The Last Wolf (17 page)

‘I'd hate that, Hamish. It would be a terrible thing to do. I love Craigmore. I thought you did too.'

‘I do. But we're not kids any more, and when the war's over, things are going to be very different. We'll both have other lives to lead.'

‘Supposing we don't win the war?'

‘Of course we will. In the end.' He glanced at her. ‘Don't look so tragic, Stroma. We don't have to decide anything about Craigmore right now. Grandfather's going to carry on for years.'

‘I'm not so sure.'

‘He was all right when you saw him last, wasn't he? He's not ill, or anything?'

‘He didn't look very well, and he misses Grandmother.'

‘Well, he would. But there's not much we can do about it. It'll be ages before I can get to see him and you're going back to school.'

‘Worse luck.'

‘Only two more terms and you'll be out of prison. What are you going to do then?'

‘I want to join the WRNS – if they'll have me.'

‘Lots of girls want to do that. The WRNS are pretty picky from what I hear, but I should think they'll take you.'

‘There is a rumour that our Führer is opposed to us being kind to survivors. He would prefer us to shoot them.'

The Old Man's tone was conversational and his glance round the wardroom table invited comments. Nobody volunteered one.

He speared a tinned sardine on the prongs of his fork, waved it around. ‘Well, Number One, what's your view?'

Reinhard said, ‘That it wouldn't do us any favours in the long run, sir. The Allies would be less inclined to be kind to us, should we ever be in need of rescuing.'

‘My own thoughts precisely.'

More than once, under the Old Man's order, they had provisioned lifeboats crammed with survivors and given them a course to steer for the nearest land. The Old Man had shouted out
Bon Voyage!
to them through the megaphone, and without a trace of irony. On one occasion a distress signal had even been sent off on behalf of the crew of a stricken freighter. Reinhard had drafted the message in English himself.

‘And tell them to get a bloody move on,' the Old Man had urged him. ‘Those poor sods won't last long in this weather.'

A war was being fought and ships sunk but there was no need for unnecessary savagery. Sailors had always gone to the aid of those in peril on the seas. It wasn't always possible, but where help could be given, it should be. Mostly, of course, it couldn't. Men went down with their ship or drowned in freezing seas unable to reach a lifeboat or raft. Or if they reached one, they soon died. There was also the inescapable fact that, unlike a surface vessel, there was no room in a submarine to take survivors on board. One or two, perhaps, but no more. The crew already took up all the hull and the only space left was out on the U-boat's open decks. What use was that, unless they happened to be very near land?

This time a patrol took them up the St Lawrence River, into Canada. Like a spider, they positioned themselves so that their victims came to them – merchant ships, laden with lumber and steel and crates of aeroplane parts, passed by in a slow parade as they set out for England. The corvette escorts swept the river from side to side, but their sonar beams were somehow distorted by the warmer, turbulent river water and the U-boats remained invisible, choosing their targets at leisure. It was almost too easy, Reinhard thought. Almost unfair.

Everything seemed to be in their favour now, even the weather and the long, black winter nights which gave them excellent cover. With such a low profile a surfaced U-boat was hard to see, even in daylight; in darkness it became virtually invisible unless there was a full moon shining or the Northern Lights happened to be putting on one of their spectacular shows.

More U-boats were being built and launched to join the battle. The wolves no longer attacked in ones and twos and threes but in packs of fifteen or more, prowling after the same convoy at the same time. And if the enemy escorts singled out one U-boat for attack, the rest of the pack pounced together on the neglected merchant ships. For the wolf packs this was a second ‘Happy Time' – ‘
die Gluckliche Zeit
'. And the happiest fact of all was that the U-boats were sinking ships faster than the British could build them.

But how long could this state of affairs last, Reinhard wondered? Enemy planes were becoming an increasing threat. Fitted with radar, they could track a U-boat on the surface from miles away and attack as soon as it was in sight. As for the enemy ships, the convoy escorts were showing signs of having learned some useful new tricks. The Happy Time might soon not be quite so happy.

