Erich Bruckner
Chesapeake Bay
4 May 1945
Ostermann was the last to leave the boat. “Are you certain you want to do this, Captain?”
Erich shook his hand. “A captain stays with his ship,” he said. “I will try to get her where she belongs.”
His navigator saluted, then headed for the Sturm. There had been no need to share his intentions with the rest of the crew. As Manny and Hausser watched the big cruiser glide away from them, Erich was already charting a course for the short run south to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. They would be forced to remain on the surface because they would not have enough crew to perform even the most rudimentary diving or surfacing operations.
Erich had no choice but to gamble they would not be discovered. For the scant hour or so of daylight, a low cloud cover was in their favor if the Americans had continued recon flights along the coast despite the war’s end.
Hours later, rocked in the cradle of midnight, the U-5001 tossed gently on the surface of the Bay. They had made it. It was very dark—and the cloud cover remained heavy with the possibility of a storm. Frederich Hausser stood by an inflated rubber dinghy, tied up alongside the rear hatch. He stood at the ready to unleash it in case of an emergency. After all this planning, Erich did not want the sinking submarine to pull their life raft down with it.
Manny was not certain how close they might be to any onshore installations or homes, and for that reason he did not want to place any charges. If sounds of detonations drew attention, they would be risking capture. Erich did not want the Americans to know anything about his boat’s true mission. And so, it was necessary to scuttle the boat by hand in a fairly deep drop off in the seabed.
He and Manny opened the ballast doors, overflowing all tanks. The effect was immediate and much faster than they imagined and the brackish water rushed in the open hatches around their feet in an instant.
“Get to the aft hatch!” yelled Manny.
As they ran, Erich could feel the boat was lowering itself into the water with great speed. He knew they had little time before all open hatches were breached. When that happened, she would go down.
As he rushed headlong past his captain’s quarters, Erich paused, debating for an instant whether he had time or inclination to bring his small footlocker—containing his papers and the ship’s log. He’d previously convinced himself he would be starting over with a whole new life, but when the moment came to let everything go, he felt hesitation.
But it was short-lived. Manny ran up behind him, pushed him along, yelling like a maniac. “No time! No time!”
Erich trailed his friend as they scrambled up the ladder to the escape hatch. At that moment, the strap to Manny’s rucksack snagged on a jutting pipe. When it pulled taut, its flap opened and one of the metallic bars he carried fell away, clattering to the deck below. Erich paused, thought about trying to retrieve it, and Manny yelled something unintelligible as he grabbed his captain by the neck of his sweater and yanked him up the ladder.
Water breached the hatch; a torrent roared past Erich just as Manny pulled him clear. If he had not done that, Erich could have been trapped.
And then it happened so quick after that. He was stunned how fast the water took her down. Jumping into the dinghy, he barely had time to turn and salute his last command. The U-5001 slipped beneath the shimmering black bay and was gone.
It had been a sobering scene.
So final.
After seeing it, the three men paddled slowly, trying to make as little noise as possible. Without the bright, clear chart of the stars, they had no cues for direction, but they could see a pale, distant scattering of lights, which defined the shoreline and the general north-south orientation of the Bay. At that moment, Erich tried to concentrate on their position rather than think too deeply upon the enormity of what he was doing. But one thought would not leave him: he was certainly a very desperate young man.
They fought against the tide for several hours before finally reaching a muddy embankment. With no moon, the land was dark as a coalmine, and the lights they had seen from a distance had become lost in a thick tree line. Insects thrummed and Erich thought he heard the occasional rattle of a vehicle on some distant, unknown road.
“Hide the raft,” he told his small crew, and they punctured the dinghy and did a poor job of hiding it beneath some underbrush. However, it only needed to stay undiscovered until they were far enough away to never be connected to it.
Hausser had said they must work their way north, toward Baltimore, but slowly with great caution. Once in the city, they could find his uncle’s restaurant, and the hope of sanctuary. Erich felt this was a simple plan, but he was concerned about his poor English skills. Like Manny, he barely recalled any of his grammar school drills. Hausser claimed to have a decent vocabulary from his letters to his American cousins, but Erich believed in no guarantees at that point.
