Horst von Schroeter, who at age twenty-three had been jumped over numerous senior officers to command of 123, because, as Hardegen argued to Dönitz, “he has such rapport with the crew they will fight the boat better for him than for any other commander,” took 123 to further successes, in the process winning his own Knight’s Cross. True to the seaman’s superstition, the boat’s only unsuccessful cruise was its thirteenth, in March-April 1944. Von Schroeter ended the war in command of a new generation electroboat Type XXI. In the postwar years he was recalled to service in the new German Navy (Bundesmarine), and as commander of all NATO forces in the Baltic he rose to vice admiral, the highest rank in the peacetime Navy. He lives in Bonn.
Like many others in the crew who had served under Hardegen, Fritz Rafalski eventually ended up on another boat, in his case the minelayer U-233. Off Halifax on 5 July 1944, this boat was sunk by U.S. Destroyer Escorts USS Baker and Thomas from an escort group centered around the carrier USS Card. Thirty-one of Rafalski’s crew were killed. He and twenty-nine others were rescued and taken to the United States aboard Card. He spent the remainder of the war picking cotton as a POW at Camp McCain in Mississippi, where he says he was well treated. He lives in Bonn.
U-123 was decommissioned at Lorient on 19 August 1944. The boat was later recommissioned in the French Navy under the name Blaison. She was scrapped in 1957.
In volume 4 of Winston Churchill’s History of the Second World War, published in 1950, the former Prime Minister wrote: “The U-boat attack was our worst evil. It would have been wise for the Germans to stake all upon it.”6
For thirty-nine years tanker motorman Wilfred Larsen of the Pan Norway was unable to shake the mental picture of the man who had been both executioner and savior on that night at sea, 27 January 1942, when his ship went down. Permanently fixed in his memory was the sight of the U-boat commander, binoculars in hand, scanning to see if Wilfred and his companions were all right, then steaming off to hail the Mount Aetna and ensure that every man in the water was rescued, even when some of the Norwegians themselves attempted to persuade the Swiss master to depart prematurely. For thirty-nine years Wilfred felt himself in terrible debt to the German who had transmuted the Atlantic from a battlescape to a sea of mercy and thus given him a life he would not otherwise have had. Back in Bergen after the war, he bought a home, married, and continued the life of a seaman. At age fifty he began to experience nightmares about his escape from death, and his nerves became so raw that he jumped at any unusual noise. When medication failed to help his condition he decided that the only remedy was to meet the man whose memory presided over his every day, waking and sleeping. Perhaps then he could lay to rest some ghosts, some debts, and some ill-understood resentments.
On a railroad siding in Bremen, Germany, in December 1981 the short, roundish Wilfred excitedly took the outstretched hands of a tall, athletic-looking, gray-haired man. As the two men later drove through the streets of Bremen in the Mercedes with its 123 license plate, Reinhard Hardegen explained that after the war ended he began a marine oil company that proved to be very prosperous, enabling him to enjoy a life that included thirty-two years of service in the Bremen Parliament (Landtag) as well as lots of “golf, swimming, and lawn-mowing.” Wilfred was impressed by the large Hardegen home on Kapitän-König-Weg in Bremen’s Oberneuland suburb. There he met Barbara Hardegen and a neighbor, Walter Kaeding. Long, friendly conversation ensued over coffee and sandwiches before a blazing hearth, German and Norwegian taking the measure of each other, Wilfred gradually getting over his initial tensions, and both agreeing, “We were seamen at that time. Enemies yesterday, friends today.” They passed over matters of blame and justification. Hardegen told his new friend: “After the war my family was impoverished in a bombed-out Germany. We had nowhere to live. We were cold. I was out of work. I started from zero as a businessman, first on a bicycle, then on a motorcycle, finally in a car. In 1952 I started my own oil company, which I still run today. Hard work has given me and my family a beautiful home and security. This I am proud of.”
