Battleship Bismarck (57 page)

“Gentlemen,” Izzard suggested after a while, “we should go to dinner now, just around the corner from here.” The Écu de France, another familiar place from past years. Uniforms here, too, as before, including Free French, these at the very next table. First-class food, good wine, nothing indicating wartime shortages, and more light, neutral conversation.

From there we continued on through London, which in the meantime had grown pitch-black, to an unnamed destination in a basement somewhere in Chelsea. Uniformed British naval officers, nearly enough to take one’s breath away, stood dispersed throughout the room, as though at a drinks party. I had not imagined that the coming attack would be altogether so massive. All the red lights went on in my head. For heaven’s sake, be careful!

In a casual manner, also as at a drinks party, outwardly relatively unobtrusive but damned purposefully, they opened a conversation with me. The questioners were, of course, a collection of specialists: ship constructors, engineers, gunners, range-finding officers, signals officers.

“What was the highest speed, what was the radius of action of the
Bismarck
?.”

“Twenty-eight knots certainly, perhaps even a little more, didn’t we keep pace with your fast formation in the Denmark Strait?”

“The thickness of your armor, outboard, below decks, at the guns and control stations?

“I’m very sorry, I don’t know. All this is secret. Anyway, the thickness of armor usually corresponds more or less to the caliber of one’s own guns—you know that, too.”

“Muzzle velocity, weight and range of your largest calibers?”

“Sorry; as for range, well, we had two major actions with your ships, the shooting always began at a range of around twenty kilometers—the maximum range is certainly in excess of that, but how can one then accurately observe the fall of shot without the help of an aircraft?”

“Rangefinding, still your stereoscopic system, nothing beyond that, no radar for the guns?”

“I discussed your co-incidental and our stereoscopic system with
your comrades aboard the station ship of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in London, HMS
President
, in 1936. They believed in their system and we in ours, which is probably still the case today. The battle in the Denmark Strait may have proven us correct; during the final action on 27 May your preponderance in gunnery was too great. And radar for the guns? I’m sorry to say that I know nothing about that.”

The conversation ran on like this for an hour until our departure to return to Cockfosters.

We had had something to drink in the course of the evening, but we felt clearheaded enough throughout. Nevertheless, had we got through the voluntarily accepted challenge without doing any military harm to the Kriegsmarine or the Reich? Had we said one word too many anywhere? I thought not. But it would be impossible to go through such an experience without being left in the end with a residue of doubt, however small. Later, after the close of the investigation of the
Bismarck
, the Naval Intelligence Department would determine that all the survivors had been extremely closemouthed when questioned about things that were meant to remain secret.

“You seemed so familiar to me when we were introduced; I thought right away that I’d seen you before.” These words were spoken to me in the early 1960s by retired British Rear Admiral Keith McNeil Campbell-Walter on the manicured lawn of King’s House in Kingston, Jamaica, at a reception being given by the governor-general, Sir Kenneth Blackburne. As a former father-in-law of the industrialist Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza—who had married Campbell’s beautiful daughter, the ex-model Fiona—Campbell-Walter’s name had long been a familiar one in the society columns. At the moment he and his wife were taking a short vacation on the enchanting Caribbean island, where they were staying in an expensive property belonging to the industrialist on Jamaica’s north coast. Sir Kenneth and Lady Blackburne had invited my wife and me this time not only as the German ambassadorial couple—I was then the German Ambassador to Jamaica, with consular jurisdiction in the British Caribbean—but also so that two former officers of once warring navies could meet one another. Sir Kenneth himself loved the sea and seafaring, was an enthusiastic and successful sailor and commodore of the Royal Yacht Club in Jamaica, and was interested in naval history. In 1960 he had insisted that I go with him to see the film
Sink the Bismarck
in Kingston. He was one of the those who encouraged me to write some day about the German battleship.

I now looked closely at Campbell-Walter. “I’m sorry, Admiral, unfortunately I can’t say the same.”