In May, they were lying in wait for a convoy in heavy seas and among drifting icebergs off the coast of Greenland, when a Canadian Air Force Catalina appeared without warning out of the clouds. It was too late to crash dive. The seaplane came in low, machine-gunning the decks and the bridge where Reinhard was standing. Four bombs fell along the boat's starboard side, sending great fountains of water high into the air. The aircraft circled and returned head-on towards them. The U-boats deck gun crew was ready but their single armament was a poor defence against enemy air attack and four more bombs dropped from the Catalina's racks. Again, they missed. It was very hard to hit such a narrow, moving target in rough seas.

They'd been lucky this time. No real damage to the boat and no casualties. The Catalina, all bombs spent, flew away, leaving them alone. Or perhaps not quite so alone . . .?

A second Catalina appeared, no doubt already tipped off by the first. Reinhard was last off the bridge, slamming the tower hatch shut and spinning the wheel to secure it as they dived.

A bomb exploded directly above them, tossing the boat about like a bath-time toy, and then another. He could hear the sea bubbling and roaring back into the vacuum. The Old Man gave orders to take the boat down further. They went to 100 metres and then deeper still, to 150 metres. More bombs exploded. There was nothing to do but sit there and take it.

They took it for four more hours. The second Catalina used up its bombs and went away but it was shortly replaced by another plane with a full load, and then a fourth plane after that one. And so on. A direct hit wasn't necessary to finish them off, as Reinhard well knew. All that was needed was for the detonation to be close enough to cause a rupture in the pressure hull – just as a hairline crack in an eggshell can destroy the whole egg. If that happened there was almost no chance of them being able to surface. They would sink to the very bottom of the ocean and if the hull wasn't crushed by water pressure they would go on sitting until their air supply finally gave out. Another possibility was sea water getting to the batteries, in which case they would all be choked to death by chlorine gas. Or the batteries that drove the electric motors under water, keeping the boat buoyant at a safe depth, might eventually run down. And since they could only be recharged on the surface, the boat would be forced to go up to face the waiting enemy. Of course, there was still the simple possibility of their air supply running out and the carbon monoxide level rising, which would be another urgent reason to surface.

No wonder there was terror in some of the men's faces. His own, he hoped, looked as inscrutable as the Old Man's who was leaning calmly against the periscope shaft, apparently engrossed in a book. Moving a bit closer, Reinhard saw that the book was upside-down. He smiled, but to himself.

Eventually the explosions stopped. Condensation from cold steel had run into the bilges and it dripped from pipes to soak their clothes. The air was thick with the reek of oil, urine, sweat and fear. They went on sitting, waiting to see if the enemy had really given up and left or was just fooling them.

The Old Man put aside his book. ‘Stand by to surface.'

They rose slowly from the deep, up to periscope depth. The Old Man took a look round until he was satisfied that the coast was clear. He gave Reinhard a grim smile.

‘Our enemy is improving, but he's still not quite good enough.'

The U-boat surfaced, shaking herself like a dog. They caught up with the convoy they had been waiting for and joined up with the rest of the pack. Three more enemy ships were sent to the bottom – well-laden merchantmen escorted by two destroyers, one frigate and four corvettes. The U-boats were attacking from every direction except ahead and the total pack tally was twelve ships sunk. But six U-boats were lost to the escorts. The enemy was certainly improving.

On their return to Lorient at the end of their patrol the U-boats and their men received the customary enthusiastic welcome. Reinhard was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class. Attached to a striped ribbon, it was presented by a jovial Korvettenkapitän with plump, white manicured hands. He had probably not been to sea for years, let alone out on patrol. Iron Crosses were two-a-penny, handed out like sweets to bolster morale and not to be compared with the well-deserved Knight's Cross won by his father and now presented ceremoniously to the Old Man who, it turned out, was only twenty-nine – not so old after all.

Even better than the Iron Cross, Reinhard was given the good news that he had been recommended for the commanders' training course. He was well and truly on the up.