Hardegen took Wilfred out onto his extensive lawn and garden at the rear of the house. He pointed out the various ornamental bushes that he had planted. In the distance stood a deer. It was idyllic, Wilfred thought. It was a day when he was truly glad to be alive. As the two men walked the old U-boat Commander noticed that one of Wilfred’s shoelaces had become untied. He knelt in the grass to tie the sailor’s shoe.
When Wilfred returned home to Bergen he said: “I shall tell you what made the deepest impression on me. When the German U-boat commander knelt down and tied my shoelace, at that moment I felt that, at last, all that had happened to me long ago was gone and forgotten.”7
Flaunt out O sea your separate flags of nations!
Flaunt out visible as ever the various ship-signals!
But do you reserve especially for yourself and for the soul of
man one flag above all the rest, A spiritual woven signal for all nations, emblem of man elate above death,
Token of all brave captains and all intrepid sailors and mates,
And all that went down doing their duty, Reminiscent of them, twined from all intrepid captains young or old,
A pennant universal, subtly waving all time, o’er all brave
sailors, All seas, all ships.8
APPENDIX A
Maintaining Trim
After achieving trim the LI and his team recorded on paper all the volumes and levels in the trim and regulator cells. From those benchmark readings all subsequent readings would be measured. For the moment the weight of the boat, which included the weight of the water taken into the large exterior diving, or ballast, tanks at the initiation of the dive, equaled more or less the weight of the water the boat displaced. Any change in that weight, however slight, would either cause the boat as a whole to rise or sink in depth or cause the bow or stern alone to move up or down. Minor changes such as the movements fore and aft of individual crewmen could be compensated for by the planesmen, but major changes such as the accumulated consumption of fuel, food, and fresh water over time required alterations of the water levels in the trim and regulator cells. So did changes in the specific gravity of the seas through which the boat passed, and changes owed to varying depths, currents, temperatures, sun times, salt contents, and levels of marine life. Particularly critical were torpedo launches since those events, leading to sudden weight losses of 1,600 kilograms per torpedo, required immediate additional flooding to make good the losses. In attack situations the LI had to calculate in advance how much seawater he would have to take on and then check the sudden buoyancy an instant after each torpedo left its tube. When the launch occurred underwater stabilization had to be achieved with unusual quickness lest the boat, which was only at periscope depth, surge through the surface and betray itself. The chief hydroplane operator carried the responsibility of constantly recalculating weight and balance, using written data supplied him regularly by one of the control room machinists. For these calculations even the cook had to report each day the number of food cans used in preparation of meals, from which point in the boat the cans had come, and how much garbage he had had to jettison. And every second, third, or fourth day the commander would order a shallow dive to check the trim and weight against the numbers.
APPENDIX B
Operation of the Head*
Cabin H, the head (toilet), was on the forward port side opposite the galley. Type IXB boats had six torpedo tubes; crewmen called Cabin H “Tube Seven.” It contained one of the most complex mechanisms on board, the use of which was governed by three rules. The first was not to attempt use when the boat was submerged below twenty-four meters, since outside water pressure made the system inoperable. The second was never to use the head when the boat was submerged and under attack, since, it was believed, an enemy soundman could pinpoint the pumping noise. The third was that the first action of a crewman on passing through the narrow steel door into the confined space of Cabin H shou
ld be to sign his name, date, and time of entry on a clipboard, so that, in the event of backup, everyone would know whom to call for clean-up.
When a crewman finished his business he observed the following sequence of actions. First he checked to see that the safety lever on the valve from the intermediate chamber to the outside chamber was closed and that the lever from the bowl to the intermediate chamber was open. Then he used the pump lever to transfer the contents of the bowl to the intermediate chamber. Next he closed the lever from the bowl to the intermediate chamber and opened the valve from the chamber to the outboards. Then he pumped the contents of the chamber to the outboards and checked to see if anything had returned to the bowl; if it had he repeated the two pumping actions. Finally he returned the levers to their original positions, filled the bowl with water using another hand pump, and signed his departure time on the clipboard. Various examples of nautical verse usually made their way onto the clipboard pages as well.
