The War That Came Early: West and East (6 page)

“This is a pretty good batch,” he said as he put the loaf in her cloth sack.

“You always say that,” Sarah answered. “Or your father does, if he’s back there instead.”

“We always mean it, too. We do the best we can with what they let us have,” Isidor said. “If they gave us more, we’d do better. You know what we were like before … before everything happened. We were the best bakery in town. Jews?
Goyim?
We were better than everybody.”

“Sure, Isidor,” Sarah said. As far as she could remember, he was right. Whenever the Goldmans wanted something special, they’d come to the Brucks’ bakery. She remembered things as ordinary as white bread with a fond longing she wouldn’t have imagined possible only a couple of years before.

She gave him money and more ration coupons. Just handling the coupons, printed with the Nazis’ eagle holding a swastika in its claws, made her want to wash her hands. But she had to use them—she or her mother. If they didn’t, the family wouldn’t eat. It wouldn’t eat well any which way. Aryans couldn’t eat well under rationing, though they could keep body and soul together. Jews had trouble doing even that.

He handed her her change. Some of the bronze and aluminum coins also bore the eagle and swastika. She liked the older ones, from the Weimar Republic, better. They didn’t make her wish she could be a traitor against the government, or at least that the country
—her
country, in spite of everything—had gone in a different direction.

“Take care,” Isidor said as she turned to go. “Hope I see you again before too long.”

“Sure,” Sarah said, and then wondered if she should have. She could see his reflection in the front window as she walked to the door—neither brownshirts nor British bombs had broken this one. Yes, he was watching her. She had to ask herself how she felt about being watched. What would she do if he asked her to go walking in the botanical gardens, or through
the park just south of them that held the zoo? (Those were the most exciting dates Jews could have these days. Even movie theaters were off-limits. Sarah didn’t look especially Jewish, but Isidor did. The ticket seller would surely ask for his ID, and trouble would follow right away.)

A baker’s son? In ordinary times, she would have laughed at the idea. These days, weren’t all Jews equal in misery? And—a coldly pragmatic part of her mind whispered—if anybody kept food on the table, wouldn’t a baker? The things you had to think about! She was glad when the door swung shut behind her.

Chapter 3

U
p atop the U-30’s conning tower, Lieutenant Josef Lemp imagined he could see forever. No land was in sight. Ireland lay off to the north, Cornwall to the east, but neither showed above the horizon. Gray-blue sky came down to meet green-blue sea in a perfect circle all around the boat. The eye couldn’t judge how wide that circle was. Why
not
believe it stretched to infinity and beyond?

Why not? Only one reason: you’d get killed in a hurry if you did. Three petty officers on the conning tower with Lemp constantly scanned air and sea with Zeiss binoculars. The U-30 had almost circumnavigated the British Isles to reach this position. As far as the Royal Navy and the RAF were concerned, she made an unwelcome interloper. They had ways of letting her know it, too.

But the U-boat needed to be here. Convoys from the USA and Canada and Argentina came through these waters. Without the supplies they carried, England and her war effort would starve. And British troopships ferried Tommies and RAF pilots and the planes they flew to France. Sink
them before they got there, and they wouldn’t give
Landsers
and
Luftwaffe
flyers grief.

One of the petty officers’ field glasses jerked. He’d spotted something up in the sky. Lemp got ready to bawl the order that would send everybody on the tower diving down the hatch and the U-30 diving deep into the sea. Then the binoculars steadied. The petty officer let out a sheepish chuckle. “Only a petrel,” he said.

“That’s all right, Rolf,” Lemp said. “Better to jump at a bird than to miss an airplane.”

Rolf nodded. “You bet, Skipper.”

The surface navy was all spit and polish and formality. There was no room for that kind of crap aboard U-boats. The men who sailed in them laughed at it. They were a raffish lot, given to beards and dirty uniforms and speaking their minds. But when the time came to buckle down to business, nobody was more dangerous.

