The Ocean Liner

U-113

None of the crew were quite sure what to do with Kapitän-leutnant Jürgen Todt. Since being relieved of his command, he had not spoken a word. He went straight to his quarters and remained there, which many of them thought was ominous; they imagined he would be writing furiously in his notorious log, preparing a report which would have them all shot on their return to Germany.

Rudi Hufnagel, however, was in need of immediate medical attention. He had been wounded twice and he was losing a lot of blood. The first of Todt’s bullets had glanced across his left shoulder, damaging bone and muscle. The other, ostensibly more superficial wound, was the one that Krupp found most hard to deal with. The bullet had torn open the veins of Hufnagel’s right forearm, and blood was pouring out as the First Watch Officer lay slumped on the floor, starting to lose consciousness.

Krupp bandaged the arm as tightly as he could, but the scarlet blossomed through the gauze instantly and spilled on to the metal deck-plates, making them slippery underfoot.

‘Tie a tourniquet above the elbow,’ someone advised. ‘That will stop it.’

‘I can’t cut off the circulation altogether,’ Krupp said helplessly. ‘By the time we get back to Kiel he’ll have lost the arm.’ With a seriously wounded man to care for now, and very little real experience, the twenty-three-year-old Krupp was overwhelmed, and on the edge of tears. There was a hubbub of conflicting advice from the men standing around him: to raise the wounded arm above Hufnagel’s head, to make Hufnagel lie down, to cauterise the wound with the electrician’s soldering-irons.

The sharp voice of the hydrophone operator cut through this babble.

‘Torpedo launched.’

They all turned to stare at the man, who was hunched over, with his hands clamped on to his headphones. ‘We haven’t launched a torpedo,’ Krupp said stupidly.

‘Enemy torpedo,’ the hydrophone operator said. ‘Starboard stern. One thousand metres. Closing at thirty knots.’

There was a moment of silence. In the confusion of the last few minutes, and with their two senior officers out of action, the inexperienced crew had neglected the primary rule of submarine warfare – to keep a watch at all times. They now had less than a minute to respond to the torpedo which had been launched at them.

‘Secure hatches!’ Krupp screamed. ‘Prepare to dive.’

Leaving Hufnagel bleeding on the floor, the men rushed to their posts, closing the watertight doors, gulping water into the ballast tanks, revving the motors. The seconds ticked by. The remainder of the crew rushed to the forward compartment to weigh U-113’s nose down. At his station, the hydrophone operator murmured, almost admiringly, ‘It’s a British submarine. They crept up behind us while we weren’t looking.’

U-113 was just starting her dive when the torpedo struck her stern. The explosion ripped through the compartments, bursting the watertight doors open, hurling men and machinery in all directions, plunging the U-boat into darkness and opening her like a sardine can to the plundering sea.