Wreckers Must Breathe (11 page)

When the doctor had finished and had left us, I said to Logan, ‘Well, thank God for that! I didn't think it would end as comfortably as this. How are you feeling?'

‘My back is bloody painful,' he said.

‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘But you're lucky to get away with nothing worse.' I felt this was ungracious, so I said, ‘Many thanks for doing what you did. I owe it to you that my ribs are still intact. But it was a dangerous thing to do.'

‘Ar,' he said, ‘but it was a real pleasure.'

I looked at him closely. His eyes were shut and he was grinning happily. There was something very Irish and a little unbalanced about him. I said, ‘Well, for God's sake leave me to get out of my own scrapes. If you knock any more officers out you'll be for it.'

‘Is that why they were going to whip me?'

‘Of course. What did you think?'

‘I don't know,' he said. ‘I thought it might be their idea of fun.' He turned over so that he was facing the wall. ‘Good-night,' he said.

I stared at him. He just did not seem to grasp things. The old alertness was gone. He seemed dull and slow-witted. I put the light out and climbed into my bed. ‘Good-night,' I said.

The warmth of the cell and the darkness were wonderfully comforting after the wet cells in the dock gallery. But even so I found it difficult to get to sleep. My brain was too full of thoughts to be still. The fantastic events of the last few hours ran through and through my mind. I had keyed myself up to see Logan whipped to death before my eyes for something that he had done for me. Miraculously he had been saved from that and now he did not seem to realize what had happened. It was pitiful. But gradually the relief of the changed circumstances—no cold damp cell—no Gestapo—lulled me into a state of coma. I kept on seeing Fulke's face, shiny with sweat, as he realized what the commodore's words meant, the loose twist of his normally set lips, his sudden dive for the revolver. In how many sections of the German war machine were service men suddenly throwing off the yoke of the Gestapo? I had seen the relish in the commodore's eyes as he had hit Fulke. Then his words to the doctor—‘I don't know when I have enjoyed myself so much.' If the services felt like this towards the watchdogs of the Nazi Party, how did the German people feel? Was there hope in this for a short war, or merely food for thought? Questions, questions, questions—but no answers.

IT WAS BREAKFAST
at seven next morning and then we were set to work on the hull of U 39 again. Logan worked stripped to the waist because his clothes rubbed against the wounds on his back. But though he moved rather stiffly, he worked with the same methodical speed that he had done on the previous day. My own muscles soon lost their stiffness, and I found the work required less effort.

So morning ran into evening and evening into morning again with only the routine of the place to distinguish night from day. We worked a ten-hour day, from seven-thirty in the morning until six in the evening with a half-hour break for lunch. Hull scraping only occurred when a submarine came in from a lengthy cruise. If it were a rush job a whole party of ratings was put on to it with us and it only took a few hours. Otherwise, we had the work to ourselves and it took nearly two days. When there was no hull scraping, we worked in the canteen, washing up, peeling potatoes. Sometimes, when a submarine was due to go out we had to help carry provisions from the store-rooms and load them on to the submarine. Every morning, whatever else we had to do, we cleaned out the latrines, which were of the bucket type.

Now that we were no longer under the control of the Gestapo we had less supervision. So long as we did our job and kept to the times laid down for us, chief of which were to rise at seven in the morning and return to our cell at seven in the evening, there was little fear of trouble. But we remained under a guard. The officer of the day was responsible for us. He was in charge of fatigue parties. Fatigue parties were provided as required by the submarines in the base, so many men being detailed from each boat. No man went on fatigue more than once until every other rating from his own boat had also done his turn. The whole point of the base, so far as the crews of the U-boats were concerned, was to provide the maximum relaxation—a thing that was very difficult to achieve in view of the cramped quarters which were really very little different from quarters in a U-boat. The main trouble, of course, was that the men never saw the light of day in the base. It was all underground, and, with the constant sound of machinery and the queer echoes, the place was apt to get on men's nerves.

These fatigue parties worked on more or less the same basis as we did, though they were free to do what they liked when they came off duty at six. Like ourselves, however, they had to hold themselves ready for duty when a submarine was coming into the base or leaving it. This meant that the fatigue parties were often called out in the middle of the night as it was only during the hours of darkness that the boats could get in or out of the base.

Thus it was that I was present when U 24 left the base. This gave me great joy for it enabled me to watch Fulke's arrival in charge of two guards. Until then I do not think I had ever seen real panic in a man's eyes. He was struggling like a madman and I was certain he would prove quite useless as a cook and be an infernal nuisance to every one on board. The crew lined up to watch him come on board and there were broad grins on their faces. It was plain that the men of the German submarine service had no use for the Gestapo. It is not altogether surprising. Fulke demanded complete and absolute obedience to every petty and arbitrary rule he made. This may be all right in the army and possibly in the big ship navy, but it does not work in submarines.

The submarine service is probably much the same in all countries. It differs from every other branch of the services because of its danger. It is not a question of tradition or the honour of the service. To be of the service is in itself to be a hero. And a hero is above discipline. Throughout the service stress is laid on efficiency—nothing else. It is a question of existence. Each man has in his hands the fate of the whole ship. In these circumstances discipline is automatic. But when they return to base, especially a base like this, the crews want to relax, not to be pestered by petty disciplinary regulations.

