At All Costs (14 page)

CHAPTER 23 •••

DIVE OF THE
EAGLE

G
erman intelligence had seen Operation Pedestal coming a week earlier. On August 4, U-73 had been undergoing repairs at its cave in La Spezia, Italy, when urgent orders came from Admiral Karl Dönitz to go after the convoy: find an aircraft carrier and sink it.

Kapitanleutnant Helmut Rosenbaum of U-73 knew the
Eagle.
Nine years earlier, in the Chinese port of Tsingtau, when he had been a cadet on the cruiser
Königsberg,
he had been invited aboard the
Eagle
for cocktails and dinner by some of the British officers. Now he was trying to kill them.

As he lay in wait sixty miles off the coast of North Africa, he heard the propellers of the British ships on his hydrophones. The convoy was right on schedule. When he raised the periscope of U-73, he saw five destroyers and knew their sonar would locate his boat if he allowed them to come much closer. But beyond the destroyers he could see the
Eagle,
about four miles away, which he recognized by her unique high pilothouse on a tall tripod mast.

As he peered through the U-73’s leaking periscope—he had rushed out of La Spezia before the repairs were finished—he ordered a brandy to calm himself down. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen him like this,” said the first mate, Helmut Spieler.

He submerged to 100 feet and sped away.
Eagle
was at the tail end of the starboard column, and he stalked her for two and a half hours. When a destroyer dashed past U-73 at a distance of 200 feet, Rosenbaum made his move. He boldly slipped between two destroyers and passed in front of the battleship
Nelson,
at a depth of about 100 feet. He fully expected the destroyers to discover U-73 and start dropping depth charges. He was prepared to die for the fatherland, although maybe not for the Führer; like so many German officers, he separated the two.

He gulped a second brandy.

But the destroyers’ sonar failed to pick up the 750-ton U-boat, because of the layered density in the water from currents of different temperatures. U-73 passed under the fourth column of the convoy, under the cruiser
Charybdis,
and sneaked down between the third and fourth columns, splitting the
Ohio
and the
Santa Elisa.

Rosenbaum raised the periscope very slowly, because the water was calm and lookouts on the ships could see the slightest ripple. The
Eagle
was right before his eyes, a mere 500 meters away. He said it looked like a giant matchbox floating on a pond.

Eagle
was zigging and zagging at 13 knots. She zigged away from him, hard to starboard. He knew she would come back. He tossed down a third brandy.

Finally the
Eagle
zagged toward him, hard to port, perfectly exposing all 667 feet of her port beam. He instructed four torpedoes to be set in a fan pattern and gave the command to fire. They were kissed good-bye and shot from the bow tubes of U-73 by a nineteen-year-old, the youngest man on the boat. U-73 was so close to the
Eagle
that only about 40 feet separated the torpedoes when they hit, sending rivers of oily brown water laced with debris and shards of metal hundreds of feet into the air.

The instant the teenager fired the torpedoes from the bow of U-73, Kapitan Rosenbaum took her down to 500 feet, a dangerous depth, nearly 200 feet more than the boat’s textbook maximum, and ordered silence. Icy water squirted from unfixed leaks. The
Eagle
’s last gasps and creaks and spooky moans carried underwater to the U-boat, whose crew listened in amazement, awe, and fear. Soon depth charges shook their ship. Three hours would pass before Rosenbaum could creep back to the surface. He raised the periscope, saw an empty sea, and sent a signal to Berlin announcing his success.

Convoy—15 destroyers and escort ships, 2 cruisers, 9 to 10 freighters, one aircraft carrier, probably one battleship. Fan shot against aircraft carrier. 4 hits from 500 meters distance. Strongly audible sinking noises.

—All clear!—

Rosenbaum

The morning after the sinking of the
Eagle,
Kapitan Rosenbaum of U-73 was a national hero in Germany and was called back to Berlin, where Hitler decorated him with the Iron Cross.

Two images have been fixed for more than six decades in the fading memories of the dwindling numbers of veterans of Operation Pedestal, from that still summer afternoon in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. One of them is surreal, a vivid and unbelievable picture of an aircraft carrier suddenly on its port side, with scores of men and a dozen airplanes sliding down the big flat deck like matchsticks and toys, pitching over the edge and tumbling into the sea.

