HMS Hurricane arrived at Greenock in Scotland on 20th September, while the wolfpack attack was still in progress. It was only during disembarkation that Colin was able to see which of the other children had been rescued, and who among them had not. While the more seriously injured survivors were transferred to the Smithston Hospital via ambulance, Colin and the other walking wounded were led to an assembly shed which served as an impromptu customs office.
Grave-faced, the man at the desk asked for Colin’s passport. Before the boy had a chance to scoff at his request, the man added, with the inflexible practice of the humourless bureaucrat: ‘Oh, and do you have anything to declare?’
The child produced, from the wallet stowed in his life-jacket pocket, the soggy ten-pound note his father had given him. After offering his statement to Geoffrey Shakespeare, the director of the evacuee programme, Colin was taken by bus into Glasgow and delivered to the Grand Central Hotel, one of the city’s loveliest, of which Churchill was a frequent guest. The boy walked into the plush lobby in his dried-out pyjama bottoms, still wearing his red kapok life jacket, his promise to his mother intact.
For a moment, nobody took any notice. Then and all at once, Colin and the others were swarmed by reporters. The cameras began to click, a chorus of grasshoppers.
Kretschmer and his crew, having almost emptied their torpedo tubes, decided to mop up the leftovers of battle for HX.72. Wounded ships did not count toward a U-boat captain’s score; they had to be sunk. So, U-99 returned to the Invershannon, and Kretschmer fired a round of bullets from the machine gun mounted above deck, hoping to puncture the ship’s hull. When the bullets ricocheted off, Kretschmer sent his first lieutenant, Klaus Bargsten, in a dinghy loaded with explosives. Bargsten, however, promptly capsized and had to be hauled back aboard.
Kretschmer was loath to fire another torpedo to finish the job. His boastful motto was ‘one torpedo, one ship’. Yet dawn approached, and with it the risk of being spotted by an Allied air patrol. Aircraft attack was more feared by U-boatmen than that of an escort vessel, as a well-piloted aircraft could mount an attack on a U-boat before it had a chance to dive to the eighty or so metres required to evade an aircraft-hurled depth charge.1
Kretschmer sullenly fired another torpedo at the ship’s hull. With an elemental yowl, the tanker split in two, from the centre. The ends of the ship rose up, till they were almost perpendicular, locking masts together at the top to form a giant portico. Smoke billowed up in great, sky-scraping columns, while, like a Gothic archway, the wreckage sank, with noble serenity.
As Kretschmer pulled away from the scene, he caught sight of a lone raft. On it stood a man wearing only his underwear. He was leaning against an oar that had been erected as a mast, to which a white shirt was tied, fluttering in the wind. The mournful absurdity of the scene reminded Kretschmer, he later said, of a Punch illustration and, after setting fire to the Elmbank using phosphorous shells aimed at the ship’s timber deck-cargo, he pulled alongside the raft. Kretschmer, who had studied for a while at Exeter University, greeted the man in English. After the survivor willingly boarded the U-boat, the German told him to dry off and fetch something to drink.
It was not the first time Kretschmer had aided his enemies in this way. Earlier that summer, he had approached a lifeboat filled with crew of the Canadian steamer Magog. When one of his petty officers appeared at the conning tower brandishing a machine gun, Kretschmer reprimanded him, telling him to get below decks and not to show his face again. Kretschmer gave the survivors a bottle of brandy and a pile of blankets and pointed them toward the Irish coastline.
He was not alone among U-boat captains in aiding the enemy although, during downtime in the French ports, debate would often rage between the younger sailors on the correct course of action. Many younger men believed it was farcical to shoot at a man when he had a deck under his feet and show mercy when he did not, while the older hands cleaved to the old mariner’s credo that concern for the fate of the shipwrecked is the first duty of every seaman.*
Werner Hess, who served on U-530, claimed that Doenitz ordered all of his crews to help survivors. In the first week of war, the crew of U-48, which would later sink the City of Benares, torpedoed and sank the British freighter Firby. The U-boat crew picked up the captain. Close to tears, he explained to the Germans that, against his wife’s advice, he had taken their son on the trip.
