The afternoon watch that came up at 1200 hours CET (0700 ET), and precisely on time since punctual watch relief was a matter of honor, knew full well what to expect from the tumult they had experienced belowdecks, where crewmen were being thrown about like puppets and some, nauseous from watching the inclinometer bubble or compass needle, were puking into buckets. The new watch were glad to see the men whom they relieved. Every lookout knew the story of V-106 on a calm blue day in October 1941, just outside the Bay of Biscay, when an unexpected wave from a stern sea carried the unstrapped bridge watch overboard. When Kptlt. Hermann Rasch came up the hatch later for a look at the sky, he found the four men simply gone—vanished. Ever after Rasch grieved whenever he speculated how the men must have cried out to the unknowing boat, then called to one another, then in their fatigue and despair yielded to the choking waters. There were stories, too, of men thrown out of their safety belts by sudden seas, and of ribs crushed against the binoculars or coaming, and of faintings from the stress of facing the violent, implacable Atlantic. No new watch relieved its exhausted predecessor without a healthy measure of respect for the ocean and fear of its freakish wrath. And when a watch completed its assigned hours, they counted themselves lucky to be alive and under cover, which was how the bone-chilled forenoon watch felt now, when—after four straight hours of presenting their bodies to the punishing seas—they hung up their binoculars, doffed their dripping oils and boots, splashed Colibrí on their salt-encrusted beards and eyebrows, warmed their feet and hands before an electric space heater, gulped a cup of Hannes’s coffee, and then, otherwise fully clothed, climbed stiffly into bunks. Sodden clothing dried on the body as well as anywhere else on board, including the aft torpedo room, which some men used. But perfect dryness was never achieved in an environment that was now always humid, where fog glowed around all the lamps, and one had to cut away the mold before eating Hannes’s bread. No matter; the watch fell fast asleep. Even the foul emanations of the boat’s interior were a blessing after the fragrant hell they had endured outside.
The Old Man himself appeared on the bridge during the afternoon watch and was surprised to find visibility improving to eleven miles. Snow still fell thickly, ice splinters covered the bridge cowling, and wind continued to thrash at the unsteady boat. Watch Officer Hoffmann and the lookouts held tightly on to their harnesses lest they lose their footing on the slick deck with its snow and slush. The wind, still from the northwest, was slightly down yet strong enough that when Hoffmann turned to speak to Hardegen it blew the words out of his mouth and away. What most struck the Old Man was the seamless gray of the snowscape. There was no discernible horizon, only one disorienting curve of gray from sea to sky. The sense of being alone without reference in the middle of the day was unsettling, particularly since the upper hatch remained closed against shipped water and the showers of spume and spray; except that periodically the turret hatch would open and hands from below would take the binoculars in, turn and clean them with a leather or dry absorbent cloth, then hand them back to the lookouts as the bilges below pumped out the water that splashed through the opening. The only variation in this gray-shaded world of which U-/23′s paint scheme was a part was the white foam that boiled on the crests of breaking rollers, or scalloped from the bow wake, or poured from the limber holes along the sides of the hull casing. Hardegen leaned forward over the cowling to tell, if he could, how well if at all the twin front wind collars on the bridge fairwater were working. Their purpose was to turn the horizontal air currents upward and over the bridge. To Hardegen the fairings seemed to reduce somewhat the straight-ahead wind, and that was what they were designed for. Quarter and counterclockwise winds seemed to be unaffected. And that, too, was unexceptional. Hardegen looked at his wrist chronometer, shielding it against the snow and spray. The mixers had to pull torpedoes from the tubes and adjust them. Eins Zwei Drei was getting too close to U.S. sea-lanes to neglect that task any longer, but it was too dangerous to undertake while the boat was being tossed like a cork in a maelstrom. Hardegen cupped his hand to Hoffmann’s ear: “Take the watch below!” he yelled. “I’m going into the cellar!”
As the boat slid under the angry surface, men exhaled audibly in relief. Eins Zwei Drei settled into a quiet glide. In his bunk Alwin Tolle thought that the war must have ended. He had never known such sudden peace. Moving gingerly with his splinted finger onto the floor plates he asked a steward who was passing through with a pail of lemon juice what was happening. “Mixers have to mix,” he was told. Tolle had watched the procedure before, but too many men and too many groceries had obstructed his view of the torpedo mates at work. He wondered if he might have a better view in the after torpedo room. But that meant passing through the diesel and maneuvering rooms, to which Hoffmann had not yet introduced him. £5 macht nichts—Vs/e\, it was probably all right. He would make the transit on his own. After reaching the control room he asked the LI, Schulz, if it was all right to open the engine-room hatch. It was, said Schulz matter-of-factly, but pull it shut after passing through. Tolle opened the hatch, entered in a bent position, and stood upright in a world of machinery that was strangely inert and silent given the constant hammering he had heard from it day and night. So these were the dieseis. He looked down two rows of engines on either side of the gangway from which rose lazy spumes of heat smoke and a dense, sweet smell of oil. He would have gagged, he thought, had he not already had his fill of that smell which, with other scents, defiled the boat throughout. From his left materialized a face he recognized from the Christmas party but had not seen since.
