Stark Realities Read online

  Stark Realities

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Postscript

  Copyright

  Stark Realities

  Alexander Fullerton

  Epigraph

  Our war aim, apart from destroying the English Fleet as the principal means by which Britain controls its Empire, is to reduce its total economy in the quickest possible time, bringing Great Britain to sue for unconditional peace. To achieve this it will be necessary:

  To cut off all trade routes to and from the British Isles,

  To cripple in all the seven seas, all ships flying the British flag and all ships under neutral flag plying to and from Great Britain,

  To destroy military and economic resources and by means of air attack disrupt the trade and commerce in the British Isles, showing its population quite mercilessly the stark realities of war.

  German Naval Staff memorandum to the Kaiser, 6 January 1916

  For a woman, lying is a protection. She protects the truth, so she protects her chastity.

  John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

  Man has always found it easier to sacrifice his life than to learn the multiplication table.

  W. Somerset Maugham, Mr Harrington’s Washing

  1

  ‘Down, you two!’

  The lookouts had been expecting it, were already tumbling into the open, brass-rimmed hatch, their wet, oilskin-wrapped bodies temporarily occluding the soft glow of light in the tower below; von Mettendorff stooping to the voicepipe to call down, ‘Break the charge, stop engines, prepare to dive!’ UB81 battering eastward through black, white-streaked, pre-dawn sea – English sea, Lizard Point roughly fifteen nautical miles abaft the beam to port. She’d been making about six knots throughout the hours of darkness – her best surface speed being nine, nine-and-a-quarter, but had spent the night on one diesel only, the other’s power going into the necessary re-charging of her batteries; was losing way now, pitching and rolling more wildly as engine-power fell off and the sea did its best to take charge. Get down into it, in a minute you’d have peace and quiet; in fact he was diving about a quarter-hour sooner than he might have done, being this close to the enemy coast and – well, Falmouth, Plymouth; it was only a matter of common sense to sacrifice a couple of miles of faster eastward progress for a better chance of bringing his ship home intact. Meanwhile, one last binocular search of the most obvious danger-sector, from right ahead back to the port quarter: 81’s skipper a tall, lean figure bulked out by oilskins shining wet in the still near-total darkness, his Zeiss glasses gripped one-handed and sweeping slowly, steadily. Needing the other hand for hanging on with. No engine racket now, only the wind’s howl and the sea’s roar and the noise she made throwing herself around. And – nothing there, so all right, duck under… Stooping to the pipe, yelling down, ‘Motors half ahead, open main vents!’, hearing the start of acknowledgement of that order from below and cutting it short by dragging shut the voicepipe cock: thuds of the vents dropping open, rush of escaping air, Oberleutnant zu See Otto von Mettendorff by this time in the hatch – unhurried but not wasting any seconds either – dragging the heavy lid shut above his head and jamming a clip on, calling down to Claus Stahl to stop her at fifteen metres. Thinking, Some chart-work now, then breakfast… Both clips on: clambering down the ladder into the control-room. Time/date 0648, 22 October 1918.

  * * *

  Stahl, UB81’s first lieutenant, put down his coffee mug and looked at his skipper across the wardroom table. The messman had just left them.

  ‘Wilhelmshaven? And “merchant vessels not to be attacked”. A general recall – cessation of operations, in other words? Evacuating Flanders, maybe? There was a rumour of that, wasn’t there, before we sailed? But recalling boats from everywhere else as well – bloody surrender?’

  Otto shook his head, glancing through into the control-room. ‘Keep your voice down, man. In any case, evacuation of the Flanders bases does not necessarily mean surrender.’

  They’d had the signal last night via Nauen, the German Navy’s long-range wireless transmitter. Long-range transmission being needed of course because it was a general recall of U-boats from patrol – some in mid-Atlantic and the Mediterranean, as well as in the Channel and North Sea. And Stahl was right – evacuation of Bruges, this boat’s Flanders base, had been on the cards before they’d left for this patrol. Hence presumably their recall now to Wilhelmshaven, the main fleet base, home to the High Seas Fleet.

