“Thanks.”
Tolle stepped warily through the circular bulkhead hatch past the two-meter-high Christmas tree the Patenbattalion had decorated with tinsel and candles. Hoping not to be noticed, he walked to what appeared to be the chart table, as instructed, and waited to see what happened in this strange theater of dials, pipes, and levers, so unlike anything that he had seen before that it might easily be taken for the movie set of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory.
The commander—the Old Man, as he should learn to refer to him—was engaged in conversation with IWO and IIWO Hoffmann and von Schroeter. The LI Schulz stood blankly watching the gauges until the Old Man called.
“Finish your data tables, Chief?”
“Yes, Herr Kaleu.”
“All right, then, let’s surface and build up some speed and time so that we can spend an underwater Christmas Eve tomorrow. Number One?”
Hoffmann leaned into the forward bulkhead opening and yelled, “Lookouts to control!” The same four seamen whom Tolle had seen equipping themselves with bridge gear swung into the control room. The Old Man ordered Schulz:
“Stand by to surface. E motors full ahead. Steer up. Blow out main ballast by diesel. Surface!”
Although Tolle would have no way of knowing it, the boat at periscope depth was so close to the surface there was no need to blow the ballast tanks underwater with compressed air—the usual procedure for surfacing. Blowing the tanks meant expelling the seawater that had been taken aboard and replacing it with air to restore buoyancy, causing the boat to rise. At this shallow depth, however, the boat could be steered dynamically to the surface, using E motors and planes. After surfacing, the engine exhaust from the refired dieseis would be used to expel water from the diving tanks and thus save the boat’s store of compressed air.
Schulz ordered the planesmen: “Bow up fifteen, stern up ten.” As the boat rose up the mercury column, the chief planesman reported: “Ten meters … eight … six, five, conning tower clear!”
With that Hardegen and four lookouts behind him pounded up the ladder, wheeled open the hatch, stepped up to the dripping bridge platform, and swept all quadrants of the horizon with binoculars while Schulz, in the reverse of commands given on initiation of the dive, fed surface air to the dieseis, shut down the E motors, opened the ventilators, neutralized the planes, and expelled the water ballast with exhaust. As air refilled the diving tanks the buoyant hull rose to optimum cruising depth.
Hardegen shouted down the voice pipe to the helmsman in the tower who had his hands on the engine telegraph as well as on the rudder buttons:
“Both engines Grosse Fahrt— full ahead—steady on course two-seven-five!”3
Schulz turned to Tolle, whom he recognized from the morning departure. “Now our screws are really digging holes,” he said. “If the Old Man and the lookouts had spotted anything in their glasses—a warship or a plane—we could have dived immediately because we were still heavy. But there was no alarm and so we put both dieseis on line. The Old Man must have a good sea up there if he’s going Grosse Fahrt.”
Against the noise that now filled the control room Tolle asked Schulz, “Do you think I can go up?”
Schulz walked over to the bridge pipe. “Herr Kaleu, Tolle requests permission to go topside.”
“Granted,” Hardegen returned.
“Go on up,” Schulz said. “Watch your ass that you don’t slip and fall. Don’t stay too long, and don’t get in anybody’s way.”
“Yes, sir.”
As Tolle eagerly clambered up the ladder Rafalski called up his own radio shack pipe: “Herr Kaleu, permission to play Radio Berlin to the crew?”
With “granted” Rafalski tuned his Telefunken Type ELA/E1012 receiver to the 360-meter band and relayed its strong clear signal through the loudspeaker system. The time was exactly 1930 hours. A recording of the Potsdam garrison chapel carillon playing an eighteenth-century folk song by Ludwig Holty provided the signature background to Berlin’s call sign:
“Here is Deutschlandsender on wave bands 360 meters, 410 and 492 meters. We bring music and news to comrades in the command areas West and Norway. And here is dance music, beginning with the popular Berlin music hall song, ‘Es War in Schöneberg im Monat Mai.’”
