23 October 1942: Commander-in-Chief Middle East to Prime Minister: Zip!
Prime Minister Winston Churchill to President Roosevelt: The battle in Egypt began tonight at 8 pm London time. The whole force of the Army will be engaged. I will keep you informed.
Max Looff, Kapitänleutnant, dragged out of sleep by the shriek of his submarine’s alarm bell, moved instantly by reflex – jack-knifing to hurl himself off the bunk, the noise like a torture in his fogged brain while awareness grew inside like a negative taking form in the developing liquid: this alarm – ten to one it was an aircraft attack – the long, nerve-wracking patrol and his own sick worry growing: but only hours short of docking in St Nazaire now, thank God – or rather, please God… Main vents had crashed open and before that he’d heard distantly the yell of ‘Dive, dive, dive!’ The deck was angling by the time his feet landed on it, U 122’s bow dropping steeply, men rushing to their action stations skidding and jostling, and Looff glimpsed – as sudden and startling as party-goers caught unaware in camera flashes – fright, desperation, in the pale, drawn, stubbled or bearded faces of men already close to their limits. You saw it only for an instant before the individual reasserted control, faces turning to masks again, and Looff hoping to God that none of them focusing on him one or two seconds ago as he pushed out through the green curtain that shut off his tiny cabin-space might have seen that same fright mirrored: eyes wide, mouth slackened… It had drawn tight now, into a slit like a sabre-cut: he was in the control room and the bridge lookouts – and Oelricher who’d been officer of the watch – were sorting themselves out of a heap on the deck, under the lower hatch in a mess of water that would have sloshed down as she dipped into the waves, while Oelricher had still been pulling the lid down over his soused head. Fourteen metres on the depthgauges: Franz Walther, Looff’s chief engineer and right-hand man, was busy with the trim.
‘Blow Q!’
Q being the quick-diving tank, flooded to get the boat down fast. It had done its job, she was going down too fast.
‘Brit aircraft, sir.’ Oelricher – he was quartermaster, which in the U-boat context meant warrant officer and navigator – answered Looff’s unspoken question. ‘Bomber – Wellington, I’d guess, but I didn’t wait to—’ shaking his head, still short of breath: ‘Came out of nowhere – well, low cloud, but straight for us, as if—’
The sea began to explode, astern. U 122 like a drum being smashed or a ball kicked point-blank against a wall. Bombs, or very shallow-set charges. Men were being flung about: Looff, hugging the long barrel of the search periscope as his submarine tilted until she was almost standing on her nose, plummeting down, saw the depth-gauge needles jerking to the blasts of pressure. Then realised as the reverberations died away that she was still vibrating, the whole ship trembling violently enough to shake herself apart, and noise from the stern like a giant knife-grinder.
‘Stop both motors!’
Noise and vibration ceased so promptly that he knew the men back aft must have pulled the switches of their own accord before that order could have reached them. Either the screws had been damaged – blades bent or blown off – or the shafts had been bent. Or both.
‘After ends report bad leaking, sir!’
Eighty-seven metres on the gauges. Ninety…
‘Get her snout up, for Christ’s sake!’
‘Blow number one main ballast, sir?’
He nodded to Walther. The engineer was bearded and incredibly dirty, but his brown eyes were calm. Looff envied him: and was more than ever conscious of the degree to which he relied on him. Scruffy bastard though he was… He heard the rush of high-pressure air, a noise as harsh as sand-blasting in the narrow pipe. There’d been something said about leaks aft: he guessed it would be the stern glands again, where the propeller-shafts passed through the pressure-hull. They’d had trouble with them earlier in this patrol, first during a counter-attack after U 122 and some others had mauled a convoy south of Iceland, and then again – worse, and with other major damage too – farther west, during a long, very unpleasant depth-charging close to Newfoundland.
Walther had been blowing the forward main ballast tank for nearly half a minute, and she hadn’t responded at all. Steep bow-down angle, needles sweeping round the gauges. Hundred and five metres: something as wrong as hell… ‘Blow two and three main ballast!’
