The U-115 cut through the waves of the north Atlantic at sixteen knots. While she plowed westward, the diesel engines recharged the batteries and pulled fresh air into the interior. Rolf closed his eyes against the glare of the sun. His tasks aboard the U-115 didn’t include lookout duty, so he hadn’t been above deck for a week. He’d missed the sun. He tried not to complain, not even in his head, but the cramped confines of the U-boat sometimes felt like they were closing in. His crewmates were all good men, dependable and loyal, but they’d been at sea for coming up on four weeks. Their bodies stank. Their idiosyncrasies rankled. He’d heard most of their stories several times already. The supply of bread had long since grown a thick layer of white mold. The cook took most of it off before serving it, but imagining fresh bread, the kind Frieda baked, made Rolf’s mouth water. It also made the moldy stuff all the more distasteful.
“Ready to go home?” Baumman asked.
Rolf hadn’t realized the kommandant was so near. “Well . . . I would like a shower. And I would like to see my wife. But I wouldn’t mind a few more victories first, if we have the fuel for it.”
Baumman frowned. “There are normally ten convoys on the North Atlantic at any given time. They’re out there, but in an ocean this enormous, it’s like finding a lost coin in the bilge.”
“Do you think they stopped moving the ships in convoys?”
Baumann shook his head. “If they’d done that, we’d actually have an easier time finding something. With each dispersed convoy, we’d have forty or fifty small targets instead of one large one.”
“Something sighted,” one of the lookouts called. “Broad to starboard.”
Rolf saw nothing, but he had no binoculars and needed spectacles in the best of conditions.
Baumman lifted his binoculars and scanned the waters to the north of the U-115. Then he called down directions for the steering change. “Come right to fifty degrees.”
Rolf was off duty—the petty officer currently manned the radio shack—so he stayed to watch and lend his feeble eyes to the object sighted. Eventually, it came into view. A lifeboat. The men aboard didn’t wave at them, but perhaps they hadn’t seen the U-boat yet. Their low position in the water would give them poor visibility.
“Will we stop for them, sir?” Rolf asked the kommandant. U-boats sometimes took a ship’s master prisoner, depriving the enemy of their most experienced seamen, but U-boats had little room to spare. They couldn’t take an entire crew on board, no matter how desperate they were.
“We’ll talk to them at least. See if they need food or water. Radio their location to someone who can help.”
Yet even when the U-boat drew within shouting distance, the men in the lifeboat didn’t move, and as the U-115 approached close enough to throw the men a line, the reason why became obvious. The men were dead. Rolf couldn’t guess how long they had drifted or where they had come from or even if they’d died from exposure or from lack of water. Regardless, there was no longer anything the U-115 could do for them.
One of the lookouts swung his binoculars up at a tiny black speck in the sky. “It’s a plane.”
Baumann shouted orders, the diving bell rang, and the U-115 began dipping while Rolf and the others who had been on deck scrambled through the hatches and pulled them shut behind them. Rolf ran to the forward torpedo room with the other off-duty men and prayed the U-115 could dive more quickly than the plane—and its depth charges—could reach them.
With the others, he waited, perspiration lining his forehead and tension twisting his stomach. The splashes came, as did the explosions, some of them strong enough to shake the hull.
Hours passed, and the plane either gave up or reached its fuel limit. Rolf checked his watch and went to the radio shack.
“Did you count how many depth charges they dropped on us?” Meyer asked.
“Thirty-five.” Rolf wasn’t sure if it was healthy to count, but he always did.
Oberleutnant zur See Baumann glanced up from his conversation with the executive officer. “Sometimes we are the hunters. And sometimes we are the hunted.”
* * *
Rolf’s little town still looked the same when he arrived at the train station for his next leave, almost as if there were no war. But of course there was a war, and news of its growth had greeted the crew of the U-115 when they’d returned to Lorient. War against the Soviet Union. It seemed to be the only thing anyone talked about on the train ride to Germany. His patrol may have ended, but evidence of war had continued to surround him from the moment he’d stepped on land. Lorient’s U-boat pens, made of sixteen-foot-thick concrete, had proven indestructible. The same couldn’t be said of the surrounding town. The French city still held plenty of temptations for a newly paid sailor, but it also held growing stretches of destruction as a result of the enemy terror fliers.
A few acquaintances called out greetings to Rolf as he strode toward his parents’ apartment, but Rolf didn’t slow his stride. He didn’t want any distractions to keep him away from home, even if only for a few minutes.
He rushed up the stairs to his family’s rooms and knocked only when the door proved locked. If everyone was gone, he would regret not stopping to ask his old teacher about his son, one of Rolf’s friends from primary school. He’d joined the Luftwaffe. No doubt he’d been busy lately with the fight against the communists.
Frieda pulled the door open, and in an instant, she was in his arms. “Rolf!”
“My darling Frieda.” He held her for a long while, then decided it was better to embrace her in privacy, so they entered the apartment, and he gave her a very thorough kiss.
“Did you get my letter?” she asked.
“I received several letters from you.” He grinned. “Including one with news about a baby.” His cry when he read the letter—part surprise, part joy—had drawn the attention of most of the crew. Rolf pulled back enough to study his wife’s abdomen.
