The War That Came Early: West and East (55 page)

S
ailors threw lines from the U-30 to the men waiting on the pier. The other ratings caught the ropes and made the U-boat fast. “All engines stop,” Julius Lemp called through the speaking tube.

“All engines stopped,” the reply came back, and the diesels’ throb died into silence.

Lemp sighed. Especially since the
Schnorkel
had come to let the diesels run almost all the time, that throb had soaked into his bones. Doing without it felt strange, unnatural, wrong. He sighed again. “Wilhelmshaven,” he said to no one in particular. “Home port.”

“Sounds good to me,” Gerhart Beilharz declared.

“Well, sure it does,” Lemp said. “You won’t have to wear your iron pot all the time.”

“No, and I’ll probably clonk myself a couple of times when I don’t have it on,” the tall engineering officer answered. “Too goddamn many doorways aren’t made for people my size, and sometimes I forget to duck.”

“That is a bad habit for a U-boat officer,” Lemp said with mock severity.

“I’ll try to unlearn it.” Beilharz stretched. The space right under the conning toward was the only one in the boat where he could do that without clouting somebody. “Be good to get my feet on dry land again, even if it’ll feel like it’s rolling under me for a little while.”

“They’ll probably pin an Iron Cross First Class on you for the snort,” Lemp told him. “It did us some good, no two ways about it.”

“I’m glad you think so, Skipper. I know you had your doubts when the technicians installed it.”

That was putting things mildly. Lemp didn’t feel like rehashing it, though. All he said was, “We’ve earned some time ashore.”

As the sailors trooped off the U-boat, a commander nodded to Lemp and said, “Admiral Dönitz’s compliments, and he would like to speak with you at your convenience. If you would care to come with me …”

At your convenience
plainly meant
right this minute
. And if Lemp didn’t care to go with the commander, he damn well would anyway. Two unsmiling sailors with rifles and helmets behind the officer made that obvious. “I am at the admiral’s service, of course,” Lemp replied, which meant just what it said.

Dönitz sat behind a broad desk piled high with papers. He had a broad face that tapered to a narrow, pointed chin. But for a thin beak of a nose, his features were rather flat.

“Well, how do you like the
Schnorkel
?” he asked without preamble.

“Sir, it’s more useful than I thought it would be,” Lemp answered. “It’s given less trouble than I expected from an experimental gadget, too. And Beilharz does a fine job of keeping it healthy. He’s a good officer.”

“He didn’t fracture his skull inside the boat?” Dönitz inquired with a smile. Lemp blinked. Did the admiral keep every junior lieutenant in his mental card file? Maybe he did, by God.

“A couple of flesh wounds. Nothing worse,” Lemp said after a beat.

“That’s good. And it’s good you sank a Royal Navy destroyer. We’re going to win the Scandinavian campaign, even if England and France haven’t quite figured that out yet,” the admiral in charge of U-boats said.

“I’m glad to hear it, sir. I know we’ve hurt the Royal Navy badly.”

“Yes, mostly with U-boats and land-based aircraft, though the big ships did get that one carrier,” Dönitz said. “They’ve hurt our surface
forces, too, and we have less to spare than they do. But we dominate the waters in the eastern North Sea, and that’s the point.” His telephone rang. “Excuse me.” He picked it up. “Dönitz here.”

Someone gabbled excitedly in his ear. Lemp was astonished to see his jaw drop. Dönitz was for the most part an imperturbable man. Not today.

“What?” he barked. “Are you sure? … What is the situation in Berlin? … Are you sure of
that
? … Well, you’d better be. Call me the minute you have more information.” He slammed the handset into its cradle.

“What’s up, sir?” Lemp asked. “Anything I need to know about?”

Dönitz took a deep breath.
He’s going to tell me to get lost
, Lemp thought. What the devil
was
going on? But the admiral didn’t do that—not quite. “Maybe you and your men should stick close to barracks for the next couple of days,” he said.

“Sir, we just got in after a cruise,” Lemp protested. “The boys deserve the chance to blow off some steam. It’s not as if—” He broke off.

“As if you’d sunk the
Athenia
again?” Dönitz finished for him. Lemp gave back a miserable nod. That was what had been in his mind, all right. Admiral Dönitz went on, “No, this isn’t your fault. But they should do it anyhow, for their own safety. Things may get … ugly.” He seemed to pick the word with malice aforethought.

