An Honorable German (24 page)

But it was Lehmann, the first watch officer, who should have found the wrench. As first watch officer, it was his responsibility
to inspect the boat for any condition that could jeopardize their safety before reporting to Max that they were ready to proceed.
And he
had
inspected the boat—which worried Max more—because it meant Lehmann lacked thoroughness. But then he was only twenty, with
twelve months of training to master what it had taken Max more than five years to learn. In the old navy, a mistake like Lehmann’s
would end a sea officer’s career. All Max could do now was to speak very sharply to him. If he sent him packing, his replacement
would likely be worse.

Admiral Dönitz and UBootwaffe Command had suddenly decided years of training could be replaced by enthusiasm for the party,
widespread now among the youngsters coming into the fleet. All these young men had been in the Hitler Youth since they were
ten years old—they knew nothing else. Will to Final Victory and Belief in the Führer will get us through, or so Lehmann liked
to say. Not an effective way to operate a U-boat. Belief in the Führer had nothing to do with knowing which valve to turn,
or knowing that you must thoroughly inspect all intake valves to ensure they were not jammed by a stray wrench.

“All hands to the bow,” Max ordered, hoping he sounded as calm as Captain Langsdorff had during battle. He wanted to curse
at the top of his voice, but that would accomplish little except to rattle the men. They’d all be finished if he lost his
composure now. The crew pulled themselves up the deck plates, now at a fifty-degree angle to the bow. “Faster! Faster!” Max
shouted. “Bosun, move these men along, now!”

Carls growled at the young sailors. “Move, move, move! Raus, raus!” Max thanked God he had been able to steal him from
Scharnhorst
.

Several young sailors sniffled in fear as they went. “Quiet in the boat,” Max ordered again. If they sniffled now, what would
they do when British depth charges exploded overhead? Carls drove everyone into the bow, taking two youngsters who had stumbled
and dragging them by the collars of their shirts. Max hoped the weight of the men would be enough to force the boat to an
even keel. He worked his way back into the control room.

“Chief, damage report.”

“Main lighting circuit out, all fuses blown. All motor relays have tripped. Gyro compass out. Port diesel operable but leaking
hydraulic fluid. Fore and aft bilge pumps out. Two motor mounts cracked on starboard diesel and one fastening bolt sheared
off. Batteries damaged.”

“Gas escaping?” If seawater mixed with the hydrochloric acid from the batteries, deadly chlorine gas would be produced.

“Not yet,” the chief said. “I don’t think any of the batteries are cracked.” He hit the depth gauge with his fist in frustration.
“Bloody hell.” The chief engineer hated the U-boat even more than he despised the navy. He’d been “volunteered” from the merchant
marine, plucked from a comfortable billet on a supply ship in Norway and packed off to the UBootwaffe. He didn’t care for
Max either, since Max, as a sea officer, stood a long way up the ladder from a mere engineer.

The last man climbed into the bow compartment. Still the U-boat hung, angled up, the tons of water in her stern keeping her
rooted to the bottom. The chief unfolded a diagram of the boat’s pump circuits and spread it on the small chart table. He
and Max examined the drawings in the dim glow of the emergency lanterns. “Bloody hell,” the chief muttered again. “Bloody
hell.” He traced a circuit with the stub of a pencil and looked at Max. “Water to the control room bilge, pump it into the
ballast tanks, then blow.” Max nodded. There was no other way to get rid of the deadly water that held them down.

“Carls!”

“Herr Kaleu?”

“Bucket chain, now. As much water as possible from the stern compartment to the control room bilge. First watch on duty. Second
watch to their bunks.” Putting the men to bed would lessen their need for oxygen.

Men tumbled back to the stern, seized pots and pans from the cook, buckets from Carls. The second officer—nicknamed Ferret
because he looked like one—joined the line. “C’mon, men,” he said, “let’s show them what the League of German Girls can do.
Put your backs into it, lads, it’s a long swim home.”

For hours they cursed and passed the water, slopping it all over the boat and themselves. Not a man among them kept dry. The
Baltic cold penetrated the hull; the temperature dropped and the cold penetrated their bones. There was no heat on a U-boat,
save for a handful of portable heaters that had little effect. Men shivered in the bunks, waiting their turn. Condensation
formed on the interior of the hull and ran in slimy rivulets to the deck.