There were other concerns as well—they had no American money, no real sense of direction nor distance, and were very afraid people might not yet know the war had ended. What would happen, Erich mused, if they were caught and discovered to be Germans by an uninformed populace?
Manny felt it wise to head toward the sound of vehicles, which promised a road and a means of orienting themselves. They reached a paved two-lane highway just as dawn arrived, giving them a compass heading. Manny figured the road headed in a general northwest direction, which suited their purpose. However, they decided to remain in the woods and brush bordering the road, moving as best they could, but undetected during the day. The landscape was mostly peppered by farms and the occasional intersection.
When darkness fell, they were fighting exhaustion and had used up the small amount of rations they’d brought along. Although risking capture was almost unthinkable, Erich knew they would not get very far without food or water. And so, when they stumbled on a small rural gas station and grocery which had closed for the evening, they had no choice but to break inside and gather provisions.
For almost a week, they moved only in darkness, abetted by one additional burglary. It was slow and they had no idea when they would reach the city. However, as the farms became more plentiful, so did available supplies and well water, which kept them alive. Manny seemed particularly terrified by the idea of capture. Erich was getting to the point of no longer caring what happened to him, while the young Hausser seemed to be genuinely excited at the prospect of seeing his relatives.
On the evening of the sixth day of their wandering, they saw a glow beyond the horizon, signaling a large city. The outskirts of Baltimore. Crowded. Dirty. Industrial.
They entered the area through the southeast where steel mills still blazed around the clock and shipyards swelled with dry-docked vessels in for repairs. The war with Japan was very much in doubt, and America still labored to earn victory. Everyone working so hard. So much activity that Erich felt safe walking in the streets. Wearing non-descript khaki and denim, they looked like other workers. No one gave them a second glance.
They became more comfortable, and Hausser became downright bold. “We need money,” he said. “I will get it for us.”
Erich and Manny waited in an alley, while their young cook begged for coins on a street corner.
Within the hour, he had a handful of nickels. “Watch this, Captain,” he said.
Erich and Manny followed him into a tiny corner store selling cigarettes, newspapers, and American soft drinks. Hausser smiled as he spotted what he was looking for in the rear corner of the establishment. But first he moved to a refrigerated chest, lifted its lid and pulled out three bottles of Coca-Cola. The glass felt cool in Erich’s hand, and he realized they had no way to open them. A small boy squeezed past him, retrieved his own bottle, and snapped it open on a small lip attached to the side of the cooler.
Smiling, Manny nodded and they all opened their first bottles of Coke in America. It was a moment Erich never forgot.
As they edged to the back of the store, Hausser directed them to the original object of his quest—a wooden phone booth with a split hinged folding door and a large book attached to a shelf beneath a telephone.
Hausser spent considerable time searching through the listings…until he found what he needed. “It is the Continental House,” he whispered in German. “I found it!”
A phone number. Using one of his begged coins, he successfully telephoned his Uncle Herman at the restaurant. Hausser was so proud of his ability to do this, his smile looked as if it would explode off his face.
After hanging up, Hausser guided them outside into the noisy street, then told them how shocked his uncle had been to receive a call from young Freddie, as they all called him. But the elder Hausser did not hesitate to act.
One half hour later, Herman and his son, Dickie, arrived in a 1938 Plymouth, a beat-up black sedan, covered in road dust. He drove up Hanover Street through a neighborhood he called ‘Sobo’. The uncle was tall with thin blond hair and small, round spectacles. He had been clearly overjoyed to see his young nephew, and if he was suspicious of Manny and Erich, he did not show it. As he drove slowly up the crowded streets, he told Erich with evident honesty he could not have helped them if the war in Europe had not been ended.
