Stage Door Canteen (4 page)

The U-426 rolled in another swell and the kapitanleutnant leaned against the railing of the deck gun emplacement until it had subsided, then lifted his glasses. Above him on the bridge the officer of the watch, his twenty year-old first officer, Straedel, and three crewmen, also monitored the surrounding darkness. The moon was not due to rise for three hours. The U-426, a 180 feet long, 18 feet wide, class VII-C submarine carrying an all-volunteer crew of forty one, rested on the surface in nineteen feet of water on the eastern part of Lower New York Bay, on what was known as the East Bank, its diesel engines going at a speed just enough to maintain headway.

The U-426 had not been so close in to the coast of the North American continent in months, but surfacing off Coney island was not all that perilous: Like all submarines, the U-426 was almost flush with the surface of the water, its most visible profile the not-easily-discerned conning tower. In addition, the breaking of U.S. and British naval codes in midsummer made it possible to track Allied ship movements, including warships, with what was claimed by the high command at Bremershaven to be reliable accuracy. The evening’s radio transmissions had already informed the U-426 of tankers without escort moving out from the oil depots at Paulsboro, New Jersey, coast guard patrol boats in Lower New York Bay and off Long Island, and a convoy forming several miles south off the port of Norfolk. It was quiet, though, at that hour, between Coney Island and Far Rockaway, with only occasional coastal trawlers and tugs with barges navigating the Coney Island and Amboy channels. Still, lookouts on the U-426’s bridge were vigilant.

Kapitanleutnant Ensmann was amusing himself seeing what, in spite of the lack of light, he could make out in still-familiar territory to anyone like himself, raised in the New York area. To the lee of the U-426 was the Coney Island Ship Channel marker, beyond that the Steeplechase Pier. Somewhere against the night skyline, he knew, were the parachute tower and Ferris wheel, easily identifiable landmarks by day. Also, he remembered, there were not one but several famous roller coasters that were designed to scare the very devil out of a middling-small boy. Why else would he go to Coney Island with his schoolmates, if not to take a roller coaster ride, screaming in terror all the way, pinned against the seat, while the demon mechanism ripped out one’s elemental innards? He and his friends, of course, had loved it; they had kept riding the things until at least two of them had thrown up.

But now Coney Island, like the rest of New York City, was dark.

Kapitanleutnant Ensmann braced himself as a long, rolling swell rocked the U-boat. He had been a schoolboy of thirteen or fourteen, riding roller coasters at Coney Island. No, he corrected himself, since he had been attending the Heinemann Academy on Third Avenue and 97th Street, a private German grammar school, he could not have been more than twelve. The following year was 1913, when the staff of the German consulate had been drastically reduced due to the fear of impending war. By then, in the spring of 1913, Klaus Ensmann, the consulate’s cultural attache, and his family, had been ordered to take ship back to the homeland.

At that time Yorkville, on the upper east side of Manhattan, was a very German district where one could shop, go to restaurants, even consult a doctor, without having to speak English. The kapitanleutnant had taken four years of violin lessons in German, an excellent musical education that had not, due to the rigors of the first great world war, been continued after his family left New York. In fact, there was only one tune from all that time that he could recall, a favorite by a good German composer. The name came to him after a few seconds’ thought. Fritz Kreisler.

Nevertheless, when he and his schoolmates went to Coney island in a group they spoke English. The Neptune Avenue subway stop. He had not forgotten. Also the Brighton Beach Line. One could take the subway in the sprawling city even in those days and go anywhere. There were trains to the theaters in mid-Manhattan and the Metropolitan Opera House—his mother loved opera, her favorites were anything by Verdi—up Broadway and into the Bronx and the wonderful zoo, or across to Brooklyn and the beach.

The kapitanleutnant peered into the binoculars, trying to picture Coney island, the big amusement parks like Luna and Steeplechase, as they were now. The roller coasters would be full of American sailors and soldiers. And of course, girls.

At that moment the low voice of First Officer Straedel spoke from the bridge informing the kapitanleutnant down at the deck gun that the electrical battery had been freed from its position under the U-room deck plates, and would shortly be coming up.