* This description of the head’s operating system relies on former Oberleutnant Otto Giese (U-/S/) in a letter to KTB 49 (March 1988), a monthly newsletter published by Sharkhunters, Harrv Cooper Enterprises, Tampa, Florida. Cf. Gasawav, Grev Wolf, Grev Sea, pp. 37-38.
APPENDIX C
Operation of the Schlüssel M (Enigma) Machine
The cipher handbook for a specific day directed the operator to select a specific three of eight available rotors, for example, wheels A, C, and G, and to place them in the machine slots in a certain wheel order, for example G, A, C. The rotors were each 1.27 cm. (a half inch) wide with serrated rims so that as they sat in their housings with the edges barely visible the operator’s fingers could rotate them manually. As the operator did so letters of the alphabet that were inscribed on the rotors would appear consecutively in small round glass holes. The operator then rotated the wheels so that they presented that day’s settings, for example, E, L, Q. Next, the handbook prescribed that pairs of connecting plugs resembling those on a telephone switchboard be inserted into specific plug holes, each representing a letter of the alphabet, the usual number of pairings being six to ten.
This completed and the Schlüssel M set for the day, the operator could begin the actual message encrypting. He selected at random three letters to constitute the preambular key, such as SHB, which would identify this message as different from all others that he might encrypt and transmit on the same day. With this key embedded in the message he “typed out” the message. As each key engaged—the resistant key action was hard on the fingers, slowing the punching process—a number of permutations took place inside the electromechanical device. For each key (letter) depressed the right-hand rotor advanced one position. Around the rotor rim, twenty-six to a side, were fifty-two electrical contacts. Movement of the rim caused a constantly changing series of current intersections. Once twenty-six character keys had been punched, the middle rotor, with a completely different wiring pattern, would also begin to advance, adding yet further complexity to the network of electric pulses in Schlüssel M’s entrails. In long messages all three cylinders would be in movement, allowing the machine to encipher 26 x 26 x 26, or 17,576, characters before the cylinders returned to their original positions. By rearranging the selection and order of the cylinders the possible combinations increased six times to 105,456. Further complicating the route the electric pulses followed were the plugs in the switchboard that operated independently of the mechanical operation in the rest of the machine and provided additional circuits and loops to the tortuous passage of the cipher maze, whose number of possible permutations approached one hundred and fifty million million million, a number maintained by German cipher authorities to be beyond solution. Without knowledge of the day’s selection and order of the three rotors, the settings of their rims, and the plug pairings, an enemy crypt-analyst, even if he possessed the machine, would face, it was believed, an impossible task making sense of the alphabet gibberish that emerged.
Exactly replicating the keyboard, individual glow holes lit up as the operator punched the keys one by one. If he depressed M in the first word of his message, the R glow hole might light up, which letter the operator took down on his pencil pad; when he depressed the second M in the first word the F hole might glow, and so on as the machine transposed letters in seemingly random fashion. The final step was wireless transmission of the message in its encrypted form. The intended receiver then decrypted the message on an identical machine with the same rotor and plug settings prescribed for that day: The gibberish that the receiver “typed out” on his machine appeared in the glow holes as understandable German.
The HYDRA cipher used by Atlantic boats was originally called HEIMISCH (“home waters”) but is best known in the intelligence literature as HYDRA, hence that term’s use here. The cipher was known at Bletchley Park as DOLPHIN.