  Background hum of electric motors; atmosphere soporific in the warmth they generated and the stillness of the boat rock-steady at her depth of fifteen metres. To use the periscope she’d have to be at less than ten: in this sort of weather more like eight for that top lens to reach above the waves. In any case it was still dark up there, you weren’t missing anything. Anything that was there – please God – you’d pick up on the hydrophones.

  Gasse or Schuchardt would, whichever of them was on watch.

  Wilhelmshaven, though: Helena was at Wilhelmshaven, and on his September visit there she’d promised… Otto with his eyes shut, hands over his face, promising himself that whatever the hell this recall was going to lead to, the first free minute he had he’d be on the line to her.

  Which was – something else entirely. Something – to put it mildly – thrilling. Nothing to do with the questions crowding his mind and Stahl’s. Stahl’s darkly unshaven, rather pudgy face creased with foreboding as he muttered, ‘Those whispers about the Army beaten to its knees—’

  ‘Oh, come on…’

  ‘Run out of steam, then. Either way, ourselves as the only weapon could pull chestnuts out of the fire.’

  ‘If the war’s lost, Stahl, we didn’t lose it. And the Army is not “beaten to its knees”.’ Skipper almost whispering. ‘Over-extended lines of communication is one thing – and exhaustion, look at the distance we’ve advanced since April – and the damned Americans in it now is something else again. Guessing’s no help though, Stahl, nor’s defeatism. Or listening to propaganda from our enemies, including left-wing politicians and revolutionaries. Anyway, looking on a very much brighter side, I must say the prospect of a spell in Wilhelmshaven – well…’ A smile suddenly on his blond-bearded face, hands lifting as if in – what, revelation, hope? ‘Tell you frankly, far as I’m concerned—’

  ‘Wilhelmshaven by way of the Dover mine barrage, skipper?’

  Chief Hintenberger, the boat’s engineer, joining them at the table, squeezing himself in beside Stahl. Coastals weren’t all that roomy – although these UBIIs were a hell of a lot more so than the originals, the little UBIs. Hintenberger was a small man anyway – paper-white bony face, black beard and quick, hard eyes, in contrast to his captain’s tallness and blondness, or Stahl’s crumpled, flabby look. Otto told the engineer – answering his question about the Dover passage – ‘By the same route we took coming south. A route which incidentally Franz Winter in U201 assured me was safe enough.’

  ‘Safe enough then, no doubt. Things change, don’t they. Are changing – aren’t I right? For one thing the barrage is a lot deeper than it was – you’ll agree you can’t just paddle under it now, cocking snooks, like we used to do, eh? Remember, skipper, we discussed it in Bruges, you and I, and—’

  ‘Are you suggesting I should take her back through the Irish Sea and round the Scottish islands?’

  ‘No.’ A shrug. ‘Wou
ldn’t presume so far. Although that was the intention, wasn’t it, earlier on?’

  ‘When we were expecting to be shifted up that way in any case. And who knows what’s happening on that coast now – now the English have pulled their socks up… Anyway, since we’re where we are, and have received immediate recall – and have a way through that’s been checked out and found safe—’

  ‘Found passable then—’

  ‘Chief.’ Otto’s cold stare held the engineer’s. ‘Having known each other as long as we have, and you being as damned ancient as you are, one has tended to allow a certain degree of – self-expression, you might call it—’

  ‘I beg your pardon – sir.’

  ‘It would be better to keep things in proportion.’ His expression hadn’t softened, although his tone was still quiet. ‘For instance, d’you agree that this – er – reminder to you should not be necessary?’

  ‘I do. And I beg your pardon, mein Kommandant!’

  ‘Good.’ He asked Stahl, ‘Battery right up, did you say?’

  ‘Could have done with another half-hour’s charging, sir.’

  ‘Something else that can’t be helped.’ He leant back, stretching. ‘Take a peek up top now, perhaps.’ He turned his head, raising his voice: ‘Happy in your work there, Hofbauer?’