Lemp had his own binoculars on a strap around his neck. The conning tower also carried a massive pair on a metal pylon, for times when a skipper needed to trade field of view for magnification.

Rolf stiffened again, this time like a dog coming to the point. “Smoke!”

“Where away?” Lemp asked, grabbing for his field glasses.

“Bearing about 270,” the petty officer answered. “You can make it out just above the horizon.”

Back and forth, back and forth. Moving the binoculars that way was second nature for Lemp. And sure as hell, there was the smudge. “Well, let’s see what we’ve got,” he said, excitement tingling through him. “Go below, boys,” Down the hatch they went, shoes clanging on iron rungs. Lemp, the last man there, dogged the hatch. “Take us to
Schnorkel
depth,” he ordered as he descended.

The U-30 slid below the surface—but not far below. The tube mounted atop the submarine let the diesels keep breathing even so. Lemp was not enamored of the gadget, which didn’t always work as advertised. The shipfitters back in Kiel wouldn’t have installed the Dutch-invented device on his boat if he’d been in good odor with the powers that be. After sinking an American liner while believing it to be a big freighter, he
wasn’t. He was lucky they hadn’t beached him—maybe lucky they hadn’t shot him. No one who remembered the last war wanted to see the USA jump into this one.

Lemp turned to Gerhart Beilharz, the engineering officer who’d come with the
Schnorkel
. “Is the damned thing behaving?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, sir,” Beilharz said enthusiastically. He was all for his new toy. Of course he was—he wouldn’t have been messing with it if he weren’t. Normally, an extra engineering officer on a U-boat—especially one two meters tall, who wore an infantry helmet to keep from smashing his head open on the overhead pipes and valves—was about as useful as an extra tail on a cat, but, if they were going to have the
Schnorkel
along, having somebody aboard who knew all about it seemed worthwhile.

It did have its uses. With it in action, the U-boat could make eight knots just below the surface—better than twice her submerged speed on batteries. And she could keep going indefinitely, instead of running out of juice inside a day. Best of all, with the
Schnorkel
the U-30 could charge the batteries for deep dives without surfacing. That was good for everybody’s life expectancy … except the enemy’s.

Lemp could have gone twice as fast in approaching the ship or ships making that distant smoke plume had he stayed surfaced. Maybe it was a lone freighter: a fat, tasty target. Maybe, sure, but the odds were against it. Freighters in these waters commonly convoyed and zigzagged. They commonly had destroyers escorting them. And destroyers loved U-boats the way dogs loved cats—even cats with two tails.

Better to be a cat o’ nine tails
, Lemp thought. With all the torpedoes the U-30 carried, he could flog England even worse than that. If he could keep England from flogging back, he’d bring the U-boat home so he could go out and try it again.
So the English have the chance to kill me again
. As he did every time that thought surfaced, he made it submerge once more.

He peered through the periscope. Nothing but smoke, not yet. Eight knots was a walk, even if it wasn’t a crawl.

He could come closer to the enemy with the
Schnorkel
than he could staying on the surface. He did have to give it that. An alert lookout who’d
spot a light gray U-boat hull even against a gray sky wouldn’t notice the hollow pole that kept the diesels chugging. If he did spot it, he might think it was a piece of sea junk and keep his big mouth shut.

“What have we got, Skipper?” somebody asked. The first time he put the question, Lemp heard it without consciously noticing it. Whoever it was asked the same thing again.

This time, Lemp did notice. “Convoy. They’re zigzagging—away from us, at the moment.” Even tubby freighters could go as fast as the U-30 did on the
Schnorkel
.

“What kind of escorts?”

“Warships. Destroyers, corvettes, frigates … I can’t make that out at this distance. I see two—bound to be more on the far side of the convoy.” Lemp muttered to himself. If he was going to get close enough to fire at the enemy ships, either they’d have to swerve back toward him or he’d need to surface and close the gap before diving again. He didn’t much want to do that; if he could see the enemy, they’d be able to see him after he came up. Trouble was, you couldn’t fight a war doing only the things you wanted to do.