‘Take him with you,’ he implored, pushing his boy forward.2 The U-boat’s captain, Schultze, a father of twins and a father figure to his crew, sent out the plain-text radio signal addressed to Churchill himself:
‘To Mr Churchill. I have sunk British steamer Firby position 59°40N/13°50W. Save the crew if you will please. German submarine.’3
All of the ship’s crew, including the child, were duly collected. These acts of benevolence, which became less frequent as the war progressed, were not entirely selfless. ‘There was always the chance that our own boat would be sunk one day,’ Hess wrote.4
That night, U-99’s hydrophone operator took charge of the lone man on the raft, who could remember neither his own name nor that of his ship, although he did recall its cargo was iron ore. In fact, the two men, the German Josef Kassel and the Englishman Joseph Byrne, were namesakes. Wrapped in blankets and with a bellyful of brandy, Byrne sat muttering to himself. Kassel assumed he was suffering from concussion. After drifting off for an hour, Byrne awoke and asked for some food. Kassel passed him a tin of pineapples, plunder from the British stores at Dunkirk that had, at Hitler’s behest, been distributed among U-boats.
As he ate, Byrne listened to Kretschmer chatting to another crew member in English. In fact, this second man was an Italian submarine captain, shadowing Kretschmer on the voyage to learn how the Germans commanded their U-boats. Kretschmer didn’t speak Italian and the Italian didn’t speak German, so the pair communicated in English. When Kassel brought Byrne some coffee, he was astonished when his captive said: ‘Thanks mate. A bloody U-boat torpedoed the ship, but those blasted Nazi swine didn’t get me.’
Suffering from mild concussion and confused by the officers’ conversation and the tin of pineapples, Byrne had assumed that he had been rescued by a British submarine. Rather than disabuse his captive of the idea, the German bandaged Byrne’s head in order that he might be transferred to another lifeboat of survivors that Kretschmer had spied on the horizon. Byrne protested, saying that he was comfortable enough on the submarine.
Exasperated, Kassel told Byrne to look at the swastika on Kretschmer’s cap when he next climbed the conning tower. Carefully enunciating each word, he finally said: ‘We are a German U-boat.’ Byrne laughed at the suggestion. It was only when U-99 pulled alongside the lifeboat, and Byrne climbed the ladder to stand alongside Kretschmer, ready to protest, that the sailor saw the captain’s cap, its insignia and his mistake.
‘I hope you feel better,’ said Kretschmer, holding out his hand. In pale-faced silence, Byrne shook it, before tripping into the lifeboat, filled with survivors from the Invershannon.
Kretschmer handed bread rolls and water down to the men whose ship he had destroyed a few hours earlier. Then he set the ship’s boatswain on a course for Ireland. Before pushing the lifeboat away, the boatswain reached down and threw a carton of 200 cigarettes up to Kretschmer as a thank you.
The battle for HX.72 was finished. The Germans had won a decisive victory. Over a period of three days, the pack of U-boats had sunk eleven ships and damaged three more, robbing Britain of tens of thousands of tons of vital supplies. The victory vindicated Doenitz, who for more than two years had pleaded with his superiors to grant him the assets he needed to execute wolfpack attacks. And the battle had also proven the usefulness of Kretschmer’s high-risk tactic of penetrating the convoy to attack from within. Ten of the eleven Allied casualties were sunk by Kretschmer and Schepke alone, pioneers of the tactic.
The next day, while en route to France, the crew of U-99 tuned their radio to the German news. They listened with hot indignation as a Berlin news announcer credited the sinking of Elmbank and Invershannon to Kapitänleutnant Bleichrodt, who was, at that moment, also heading back to Lorient. In a job where one’s effectiveness was measured in the cold, irrefutable numbers of tonnage sunk, a miscredit affected not only one’s ego, but also one’s status. Still, Silent Otto, true to nickname, chose to not issue a correction to U-boat headquarters, assuring his men that he would clear up the misunderstanding when they returned to port.
On 25th September 1940, while Colin was being reunited with his family,* his assailant, Bleichrodt and Kretschmer sailed into Lorient, their respective crews standing on the upper decks of U-48 and U-99, pale and hollow-eyed, in their salt-crusted fatigues, with caps askew and thickening beards. Seven white pennants fluttered on each U-boat’s raised periscope, each one representing a ship sunk and a further blow to Britain’s food supplies and, in the case of the City of Benares, families.
