Sink and Destroy

by Edward Kay

  On Gottingen Street a couple of them asked to see my papers. I showed my ID without comment and went on my way. Two blocks later I was stopped again by a couple more shore patrol. Then it happened again on Cornwallis Street. These guys not only asked to see my pass, but asked where I was going and why. We were literally within sight of the last patrol, and I was sure that they must have seen me show my ID already.

  “What’s the matter — slow day?” I asked. “I’ve already shown my pass twice, including to those guys on the corner.”

  “Well, you can show it to us too, wise guy,” cracked one of them.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a war on,” I said. “Can’t you find something more useful to do with yourselves than bugging the guys who are doing the fighting?”

  His lip curled. “That’s enough smart talk out of you!” he growled. Then he gave me a shove.

  I hadn’t done anything wrong, and I hadn’t laid a hand on them. But I didn’t feel like being pushed around by some idiot with an attitude. So I pushed him right back. His partner came at me and I gave him a shove too. The rest was predictable. They arrested me and marched me down to the base.

  The captain wasn’t terribly pleased at the news. “Listen, O’Connell, I know the shore patrol are a bunch of clowns, but why the hell did you have to hit them?” he asked.

  “Sir, I never hit them,” I replied. “They shoved me, so I shoved them back. That’s all. If I’d hit them, they’d both be in the hospital right now.”

  He sighed. “You know I can’t just let this go,” he said, “even if I wanted to. The brass hats will be all over me if I don’t throw them a bone.”

  “Yes, sir, I suppose,” I replied.

  I was given two weeks in the brig. It was near-solitary confinement in a room with no paper, no pens or pencils. It might seem easier than being thrown about in a hammock in a stinking mess deck, or up in a crow’s nest inhaling bunker fuel exhaust and looking for German submarines intent on blasting you to kingdom come. But the last thing I wanted was to be alone with my thoughts. I kept thinking about Aileen, her brother, her mom and her dad. I thought about the sailor who died alone on the mess table beneath my hammock. I even thought about the German gunner in the plane, and wondered if I’d killed him, or sent him home crippled for the rest of his life.

  After ten days, I heard a key in the door. A shore patrolman stuck his head into my cell. “You’re in luck. Things have gone to hell out there. They need your useless butt out on convoy duty more than we need it in here.”

  I was given orders to return to my ship immediately. When I got there, I found out that the battle had taken a dramatic turn against us.

  One of the guys on my first watch, a fellow by the name of Lougee, had just been transferred to the ship after coming in off a westbound convoy.

  “It’s a mess out there. Word is that the Krauts have broken our codes. On the last trip over, HQ had us changing directions all the time. But no matter which way they directed us, the wolf packs were there, waiting for us.”

  This was frightening news. In late 1942 we’d been losing about a hundred merchant ships per month, which was already a terrifying figure. Then, in just one four-day period during March, we had lost twenty-two merchant ships. We all knew we couldn’t take those kinds of losses for long. Now the Germans were sinking our freighters faster than we could build them. The rumour was that Britain’s oil and gasoline stockpiles had hit an all-time low, with only enough for three more months. If the situation didn’t improve in a hurry, we would lose the war. Even the normally stoic Churchill was reportedly so alarmed that he was considering cancelling the convoys altogether, except that nobody could think of an alternative. It was the worst crisis we had faced so far in the entire war.

  The mood was grim as we sailed into the frigid waters of a late-winter Atlantic to shepherd our convoy across. Two convoys that had sailed ahead of ours had been torn apart by huge wolf packs made up of dozens of submarines. We had every expectation of meeting a similar fate. But then, just as suddenly, the tables turned once again.

  While out in the middle of the Black Pit, I was happily surprised to see, for the first time, an Allied B-24 Liberator bomber. An aircraft with exceptionally long range, the Liberator had been monopolized by the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Force for bombing missions over continental Europe. But rumour was that Churchill himself had personally ordered them to be transferred to Coastal Command because of the dire situation out here in the North Atlantic. So they were at last assigned in force to convoy escort duty. The B-24s operated from bases in Newfoundland, Iceland and Great Britain, so now, no matter how far out in the Atlantic we were, we’d see them on air patrol, and we’d hear about them attacking and sinking U-boats where the German subs used to roam freely.

