y 6 June 1939 ·
OFF HAWKE POINT
Silence, you idiot!” the captain hissed in the darkness.
“Can’t you see I’ve got the sonarphones on?”
“Sorry, mein Kapitän !” came the meek reply from somewhere amidst the whispered chatter of the darkened submarine control room.
“Ach! Now I’ve lost him! Schweinehund! ” he said. “I want absolute silence!”
Suddenly, it became deadly quiet and still inside the steel hull lurking beneath the mirrored moonlit surface of the sea. The only noise was the constant ping from the radar screen, a ghostlike green oval in the shadowy red light of the control room. The screen showed a jagged point of land, jutting into the sea, in brilliant detail. On the German naval charts, that point of land was marked Hawke Point, and it was here that U-33 had been spending most of her time lately.
Like everything else aboard the submarine, the sonarphones the captain was wearing were the most advanced available from German scientists. U-33 was also equipped with highly experimental turbopowered engines, which converted hot exhaust gases into supercooled liquid propellants that drove a giant turbine aft. It took four of the giant engines to power the massive submarine.
“Project Crossfire,” a top secret German Kriegsmarine program to develop new submarine propulsion systems, had produced the magnificent engines, capable of more than triple the horsepower of conventional submarine engines.
The power plants were coupled to an even more radical breakthrough, the Hydro-Propulsion system. This entailed water entering the sub at the bow, being superheated, then fed through an impeller, supercooled, only to be expelled at great force from the stern. To Berlin’s delight, the design almost doubled the sub’s submerged running speed.
The only remaining question was, could U-33’s steel hull survive double the stress-loads of the high-output, high-torque, high-speed Crossfire propulsion system?
U-33’s mission to the Channel Islands was, in part, a shake-down cruise to assess the new Crossfire system’s impact on a conventional sub hull. Her other mission, known only to a few men on board, was to confirm the existence of a network of English spies on tiny Greybeard Island. Spies who’d somehow been getting highly accurate information about Nazi naval movements in the Channel to Hitler’s nemesis, Winston Churchill.
Churchill’s speeches in the British Parliament were a daily source of irritation to the Führer, and he wanted the flow of information to the old bulldog stopped, at any cost. That’s why U-33 spent most of her time lying off Hawke Point, the believed base of the espionage group.
Finally, the experimental U-boat was to scour the island coastlines and map them for possible infantry landing sites. Berlin’s plan for the German invasion of these tiny English islands was already in the final stages. Hitler planned to launch his invasion of the English mainland from these four islands, so it was imperative he capture them first.
The new sub, entrusted with all these important missions, was the pride of the whole German Navy—the largest, fastest, deadliest undersea weapon Germany had yet produced. She was officially called U-33, but her crew had already given her a nickname that looked like it was going to stick.
She was called Der Wolf, a tribute to her skipper, Wolfgang von Krieg, the “wolf ” himself.
Von Krieg was watching and waiting, his eye glued to the black rubber eyepiece of the periscope. Framed in the center of his lens was the dark outline of Castle Hawke, sitting high above the pounding black sea on its rocky cliffs, lit by jagged flashes of lightning from an approaching squall. The lights at the top of the castle tower had been burning since sundown, which was unusual. The eye knew. The eye was here night after endless night. Waiting for something, anything. Watching.
The human eye blinked away a tear, but it wasn’t sadness or even fatigue that caused that solitary eye to water. It was cabbage.
“Ach! Zose cabbages! Zose cabbages!” the shrill voice of Kapitän von Krieg reverberated throughout the silent ship.
It was Monday, cabbage night aboard U-33. Pungent vegetable smells permeated the length of the vessel, from the torpedo rooms fore and aft to the control room amidships. Even a submarine this advanced was no place for a sailor with a sensitive nose. And the pungent smell of boiled cabbage now seemed especially powerful amidships where von Krieg stood with his eye to the periscope. Kapitän von Krieg, while not a sensitive man, had an extremely sensitive nose.
