On 123′s bridge a shaken Hardegen yelled down the voice pipe: “LI, weld that pipe and install it or we’ll be rammed! Do you understand?”
“Yes, Herr Kaleu!”
Schulz raced through the engineroom bumping Karlchen Latislaus aside as he went. “Karlchen, get ready to install the pipe—emergency!” When he reached the welding station in the aft torpedo room he hollered at Kraxel: “Finish it! Finish it! We’re about to be rammed!”
Kraxel’s torch raced along the fracture and when he was satisfied, he flung back his face shield, looked briefly at his work, and handed the pipe to Schulz. “It should hold, LI,” he said in the wake of the disappearing Schulz who was already racing with the life-saving organ to the moribund port engine, where with pounding heart and little breath he assisted in the installation. In two minutes the port cylinder coughed to life, the temperatures held, and Karlchen clutched the engine shaft.
At once Hardegen on the bridge sensed the lurch forward. And none too soon! The whaler’s blade was only seventy-five meters astern. But now they might be able to keep that distance. The thundering dieseis bent to the task. The bow threw up a boiling wake. “Helmsman, rudder amidship!” Any turn, however slight, might slow them in their escape. With Hoffmann at his side he stared at the black giant bearing down on them. He did not need any reminding from Hoffmann: “Herr Kaleu,” Hoffmann shouted over the dieseis, “if we reach diving depth we still can’t dive. Submerging will slow us up too much. He’ll catch us. Even if we got the boat under, a deep draft ship like that would slice us across the top.”
“Number One,” Hardegen yelled back, “you better pray that the weld on the cooler pipe holds. If it goes out on us now we’re finished.” He paused and then added, “The water’s too shallow for diving anyway. And we’re headed south along the same depths. I’ll turn seaward if we can open up some distance. If only we had two eels in the stern tubes! Our pursuer doesn’t have any guns, I guess. He would have fired on us by now. We’re sitting ducks.” He turned to the voice pipe: “LI, what speed are we making?”
After a moment Schulz sang back, “Estimating eighteen-max with your freshening sea.”
An edge of half a knot would be enough. Hardegen ordered the bridge watch to take a squatting position behind the fairwater in order to reduce the drag created by their heads and shoulders. It might be a futile gesture but everything, he reasoned, should be tried. The photographer Tolle, who always liked to be on the bridge with his camera when there was action, now made an appearance in the hatch opening. Hardegen angrily ordered him below.
Hoffmann said from a kneeling position, “Herr Kaleu, if she reaches our stern we can go rudder hard right and let the stern take the brunt with the rest of the boat flying off to starboard. Recommend moving all hands forward except engine crew and closing all passageway hatches aft of the control room.”
“Very well,” Hardegen replied. “Order Schulz to get on it.”
As movements and precautions got under way below Hardegen noticed that crewmen of the Kosmos ¡I were standing on the bow watching them. He decided to wave to them, which he thought they would find disconcerting. Then he waved to port and starboard as though signaling other U-boats.2 To Hoffmann he said, “Get Rafalski up here with the yellow signal light and have him simulate signals to other boats! And send up flares and the pistol!”
When Rafalski came up Hardegen bent below the cowling while the Puster went through the motions of his ruse. When it seemed enough Hardegen ordered Rafalski below while he looked up to gauge the distance between the hunter and the hunted. If he was not mistaken 123 had drawn ahead slightly. Just to gain a little more advantage he pointed the flare pistol at the hunter’s bridge and fired. A brilliant flash of red light that must have blinded the Norwegian bridge poured cascades of incandescence down the ship’s sides. Hardegen readied the pistol and fired again. The second flash, against the upper works, showed that the men who had stood on the bow had left that position, which was good, he thought, since he was relieved of the temptation to use the machine gun against them as a way of giving the ship’s master second thoughts. Now it did appear certain that 123 was pulling away, meter by meter. The pulsing dieseis were at their limits, and the limits seemed to be enough. Eins Zwei Drei probably had a one-knot advantage. Hardegen looked at his chronometer. An hour had passed. He ordered the bridge watch to their feet.
