23RD MAY 1945
Gilbert Roberts, a retired British naval officer turned game designer, stepped onto the gangway leading up to the ocean liner, then immediately stopped. If he was not mistaken the man making his way down the plank, labouring under the weight of a suitcase, was Karl Doenitz, a German admiral who, twenty-three days earlier, following the suicide of Adolf Hitler, had become Nazi Germany’s new head of state.
The men drew close, then stopped in front of one another, suspended, as they had been for much of the war, in a liminal space, neither fully on land nor fully at sea. For a moment, in the mid-afternoon sunlight, the creak and slop of the dockside was the only sound.
Each man looked at least one size too small for his uniform. It was misfortune, not restraint that had helped them avoid the thickening torsos worn by most who reach a high rank and all its associated comforts. For forty-four-year-old Roberts, a violent battle with illness had left him wheezy. At eight stone and five feet eleven, he was also perilously underweight. Doenitz, meanwhile, had spent the month bearing the pressure of trying to broker the surrender of his beleaguered nation. Then there was the unquenchable pain of having lost not one but two sons to war within a year of each other. Moreover, both the boys had died while serving in the U-boat division, which Doenitz had founded and tenaciously commanded at every step of his rise. He had been twice responsible for their lives: as their father, and as their commander.
Catastrophe and a talent for endurance were not all that the two men shared. For the last three years Roberts and Doenitz had also been adversaries in a vast and deadly game of U-boats and battleships, played out on the Atlantic Ocean, an arena so treacherous and capricious that it was considered, by all those who fought there, to be the third adversary in their war.
Roberts, having been discharged from the navy in the summer of 1938, the day after his tuberculosis was diagnosed, had been brought back into service seven months into the war. ‘Game designer’ was not a job description used by the navy at the time, but this was the nature of the role given to Roberts by Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill. He was to create a game that would enable the British to understand why they were losing so many ships to German U-boat attacks. Teamed with a clutch of bright, astute young naval women known as Wrens, many of whom were barely out of school, Roberts had, in the months that followed, restaged countless ocean battles using his game. Through play he had developed anti-U-boat tactics that, once proven, had been taught to thousands of naval officers before they headed to sea.
Doenitz also knew the curious value of play during wartime. He too had designed games to test and refine tactics that, from his HQ in the bunker beneath an elegant nineteenth-century villa in occupied France, could be issued to his beloved U-boat captains. These would aid the crews in their ultimate aim: to sink Allied merchant ships, thereby preventing food and supplies from reaching British shores, in order to starve the islanders and win the war.
Both men had orchestrated their feints and attacks by shunting wooden tokens around maps of the ocean, known as plots, like pieces on a watery chessboard. The stakes were mortal; many thousands of Britons and Germans had died, including men whom Roberts and Doenitz had each personally known and instructed.
‘Good afternoon, Admiral,’ said Roberts, who was flanked by a young American interrogator and former FBI agent.1
Doenitz, who immediately recognised his rival from a photograph printed in a British magazine article the previous year, nodded respectfully.2 He knew why Roberts had come to the German port of Flensburg: to salvage any evidence that might show whether or not his theories about secret U-boat tactics, deduced via the crucible of his games, were accurate.
In his pocket Roberts, a fluent German-speaker, felt his ‘Ike’s pass’, a document issued and signed by the general of the US Army, Dwight D. Eisenhower, that bestowed on him authority to interrogate anybody related to his investigation. How Roberts longed to quiz Doenitz about the U-boat tactics–the wolfpacks, the torpedo attacks, the underwater getaways–and, moreover, to discover how much the admiral knew about the countermeasures he and the Wrens had designed. But Doenitz was needed in Luxembourg, where he was to join the other captured Nazi Party and SS leaders, army chiefs and ministers and await trial for war crimes.
‘We will supply you with everything you need to make your visit pleasant and efficient,’ Doenitz said, before continuing down the ramp towards the pier.
As an armed guard led Doenitz past a phalanx of British tanks toward the nearby police station where he was to be searched for hidden phials of poison,3 Roberts and the FBI interrogator boarded the ship. It was called the Patria, the last vestige, as the name implied, of Hitler’s crumbled Fatherland.
Aboard the liner, which could accommodate close to six hundred crew and passengers, Roberts was shown to his quarters. It was a first-class suite comprising a sleeping cabin, private bathroom and sitting room, where he planned to interview surrendered U-boat officers. As he walked through the door, Roberts was greeted by a handsome young German naval officer, with slicked hair and a determined brow. The man introduced himself as Heinz Walkerling. He was, he explained, to be Roberts’ assistant for the duration of the mission.
Walkerling, who had celebrated his thirtieth birthday just four days earlier,4 was one of the U-boat captains who, for the past three years, Roberts had been diligently trying to kill. This German had been one of the lucky ones. After successfully torpedoing and sinking five Allied ships–two British, two American and one Canadian–Walkerling had been transferred to a torpedo school at Mürwik, where he had taught trainee U-boatmen how to shoot straight. As the FBI man set up his tape recorder, which was disguised as a suitcase, under Roberts’ bunk, Walkerling asked whether his new boss had a gun to keep him safe.
‘No,’ said Roberts, who had turned down the offer of a weapon before leaving London.
At five o’clock that afternoon, Roberts conducted his first interrogation, with Doenitz’s chief of staff, the man responsible for the organisation and operation of all U-boats. After two hours’ intensive questioning, Roberts switched off his tape recorder and, accompanied by Walkerling, made his way to the officers’ mess for some food.
The atmosphere in the room was confused. The Germans, a mixture of naval captains and dockyard officers, joshed at tables on the periphery of the room. Roberts perceived in their deep and easy laughs an accent of hysteria, a tell, he reasoned, of the relief that follows the lifting of an immense psychological burden.5 The British officers, by contrast, sat in sombre quiet around a table in the middle of the room, contemplating the gravity of the victor’s clean-up task. The ecstasy of the vanquished; the misery of the vanquisher: the curious paradoxes of war.
In almost silence Roberts and the others ate black bread dipped in thin cabbage soup. Still hungry, Roberts retired to his suite. The next day he would begin the task of interviewing and recording U-boat officers in earnest. He was also desperate to visit the plot from which Doenitz had conducted the Battle of the Atlantic, a chance to compare the German nerve centre with that of the British equivalent, in Liverpool, which had been Roberts’ home for the last three years.
When Roberts reached his bedroom, Walkerling asked whether he might be able to sleep on the settee in Roberts’ cabin.
‘I have nowhere else to go,’ the U-boat captain said, ruefully.
Roberts refused, but secured his unlikely aide a cabin nearby and ordered that a sign be placed on the door that read: ‘German Assistant to Captain Roberts’.
Finally, Roberts lay down in his bunk. He was tired in complicated ways. There were the long-term rigours of the five-year-old war, of course, with its daily rations and, for city-dwellers like Roberts, its nightly bombings. But he had additional reasons to be weary: the long-term strain of a collapsing marriage and the short-term exhaustion of the previous night, which Roberts had spent in a Belgian hotel, cringing while American bombers thundered over Brussels in one of the final raids of the war.
Roberts fell into the impregnable sleep of the spent. He did not hear the latch to his cabin click. Neither did he see the flickering silhouette of a man caught in the light spilled through the crack in the door. Nor did he see, in the figure’s hand, the outline of a Luger pistol.