“I smell zose cabbages!” von Krieg thundered, though his first officer was standing immediately behind him. His number one on this voyage was a short, jumpy little man named Lieutenant Willy Steiner.
It was his job to be two steps aft of von Krieg and he had been the first officer to keep the job for more than six months. Was it because he was the only man who could tolerate the captain’s constant abuse? Or, as gossip had it, because “Little Willy,” as von Krieg called him, had powerful friends in Berlin? There was even a shipboard rumor, so far limited to the officers’ mess, that Willy was an SS officer personally sent by Hitler to keep an eye on the sometimes explosive von Krieg.
It was no secret to anyone aboard U-33 that her captain was something of a loose cannon. A dangerous thing aboard any vessel. But especially aboard an experimental submarine on a highly secret mission that might well determine the outcome of the war.
Baron Wolfgang von Krieg, or “Wolfie,” as he was known in civilian life, was the only son of one of Germany’s richest and most powerful men, Count Helmut von Krieg. Tall, powerfully built, and quite handsome when his features weren’t clouded with drink, Wolfie had been a notorious character in Berlin society. With his striking blue eyes and blond, almost white hair cut close to the skull, he had cut quite a dashing figure in ballrooms in every corner of the Fatherland.
Sent to university at Oxford against his wishes by his half-English mother, the rebellious, arrogant boy had been shunned at school and had developed a great hatred for English people. A hate that was almost as strong as his love of French wine. A brilliant student, he’d nonetheless been accused of attacking a college Don in a drunken rage and been sent home to Germany in disgrace. The story that followed him home to Berlin was that he’d sliced off the Magdalen Don’s ear with a fencing foil.
The von Kriegs had built Germany’s most powerful arms and munitions empire. Their loyalty and support of Hitler’s Third Reich was critical to the Führer’s plan to bend all of Europe to his will. The von Krieg factories, deep in the Ruhr Valley, were operating twenty-four hours a day producing everything from bombs for the Luftwaffe air corps to long-range 88-millimeter cannons for the army. As Germany took up the weapons of a world war, it was with the powerful arms of von Krieg.
Wolfie knew that, and had taken every advantage of it to advance his naval career. His most glittering prize thus far had been the command of U-33.
“Why do I smell cabbages, Willy?” von Krieg asked, more pleasantly now, his way of keeping his assistant slightly off guard.
“It’s Monday night, mein Kapitän, ” Willy said.
“I know that, Willy,” he said, his eye still glued to the eyepiece. “And what difference does that make?”
“None, sir, of course, except that Monday night is cabbage night,” Willy said mildly.
He could almost feel von Krieg go rigid with anger at his scope. He had noticed that it didn’t take a great deal to get this reaction from his captain. The captain had a hair-trigger temper and Willy often noted his captain’s outbursts in the little black book he kept locked in a safe in his tiny cabin. A black book he kept for Hitler’s eyes only, at his leader’s orders.
“U-33’s mission is critical to me personally, and I don’t want this headstrong young captain to botch it, do you understand?” Those had been the Führer’s parting words to Willy, and, not being suicidal, he took them to heart.
“It vas cabbage night, Little Willy, until I gave strict orders that there would be no more cabbage nights! You know how I despise cabbages! That is why I forbid anyone to cook this peasant food on my ship! Do you forget my orders so easily?”
“Of course not, mein Kapitän, but tonight is also Chief Torpedoman Ober’s birthday and the cook thought that—”
“You say the cook thought? Surely I misunderstand you. Are you trying to tell me that our cook can think? For he surely cannot cook!”von Krieg hissed. “Listen carefully to me, Willy. I will say this only once.”
Von Krieg made a fierce effort to control his violent temper. “I want you to go to the aft torpedo room.”
“Aft torpedo room, mein Kapitän.”
“Ja, the aft torpedo room. And I want you to arrest Torpedoman Ober.”
“Arrest him, mein Kapitän ?”
“Am I speaking too softly, Lieutenant?” Von Krieg had still not removed his eye from the periscope lens. “Yes! I said arrest him, you idiot, for disobeying a direct order!”