Seventy-seven of the ninety children who sailed on the City of Benares did not return home. How they must have wondered, in their final moments, why they were being made to die. How might any of us answer their question, then or now? Our adult wars are incomprehensible from anything but the stratospheric vantage point. There, where the grotesque detail of war’s human impact–the blitzed nursery, the mother’s hysterical phone calls, the lifeboats filled with slipper-less corpses–can no longer be made out, a war can be viewed as a conflict of ideas. Close up, however, war is senseless. For civilians, life becomes a series of overlapping scandals and outrages, each one a reaction to some new capricious tragedy. Even so, the loss of so many children caused outrage at a universal scale. The sinking of the City of Benares belongs to that rare category of disaster able to alter not only the national mood, but also the national stance.
Prior to the sinking of the City of Benares, the U-boat had not been an entirely foreign entity in Britain. In fact, many people had seen the inside of one. Two decades earlier, on 2nd December 1918 a captured U-boat, the Deutschland, had been towed up the Thames and docked, provocatively, next to Tower Bridge. Part trophy, part morbid attraction, hobbling veterans and inquisitive day-trippers alike could pay a shilling to poke around its confines. Squat and tubby, the Deutschland began life as a cargo carrier. It immediately distinguished itself as the first German submarine to cross the Atlantic. In its maiden voyage in 1916, it carried $1.5 million worth of gemstones, valuable dyes and pharmaceutical drugs from Europe to Baltimore (much to the protestations of the panicky British, who beseeched the Americans not to classify U-boats as merchant ships, arguing that submergible vessels cannot be easily stopped and searched for illicit munitions).
In February the following year the Deutschland was transformed into a wartime vessel with a refit that added six bow torpedo tubes and two naval guns borrowed from a battleship. It was sent to war, where it sank a harbour’s worth of forty-two Allied ships. Then it was surrendered to the British at the Armistice. The Deutschland was one of a hundred or so German U-boats that were towed to England at the end of the First World War to be scrapped for metal, and the reliable, German-made diesel engines removed and used in industrial factories.
Even in peacetime, the Deutschland continued to wreak havoc both major and minor. While being towed up the Thames, it collided with a passing steamship. (This was the second accidental impact the U-boat had been involved in; when departing the port of New London before the war, it rammed a tugboat, killing all five crew members.) Then, after its stay in London, the decommissioned vessel conducted a tour of the UK for exhibitions in Great Yarmouth, Southend, London, Ramsgate, Brighton and Douglas on the Isle of Man, further raising the U-boat’s profile in the national consciousness. In September 1921, the vessel was finally towed to Birkenhead, just outside Liverpool, to be scrapped. During the process of breaking up, an explosion killed five young apprentice fitters, a final act of devastation by a submarine much of whose brief existence had been characterised by wanton destruction.
In more recent times, too, the British civilian had been made aware of the U-boat menace. It was a U-boat that had made the primary attack on the first day of the war. A few hours after Britain declared war on Germany at 11:00 a.m. on 3rd September 1939, Lieutenant Fritz-Julius Lemp, captain of U-30, sighted the transatlantic passenger ship SS Athenia north-west of Ireland, en route to Canada from Glasgow. Lieutenant Lemp sank the liner. The attack, in which 117 passengers and crew members died, violated the Hague convention, which prohibited attacks on unarmed passenger vessels, and ensured that the start of war was marked by national awareness of the lethal U-boats stalking British shipping lanes.
In the early months of war, Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, had sought to allay these fears. (Later he famously wrote that the U-boat terror was ‘the only thing that ever really frightened me’.) In a speech at Mansion House on 20th January 1940, at a moment when British forces had sunk just nine of Germany’s fifty-seven U-boats, Churchill claimed to have sunk ‘half the U-boats with which Germany began the war’.
To arrive at this dishonest conclusion, Churchill had added sixteen U-boats that the Admiralty believed may have been sunk to the nine U-boats known to have been sunk. To this number, for good measure, Churchill also added a further ten U-boats of his own imagining, to bring the total to more than half of the U-boat fleet as British intelligence understood it to be.