“Look alive,” he said. “So far we have outdistanced the whaler. But she called for Navy airplanes an hour ago. We’re cornered. If the Navy had come, by this time we might have been finished. They may yet come. Keep your eyes on the horizon, particularly to the west. At the first sight of aircraft I’ll order up the AA crew. We’ll have to fight it out on the surface unless we can make deep water first. The sun’s coming up. We are vulnerable as hell until we can dive. There’s enough distance now between us and the whaler for the boat to turn east and then north. I doubt that our enemy will want to go north. Number One, execute gradual ten-degree turn to the east and north.”
“Yes, Herr Kaleu.”3
By an hour and fifty minutes into the chase, 123 was on a northeast heading and the Kosmos II, left behind, had resumed normal navigation. At 1420 (0720 ET) Barth on the wireless heard the chatter of Navy aircraft taking off from nearby Norfolk. Alerted, Hardegen changed course to 90 degrees and deeper water. An hour and fifty minutes after the whaler had first sent out the alarm and position, a single Navy aircraft circled over the position where the U-boat had last been sighted, but by that time a rainsquall developed and 123 dived successfully to avoid detection. The aircraft, unable to find its quarry, gave up and returned to base. Even in a situation where the enemy was trapped the USN could not prevail.
Now, in the peace and steady state of submerged cruising, a greatly relieved Hardegen composed this entry in his KTB:
Die Nacht der langen Messer war beendet—“The night of the long knives was over.” A drumbeat [Paukenschlag] with eight ships [he counted the two “mystery” ships and Malay], including three tankers and 53,060 GRT [more like 40,898]. It is a pity that the night I was off New York we did not have two mine-laying boats along. And tonight we could have used 10 to 20 boats instead of one. Every boat would have gotten its fill. I have sighted no fewer than 20 steamers, some with their lights on. All of them hugged the coast, the darkened ones not visible until two or three nautical miles away.… Monitoring the 600 meter band proved a real boon since I learned not only about the removal of lightships but about the recognition signals of the buoys that replaced them. In addition, I received U.S. assistance from wireless bearings and reports about traffic density. After the first sinkings, though, wireless traffic became very restricted.4
When night fell Hardegen surfaced and sent a signal listing the number of ships and tonnage sunk by ¡23 to BdU at Lorient. Not many hours later he received acknowledgment from the Lion: TO THE DRUM-BEATER [PAUKENSCHLäGER] HARDEGEN. BRAVO! YOU BEAT THE DRUM WELL. BDU.5 As the boat made its way eastward on a course for home via Bermuda, Hardegen lay in his bunk savoring the recognition and composing in his mind the reports that he would make to the Lion personally on his return to base: Targets abound off the coast from New York to Cape Hatteras…. Most are lighted…. Only the British seem to have guns…. American defenses against U-boats almost nonexistent…. Sighted few destroyers or patrol craft…. Aircraft untrained and inefficient…. Norwegian whaler gave us our only real fight…. Coastal towns and cities fully illuminated…. Lighthouses, buoys, and beacons operating as in peacetime, though some lightships have been withdrawn.
Close by his head Hardegen could hear the slap of the surface rollers against the port side plating while his bunk pitched and yawed with the rest of the boat’s interior, now a much more relaxed environment than at any time since Christmas. Officers and crewmen moved through the passageway with a lighter, slower step, their conversations, for a long while past edged with the baritone of tension and fatigue, now taking on a bright tenor sparkle, punctuated by freque
nt loud laughter. With permission Rafalski played swing music from WBT, Charlotte, North Carolina, through the loudspeakers: “Perfidia,” “The Hut-Sut Song,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” In the galley Hannes banged his pots around in time with the music while “Icke” the galley mate flattened empty tin cans to the same beat. Other duties were being performed with the same animation, born of the knowledge that for a while the war was over and everyone was going home. There was a nimbleness to the movements of the bridge watch as they mouse-squeaked by in their gum boots, of the hands detailed to dump trash and garbage overside in weighted sacks, and of the stewards as they passed through the compartments with the obligatory daily ration of lemon juice. Not only the need but the desire of the men for exercise was manifest. Calf muscles had gone soft and slack. And everyone anticipated the day when he could emerge from this eternally soggy fug into dry, bright sunlight. It had been twenty-eight days since 123 left La Rade de Lorient, and all hands felt the physical effects of the patrol. Psychologically, though, they seemed not to have suffered much. Where other crews on long patrols were known to have developed Blechkoller, the tin-can neurosis that came from prolonged nervous strain in a U-boat’s unnatural enclosure, this crew’s mental state was holding up quite well, it seemed to Hardegen. No doubt the boat’s huge success was one reason. And now the anticipation of dry land, baths, girls, Beck’s, Martell, and Iron Crosses lifted spirits further. Certainly of this boat, Hardegen thought, the old sea saying was true: Je länger die Fahrt, um so besser die Kameradschaft—“The longer the voyage, the better the crew’s spirit.”