Faces like trapped animals’. Sweating with nerves. Frightened animals, all in the same cage and perhaps about to drown. He himself – inside himself – as screwed-up as any of them, and the worst and deepest fear was the nightmare of this being recognised. Externally at this moment all they’d see would be the straight gash of a mouth, hard eyes, strong jaw. Even a smile – as demanded by his reputation. He was also supposed to smile when ships burned. He’d done so once, apparently, even though he had no recollection of it and could only think it had been a grimace which someone had wrongly interpreted: but whenever he hit a tanker, in particular, they all looked for that grin, for the way they wanted him to be. They were kids, most of them eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, only the POs and CPOs older than that: they wanted a fable, a skipper they could boast about to their girls. And he’d given them a tanker, this trip, with a grin to match: he’d also knocked down one straggler, and two other freighters out of that convoy close to Canada… The slight smile began to form now as he remembered a little catch-phrase that had gone around and was still quoted: ‘For Max Looff it’s always the happy time!’ Then his smile switched off completely: he shouted, pointing furiously, ‘Main vents, you fucking idiot!’
You could see from the indicators on the panel – the vents were still open. All that air had been blown straight out to sea!
Vents thudding shut now. Walther scarlet under dirt and beard. Walther of all people – probably the shrewdest and most conscientious engineer Looff had ever sailed with. Looff glaring at him in white-hot rage: fists bunched, eyes blazing, on the brink of losing control, physically attacking him. It was the sort of carelessness, stupidity, that you’d have skinned some half-baked recruit for: from a man of Walther’s experience and expertise it came closer to sabotage, dereliction of duty, criminal carelessness…
‘Stop blowing!’
The boat was levelling, and Walther was directing the two planesmen – on the fore planes, five degrees of dive… The gauges showed 130 metres, and the descent had been checked. They’d been deeper than this before now, of course, quite a lot deeper, but the Type VII C was only tested to 90 metres. Besides which Oelricher had called a warning from his chart-table a few minutes ago: ‘We’re in eighty-six fathoms, sir…’ 86 fathoms being about 172 metres: so another forty of that headlong rush and she’d have slammed into the bottom.
‘I’m—’ Walther glancing round, shaking his head – ‘extremely sorry, sir. Don’t know how I could’ve—’ His voice had a shake in it, too. He’d turned back: he had his hands full with the trim, to get her up now out of danger – because with weak spots, leaks such as they had aft and other points of strain from those earlier batterings, this depth was dangerous – and to do it in a controlled manner he’d need to get rid of some of that air in the main ballast tanks. The submarine’s bow was already rising to an extent that the forward planesman, with maximum dive on now, was finding impossible to control… ‘Permission to crack number one main vent, sir?’
Looff barely heard. He was still glaring at him… Then the engineer looked round again: Looff swallowed, mumbled ‘Affirmative’, and turned away as if he couldn’t stand the sight of him. Walther, the man he’d trusted, relied on, more than any other. All right, so in a U-boat the engineer was the man who counted most, after the skipper: but Walther was exceptional in any case. And a minute ago he’d nearly drowned them all! It amounted to nothing less: if you couldn’t use your propellers, all you had to get her up with was the store of high-pressure air in the bottles, so if you blew it all out through tanks with open vents in their tops you’d be left with nothing except a one-way ticket to perdition. And yet – it dawned on Looff as suddenly as a cold shower hitting him – by reacting as violently as he had he’d made an exhibition of himself: seeing it, he felt like a man coming out of fever, delirium…
Because he did rely on Franz Walther so heavily? Needed his talents and support now more than ever, because of his own…
No. He shut his mind to that. It wasn’t that his nerves were shot, simply that he was played-out, mentally and physically exhausted, worn through to the bone… He needed the leave that was due to him: and afterwards he’d be all right. Berlin, and Trudi: he’d drown in her… He put a hand on Walther’s shoulder, told him gruffly, ‘Sorry. Temper’s a bit short… Look – you’re allowed one mistake a year, and I’d forgotten, this year you never drew your ration. So we’ll forget it.’
Walther glanced round. White teeth gleamed in a gap in the scrubby beard. Teeth like a rat’s, narrow and sharp-looking. Despite which Franz Walther invariably got more than his ration of women. There was surprise in his eyes now, despite the grin: Looff had turned away but he was still seeing that probing stare, a kind of critical speculation – as if Walther had begun to guess…
She was coming up nicely now. The engineer was releasing air from the tanks a little at a time as she rose, still slightly bow-up but not excessively so. It would be necessary to check out the propellers now – one at a time, in the hope that only one of them might be damaged. That was only a very small hope, from his recollection of how it had felt and sounded: but in any case he wanted her closer to the surface before making any experiments of that kind: there was a danger of shaking those glands right out. Imagination saw the spurts of sea, rivets blowing out like bullets, plates bulging, splitting, the Atlantic bursting in…
‘I want a report on the leaks – after ends.’
