Stage Door Canteen (39 page)

Sometimes in the waters east of Boston, the fierce winter storms hid freighters on their way to Nova Scotia and the convoy rendezvous at Bedford Basin. It was frustrating and wearying for a U-boat crew to stand watch for hours, with the freezing rims of binoculars biting into one’s flesh, trying to penetrate a swirling white curtain of snow, or fog, while never taking one’s eyes from the sea. There was no protection, either, from sudden mishaps. Lashed to the rail of the steel bulkheads, the leather safety belt, reinforced with steel, chewed into the ribs through rubber coats and layers of clothing. In spite of the belts, watches on U-boat bridges had been washed overboard. On one U-boat the relief watch had gone up to find the tower empty, no one there. The crew mysteriously gone.

Then there was the enemy. At any moment a US Coast Guard cutter could suddenly loom out of the snow and mist. The United States Navy, and even civilian spotter planes on the east coast had thrown themselves into a massive counterattack against U-boats since late November. A sudden break in the overcast could reveal a Navy anti-submarine Catalina bomber overhead. A U-boat watch was constantly on the alert, ready every second to scramble back into the tower to respond to the order to dive.

The cook’s helper’s accordion music had stopped. The boy appeared at the hatch with mugs of hot coffee. Kapitanleutnant Ensmann declined the coffee. He had just about decided to go below and spend an hour or so catching up on radio reports, when the bosun standing next to him cried, “Masthead off the port bow!”

The crewmen on the bridge froze. They were forbidden to look in any quarter but their own. Their orders were to continue scanning the sea. But excitement ran through them like a bolt of electricity.

Kapitanleutnant Ensmann turned. At that moment a breaker came over the U-426’s bow and raced down the length of the U-boat toward them. The cook’s helper quickly ducked down the hatch. The watch braced themselves. Only a second before the roller broke, Kapitanleutnant Ensmann could see the freighter standing off the port bow like a huge gray and black ghost, trailing steamer smoke. As insubstantial, in the snow-fog, as the legendary Flying Dutchman.

Then she was gone.

Ensmann knew that what he had seen was no ghost, no illusion of overtired eyes, but several thousand tons of Allied shipping. And he had to immediately decide whether it was possible, with poor visibility and the heavy swell that was running, to take her.

He turned to the officer of the watch. “Take this down, Brietmann. Unaccompanied vessel sighted, approximately six nautical miles.” The “unaccompanied” was optimistic. “Visibility poor. If we can find her again, we’ll run alongside.”

He unbuckled his safety belt as the navigator gave the orders to clear the bridge. The watch scrambled down into the tower. As soon as he was below the Kapitanleutenent issued orders to flood, and proceed at periscope depth.

With the hatches secured, the ventilators were promptly switched off. The U-426’s diesel engines shut down. At once the overpowering stink of fuel, unwashed bodies, and bilge, filled the air. The atmosphere began to steam over in wisps of vapor on the pipes and other metal surfaces. In the sudden silence they could hear the hum of the U-boat’s electric engines taking over.

The kapitanleutnant drew up a stool at the periscope tower. He had decided on a periscope attack because, in bad weather, the periscope caught more light. Even so, getting the steamer in the sights would be difficult; for the past three days the rolling sea swell in Massachusetts Bay had reached heights of eight to ten feet. Once the U-426 lifted on a huge wave and found, for a few terrifying seconds as it poised at a forty-five degree angle, that the screw was completely clear of the water. Then, as it nosed down again into the trough, every man aboard scrambled like grim death to find something to hold onto. The submarine shook like a rag doll in the jaws of a bulldog. Cups and saucers in the galley shattered, and a variety of loose objects sailed through the air.

Ensmann adjusted the periscope while the men at the hydroplane controls were joined by the chief engineer, who was in charge of the U-boat’s trim while it was running underwater. The navigator was on station inside the conning tower to feed the ship’s calculator data on the freighter’s position. Which would be directed to the gyro-steering mechanism of the torpedoes, and constantly adjusted up to the second of firing.

The sound man reported he had detected and confirmed propeller noises. Good, Ensmann told himself. The big freighter wasn’t an illusion after all.

