The Burning Shore (26 page)

At about 1412 EWT, Kane glanced out his left-hand window and spotted a tiny, feather-like line on the water about ten miles away. He called out on the aircraft’s intercom for the other crewmen to view the sight. After several minutes, Kane changed the aircraft’s heading to due west and went in for a closer look. He nosed the bomber higher up in the cloud layer
and instinctively pulled back on the throttles to reduce the engine noise.
⁸

O
N
U-701’
S NARROW BRIDGE
atop its partially submerged conning tower, Degen, Junker, Kunert, and Hänsel peered through their Zeiss binoculars, each man tracking a ninety-degree sector of the ocean and sky. The boat continued to plow through the moderate waves, its bow and stern still just below the surface, but the twin propellers were thrashing a noticeable wake behind it.

Suddenly Hänsel, the forward lookout, called out a surface sighting: the funnel and two mastheads of an Allied freighter sunk in shallow waters had just appeared on the western horizon. At that moment, Bahr called up on the voice tube to report that the ventilation process was complete.

“Let’s go down! Take her down!” Degen shouted. In the engine room, the duty watch-standers shut off the diesel engines and activated the two e-motors, while in the control room, Bahr ordered the ballast tanks blown and a down angle on the diving planes. U-701 began easing below the choppy surface.

Kunert and Hänsel disappeared down the hatch opening, and Degen was waiting for Junker—who was standing at the aft end of the bridge—to step forward and climb down, when the 1WO suddenly stiffened and pointed, shouting, “Airplane, 200 degrees, coming in from port aft!” Junker leaped down the hatch opening. Horrified, Degen looked up and saw an enemy bomber plummeting out of the cloud layer. He jumped down the hatch and cranked it shut as the U-boat submerged.

Degen stood in the cramped control room with Junker, Hänsel, and Kunert as the duty watch-standers pushed U-701 nose
first into the depths. It was silent and tense; the only sound was the high-pitched whine as the boat’s two e-motors ran at full speed. Degen turned to Junker and said in a near-whisper, “You saw it too late.”

“Yes.”

B
Y THE TIME
K
ANE
’
S
H
UDSON
got within five miles of the object, he and the other crewmen knew they had spotted a surfaced U-boat. When he saw it suddenly begin to submerge, Kane firewalled the throttles and shoved the control yoke forward. The bomber dove at the target, which was now cloaked in a swirl of bubbles and foam. Kane shouted at Bellamy to open the aircraft’s bomb bay doors as he yanked back on the yoke and leveled off at fifty feet above the water, hurtling at 225 knots toward the U-boat’s location.

As the A-29 came up over the U-boat, Kane could clearly see that it was still close to the surface. He judged the right moment and stabbed the bomb-release override button on the control yoke. He felt a slight thump-thump-thump as the aircraft’s load of three 325-pound Mark XVII depth charges fell free. Kane threw the A-29 into a steep climbing turn and craned his neck looking down at the water. He watched as the three depth charges exploded. The first fell twenty-five feet short of the U-boat’s blurred outline, but the second and third straddled its hull at the stern. Three columns of seawater erupted more than fifty feet high, then slowly collapsed back down into the boiling surf.
⁹

12

THE ORDEAL

M
ANY OF THE CREWMEN ON
U-701
RECEIVED NO WARNING
that their boat was on the brink of destruction. In one moment, Gerhard Schwendel, Herbert Grotheer, and
Mechanikergefreiter
(Seaman 1st Class) Werner Seldte were among a group of a dozen or so off-duty crewmen relaxing in the bow compartment as the diesel motors sucked sweet, fresh air throughout the boat. In the next instant, they heard distant shouts ordering a crash dive. They felt the blast of compressed air as the ballast tanks emptied and the sudden lurch as the U-boat pitched down by the nose in a frantic attempt to go deep. But before they could even react to the emergency, three sharp explosions rocked the boat, throwing several of them to the deck. The compartment lights went out, and in the dim illumination of the emergency lighting system, the crewmen heard the most terrifying sound imaginable in such a scenario: the harsh bellow of seawater thundering inside the pressure hull. Seconds later, a wave shot through the open bulkhead hatch, sweeping loose equipment, personal possessions, and several crewmen against the forward bulkhead.