  The escort carriers were starting to give the Germans some grief as well. On one particular day in May, I was just coming on watch when the action stations alarm sounded. The cox’n said that a Grumman Avenger patrol plane from an escort group ahead of ours had caught a German U-boat unawares on the surface, 6 miles ahead. The plane had unloaded all four of its depth charges on the sub. The radio operator said that three went wide but the fourth had come down close enough to do some damage before the U-boat escaped by crash-diving. The plane crew had observed a small oil slick on the water afterward, but no debris. That meant the sub was still hiding down there somewhere, waiting for its chance to escape. We were the closest surface vessel, so it was up to us to finish them off before they could do that.

  “Full speed ahead!” I heard the captain shout from the bridge.

  “Aye-aye!” came the response.

  An instant later the thrum of the engines vibrated through the soles of my boots. Black smoke belched from our stacks as the stokers gave it everything the Wildrose had to try to close the gap between us and the sub.

  From my gun position I spotted the American plane circling above the spot where the U-boat had dived. As we closed in, the Avenger made a final circuit over the oil slick. Then, probably out of ammunition and low on fuel, it headed back toward its carrier, flying past us so close we could see the crew’s faces in the cockpit. We waved and cheered. The plane waggled its wings, then banked away, disappearing into a grey cloud bank.

  Now it was just us and the U-boat. We knew that German subs could travel up to 7 nautical miles an hour underwater. So in the twenty minutes or so since it had submerged, the sub could be anywhere within about 17 square nautical miles. And that area would only get bigger the longer it took us to find them.

  We began tracing a grid pattern over the water, with the sub’s last known position at its centre. Our ASDIC operators listened for any telltale pings. Except for the faint thrumming of the engines below, and the sound of the bow spray as the Wildrose plowed through the waves, everything was strangely silent. Nobody spoke. Then I heard a shout relayed from the ASDIC room.

  “Contact!”

  They had picked up the unmistakeable ping of a submarine. My heart felt like it was jumping into my throat. We were going into combat.

  We had recently been refitted with a new weapon, something called Hedgehog. A lot of the fellows weren’t very enthusiastic about it. The usual way to attack a sub was to drop depth charges after you’d passed over it. But Hedgehog was a new system using mortars that were fired forward through the air and into the water 200 yards ahead of our bow.

  We were told that Hedgehog would be a big improvement over depth charges. Depth charges always went off when they reached their assigned depth, whether they were near a submarine or not. They made a huge explosion that, while satisfying for the crew to see, often did little or no damage to a lurking submarine, but caused such a disturbance in the water that the ASDIC operators lost contact with the sub, often allowing it to escape. Hedgehog mortars detonated only if they struck a submarine, so the ASDIC operators never lost contact with their target, and could keep tracking a sub if the mortars missed it. That would g
ive us a major advantage fighting the U-boats. Or so we had been told. A lot of the sailors were very skeptical.

  The captain gave the order and a shower of mortars shot like rockets off our deck and landed in a V pattern far ahead of our bow, diving straight down, nose-first. Everything was quiet again, except for the wind and the waves and the thrum of our engines. The Hedgehog charges sank at a rate of 23 feet per second, and no U-boat operated below about 650 feet — usually less than half that depth. So after thirty seconds, I knew it was a miss.

  The ASDIC operators maintained contact with the sub and we turned sharply, getting into position to fire once more. With another loud crack a second salvo flew over us and splashed into the water 100 yards or so off our bow. I counted to thirty again. Nothing. Some of the guys shook their heads.

  “Another genius move by the brass,” muttered a sailor. “I don’t know why we didn’t stick to depth charges.”

  An explosion — even an ineffective one that made it harder to track a submarine — at least made us feel like we were doing something.