“Can we sneak up on them, sir?” That was Lieutenant Beilharz, both more formal and more optimistic than most of the submariners.

Unhappily, Lemp shook his head. “Afraid not,” he said, and then, “Prepare to surface.”

Beilharz grunted as if the skipper had elbowed him in the pit of the stomach. The youngster wanted his pet miracle-worker to solve every problem the sea presented. Well, no matter what he wanted, he wouldn’t get all of it. Lemp wanted to be taller and skinnier than he was. He wanted his hairline to quit receding, too—actually, he wanted it never to have started. He wasn’t going to get everything his heart desired, either.

Compressed air drove seawater out of the ballast tanks. Up came the U-30. Lemp scrambled up the ladder and opened the conning-tower hatch. As always, fresh air, air that didn’t stink, hit him like a slug of champagne.

He knew he would have to dive again soon no matter what. British binoculars weren’t as good as the ones Zeiss made, but even so And he
had ratings scan the sky to make sure they spotted enemy airplanes before anyone aboard the planes saw them. How close could U-30 cut it? That was always the question.

Then one of the petty officers yelped. “Airplane!” he squawked, sounding as pained as a dog with a stepped-on paw.

“Scheisse!”
Lemp said crisply. Well, that settled that. “Go below. We’ll dive.” He knew the U-30 had no other choice. Shooting it out on the surface was a fight the sub was bound to lose. And if machine-gun bullets holed the pressure hull, she couldn’t dive at all. In that case, it was
auf wiedersehen, Vaterland
.

The ratings tumbled down the hole one after another. Again, Lemp came last and closed the hatch behind him. The U-boat dove deep and fast. He hoped the plane hadn’t spotted it, but he wasn’t about to bet his life.

Sure as the devil, that splash was a depth charge going into the water. The damned Englishmen had a good notion of what a Type VII U-boat could do—the ash can burst at just about the right depth. But it was too far off to do more than rattle the submariners’ teeth.

“Well, we’re home free now,” Lieutenant Beilharz said gaily.

“Like hell we are.” Lemp had more experience. And, before very long, one of the warships from the convoy came over and started pinging with its underwater echo-locater. Sometimes that newfangled piece of machinery gave a surface ship a good fix on a submerged target. Sometimes it didn’t. You never could tell.

Splash! Splash!
More depth charges started down. Unlike an airplane, a destroyer carried them by the dozen. One burst close enough to stagger Lemp. The light bulb above his head burst with a pop. Somebody shouted as he fell over. Someone else called, “We’ve got a little leak aft!”

Lemp didn’t need to give orders about that. The men would handle it. He waited tensely, wondering if the Englishmen up there would drop more explosives on his head. They were waiting, too: waiting to see what their first salvo had done. Only a little more than a hundred meters separated hunter and hunted. It might as well have been the distance from the earth to the moon.

Splash! Splash!
Those sounded farther away. Lemp hoped he was hearing
with his ears, not his pounding heart. The bursts rocked the U-30, but they were also farther off. Lemp let out a soft sigh of relief. They were probably going to make it.

And they did, even if they had to wait till after dark to surface. By then, of course, the convoy was long gone. The English had won the round, but the U-30 stayed in the game.

VACLAV JEZEK POINTED
to a loaf of bread. The French baker in Laon pointed to the price above it. The Czech soldier gave him money. The baker handed over the torpedo-shaped loaf. Jezek knew only a handful of French words, most of them vile. Sometimes you could make do without.

Off in the distance, German artillery rumbled. Vaclav started to flinch, then caught himself. If the Nazis were hitting Laon again, he would have heard shells screaming down before the boom of the guns reached his ears. They had plenty of other targets in these parts: a truth that didn’t break his heart.