Operation Drumbeat

by Michael Gannon

  As the gun crew gathered in the control room von Schroeter talked to them as an athletic coach might speak to his players, calming them down, reminding them of their assignments. He and they would be first up the ladder after the Old Man. In the passageway forward the petty officers were forming up the party that would hand-cradle the shells through the tower to the bridge and from there down to the two guns. Hardegen climbed up the ladder to the periscope saddle, where Hoffmann had been tracking the steamer’s approach at high-power magnification. As the Old Man placed his right eye into the lens cup Hoffmann reported, “It’s armed, Herr Kaleu. I can make out a deck gun aft and automatic weapons on the bridge. I estimate three thousand GRT, a freighter, and since it has guns, British.”

  “Yes, that’s about right, Number One. I see it has a hoop around the bow for attaching minesweeping equipment. Heavily loaded-sheds on deck. A five-centimeter gun, it looks like, with a shield, on a circular platform aft. Machine guns on the bridge. Number Two, go after their machine guns with ours. We can’t have them hurting our men on deck. Now here comes someone—a sailor with a load of wash that he’s hanging on a line. Maybe he won’t have to take it down.”

  As tension built in the control room Hardegen continued to watch intently as the target came on in the bright daylight. “One thousand meters … We’ll surface at six hundred … Use E motors and planes, LI… nine hundred … eight hundred … Stand by to surface! … seven hundred … Periscope down! Surface!”

  “Turmluk ist frei,” Schulz sang out. “Boot ist raus!” “Hatch is free. Boat is up!” The gathered deck force clambered noisily up the ladder, the Old Man in the lead. Hardegen took in the scene with his glasses while the gun crews took their positions and the two guns received their first shells from the crew chain. What must emotions be like on that steamer? he wondered. No doubt its seamen shuddered inside to see this huge metal shark suddenly break the surface and bare its teeth. “Permission to fire!” Hardegen called fore and aft through the megaphone. The target was now four hundred meters distant. With a sharp clang the 10.5 breach closed, and a second later the muzzle erupted with the first shot, which cleaned the barrel. It fell well aft of the target. The second shot hit below the bridge, the third below the stack. From von Schroeter’s gun dense brown cordite smoke trailed aft across the conning tower. But now the enemy gun crew was training its weapon in 123′s direction, and an incoming shell plunged into the water to port of the U-boat sending up a large column. “Take out that gun crew!” Hardegen yelled to the 2-cm machine-gun crew behind him, but they yelled back, “Herr Kaleu, the firing pin is broken!” Now four more incoming shells ricocheted off the water sending some fragments banging against the U-boat’s hull and others whistling past Hardegen’s head on the bridge. One puncture of the pressure hull, Hardegen worried, and 123 would not be able to dive anymore. The enemy gun crew had continued to fire while von Schroeter’s gun was pounding away at the hull beneath them—Hardegen would say later: “It must have been awful for that gun crew to feel our explosions just below them. I have to show my respect to the enemy: They stuck to their battle stations.”12 But finally the U-boat’s aim and range combined to hit squarely on the target’s gun pivot, destroying the gun and killing the crew. Von Schroeter’s 10.5 crew raised their arms and cheered. A few more shots set the bridge on fire and silenced the machine guns. The freighter blew off steam, slowed, and began settling by the stern. The surviving crewmen went into lifeboats while the wireless operator, among the last to leave, put out repeated SSS signals. On 123 the belowdecks crew one after the other were invited to the bridge to see the dramatic picture of a burning, sinking ship. Karlchen enjoyed the fresh air more than the scenery, before which his darkened eyes narrowed and blinked. Meanwhile the 2-cm gun crew replaced the firing pin and set the firing chamber for one shot to test the weapon.

  POW! The barrel exploded! A fragment entered the back of Tolle’s skull, and the photographer collapsed, bleeding badly, near the aft periscope where he had been taking photographs. Hannes, the cook, who was on the machine-gun crew, was hit, but not seriously, by a fragment in the left thigh. Blood poured from Tolle’s head and he began vomiting. Hardegen ordered the wounded men taken below. A crewman picked up Tolle’s camera and continued taking pictures while Hardegen returned his attention to the steamer, which was making water heavily by the stern. Navigating at dead slow he approached the lifeboats and asked their occupants the name of the victim. “Culebra,” an officer answered, “three thousand forty-four GRT out of Liverpool with a general cargo.” He went on to say that their boats were full of water and they had only one bucket, which was punctured. Hardegen ordered the forward gun crew below to round up a few buckets, some bread, lard, sausages, canned foods, and a knife for opening the cans. The survivors said that they probably had sufficient water. Kaeding then plotted their precise position, 35-30N, 53-25W, and gave them a course to the Bermudas. Hardegen observed in his KTB: “They were all very thankful and waved to us when we left.”13 It was the kind of solicitude that Hardegen could take time to show, seaman to seamen, in the mid-Atlantic “air-gap,” where he was unlikely to be surprised by enemy defenders.