‘Lieutenant Gebhardt went to deal with it, sir.’ That was Grewe, first lieutenant – on his way to the watertight door, to unclip it and go aft. There were only two such doors in the boat, one at each end of the control room, so that the forward and after compartments were very large, so big that in practical terms it meant if one of those subdivisions were flooded, and the boat was in deep water, you’d have had it. And most of the Atlantic – until you came to a shallow coastal strip such as U 122 was in now – was very deep indeed.
‘Periscope depth.’
He’d decided he’d surface completely, then check the state of the screws. A recce of the sky first, of course. That bomber would be a hundred miles away by now, but there could be another: there were far too many of the bastards these days, and the approaches to the U-boat bases were favourite hunting areas for them. Three U-boats had been lost to British aircraft in Biscay in the last few months: and if those bombs had fallen just a metre or so from where they did fall, U 122 might well have made it four.
Looff was at the chart beside Oelricher, using dividers to measure the distance from here to the Loire estuary and the St Nazaire U-boat pens. The quartermaster told him, saving him the trouble, ‘Would’ve been four and half hours’ steaming, sir.’
And by this time tomorrow he’d have been on his way to Berlin. To Trudi, whom he’d married only four months ago. Trudi’s father was a general, now on the Eastern Front with the Sixth Army, advancing against Stalingrad… But there’d be at least a day’s delay now, Looff guessed, in his own take-off for Berlin, and more than that if anything else went wrong. The thought gave him a feeling of a barrier erected between himself and Trudi: of Trudi always a little out of reach, like a retreating figure in a dream… He turned, feeling the sick depression again as Grewe arrived from aft with the second engineer in tow.
‘Reporting on the leaks, sir…’
Looff looked at the depthgauges. Thirty-five metres, and she was rising steadily on an even keel. He moved towards the search periscope. ‘Stern glands again?’
Gebhardt nodded. Deathly pale, and glistening with sweat – or with spray from those leaks… ‘The port gland, the one that was bad before, was fairly hosing in. When we were deep it—’
Irritation was sharp, intense: he snapped, ‘How is it now?’
‘It’s – less, sir, a lot less, but still – sizeable. Bilge pump will need to be run every ten minutes in thirty, say. But the starboard gland’s no more than seepage now.’
‘Very well.’ He told Walther and Grewe, ‘If the RAF have gone home, we’ll surface and see what’s what.’ Turning to the search periscope as the boat rose smoothly towards the ordered depth. This search periscope was operated from the control room, but the attack ‘scope you worked from the conning tower, on a saddle-seat that turned with it. He couldn’t in fact have used it now because it was jammed solid, one of the effects of those Canadian depth charges. Looff was busy sky-searching, swivelling slowly around with his eyes pressed against the rubbers while behind him Walther struggled with the awkward trimming job. You needed motive-power, some motion through the water, for the hydroplanes to grip and take effect, like horizontal rudders. Now, with the screws motionless, the engineer was having to adjust his trim by no more than pints flooded in or pumped out: and there was enough motion at this depth to make it a losing battle.
‘Can’t hold her, sir, we’re drifting up…’
It would be worse to over-flood, blind the man at the periscope by dipping it. Walther’s eyes were on the Papenberg, the sensitive water-tube depth-meter between the two clock-face ones. The Papenberg showed depth-changes with great accuracy and was used primarily for periscope work, especially during dived attacks when it was important not to show an inch more stick above the surface than you had to.
‘All right.’ Looff stepped back. ‘Surface.’ He told Grewe, ‘I want the twenty millimetres manned.’ The AA guns, a quadruple mounting abaft the bridge on a railed platform that was known for some obscure reason as ‘the conservatory’. He’d have the gunners up there because if you had no motive-power you couldn’t dive quickly, and it would be safer to stay up and fight than wallow slowly, defencelessly into the waves, a sitting duck for aircraft bombs or depth charges. The British aircraft had RDF in them now, which made them much more dangerous than they had been and presumably accounted for the recent losses. U-boats had been promised search-receivers as a counter to this: some kind of device that would give warning when an airborne radar fingered you.