And so Fulke was given a warm welcome by the crew of U 24. I don't know what the man had originally been. Some thought he was one of the Munich Putsch crowd. I doubt it. But at any rate, he had apparently been with the Party since 1933 and had wielded for a sufficient length of time the power of life and death to have become completely callous to his victims' feelings. And now he was scared. I heard one man on the dockside say that he had been in the submarine that had brought Fulke to the base. ‘He looked pretty scared then,' he said. ‘And he'd been drinking heavily before he came on board. He's a coward—no doubt of that.' And he spat. Then in a whisper he added, ‘I wouldn't wonder if most of the Gestapo aren't afraid as soon as they get the wrong end of the lash.'

Perhaps they did Fulke an injustice. Perhaps he had second sight. At any rate, U 24 was sunk by a seaplane in the Bay of Biscay two days later.

Before U 24 went out the commodore walked down with her commander, Varndt. Whatever time of the night a submarine left he always accompanied the commander to his boat. It was a ritual. I saw Varndt's face as he went on board. It was set, but cheerful. Before descending the conning tower, he saluted, then waved his hand. They were all the same, these U-boat commanders—their men, too, for that matter. Most of them were young. They knew what they faced. The chances of death at that time were only two-to-one against every time they went out. The odds were short enough. They had responsibilities thrust upon them at which much older men would have blenched in peace-time. Yet they accepted these responsibilities and the danger without question, and with set faces and sublime cheerfulness went out to almost certain death.

Before I had been in the base more than a few days my admiration for the German submarine service was immense. And I was filled with a great sense of depression. These men were mostly young. They faced death and accepted their responsibilities without question. They were the pick of Germany's seamen. And they were being thrown away to fulfil the destinies of a man whose boundless ambition spelt ruin for his country, himself and half the civilized world. More, they were given orders the execution of which brought universal opprobrium upon them and their Service. In the first days of the war, it was in fact for German youth that my soul cried out against that fanatic, who had diagnosed his country's and the world's disease correctly, yet attempted a cure that had been tried before and had been found only to increase the suffering of the masses.

As far as Logan and I were concerned life was not unpleasant. We worked hard, it is true, and the air was not too good despite a system of ventilation. But in the evenings, when we retired to our own quarters, there were German magazines to read. There was a plentiful supply of these available and I would surreptitiously read stories to Logan. He enjoyed this, but though I talked to him endlessly of Cadgwith and South Cornwall, his mind seemed quite blank. He had loved the place. It had been, I think, his only permanent love. Yet he showed no interest in it and never at any time asked me to tell him about it or describe it to him in greater detail. Much of his time he spent fashioning pieces of wood into models of boats with an ordinary table knife. I suppose it was some sort of subconscious manifestation of the life he could no longer remember. No one seemed to object. In fact the doctor encouraged it. He said he thought it might help him to remember. Sometimes Logan would spend hours carving his name on the wooden legs of his camp-bed as though he were afraid of forgetting that, too.

As time went on, we were allowed to mix more and more freely with the men. They took to Logan very quickly. They made fun of him, but he did not seem to mind. His great bulk and terrific strength seemed to fascinate them. And as it became quite obvious that he was not only rather simple, but also quite harmless, they would take him into the mess of an evening and stand him drinks and put him through his tricks. His tricks were largely a matter of strength. He could lift two average size sailors up on to the bar by the seat of their pants. This, and the fact that a very few drinks now seemed to go to his head and make him fuddled and rather amusing, made him popular. Big Logan had become something of a buffoon, and I found the spectacle somehow rather revolting.

Meanwhile, I learned my way about the base. Generally speaking, we had the freedom of the three galleries, but not the docks nor the repair and munition depots. There were grave penalties for entering these other than when ordered to do so. Nevertheless, in the course of my duties I eventually penetrated to even the most remote sections of the base, and gradually I was able to build up a plan of the place in my mind's eye. When I had a complete picture of it clear in my mind, I made a rough plan, and this, with a few comments added later, I have reproduced.

I have always credited the Germans with a greater eye for detail than any other race. But it was not until I had a working knowledge of that U-boat base that I fully understood what the thoroughness of the German mind meant. It was incredible. Later I was to learn that it had taken two years to build and had cost the equivalent of about £5,000,000. Moreover, all equipment, or the raw materials to manufacture the equipment on the spot, had been brought into the base by a submersible barge. I have already explained the dock sections, the long cave into which the submarines rose, the heavy haulage gear and the seven docks radiating off from the slightly wider section of the main cave.

 

I should perhaps explain the haulage gear more thoroughly, though here again I did not discover the details of its working until later. First, no U-boat was allowed to enter the base in any circumstances during the hours of daylight or in moonlight. The haulage gear itself ran out through the underwater mouth of the cave and round a pylon fixed to the bed of the sea about a hundred yards or so off the shore. In suitable conditions, a glass ball of a type used by fishermen for their nets was floated up from the pylon. This ball was coated with mildly phosphor-escent paint, and was attached to the pylon by ordinary rope. This in turn was connected electrically with the shore. Any sharp tug on the glass ball—the buoyancy of the ball was not sufficient—started a buzzer in the haulage gear control room. A submarine commander desiring to enter the base had to give in morse by tugs on the ball the number of his boat and his own name. If any unauthorized person attempted to haul it up it was immediately released.

When a U-boat had given the correct signal, a small buoy was released in which there was a telephone. Communication was thus possible between the base and the incoming submarine. When required the main buoy was released, the submarine was coupled to it by a grappling hook at the bows and the U-boat then submerged. Care was necessary to submerge in the correct position, namely at right angles to the shore, or two points south of due west. The reason for this was that the submarine had to come to rest on an iron cradle which ran on a line laid from the cliffs out along the seabed. This, I understand, was the most difficult of all the tasks that confronted the German engineers. The seabed was mostly rock and rails were the only means of preventing the submarine being injured while being hauled into the base.