Max knew it might not work. And at this depth they wouldn’t be able to open the hatch and use the escape gear. Truth be told,
their escape training had been only for psychological solace. Almost no one ever escaped from a submerged U-boat. Only under
tightly controlled circumstances could it even be done and certainly never below twenty-five meters. They might be entombed
here, with all the other German sailors who had died in these waters. He wanted a cigarette.

Instead he went and lay on his green leather bunk, leaving the curtain open so men looking up from their work could see him.
They might think the situation under control if the captain stepped away for a nap. Not that Max slept, though he kept his
eyes closed, shivering in fear, hoping the crew wouldn’t notice in the dim light. Imperturbability: a U-boat commander must
have it, or else pretend to have it. Forty-six men jammed together in a steel tube no longer than two railway carriages and
no wider than a tram—you couldn’t hide from them. They could always watch you and watch you they did. If you panicked, they
would go crazy. Max found as time went along, he acted more and more like Captain Langsdorff, or even Captain Hauer. He became
more formal and distant, a stickler for rules and etiquette. Not a month ago, he had given a sailor three days in the guardhouse
for not saluting him. The crew feared him. He wore his blue naval tunic with the gold stripes at every meal, even if it did
get filthy, and he forbade the men from wearing the ridiculous checked shirts they’d recently been issued, surplus gear seized
from the French navy. His crew loved the garments, but Max wasn’t about to let them go to war in checked French shirts. Harsh
discipline, spit and polish, or a semblance of it, was the only way. No wonder so many officers cracked.

The watch changed. Sailors of the first watch fell into the vacated bunks as the second watch set to work with the buckets.
Max turned on his bunk, faced the black hull, touched it, felt the cold. Twenty millimeters of steel, no thicker than a boot
heel, was all that separated them from perdition. And everywhere dampness; permeating everything in the boat with a sodden
odor that mingled with other smells—sweat, unwashed men, urine, oil, mold, shit—and produced a heavy fog of stink. That special
U-boat odor was recognizable to all who had served in the UBootwaffe. Max didn’t want to die with that foul smell on his skin.
He didn’t want to die on a training mission after surviving the loss of two ships at war. He didn’t want to die at all. Were
they doing everything they could? Fire the torpedoes to lessen their weight? No, they were too deep for that. Had he failed
to think of something? Pump the oil tanks out? A useful trick under heavy depth charge attack, since a heavy oil slick would
cause the Brits to think the U-boat had imploded. But it wouldn’t help them now. Neither of his outboard oil tanks was even
one-eighth full. Lehmann had gotten the second watch to singing Hitler Youth marching songs—one of his favorite maneuvers.
“A regular bloody choirmaster, our first watch officer,” Carls had said of him. The posturing of the young crew annoyed the
chief petty officers. “Lot of bloody good that sort of thing will do when the Tommies are dropping depth charges on your head,”
they told the sailors. The youngsters sang,

We will march on

Until everything lies in ruins,

Because today we own Germany

And tomorrow the whole world.

Max envied Lehmann his easy way with the crewmen. It came from the camaraderie of the Hitler Youth; Lehmann had been a district
leader. Max never joined the Hitler Youth. He took up his appointment in the navy just months after the Führer came to power.
He had been a member of the Catholic Youth League as a boy, but they spent most of their time hiking, singing hymns, and secretly
discussing how to screw, whatever exactly that was.

Even on
Graf Spee
, Max’s relations with the crew had always been professional and correct, less relaxed than some of the other officers. “Officers
must never make friends with their men,” his father had told him before he entered the Marineschule Mürwik. “They won’t respect
you for it, Maximilian.” Keeping his distance wasn’t hard for Max. He did so by nature. But Lehmann was the opposite; he called
the men by their forenames, listened to their troubles, joked with them—the new National Socialist officer. The Imperial Navy
had been abolished in 1918, after the Kaiser abdicated, but its traditions lived on and were imparted with the greatest vigor
to the Seekadetten at the Marineschule Mürwik. Lehmann knew nothing of those traditions. None of the junior officers did.
Max despised the English as much as anyone, but the war was a contest between professionals. At least it was supposed to be.
To men like Lehmann, the war was a crusade. But why march on until everything lay in ruins? Wasn’t that what they were trying
to prevent?