“Can you tell me what’s going on?” Lemp asked.

“Only that it’s political,” Dönitz replied. “Listen to the radio. You’ll probably piece things together—as well as anyone can right now. Oh, and don’t be surprised if you find the barracks under guard.”

That raised more questions than it answered. Lemp chose the one that looked most important: “Political, sir? What do you mean, political?”

“What I said.” Dönitz seemed to lose patience with him all at once. “You are dismissed.” Lemp saluted and got out. He hadn’t closed the door before the admiral grabbed for the telephone again.

The commander was waiting in Dönitz’s anteroom. “What’s up?” he asked when he got a look at Lemp’s face.

“Ask your boss … sir,” Lemp said. The commander looked impatient. As best he could, Lemp recounted what had gone on after the phone rang.

“Der Herr Jesus!”
the other officer said after he’d finished. “Something’s gone into the shitter, all right. You’d better do what the admiral suggested. Things are liable to get nasty in a hurry.”

If he didn’t know what was going on, he had his suspicions. “What do you mean?” Lemp inquired.

“Just sit tight. I hope I’m wrong,” the commander said, which only frustrated Lemp more. Instead of giving him any answers he could actually use, the other officer hurried into Dönitz’s sanctum.

“Why don’t you do what Commander Tannenwald says, sir?” one of the armed ratings said. Now Lemp had a name to go with the face. The fellow with the
Stahlhelm
and the Mauser should have had no business giving him orders. His muscle, and his friend’s, and their weapons, were very persuasive. The two of them escorted Lemp back to his crew.

A few minutes after he got to the barracks, rifle shots and a short burst from a machine gun rang out not nearly far enough away. “What the hell is going on?” Peter demanded. No one answered. No one could—no one else knew, either. The helmsman turned on the radio in the barracks hall. Syrupy music poured out of it. That was no help.

When the tune ended, the announcer said, “Remain obedient to duly constituted authority.” Then he played another record.

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?” Lemp asked. He got no more answer than Peter had.

More gunfire came from the edge of the naval base. The lights outside the barracks hall suddenly went out. One of the guards stuck in his head and said, “The watchword is ‘
Heil Hitler!’
Remember it.” He shut the door before anybody could ask him any questions. Lemp wasn’t sure what to ask anyway. And if people were running around with guns, the wrong question was liable to have a permanent answer.

Lieutenant Beilharz took him aside and spoke in a low voice: “Skipper, I think some kind of coup is going on. What do we do?”

The same unwelcome thought had crossed Lemp’s mind. “What
can
we do? Go back to the U-30 and start shooting things up with the deck gun? We don’t even know which side is which. Best thing is to sit tight and wait to see what happens. Or have you got a better idea?”

“Well …” What wasn’t Beilharz saying? What were his politics? What
did he think Lemp’s were? Terrible for a fighting man to need to worry about things like that. The engineering officer sighed and nodded.
“Ja
, that’s probably best. What else is there?”

“Nothing that won’t put us in worse hot water,” Lemp answered, and they were in plenty. A bullet shattered a window and buried itself in the opposite wall.

“Douse the lights! Get down!” Peter sang out. Somebody hit the switch. The hall plunged into blackness. Thumps and shuffling noises said quite a few men were hitting the deck anyhow. Lemp only wished he knew who was shooting at whom, and why.
Wish for the moon while you’re at it
, he thought as he flattened out himself.

WHEREVER PEGGY DRUCE WENT
in Stockholm, she kept looking over her shoulder. Would Nazi soldiers suddenly come out of the woodwork like field-gray cockroaches, the way they had in Copenhagen? Germany loudly insisted she had no aggressive designs on Sweden. Of course, she’d said the same thing about Denmark and Norway. If she did end up invading, she would swear on a stack of Bibles that she’d been provoked. An oath like that was worth its weight in gold.

If you listened to the magazines and radio reports coming out of occupied Denmark, all the Danes were happy as could be with their Aryan brothers from
Deutschland
. If you listened to the people who’d got out of Denmark just ahead of the
Gestapo
, you heard a different story.