In the torpedo rooms fore and aft the mixers, with no more eels to mix, passed the time playing skat, or reading, or telling stories, or sleeping. With the eels gone the bunks were in down position full-time, and more than the usual number were occupied since, on turning for home, the Old Man had ordered the sour-smelling sheets and pillow cases turned to their clean sides. With the pressure off, sleep came easily, especially to the strains of swing music mixed with the harmonic throb of the dieseis. When not on watch the officers now spent a large amount of time playing chess and the board game Mensch ärgere Dich nicht.6 With his sextant and chronometer Walter Kaeding was often on the bridge to catch a round of stars or sun lines; then, in his own high state of anticipation, he would go below and step off four-hour positions on the chart track home. In the engineroom Karlchen Latislaus nursed his “babies” along, the starboard clutched to the screws, the port to the dynamotors, for charging the batteries. Every hour he lubricated the rocker arms and entered the cooling water temperatures in the engine logs. He hoped he would not again have to strain his babies to escape whalers. A member of the bridge watch had described the close call to him. What an impertinence, Karlchen thought, a factory ship pursuing a U-boat! He whistled through his teeth, however, when he recalled how near the boat had been to having one engine down because of the broken cooler pipe. If Kraxel had taken any longer than he had Eins Zwei Drei would be history in the mouth of that slavering Leviathan.
Hoffmann and von Schroeter huddled in the control room debating whether it would have been wiser for the Old Man to have turned toward shore instead of holding to a straight course south to evade the whaler. Hoffmann thought that the boat should have risked the small loss of speed in a turn to the west since the whaler would not have pursued them into shoal water where she was certain to run aground. Both officers ended up agreeing that the Old Man’s decision was the correct one, however, since it succeeded. They laughed when they both spoke together the same line, now a commonplace on board: “Well, he pulled it off again!”7 The LI, Schulz, half listening nearby, was having some fun with Tolle, telling the photographer the kinds of things, Schulz knew, that Tolle did not like hearing. When the dynamotors charged the batteries, as they were doing now, Schulz told him, a high level of hydrogen built up in the battery compartments. If any spark got to that hydrogen from any source, be it motor, wireless, or strike of metal against metal, it would cause an explosion and fire, and that in turn would fill the hull with chlorine gas, and Tolle knew what that meant, did he not? As Tolle nodded sickly, Schulz was confident that he could identify the one person on board who wanted to be back home more than anyone else.
22 January. 2400 to 0400 (CET), Hardegen made a reconnaissance of the coast of Bermuda on his passage eastward, noting for the KTB that the towns of Hamilton and Saint George were as brilliantly lit as coastal cities and towns on the U.S. seaboard. Indeed, the night defenses here seemed to be based on illumination. Floodlights swept the harbor entrances, and twice the bridge sighted star-shell barrages at Hamilton Harbor. Flashing buoys were everywhere. Mount Hill light-house was out but was visible as a silhouette against the night sky. One could easily see hotels, single homes, the radio station tower, and other lighted features. There was no sign of mines or of nets. Hardegen did add, however: “A very strong tidal current prevails here. U-boats will have to navigate very carefully.”8 The next day BdU transmitted these observations to all Atlantic boats.9
The KTB for the next day’s travel recorded only one practice emergency dive and a cleaning of the 10.5 gun. But for 24 January two short entries over Hardegen’s signature represented major moments in his life. The first, at 1600 (CET), recorded: “We just listened to the special shortwave announcement [from Germany] about the successes of U-boats in American waters. Our ship was mentioned by name.”10 The second, six lines long, recorded the realization of one of Hardegen’s chief professional goals. At 1740 (CET), he walked into the control room to find it tightly crowded with most of his officers and crewmen. What was going on? LI Schulz, with a broad grin, addressed the Old Man.