“The photographer, aren’t you?” said “Karlchen”—Karl Latislaus—the chief diesel mechanic in his black overalls, wiping his hands on a towel just as black. There was an edge to his voice, betraying the general disdain that seamen had for landlubbers and suggesting as well a certain irritation with his lot in life, or so Tolle thought. Thirty years old, Karlchen was the oldest man on board.
“You must want pictures of some real heroes,” he said, smiling grimly.
“No, I don’t have my camera,” Tolle said. “I’m just passing through. But maybe I should learn—”
“Yes, you should learn something about these poor bastards,” Karlchen said, pointing jerkily at the rest of the engine crew faintly visible through the foul gauze at the far end of the passageway. “Six hours on, six hours off, not knowing where the hell we are or what the hell we’re doing, living by the klaxon of the control-room telegraph. None of these men has seen the sky for two weeks, and it’s not likely they’ll see it again until we get home.” Karlchen then suggested that Tolle pay a little attention to what was really driving this boat. “Those electric motors that are on now—they’re for rest and relaxation. These babies,” he said, patting the cylinder heads of the two long, gray engines within near-shoulder reach of him on either side as he stood in the passageway, “these are the power plants that take us to war.”
There were two dieseis, he explained to Tolle, manufactured by Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg AG, which had made engines for 1914-18 boats and now provided updated power systems for both Type VII and IX boats. These MANs were each nine-cylinder, four cycle, supercharged and salt water-cooled. At maximum power setting they each developed 2,200 horsepower at 470 RPMs. In a good sea they could drive 123 at eighteen-plus knots.*
Karlchen escorted Tolle aft to the maneuvering and electric motor room, where he called attention to the bright, clean panels and floor plates of the E-motor space, which contrasted vividly with the oily, stinking world that he inhabited. “These two guys,” he said, pointing to E-maschine mates Renner and Pleuser, “will tell you what an easy life they have running their little silvery toy machines.” Karlchen withdrew through the hatch chuckling at his own sarcasm, while Tolle tried to make sense out of the sculpted panels, black gauges, and red switches that confronted him.
Pleuser explained that on either side of the passageway were twin dynamotors, or E motors, manufactured by Siemens-Schuckertw
erke AG, model type ZGU345/34. Each E motor was rated at 500 horsepower. Power was supplied by storage batteries—2 by 62 cells 28 MAL 1000, one of the largest accumulator types used in the Kriegsmarine—most of which were positioned under the forward compartments to counterbalance the weight of the dieseis. With batteries in parallel at 210 volts the motors could develop 500 horsepower, 275 RPMs, and 1,950 amps, but only for one hour’s duration. Like the dieseis, the E-motors clutched directly to the line shafts. Tolle could see the voltage and ampere gauges, the shaft RPM indicators, rudder angle indicators, and, by the hatch, the control room telegraph. On the starboard side Pleuser and Renner identified for him a panel with controls for electric welding and a four-stage Junkers air compressor for filling containers of compressed air that the control room needed to blow water from the ballast tanks when the boat surfaced, to start the dieseis, and to launch the torpedoes from their tubes.
Tolle thanked the two mates and exited through the aft hatchway. It was too much to assimilate.
The aft torpedo room was not unlike the forward torpedo room, it seemed to Tolle. There were eight bunks for sixteen crewmen, though for the moment some were lashed up to the sides to allow room for the torpedoes. At the extreme stern there were two white-faced torpedo tubes. The mixers were busy at the arduous task of coaxing an eel out of its tube, with all the expected sexual expressions—of which the Old Man did not approve. The differences were minor: two tubes instead of four, and directly in front of them there stood a lathe for repairs and an auxiliary steering wheel in the event something disabled the helmsman’s buttons in the conning tower. And the view was better. It was easier here for Tolle to follow the actions of the mixers as they tended to the torpedoes that sat both in and out of their launch tubes and required these every-three-to-five-day inspections and adjustments to maintain launch condition. Ordinarily on an extended cruise one torpedo fore and aft was withdrawn from its tube each day, but heavy seas made that regular sequence of inspections dangerous if not impossible. Numerous accidents had occurred when torpedo mates in rough weather had used their body weight to prevent eels swinging in their harnesses from bumping structures and thus bending propellers or throwing directional controls out of calibration. As Reinhard Hardegen himself would write, “Many physical injuries take place here because the crewmen would rather protect the torpedo by intervening with their own flesh and blood than allow a torpedo to be damaged.”2
