The Ocean Liner

The Western Approaches

Out in the North Sea, a hundred miles west of the British coast, where the shipping lanes converged, Kapitän-leutnant Jürgen Todt had ordered U-113 to heave to. The submarine was within range of British aircraft sweeping from the mainland, but it was the end of the day and the light would soon be gone. A heavy swell was rolling. The air was cold and salty, and the crew crowded at the rails, hawking and spitting up phlegm, or cupping cigarettes in the palms of their hands.

Todt’s number two, Leutnant zur See Rudolf Hufnagel, stood beside him, gratefully inhaling the clean air. Less than a month out of port, U-113 already stank. Not only were there no washing facilities for the men or their clothing, but the provisions were swiftly deteriorating. The onions, dried sausages and loaves of black bread, which were stuffed between pipes or in ducts, were sprouting white mould – rabbit’s-ears, as the crew called them – and spreading a dank smell of mildew. The single usable privy (the other was stuffed full of eatables) was a malodorous swamp, outside which was always a queue of sailors waiting to empty their bowels.

The crew, most of whom were by now sporting straggling beards, were bundled into sea-jackets, except the diesel officer Ludwig, who was obsessed with vitamin D, and who had stripped to the waist. He was baring his chest to the lurid yellow sunset, apparently impervious to the icy spray, his arms upraised to catch any benefit from the fading rays.

Morale was high. There was laughter, some of it at the expense of ‘Mad King’ Ludwig and his sun worship. Eccentricities were prized in the early weeks of a submarine’s voyage, sources of entertainment. Later, Hufnagel knew, they could become intolerable, but they had yet to experience that.

For all the good humour, Hufnagel saw that there was a perceptible barrier around the captain. None of the crew stood too close to him, or involved him in their banter. It was not that he was a martinet, or even an unpopular officer. Rather, there was an aura of coldness around him that precluded idle conversation. They knew little about him. The camaraderie, even informality, which grew around other U-boat captains, sometimes deepening into affection, had not established itself in U-113.

But the boat was new and the crew was new. Most of them had been selected for the service and were not volunteers. Hufnagel would have preferred more experienced men. But this crew had been hastily assembled by a submarine command which had known that war was imminent. They had all been together only a few months, most of those spent in exercises in the Baltic Sea, stalking dummy targets, practising loading torpedoes and launching attacks, testing the ship’s motors, radio system and deck guns.

They had been in port in the Elbe during the last week of August. The day after the declaration of war, they had slipped out to sea again and had headed west into the Atlantic, to the hunting grounds assigned them by Admiral Dönitz. They had yet to sight an enemy vessel.

Hufnagel glanced at the skipper. The dying light which bathed Ludwig’s skinny chest and gilded the death’s-head painted on the conning tower also glowed in Todt’s blonde fringe. Todt’s pale eyes and flaxen hair had helped his progress through the ranks of the new Kriegsmarine, which counted an Aryan appearance – and membership of the Nazi Party – as considerable advantages, advantages which Hufnagel did not share.

Todt, unlike Hufnagel, had been a member of the Nazi Party almost since its inception, and was a devoted follower of its leader, who had promised to expunge the humiliation and treachery of 1918. He had been swiftly promoted, while Hufnagel, though his senior in age and experience, was only second-in-command. Hufnagel’s indifference to Nazism had counted against him, as had certain other errors.

The light was failing fast. Even Mad King Ludwig had acknowledged it and was buttoning up his shirt. An immense darkness had started to spread across the sky. But the many vigilant pairs of eyes on the conning tower had caught something in the last gleams and there were excited shouts.

Todt saw it too through the high-powered bridge binoculars, a smudge on the distant horizon, glimpsed from the top of a swell before U-113 slid down into the trough again. He yielded the binoculars to his First Watch Officer. ‘What do you see, Hufnagel?’

Hufnagel peered through the Zeiss lenses as U-113 rose again. ‘Smoke,’ he said. ‘Bearing fifteen degrees to our east.’

‘A convoy?’

‘A single vessel, in my opinion.’

‘Good.’ Todt turned to his crew, his pale eyes alight. ‘Everyone below.’