One could not miss Straedel’s distinctive speech. There was a hesitancy there, almost like a hiccup, while Straedel fought back a reflex, ingrained as a longtime member of the Hitlerjugend, to precede every statement with “Heil Hitler.” After three months aboard the U-426, Straedel had last been impressed with the necessity of not invoking Der Fuhrer’s name as a matter of everyday intercourse. But what they had now, his commanding officer couldn’t help observing, was a peculiar verbal check, like Straedel swallowing his damned tonsils.

Kapitanleutnant Ensmann could hear muffled voices coming from the conning tower. Below the engineer for the electric engines was supervising the removal of a battery that had cracked and absorbed water; the warning signal had been a whiff of the telltale odor of chlorine gas. When the battery was pried out from under the deck plates, it would be silently passed from hand to hand by the crew, up through the conning tower, to be jettisoned in the waters of Lower New York Bay. For the time being, U-426 was hove to on the edge of the Coney Island Ship Channel, warily, but not fearfully, watching the night.

The kapitanleutnant was suddenly aware that the galley hatch just aft of the deck gun had opened. The shadow that was the cook emerged with a can of garbage, followed by another shadow that was the cook’s helper. In silence they proceeded slowly over the U-426’s deck gratings to empty the containers into the sea. A sudden gust of wind brought the pungent odor of something other than kitchen refuse.

Kapitanleutnant Ensmann muttered under his breath. Permission had been given for the dumping and was, as with many things aboard a cruelly overcrowded submarine, a matter of necessity. There were two latrines for the crew, but one of them was nearly always pressed into service for storage. The U-426’s stern toilet was packed to the ceiling with containers of flour and other staples, and every nook and cranny stuffed with food tins and the inevitable strings of sausages. Waste, in spite of popular folklore, was only expressed through the torpedo tubes in an emergency; even then most captains would hardly run the risk of fouling them.

On the surface of the water something caught a stray gleam. The kapitanleutnant put down his binoculars and leaned forward against the gun railing. A dim object floated by, down the long, narrow steel cigar tube sides of the U-boat, bumping against the metal hull.

Refuse from the galley he told himself. There were unpleasant pictures in this war that anyone would wish to put out of one’s mind. Black lumps of garbage, paper wrappers, a rotten head of cabbage the cook couldn’t salvage, were bobbing in the watery dark. Watching this float by, a person could wonder again why anyone could be persuaded to ship out on an oil tanker, since even a matchstick could send it sky high. To say nothing of a torpedo.

In July, the U-426 with three companion U-boats, Hartmann’s U-405, Schultze’s U-589, and Gelhaar’s U-457, intercepted a convoy south of Greenland. By the end of the first day a tanker in the convoy had become, because of the difficulty in hitting it, the U-426’s special target. On three successive nights the U-426 sank the ship ahead of the tanker, made a direct hit on a Liberty ship astern of her, and Hartmann’s U-405 torpedo had hit the corresponding ship in the next column. Still they could not seem to touch her. The convoy’s destroyer and corvettes went after the U-boats with depth charges, but the convoy was out of air support range that it really needed in that part of the mid-Atlantic, and vulnerable; the wolf pack lingered for a final day’s work. When the sun was up the U-426 finally pinned the elusive tanker in its periscope and launched a bow torpedo. There was a muffled explosion, then a towering pillar of smoke and flame that billowed up into the blue arctic sky. The merchant ships in the convoy waddled away from the tanker as quickly as they could in the hope of saving themselves. The corvette and the American destroyer raced up, virtually helpless to do anything for the stricken tanker. The oil burst out, bathing it in flames. Her crew collected on deck, small figures running back and forth, waving, yelling. And then in ones and twos and threes they leaped into the clearest patches they could find in the oil-clogged sea.

The good swimmers pulled out in front of the flaming oil. Others, less strong, thrashing in their lifejackets, fell back. The U-boat pack surfaced and the U-589 sent a second torpedo into the inferno of the still-afloat tanker. There was an explosion that made the U-boats’ hulls shiver. The Royal Navy corvette, the destroyer and some small rescue boats hurried away out of the reach of the fountains of fire erupting from the broken hull and the sheets of flaming oil spreading away from it. The tanker’s crewmen, swimming for their lives, were not so lucky. The burning oil spread faster than any of them could swim. One by one they were overtaken, licked by flames, and roasted. Even in the conning tower of the U-426, where most sound was blocked, one could hear, or imagine one heard, the screams.