  The ship leaned hard as the wheelman turned tightly to get us into attack position once more. When we straightened out of our turn, the captain ordered a third volley. The mortars arced through the air once again and nose-dived into the waves. By the time I had counted to fifteen I was beginning to think that the U-boat had escaped, leaving us to eat our rotten meat, scrape our frozen puke off our ships and wonder where they were going to strike next. But then there was a low rumble that I felt as much as heard. Water boiled up out of the ocean ahead.

  “It’s a hit!” came a shout from the ASDIC hut.

  Everyone cheered.

  The only question was how much damage we’d done. Depending on the answer to that, the sub was either going straight to the bottom or straight to the top, which could be dangerous. Even a stricken U-boat was armed to the teeth with deck guns and was easily able to fight it out with a single corvette.

  A huge air bubble broke on the surface. That meant we’d cracked open their ballast chambers, so they wouldn’t be able to dive. A heavy oil slick rose a few seconds later. The acrid smell of diesel oil reached my nostrils. We had shattered their fuel tanks. They were seriously wounded.

  “She’s coming up!” shouted the ASDIC operator.

  “Ready with the deck guns!” a petty officer ordered.

  I made one last check of my Oerlikon. A few seconds later the sub’s dark grey bow erupted out of the waves on a steep angle. It looked ugly and evil, like the nose of a massive, primordial shark rising up out of the depths. Then the conning tower appeared. Painted on the side of it was an image of a trident-wielding Neptune, his face a grinning skeleton. These guys wanted to make an impression, that was for sure. When the submarine settled, it was low in the water and listing to port. The conning tower hatch opened and several officers appeared.

  One of our crew, a fellow by the name of Schumacher, spoke some German. He raised a megaphone to his lips and called out to them to surrender. I didn’t know any German, but from the intensity of Schumacher’s voice, anybody would have known he wasn’t fooling around. The submarine crew gave their response a moment later, not by raising their hands or waving a white flag, but by racing for their deck guns. The sub sat low in the water compared to us, and was so close that the crew on our 4-inch gun couldn’t lower it enough to get a shot off.

  “Fire at will,” an officer called out.

  The German crew were pulling the watertight plugs out of the barrels of their deck guns when I opened up on them with the Oerlikon. It was one thing to fire at a machine, like an airplane or a submarine, but shooting at living, breathing humans was the most difficult thing I’d ever done. But it was clear that they were hell-bent on firing at us, so I sprayed their deck with automatic cannon fire. As my shells raked the submarine, I saw German sailors falling into the water. I didn’t know if they were dead, or jumping over the side to save their lives, and I didn’t have time to think about it.

  Meanwhile, as we closed the gap, several other men had now emerged from the sub, standing in the conning tower, firing sub-machine guns at us as cover so that their comrades could get to the deck guns. I aimed my Oerlikon on the conning tower and the guys with the machine guns. My shells slammed into the tower, making so much smoke as they exploded that within a few seconds I could barely see my target. There was now no more return fire from the U-boat.

  I stopped firing a moment later to let the smoke clear. The sub’s conning tower was so full of holes it looked like a salt shaker. Bodies of German submariners lay inside the tower and others slumped over the edge. One of them had most of his head missing. Even then the sub kept going, the remaining crew hoping to somehow outrun us on the surface.

  Since we were too close to use our big gun, the captain ordered a ramming attack. The engines roared and the water churned behind us as we quickly built up speed, heading straight for the sub, which was damaged so it couldn’t outrun us. The cox’n, an old-timer in his forties, had taken part in a ramming attack during the First World War. He turned and shouted to us, “Get down, and hang onto your hats, boys! When we hit that eel, there’s going to be a hell of a thump, and you don’t want to get thrown into the drink with all those Krauts!”

  I was already strapped into my seat on the Oerlikon, but I put my hands against my gun shield and braced myself. A second later there was a bone-rattling crash of metal on metal. It felt like we’d run into a wall.