As the catchy tune filled the boat the mixers forward, who knew the lyrics only too well, loudly chimed in with their own bawdy version:
“Ich war in ¿orient in einem Puff…”
“I was in a brothel in Lorient …”
2150 hours. Tolle had been on the bridge for two and a half hours. To watch officer von Schroeter it was obvious that the guest from Propaganda much preferred the open air to the confined quarters below, even with the unsteady footing that came with mounting seas. The swells were breaking now into choppy waves, and as the boat passed from crest to trough she took on the pitch and roll that would characterize her movements for the rest of the passage. There would be no more phonograph playing belowdeck while the boat was on the surface: The needle would skid across the grooves. And the elephant dance would only become more pronounced as the boat approached, then entered, the storm-strewn Atlantic. While the four lookouts moved their binoculars across the horizon in never-varying rhythmic patterns looking for any black dot that might be more than a dot, von Schroeter’s eyes took in a wider angle of sea and sky and his mind began to frame the report he would call below on the hour: “Wind northeast force two, sea running two, increasing, sky overcast, some moon to east, visibility eleven.” His concentration broke the instant the lookout on starboard ahead disturbed the binocular ballet, and frozen in place, chopped his right hand toward ten degrees of the bow.
“Herr Leutnant!” he called. “Shadow off starboard bow!”
Von Schroeter placed the rubber-cushioned eyepieces of 7 x 50s against his eye sockets and looked ahead, slowly moving the lenses across the horizon where the lookout had indicated. There! A narrow black silhouette of some kind fell left and right against the night sky. He leaned to the voice pipe:
“Commander to the bridge!”
Moments later Hardegen stood alongside von Schroeter peering ahead through his own glasses.
“Yes,” Hardegen said, “a superstructure, hull down, bow wake on our reciprocal. No masts. It’s a U-boat, probably ours.” To the pipe he ordered, “Port fifteen, both ahead slow. Gun crew stand by! Puster to the bridge with the blinker light!”
The voice of the helmsman in the tower acknowledged, and the shrill clang of his telegraphs came up the open hatch.
Barth reached the bridge with his shoulder-held signal light trailing a power cord from the tower.
“Challenge him, Puster,” ordered Hardegen, who could now just barely see the tower of the approaching boat with unaided eyes. Barth flipped the blinker shutters giving the December code challenge: F-L-U-S-S.
“What’s the recognition response, Puster?” Hardegen asked.
“BRUNO, Herr Kaleu,” Barth answered. The seconds passed and there was no response. Hardegen ordered, “Clear bridge hatch! Forward gun crew to deck! Battle Stations!”
Just as the gun crew clambered up to man the 10.5 and gunnery officer von Schroeter made his way down the outside ladder to command them, yellow lights flashed off the bow to starboard: B-R-U-N-O—U-A.
“It’s UA!” Hardegen exclaimed. “Gun crew stand down! Secure from battle stations. Puster, send blinker recognition U-123.”
Turning to Tolle, Hardegen said, excitedly: “That’s Korvettenkapitän Hans Eckermann. His boat UA is on her way home to Lorient. I should have guessed it was UA. Flotilla told us the story day before yesterday.” Hardegen went on to relate it.
UA had been on southern patrol off South Africa and there, together with U-68, received orders from BdU to rendezvous with refueling and supply ship Python. While the two boats lay nearby, Python was sunk by a British cruiser.4 The German survivors in the water were unusually numerous since only ten days before Python had rescued the crew of the German surface raider At
lantis, sunk by another British cruiser.5 UA and J-68 gathered the lifeboats and formed two tow groups. For the next five days, hauling 416 survivors, most in open boats, the two U-boats made five knots on a course of 330 degrees northward. On 5 December by prearrangement they rendezvoused with two other boats, 129 and Hardegen’s old Edelweissboot, 124, and divided up the tow. Most of the survivors were subsequently transferred to large Italian submarines, UA moving 50 of her 104 to the Italian Torelli off Freetown on 16 December. After taking the remainder inside her hull UA had twice the normal roster of a Type IXB, which she resembled in size.
As UA came into closer view and her dimensions materialized Hardegen explained to Tolle: “That boat was built originally in 1938 for the Turkish Navy. Her name was Batiray. When war came she was commissioned instead into the Kriegsmarine. Look at her come on. Fifty-plus extra men for ballast. They must be layered in there like anchovies. They’ll open the tin tomorrow in Lorient!”6
“Why UA instead of a numeral?” Tolle asked.
“Any boat built for a foreign navy or captured from a foreign navy carries a letter rather than a numerical designation. Most of the boats we’ve captured were Dutch or Norwegian.”