‘Blow all main ballast!’
The gunners were standing by. Looff climbed into the tower. Alone for a few seconds he paused with his eyes shut while the sweat broke out like fever and his body shook with the release of tension. Air was ripping into the tanks and his boat tilted, lifted: Walther’s voice rang hollowly from below, ‘Standards awash…’
One whole day lost, was what it boiled down to.
The tug – from St Nazaire – escorted by one Möwe-class torpedo-boat, had taken seven hours to get to them. Another Möwe had arrived before that and stayed with them, and there’d been fighter cover overhead most of the time.
U 122 had been completely immobilised by those bombs. Both screws smashed… Looff had sent a diver over the stern, and he’d reported that the propeller blades were all either twisted or shorn off. And one shaft was bent, too. So there’d been nothing to do but wait, with the hydrophones manned to pick up any sound of approaching screws. With air cover to protect them from further bomber attack, the threat to guard against had been the chance of a British submarine finding this easy target.
But it was close to noon now – the attack had been yesterday afternoon – and they were well inside the Loire estuary, the tug making an extra couple of knots in the land’s shelter. One torpedo-boat had gone ahead into St Nazaire, and the other hung astern. Air attack was still very much a possibility.
From the partly-raised search periscope, four white pennants fluttered – white because the four ships sunk on this patrol had been merchant-men. When you KO’d a warship, you marked the success with a red pennant. The four streamers looked good, up there: they were the signs a welcoming crowd always looked for and applauded. Looff was dressed for the return to harbour, ready for that welcome, wearing a clean white cap and also his Knight’s Cross. The white cap was a U-boat commander’s badge of honour and special privilege: they stopped you in the street, women tried to kiss you, and if they were pretty enough you’d permit it.
Max Looff, ace ship-killer. His tonnage sunk had passed the quarter-million mark last time out. The four kills on this patrol added another estimated 33,000 tons to the bag; so a third of a million was in his sights. The old dream becoming fact, the burning ambition he’d had of following in the footsteps and the fame of Prien, Kretschmer, Schepke, Frauenheim, Endras…
Endras’s nerves had been in ribbons, before he’d sailed on that last patrol. They shouldn’t have let him go. And Prien, Schepke and Kretschmer had all been lost in the same month – in March of last year. None of it had seemed to spell out any kind of lesson: those were the tragedies of war and it was always the other guy it happened to. In March of 1941, it seemed to Looff now, he’d been a kid, a brash youngster, new to the white cap and blinded by its glory. In nineteen months he’d aged by – what, twenty years? He could see himself as he had been then when he looked now at the new, young COs: strutting, desperately impressed with themselves, believing in the Reich’s destiny and their own involvement in it. Max Looff would look at them and think, You’ll grow up: or you’ll drown.
He’d grown up, all right. And now, he’d be all right. After this break, three weeks in Trudi’s warm, enclosing arms, he’d be as right as rain. The signs he’d read in himself, all the forebodings and introspection, had been symptomatic of nothing more than exhaustion, over-strain over too long a period. Nerves on edge, certainly, but that was an entirely different thing from nerve lost. If that had been on the cards it would have happened long ago: there’d been plenty of tough patrols before this one. It was important to bear it in mind: and a question of self-discipline, not to allow the imagination to play such games. Also – and oddly enough – another way of steeling oneself against any such weakness was to think of Trudi: she’d been swept off her feet by a famous U-boat commander, a national hero whose hand had been shaken by the Führer himself: and this same man would be returning to her now – tomorrow, or the day after. The same man, the same lover…
What if he – well, talked in his sleep, or—
Christ…
Imagination off the leash again: seeing it, the bedside light switched on, Trudi up on one elbow, golden light bathing those perfect breasts, her hand on his shoulder and her voice urgent, waking him from nightmare and the echo of his scream still ringing. The shock, disbelief in her face, tears streaking his…
‘One man on the bridge?’
He imagined, as he bent towards the voice-pipe, how it would be to have Trudi’s sympathy, how long it would be before sympathy became contempt. He answered that request: ‘Affirmative.’ It was Franz Walther, the chief engineer, who came up, clambering past the helmsman in the tower, emerging into the bridge with an unlit cheroot clamped between his teeth.