“Do you still remember,” he continued, “the drinks party in Chelsea in 1941? I tried to sound you out there about the
Bismarck’s
radio equipment and transmissions. I had a microphone under my lapel; the receiver was in the cellar. But you didn’t say anything. “

And who had thought up this outing to London and planned its details in the first place? None other than Ian Fleming, later the creator of James Bond. Admiral Godfrey had taken him, a former stockbroker, bright and shrewd, to be his personal assistant after entering the post of director of naval intelligence in 1939. Fleming—quick-witted, good looking, and sophisticated—had earlier considered and prepared himself for entry into the army or the diplomatic service. Now, as a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, he was assigned to Room 39, where he acted as the “ideas man.” Without any experience at sea, he, through his flexibility, broke up—or relaxed—many of the naval orthodoxies around Godfrey and enlivened the department with his brainstorms, usable or not. Two may be selected from the number that bore fruit; one in 1941, with the aim of capturing secret materials from a German weather-reporting ship in the Atlantic, was later carried out successfully; the other, copied from the example of the German paratroopers who seized secret British materials in Crete in 1941, was accomplished three years thereafter in Germany by a commando team that captured from the German Kriegsmarine tons of archival material of inestimable value to the British Admiralty.

While I was sitting in Cockfosters, someone may well have recalled my activity on the staff of the naval attaché at our London Embassy in 1938–39, and have regarded my “ideological conversion” to the British side as conceivable, and so given Fleming the idea for the outing. Fleming then turned its planning over to the deputy chief of the “German Prisoners of War” subsection, his friend Eddie Croghan. The latter—around thirty-five years old, plump and black haired, fluent in German, and previously a much sought-after interior decorator in London—had taken over the arrangements for the evening. Croghan had obtained his position as deputy subsection chief through Fleming’s initiative. He was for his chief, Trench, what Fleming was for Godfrey—“the ideas man.” To be sure, Trench was sharp-witted, but he was also conventional and simple hearted; his hobby was knitting. Therefore, as Fleming saw it, Trench, too, needed a “sparkplug.” This role was now played by Croghan, who prior to Izzard’s
arrival at Cockfosters had composed the written reports of the interrogations of prisoners. He himself never took part in them on a regular basis and only came to Cockfosters now and then, when some point had to be cleared up.

Our London outing had not been cheap. The Admiralty paid for it. For no other German prisoners would it ever again spend so much money for such a reason. The “standard outing” for prisoners “giving reason for ideological hopes” led to the fixed-price menu at Simpson’s on the Strand, the quantity and quality of which were surprisingly good for the price; and afterwards to a part of the city upon which the Luftwaffe liked to claim it had inflicted extensive damage. It did not fail to leave an impression, for example, to see St. Paul’s standing intact in the midst of ruins.

To my knowledge, however, a very different kind of special treatment was extended to a nephew of Martin Niemöller, a U-boat officer. He was deeply religious and had repeatedly told his interrogating officer of his desire to participate in a divine service. Accordingly, orders came from London to take him to church. On three Sundays two interrogating officers escorted Niemöller’s nephew and another German officer to various churches: St. Alban’s Abbey, Stokes Page Church (where in 1750 Thomas Gray wrote “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”), and St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle. Each time the German officers knew all the hymns in the service and, to the embarrassment of their British escorts, loudly joined in singing the words—in German.

And the results, as regards an “ideological conversion,” of special treatment in Niemöller’s case and mine: nil. Churchill was always after the Naval Intelligence Department to designate a German officer whom he could present to the British public as a symbol of crumbling morale in the Reich. But Cockfosters always had to report that the Germans’ discipline remained very high. A suitable German officer was not found in Great Britain until the beginning of 1944—somewhat earlier in the U.S.A.—and only a few enlisted men had come forward before that.