  Unexpectedly, Culebras ammunition and flares magazine exploded and the U-boatmen and survivors alike were treated to a daytime fireworks display that included descending parachute flares. Hardegen ordered von Schroeter to shoot more holes into the water-line, after which the mutilated vessel sank over her sternposts, and cargo stored in the sheds on deck broke loose and slid overside. The “general cargo” turned out to be disassembled warplanes with RAF wing markings—red, white, blue, and yellow roundels. Finally, Culebras bow went vertical and she disappeared with all her mice. Hardegen resumed normal surface navigation, course 070, both engines half, and went below to assume the role of doctor. With Rafalski’s help he managed after a long while to stop Tölle’s profuse bleeding, but the photographer had suffered a serious concussion and the barrel fragment could not be removed without surgery, for which the Old Man and Rafalski were untrained and unequipped. On 123′s patrol to Freetown the year before a doctor had been on board. Would that they had one now, Hardegen reflected, especially as treatment of the large skull wound became as unpleasant as it was delicate. Hardegen gave Tolle injections of morphine to ease his pain. The five-centimeter thigh injury to Hannes required only a dressing. For the first time in Hard-egen’s career as a commander he experienced the hurt of war. He had often stood where the bitter wind of death blew across the waves, but this was the first time that that wind had even touched his own boat and crew, causing, fortunately this time, only the loss of blood, yet at the same time offering a somber, ghostly counsel that bade him remember how many mariners who had lived by the sword died by the same blade.

  The Old Man noticed that on board some of the light step and lilt of voice of the last several days had vanished. He could have passed up Culebra and sustained a pleasant, uneventful homeward cruise. But the Lion would have expected better, so long as there was ammunition for the guns. And that, he determined, would be his mind if he encountered anyone else across his course.

  Life had never been easy for tanker motorman Wilfred Larsen, of Bergen, Norway. Raised by a foster mother who beat him as regularly as she fed him, Wilfred escaped to sea when he was seventeen, first on board the training ship Statsraad Lehmkuhl, then on the cargo ships Grana and Salta. In April 1940 the Salta, together with six other Norwegian vessels, was interned at Dakar in French Senegal on the coast of West Africa. During the long internment many of the Norwegian crewmen became half-crazed on board their ships in the intense heat. Many engaged in fistfights at the slightest provocation. Many escaped and were captured. Finally, after thirteen hot months, nineteen-year-old Wilfred succeeded with several others in rowing four days in a lifeboat to the British colony of Gambia, and from there he made his way as a seaman to the United States and a new ship. She was Pa” Norway, a Norwegian motor tanker, 9,231 GRT, built in 1931, owned by Per Holm Shipping Compa
ny in Oslo but chartered since the German occupation of Norway by the Allied company Nortraship. On 27 January 1942, the tanker, with Wilfred aboard, was en route in ballast from Halifax to Aruba in the Dutch West Indies to load aviation gasoline for Britain. Like the rest of the all-Norwegian crew, Wilfred feared the “underwater” menace posed by the German U-boat. To him the presence of a 1918-vintage 12-cm gun on the tanker’s aft deck provided only the barest comfort. Wilfred knew from the SSS received from Culebra, news of which passed swiftly to all hands, that a U-boat was nearby, and he feared its sinister presence-deep down in the ocean as he imagined it—feared that its “beastly” and “bloodthirsty” crew would at any moment turn Pan Norway into one huge iron casket. “All we could do,” he remembered forty years later, “was to prepare ourselves to abandon ship. We placed extra water tanks in the lifeboats, extra food and cigarettes.” The crew, he said, had a near palpable sense of the U-boats. “We were completely surrounded. We could not see them, but we could sense their presence—a feeling that is impossible to describe. We stood double-watch at the gun. We stared into the night until our eyes hurt.”14