The veterans say they can close their eyes and see it clearly, as if it were happening at this very moment. Their minds can’t erase the image of hundreds of shouting heads in the oily water, along with the dead bodies. The men and the flotsam and the ugly black slick, glistening under the midday sun on the dead flat sea. That was all that was left, eight minutes after the torpedoes hit.

Few of the ships in the convoy saw much of the sinking because they were far ahead, but both the
Santa Elisa
and
Ohio
were nearby.
Santa Elisa
’s liaison officer reported that the
Eagle
was 10 cables (1.15 land miles) off his ship’s starboard quarter, and Captain Mason said the
Eagle
was 1.5 miles off the starboard quarter of the
Ohio.

Just before the torpedoes hit, said Lonnie Dales, “The weather was beautiful and the Mediterranean was flat calm. Right after lunch, we had a general alarm. We all dashed for our gun stations. This was the real thing!”

The general alarm was three long blasts, three shorts, three longs, three shorts. On the bridge, Captain Thomson shouted, “Keep your eyes peeled out there! One of the ships just spotted a torpedo wake!”

“I had been assigned a 20 mm Oerlikon on the port side of the bridge,” said Dales. “Upon coming out of the wardroom to run to the gun station, I witnessed the HMS Eagle being hit by three torpedoes, before turning over and sinking immediately. It was a very, very sad and pathetic sight to see the sailors and planes all sliding off the deck as she rolled over and went under. In a matter of minutes she was gone. There wasn’t even enough time to lower the lifeboats.”

“Eagle was turning hard to port, and I could see her planes warming up on her flight deck,” added the purser, Follansbee. “She was probably about to send off a patrol squadron, I thought. One of her planes had just started down her deck. Suddenly a huge geyser of water rose from the carrier’s port quarter. Then a second geyser rose amidships and a third rose from her bow. Three muffled explosions then came across the water. Automatically I looked at my watch. It was quarter past one. No one spoke as we stood hypnotized by the sight before us.

“The carrier was listing heavily to port, and the plane which had started to take off was roaring down the crazily sloping flight deck in a desperate effort to leave the stricken ship. I watched breathlessly as the plane approached the end of the flight deck. Then the carrier’s list increased and the plane slipped off the port side of the flight deck and plunged into the sea with a sickening splash. It was like a bad dream.”

Captain Lachlan Donald Mackintosh had been skipper of the
Eagle
for only a couple of months, but he had already endeared himself to the crew by wearing his kilt and playing his bagpipe when the
Eagle
entered port. He was the chief of Scotland’s Clan Mackintosh, fierce fighters whose Inverness roots reached back nearly eight hundred years. His great-grandfather, General Lachlan Mackintosh, had fought with George Washington against the hated redcoats after being driven out of the clan’s Highlands.

Now, as his ship listed, he clung to a bulkhead on the starboard gun deck, shouting commands to lower some ropes so the men could climb down to the antitorpedo bulge on the hull and drop into the sea. Captain Mackintosh finally climbed down the rope himself and held on to his gold-braided cap as he leaped into the water, because he was still the captain of the men, if no longer of a ship. He swam to a Carley raft, about four by six feet and made of canvas and wood, with a bottom of meshed rope stiffened by battens. The men who were crammed on the raft greeted him with the ship’s war cry, “Up the
Eagle
’s!,” before they pulled him aboard and paddled away as fast as they could.

“I jumped from the gun deck, where Captain Mackintosh was,” said petty officer George Amyes, now eighty-four, living in Hull on the North Sea, the town where he grew up and where his parents were killed by German bombs during the war. “When the first torpedo hit, I hadn’t the faintest idea what the thump was—I thought we hit a whale or something like that. Then the ship began to list, and I saw Marines jumping from the flight deck, hurtling past the gun deck, and I figured it out.

“There were two nonswimmers sitting on the antitorpedo blister who were too petrified to jump. An officer came along and told them, ‘Now’s your chance to learn,’ and he grabbed them by the hands and the three of them leaped together about thirty feet into the water.”