  When I looked over the railing, there was no more gun or gun deck on the German submarine. Its hull had been crushed and it was sinking fast now. Most of the crew were dead, either shot or drowned, but some managed to escape from inside the hull as it sank. They came to the surface, waving their hands in surrender.

  Because they were an elite branch of Germany’s military, U-boat crews didn’t have uniforms or dress codes like everybody else. With their long hair, beards, denim shirts and leather jackets, they looked more like thugs than the crew of a military vessel. We lowered the scramble nets. Some of the submariners were too badly injured to hold on to the nets, so the captain lowered the lifeboat and a few of us went down and pulled the remaining survivors out of the water. The last one I picked up was covered in so much oil that all I could see were the whites of his eyes and the pink of his mouth when he shouted for help.

  I grabbed onto his arms and started to pull him into the boat, but he was so oily that I lost my grip and he slipped back into the sea. A large wave hit us and he disappeared under the surface. A few seconds later I saw the whites of his eyes emerge again. He looked terrified and desperate, gasping for air. Another wave broke over him and in an instant he was gone. Simple as that.

  I had been so angry at the Germans for what they’d done that all I could think of was shooting down one of their planes or blasting one of their subs. But now, seeing this guy scared out of his wits and struggling for his life, I suddenly felt sorry for him. I leaned out over the side of the boat, the way George used to with the dip net when we were landing a fish. I reached down, all the way to my armpit, but all I felt was icy cold water immediately starting to numb my fingers. Then something bumped against my fingertips. I felt his shoulders, but his arms had gone limp, too slippery to get hold of. I reached down farther until my face was almost in the water. I felt his belt. I pulled as hard as I could. I almost fell over the side of the lifeboat, and with my last ounce of strength hauled him over the gunwale. He didn’t move. I wasn’t sure if he was even alive. I put my hands on his chest and gave it a few short, sharp jabs, the way I’d been taught. Then he coughed hard and spat up a huge mouthful of oily water.

  His eyes opened. “Danke,” he said weakly.

  Of the U-boat’s crew of fifty, there were only eighteen survivors. We put the prisoners down in the boiler room, in the very bottom of the ship, where we could easily stand guard over them from above. When the last of them had clambered down the stairs into the room, Schumacher stood by the hatch above them and gestured to
his rifle. With his limited German and his .303, he made it abundantly clear to the survivors that if any of them tried to make a break for it, harmed any of our crew or tried to sabotage the ship, they’d be shot without a moment’s hesitation. The U-boat crew didn’t make any trouble for us after that.

  Our battle that day seemed to be the start of an overall pattern. After almost losing everything, we had come back from the brink. The Allies’ combination of new weapons and tactics was suddenly turning the tide in our favour. The Hedgehog was killing subs far more efficiently than the depth charges, and our aircraft had a new secret weapon, an air-launched torpedo that could chase a submerged sub and home in on the sound of its engines. The combined effect on the U-boats was devastating. After savaging our convoys earlier in the year, the Germans were getting it handed back to them in spades. They lost sixteen U-boats in March, another sixteen in April, and then in May a staggering forty-two. After losing almost a quarter of their operational submarines in one month, the German Navy was forced to withdraw its fleet from the North Atlantic.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Summer 1943–Spring 1945

  With the U-boats now driven from our shipping lanes, the build-up to the rumoured invasion of Europe began. Tanks, artillery, guns, fuel, ammunition all poured into Britain in the merchant ships we escorted. We knew that Germany’s Admiral Doenitz still had a huge submarine fleet at his disposal, and we guessed he was holding it in reserve for a decisive moment. We all figured that moment would come whenever we launched the cross-Channel invasion into France. So our job now became to hunt and kill the U-boats in European waters.

  Because of my gunnery experience I was taken off corvette duty and assigned to the destroyer HMCS Mohawk. I had come to appreciate the Wildrose, but I didn’t have an instant of remorse when I was transferred off it. I was excited as I stepped up the gangplank onto the Mohawk. Comparing it to the Wildrose was like comparing a thoroughbred racehorse to a mule. They were two different creatures altogether.