  Just off watch that evening, while he was having supper, Wilfred’s nightmare took form as an earsplitting bang and blinding flash filled the mess room. An artillery shell had smashed into the tanker’s starboard side. With the brilliant light followed by total darkness, Wilfred could not see anything for a while as he groped his way toward the gun deck. There, after his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw the U-boat of his fears, a single sharklike form moving boldly on the starboard surface. Fascinated and terrified at the same time, he watched the assailant’s foredeck gun spit red flashes as it loosed one, two, three more exploding projectiles at his ship’s side. The engine room took one of the hits, slowing way, and then the stern erupted in flames. It was no longer possible to man the gun, but Wilfred observed that machine guns on the bridge had taken the attacker under fire. He watched the U-boat circle astern of the tanker and come up on her port side. Then, knowing that Abandon Ship had been his only hope from the beginning, he raced for a starboard lifeboat. As he climbed into it the bridge machine guns were taken out by answering fire from the U-boat, and the bridge signalman began sending SURRENDER in Morse on the signal lamp. The U-boat’s gun ceased fire for ten minutes, apparently to allow the lifeboats to get down and away.

  Only two boats put out successfully, the rest having been damaged by the shelling. Wilfred succeeded in holding his boat’s descent on the davits until his best friend climbed in. They had had their photograph taken together on deck just the day before. Where had he been? The friend refused to say, even to speak. Obviously traumatized, he sat in the boat looking blankly, mutely ahead. Only many years later did Wilfred learn from his friend’s wife that, when the first shell struck, his friend had dashed below to the cabin they shared to rescue something precious and, while he was there, a second shell hit, jamming the cabin door. As his friend struggled to get out a third shell exploded against the ship, unjamming the door. In the lifeboat he was simply unable to handle the incongruity that the U-boat commander had both imprisoned him and released him. The lifeboat descended successfully down the falls. Wilfred was unconcerned that he had left behind eight hundred rare stamps and a prized sweater that he had just purchased in Halifax. To save himself was enough. Later, congratulating himself on his discretion, he would learn that only the steward failed to get away in a lifeboat or life jacket. (He had gone below to save a picture of his wife and was not seen again.)

  Wilfred’s lifeboat pulled away from the starboard side of the doomed ship. Other men, not so lucky, clung to preservers and wood planks in the water, kicking hard with their feet to escape the tanker’s death throes, while on the opposite side to them, unseen, the U-boat’s artillery began pounding again at the port waterline. After a time the U-boat came around to their side, where Wilfred could see the energetic Germans at their deadly work. The bombardment, which was incredibly loud, continued for two and a half hours before Pan Norway, by then a sieve, lifted her bow skyward and began a macabre dance, forty meters up, twenty meters down, each time expelling air from her interior, until, at last, a grotesque ballerina in the footlights of flaming oil, she passed below the dark water. At that instant the U-boat turned toward the survivors, causing Wilfred and his companions to shout in fear. He knew that now it was their turn to die. “I was petrified when the U-boat came toward us,” he said forty years later. “The sight of that dark monster I shall never forget. Nor will I forget the emotions that filled me during those long seconds when I felt sure I was about to die. I was barely twenty years old. I had not seen enough of the world. I had not had many experiences. It did not seem fair that I should die at that moment.”15 But, just as abruptly, to the Norwegians’ huge relief, the U-boat veered off at high speed toward the northeast.

  From the time of his first shots at this unfortunate tanker that chanced to intersect his course, Reinhard Hardegen had noticed another ship, fully illuminated, about three nautical miles to the northeast. He guessed—correctly—that it was a neutral. He intended to investigate the vessel when he finished with Pan Norway, whose name he could clearly see from the range, 250 meters, where he fired the 10.5. Before the tanker’s machine guns were disabled, the Norwegians had managed to make numerous hits on the U-boat’s conning tower and deck, but lacking the punch of artillery, the bullets had been no more than bee stings on the steel. Eins Zwei Drei did suffer one casualty when a cartridge case fell down the bridge hatch into the control room where it struck one of the control room machinists in the face. Hardegen sutured the man’s split upper lip, but his broken teeth would have to wait for a dentist’s chair in Lorient. After two hours of firing, ammunition for the 10.5 gave out and Hardegen peppered the tanker with the 3.7. At last the riddled hull went under, and Hardegen turned his glasses on the lighted ship in the distance. It lay to as it had for several hours, as though not wanting to miss any of the long-drawn-out punishment that Pan Norway was absorbing. Hardegen decided to go after it, not to shoot, since, one, he was out of shells, and two, the ship was obviously neutral, but in order to direct the ship to pick up survivors. It was in that spirit rather than in the one Wilfred Larsen feared that the commander of U-123 approached the Norwegians. He wanted to check on their condition, which he could do easily by the light of the oil flames. Satisfied that they could stay afloat until his return, he then called for both engines ahead full and raced after the neutral. What happened next Hardegen described after the action in his KTB. It is a moving account. Perhaps, later, back in Lorient, the Lion—he who had said, “We must be hard in this war”—reacted to this entry when he read it with mixed emotions, but nearly five decades later the reader of the German text is glad to have the chance, amid so many depictions of carnage and destruction, to acknowledge humanity and compassion in a protagonist when it appears:

  The previously mentioned light was a neutral ship, waiting three nautical miles away. We sailed up to it and to our surprise it took to its heels. We pursued at full speed and, using our blinker light, we asked it to stop, which it did. It was the Greek Mount Aetna sailing under a Swiss flag. We approached and asked that she pick up the survivors. She turned to do so and we led her to two lifeboats that we had observed previously. Then we went back to the site of the sinking, where we found a sailor floating in the water and we picked him up. Since he was injured by shell fragments and exhausted from struggling several hours in the water it was difficult to question him. Besides, he spoke only Norwegian.

  This seaman informed us that the crew were caught by the war in an English port and were forced to sail for the English. The captain was English, the crew Norwegian. They had just sailed from England to Halifax and now they were en route to Aruba. When we confronted him with the fact that their position and course hardly corresponded to an Aruba run he said that the ship had taken a circuitous route in order to avoid U-boats. They had not sighted us. After the first of our shells hit panic broke out on bo
ard. The crew fought each other for space in the lifeboats. This man was already in a lifeboat when a “friend” punched him in the face and knocked him overboard. The blow cost him his front teeth and the lifeboat passed him by in the water. So he was lucky that we found him, and he was very thankful.

  We then noticed that the Swiss ship was leaving the scene. We pursued her, stopped her with our blinker light, and handed over this survivor. The Swiss had picked up 29 men and that group told the captain that they were the entire crew. We knew that [Pan Norway] had a crew of 51. It turned out that those already taken on board were afraid that we would sink the Mount Aetna, too, and so they had persuaded the captain to steam off. We, however, had seen many more survivors of the tanker clinging to debris in the water, and we ordered the captain to return and save them, which he did. He thanked us warmly for not sinking his ship and for allowing him to rescue the others. We turned [back to our] course 070°. All the survivors lined the rails waving and wishing us luck for the voyage home.16

  Something had to be done for Tolle. His wound was festering, draining blood and pus, and he was in and out of delirium. The poor man needed a physician. Was there perhaps a German surface ship or U-boat nearby that had a doctor on board? Hardegen asked Rafalski to sift through his sheaf of intercepts. There was one possibility, Rafalski suggested, a German blockade runner named Spreewald that was proceeding north under the Norwegian camouflage Elg. Some days before she reported having reached Punkt (position) Specht, and her latest orders, also intercepted by 123, directed her to rendezvous with U-575 (Kptlt. Günther Heydemann) at Punkt Sperber for escort into Bordeaux. The rendezvous date was 29 January, just over a day away.17 Hardegen huddled with Kaeding to check the navigational code book for these reference points: Punkt Specht was northeast of South America, Sperber was mid-Atlantic in square CD. 123 was already entering the southwest corner of CD. There was no doubt they could make Sperber in time. But did Spreewald have a doctor? Hardegen drafted a signal to be sent to BdU: HAVE JUST SUNK PAN NORWAY IN CC8691 BY CANNON. OUT OF AMMUNITION. NET 66135 CRT. SURVIVORS PUT ON MOUNT AETNA. IN CASE PHYSICIAN IS ABOARD SPREEWALD REQUEST HIS SERVICES. HAVE ONE SERIOUSLY AND ONE LIGHTLY WOUNDED. PROPAGANDA CAMERAMAN TÖLLE HAS SPLINTER IN BACK OF HEAD, MUCH LOSS OF BLOOD, CONCUSSION OF BRAIN. CAN BE AT RENDEZVOUS BY 29 JANUARY. FROM THIS POINT WILL KEEP WIRELESS SILENCE AND PROCEED ACCORDING TO INSTRUCTIONS. 40 CUBIC METERS FUEL REMAINING.18