An Honorable German (23 page)

“Yes—and much worse than that since, Maximilian. And certainly no one will be shooting at you in the Baltic.”

The admiral turned his attention to a small velvet box beside the phonograph. He opened it and displayed the contents for
Max, who stood up. “The real highlight of the evening, Oberleutnant. In the name of the Führer, I award you the Iron Cross
First Class for bravery under fire at the Battle of the Rio de la Plata and the subsequent action involving the auxiliary
raider
Meteor
.”

He pinned the Iron Cross to Max’s uniform, on the left breast pocket.

Max felt the medal—sharp and cold under his fingers. He looked down and smiled, his pulse quickening. How often in his days
at the Marineschule Mürwik had he dreamed of this moment? Yet only now, when the moment had come, did he understand its price—Dieter,
Langsdorff, the men who had died around him in the drifting lifeboat, all the others who would never come home. None of that
had been part of his cadet fantasies. “I am honored, Herr Admiral.”

“You earned it, Maximilian. And now, an even more pleasant task. As of today I appoint you to the rank of KapitänLeutnant.”
Saalwächter stood back and saluted Max. “Allow me to be the first to salute your new rank, Herr Kaleu.”

A promotion and an Iron Cross. The price had been too high, but Max felt his pride welling up nonetheless. “Thank you, sir.
I will do my best to bring honor to the rank.”

“I know that you will, KapitänLeutnant. Germany will need nothing less from you.” Saalwächter saw Max to the door, shook his
hand, and sent him off with the traditional U-boat man’s farewell. “Good luck, son—and good hunting.”

DANZIG, EAST PRUSSIA

HEADQUARTERS 23rd U-BOAT TRAINING FLOTILLA

ABOARD
U-114

5 JANUARY 1943

EARLY MORNING

M
AX FOLLOWED THE ICEBREAKER OUT OF THE HARBOR, THE GRAY
steel of the U-boat’s prow pushing aside the slush left in the channel. A violent wind blew across the Bay of Danzig; Max
could feel the chill of it on his skin, even though he wore a rubber diver’s suit under his heavy sweater, leather jacket,
and fleece-lined bridge coat. No one was ever really warm in East Prussia with this damned wind blowing in from Russia all
the time. Max wondered how the boys on the Eastern Front withstood it—especially those in Six Armee at Stalingrad, which had
been surrounded by the Soviets since mid-November. How much longer could Paulus and his troops hold out? Cut off from their
supplies, dying in the thousands from hunger and frostbite. But the Bolsheviks had to be defeated. If not, they would march
on Germany eventually, and if the Red Army ever entered the Reich—Max couldn’t even allow the thought. It would never happen,
must never happen.

The water was black and filled with chunks of ice as they passed out of the channel and came into the Baltic proper. “Helm,
port five degrees rudder, come to new heading zero five zero,” he called down the open hatchway.

The helmsman, sitting blind in the conning tower, operated the push buttons that controlled the rudder. “Steady on zero five
zero, Herr Kaleu.”

“Both engines full ahead,” Max called into the voicepipe that led to the control room. Feeling her speed pick up beneath him,
he navigated the U-boat into her assigned training area. With so many boats working up, Flotilla Command had divided this
part of the Baltic into quadrants. Each boat was limited to a specific quadrant in hopes of preventing collisions. Still,
training losses were running high, Max had heard—much higher than officially acknowledged. Bad enough being in a U-boat sunk
by the enemy, worse was being in a U-boat accidentally sunk by your own navy. When it happened, Flotilla Command simply removed
the name of the missing boat from the roster, removed the crew belongings from the barracks ship, and scrubbed the cabins
down.
Gefallen für Volk and Führer
, the telegram would say.