  Rudolf Hofbauer, Leutnant zu See, nineteen years of age, the boat’s navigator and currently officer of the watch, was leaning over the chart-table, figuring out distances and dead-reckoning positions from UB81’s present location to the Dover Strait and the dogleg from there to Wilhelmshaven. He said, straightening, scratching his lightly furred jaw with a pencil stub, ‘Looks like three-and-a-half days, sir, into Schillig Roads. That’s calling it twelve hours’ daylight and twelve dark, nine knots surfaced and five dived.’

  ‘Average seven, so about a hundred and sixty miles a day, and’ – Otto muttering this, thinking in nautical miles as he walked dividers across the chart – ‘allowing for diversions here and there – including avoidance of reportedly new minefields.’

  ‘Say four days?’

  ‘More like it. As a rough estimate. And today’s October twenty-second, so – arrival twenty-sixth.’ Turning away, adding, ‘Maybe. Let’s have a gander up there now. Bring her to ten metres.’

  ‘Ten, sir.’ Hofbauer moved further into the control-room. ‘Klein…’

  The for’ard hydroplane operator, a leading seaman, muttered acknowledgement as he tilted the fore ’planes’ control. The after ’planesman, Freimann, at the same time angling her stern-down, bow-up, while Hofbauer passed orders over the electric telegraph for a slight adjustment of the boat’s trim, allowing for transition into less dense water closer to the surface. Von Mettendorff pausing and turning back to the chart, checking on how long the passage to Wilhelmshaven might have taken if he’d opted for the Irish Sea route. Well, at a glance, seven or eight days, say. Twice as long – and that would be cutting all the corners. Four days longer to get to Helena – while Franz Winter in U201, having by now left his patrol area – Biscay or thereabouts, Azores-Canaries – would be several days ahead of him; with that ocean-going boat’s superior speed, even a week ahead.

  Whereas now they’d be about neck and neck.

  It was Winter, oddly enough, who’d introduced him to Helena, despite having a keen interest in her himself, apparently. Not that she took him very seriously. He was too old for her, for one thing, too set in his ways. A dedicated, highly successful submarine commander, but in other respects – well, on dry land, you might say, a fish out of water. Certainly no ladies’ man – more the crusty bachelor. Origins obscure at that – table manners appalling, for instance: one had known dogs one would sooner feed with. All right, so he’d done a lot for Otto von Mettendorff at one time and another – pushing him through for command at an unusually early stage had been the end result of it. Rough diamond selecting the aristo as protégé, getting some kind of satisfaction out of that?

  Frowning, with his eyes on the chart – on the Dover Strait – but still with his mind on Helena. Reminding himself then, All’s fair in love and war… Even if the war was on the point of petering out. Make the most of it while it lasts, is all… And now back to business: moving into the centre of the control-room as Hofbauer reported, ‘Depth ten metres, sir.’

  A grunt of acknowledgement and the customary signal: movement of both hands palms upward. Boese, mechanician of the watch, long-faced and already balding although not yet out of his twenties, stooped to the control levers of the periscopes and inched one of them upward. Thump of applied hydraulic pressure, then the scope hissing up out of its well, steel-wire hoist purring around deckhead sheaves. The larger of 81’s two periscopes this was, bifocal and providing low- or high-power; the other, the ‘attack’ scope, unifocal and operated from up there in the conning-tower, was as slim as a broomstick and gave one-and-a-half times magnification, non-adjustable. Otto was waiting for the big one, jerked its handles down as the eyepieces rose level with his face, murmured, ‘All the way up, Boese.’ With a fair suspicion that from this depth he wasn’t going to see anything but the insides of waves in close-up – as now, indeed, a confusion of green and white, kaleidoscopic motion in the glittery light of this new day. He told Hofbauer without taking his eyes far off the lenses, ‘Nine-and-a-half metres’, and heard the order repeated by the fore ’planesman Klein, whose wife had given birth to a baby girl less than a month ago. It would most likely be necessary to come up to nearer eight or eight-and-a-half metres to get any decent all-round view, but on principle you didn’t show more stick than you had to, especially when the sea-state made depth-keeping difficult. There was even the risk of breaking surface, exposing periscope standards – the structure that housed the periscopes – or even the bridge itself, in a great flurry of seething foam visible for miles, with the danger then of being spotted by one of the Royal Navy’s dirigible airships that patrolled these inshore waters, and which if they weren’t themselves in a position to drop bombs would whistle up destroyers.

