"We'll remain surfaced after we're fully charged," Hersing shouted into the speaking tube to the engine room.
He was in no rush to seal the hatches again. Better to allow the crew to relish the fresh air while they could. Besides, with the U-boat's low silhouette, he could see an enemy ship long before it spotted U-21.
He arched his back and stretched, staring at the sky free of clouds, and thought momentarily of his village in Germany, wondering if he would live to walk its narrow streets again. Reluctantly, he turned his attention back to the business at hand, raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes, and scanned the sea for signs of the enemy, a hunter waiting in ambush with no prey in sight.
Where were the British hiding? Hersing wondered. The largest fleet in the world couldn't stay lost forever.
Unlike Hersing, who savored conning his vessel in the open air, British Royal Navy Captain Martin Leake stood in the comfort of H.M.S.
Pathfinder's wheelhouse and sipped tea from a china cup. His light cruiser had spent the first few weeks of the war on routine patrol duty, finding no sign of the enemy. He felt little fear of enemy submarines.
His ship had twice the speed of those underwater coffins. To most British naval officers, they were underhanded, unfair, and un-English.
Already two U-boats had been lost, the U-15 rammed and sunk by the cruiser Birmingham and the U-13 presumed to have struck a mine.
Leake was proud of his sleek warship. She was fast and she was deadly. He believed he could dodge any U-boat by the skillful exercise of speed and maneuver. His orders were simple. He and Pathfinder were to patrol the North Sea off the Scottish coast and sink any German in sight.
Constructed ten years before and rated at 2,940 tons, Pathfinder had recently been refitted by the British Navy at a cost of nearly half a million pounds. Built at the yards of Cammel Laird, the fast scout cruiser was 370 feet in length with a 27-foot beam. She mounted ten 12-pound guns and eight 3-pound light-duty cannon. The stem that graced the bow was a businesslike straight up and down. None of that rakish clipper-ship bow for her.
Amidships, the sidewalls of the hull were cut down so the stern deck was much lower to the water than the bow. Rising above the high forward quarter, the wheelhouse stood awkwardly on a maze of stilts.
A tall mast rose immediately behind, sporting a radio antenna and a lone crow's nest. Still farther aft, triple smokestacks that vented the coal-burning furnaces towered above the deck. Five lifeboats, two motor launches, and the captain's gig hung in their davits above decks amidships.
After the refit, Leake was pleased her updated systems seemed to be operating properly, but the newly installed furnaces were throwing out more smoke than he would have liked. Still, the crew performed their duties skillfully and the ship responded to the helm like a horse bred to chase hounds.
Everything aboard Pathfinder was going well, almost too well.
Daily dispatches from the Admiralty Office warned ships of their fleet to stay vigilant. But five weeks of tedious patrol duty dulled any real sense of jeopardy. The dreaded underwater ghosts were out there somewhere, haunting the sea. But this early in the war there were few trained eyes that could spot telltale signs of a periscope.
Leake placed the cup back on the saucer. Pathfinder was up to the job, he thought. She could handle almost any opponent except a battle cruiser. He considered turning over the helm to his first officer and retreating to his cabin for a few moments of solitude. But he did not feel tired and decided to Turn in later.
It was a decision that would save his life.
Hersing climbed down the steel-runged ladder from the conning tower into the control room, a jungle of instruments, gauges, wiring, and pipes that ran along the curved walls like hardened snakes.
Electric light bulbs, contained in metal cages to prevent shattering if the crew was tossed about during a depth-charge attack, haphazardly, creating areas of twilight in the far corners of the boat.
Forward of the control room was a tiny galley. TWin hot plates and a fifty-quart stew pot cooked the food both the officers and crew shared.
For a boat that carried forty-two men and several officers there were only two heads, one often used as a food locker at the start of a voyage.
The heads could not operate below eighty feet. And even if the boat was on the surface, the series of levers used to flush the little commode were so complex that one wrong twist and the contents of the toilet bowl blew back in the user's face.
Germany's U-boats were never designed for comfort. They were designed to kill, and they were as cold and heartless as a tax collector's soul.
Hersing sat down at a tiny table reserved for him and his first officer, and ate a meal of potato soup and sausage, washed down with a cup of cocoa. As he finished, one of the U-21's crew popped his head in the cramped galley.
"Sir, the first officer requests your presence topside."
Hersing rose, jamming his officer's cap on his head at a rakish angle.
Climbing the ladder from the control room, he returned to the conning tower.
"What have you got?" he asked without preamble.
First Officer Erich Herbert handed Hersing his binoculars and pointed toward the northwest. "There, to the northwest, a column of smoke."
Hersing peered at the dark smudge on the horizon. He later described the "thick, black promising smoke as an obscure smear gradually growing into the outline of a ship." Patiently, he waited until it became more distinct. "She appears to be a British light cruiser. Scout class. Alert the crew and give the order to dive."