Families printed up small death cards with the name and photograph of the departed that they sent to relatives and friends:
In Proud Sorrow, We Announce the Death of Our Beloved Son, Seaman First Class Otto Muller, 17, fell for Volk and Führer, 5
December 1942, the Baltic Sea. He gave his life for Greater Germany. The Lord is my Shepherd.
Anyone who read the death card would know, as the family did, but would not say for fear of the Gestapo, that the young sailor
had died for nothing. In a training accident. In a U-boat. In the Baltic. In the winter. Pray God it was quick. And no doubt
it was. There would be no crew-mates to assure the parents that their son had not suffered, as much of a lie as that may have
been, because they all drowned as well. Not that the Baltic was deep—never more than one hundred fifty meters. But that was
still much too deep to use the escape gear since the outside water pressure would prevent the opening of the hatch.

Max had reported to the Deutsche Werke shipyard in Kiel ten months ago to shepherd
U-114
through its final four months of construction and learn everything about this complex machine—a type VII C, the backbone
of the German U-boat fleet. Over those four months, he had also moved to recruit his officers and petty officers, gathering
the best men he could find, this task made difficult by the demand for men from every corner of the Greater German Reich,
especially the Eastern Front, from which no one ever seemed to return. At least he’d been able to get Carls, his Oberbootsmann,
from
Graf Spee
, who’d been serving aboard
Scharnhorst
since escaping from Buenos Aires on a fishing boat in the fall of ’40. After the U-Boat Acceptance Command had put the boat
through trials and officially accepted
U-114
from the builders, the crew had come aboard.

For the last six months, they’d been working the boat up, with the final operational tests scheduled for the next week, including
three simulated attacks—the final three of the sixty-six they’d been required to perform over the course of their training.
When the operational tests finished, they would finally return to Kiel to load supplies and real torpedoes for their first
war patrol.

Beside Max on the bridge, the four men of the watch shivered in the wind. Time to see if anyone was awake. “Alarm!” he bellowed.

The bridge watch jumped through the hatch. An aluminum ladder ran through the conning tower into the control room, but four
men couldn’t make it down a ladder in fifteen seconds, so they just dropped the three meters and slammed into the deck plates,
too bad if anyone got hurt. Most times the control room crew kept a deflated life raft under the hatchway to cushion the fall,
but the raft constantly slid out of position. Max secured the main hatch and dropped into the control room, himself missing
the raft, as water flooded the bridge above.

On early training runs, they had spent an hour or more checking every wheel and valve before executing the precise movements
required to submerge the boat. But in combat you didn’t have an hour. You didn’t have minutes. You had seconds. Your only
real protection was beneath the waves, so you had to learn to submerge at lightning speed—though submerging itself was a dangerous
maneuver. The moment Max gave the alarm to dive, seawater began gushing into the ballast tanks, and by the time he closed
the main hatch and dogged it home, water nearly engulfed the bridge. If you didn’t get the timing just right, tons of water
poured into the boat and you sank. Simple. No one knew how often it happened, because no one ever lived to report the mistake.

“All outlet valves open.”

“Venting all diving tanks—main tank ready, bow and stern ready… port and starboard ready.”

“Reporting all air intakes closed.”

“Reporting all outboard exhaust valves closed.”

“All inlet valves open! Flooding all tanks.”

Max watched the controlled panic of an emergency dive. Sailors jackknifed through the hatchways, using their bodies as ballast
to increase the forward momentum. “Move, men! Move,” Carls yelled. Alarm bells rang throughout the boat. Red lights blinked.
Machinists hung from the levers that opened the ballast tanks to the sea. Water flooded into the tanks with a dull roar, a
sound like the deluge at the heart of a rainstorm. And then they were under. Thirty-one seconds. Quiet now, the electric motors
purring.

In thirty-one seconds, they could submerge to a depth of twenty-five meters, the minimum cushion of water required to absorb
the blast of a depth charge dropped by a plane. An Allied aircraft needed close on forty seconds to make a depth charge run,
so timing had to be just so. That was the theory. No one knew the exact timing, because the men who got it wrong never came
back. But certainly you had to be quick. Aircraft were a U-boat’s deadliest foe—half of all U-boat losses came from low-level
attack by Allied aeroplanes. Oftentimes, the aircraft was on top of you before you knew it and you had to stay on the surface
and fight it out with your anti-aircraft guns. That had its own dangers. Just last month, Max had heard,
U-459
’s crew had been surprised by an RAF Coastal Command patrol bomber coming in just five meters off the water. Recovering their
wits, the flak gunners brought it down only to have the plane crash into the conning tower, decapitate the Kommandant, kill
the other officers, and mangle the flak crews. The boat limped back to port with its navigator chief petty officer in command
and a very nervous RAF tail gunner in the forward mess, having been the only survivor of the plane’s crew.