She turned to the side and held her dress tight against her torso. “Can you tell yet? I’m nearly four months now.”
Was she any larger? He’d seen her so infrequently since enlistment. He couldn’t remember how each of her dresses fit. “I don’t know. It’s been too long.”
Her lips pulled into a pout. “It has been a very long time since your last leave. I shouldn’t complain when everyone is sacrificing—poor Elke’s husband is in the army, and he’s home even less—but I miss you. And every time I hear about a U-boat disappearing—” She broke off. “It feels like we have more to lose now.”
He didn’t have an answer for that. Men he knew, men he had sailed with, went to sea and didn’t come back. He could imagine what their final moments would have been like, with depth charges smashing into the hull, damaging it so thoroughly that it could no longer hold back the ocean. He pushed those thoughts away. “More to lose, maybe, but also more to be grateful for.”
She forced a smile. “I received your letter too. No longer Funkgast Denhart. Funkmaat Denhart. It has a nice ring to it.”
“And a nice pay raise.” The raise would come in handy with a baby coming, but they could talk about that later. For now, he went to his knees and held his ear against Frieda’s abdomen. He didn’t hear a baby, but knowledge that their child grew within her filled him with awe. One more reason to do his duty. One more family member to protect.
* * *
Later that night, after neighbors and extended family had come to say their hellos and the family had shared a supper with fresh rolls that seemed to melt in Rolf’s mouth, he held Frieda next to him in their bed.
“Are you happy in the Kriegsmarine?” she asked.
“Most of the time. I am glad to do my duty, but I do not like war.” Torpedoes. Depth charges. And an ocean only slightly more forgiving than the weapons men wielded on and below her surface. It was thrilling, in a way, to find a target, stalk it, and win a victory, but he took no joy in killing sailors on the other side. They weren’t all killed. Most would evacuate before their ship sank, and when the enemy ships were in convoys, they could often be rescued.
“Sometimes I wonder . . .” Frieda’s words were soft.
“What?”
“Whether we should even be at war. We needed to protect the Germans in the Ruhr and in Czechoslovakia, but why are we at war with Britain?”
“Because they declared war on us after Poland.”
“And why did we go to war against Poland?”
“There was that incident . . . They came across the border and attacked one of our radio stations.” Rolf shifted his head on the pillow.
“Elke said it was staged.”
Rolf fought back a scoff. Leave was short, and he didn’t want to hurt Frieda’s feelings, but he also didn’t want her led astray. “How would Elke know more about that than the radios and the newspapers did?”
“Think about it, Rolf. They strike, and we have an entire army ready to invade the very next morning? No negotiations. Just an invasion. And now the Soviet Union. Having an agreement with them was supposed to be such a triumph, and now they’re our enemy?”
Maybe the incident on the border with Poland was suspicious, but there wasn’t anything Rolf could do about it. “We just have to trust our führer.”
“But what if he’s wrong?”
“Careful. If the wrong people hear you say things like that . . . well, it could lead to trouble.”
“I don’t know if I want to live in a place where I can’t question our leaders.”
“Frieda . . .” Rolf ran his hand over her shoulder. Maybe pregnancy was turning her more emotional. He’d heard that could happen. “Everything is going to be fine. You don’t have to worry. You just have to be careful what you say.” Even as he said the words, they sounded false in his ears. How many U-boats didn’t return from patrol? He couldn’t promise her everything would be fine when he had no idea if he would survive the war, and he couldn’t tell her not to worry while also telling her to watch her words.
“How do you know everything is going to be fine? People are disappearing, Rolf.”
“Who?”
Frieda pulled the blankets up, as if chilled. “A farmer just south of town. They said he was hiding a Jewish family, and he and his wife both disappeared.”
“Well, it sounds like they were helping the enemy, and we’re at war.”
“A Jewess with two children? How were they dangerous?”
Rolf sighed. “I don’t know, but I’m sure whoever arrested them had good reason. The Jews betrayed us in our last war. We can’t let that happen again.”
Frieda huffed. “My best friend when I was a little girl was Jewish. Her father won an Iron Cross in the Great War. There was nothing disloyal about her family.”
“Well, of course there are some good Jews, but as a whole . . .” Rolf didn’t finish his thought. He’d read in the papers that Jews were untrustworthy and greedy and a parasite on society, but he’d only known a few Jews when he was younger, hadn’t talked to anyone of that race in years.
“You can’t take an entire group of people and assume they’re all the same.”
Rolf leaned closer to his wife. “You’re right. Everyone should be judged individually, including Jews. But, Frieda . . . Germany is our home. We have to support the fatherland. And you have to be careful what you say and what you write because I don’t want anything bad to happen to you or to the baby.”
She placed warm fingers on his left cheek. “I will be careful with what I say . . . if you will be careful with what you think.”
Dissent couldn’t be allowed when the fatherland was under attack. And yet, there were things that Rolf now questioned . . . the arrest of Jewish children—if it had really happened—and the overly convenient timing of the incident on the Polish border. He didn’t want to question everything he was told, but maybe Frieda was right. If the führer was also right, then his actions would stand up to a bit of mental scrutiny. And if the führer was wrong . . . heaven help them all.