Hitler's War (15 page)

Somebody yowled like a wildcat, which meant a jagged steel fragment had bitten him. Joaquin hoped it was no one he knew. You always hated to hear a buddy get it. That reminded you how easily you might stop something yourself.

“Ave Maria,”
Joaquin whispered. As he went through the Hail Mary in Latin, his left hand found the rosary in his tunic pocket.
Keep me safe
, he thought.
Let Marshal Sanjurjo win, but please, God, keep me safe
.

THE NORTH SEA IN NOVEMBER
was nowhere a skipper wanted to go. It was even less pleasant in a U-boat than it would have been in a larger surface warship. Lieutenant Julius Lemp guided U-30 north and east. He had to get around the British Isles to take up his assigned position in the mid-Atlantic.

He liked everything about his boat except the way it rolled and
pitched in the heavy seas. Type VII U-boats made everything that had come before them seem like children’s toys by comparison. They had outstanding range. They could make seventeen knots on the surface and eight submerged, and could go eighteen hours at four knots underwater.

During the last war, the British mined the northern reaches of the North Sea, trying to bottle up the U-boats. With hundreds and hundreds of kilometers between Scotland and Norway, they couldn’t sew things up tight there the way they did in the Channel. But they could make life difficult, and they did.

They were supposed to be trying the same thing this time around. Lemp had orders to sink any minelayers he spotted. Odds against spying any were long: it was a big ocean, and he couldn’t see very much of it, even with the Zeiss binoculars hanging around his neck. But his superiors were thorough. They wouldn’t have got those wide gold stripes on their sleeves if they weren’t.

Gray clouds scudded low overhead, driven by a strong west wind. In clear weather, Lemp would have scanned sky as well as sea with his binoculars. One thing had changed from the last war: airplanes were much more dangerous than they had been. They could carry bigger bombs, and carry them farther. And they all had radio sets, so they could guide enemy warships to a U-boat’s path.

In this weather, though, a plane would have a devil of a time spotting the U-30. Lemp thought a pilot would have to be nuts even to take off, but he also thought pilots
were
nuts. Maybe it evened out.

About the most interesting thing he saw on his watch was a puffin that landed on the conning tower for a moment. With its plump, dignified body and the big beak in bright crayon colors, the bird looked as if a talented but strange child had drawn it. It also looked confused, as if wondering how this convenient little island had popped up in the middle of the sea. Then it noticed Julius Lemp—and then it was flying away again, as fast as it could.

“I don’t like puffin stew,” Lemp said. The wind blew his words away. Chances were the puffin wouldn’t have believed him anyway. Birds didn’t live to grow old by trusting people.

At 1400 on the dot, Ensign Klaus Hammerstein’s shoes clanged on the iron rungs of the ladder leading up to the top of the conning tower. “I relieve you, sir,” the youngster said formally, and then, “Anything I need to know?”

“Don’t talk to puffins,” Lemp replied, deadpan.

Hammerstein’s left eyebrow—the sardonic one—rose a few millimeters. “Hadn’t really planned to…sir.” He took a deep breath, and his expression cleared. “Nice to get up here, isn’t it?”

“Don’t remind me. I’m going the other way.” With a sigh, Lemp descended into the bowels of the U-30.

When the sun shone brightly, when the sky was blue, when the sea was smooth, you could easily think that coming off watch and going back into the iron coffin that let you do your job was like going from heaven to hell. With winter on its way in the North Sea, the change wasn’t that bad, but it sure wasn’t good.

Bowels…Julius Lemp wished he hadn’t thought of that particular word, because it fit much too well. U-boats filled with every stench in the world; they might have been a distillery for bad smells. High on the list was the reek from the heads. Toilets that worked without putting the boat at risk of flooding were something German engineering was…almost up to. No U-boat had ever been lost because of a malfunctioning head—which didn’t make the toilets a nice place to be around.

