by D. A. Rayner
At the Kapitän’s touch the periscope rose still higher until he was standing upright. Schwachofer watched von Stolberg’s feet move flatly, gripping the deck that, now that they were at periscope depth, was feeling again the effect of the surface waves.
The Kapitän spoke: “She is not astern.” A pause—then: “Ach—I have her now, bearing green one-six-oh. A Western Approaches destroyer. She has the white and light green camouflage. Converted for escort work. One of the forward, one of the after guns, and the torpedo tubes have been taken out of her so that she may carry more depth charges.”
“She was astern,” Schwachofer volunteered.
“Then she makes her big mistake.” The Kapitän’s voice was gleeful. “Her Captain is a clever man. He thinks to work out on my beam before he comes in to attack. An attack up my stern is so difficult for him. He will lose contact so long before he must fire his depth charges that I shall avoid them. So he plans to attack from my beam. But, Schwachofer, I shall sink him. Kunz, start the attack table.”
“Jawohl, Herr Kapitän.” Kunz, its attendant officer, started the complicated electrical device that, when fed with the enemy’s course, speed, and range, would provide the angle of deflection that, when set on the sight in the periscope, would enable the torpedoes to be aimed just the right amount ahead of the target in order that target and torpedoes should arrive at the same place and at the same time. The Kapitän himself, knowing the length of the enemy, would decide on the amount of spread between one torpedo and the next.
“Muller,” the Kapitän called the torpedo petty officer. “Prepare numbers five and six tubes; set torpedoes to run at three meters at forty knots.”
“Jawohl, Herr Kapitän.” The man disappeared aft.
“Kunz. Enemy’s bearing green one-five-five, course two-four-oh. Speed one-five knots. Range eight thousand five hundred.”
The hush of excitement settled on every man in the boat. Their heartbeats were caught up in the steady purr of the engines.
The periscope hissed as the Kapitän lowered it.
“Well?” he said, turning to Kunz.
“Deflection two-five degrees left, Herr Kapitän.”
“Zum Befehl.” The Kapitän bent to the periscope handles and raised them slowly. “Stand by numbers five and six tubes.”
“Muller reports numbers five and six ready, Herr Kapitän.”
“Gut.”
The periscope was nearly up now. The Kapitän was sweeping the horizon on either side of his target.
“The poor fool. He forgets that he is alone. For once—just for once—I have a British escort in my sights, and I do not have to worry whether another is about to attack me. I have prayed for this so many times. Port ten, Coxswain, let her come round slowly. Ah—das ist gut—I enjoy myself. Stand by to fire. Fire six!” The boat lurched as the torpedo sped on its way.
“Torpedo running,” Braun, the hydrophone operator, reported.
“Fire five!” the Kapitän ordered, and again the boat lurched.
“Torpedo running,” Braun repeated.
“Kunz, what is the length of run?”
“One minute forty-eight seconds, Herr Kapitän.” Kunz held a stop-watch in his hand.
The Kapitän, his eyes glued to the periscope, answered: “Tell me when the first fish has been running for a minute.”
“Jawohl, Herr Kapitän.”
The tense-faced men gathered round the Kapitän in the control room saw his braced legs and back stiffen to rigidity, and heard an explosive “Du lieber Gott! He turns!
He cannot see my torpedoes—but he turns under full helm.”
“One minute, Herr Kapitän.”
“You fool! This is all your fault,” the Kapitän exploded, burning up his rising chagrin with a return to the original complaint.
The Executive Officer made a mental note that now there would be no bombastic reports written on this episode—and he smiled rather ruefully.
The Kapitän, watching the destroyer in the circular view of the periscope, saw that her bow was pointing directly toward him; and before he had seen the whole of her port side. She was still turning; as much of her starboard side was visible as before there had been of the port. The target was already moving slowly to the right across the little black lines etched on the glass of the periscope—and the torpedoes had been fired with twenty-five degrees of left deflection. He had missed.