“Herr Kaleu! Your officers and men salute you! On this war cruise you have left standing orders that all wireless signals addressed to this boat are to be brought to you instantly after decrypting. This one time we have disobeyed you long enough for Kraxel to manufacture something in the aft torpedo room. I have the honor now to read to you two F.T.s received by our boat. The first: TO HARDEGEN. I EXTEND TO YOU AND YOUR BRAVE CREW MY HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS ON THE AWARD OF THE KNIGHT’S CROSS. SUPREME NAVAL COMMAND. SHORTLY after Admiral Raeder’s signal the following arrived from Admiral Dönitz: TO HARDEGEN. HEARTY CONGRATULATIONS ON THE KNIGHT’S CROSS. BDU.11
“Herr Kaleu, the officers and crew decided that you should not have to wait until reaching ¡sere to receive your Ritterkreuz. And so Kraxel here has fashioned our own version for you to have in the meantime. You will notice that on the reverse side we have engraved the number of ships, sixteen, that the boat has sunk since you took command, together with the tonnages. Congratulations, sir.”
Schulz then placed the Ritterkreuz copy with its attached ribbon around the Old Man’s neck while the Zentrale rang with cheers. Hardegen energetically shook the hands of Schulz, Hoffmann, von Schroeter, and the petty officers, then joined in the general merriment as Amstein’s accordion struck up sailors’ songs.
1431 hours (CET), 25 January, position CC 7927, boat on the surface in state 4 seas under mostly cloudy skies, winds at 4 from the southwest, daylight visibility twelve miles, course 070 degrees. The voice pipe barked: “Commander to the bridge!” Hardegen bounded up the ladder with his 7 x 50s and trained them along the starboard lookout’s point. “Steamer on starboard bow, Herr Kaleu,” one of them said. “Yes,” Hardegen responded, drawing out the word. “Our Sunday dinner.” He called down the pipe: “Number Two to the bridge!” When von Schroe-ter arrived Hardegen showed him the mast tops and said, “I estimate it at nine knots, course two twenty, crossing to port of our reciprocal. We’ll submerge and wait for it. Have your gun crews stand by. With no eels left we’ll have to take this one out by artillery. You, Schulz, and I will need to coordinate. Meet in the control room. Now let’s get under. Alarm!”
When Schulz had the boat at periscope depth and trimmed, the Old Man held his conference. They would attempt to sink this vessel by artillery alone, he said, and employ machine-gun fire at the bridg
e and at any sighted gun positions. If the target was unarmed, von Schroeter was to direct his cannon fire at the waterline below the stack since that was where the engine room would be. He was to use both the 10.5 forward and the 3.7 aft. If the steamer turned out to be armed, von Schroeter would have to concentrate his fire on the gun or guns and neutralize them before disabling the steamer’s hull and power. He reminded the two officers that in a daylight artillery duel the U-boat would have nowhere near the advantage it had in a surprise torpedo attack. A gunfight meant hand-to-hand battle. It meant finding out who had the better training, the better aim on a tossing deck, the stronger nerves, and the greater luck. He asked them to remember that the goddess of fortune always smiled on them when they refused to give up.
“LI,” he said, “you take charge inside the boat. Have every man ready for damage and fire control. Be sure that the ammunition chain works efficiently and safely. Number Two, have your gun crew steadied down. With the swell upstairs it’s going to require cool minds and level hands to load and aim. Be sure the aimer, layer, and loader are strapped in. I’ll navigate at a speed that will wet you the least, and I’ll maneuver against the wind so that your sight will not be hindered by our own powder smoke. Have Tolle come up last. All right, everybody, stand by!”
Operation Drumbeat Page 37