The Ocean Liner

The Western Approaches

Jürgen Todt was in a state of nervous elation. He had sunk two more vessels within forty-eight hours. It was true that they had been small fry – a 1,500-ton collier limping along the Irish coast, and a 2,000-ton freighter carrying pig iron to the Clyde – but his total was already approaching seven thousand tons sunk. At this rate, the Knight’s Cross would be his in a matter of weeks.

In the lens of his periscope now was a fishing smack of around 250 tons. She was so close that he could read the name on her bows, Kitty of Coleraine, and underneath that, the name of her owner, a Northern Irish fisheries company.

She was fair game. And he lusted for her. But U-113’s complement of sixteen torpedoes was already reduced to nine. To use a torpedo on such a small prize would be wasteful. He weighed up his options, then closed the handles of the periscope and pushed it down with a pneumatic hiss.

‘We’ll take her with the deck gun,’ he said.

‘That will be hard,’ Rudi Hufnagel noted. ‘It’s rough up there.’

Todt ignored his watch officer. ‘Action stations. Prepare to surface.’

U-113 surfaced in moderately heavy seas, about fifty yards off the fishing boat’s starboard quarter. Todt broached the U-boat so that it was parallel to Kitty of Coleraine. It was early in the evening, and very cold.

The crew went into action fast, clambering out of the conning tower and on to the rolling deck. Their captain had brought them within range of the RAF’s Sunderland flying-boats, so what had to be done had to be done quickly.

The gun crew of four lugged the heavy 20mm flak gun along the deck and mounted it on the firing-platform behind the conning tower. The swell made the work difficult; waves dashed over the mounting, the men slid and fell, saved from being swept away only by their safety-lines.

‘Take out the bridge, quick,’ Todt commanded, the binoculars to his face. ‘Rapid fire.’

The Oerlikon opened fire, its twin barrels pumping shells into Kitty of Coleraine’s wheelhouse. The flimsy little structure collapsed almost immediately, the radio mast sagging down into the water. It was a miracle of gunnery, given the conditions. They could see crew members running in panic for the single lifeboat, which was slung on a davit over the stern. The gun crew ceased firing as the ammunition canisters emptied.

‘Reload!’ Todt screamed at them. ‘Keep firing.’

‘We’re giving them a chance to abandon ship, Captain,’ the chief gunner called up to the conning tower.

‘The bridge, the bridge, God damn you. They may be sending a radio message right now.’

The gun crew locked the fresh canisters in place and opened fire again. The wheelhouse disintegrated in the storm of shells, its wooden wreckage now ablaze. Some of the Irish crew, scrambling to ship the lifeboat, were caught in the barrage of shells, their bodies spinning like rag dolls.

‘Again! Again!’ Todt commanded. ‘Don’t stop until I give the order.’

The rest of the U-boat crew watched from the bridge while Todt ordered the gunners to keep firing until the smack’s deck was a blazing ruin. The single smokestack was gone, all the tackle and rigging had been shot away. Though they’d tried to spare the lifeboat, the heavy seas had made accurate aiming impossible, and a shell had hit it, blowing off most of one side. It dangled uselessly over the transom.

Todt studied the fishing boat tensely through his binoculars, wiping them impatiently as condensation formed in the lenses. Satisfied that there was no further movement, he leaned over the rail to the heavier cannon. ‘Now, the waterline,’ he shouted.

The cannon crew obeyed, raking Kitty of Coleraine’s hull with half a dozen 88mm shells. The little boat listed heavily and began to founder.

Todt circled U-113 around the sinking fishing boat. The crew stared in silence at the morning’s work. As the deck submerged, Kitty of Coleraine’s cargo of fish started to float out of the hold, like the disgorged last meal of some stricken animal. Silvery, the fish drifted among the oil that slicked the sea.

Other things were drifting, too: the men’s cots, their few possessions, unused life jackets. Some of the flotsam was human, no longer intact, blackened lumps of men barely breaking surface as they wallowed in the swell. And there were two living men, too dazed to call for help, clinging to the same lifebelt.

‘I count sixteen bodies,’ Hufnagel said without inflection. ‘Including the survivors.’ The sea-spray had frozen in his and Todt’s eyebrows and beards, white forests riming their faces. There was no hope for the men in the sea. ‘We could have warned them before we opened fire.’

‘So they could radio for a plane to come and sink us?’

‘We could have told them to keep radio silence and ship their lifeboat. That is the procedure we are asked to follow.’

‘This is not a gentleman’s game,’ Todt retorted. ‘It’s war.’

‘Yes, Kapitän.’

‘We can hardly stop every ship for a friendly chat. What would you say, three hundred tons?’

‘I would say less. Perhaps two hundred and sixty.’

‘Good enough. Put that in the log,’ Todt commanded.

The silence among the crew continued as the U-boat slipped away from the kill. Many of them were the sons of Baltic fishermen. Seeing those bodies broken by the anti-aircraft gun had left a bad taste. ‘Boys and old men,’ as Ludwig the diesel officer muttered, opening a can of peaches he’d saved for such an occasion, when he would want something sweet. ‘No warning given. Just goodbye, nice to meet you.’

The men crowded around the electric heaters, but they did little to mitigate the piercing cold. Condensation glistened on the bulkheads and on the menacing hulks of the torpedoes in their tubes.

Todt had chosen a Hitler speech to play on U-113’s gramophone. It was one they had heard many times before, and most tried to shut their ears to the ranting voice that echoed out of the speakers.

In the officer’s mess, Rudi Hufnagel tried to analyse the Führer’s words as he stared into his coffee. They were full of sound and fury, but the more he heard them the less sense they made to him.

He had been present at the lunch party given on the Tirpitz at the naval base in Gotenhafen when Hitler had come to inspect the new generation of U-boats, a few years earlier. As one of the most promising young officers in the Ubootwaffe at that time, he’d been given a seat diagonally opposite Hitler. He’d had an opportunity to observe the Führer at close hand. With the lock of hair plastered across his forehead and the absurd toothbrush moustache, he had seemed to Hufnagel like the new boy who arrives at school in mid-term, trying to appear manly among men, monopolising the conversation, never asking a single question, trying to show that he knew every detail about everything before he was even informed. Hufnagel had not been impressed.

Hufnagel’s father, a veteran naval officer of the last war and a man of few words, had summed up the Nazi phenomenon contemptuously: ‘When small people get big ideas, watch out.’

That Hitler had surrounded himself with thugs and murderers had cast a darker shadow on the years that followed. But by then it was too late for anyone to do anything. The thing was unstoppable. And Hufnagel’s own career in the U-boat service had already foundered on the rocks, lured by the Jewish siren, Masha Morgenstern.