From UA by blinker: B-A-D—S-E-A-S—N-O—B-E-E-S.
Hardegen explained that “bees” meant enemy aircraft and that this information that UA had not encountered Sunderlands so far on the Biscay crossing was welcome news indeed. “Puster,” Hardegen said. “Send message: WELL DONE, GREAT SEAMANSHIP, HAPPY CHRISTMAS.” The Old Man and the bridge watch leaned on the bridge coaming and followed with fascination as the gallant boat passed on the starboard beam, her commander’s white cap dimly visible above the tower, and then as, with her human cargo brought more than five thousand nautical miles, she receded from view in the black night aft.
* See Appendix A.
* See Appendix B.
5
Destination New York
0917 hours, Christmas Eve. Steering on the Nantucket Great Circle route used for reaching all six previously worked operational areas in the West Atlantic, “ALARMMM!” Hardegen’s shout down the bridge pipe first stunned, then supercharged every muscle on board. Brrirtg! Brring! Brring! In the Zentrale and aft a blur of well-trained hands whirred among the warren of valves and levers while the boots of the watch party, Hardegen in the rear, pounded on the floor plates, and Kaeding hollered over the loudspeaker: “All hands to the bow!” Down the fore-and-aft passageway every free hand, including the diesel machinists who had shut down their power plant, poured in a hunched running position through the compartments to whatever space they could find in the farthest points forward in the hull. Tolle, who had been asleep in a bunk, awoke to this bedlam of banged shins, crashing buckets, and seamen’s obscenities and wisely stayed in place. With so much weight forward to assist the planes at hard-a-dive, 123 went down fast by the bow, her binoculars hanging crazily as pendulums.
“Rig for depth charge, rig for silent running,” Hardegen ordered from his position at the chart table. To Schulz he said, calmly, “Go to fifty meters, Chief, then flatten your angle and steer down to A plus fifty.” (A was the code for twenty meters, used in wireless transmissions to disguise reported depths. Seventy meters equaled 231.5 feet. The procedure of going no deeper than fifty meters at hard-a-dive and then gradually “steering in” to greater depths had only that month been decided on as safest for the boat by Ubootwaffe engineers.1) As the needle approached fifty on the depth gauge, Schulz ordered his planesmen, “Bow on ten, stern on five.”
Hardegen looked over to Hoffmann. “Time on the dive, Number One?” With that question everyone in his hearing knew that the dive was a drill and not an actual emergency. Chests heaved and smiles flickered. “Thirty-seven seconds,” answered Hoffmann. That was the expired time from the sounding of the dive order to the placement of ten meters of water above the hull. Thirty-seven seconds was not bad, but—“Regulation is thirty-five, Number One,” Hardegen admonished. “Shave off those extra two and you may save our lives. Secure from depth charges. Crew return to their stations.”
“Yes, Herr Kaleu.” The admonition was meant as much for Schulz as for Hoffmann.
Hardegen followed the Tiefenmesser as the indicator passed the 60-meter mark. It was still well within the green range of the gauge, with caution amber starting at 100 and red, the danger zone, calibrated at 150 to 200. The Type IX was shipyard-certified to 200 meters (662 feet), but this “paper depth” below which water pressure theoretically would crush the hull had often been exceeded.2 Even at maximum posted depth, Type IX commanders had been confident that they were safely below the deepest settings of British Wabos.3 As the indicator reached 70 meters the LI Schulz neutralized the planes and trimmed the boat’s attitude in the water. With a practiced ear he listened along with Hardegen to every small creak and moan in the hull, now tightly compressed against the outside water pressure.
“Let’s stay here for a while, Chief,” Hardegen said, “to see how good a job Keroman did on our valves and seals.”
The “a while” lasted only seconds as, with a shattering blast, the water-depth gauge from the starboard diving bunker exploded, sending shards of glass across the control room.
“Not only that, Herr Kaleu,” Schulz shouted, “we have a cutoff valve problem! Fuel followed by seawater is leaking into the main bilge! Recommend surfacing!” Hardegen approved. “Stand by to surface,” he ordered. “Surface!” The boat went up at a moderate speed, broached bow-high, and settled down on the Biscay surface. While the lookouts scanned above, Schulz and his team made for the offending valve, which they found had not been properly installed. It was either negligence, Schulz reasoned, or a deliberate act of sabotage by French dockworkers at Keroman. With the machine shop equipment on board, together with the electric arc welder that operated off the portside main motor in the maneuvering room, Schulz and the control room machinist “Kraxel” remanufactured the valve housing and proved it watertight.