In July, Stroma left school after taking her Higher School Certificate. A week later she posted her application to join the WRNS, together with two references – one from a titled godmother she hadn't seen for years and the other from Grandfather's old friend Colonel Crawford, who could be relied upon to say nice things about her.

She was interviewed at the WRNS headquarters at Admiralty Arch.

A Wren officer in a smart tricorne hat asked a lot of questions, including if she could type.

‘I'm afraid not.'

‘That's a pity. We need typists.'

‘I can sail,' she said. ‘I'd really like to be a Boat Wren.'

She'd heard about the Boat Wrens, who had a marvellous time swanning around harbours in cutters, ferrying naval personnel to and fro. They were allowed to wear bell bottoms and white lanyards and to do more or less as they liked.

The officer gave her a frigid stare. ‘You can't pick and choose, you know. You have to do what you're told to do.'

She passed the medical easily and the WRNS seemed to have accepted her, so she signed on for the duration. The next step was basic training, which took place at a large house in west London where the bedrooms were called cabins, beds were bunks and the floor was the deck. The training consisted mainly of marching in ragged ranks, left, right, left, right, and then turning about to march back again, left, right, left, right. They also learned to salute – not the shielding-the-eyes-from-the-sun salute of the Royal Air Force and the Army, but the distinctive palm-outwards salute of the Royal Navy. She had been kitted out with uniform – rough navy serge skirt and jacket, white shirt with a stiff collar attached by fiendishly tricky studs, black tie, jaunty rating's hat – not the officer's elegant tricorne – unspeakable navy blue bloomers, black lisle stockings and heavy lace-up shoes. Her parents arranged for a studio portrait to be taken of her by a swanky photographer in Sloane Street and Grandfather was sent a framed copy to join the one of Hamish in his sub-lieutenant's uniform and the rest of the silver-framed family shots on the grand piano at Craigmore.

Reinhard was ordered to the U-boat commander's school in Neustadt on the Baltic coast, which involved a long and tedious railway journey. He joined a small group of prospective commanders and they practised on a simulator resembling the interior of a conning tower. The mock-up could be moved in all directions and they learned techniques, tricks and tactics, a good deal of which he had already gleaned from the Old Man. After two weeks he was sent to Danzig for active shooting. On the train journey he found a seat in a compartment crowded with Wehrmacht officers bound for the Russian front. Cigarettes were passed round. The soldiers seemed certain that they would easily overcome the Russians' stubborn resistance.

‘We can afford to give them a few metres here and there,' one of them told Reinhard. ‘Our lines will hold easily. They don't have our industrial capacity, you see, and their weapons are clumsy compared with ours.'

‘All the same, I don't envy you the job.'

The man laughed. ‘That's a good joke. I'd sooner be on the Russian steppes any day than in a U-boat.'

At Danzig, Reinhard's training started at dawn the following day when shooting practice began at sea with U-boats and surface vessels. The gruelling schedule was designed to train a commander to think and act fast in emergency conditions, to learn how to sense the enemy's next move, to know when to crash dive, when to stay on the surface and shoot, how to handle the U-boat under bombardment, how to deal with every imaginable problem that might occur. After four weeks, with very little time for sleep, he finished with the highest rating. He was assigned a brand new U-boat, still in the final stages of construction, and promoted to the rank of Kapitänleutnant.

He was given two weeks' leave and decided to spend the first one skiing in the Alps where the winter snows had already fallen. The train journey involved a change at Berlin. With a couple of hours to kill before his connection, he walked to Katrin Paulssen's apartment. As it was the weekend, he had reckoned there was a good chance of finding her at home, but there was no answer when he rang the bell. He rang several times and then stopped a middle-aged woman coming out of the building.

‘I was hoping to see Fraulein Paulssen who lives here. Do you happen to have any news of her?'

‘She doesn't live here any more.'

‘Oh? Perhaps she has gone to her parents at Wegendorf.'

‘I don't know where she is. They took her away several months ago.'

‘Took her away? Who?'

‘The Gestapo. They burst in here one night and arrested her.'