‘Time for a smoke before we dock, sir?’
‘Plenty.’
Walther lit up, then inhaled luxuriously, smoke eventually trickling from his nostrils while he gazed around – at the tug with its mound of churned froth ahead, the torpedo-boat with its clean, warlike lines back on the quarter, the smoothly swelling rush of grey-green water surging into froth along the U-boat’s saddle-tanks, her wash spreading in a widening V towards land encroaching on both sides. Looff was glad to have had that sequence of thought interrupted. In fact it hadn’t been thought, it had been imagination, the very thing he had to avoid, forbid. It was unreal, a lie, you had to shut your mind against it and keep it shut. He asked Walther, ‘Looking forward to some leave, are you?’
‘Well.’ Expelling smoke. Even through its heavy pungency you could smell him. ‘I expect I’ll stick around the boat, pretty well. Make sure they don’t cock anything up.’
Walther wouldn’t trust any shoreside engineer farther than he could spit. He was like a jealous husband, with his boat. Looff advised him, ‘You ought to get yourself away for, at any rate, a short while. Pick a stage when they can’t do much harm. I don’t want you getting stale, or sick, you know.’
He knew the engineer was staring at him: out of the side of his eye he’d seen the black cheroot swing, jutting like a gun-barrel. But silence, no comment at all: Looff remembering the way this man had looked at him yesterday – that doubting, assessing stare. There might be the same sort of question in Walther’s face now, if he’d cared to look back at him. The connection being the warning he’d just given him, about getting stale, when yesterday Walther had seemed to be wondering whether his skipper might be going off his head… He mumbled, finally, ‘I might take a few days. Week, at most – once the work’s properly in hand. Maybe Paris.’
Looff smiled. ‘Ah.’
‘Well, for shit’s sake, the local tarts—’
‘Quite.’ It occurred to him that if one of the local whores took anything like a close look at Franz Walther, she might feel very much the same degree of caution. ‘We don’t want you with that sickness, either.’
‘The Maquis’ secret weapon.’ Walther hawked, and spat to leeward. ‘I suppose you’ll be off to Berlin, sir?’
‘Bet your boots.’ Looff was conscious of the constraint between them, and the mutual effort to break through it. It might be quite a while before the incident really faded. He added, partly by way of a fresh, oblique apology, ‘Three weeks, and I feel I need every day of it. Every hour. I’m going to forget I ever saw the inside of a U-boat.’
‘Fat chance of that, sir.’ The engineer shrugged. ‘They’ll have you making speeches, lecturing, signing autographs, taking the salute at parades of Hitler Youth – etcetera, etcetera…’ Walther belched, and cheroot-smoke seeped through his facial hair. ‘Kapitänleutnant Max Looff – in Berlin – ye Gods, they’ll be climbing over each other to get their hands on you!’
He was right, at that. It wouldn’t be possible to evade it all. The heroes of ‘Dönitz’s private navy’ were a major propaganda asset. Dönitz himself had referred to them as ‘the bravest of the brave’. They were the stars, the gladiators…
‘Knights in shining armour.’ The captain of the flotilla’s smile had irony in it. ‘That was the C-in-C’s own expression.’ The captain was a large man, about the same height as Looff but much burlier. Duelling scars on his cheeks. ‘And you’re one of the shiniest, my dear Looff.’ He moved round behind the desk. ‘Sit down. How about a touch of cognac? Or schnapps?’
‘Not just at the moment, thank you.’
‘Dare say you’re wise. It’s early, and you’ll be painting the place scarlet tonight, I suppose.’ By ‘the place’ he’d be referring to La Baule, ten or a dozen miles away, to which submarine personnel were transported each evening. This base was too much of a target for bombing, not to mention for British commandos, who’d paid the main port of St Nazaire a highly destructive visit earlier in the year. ‘But – I was saying – one of the shiniest. You’re very well thought of – which is hardly surprising, the way your bag’s mounting and the fact that aggregate monthly tonnages destroyed are the figures by which our lord and master stands or falls. Eh?’
‘Admiral Dönitz.’