With a sound like the clanging of a fire bell, the U-21's dive alarm rang loudly inside the tight confines of the submarine. The crew scurried quickly to their duty stations, ducking heads while snaking through the cramped hatchways. The conning-tower hatch was dogged shut, valves were turned to flood the ballast tanks, and U-21 slowly slipped beneath the restless waters of the North Sea.
"Adjust diving planes for periscope depth," Hersing ordered.
Steaming in her patrol pattern off the coast of Scotland, Pathfinder sailed on unaware of the threat. The trail of thick black smoke still bothered Leake, but there was little he could do about it until his ship returned to port.
"Watch report," Leake ordered.
"Watch reports all clear," came the reply of his first officer.
"Time?"
"Sixteen forty hours, sir."
Leake gazed at the great column of smoke that merged from Pathfinder's three big stacks, curling high in the sky without benefit of a brisk wind. "We're throwing out a rather large amount of smoke," he said. "We might as well advertise our position to every German ship within fifty miles. Ring down to the engine room and ask if they can reduce it somewhat."
Belowdecks, Sub-Lieutenant Edward Sonnenschein was checking the position of the watertight doors, making notations on a clipboard.
Born in England, Sonnenschein had a distinctly German name, yet he was British through and through.
"Powder magazine door secure," reported a seaman.
"Door secure," Sonnenschein acknowledged.
On it went until all doors were inspected and certified in good working order. Then Sonnenschein slid the checklist into the document slot outside the captain's cabin and reported to the bridge.
"All doors are secured, sir," he said to Leake. "The report is in your slot." "Very good." Leake spoke without turning his attention from the sea ahead. His thoughts were more on German surface ships than U-boats.
Pathfinder sailed on.
At a keel depth of sixty feet beneath the waves the only sound that came from U-21 was her electric motors, which purred like an army of cats. Fifteen minutes before five o'clock in the afternoon, U-21 began her attack approach. Hersing reversed his peaked cap with the brim to the rear and pressed his eye against the focal adjustment of the two-inch-diameter periscope. After no more than ten seconds, he leaned away.
"Down periscope," he ordered. "Come to heading two-nine
-zero."
"TWo-nine-zero," his helmsman repeated.
"If the Britisher maintains his present course," Hersing said to his crew in the control room, "we should be within strike range in another fifteen minutes."
Like a tiger slinking toward its quarry, U-21 methodically closed in for the kill. Hersing raised the periscope again, relocated the target, and made his course corrections to launch a torpedo. The British cruiser steamed into view almost dead ahead. No more than half a mile separated the two vessels.
"Tube one, stand ready," said Hersing. Patience was a requirement for German U-boat commanders. He waited for the range to close as calmly as if he were waiting for a taxi.
First Officer Herbert, standing forward in the weapons room, unscrewed the cover from the firing mechanism and stood poised to carry out the command he knew would be issued shortly.
The U-boat and the cruiser were only fifteen hundred yards apart when Hersing shouted in the same breath, "Away torpedo! Periscope in!
" The torpedo leaped from the bow of U-21. Like a spear thrown from a mythical god's hand, the deadly tube streaked toward Pathfinder Hersing waited anxiously for the sound of a muffled explosion and the following concussion. He was as ignorant as Lieutenant Dixon fifty years before about the effects of underwater explosions. He tapped one foot nervously on the cold steel deck.
Thirty seconds ticked away. Then a full minute. A miss, Hersing thought. Considered the best scorer in practice with torpedoes in the U-boat flotilla, he could not believe his calculations were not correct.
A minute and fifteen seconds. Too long for a run of only fifteen hundred yards.
"Torpedo!" the lookout high in Pathfinder's crow's nest cried.
"Starboard aft!"
Captain Leake reacted instantly. "Full speed, hard to starboard."
Pathfinder rolled on her starboard beam, stern deck nearly awash, as her big propellers bit into the water and turned it white, her powerful engines racing to escape certain doom. In a desperate gamble, Leake attempted to throw the torpedo off course with Pathfinder's prop wash.
Set on a collision course, the torpedo narrowed the gap. Fifty yards, thirty, ten. Watching from the wheelhouse, Leake felt as if time had stopped and gone on hold. Then it was abruptly released.
The torpedo's warhead slammed into Pathfinder under the forward funnel, fracturing the steel plating and piercing one of the boilers.
Superheated shrapnel punctured the bulkheads surrounding the powder magazine and igniteda massive explosion that ripped out the guts of the ship.
The concussion was far more severe than Hersing had conceived. An immense surge of water pressure pounded the hull of U-21. Several crew members were knocked off their feet and injured as they fell against any steel object that got in their way. The lights blinked out and came on again as the battery connections were shaken loose.
"Up periscope." Hersing leaned against the eyepiece and was pleased at what he saw across the water.
The British cruiser was clearly in its death throes. As Hersing watched, another explosion rocked the already shattered vessel as the forward ammunition locker detonated. Pieces of the wheelhouse burst through the air and splashed the water like a heavy rain. She plunged bow-first, stern lifting until it was straight in the air, propellers still spinning and seemingly clawing at the sky. Hersing scanned the water for lifeboats. He saw one half swamped, but no evidence of survivors.