Unwashed bodies, musty clothes, and stale food added to the reek. U-boats carried enough drinking water. Water for washing was a luxury they didn’t bother with. Seawater and saltwater soap were supposed to make up the lack. As with the heads, theory ran several lengths in front of performance.

Bilgewater added a swampy smell as old as the sea—as old as boats,
anyhow. When you first came down into it, the combination was enough to knock you for a loop. After a while, you stopped smelling it—your brain blanked it out. But when you’d been breathing fresh salt air, the change was like getting a garbage can thrown in your face.

The sailors looked as if they might have been demons from hell, too. The orange light bulbs didn’t help. More to it than those, though. A U-boat skipper couldn’t insist on spit and polish the way officers in ordinary warships did. The men were too cramped together here—and U-boat crewmen were commonly harder cases than sailors in surface ships, too.

A lot of them started beards as soon as they left port. Shaving with saltwater soap was no fun. Even if it were, these guys were a raffish lot. They enjoyed flouting regulations. Lemp couldn’t very well ream them out for it, not when he was sprouting strawberry-blond face fungus himself.

Off-duty men looked up from a game of skat. Nobody jumped to his feet and saluted. If you sprang to attention on a U-boat, you were liable to coldcock yourself on an overhead pipe. In that, U-boats were like panzers: being a shrimp helped.

He hadn’t been below long when a shout floated down from the conning tower: “Ship ho! Ship off the starboard bow!”

That sent him scrambling up the ladder again. He wanted to see the ship for himself. No—he needed to see it for himself. If it was a warship, he would sink it if he could. No German surface units were in these waters. But if it was a freighter…Life got complicated then. Belgium and Holland, Norway and Denmark and Sweden were neutrals. Sinking a freighter bound for one of them could land the
Reich
in hot water. Freighters shaping a course for England, though, were fair game.

Up into the fresh air again. “Where away, Klaus?” he asked.

“There, sir.” Hammerstein pointed. “A smoke smudge.”

“Ja.”
Lemp saw it, too. “We’ll have to get closer, see what it is.” They
could do that. The U-30’s diesel engines gave off less smoke than did ships burning fuel oil or coal. And the gray-painted U-boat sat low in the water, making it hard to spot. Julius Lemp called down the hatch: “Change course to 350. I say again—350.”

“Jawohl
. Changing course to 350,” the helmsman answered, and the U-30 swung almost due north.

Lemp and Hammerstein both raised their binoculars, waiting for the ship to come up over the horizon. Lemp didn’t forget the rest of the seascape and the sky. You could get caught with your pants down if you concentrated too much on your prey. That was how you turned into prey yourself. Every so often, when the skipper lowered his field glasses for a moment, he looked over at Ensign Hammerstein. The pup hadn’t forgotten to look other places besides dead ahead, either. Good.

“That’s no freighter, sir,” Hammerstein said after a while.

“Damn right it isn’t,” Lemp agreed. The silhouette, while tiny, was too sleek, too well raked, to haul anything so mundane as barley or iron ore. Easier to mistake a thoroughbred for a cart horse than a freighter for a…“Destroyer, I think, or maybe a minelayer.”

“I want one of those!” the ensign said. “The bastards are dangerous.”

“Too right they are,” Lemp replied. Admirals sneered at mines—but admirals didn’t have to face them. Sailors who did had a healthy respect for them. Mines were worse than a nuisance—they were a scourge. And they were an economical scourge, because they murdered ships without endangering the murderers…most of the time. But not today! Lemp set a hand on Hammerstein’s shoulder. “Let’s go below.”

The U-30 stalked the enemy warship at periscope depth. That slowed the approach, but no help for it. If the ship spotted the U-boat, she could get away—or fight back. In a surface action, the U-30 was doomed. Her deck guns were for shooting up freighters and shooting down airplanes, not for taking on anything with real weaponry.

“It
is
a minelayer, by God!” Lemp said. The silhouette matched the one in
Jane’s Fighting Ships
. How thoughtful of the English to help destroy themselves. The enemy vessel went about her business without the slightest suspicion the U-30 was anywhere in the neighborhood. That was just how Lemp liked it. It might as well have been a training run. He sneaked to within a kilometer.