  At eight-and-a-half metres he had a good enough perspective, could even bring the ’scope down a little. Stooping, shuffling hunched around the well, while the men around him saw daylight reflected brightly in his eyes, his own view being of grey-green heaving sea ribbed and whorled with the broken white and backed by low, grey cloud. Circling first with the ’scope in low power, then again, more slowly, with four-power magnification. And – nothing anywhere. Which was fine, since in the present unexplained circumstances you weren’t looking for targets anyway, only for dangers that might be threatening. He straightened, snapped the handles up, told Boese, ‘Down periscope’, and Hofbauer ‘Fifteen metres.’ The ’scope already hissing down, oil and droplets of salt water from the deckhead gland shimmering on its bright and greasy barrel. Otto telling both Hofbauer and Claus Stahl as he headed for the wardroom and his bunk, ‘If I’m still asleep at noon, give me a shake.’

  * * *

  The Dover mine barrage was scary. Hintenberger – now snoring in his bunk – was right as far as that went. Otto had been in the game long enough to have his senses, instincts, tuned to the realities – including the plain fact that a U-boat man couldn’t expect to live for ever, even if for his own comfort he had to believe he might. The engineer was several years older than himself, and conscious of it, not only in terms of submarine experience, but in plain maturity – and in his own view, probably, wisdom.

  Comparative youth, for a commander, wasn’t all beer and skittles. You saw the envy, resentment in contemporaries who hadn’t got on so fast and asked themselves why they hadn’t, what von Mettendorff had that they did not.

  The professional and personal support of Franz Winter, who despite his rough manners was now well established as one of the ‘Ace’ COs, having at the last count 160,000 tons of British and Allied shipping under his belt, had certainly been a major factor in one’s advancement. Otto had been Winter’s first lieutenant in U53: had been appointed to her originally a
s navigator, been advanced by Winter to the position of second-in-command when that job had fallen vacant. U53 had been Hans Rose’s boat earlier on – the Hans Rose – so that joining her as a junior lieutenant, with comparatively little submarine experience of his own at that stage, he’d had a sense of walking with the gods. And with that came determination to follow in their footsteps, an ambition that made for ruthlessness, which Franz Winter had duly noted and approved, and in due course – really very little time at all – had recommended him for command. For the command course, naturally – which he’d come through with flying colours and been rewarded with one of the original coastals, the little UBIs – single screw and only one periscope, no for’ard hydroplanes, top surface speed six knots, crew of fourteen, and designed to be deliverable by rail: five wagons per boat, assembly at Hoboken and Antwerp, then towed through the Scheldt and the Ghent-Bruges canal. So cramped that if you’d wanted to sign on a ship’s cat you’d only have got it in with a shoehorn, and would not have tried to swing it round. But he’d been reasonably successful in her, operating from Bruges – had become a top-scorer, in fact – and after only a few months graduated from her to this UBII, taking her over from Reinhold Salzwedel, who’d moved to command of one of the minelayers, the UCs.

  Franz Winter, who’d made a similar move when U53 had gone in for a major re-fit, had returned almost at once to an ocean-going boat – U201 – and his advice to Otto had been to stay clear of minelaying if he could; there was a lot of it going on, and the UCs’ mines were sinking a lot of English ships in the approaches to their harbours, but it was more nerve-racking, he said, than anything in his previous experience.

  More recently – very recently – he’d given him quite a different warning.

  ‘You’ve been doing a good job, from as much as one hears. Regrettably, one also hears that you’ve been throwing your weight about. As you’ll recall, in days gone by I’ve had occasion to caution you about that sort of thing?’