He pulled down the periscope. “Port fifteen come to thirty degrees. Slow ahead.”

The U-426 was under the surface of the water, running on the silent electric engines and not the noisy diesels. Blind, and because of the limits of its batteries, living on borrowed time.

The steersman near Kapitanleutenant Ensmann sat before a panel of wheels, cables and levers. If you joined the Navy to see the world, service on a submarine was not the place for you. Some of the engine crew, the stokers and mechanics, would never go topside their entire tour of duty.

“Go to forty feet,” he said to the chief at the hydroplanes. “Periscope is still under water.” He knew the hydroplane crew was having their problems with the sea’s deep swell. Water had been pumped into the tanks for extra ballast but the U-426 was still bobbing like a cigar-shaped cork. It was not going to be a day when one followed U-boat ace Kapitanleutnant Otto Kretschmer’s famous dictum: One ship, one torpedo. “Tubes one to four stand by for underwater firing,” he continued. “Flood tubes, open torpedo doors.”

“Propeller noise at two hundred twenty degrees,” the soundman reported. “Sound bearing steady. No other noise.”

The freighter was still there, less ghostly as they closed on her. Hopefully, she was unescorted. Solitary freighters chugging along the way to Halifax could be bait for a U-boat, with a destroyer lurking nearby.

The chief said, “Boat balanced.”

The Kapitanleutnant stood up and called into the tower, “Switch on tubes one and two.” Then, to the navigator, “What’s the time?”

“Sixteen thirty-six.”

He took the cross bar of the periscope in both hands. “Once more, exact bearing.”

“Two hundred and twenty degrees.” Tension was thick. It showed in all their voices. They were running submerged, the freighter somewhere above them. “Target louder, moving forward.”

Suddenly the periscope broke through the green glassy wall of a wave. There was the steamship, enveloped in swirls of snow, wallowing in the sea swell. She looked vaguely familiar. The kapitanleutnant stared at her, trying to remember something. “Range twelve thousand feet, go to zero!” he told the helm. “Half speed ahead!”

There was a pause. He told the navigator up in the tower, “Prepare for comparison reading. Enemy position bow right, angle sixty, enemy speed less than three knots.”

He didn’t try to rotate the periscope. With such rotten weather there was hardly any need to look for enemy airplanes. Astonishingly, he could see the merchant ship was on an erratic course. Not tactically zigzagging to evade attack, but slipping sidewise crazily, making little or no headway. Taking heavy seas broadside. God, what was the matter? Was the crew all drunk?

All caution, now, he said to the sound man, “What’s the sonic bearing?”

“Commander, two hundred and seventy five degrees.”

The periscope cleared the waves again. In spite of her unpredictable course the freighter was still on target. Ensmann turned the periscope, looking for a lurking destroyer. He had no idea what was the matter with the troubled merchant ship, it gave the appearance of having lost its steering. If that’s what was happening, the men abroad were in a peck of trouble.

And if she was a decoy, so were they. In trouble.

The kapitanleutnant searched, but there were no destroyers, no enemy ships to be seen on the churning sea. And no planes, hopefully, in the snow-filled sky.

“Chief, a double shot from one and two,” he told the team at the hydroplanes. “Half speed?”

He saw the chief nod. To the tower he ordered, “Enemy course twelve knots. Torpedoes to sixteen feet. Hydroplane station, bow right, angle fifty, follow changing angle.”

Behind him the U-boat was absolutely silent except for the hum of the electric engines and the usual mysterious thumps and murmurs from the hull. No one aboard could see what was happening, except for the man at the periscope. Everything from now on required absolute faith. Ensmann was filled with tension. It was in moment like this, he’d been told, that he looked as though he was trying to jam his head up into the periscope.

The U-426 rose on the crest of a swell. The view was, for a lucky few seconds, unobstructed. The freighter was there in their sights. Suddenly Ensmann knew where he had seen her before. Damned if it wasn’t the British steamship Esher they’d nearly sunk off the coast of New Jersey a few months ago. Fired on, but not sunk. Now here she was, in the sea east of Boston, strangely crippled, but still alive.