But that was not the end of it. The wolf pack broke up and dove as the destroyer and the British corvette circled, dropping depth charges. Two hours later the U-426, batteries low, surfaced several miles south of the ravaged convoy in the expanse of ice-strewn sea. The gun crew went up on deck and the kapitanleutnant with three lookouts, a petty officer and two crewmen, came up out of the conning tower and onto the bridge.

They could not believe their eyes.

Miles away on the horizon there was a pillar of smoke from the gravesite of the tanker the U-426 had torpedoed. But, incredibly, a lake of spilled oil had drifted south, following the wind and seas in some errant North Atlantic current. The U-426 had surfaced on the edge of what seemed like a return to the very place of their violent deed. There, in the midst of limitless gray-blue water littered with ice floes, was the dead tanker’s life’s blood, a moving, shifting, viscid black blot of oil inches thick, broken in places by wave action but for the most part forming a foul, stinking blanket of at least a mile. In this, half-embedded, were black objects, the charred, oil-covered heads and upper torsos, some with the arms intact, of the tanker’s crew.

The gun crew of the U-426 were young, some beardless because they were not yet old enough to grow beards. Not fifty feet from where they stood floated a life raft or perhaps a piece of the tanker’s wreckage—it was difficult to tell because of the black mantle that covered everything—containing burned bodies that might have been clinging to it, or half-lying on it. It was possible to make out the color of hair on one corpse. And although all of the faces were charred, there was one black-coated head with no lips, ears, one eye gone, and the other eye a white, staring ball embedded in a raw pink socket, that lolled raffishly back and forth with each wave. In fact, there was movement everywhere in the black muck, the nightmarish dead men rising and falling with the swelling sea.

At that moment the U-426 gun crew was convinced that someone out there could be alive. Which was absurd, nothing could live in that arctic water for more than twenty minutes, much less the thoroughly broiled crewmen of the torpedoed American tanker. The shaken gun crew was dismissed and orders were given to dive. The next time the U-426 surfaced, Kapitanleutnant Ensmann told Straedel, the first officer would see to it that the gun crew was disciplined by drawing the duty of helping clean the tanker’s oil off the hull.

Now, it was the end of September. A slight, offshore breeze had developed, and it was only garbage Kapitanleutnant Ensmann saw in the dark, calm waters off Coney Island. The engineer and a helper were bringing the battery up through the conning tower to the bridge where Straedel and the lookouts squeezed together to make room for them to pass. The defective battery would soon join the refuse dumped from the spot below the still-open galley hatch. Kapitanleutnant Ensmann suddenly remembered the name of the Fritz Kreisler tune he had played on the violin so many years ago. The one that he had liked so much. Actually, the only one that he remembered.

Traumerei.

That was it. He leaned on the iron railing that enclosed the U-boat’s deck cannon and found he could still, under his breath, hum the tune.

It was so dark on the iron stairs coming down from the elevated part of the subway at 75th Street that Dina slipped, stumbled down at least two steps in her high heels, and almost fell. Which brought on an attack of giggles from all four of them.

“Drunk again,” her cousin Angie said.

“Yeah, sure.” She had almost broken the heel off her shoe. Dina held on to the stair rail and quickly rotated her foot to make sure she hadn’t sprained it or torn a ligament. Dancers had to look after their feet. “Like I’m drunk from all the Coca-Colas those sailors kept pouring into me. You’d think it was booze and they were trying to get me in the mood.”

“Oh, no.” Frankie Babinofski looked concerned. “No, really, the guys were only trying to be nice. But those women who run the canteen didn’t like it much, that the guys kept going up to the counter and getting free Cokes and then giving them to us.”

“I don’t see why they can’t turn on some lights,” Georgina complained, “look at these stairs, we’re all going to break our necks before this war is over. They don’t have to turn out the lights in Bensonhurst, for God’s sake. Who’s going to bomb anything this far out in Brooklyn?”