A nod… ‘What I’m telling you is he was talking about you, Looff.’ The captain pointed at the telephone on the desk between them. ‘Over that thing, two or three hours ago.’
Looff fingered the Kriegsabzeichen, the gilt U-boat badge on the left side of his jacket. C-in-C talking about a U-boat CO to the flotilla captain could mean very little, or it could mean something like promotion, or – well, something quite different. There was a suspicion in the back of his mind now, a small seed of anxiety. He inclined his head: ‘I’m honoured.’
‘That’s a hell of a long defect-list your engineer’s presented, I’m told.’
Abrupt change of subject. But there had to be some link. The seed swelled, a little. Looff explained, ‘Most of the damage was done by the Canadians. Or one assumes they were Canadians, right on that coast. I was – well, to be frank, lucky to get out of it… But there was also an earlier pasting, out in the air-gap, and finally as you know this damn bomber – another extremely close shave.’ He could hear a shake in his own voice, and he was worried that the other man might detect it too. He thought, I’m talking too much, running off at the mouth: better dry up… But it was necessary to finish – ‘also some of the minor items were held over from our last spell in harbour, if you remember – because that was only a short stand-off, whereas this time—’ he smiled, rather uneasily – ‘well, personally, I’m off for my three weeks in Berlin, while they put us back in shape.’
He noticed a slight deepening of the lines around the captain’s eyes: eyes which did not, now, meet his own. It was out of character: and the seed was active, germinating.
‘Not this time, old chap, I’m afraid. As I was saying – or rather, beginning to say—’
‘But—’
‘Wait, let me—’
‘Sir – I’ve absolutely got to—’
‘I said wait!’
A roar: then silence. A slow blink: and now an understanding smile. But the eyes were like steel. Looff staring back at him: Looff’s fingers gripping the edge of the desk. The captain’s hands moved too, joined each other on the blotter in front of him, linked and seemed to be trying out each other’s strength. He murmured, frowning down at them, ‘Von Rosenow was a friend of yours?’
Was. So it was true, Horst had gone…
‘I’m sorry to have to confirm it. But there’s no doubt now. We’ve no idea how or even exactly where, but—’
‘That’s terrible.’ Staring at the motionless, grim-faced man on the other side of the desk, he remembered another question he’d meant to ask – about young Neumann of U 102: Neumann had been out there with him in that first pack attack, and after it there’d been several days of unanswered ‘Report your position’ calls to him – just as there’d been to Von Rosenow earlier.
‘The point is this, now. Rosenow was to have taken over a brand-new boat. U 702. Not only spanking new, but she has the added strengthening, the deep-diving capability. Oh, and a search-receiver. A few other small improvements… Anyway – she’s yours. This is the personal decision of Flag Officer U-boats, a decision which I personally applaud and also, as you’ll appreciate, something of an honour. But it certainly means you’ll have to postpone that leave. 702’s ready for sea, there’s a particular task for her – for you, Looff – and you’ll sail the day after tomorrow.’
The room was turning, swimming… He closed his eyes to stop it. Then wet his lips and found his voice: it sounded like someone else’s. ‘Special task?’
‘Well. You’ll get your orders and full details from Operations, of course. But – briefly – and bear in mind this is not to be discussed either here or in quarters, right?’
‘Naturally.’
There was far too much talk, and far too many French ears listening to it, and some of them weren’t listening by chance or out of mere curiosity, either.
‘Intelligence has reason to believe the enemy’s preparing a seaborne assault on Dakar. It also happens that a group of boats currently deployed in that general area are being shifted into the Mediterranean: this is a routine change-over that can’t easily be cancelled. It’s very important therefore that we should deploy a new group down in that Azores-Freetown stretch. As you’re aware there’s a zone of no air cover, east of the Azores—’
‘The Black Pit.’
A nod… ‘So it’s a good hunting ground in any case. Your starting-point will be due east of Santa Maria. It’ll take you a few days to get there, of course, and you’ll need to get a move on. There’ll be seven, possibly eight other boats joining you, to form a patrol line and then move southward towards Freetown. Your pack’s been allocated a code-name – which is on the tip of my tongue but for the moment seems to elude…’ The big hands separated: then the fingers of one of them snapped like a pistol-shot, and the captain smiled. ‘Drachen. You’ll command the Drachen group.’
Drachen meaning ‘dragon’.