Decoy (31 page)

Right, that’s dragged the problem out into the open, if this dank steel tube humming along a hundred feet below the surface can be called ‘open’. How do we get back safely? Certainly the Teds are winning the Battle of the Atlantic, but they’re losing boats all the time – thirty-seven in July, twenty-five in August, nine in September. They are losses that do not matter a damn to Dönitz because, despite all ‘Bomber’ Harris’ claims on behalf of the RAF, who are losing an appalling number of aircraft, many more new boats are being launched than we manage to bomb in the shipyards or sink once at sea.

While the Germans launch more U-boats than the Allies sink, and those U-boats sink more merchantmen than the Allies can build, it needs no great feat of mathematics to see who is winning. And that was while we were still reading Hydra; when we knew every order and report passing between Dönitz and his U-boats in the Atlantic.

Yet the Battle of the Atlantic when viewed from a U-boat itself and ignoring Dönitz, Ned suddenly realized, gave a vastly different perspective. Thirty-seven, twenty-five, nine – as U-boat sinkings on the ASIU chart they might not look very impressive as a percentage of the U-boats known to be operating in the Atlantic, and no doubt to Dönitz they were a mere pinprick, but they still added up to seventy-one, and that averaged six a week. So bearing all that in mind, the chances of getting this literally dumb boat into British waters without being sunk by a wary British corvette captain or the excited pilot of a Liberator or Sunderland were not very great. Six in a week. Maybe Sundays were regarded as close season for U-boats.

It occurred to him that the swilling back and forth was bilge water inside the boat, like an open sewer sluicing forward and aft and athwartships with every pitch and roll. Surely there were bilge pumps? Admitting to himself that as far as the wireless transmitter was concerned he had a problem but no answer, he pulled himself out of the bunk and went through into the control room.

‘What about pumping the bilges?’ he said to Yon, who was still talking to the German Engineer.

‘Certainly sir, I’ll just clear it with the skipper because it means leaving some oil floating on the surface.’

He shouted up the ladder to Jemmy, and then came back. ‘That’s fine, sir.’

Yon asked the German a question and then pressed the buttons he indicated.

Ned thanked him and realized that he had absolutely nothing to do. Jemmy commanded the U-boat, the Croupier…well, come to think of it the Croupier knew as little about submarines as Ned did, and Jemmy did not have enough watchkeeping officers, even if he stood a watch himself.

Now they had the prisoners sorted out and the Croupier had put Sergeant Keeler in charge of arranging guards, there were still some housekeeping jobs to arrange: the German cook must be found, threatened with hellfire and damnation, and put back to work in the galley. He was the only man who knew how it all worked and what provisions were available. Yes, stewards, too. The wardroom steward could look after the British officers, and the POs’ steward could look after the seamen and Marines.

He could go through the chest of charts. Thanks to the time spent in ASIU he was more than familiar with the German gridded chart of the Atlantic, each tiny square numbered and lettered. He remembered the signals from Dönitz to particular U-boats, sent in the Hydra cipher and intercepted and deciphered by BP. A typical one would be ‘Proceed at once to AS 57’, and then giving the course and speed of an Allied convoy expected there. Sometimes
B der U
would be more urgent: ‘All boats with torpedoes’ would be ordered to a particular grid square when a convoy had been sighted.

Now Ned was actually inside a U-boat, he could better understand why Jemmy in the ASIU office used to dismiss derisively any idea that the Germans after assembling a pack of submarines then put an ace commander in charge. Jemmy had always maintained that the boats arriving at different times and from different directions just waded into the convoy as soon as possible, leaving only when out of torpedoes, running low on fuel or pinned down by an escort for a couple of days so there was no chance of catching up the convoy again.

At that moment he saw the Croupier crowded in the wireless cabin with the German operator and the British. These two had the casing off the transmitter.

Ned caught the Croupier’s eye and the lanky lieutenant came out of the cabin.

‘Where’s your Sten?’ Ned asked. ‘These dam’ prisoners might…’

The Croupier gave a lopsided grin and from each jacket pocket pulled out an automatic. ‘Look at ’em, nine millimetre, hold six rounds each. That means twelve individually aimed rounds, which would pay more dividends with all these pipes and gauges around than a squirt with the Sten.’