Kunz opened his mouth to tell his Kapitän that the first torpedo should be arriving. He caught Schwachofer’s eye and hesitated. Slowly Schwachofer shook his head and dropped the corners of his mouth. Kunz tried hard but only succeeded in irritating the two “vons.” Schwachofer held that the freemasonry of the sea service should override all other considerations. He was sorry for Kunz.
Von Stolberg whipped the periscope down. The hiss it made as it slid into its well sounded as if its pride was hurt. “Dive to eighty meters, Herr Oberleutnant. Silent routine. Warn Engineer Kritz that we shall be shortly attacked with depth charges.”
In the last second before he lowered his periscope the Kapitän had seen the destroyer’s bows begin to turn back to starboard—toward him. The turn had not, then, been a lucky chance but a deliberately timed and carefully thought-out maneuver. Such a possibility had not, until the last moment, appeared to be credible—and he realized for the first time that he was up against another brain. In all his previous experience a target had been simply a target. The lumbering shapes of merchantmen had proceeded sedately along a straight line. His machines had calculated the angles. He had given the orders to fire when certain prerequisites had been observed. Then, so long as his trained guesses at the target’s course, speed, and range were reasonably accurate—and provided the temperamental torpedoes ran correctly—hits were obtained: hits that in the fullness of time brought congratulatory letters and iron crosses. That this well-known procedure was not functioning now was an uneasy thought; and it was quickly followed by one that was worse. Suppose the opposing brain were better than his own? For the first time in his life von Stolberg saw death and knew it for what it could be.
“Asdic transmissions green one-six-five,” Braun reported, spinning the polished wheel that directed the hydrophones. Before the Kapitän could acknowledge the information, he added: “Closing. Propeller noises. Probably turbines, one-five-oh revolutions.”
In the silent control room the waiting men, who hardly dared to breathe, could hear the sharp zip of the asdic transmissions that struck the U-boat’s hull ten seconds apart. It was heard by them as the whisper of a whip about to be laid across their steel back.
THE HECATE advanced upon her quarry. Circumstances had decided her Captain that he must attack up his adversary’s tail. There was no time to work out on her beam, and he did not wish to risk another torpedo attack by delaying his first too long. In any case an alert U-boat, fighting a single escort, would nearly always present her opponent with a stern attack by continually turning away from his approach. He was not to know either the urgency that existed in von Stolberg’s mind or the desperate attempts that that determined man would make in order to keep his rendezvous. The Hecate s Captain knew nothing of the time nor place, nor could he realize the efforts that must be made if the rendezvous was to be achieved with the last twenty-eight hours submerged.
The British Captain was not entirely happy. Trained before the war in asdic trawlers, and until recently commanding a corvette, he was used to carrying out attacks by going into the asdic hut and there donning one set of headphones himself. In the destroyer, instead of leaving the bridge, he was expected to do the work with the aid of a loud-speaker. Mechanically the loud-speaker gave a faultless performance, but it had always seemed to him that slipping the headphones over his ears had the psychological effect of putting him in direct contact with the delicate instrument that was fixed to his ship’s bottom. Accustomed to one method, he found that the new one, dictated by the larger ship, was irksome in the extreme. Not being gifted with a really musical
ear, he had managed by practice to teach himself to detect the smallest alteration in the tonal qualities of the echo that came back from the submarine. Alterations of tone that, betraying a change of course on her part, would be used to form his own decisions. This affinity with his instrument he found to be much more difficult to achieve now that the sounds came to him through the voice of a loud-speaker.
“Steer two-oh-eight.”
“Steer two-oh-eight.” The First Lieutenant at his action station by the standard compass relayed his Captain’s order to the wheelhouse. Here was cause for yet another vexation—the slight delay in time that relayed orders must cause, for he dared not imperil his hearing by mounting the raised plinth that surrounded the compass. To do so meant his leaving the sheltered corner of the bridge from whence he could best hear the loud-speaker. Another minor complaint, and one that did not in the early hours trouble him in any way, was that the Captain’s chair, which he alone had the right to use (although he assumed correctly that every officer of the watch used it too during the darkness of the night), was fixed beside the standard compass. At the moment he was far too excited to consider its use; but if the battle should be a prolonged one, it would have afforded rest to tired limbs.