This exaggeration of gains and suppression of losses, be it by accident or scheme, had, as the author of a classified inquiry into publicity around the Battle of the Atlantic wrote immediately after the war, ‘a heartening effect on the British public’. The political advantage apparently justified the damage caused to truth.5 Arguably, had the full miserable extent of the Allied performance in the Battle of the Atlantic to date been fully known, it may have had an invigorating effect on the coordination of efforts to find an urgent solution. The author of the inquiry, Admiral V. Lt. Godfrey* concluded, however, that Britain ‘never came quite clean about the progress of the war at sea’.6
There was, however, no possibility of maintaining public denial when news of the City of Benares broke, the discussion of which dominated newspapers and pubs alike. Speaking at the House of Commons, Geoffrey Shakespeare, the director of the evacuee programme who had interviewed Colin when he landed, spoke of his sense of ‘horror and indignation’ that any ‘German submarine captain could be found to torpedo a ship over 600 miles from land in a tempestuous sea’. This deed, he said, ‘will shock the world’.
Shakespeare’s outrage was echoed and amplified in every headline that week. ‘Nazis Torpedo Mercy Ship, Kill Children’, read the front page of the Daily Sketch. The Daily Mail, which only a few years earlier had offered fascism its full-throated support, ran an editorial that urged readers to dwell on every ‘dreadful’ detail of the story, so that they might be ‘burn[ed] into our minds as proof of the character we are sworn to defeat’. Still unaware of the Holocaust, an editorial in The Times went so far as to argue that no Nazi brutality would stay ‘longer graven upon the records than the sinking of the City of Benares’.
While Kapitänleutnant Bleichrodt unwound at the U-boat hotel in Lorient, British propaganda began to depict the U-boat captains as fanatical Nazis, and their crews as pitiless killers. On the latter count, the reputation was often earned. In the five months from June to October 1940, during which the City of Benares was lost, U-boats sank 274 merchant ships and sustained just two losses. By the end of the year the U-boats had sunk more than 1,200 ships, about five years’ worth of construction work in typical peacetime conditions, and more than the rest of the German navy and Luftwaffe combined.
The numbers told, if not the whole story of the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’–as, with characteristic flair, Churchill had memorably christened the front–then the salient point: the British were losing catastrophically.
After weeks at sea, the U-boat crew members’ first steps ashore were faltering, a clumsiness that betrayed the cramped conditions they had laboured under, and the need to acclimatise.
A so-called Marine Helferimen, the German equivalent of a Wren, greeted Kretschmer with a fat bouquet of flowers. It was the German’s first taste of the VIP treatment that was to come. While Colin and the other survivors of the City of Benares had returned to a country of thrift and rations, the U-boatmen landed in a country of wine and plenty. Lothar-Günther Buchheim, a war correspondent who travelled with a U-boat crew, later described France as ‘a kind of paradise’ to the crews who had, in the first year of war, become grimly accustomed to German shortages.7 The exchange rate for the occupying forces was fixed at twenty francs to the Reichsmark8–three more than the rate quoted on the Berlin stock exchange–a favourable discrepancy that enabled crew members, who received a U-boatman salary on top of their service pay, to spend their downtime living the high life.
Beak-wetting went all the way to the top. When he first arrived in France, Doenitz promptly commandeered a hotel and requisitioned all of its supplies, including its stocks of champagne, bottles that he made available to his U-boatmen for a token sum. Many of these men would destroy themselves with booze, numbing the harrowing reality of their position.
Some crew members took the BdU Zug, an express train reserved for U-boatmen that ran from Nantes through Le Mans and on to the German cities of Bremen, Hamburg and Flensburg, and would be home within two days. Those who chose to remain in France were sent to the U-bootsweiden, luxury hotels or chateaux that had been commandeered to be used as rest camps. These safe havens were far from the ports targeted by Allied bombers, where people were routinely forced to seek shelter, either from bombs or from falling debris from downed planes, whose pirouetting wings seemed as harmless as falling feathers, till their weight was felt through the ground.