APPENDIX D
The Engine Room
The MAN engines provided numerous options. For turning the boat in close quarters, as for example in port waters, the RPMs of the port and starboard crankshafts could be varied. Or, one engine only could be clutched to the crankshaft and screw while the other at half speed was coupled to a dynamotor that, acting as a generator, charged the storage batteries. German boats differed from the boats of other navies, particularly from American fleet submarines, in that the dieseis were shafted directly to the screws, whereas in American boats the dieseis each had a generator attached at one end and electric motors alone, with power from the generator or batteries, turned the propulsion shafts in the manner of a diesel-electric locomotive. Fuel for the engines was contained in saddle tanks, or bunkers, on the two flanks of the boat outside the pressure hull. The bottoms of the tanks were open to the sea. The fuel floated on the top of saltwater, and as the fuel was consumed water took its place. Seawater was heavier, so that on the way home a boat would ride a little lower on the surface. From the bunkers the fuel was pumped into a smaller tank in the overhead and then into the cylinders for combustion by compression. Air for combustion was sucked through ports in the exterior of the conning tower and fed to the engines by superchargers. Any water that might get in with the air was splashed into the bilges. Exhaust gases went out through ducts in the hull to ports aft between the pressure hull and the superstructure.
Anything that got into the engine room atmosphere, such as gases or heat fumes or excess diesel odor, was mostly removed by two large ventilators. Ventilation was never really satisfactory, however. A man could easily get sick in the engine room, and many did on their first extended patrols. The main and auxiliary blowers used up considerable fuel on the surface and much battery water when submerged. On very few occasions, as on surfacing to get the C02 out—carbon dioxide could rise to levels as high as 2.5 percent inside the boat—were both mains and auxiliaries operated together, and then only for a few minutes. Some of the C02 was absorbed by chemicals. Sauerstofflaschen— oxygen bottles—were available for emergency use. There were no hydrogen detectors on board, but hydrogen levels were quite high when batteries were being charged. One man lighting a cigarette could blow the boat apart. Many thought there ought to be an indicator of some kind, like a canary in a coal mine. And there was always the threat of saltwater from the bilges mixing with the battery acid to form chlorine gas that could kill everyone on board. The entire crew followed ventilation discipline religiously, though the interior fug remained generally unpleasant and unhealthy.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
The writer has relied primarily on original archival documents, which are identified in the notes. Those sources he supplemented with material drawn from interviews with surviving principals and from published works: documentary collections, official histories, technical reports, autobiographies, and secondary accounts of various kinds. All of the published works utilized in the writing are cited in the notes. Those found to have been particularly useful are named in the select list below:
Abbazia, Patrick. Mr. Roosevelt’s Navy: The Private War of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet
, 1939-1942. Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Md., 1975.
Bailey, Thomas A., and Paul B. Ryan. Hitler and Roose Lelt: The Undeclared Naval War. Free Press, New York, 1979.
Beach, Edward L., Captain, USN (Ret.). The United States Navy: 200 Years. Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1986.
Beesly, Patrick. Very Special Intelligence: The Story of the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre 1939-1945. Hamish Hamilton, London, 1977.
Bennett, Ralph. Ultra in the West: The Normandy Campaign, 1944-1945. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1979.
Blair, Jr., Clay. Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan. J.B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia and New York, 1975.
Brennecke, Jochen. The Hunters and the Hunted. W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1957.
Buchheim, Lothar-Günther. U-Boat War, trans. Gudie Lawaetz. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1978.
Buell, Thomas B. Master of Sea Power: A Biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King. Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1980.
Buell, Thomas B., et al. The Second World War: Europe and the Mediterranean. United States Military Academy, Avery Publishing Group, Inc., Wayne, N. J., 1984.
Busch, Harald. U-Boats at War. Ballantine Books, New York, 1955.
Calvocoressi, Peter. Top Secret Ultra. Ballantine Books, New York, 1980.
Chatterton, E. Keble. Q-Ships and Their Story. Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Md., 1972.
Churchill, Winston. The Second World War, Vol. 1, The Gathering Storm. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1948.
__________. Vol. 3, Their Finest Hour. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1949.
__________. Vol. 4, The Hinge of Fate. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1950.
Costello, John, and Terrv Hughes. The Battle of the Atlantic. Collins, London, 1977.
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