“Echo bearing two-oh-nine. Going away. Range fifteen hundred,” announced the voice pipe from the asdic cabinet.
“Steer two-oh-nine.”
He had a well-trained ship. Everything should be functioning smoothly—as indeed it was. He crossed to a conical metal table on the port side of the bridge and raised the lid. This allowed him to view the automatic plot below. At the moment all he could see was the head and shoulders of the navigator.
“Stand back, Pilot, and let me have a look,” he said. On the deck below him the navigator straightened his back.
There the battle was laid out in colored chalk. Red for the enemy, blue for his own ship.
“Echo bearing two-one-oh. Going away. Range thirteen hundred.”
The navigator glanced inquiringly at his Captain.
“Plot it,” the Captain told him, and to the First Lieutenant: “Steer two-one-oh. I wonder where I’ve heard that course before!” He glanced again at the plot. The navigator, who had hurriedly marked up yet another red cross, was standing back again.
“He certainly is wedded to his course,” the Captain remarked.
“Double echoes, the first at twelve hundred, the second at a thousand,” the asdic voice pipe said.
The Captain crossed to the voice pipe. “Don’t lose the further one. Try and give the plot the range of both.” He went back to the plot.
“Asdic reports ‘double echoes.’ The wily bird may have slipped a pillenwerfer. I’ve told them to give you both ranges. If you find the first one stationary, tell me at once, and I’ll tell asdic to disregard it.”
“Echoes two-one-oh degrees. The first range seven hundred, the second nine hundred. First echo stationary,” the navigator said.
“Thank you, Pilot,” and to the asdic: “Disregard the first echo. It’s a pill.”
So the German thought to fox him with that old game. It was one that every escort knew well. The bubble-making canister would temporarily give off an echo that was very similar to one made by a submarine. The Germans had hoped that behind this underwater smoke screen they could slip away. But accurate plotting had detected the device.
“Submarine echo bearing two-one-oh seven hundred.”
The Captain noted the word “submarine” inserted in the report to show that the asdic officer knew the position. Hopkins certainly had his head screwed on correctly.
The Hecate bore down on her quarry. There was no last-minute dash or excitement. She did not tear into her prey with a wave leaping from either bow. At fifteen knots she trundled over the sea, much as the popular conception of a grizzly bear—rolling slightly and with plodding gait.
“Echo bearing two-one-oh. Five hundred. Interrogative depth settings, sir?” the asdic queried.
“I’d like to wait as long as I can before deciding on the depth. Set the charges to seventy-five feet. If I want to make a last-minute alteration, I may do so,” the Captain replied.
Hopkins in the asdic hut turned the dial that repeated the seventy-five-foot depth-setting order to the depth-charge party aft. That would start the ratings there in a hurried scamper to set the correct depth on the ten charges that were being prepared.
The Hecate’s Captain had no idea of the depth of his enemy; and the charges must be released correctly in plan and also set to fire at the right depth. The enemy could be anything up to six hundred feet below the surface. He would get some idea from the last contact with the U-boat. The asdic beam did not go straight down. Beneath the ship there was a cone of silence, the sides at an angle of sixty degrees. Within this cone the U-boat could not be detected. The farther away it was when it passed inside the cone, the deeper it must be. This presented still another problem for the Captain. When two escorts were present, the one attacking could estimate the depth with some accuracy and the other ship would then have an idea what depth to set on her charges when the time came for her own attack.
“Two-one-oh; four hundred.”
If only another escort was with him! Someone to whom he could signal, “Come over here, and help me with this one. Another escort would enable him to break what he guessed would be an endless series of stern attacks. By working out on the beam the other ship would have come in across the submarine’s track as soon as the disturbance of his own bursting charges had subsided. Already he half regretted his grandiloquent words to the Doctor the night before. This “Chesapeake and Shannon,” single-ship fight was going to be a problem.