Standing firmly at the periscope, he watched the unfolding spectacle in growing astonishment. Another explosion rocked the ship as a boiler burst from the sudden contact with cold sea water. Hersing stared as if hypnotized as Pathfinder slid beneath the waves and was gone as if she had never existed.
"Down periscope," Hersing muttered quietly, in awe. "Come around to zero-three-zero."
Running silently underwater, U-21 distanced herself from her first victim and turned away in search of another.
All but a handful of men from Pathfinder were denied the opportunity to abandon ship. None were given time to launch lifeboats, most of which were destroyed before the ship sank. None were given time to scramble from the bowels of the ship. "If you were not on the open deck when the torpedo struck, you were dead," Lieutenant Sonnenschein recalled. He had emptied the bridge locker of all the life belts before jumping into the water. He tied them around a cluster of men left struggling amid the floating debris. He felt sickened at seeing so pitifully few.
Captain Leake, though badly wounded, was alive. As Pathfinder lurched from the initial torpedo strike, he was thrown through the wheelhouse door, seconds before the structure was blown out of existence. The chief surgeon was also wounded but conscious. He had been on deck smoking a cigarette.
"I say," he muttered through teeth clenched with pain. "Could someone help keep me afloat? I seem to have broken both my arms."
"Physician, heal thyself," Sonnenschein said with a tight grin.
He swam to the chief surgeon and lashed him to a plank that once had been part of a motor launch. Then Sonnenschein towed him toward the only lifeboat and two rafts that somehow survived intact.
The water in the North Sea felt bitter cold to the men struggling to live. They paddled or gripped flotsam to stay afloat, struggling to reach the boat and rafts, then waiting for a rescue they were sure would come too late. They knew death from hypothermia was only a matter of time, and they began to lose faith and talk of death.
Sonnenschein would have none of it. "Damn your hide!" he shouted.
"Don't give up. Help is on the way."
A sailor spat a mouthful of salt water through his teeth. "It's no use, lieutenant. I doubt Sparks got off an SOS."
"Keep the men close together," Leake said weakly to Sonnenschein.
"Don't let them drift off."
Sonnenschein began to recite Rudyard Kipling's poem "If." "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you Slowly, one by one, the survivors began to rally as Sonnenschein made them repeat the poem over and over again.
Pathfinder had gone down in four minutes. A vast majority of her crew went with her. The lucky ones in the water were rescued shortly after the sinking. The explosion was seen from land and reported. A British destroyer in the neighborhood was diverted almost immediately and pulled the survivors out of the water a short time later.
Out of a complement of nearly 350, only 11 survived. The second ship ever sunk by a submarine, and the first in a long line sunk by German U-boats, Pathfinder carried a far greater loss of life than Housatanic.
Otto Hersing and his U-21 made history by becoming the first submarine to sink a ship and escape. Together, they went on to great glory and gained other firsts.
After rendezvousing with a tanker off the coast of Spain, U-21 became the first submarine to be refueled at sea. She was the first to sail into the Mediterranean, where she sank two battleships off Gallipoli.
Her score also included over twenty merchant vessels that she sent to the bottom.
There were other U-boat commanders who sank more ships than Hersing, but none matched his tonnage. He went after the warships, often passing up several merchant vessels to send his small supply of torpedoes into a destroyer or cruiser.
Of Germany's first hundred submarines, only a small handful survived the war. U-21 was one of them. After the Armistice, on November 20, 1918, Hersing was ordered to surrender his boat to the British Navy at Harwich, England, where it was to be impounded and scrapped. On the voyage from Kiel, Germany, he reported to his British escort that his boat had sprung a leak. Too late to prevent the scuttling, British seamen could only pick up the German survivors.
Defiant to the end, Otto Hersing had sent his beloved U-21 to the bottom of the North Sea rather than Turn her over to the enemy.
Several years after the war, famed explorer and correspondent Lowell Thomas visited Hersing in his village just thirty miles from the North Sea. The legendary U-boat commander, now a gentleman farmer, lived in a small cottage
surrounded by fruit trees and gardens. After he was pulled from the North Sea and sent back to Germany, the British belatedly put a price on his head, but he managed to elude arrest until feelings of hatred had died away.
When Thomas asked the former scourge of Allied shipping how he kept busy, Hersing replied, "I grow fine potatoes." Down in Eighteen Minutes
May 7, 1915 ajike a wandering specter, U-20 materialized out of the fog in the Sea, and slipped alongside a small square-masted schooner before it was noticed. "Man the gun," Kapitanleutnant Walter Schwieger ordered quietly.
Beneath his boyish good looks, blond hair, and fair skin, an undercurrent of ruthlessness ran through Schwieger's veins. Sending a ship to the bottom with noncombatants on board did not interrupt his sleep. On an earlier voyage, he had crept up on a well-marked hospital ship and sent a torpedo after her. Fortunately it missed, or his future reputation as a ghoul would have been even further enhanced.
The Sea Hunters Page 28