Within the span of a few seconds, the crew’s world had been upended. “A petty officer was washed forward and got stuck between the torpedo tubes. We became aware of him because of his groaning,” Schwendel recalled. Reacting instantly, he reached up from his position in a bunk and grabbed his emergency breathing apparatus, a
Dräger Tauchretter
escape device that consisted of an air-storage bag, compressed-oxygen cylinder, and mouthpiece. He half-waded, half-swam across the bow compartment, pushing aside debris, as the space steadily flooded.

Schwendel and his fellow crewmen fought against the surging water, but to no avail. “Water was rushing in the bow compartment through the watertight bulkhead passage with enormous power,” Seldte later said. “We tried to close the bulkhead hatch, but it was impossible.” In less than a minute, the bow compartment had nearly completely flooded, leaving only a small air pocket in which the struggling crewmen tried to keep their heads up. What air was left in the boat became overheated due to the soaring water pressure as U-701 fell to the seabed.

In the control room, the situation was equally dire. “The water inside rose by the second, and within half a minute the whole boat was filled up to the hatches, and the inner air was pushed against the overhead by the outer pressure,” Horst Degen said. At last, U-701’s shattered hull came to rest on the sand about 110 feet below the surface, tilting about twenty degrees to starboard.

Degen, Günter Kunert, and Kurt Hänsel climbed up into the mostly flooded conning tower as others struggled behind them. There was less than a foot of air in the tower, and the water pressure there also created “a terrible heat,” Degen said. Shouting for
the others to prepare to abandon ship, Degen grabbed the circular hatch wheel and turned it. With the water pressure inside the boat nearly equal to that outside, the hatch opened easily, and the three swam up out of the conning tower in a veil of air bubbles. Even at a depth of over one hundred feet, there was enough light for Degen to see the dim outline of U-701 on the seabed as he slowly rose toward the surface. Thanks to their underwater escape training back in Germany, even the crewmen lacking the
Dräger
devices knew that to avoid contracting decompression sickness (“the bends”), they had only to restrict their rate of ascent to the same speed as the air bubbles escaping the stricken U-boat. One of the last sailors to swim up the conning tower hatch was Fireman 1st Class Ludwig Vaupel. As he waited for the men ahead of him to exit the boat, Vaupel saw Oberleutnant Konrad Junker clinging to a stanchion with his head in the air pocket, apparently making no effort to prepare to escape. Vaupel picked up an escape lung and handed it to the first watch officer, but the officer shook his head and said, “Go on, get out!” Neither Vaupel nor any of the survivors of U-701 ever saw Junker on the surface, and years later Degen himself would say, “I still to date do not understand why 1WO Konrad Junker, who was standing next to me in the control room, did not come up to the surface at all.”

Word spread quickly throughout U-701 that the men should abandon ship. While other crewmen in the bow compartment tended to the seriously injured sailor, the senior enlisted man present,
Obermaschinist
(Machinist Chief) Walter Fritz, asked for a volunteer to see what was happening in the control room three compartments aft. Seldte nodded. Donning his
Dräger
apparatus,
he plunged into the debris-filled water and struggled through the open hatch. Groping his way to the rear end of the petty officer’s compartment, he found Second Watch Officer Leutnant zur See Erwin Batzies, clinging to a stanchion in what remained of Degen’s semiprivate cabin, where there was a small air pocket. “He looked all right and composed,” Seldte recalled years later. “He ordered the crew in the bow compartment to try to make it to the central operations room, to evacuate the boat from there.” Seldte reversed course, returned to the bow compartment, and relayed Batzies’s order to Fritz. However, several crewmen who attempted to make it to the control room quickly returned, saying the way was now blocked. Seldte himself made the attempt and briefly became trapped in the completely flooded petty officers’ compartment.

