes had a nice little Vosswerke stove, as Tolle could see, with two ovens and three hot plates, a short standing refrigerator, and a sink with hot and cold fresh water and a separate spigot for hot saltwater. Fresh water was taken on before departure, but distilling equipment on board could produce an additional 63.5 gallons a day from saltwater, which would be used for cooking, drinking, and servicing the batteries. None of it could be used for showering or shaving. If Tolle wanted to shave with saltwater he was welcome to try it, but most of the men found it too painful, so the result was that everyone grew a beard—except, of course, the youngsters who had nothing to shave.
Just aft of the galley were the petty officers’ and then the officers’ quarters. The officers’ wardroom contained four private bunks, two on each side. The upper bunks could be folded back so that the lowers became seats. Here an attempt had been made by the nautical designers to present at least the facade of a home atmosphere. The walls were oak paneling. A cupboard contained porcelain dishes and cups. At mealt imes, when all officers except the one on watch were expected to eat together, a table leaf extended to provide a formal eating surface. It was always covered at mess- with a white linen tablecloth, though as the voyage went on the white, like everything else on board, would turn to gray. Here, too, cream-colored overhead lampshades contrasted with the wire-guarded bare bulbs found elsewhere in the boat. If the boat was depth-charged, as she had been repeatedly on her last two patrols, Hoffmann said in an aside, Tolle might see a lot of smashed crockery about and officers eating out of metal mess kits like the rest of the crew! As for the commander, while he ate his meals here and joined the other officers in paperwork or board and card games at the wardroom table, he had his own private cubbyhole separate from the rest of the officers, here on the port side. Hoffmann pulled back the green curtain that provided Reinhard Hardegen’s only privacy from the rest of the crew and showed Tolle the tiny oak-paneled compartment with its low bunk, personal effects locker, and washbasin under a hinged writing table.
On the starboard side directly across from the commander’s cabin were the sound and wireless rooms. More often than not the commander left his curtain open so that he would always be in touch with either or both men. There had to be good chemistry for two very different elements, low-ranking technicians and a Kapitänleutnant, to mix together comfortably without anyone’s feeling awkward or uneasy. Such was the chemistry here. The two radio/sound men were Petty Officers Fritz Rafalski and Heinz Barth. Both carried the same on-board nickname, Puster (“blower”). They had backups in two radiomen second class named Wälder and Beyer. When the boat was on the surface Rafalski and Barth switched off on watches of four hours, six, six hours, four, in the wireless room. When, as now, the boat was submerged one took the hydrophone and the other the wireless station, since both had to be manned in a dive condition. The commander would look into both side-by-side cubicles from his cabin, as he often did if the boat was submerged, since Rafalski and Barth were the only people on board who were in contact with the outside world. As Tolle could see, Barth in his small cupboardlike sound booth with its tongue-and-groove wood walls to deaden noise sat with earphones facing a control wheel and a glass-covered compass rose. A sweeping black indicator needle bisected the compass face. Barth’s handwheel controlled hydrophone sensors, like microphones, that were arranged in arcs, twenty-three sensors on each side on the outer skin near the forward hydroplanes. Turning the wheel activated an electric pulse-timing compensator that ranged back and forth across all quadrants to pick up the distinctly different propeller noises of coal-fired steamers, diesel motor ships, and fast naval vessels such as destroyers and convoy escorts. The hydrophone could also pick up torpedoes, “ours and theirs,” Hoffmann said, the breakup of torpedoed ships, the blowholes of breathing whales and porpoises, and various other sea noises. It took an experienced ear to separate out the sound sources and identify their signatures. By turning the handwheel Barth could obtain a crude directional sounding on a given source, estimate its range, and determine if it was approaching or receding. Tolle studied Barths distracted look and watched him swing to a suspect noise bearing 015 degrees, then turn the wheel rapidly to its reciprocal.
“Anything?” asked Hoffmann.
“Nein,” Barth replied laconically.
One step away on the starboard side was the adjoining wireless telegraph (W/T) room, which, with its several transmitters, receivers, electrical panels, Morse key bench, Marine-Funkschlüssel-Maschine M cipher machine, and phonograph, was twice as large as the sound booth. Here Rafalski, also with earphones, but one ear on and one off, moved a condenser pot across the long-wave frequency band. At this depth and down to twenty-five meters Rafalski could pick up Morse signals from Lorient keyed through the Goliath antennas in Germany. To the same question Hoffmann had posed to Barth the radioman answered “Nein.”