Ned nodded. ‘Perhaps Jemmy, Yon and I ought to have one each.’

The Croupier grinned again. ‘I’ve got all the pistols and the ammunition stowed in that drawer –’ he pointed at the Enigma table, ‘and I was going to suggest we issued them.’

‘Now, what about the transmitter?’

‘Our chap, Hazell, is checking it over now. Says the Teds were crazy to sail with only one spare pair of final valves.’

‘When do we know if he can repair it?’

‘He doesn’t think so, but he’ll know for certain in half an hour.’

While sitting in the lifeboat, Ned had found himself dreading the possibility of diving in a U-boat, but now it had happened, now the U-boat was cruising along a hundred feet down, he felt a strange reluctance to go back to the surface, where a sudden attack could come as a passing Sunderland or Catalina or Liberator, or a frigate sighted their grey hull, or the bow wave and spray. Any surface ship had a visual advantage: the higher the eye, the more distant the horizon.

‘We must monitor all traffic once we’re surfaced,’ Ned said. ‘We can read all the signals from Kernével now we have the Triton cipher.’

‘Won’t do us much good except as records,’ the Croupier commented gloomily. ‘If only we could transmit a few bogus sighting reports so that old Doughnuts concentrates all his boats in an empty part of the ocean!’

‘Yes, except the moment Kernével realizes the signals
are
bogus, Dönitz knows we’ve either captured one of his boats or at least got a Mark III and the Triton manual. Or, life being what it is, we might get all the U-boats concentrated and then one of our convoys really does steam into sight.’

‘Yes,’ the Croupier said sourly. ‘Excuse my mad burst of poor humour: I had thought of all that.’

‘Have you checked what frequencies Kernével used to transmit to the boats?’

‘No, damn it, I haven’t. I thought the receiver would be pre-tuned just for the U-boat frequency.’

‘Or there might be a limited number Kernével uses.’

‘The fact is,’ the Croupier grumbled, ‘that none of the rest of us know a damn thing about wirelesses!’

‘I prefer gramophones,’ Ned said. ‘Come on, we’d better spend some time with that Triton manual; then we can set up the Enigma machine so that at least we can decipher anything we hear tonight.’

He thought for a moment and then said: ‘Leave Triton for a moment. I’m getting hungry and so is everyone else.’ He then explained his intentions about the cook and stewards, and the Croupier went off to find them.

As soon as darkness fell, unseen but waiting above to hide or trap them, Jemmy prepared for surfacing. Those due for the bridge watch sorted through the grey-green German oilskins and found coats and shoulder-high trousers that fitted. Heavy leather boots, which had thick cork soles as insulation against the steel plating of the deck, were more difficult to choose.

Finally, adopting the German method of controlling the boat during surfacing, Jemmy went up into the conning tower to use the periscope, Ned standing by him and acting as the first lieutenant, with Yon down in the control room ready to give the orders which would blow compressed air into the ballast tanks, driving out the water and making the boat buoyant. The German Engineer stood close by, a Marine guarding him, but it was clear by now that his first concern was for the boat; he was determined that mechanically everything should continue to function smoothly and did not seem to realize that he was now collaborating with the enemy; that if ever the Gestapo caught him he would be shot out of hand.

Yon had already checked on one of the U-boat’s most valuable commodities, compressed air. Earlier the electrically-driven air compressor had filled all the tanks, those for blowing the ballast tanks and the others which would start the two 9-cylinder diesel engines, letting great blasts of air into the cylinders to get the crankshaft turning until the cylinders had enough compression to ignite the fuel spraying in through the injectors.

When running under water using her electric motors, the submarine was controlled by two sets of hydroplanes, one forward and one aft, like stubby narrow aircraft wings, or fish fins. Each pair turned together so that when those at the bow were angled up they steered the boat towards the surface like an aircraft climbing; angling them down drove her deeper. The pair right aft did the same to the after part of the boat. Two rudders, one abaft each propeller, steered the boat whether on the surface or submerged.

Surfacing was not just a question of blowing water out of the ballast tanks and blundering up like a clumsy whale. That could be done in an emergency, but normally the boat was kept carefully trimmed and brought up to within thirty or forty feet of the surface. The Papenberg showed the final precise distance from the submarine to the surface so that the periscope could be raised only enough for the commander to see over the waves, with him using a control on the periscope itself allowing him to raise or lower it completely or just a few inches.