Max didn’t move from his bunk until the first watch went back on duty. By then the level of black water in the stern compartment
had diminished. He wanted more of it hauled to the control room bilge, but he could see there wasn’t enough oxygen remaining
for the men to continue this kind of exertion. They were breathing like blown horses, though the boat could supposedly remain
submerged for twenty-four hours or even longer. Obviously the genius on the Naval War Staff who had come up with that figure
had never been aboard a U-boat, and never considered how much oxygen men consumed when they were working hard.

“Halt,” he ordered.

The men stopped, too exhausted to even groan.

“Chief?”

The chief gave Max a sour look, his way of saying, “You’re the sea officer with the star on your tunic, Herr KapitänLeutnant
Brekendorf, so you bloody well decide.”

“All hands to the bow, then,” Max said. He had to get the boat on an even keel. The men hauled themselves up to the bow compartment
and lay there like a pack of whipped dogs. Max nodded at the chief.

A wheel turned, then two. Compressed air hissed like a serpent into the ballast tanks and blew out the water that had been
pumped into the tanks from the control room bilge. Then the hissing died away. The boat did not move.

Max had been clenching his fists so hard that his fingernails had drawn blood where they dug in. “All hands to the stern!
Quickly, men, quickly!” The sailors tumbled past him, faces pale.

“To the bow, men, to the bow! Faster! Faster now!” They struggled back, Carls pushing them on.

It had to be the mud holding them fast to the bottom. It was the only explanation.

“E-motors both full ahead,” Max ordered. In the stern, the Elektriker Obermaschinist pushed his throttles forward. “To the
stern men, to the stern. Move, dammit! Move!”

The charging of the sailors back and forth set the boat to rocking. Gently, like a feather floating to the ground, the bow
came to rest on the sea floor, putting the boat on an even keel and breaking the suction of the mud. They began to rise. “One
hundred twenty meters,” the chief called out. “One hundred meters, seventy meters, fifty meters, thirty meters, ten meters.
Tower clear and… hatch clear.”

Max climbed the ladder from the control room to the conning tower and popped the hatch. Baltic air flowed into the boat, so
rich and cold that he almost passed out from the rush of oxygen to his brain.

After they limped back to port, the flotilla commander greeted Max. “A good day?”

“Very instructive, sir,” Max said. “Very instructive, indeed.”

“Excellent, Brekendorf. Carry on then.”

_________

Two weeks later, on a frigid Baltic morning, Carls mustered the crew on the foredeck to look them over. There would be a ceremony
that afternoon for
U-114
and six other boats that had just completed their training. For the final operational tests, Flotilla Command had assembled
ten freighters and four escort vessels that they formed into a pretend Allied convoy. The boats then took turns attacking
the convoy with dummy torpedoes. The crew of
U-114
performed well—Max scored two hits with his dummy torpedoes in their last practice attack. Now an admiral from the Naval
War Staff in Berlin was coming to inspect the crew and Carls wanted to make sure they were dressed strictly according to regulations.
“You never know what these youngsters will put on as uniforms, Herr Kaleu,” he had told Max. The men stood shivering in their
navy blue pea jackets, breath condensing in the frigid air. Carls examined each man, each button, each badge, and adjusted
half a dozen caps.

“Achtung!” he ordered, the two lines of sailors coming instantly to attention.

Max and the other officers stood on the bridge, watching the assembly as Carls began to pace.

“Now, if the admiral stops and asks you where you are from, you will just say, Shithole, Bavaria, or whatever no-good rat
trap you crawled out of, and you will not go into the details of who is banging your sister because the admiral is a busy
man and does not give a shit.”

Max looked down to hide his grin. This was the kind of talk he was used to hearing from sailors, not all this bilge about
the International Jewish Conspiracy that Lehmann bored him with.

Carls boomed out the answers to other possible questions: “The food is good, you love the navy, and you have complete faith
and trust in the captain. Clear?”