Max grabbed the periscope housing to keep from sliding to the deck as the angle of dive increased. The chief engineer and
his two men had just settled in at the hydroplane controls when a thin voice shouted from the stern: “Outboard air induction
valve won’t close! Boat taking water!”

Shit. “Blow all tanks!” Max ordered. Sailors in the control room spun the wheels on the trim panel and blasted compressed
air into the ballast tanks, blowing out the seawater. “Both engines ahead three-quarters. Emergency surface.”

At the diving station the two sailors bore down on the push-button hydroplane controls, raising the bow planes and lowering
the stern planes. The boat rose to forty meters, then started back down. Fifty meters, sixty meters, seventy meters—this bitch
was dropping like an elevator. The boat balanced for a moment on an even keel, then slid backward, the water in her stern
too heavy to overcome.

“Pump stern trim tanks forward. Pump out main freshwater tank. Both full ahead,” Max ordered. The electric motors went to
full speed.

“Can’t hold her, Herr Kaleu,” the chief said.

A can of ham broke loose from the storage compartment in the forward torpedo room and rolled down the central corridor like
a bowling ball till it struck the combing of the control room hatch. More cans now, followed by a suitcase and a pair of pliers.
Then a case of potatoes. Men slipped, fell backward, slid down the inclined deck. Max again heard the terrible roar of water
spewing into the boat. They hit bottom with such force the light bulbs shattered. Darkness now, water pouring in. The men
grew skittish.

“All engines stop,” he ordered. Pray the propellers hadn’t been damaged. Emergency lighting flickered on. Georg, the control
room petty officer, produced a flashlight and illuminated the depth gauge. One hundred and thirty meters. “Silence in the
boat,” Max called. His men chattered like a bunch of jackdaws. Most of them were just youngsters—seventeen, eighteen, nineteen
years old. Only a handful were regular sailors.

Max let go of the periscope and slid down the deck plates to the engine room hatch. Two machinists stood upright, working
like demons on the valve, water spraying everywhere, black and freezing. Max felt the frigid Baltic water against his rubber
sea boots. He tried to still his anxiety—situations like this would be common on the boat. A depth charge too close, a crack
in the hull, a broken valve. Water rushing in. Men screaming before their yells were choked away. “Report!” Max shouted over
the noise of the water.

The Dieselobermaschinist had his arm in the valve, straining against something, his face red with the effort as a torrent
of frigid seawater sprayed over him. “Something stuck in here, Herr Kaleu,” he gasped. He jerked back and fell onto the sloping
deck, yanking the obstruction free. His mate spun the wheel that shut the valve. It seated itself and held. The roar died
away, leaving the after compartment quiet. The Dieselobermaschinist held up a wrench. Some bloody fool had left a wrench topside
and it had jammed the valve.

Max clenched his fists. Jesus Christ Almighty and all the Saints above. He should expect it, not five of his crew out of their
teens. Only the senior petty officers were true navy men. Most of his crewmen knew nothing of war; many had yet to discover
women. A few weeks back Carls had said to him, “Until I met this lot of pimple-faced boys, Herr Kaleu, the only virgin I knew
was the Virgin Mary.” The young sailors thought this a grand adventure, their chance to get away from home and avoid conscription
to the Russian Front. Even some of the petty officers were retreads like Bekker, the radioman, who had been in the U-boat
personnel office before he and other office horses had been put to useful work and sent to the fleet. Because the radioman
also served as the medic on a U-boat, Max could only pray that he did not fall ill since nothing Bekker did with his medical
kit inspired confidence.