The flight deck of the
Eagle,
just above the gun deck, was more than 50 feet above water when the ship was level, and its starboard edge got higher and higher as the nineteen-year-old Les Goodenough found himself perched there. “It had never entered ’me head that we’d get sunk,” he said from his home in Reading, outside London. He’d been manning the starboard quarter Oerlikon when the torpedoes hit, and he struggled to release a Carley raft. But just below him a sailor was sitting in another Carley raft that was dangling from a ring bolt, and he was yelling for someone to release it, so Goodenough climbed down and joined him.

They cut the raft loose and glided 90 feet down a slope that was nearly 45 degrees by now. The port edge of the flight deck was already submerged, and the raft splashed into the thick oil on top of the water. Goodenough shouted, “Paddle!” as the suction from the sinking ship pulled them back, but they got away. They became known as the “toboggan team” in the stories they shared with their mates afterward.

Two hundred and thirty-one men were lost. Many of the victims were nonswimmers who were afraid to leap; they clung to the ship and went down with her. Others were trapped inside. The
Eagle
was no bigger inside than a battleship, having been built as one in 1914, so there wasn’t a lot of room—sailors slung their hammocks wherever they could and competed for space with cockroaches and rats, which scurried along the beams in the hangars, staring defiantly down at them. When the ship began listing and the lights went out and the water rushed in, new sailors were frantically disoriented and prayed in the darkness for someone to lead them. The
Eagle
had four boiler rooms and three engine rooms, and all of the stokers in the B boiler room were lost, along with all of the greasers in the port engine room. There were other desperately lonely deaths. One sailor died behind bars in the brig. Compartments became steel coffins, which today hold skeletons on the floor of the sea, a thousand feet down.

No one will know how many were killed by the depth charges dropped by the warship escorts, aimlessly if not pointlessly—the navy had no idea where U-73 had come from or where she had gone. Immediately after the hits, the cruiser
Charybdis, Eagle
’s protector and partner for so long, angrily raced around and blindly launched depth charges. Destroyers followed. “Two destroyers were charging up and down dropping depth charges, and their obvious priority was killing submarines, not saving us,” said one survivor.

“It happened a lot in the war,” said Dr. Nixon of the destroyer
Ledbury.
“The destroyer captains didn’t understand. I think I was the only one who really understood the effect of a depth charge on a man in the water.”

There were men in the water everywhere. George Amyes had been swimming for some time, clinging to a bit of wood, when he recognized his buddy Stripey, the oldest sailor on the
Eagle.
“I grabbed him around the shoulders, thinking he was unconscious, but what I felt at his waist was mush. There was only half a man there.”

Newspaper readers in London got an account filled with exclamation points, including the tales of heroism they wanted to hear and knew they could count on from their lads, before and after the ship “turned turtle.”
The Daily Telegraph
of London told about the valiant ship’s doctor, who rowed around to the rafts shooting morphine into the injured sailors.

The reporter Arthur Thorpe was picked up by a destroyer. “I was feeling half-dead and was brown from head to foot in the fuel oil,” he wrote. “Many of us were sick through swallowing fuel oil, but tots of rum put our greasy stomachs right,” meaning that the rum made the sailors heave up the oil.

Captain Mackintosh was picked up by the same destroyer as Thorpe. “How marvelously the officers and men behaved,” he said. “I saw no sign of panic in the last few minutes in the life of the ship.”

“There was a marked unwillingness on the part of the ship’s company to abandon ship until a superior officer actually gave the order,” he added in his own report to the Royal Navy, “and I was very impressed by the coolness, morale and discipline of all officers and men.”

Mackintosh and Thorpe’s rescuing destroyer,
Lookout,
was loaded with 536 survivors lining the rails; it came alongside
Laforey,
with 195. Another 198 sailors were picked up by the small tugboat
Jaunty,
and they swarmed over the decks like ants on a sugar cube, climbing the rigging to find space. All the survivors were happy to be alive, and as they recognized shipmates they cheered. “It reminded me of trains in a London station crowded with happy schoolchildren bound for a day out in the country,” said Thorpe.

Twenty years after the loss of HMS
Eagle,
George Amyes traveled to Germany to meet the men who had been his enemies that day. Some had been killed when U-73 was sunk in the Mediterranean by American destroyers in 1943. Amyes’s trips to Germany achieved more than personal closure, they rewarded his soul; he made friends.