Stifling a growing panic, Seldte dove to the deck plates and saw a faint light glimmering ahead of him. Emerging into the control room, he found it empty except for two crewmen huddled in the shrinking air pocket. One was incoherent from an injury, and the second, while seemingly unharmed, did not reply when Seldte told him to swim out of the boat through the conning tower hatch. Seldte was racking his brains for what to say next to the man when a loud hissing erupted and the air pocket began to disappear as water pressure built up inside the boat. Seldte left the pair behind and swam up the conning tower hatchway; in less than a minute he was on the surface.
¹

C
IRCLING SEVERAL HUNDRED FEET OVERHEAD
, Harry Kane and his aircrew intently studied the disturbed water below where
their three depth charges had detonated. “We didn’t know that we’d gotten the submarine,” Kane said. Even when they saw a plume of diesel oil and what appeared to be small pieces of debris emerge from the turbulence, the Americans thought these might be part of a ruse by the U-boat commander to trick them into abandoning the hunt. But after several minutes, they saw tiny figures popping up to the surface. Slowing the Hudson down to near-stalling speed, Kane and his crew counted about sixteen Germans in the water below, many of them lacking lifejackets or the smaller
Dräger
devices.

Kane got on the bomber’s intercom and issued a terse order. All five crewmen tore off their own lifejackets, and in the next several passes, threw them out of the plane to the struggling swimmers. Then Kane ordered Corporals Leo Flowers and Presley Broussard to jettison the aircraft’s inflatable life raft, which was mounted on the inside of the main cabin door. “They were beaten,” Kane later said of the Germans. “They couldn’t hurt anyone anymore. We couldn’t leave them to drown like rats. They were like us, they’d had a job to do and they’d done it.”
²

D
OWN ON THE SURFACE
, Degen was trying to organize the control room survivors but became distracted when he saw the twin-engine bomber fly past at a very low altitude. As he watched, a figure in the cockpit waved down at them, and a few seconds later, several objects fell into the water nearby. One of the crewmen swam over and retrieved two lifejackets. Degen counted six flotation devices: one lifejacket and three
Dräger
sets from the U-boat and the two lifejackets the Americans had just tossed
down (they never saw the life raft from Kane’s aircraft). He ordered his crewmen to string them together in a circle and to quiet down, hang on, and conserve energy. The A-29 circled around one more time, and its crew dropped three smoke floats into the water. These gestures gave Degen and the other fifteen crewman hope that they would soon be rescued.

Unfortunately, two of the men in Degen’s group were non-swimmers; they quickly became exhausted and panicked as they clung to the ring of flotation devices. The ocean was choppy with a strong breeze, which splashed the men as they floated. Despite Degen and others’ pleading that they relax, the pair quickly began swallowing and choking on seawater, which further weakened them. After forty-five minutes, both men drowned. As the sun slowly descended toward the western horizon, two more men perished. Both had been injured in the attack. They too quickly became drained of energy and succumbed to the waves.

Degen’s group had shrunk to twelve by sunset when another pair of men abandoned the group. Even though he had estimated U-701 was at least thirty nautical miles from the coast at the time of the attack, Fähnrich Günter Lange and Oberbootsmaat Kurt Hänsel decided to strike out for the semi-submerged shipwreck that Hänsel, as forward lookout, had sighted moments before the sinking. Degen warned the two that they would be swimming against the Gulf Stream and encouraged them to remain with the group, but they refused and started off together. “We never saw those two men again,” Degen later recalled.

Just before sunset, Degen and the others spotted a large convoy passing by about four miles from their position, much too far away to spot the tiny group clinging to their flotation gear.
They also saw several aircraft flying high overhead, brightly illuminated by the setting sun. “They were too high to notice us,” he said. The smoke floats had long since gone out. Darkness fell. Degen exhorted his men to have faith that they would be rescued and told them what an incredible story they would be able to recount to their families, once they were saved, after such an amazing adventure. “We talked it over how lucky we had been by going towards the coast and not eastward to the open ocean, and how all of us would have been lost immediately had we not hit the bottom at 60 meters depth,” Degen recounted. “Thinking of these facts and the situation put much of us at ease as far as a [hoped-for] rescue.”
³

L
IEUTENANT
K
ANE AND HIS CREW
were desperate to obtain help for the German sailors stranded in the water below them. Nine minutes after their attack, Kane instructed radio operator Flowers to transmit a report on the sinking. At 1424 Eastern War Time, Flowers raised Cherry Point on the radio and sent, “Sub sunk position 393376,” which translated into 34:23N 075:10W. At 1442 hours, as the A-29 continued to circle the area, Flowers dispatched a follow-up report: “Please send other aircraft to 393376, we are running low on gas. There are men in the water. Send help.”