Now the mixers’ gleaming muscular arms manhandled a grease-streaked eel from the Number 6 tube and onto hoist rings and chains suspended from an I-beam secured to pad eyes on the overhead. The thickly coated weapon assumed an ominous presence as it hung under wire-guarded lights before Tölle’s fascinated gaze. How much money—forty thousand Reichsmarks [ten thousand dollars] he had heard—had been invested in this sinister thing? How many brains and man-hours? How many people would die from its awful self-immolation? Tölle’s fascination increased as he watched the formal surgical procedure begin. One mixer unscrewed a small test plate near the warhead while another removed an entire panel from the electric motor housing near the stern. Soon additional plates and panels were spread on a floor cloth, and many of the eel’s innards were exposed. A mate holding a checklist clipboard offered Tolle a running commentary on the procedure:
These G7e electric eels, sometimes called T-2s, required much more care and maintenance, he said, than the old G7a compressed air-driven type. The boat still carried a couple of G7as. In fact there was one in the adjoining tube. The Old Man probably would use them first to get rid of them. Their exhaust gases left a bubble wake and their warhead was smaller, 380 kilograms compared to 500 in the G7e. Since the wakeless, more destructive electrics were a better weapon their maintenance was worth the trouble. What the mixers were doing at the bow end was checking the gyropots and guidance system generally. They were looking at, among other things, the pendulum, hydrostatic diaphragm, and differential valve in the depth-keeping mechanism. That mechanism had to be exactly tuned. The Old Man liked to fix depth settings as shallow as possible, two to three meters, depending on seas and swells as well as on target draft, so the depth had to be maintained precisely if the torpedo was not to broach and betray itself. Later, he said, Tolle would see the men tilt the eel with gyros running and check the angles of the vertical and horizontal rudders. For now the inspections inside continued: bearings and axles, steering controls, motor armature, lubrication points, and so on. But arguably the most important task of all was recharging batteries. These light lead storage batteries were the sole source of power. If they failed, everything else in the torpedo failed. So, as Tolle could understand, the mixers were especially careful to ventilate the batteries and prepare them for charging by the dieseis as soon as the boat surfaced. One last inspection of the structure remained, however, before the torpedo was partially reinserted in its tube prior to charge, and that was the mixers’examination of the PÍ-G7H impact pistol that, upon impact with a target, caused the torpex warhead to explode. The problem with these pistols was that their zinc lever caps tended to corrode, and if the guard flap should deteriorate the pistol would be alive. One big jolt to the boat and—boom! The crew could forget their girls in Lorient. And deep in the recesses of every mixer’s mind was fear of what might happen when the exterior tube caps were opened to the sea. Every torpedo was programmed so that its small nose propeller would revolve so many times—over about four hundred meters’ distance—before a screw thread armed the explosive charge. Theoretically it was possible that when water rushed into the open tubes before launching that the flow against the pistol propeller could activate the device that controlled the torpedo’s safety run and cause the eel to arm itself while still in the tube. In which case maybe—boom! No more drinks at the Café les Trois Soeurs.3
None of this reassured Alwin Tolle, who decided to return to his bunk.
After the boat resurfaced Reinhard Hardegen leaned against the lurching chart table and read the wireless and radiotelephone intercepts that Rafalski had brought him. Most were from merchant ships on the international distress six hundred-meter band. Others were from United States naval vessels. All were related to gale seas that tormented the lanes through which 123 had just passed. The transmissions told of merchantmen from convoys HX 168 and ON 52 battered and lashed by force 9 seas and force 10 winds. Hardegen smiled knowingly at one ship’s weather report: “The numbers don’t go any higher.” He knew that for most on the bruising cold rollers that day the war had halted of its own accord. It was challenge enough to survive. Perhaps meteorology would make peace where men could not. He thought about that for a while until brought up short by the question, Where were the other boats of Gruppe Paukenschlag? How were they faring in this winter storm? He realized that he did not know, and, given rigid wireless silence, could not. It was 9 January, 123′s eighteenth day at sea, the American East Coast coming up. There was nothing to do but press on alone and hope that all was well with Folkers and Zapp, Bleichrodt and Kals.
At 2300 hours (1700 ET) Rafalski handed him an FT. marked Offizier. A signal from BdU! Hardegen stumbled toward the wardroom table where Rafalski had already laid out the Schlüssel M. As he pressed the keys and copied out the decrypt, adrenaline rushed through his bloodstream.
“Rafalski!” he shouted at the Puster. “Call for the officers! We begin our attacks on the 13th!” He bolted for the 1870G chart in the confidential papers locker.
Rafalski had not seen the Old Man so elated since the opening of the Operation Order two weeks earlier. He called for the officers as directed and watched them assemble around the Commander, who held out the decrypt for them to read:
OFFIZIER
1058/9/1/42
(1) OCCUPY FOLLOWING ATTACK AREAS. ZAPP ATTACK AREA ROMAN NUMERAL I. HARDEGEN II. FOLKERS III. BLEICHRODT IV AND V. KALS VI.
(2) FOLKERS HARDEGEN ZAPP CONTINUE ADVANCE 10 JANUARY EARLY. BDU COUNTS ON YOUR ARRIVING IN ATTACK AREA 13 JANUARY.
(3) BLEICHRODT KALS ADVANCE PROM
PTLY ENOUGH FOR NEW ATTACK AREAS TO BE REACHED ON 13 JANUARY.
Operation Drumbeat Page 26