“Jawohl, Kapitän von Krieg!”
“Arrest him. And then I want this impudent torpedoman loaded into aft torpedo tube Number Four,” von Krieg said.
“The torpedoman into the torpedo tube, mein Kapitän?” Willy shook his head in wonder. His captain was entering uncharted waters of madness. Hitler was right. This man needed watching.
“Into the tube, Willy. Into the tube! And then I want you to offer Torpedoman Ober best birthday wishes from Kapitän Wolfgang von Krieg, do you follow? Yes? Then seal the tube and prepare it for firing. Do I make myself perfectly clear, Willy?”
“Seal the man in the torpedo tube?” Willy asked, aghast. He’d done some terrible things himself, but such cruelty to an innocent man was too much even for him. “Kapitän, please! You must understand that it was not Torpedoman Ober who—”
“Willy!” von Krieg shouted and Willy knew there was no point in continuing.
“Jawohl, mein herr! It shall be done immediately!” Willy saluted the captain before leaving the control room, but von Krieg failed to notice. His periscope had just picked up something interesting at Castle Hawke. A room of some sort, atop the tower, had been ablaze with light all evening. And now those lights were beginning to go out.
And, at the base of the cliff below the castle, a powerful shaft of white light was visible, pouring through what appeared to be a thin seam in the rock. Was there some kind of secret inlet there? Something he wouldn’t have noticed by day? An entrance to a hidden lagoon, perhaps?
“Achtung!” von Krieg shouted, though there was no need for shouting in the tiny control room. “Bearing zero-five-zero, heading left nine-two-five! Mark! All engines ahead flank speed!”
“All ahead flank, mein Kapitän !”
“So, Hawke, you English swine,” von Krieg chuckled to himself, his eye pressed up against the lens of his periscope, “I believe perhaps I have finally discovered your little secret spy nest! Ja, the secret back door of Hawke Castle itself!” He smiled at his little joke. “So this is how the great Hawke flies in and out of his lair unseen!”
The sub lurched forward as the powerful Crossfire engines, four massive screws and the hydro-propulsion impellers did their job in perfect tandem.
“And Der Wolf will be waiting by the door for your next appearance, my lord,” he added, chuckling to himself.
Little Willy had returned to the control room from his distasteful mission at the stern of the ship and now stood rigidly at attention. “Heil Hitler!” Willy saluted.
“Heil Hitler,” von Krieg returned half-heartedly, eyes still riveted to the scope. “Tube Four is loaded as I ordered, Willy?”
“Aft tube Number Four loaded and armed for firing, sir,” Willy said, morosely. The Führer would not be pleased to learn that U-33’s torpedo tubes were being used, not against Germany’s enemies, but to send an innocent German sailor to an unspeakably horrifying death.
“Fire!” Krieg shouted.
A crewman pushed the red button on the fire control panel. They heard a muffled roar from the rear of the ship. “Four away, Kapitän !” the crewman said, as the men around him stared in stunned silence. Every man in the control room knew it could have been anyone of them lying terrified in tube Four, waiting to be ejected with terrible force beneath the sea. With this mad captain at their helm, this promised to be a long and dangerous cruise.
“Happy birthday, Torpedoman Ober,” von Krieg sang softly to himself at the periscope. “Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to the English fishies, and the meal they make of you!” Chuckling, he pressed his eye again to the scope, trying to peer through the sea mists that now shrouded Castle Hawke. “And as for you, Lord Hawke…you will surely be next to feel the terrible wrath of Der Wolf !”
At that moment, in the crosshairs of his periscope, von Krieg was transfixed on this, his first glimmer of light and hope. The light escaping from the base of Hawke Castle meant that his suspicions had been correct. There was some kind of passage there, even if it was not visible by daylight.
“Well, well, Lord Hawke, it seems you’ve finally left the light on by the back door,” he said to himself. “Yes, I think you’ve finally made a little error. And guess who is here to make sure you pay dearly for it, ja ?”