It was too early to expect any messages for 123, Hoffmann explained to Tolle. But soon, probably tomorrow, Christmas Eve, she would get some traffic. Hoffmann told Tolle that he had to get into the control room, which was the next compartment aft, since a look through the hatch showed that the Old Man was back from his inspections and that an order to surface was probably upcoming. Tolle should spend some time talking with Rafalski, Hoffmann advised. Rafalski was very well known in the Ubootwaffe. He had been on U-64 when she was sunk off Narvik, Norway, in 1940. He was the only man who ever escaped from a sunken U-boat without an escape lung. Tolle should talk with him. Then, when Tolle heard the order to surface, he could step into the control room and observe those operations. Stand by the chart table to port side, Hoffmann suggested, so that he was out of the path of the lookouts who would assemble to go topside. As for the engine, maneuvering, and after torpedo rooms, either he or Schulz would give him that part of the tour another time. And, Hoffmann said with a smile, not to worry, he and Schulz were not going anywhere. “Yes, Herr Oberleutnant,” Tolle replied.
With that Hoffmann grasped the bar over the circular bulkhead opening and threw his legs into the control room. Tolle looked back into the radio room and hesitantly tried to make conversation with Rafalski, who now busied himself with the innards of his shortwave receiver. To Tolle’s questions about what he was doing Rafalski answered, as old hands were wont to answer new men on board, with more truth than they could handle, “I’m verifying the voltage levels-tubes nine and ten, cathode one-point-five volts, choke grid one-point-five, shielded grid five, anode one-thirty—tubes eleven and twelve, cathode one-point-one, choke one-point-one, shielded forty-five, anode one-twenty. That’s what I’m doing.”
Rafalski finished his task and replaced the cover on the receiver chassis. “Anything else you want to know?” he asked Tolle pleasantly.
Tolle mentioned what Hoffmann had told him about Rafalski’s escape. “Would you mind very much telling me about it?” he asked, removing from a tunic pocket a notepad on which to record the account.
“All right,” Rafalski said, with an inflection suggesting that he hoped this would be the last time he would have to tell the story on this particular voyage. “In the invasion of Norway we lost a lot of warships and transports to the British fleet that attacked our forces. We U-boats sank some of their ships, too, but not nearly as many as we should have because of torpedo defects. Anyway, on 13 April my boat U-64 was hit and sunk off Narvik by a Royal Navy fighter-bomber. I’m not superstitious, but that number thirteen had to mean something. Our boat had left base at Helgoland at thirteen-thirteen hours several days before and the Tommy plane hit us at exactly thirteen-thirty-five hours on the thirteenth! Anyway, we were
in relatively shallow water close to shore. There was no way to raise the boat. We stayed with it for an hour and a quarter and then reJized that we would have to flood the boat and try to float individually to the surface. What scared us most was not the escape—all of us had had to practice it in training—but the low temperature of the water. We worried about freezing to death. But every man reached for his Dräger Tauchretter— that’s the escape apparatus with mouthpiece and nose clip, oxygen cylinder, breathing pipe, and life vest that we keep at our bunks—and the officers gave the order to open the hatches. As the water poured in I realized that my escape gear was missing. Everybody else had his apparatus on, but where was mine? Soon the water was up to the overhead. I held my breath and headed up the tower ladder in the middle of a group that half pushed me along. Just when I thought my lungs would burst I popped to the surface. Luckily, because the water was two degrees Celsius, we didn’t have to tread water long. Some German infantrymen in row boats rescued us. I think I was in the water only five minutes. And that’s the story. I went to V-124 after that—the Old Man was number two on board at that time—and then here to 123. I didn’t ask to be transferred, I was just sent. But this is a good boat, except that the Old Man takes too many risks.”2
Tolle scribbled rapidly in his notepad. “Too many risks?”
“Forget it,” said Rafalski. “You better get into the control room like the lieutenant said.”
Tolle ducked to take a look in the room. “Let’s talk again later,” he said to Rafalski. “Just one more thing. I see a ladder in there and some kind of well around the top of the ladder that has a framed photograph of the Führer on it. Did the commander put that up?”
“No,” answered “Puster.” “That went up at the time the boat was commissioned. It’s standard issue. Every boat has the same photo in exactly the same place.”
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