You could hear both sides in Sweden. You could pick up both Radio Berlin and the BBC. Papers printed reports from the Nazis and from the Western Allies (mostly in Swedish translation, which did Peggy no good, but even so …). You could buy the
International Herald-Tribune
and
Signal
, the Germans’ slick new propaganda magazine. The Swedes took such liberty for granted. Well, so had the Danes. Sweden didn’t know how well off it was, or so it seemed to Peggy.

Still, Stockholm wasn’t too bad. London or Paris (or Brest or Bordeaux) would have been even better. Peggy soon discovered, though, that the German major in Copenhagen had been right: she couldn’t get there from here. Planes weren’t flying. Ships weren’t sailing. The Germans were
driving English, French, and Norwegian forces up the long, skinny nation to the west, but Scandinavia and the North Sea did indeed remain a war zone.

She was so desperate to get out of Europe, she even visited the Soviet embassy to see if she could reverse Columbus and get to the west by heading east. None of the Russians at the embassy would admit to following English, but several spoke French or German. Peggy preferred French for all kinds of reasons. Once they saw she understood it, so did the Russians.

“Yes, Mrs. Druce, we can arrange an entry visa for you,” one of their diplomatic secretaries said. “We can arrange passage to Moscow. There should be no difficulty in that. Once in Moscow, you may travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway as far east as, I believe, Lake Baikal. We would gladly ticket you through to Vladivostok, you understand, but the Japanese have a different view of the situation.”

“Aw, shit,” Peggy said in English. Just so the Russian official wouldn’t feel left out, she added,
“Merde alors!”
Sure as hell, Columbus had got it right: the world was round. And a skirmish on the far side of the immense Eurasian land mass could screw up her travel hopes just as thoroughly as the one right next door. It not only could—it had.

“You have my sympathy, for whatever it may be worth to you,” the Russian said.

“Thanks,” Peggy answered, and left. His sympathy was worth just as much as the Germans’ nonaggression pledge … and not a nickel more.

If you had to get stuck somewhere, plenty of places were worse than Stockholm. The weather was getting chilly, but Peggy didn’t worry about any winter this side of Moscow’s. There was plenty of food, as there had been in Copenhagen till the Nazis marched in. Plenty to drink, too—she needed that. The town was extraordinarily clean, and more than pretty enough. A lot of the buildings were centuries older than any she could have seen in America. For contrast, the town hall was an amazing modern building; the locals couldn’t have been prouder of it. The south tower leaped 450 feet into the sky, and was topped by the three crowns the Swedes also used as the emblem on their warplanes.

Plenty of those flew over Stockholm. Maybe the Swedes were sending
Germany a message: if you jump us, we’ll fight harder than the Norwegians. Or maybe they were whistling in the dark. They certainly seemed serious. Men in rather old-fashioned uniforms and odd helmets positioned antiaircraft guns on top of buildings and in parks and anywhere else that offered a wide field of fire.

Peggy figured out the placement for herself. She needed no one to explain it to her. And when she realized what was going on, she went out and got drunk. She’d seen too goddamn much of war. She was starting to understand how it worked, the way she could follow a baseball game back in the States.

She woke the next morning with a small drop-forging plant pounding away behind her eyes. Aspirins and coffee—real coffee, not horrible German ersatz!—dulled the ache without killing it. Instead of going out and acting touristy, she went back to her room and holed up with the
Herald-Trib
.

The war news in the paper was often several days old: it had to clear God knew how many censors, get to Paris, get printed, and get to Stockholm before she read it. She turned on the massive radio that sat in a corner of the room. She wanted fresher stories. If things in Norway calmed down—no matter who won—she was six hours by air from London. And if pigs had wings …

“BBC first,” she said. The English sometimes stretched the truth in their broadcasts. They didn’t jump up and down and dance on it the way Berlin did. Or she hadn’t caught them at it, anyhow, which might not be the same thing.

It was a few minutes before the top of the hour. She put up with the music till the news came on. The Nazis, who hated jazz, wouldn’t broadcast it. The English thought they could play it themselves, and insisted on trying. Most of the results argued against them.

Then the music went away, so she could stop sneering at the poor sap who imagined he could make a sax wail. Without preamble, the announcer said, “Reports of a
coup d’état
against Adolf Hitler continue to trickle out of Germany.”