“Tubes one and two, ready to fire.” It was time to put an end to this damned stubborn old cow. “Tube one, fire!”

There was a distinct jar felt throughout the U-426, caused by the ejection of the torpedo in tube one.

“Tube two, fire!”

The kapitanleutnant loosened his ferocious grip on the crossbar of the periscope and took a deep breath. Both torpedoes were on their way. Straedel, the first officer, was giving the order to flood some of the U-426’s tanks to make up for the loss of the torpedo weight.

They waited. Moments passed. No noise of the freighter’s propellers. Had the Esher finally gone down?

“Take her up,” Kapitanleutenant Ensmann ordered.

It was time to see what they’d done.

The weather in Massachusetts Bay north of the Cape Cod Canal had been extraordinary. More than what one would expect in the last days of a particularly storm-wracked year. From the Esher’s bridge there was a constant vista of waves whipped to foam as far as one could see. Which was not far. The lookouts, bundled to the eyes in foul-weather gear, had their work cut out for them.

A stubborn sea swell lifted the Esher’s bow up ten feet or more, raced on amidships, and when the center of bouyancy was passed, let the body of freighter down with a tooth-jarring thump in what was generally referred to as “pounding.” Each time this happened, the two anchors on the bow, weighing five tons apiece, slammed against the Esher’s hull. The heavy swells also lifted the stern out of the water, making the propeller race as it met nothing but air—a situation that, if left unattended, would shake the ship’s engines to pieces in short order. In the engine room the weary chief engineer compensated by constantly throttling down the steam valve, either opening it, or closing it at each lift and fall of the stern.

Captain David Griffiths had just come up to the bridge after taking a pot of tea in the officer’s mess in the company of the exhausted third mate, who had fallen asleep with his head on the table. As the captain appeared in the wheelhouse there was a sudden sidewise slip in the frieghter’s headway. He scowled. “What the devil was that?”

The first officer, a Scotsman by the name of Hogarth, had no time to answer. They watched through the windows of the wheelhouse in various degrees of disbelief as the Esher sloughed off several points heading and took a giant wave hard on her starboard beam. Tons of gray-green water swept the deck and foamed toward them. The next second, the wheelhouse windows were under water.

“Bloody hell,” the first officer said under his breath.

The second mate, who had been checking a weather report, looked up. As the water drained from the window they saw the long gray length of the freighter turn sidewise into the next sea. The impact was considerable. The floor plates under their feet shook as the ship took the weight of several tons of water on its decks.

The helmsman turned the wheel again. “She’s not responding, sir.”

“Not responding?” the first officer said. “But that was fixed!” Another wall of water came rushing toward them. He turned to David Griffiths. “Captain, we’ve lost steering.”

The second mate was already reaching for his sou’wester. “Yes, get going,” David told him. The helmsman stepped back from the wheel. “You, too, Winsley.”

The Esher took another wave side-on, rolling its bulk far to port until the rail was under water. The first mate, taken unawares, lost his footing and slid across the wheelhouse on his knees and came to rest against the door.

The emergency steering was located on the poop deck, out in the open on top of the housing known as the “steering flat.” One wouldn’t freeze to death out there, the flat had a door on each side and portholes and was kept warm by expelled steam. But it was still a hell of a job to steer from there with seas coming over the sides. The emergency steering wheel had a mechanical linkage to the steam engine directly below which drove a cog, which in turn drove the quadrant affixed directly to the rudder post. Once you got there—and God willing that you did—you were positioned more or less directly over the ship’s rudder.

The helmsman and the second mate plunged out the wheelhouse door. David Griffiths rang the beleaguered chief in the engine room. The Esher took another giant roller, listing steeply. Then they heard a deep, internal murmur, almost a sigh.

The First hung onto the binnacle and threw David Griffiths a tight-lipped look. With that sound their situation had become dire. Minus steering and taking swells broadside, they faced the immediate danger of the Esher’s cargo of tanks, army vehicles, and crates of airplane parts shifting, which would give the freighter a list. A list in these seas would breech the ship’s plates, opening her hull. That is, if the waves now washing over her didn’t break open the hatches and swamp her first.