“Two-one-oh; three hundred.”
He must think of the depth-charge position too. He’d got to sink the enemy in ten tries—or if not sink her, then to force her to the surface, so that gun or ram could finish her off. Already he considered that she had shown too much spirit to hope for a surrender. The Hecate’s full complement of charges was one hundred and ten. When they had been with the convoy, ten charges had been spent on an attack on what was afterward classified as a non-submarine target. That left her only a hundred. Two ships would have had at least two hundred depth charges and would have been able to lay them more correctly.
“Lost contact ahead, sir,” said the asdic hut.
“Set charges to one fifty feet,” the Captain ordered.
Hopkins spun the wheel of the repeater. At the same moment he pressed the buzzer that was the “Stand By” for the depth-charge firing party mustered on the afterdeck.
Mr. Grain, Commissioned Torpedo Gunner in charge of the depth-charge parties, heard the buzzer.
“Stand by charges,” he shouted. Then his ear caught the higher, smaller note of the repeater bell, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the repeater begin to tick. “Set charges to one fifty,” he yelled and dashed to help set as many as he could in the short time available.
The procedure was now automatic. No one in the Hecate could know what the submarine was doing, for the destroyer was passing over the U-boat. They only knew what the boat had been doing. This knowledge had been put on the instruments that would fire the charges by electrical impulses.
Two charges were automatically released from the after rails. Leading Torpedoman Ellis was resetting the depth on the last of the ten charges. To steady himself he put his hand on one of the rails. The heavy depth charge rolled over it, shattering his wrist. He was assisted forward to the sick bay swearing softly and continuously. The accident was not known on the bridge until after the attack.
The depth-charge throwers barked, sending their charges wobbling through the sunlit air. Two on each side, four in all. Two more pairs of death-dealing canisters rolled from her rails. The eggs had been laid by the bird of death, but there was no time for the depth-charge crews to watch the explosions. Already Grain was lashing his men with his tongue to get the throwers reloaded and the rails refilled, for it was a point of honor i
n all the ocean escorts to reload at once. Two minutes was considered a bad time by a smart ship, where the difference between a good and a bad time was measured in seconds.
High on the bridge, expectant faces peered aft. The rising sun into which they looked warmed their tanned skins. The water astern shimmered golden and was broken by the wide, dark arrow of the Hecate s wash. Then the explosions came—the bursting of the first charges, followed by more surface-shaking explosions, until the watchers wondered how anything made by man could possibly withstand the terrible shock.
The silence after the last explosions was almost palpable, and for a while men lowered their voices as in the presence of the dead.
VON STOLBERG turned to his Executive Officer.
“Heini, you have the course and depth?”
“Jawohl, Herr Kapitän. Course two-one-oh. Speed four knots, depth eighty meters.”
“That is good. Oberleutnant von Holem,” he said over his shoulder. There was no need to raise his voice in the confined quarters of the control room.
“Ja, Herr Kapitän?”
Von Holem stood up from the chart table and as a mark of respect to his Kapitän he stood stiffly to attention. It was not only a personal gesture from a junior to a senior. It expressed all the pride of a man who considered both himself and the man to whom he offered this deference to be of a race apart.
“Otto,” the Kapitän said, “let us consider the rendezvous. You had star sights last night?”
“Ja, Herr Kapitän—but not so good. The cloud was low and the boat rolling heavily. Also the spray interfered greatly with the sextant.”
The Kapitän’s face had clouded during this recital. He was on the point of complaining when the navigator went on: “But I had perfect sights this morning.”
“Ah, that is good indeed. I did not know that you had taken them. Where are we then?” He moved to stand before the table.
“Here, Herr Kapitän.” The navigator’s sharp pencil indicated the little cross on the white chart. Diagonally across the paper a black line was traced. There were many little crosses—very near to the line. Some were on one side of it, some on the other. The cross to which von Holem pointed was the last one, and the one that was the nearest to the big, heavily marked circle where the line ended.