“Where are we now on the repairs?” the Old Man asked Kraxel after an hour and a half into the maintenance. Kraxel answered: “We’re almost finished with installation of the valve, Herr Kaleu, and then we’ll pump by hand to the regulating bunker. We lost some fuel. It was pumped out by the bilges when we surfaced. I estimate that we lost four cubic meters. And the chief found a problem with the main bilge pump and something on the periscope shaft that needs fixing, so I guess we’ll be done in another half hour. The busted bunker depth gauge we can do without for now. We’ve cleaned up the glass.”
“Very well. Carry on.” Hardegen was not pleased by the loss of fuel. Four cubic meters was not a lot, but when a boat knew that it was probably going to the edge of the chart, any loss was a cause for concern. Was the faulty valve sabotage? There had been a number of incidents recently, such as water and sand discovered in the lubricating oil of some boats, and the tampering with diesel exhausts on U-101 that had caused three crew deaths. There was no way of knowing, but Hardegen made a note to ask the appropriate questions when he returned to Keroman. For the noon log entry he examined Kaeding’s DR line, wrote the numbers on a card, and handed it to Rafalski to type on the KTB form. Distance on the surface during the previous twenty-four hours: 222 nautical miles. Distance submerged: 24.5.
1230 hours. Hardegen could have stayed in port for Christmas Eve. Three of the Paukenschlag boats had not yet sortied, Kais (U-130), Bleichrodt (U-709), and Zapp (U-66). But Hardegen thought that if he had waited until after the Nativity festival to sortie, his men, still feeling the effects of Burgundy and Cognac, would not have been at their edge for the critical first day in the bay. So Christmas Eve was to be at sea. He dived the boat to twenty meters and addressed the crew over the loudspeaker:
“This is the commander speaking. Today we celebrate our Christmas Eve, the most solemn night of the year for us Germans. We could wait until the evening hours, as we would if we were home, but that is the time of day, as you well know, when we need to be on the surface ma
king our best time. So we submerge now and spend a few hours in smooth running and peace and quiet. First, let me read to you a Christmas message, addressed to all boats, that has just been handed me by ‘Puster’ Rafalski: ‘On this German Christmas, I am with you in heart and thought—you, my proud, tough, fighting U-boat crews.’ Signed BdU, which means of course, Admiral Dönitz.4
“Now, since this is our War Christmas, I want to make it as joyous as possible. To that end I have a few surprises. So I ask every man who can leave his station to assemble now here in the control room.”
Within minutes every crew member except Hannes, the cook, Barth on the hydrophone, Rafalski on the radio, and two electricians on the E motors, was crowded tightly around Hardegen in the Zentrale.
“You know,” he then continued, “that our Patenbataillon has provided us with Christmas trees, enough for every compartment. They will be distributed in a few minutes by the petty officers. The largest of the trees, here in the control room, has been decorated with electric candles by the electricians. You know as well as I why we cannot use traditional beeswax candles. Those of you who have stations elsewhere in the boat are free to come here and to enjoy the large tree as long as we are submerged. It’s from the Harz Mountains. I know that its scent evokes memories of home. Second, the Patenbataillon cooks have provided us with some cakes to go along with the pancake meal that Hannes is preparing for us. Now, here are the surprises. First, young people in many parts of Germany have sent you presents, and according to our Christmas Eve customs these will be distributed to the compartments by our own Knecht Ruprecht [St. Nicholas’s helper], Herr Leutnant von Schroeter! But remember, if you have been a bad boy he will punish you! Next, a lot of mail has been received from your families at home. I will ask my two number ones to pass it out following the meal. I know that that is the most treasured Christmas gift of all, a Christmas message from your loved ones. Finally, the last surprise. You know that, unlike some other commanders, I never allow alcoholic beverages on my boat. Others may have their ‘victory bottles’ for successful attacks, and I do not judge them, it is simply not my operating procedure. But this one time, this one War Christmas, if you will, I have allotted a certain measure of red-wine punch to each man. The LI, who is so good at fluid levels, will distribute it!
Operation Drumbeat Page 17