In Lorient, relationships between the Germans and the locals varied. In the week after the Germans marched into Paris, and before they arrived in Lorient, on 21st June 1940 the port’s préfet maritime, Admiral Penfentenyo, prepared to resist the impending German arrival. He ordered all Lorient ships to sail, some of which, like the Victor-Schoelcher, were loaded with crates of gold and money. Warehouses and oil depots were torched, unseaworthy vessels scuttled. Two platoons of French naval riflemen held back the German advance for two hours, till a false report that Admiral Penfentenyo had died resulted in a French colonel ordering a ceasefire and the raising of a white flag of surrender.
The next day a notice, signed ‘WELCKER, commander-in-chief of German troops’ and printed in the local newspaper Le Nouvelliste du Morbihan, called for ‘calm and order’. Welcker warned against ‘thoughtless acts’, and assured citizens that the mayor and police would be held responsible for maintaining order. The sale of spirits was forbidden, and a ten o’clock curfew implemented, during which residents could no longer drive or assemble unless they were doctors, priests or midwives.
‘Resistance and acts of sabotage… [were] pointless,’ Welcker wrote.9
From the first week of occupation, the Nazi flag flew above all public buildings. Road signs were rewritten in German in black Gothic lettering, and residents were warned that for every German soldier killed by the Resistance, ten Frenchmen would be shot in return. Tuning in to British radio was punishable by death.10 Yet an uneasy peace developed between the French and their occupiers, who had been ordered to make a good impression on the locals, distributing chocolates and cookies to the children, and staging parades and concerts for the adults.
Life ashore was comfortable. The German crews were allowed to visit the local cinema Rex in rue de la Comédie, where the films changed every five days or so, for free. Some U-boatmen used brothels, which all German soldiers were permitted to frequent, providing they cleared out before half-past ten each night.11 While the Germans established quasi-official bordellos in France, there were not enough workers, and some Frenchwomen, all of whom were in desperate need of money, joined. Some of the women passed information to the Resistance, who then relayed it to London.12 Other crew members took local girlfriends, relationships that came at a significant cost when, after the war, 189 women were tried for so-called ‘horizontal collaboration’ and deprived of certain civil rights.13
On their first night ashore, Kretschmer and his crew dined at the Beau Séjour hotel. After toasting their successes, the crew was told that in the morning they were to be sent to a U-bootsweiden in Quiberon for a week’s recuperation. Most of the men headed out into the night. Kretschmer, ever studious, joined Prien to discuss the nascent wolfpack’s successes, and Prien assured his friend and rival that he had sent a signal to command correcting the miscrediting of U-99’s kills to Bleichrodt. Neither man was yet aware of a kill that undeniably belonged to Captain Bleichrodt: the City of Benares.
Just then, another captain from the wolfpack–the third famous ace of the young war, Joachim Schepke–clattered into the lounge, haggard from two days partying in Parisian clubs. Kretschmer made his excuses and retired to his room and began to write up his standing orders for U-99, a document that laid out the rules for the efficient and successful running of a U-boat. This twelve-point plan covered everything from the need for an effective lookout (the ease with which Kretschmer had managed to sneak up on Prien a few days earlier was fresh in the mind) through to the need to set aside time for cleaning dishes.
Most of Kretschmer’s instructions were commonsensical. Point nine, however, went against the written advice that U-boat captains maintain a minimum distance of 1,000 metres between the U-boat and its target. Kretschmer countered, plainly, that at every given opportunity, torpedoes should be fired at extreme close range.
‘This can only be done’, he wrote, ‘by penetrating the escort’s anti-submarine screen and, at times, getting inside the convoy lanes.’
Having scored three kills in quick succession, Kretschmer knew that there was no more efficient way to cause havoc on a British convoy, causing the escort captains to flounder.
‘This should be the objective of all our attacks,’ he added.
In two sentences Kretschmer had outlined a tactic that would, in the months to come, lead to the deaths of thousands of Allied sailors and raise the line on the chart of shipping losses at the Admiralty in London perilously close to the red threshold of starvation. It was a tactic so effective that it would lead to the formation of a British unit staffed by a ragtag crew of women, led by a captain with a life-changing disability, dedicated to its uncovering.