And what would an invitation to an “ideological conversion,” which was at no time substantively addressed to me, have really meant to me personally? Since 1937–38 I had recognized the inevitability of our national ruin under the Brown tyranny and the urgent necessity of Hitler’s disappearance in our national political interest, but of course I had regarded this as a purely internal political problem. Certainly, it had increased the spiritual torment to be compelled
to see more clearly from year to year that, in view of the Germans’ political apathy, this goal would never be attained internally, but now through war, or, at any rate, through its outcome. The millions of deaths throughout the world constricted in its meaning to a change of government in one’s own country? It was a cruel dilemma. But it could never serve as a bridge for an “ideological conversion.” “Ideologically,” in terms of my basic political and constitutional persuasions, there had been for a long time nothing to “convert.” I had never allowed myself to be infected with the poison of the so-called “National Socialism.” And from the beginning I had firmly rejected a “conversion” on the grounds of possibly betraying military secrets. Also under prisoner-of-war conditions nothing remained but to continue withdrawing into myself and further to await the day of the internal decay of the “Brown system.” It was indeed in its nature to overextend itself internally and externally, and one day it would collapse under the boundlessness of its military aggression. Gradually I came no longer to have the shadow of a doubt of that.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you at the moment,” said the station doctor at Cockfosters. “The best thing would be for you to wait a while, and if it doesn’t get any better we can always take another look.” It was a late summer morning in 1941 and the day had not begun very pleasantly for me. Quite suddenly I had felt indeterminate stomach pains and had to vomit repeatedly without evident cause; I couldn’t make rhyme or reason of it. As the trouble wouldn’t go away, I finally asked the floor sentry if I could see the doctor. After the latter’s words I looked at him, rather at a loss, and then he was gone. When the afternoon brought no improvement, I asked to see the doctor again. This time he didn’t come in person, but only sent a message: “If you have pain, you must put up with it.”

How to describe my surprise when, shortly before midnight, my cell door burst open and a doctor and his staff, no less than five people, walked in briskly! “Pack right away, you’re going to a hospital and will be operated on tomorrow morning,” I heard, before I had any idea for what I was to be operated on. And at noon the next day a surgeon in a white smock leaned over my bed: “Well, that was high time, you really had a roaring appendix.” I thanked him, “It’s a good thing that I came into your hands while there was still time.”

By degrees I discovered where I now found myself: in Hatfield House, a manor house about thirty kilometers north of London built at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Robert Cecil, the first
earl of Salisbury and prime minister under King James I, and in the possession of the Cecil family for nearly four centuries now. It was surrounded by a great park and built according to a plan beloved since the time of Queen Elizabeth I, two wings joined by a central element which formed the outline of an E, the first letter of the great queen’s name. Its exquisite interiors included marvelous paintings, choice furniture, rare Gobelin tapestries, historical arms and armor, and, in the chapel, an original Flemish stained glass window of biblical themes. Now this castle had been converted into a military hospital for the duration of the war. As a German prisoner of war I lay, separated from the Allied patients, on the upper floor of the west wing. The windows of my spacious room provided a charming view of the Elizabethan garden, which I was repeatedly assured still looked exactly as it had in the time of Elizabeth I when a predecessor of the present building had stood here.

In such beautiful surroundings, cared for by two pretty nurses, I could get along very well, even if at first I let all the food offered me pass unenjoyed for lack of appetite.

When I began feeling better and the days seemed longer, at my request a friendly auxiliary brought me a copy of Erskine Childers’s
The Riddle of the Sands
from the house library. The novel had appeared in 1903 and made use of the author’s observations on a voyage along the German North Sea and Baltic coasts in 1897. At the time he had felt that the German activity there portended an invasion threat for England, an incredible thesis, which the London Admiralty later declared to be absurd. Nevertheless, Childers developed it in such an absorbing manner that the book immediately became a great success. His descriptions of everyday life in a small sailboat were fascinating in themselves. I had first become entwined in the book following a suggestion from my gunnery instructor at the Mürwik Naval School in 1931, Kapitän zur See a.D.
*
Günther Paschen. Paschen was a good judge of English literature. All at once I had to think of him as one of the strongest and most independent-minded characters I had ever encountered. At the time I had no foreboding of his cruel fate.