At his orders, the torpedomen readied three fish in the forward tubes. The enemy ship filled the periscope’s field of view. Fighter pilots from Spain said you had to get close to make sure of a hit. The same held true under the sea.

“First torpedo—
los!”
Lemp called.
Clang! Whoosh!
“Second torpedo—
los!
”
Clang! Whoosh
“Third torpedo—
los!” Clang! Whoosh!

Under two minutes to the target. The minelayer showed sudden, urgent smoke—someone aboard her must have spotted the wakes. But you couldn’t do much, not in that little bit of time. And Lemp had aimed one of the torpedoes on the assumption that the enemy vessel would speed up.

Boom!
“Hit!” Lemp shouted exultantly. The U-30’s crew cheered. Then a much bigger
Boom!
followed. The exploding torpedo must have touched off the mines the enemy ship carried. The minelayer went up in a fireball—and the U-boat might have been under the worst depth-charge attack in the world. It staggered in the water. Light bulbs blew from bow to stern, plunging the boat into darkness. Several leaks started.

With matter-of-fact competence, the crew went to work setting things to rights. Torches flashed on. Sailors began stopping the leaks. Lemp ordered U-30 to the surface. If there were survivors, he’d pick them up. He didn’t expect trouble, anyhow.

And he didn’t get any. Bodies floated in the chilly water. He saw no British sailors still alive. With that stunning blast, he was hardly surprised. A little disappointed, maybe, but not surprised. The minelayer had already gone to the bottom.

“Resume our previous course,” he told the helmsman. “We’ll celebrate properly when we’re clear.”

“Resuming previous course.” The petty officer grinned. Schnapps was against regulations—which didn’t mean people wouldn’t get a knock after a triumph like this.

T
hese days, the British Expeditionary Force was mechanized. That meant Staff Sergeant Alistair Walsh got to ride a lorry from Calais to this piddlepot hole in the ground somewhere right next to the Belgian border. Then he jumped down out of the lorry…and he was back in the mud again. Twenty years unwound as if they had never been.

If anything, this was worse than what he’d known in 1918. He’d fought through the spring and summer then, and got wounded early in fall. Guys who’d been through the mill talked about how miserable trenches got when it was cold and wet. Guys who’d been through the mill always talked. This time, they were right.

He squelched when he walked. So did everybody else. People screamed “Keep your feet dry!” the same way they screamed “Always wear a rubber!” Not too many people listened—and wasn’t that a surprise? The first cases of trench foot meant rockets went up from the people with red stripes on their caps.

Walsh remembered a trick he’d heard about in the last war. “Rub your feet with Vaseline, thick as you can,” he told the men in his company. “Do your damnedest to keep your socks dry, but greasing’s better than nothing.”

Only one man came down with trench foot, and he didn’t follow instructions. “Good job, Sergeant,” said Captain Ted Peters.

“Thank you, sir,” Walsh answered. He was old enough to be the company commander’s father, but he would have had to start mighty young. “Some of these buggers haven’t got the sense God gave a Frenchman.”

“Or a Belgian.” Peters scratched at his skinny little mustache. Walsh didn’t think much of the modern fashion. If he was going to grow hair on his upper lip, he wanted a proper mustache, not one that looked put on with a burnt match. But he couldn’t deny that the captain was a clever bloke. Peters went on, “You know why we haven’t crossed the border and taken up positions where we might do some good?”

“Belgians haven’t invited us in, like,” Walsh answered.

“That’s right. They’re neutral, don’t you know?” The way Captain Peters rolled his eyes told what he thought of that. “They think they’ll offend the
Boches
if they get ready to defend themselves. Much good that kind of thing did them in 1914.”

Maybe he’d been born in 1914. Maybe not, too. Either way, he was right. “The Germans jumped them then. They’ll jump them again. Hitler’s a bigger liar than the damned Kaiser ever was,” Walsh said.