Erich nodded, tried to relay in half-English-half-German, his appreciation and understanding. He tried to tell Herman he would have done the same. At that moment, Erich had acknowledged the day would come when they would face questions from the Americans and their answers would have to be good ones.
When they reached the Continental House, Erich was impressed with the size and popularity of the restaurant. Herman ran it with his wife, their two daughters and their husbands as the wait-staff. They had a German chef named Kimmel, a few kitchen helpers, and that was all. Herman had come to America as a small boy with his family, who had been in the meat business as butchers and packers. He started his restaurant after the Depression, originally calling it the German Haus, but he had changed the name after Hitler invaded Poland and occupied France.
Erich and Manny were taken in by Hausser’s family with a promise they would be safe until they could get established. Back then, Baltimore was very much a patch-quilt of tight little neighborhoods demarcated by nationalities. The Haussers lived in Morrell Park—an area which had been heavily German for a hundred years, and because of that, no one paid much attention to the poor English language skills of Erich and Manny.
Nephew Freddie went to work in the family restaurant’s kitchen, where he learned the secrets of the great chefs and how to speak passable English quite quickly. Herman found Manny work as a neighborhood handy-man with older residents who needed odd-jobs and who still spoke a fair amount of German. Finally, he was able to arrange employment for Erich as a helper on an ice-truck. It was backbreaking work, dragging blocks of ice into stores and taverns. And, because he spoke so little English, the pay was very low.
As the months passed, slouching into a humid Baltimore August, Manny and Erich learned to speak the language of the locals. At first, it was difficult, and peppered with colloquial aberrations, but Erich persevered because of the utter necessity of it. He, Manny, and Freddie were becoming a familiar part of the neighborhood, and no one questioned their presence there. As Erich learned more English, he was able to comprehend more of what was happening in his home country. And, as he and Manny had suspected, Europe and Russia were planning to punish Germany in a very large way. Both were grateful to not be there—either to witness or suffer it.
Japan surrendered when it felt the punishing force of an American atomic device. When Erich saw the notices later that month of a terrible weapon that had leveled two Japanese cities, he thought immediately of the device he’d left behind…and only then had any true sense of what kind of weapon it might have been.
Erich would have never imagined ever spending a Christmas in America, and his first was a memorable one. He and Manny had been making friends throughout the neighborhood and the city itself. There was a lot to like about their new country, and they had both decided to become permanent citizens—if they ever wanted better jobs, better housing.
Like so many of his friends, Erich wanted a family. But there was only one way to do this—he would need to rise up from hiding. Herman Hausser suggested waiting at least a year after the end of the war before placing himself at the mercy of the American authorities. Time has a way of smoothing out rough spots, and Erich hoped the American Navy would be tired of the war and have little interest in him or his Executive Officer.
While keeping a low profile until the proper time, he and Manny, along with Freddie Hausser, concocted a history for themselves. A history that would allow them to keep the truth buried—hopefully forever.
By the next summer, they were ready. Thankfully, Erich recalled the story of the U-1020, under the command of a very young captain named Eberlein. In January, 1945, it had disappeared during its mission to scout aerial defenses of major harbor cities along the East Coast of America—part of the preparation for the 5001’s secret mission. When Erich and the others officially turned themselves in, Erich told the federal agents they had been part of an adjunct training crew on that submarine, which had been sunk in the Atlantic, south of the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay. They had been the only three survivors—washing ashore south of Norfolk.
Erich had been confident the Americans would believe him—for several reasons. One, he gave them real names, and the feds were able to verify all three of them had been members of the German Navy. Two, there was no record of Manny, Hausser, or Erich sailing on any other boats—the 5001 never officially existed and adjunct crew were routinely omitted from regular boat crew-lists. Three, the Navy did have records of attacking and sinking U-boats sighted off the Virginia and Carolina coasts in January of ’45. which made it more than likely they sank the boat carrying Erich and the others. And four, Erich had no reason to be lying.
They did believe them, and eventually, after passing through the bureaucracy, Erich, along with Manny and Freddie Hausser, went about the business of becoming Americans.