The electric motors had to be used until the big vents could be opened to allow the diesels to suck in the huge quantities of air they needed. It was important for the men’s eardrums that the air pressure inside the boat was equalized with the atmospheric pressure outside, before the hatch between the conning tower and bridge was opened.

Jemmy had decided that he himself would stand the first watch. Normally the commander did not stand a watch but, as he explained to Ned, he wanted to get the complete feel of the boat.

Four seamen now waited in the control room, towels round their necks, bulky in oilskin suits and sou’westers, and each with a pair of binoculars slung round his neck. As lookouts, each would be responsible for a quadrant of the horizon, reporting any object in a particular way. Facing forward, the port side of the ship was divided into 180 degrees from dead ahead round to the left to a point dead astern. The other side of the ship was divided into a similar semicircle comprising 180 degrees and referred to as the starboard side. In peacetime, when ships carried navigation lights, that on the port side was red while the starboard one was green, so the lookouts now used these same colours in their reports. An object on the starboard beam would be ‘green nine oh’, something half-way between dead ahead and abeam would be ‘green four five’, an object half-way between abeam and astern would be ‘green one three five’, while ‘red’ before the bearing warned it was to port.

The German cook had worked with a will, although the Marine guard reported that he ate ravenously as he cooked. The prisoners were fed first, then the prize crew.

Jemmy looked at his watch. Ned had noticed that, ever since they boarded the U-boat and he had become responsible for her, Jemmy’s twitch had vanished. He walked around the boat, in the Croupier’s words, like the lord of the manor inspecting how the fruit was ripening and paying special attention to the pheasant chicks.

The German wireless operator was now aft with the other prisoners: he and Hazell had tried repairs, but even Ned, looking at the blackened valves and smelling the hard but sweet smell of burned-out electrical fittings, could see there was no hope.

Just before joining Jemmy in the conning tower Ned had what seemed such an obvious and practical idea that he grabbed the Croupier’s shoulder and hissed: ‘We’ll use the lifeboat suitcase wireless with a big aerial! Five hundred metres, the distress frequency: everyone listens. We’ll get hold of that corvette in a few days – she’ll be listening for us! Send her a jumbled-up signal to be forwarded to the Admiralty. Watts will catch on!’

The Croupier said nothing; his eyes dropped to the steel plating forming the floor – the control room sole, if one wanted to be accurate, Ned thought, though not one in a hundred seamen (or officers) would know what you were talking about. The Croupier was behaving most oddly. Ned knew that, if he had to describe it in one word, it would be ‘shifty’.

Ned felt his sudden elation disappearing, like a barrage balloon punctured by friendly anti-aircraft fire and slowly deflating and falling with all the dignity of an old dowager in the private bar who had drunk too many port and lemons.

‘What’s happened to it?’ Ned asked.

‘You remember we told some men to collect the duffels and the suitcase wireless, and then cut the lifeboat adrift.’

‘Yes, just before we dived. I saw the duffels being dropped down the hatch.’

The Croupier looked up. ‘If any of us had been watching from the bridge, we’d have seen the bloody fools accidentally drop the suitcase wireless into the water…’

Now Ned felt not just despair (and fear, he had to admit to that), but anger. ‘Why wasn’t I told at once?’

The Croupier shook his head. ‘Sorry Ned. Fact is, none of us – you, me, Jemmy, Yon or Hazell – remembered the dam’ thing at the time. We’d been so cold and wet so long, I suppose we thought only of the duffels. It wasn’t till after we finally gave up on the transmitter that Hazell said we could use the suitcase one, and he’d rig up a better aerial. Then we started wondering where the set was. I started asking questions… I hadn’t reported to you yet because I only found out an hour ago, and reckoned you had enough on your plate.’

‘Why didn’t the men report the accident?’

‘Well, they were so excited at capturing this bloody boat, and then seeing the big insulators on the stay-cum-aerial running up the conning tower, they didn’t think the lifeboat transmitter was of much importance: as one of them said, they thought we were just going through the drill in bringing it on board because it was government property. And the thing
looks
so like a bloody suitcase…’