The Last Wolf (21 page)

In the early days, convoy ships had sometimes scattered in panic under attack, but not any more. They were hardened. They'd learned that their best chance lay in staying together.

He ordered full speed and headed towards the convoy at periscope depth – turning as he came closer to approach on a parallel course, like a wolf slithering on its belly alongside the fold. He waited for the procession to pass and for the liner at the end to come into his sights, calculating the firing angle carefully. A spread of four torpedoes set to run at a depth of seven metres and from a range of five hundred. All four would have a chance to hit. The U-boat's bows swung slowly towards the liner so that she crossed them at right angles. He waited a few more crucial seconds.

‘
Los
!'

As soon as the torpedoes had left their tubes, he ordered the U-boat down in a steep dive and she was still diving when the four explosions were clearly heard as the torpedoes found their mark. Soon afterwards they heard the cracking and shrieking noises, the dying groans of a ship going down, followed by the unmistakable sound of her boilers blowing up under water.

He took the U-boat as deep as he dared, close to the crush depth. The enemy's ASDIC could already be heard and the first of the depth charges exploded. For more than five hours they stayed motionless at 300 metres, all auxiliary machinery stopped, bilge pumps idle, water spurting in through weak points of the hull, the boat creaking ominously. The atmosphere was stifling and foul, the men's faces shining with sweat, rigid with fear.

If he'd had a book to hand, Reinhard might have imitated his former Old Man's trick of casually reading a chapter or two while they waited – except that he'd have made sure he was reading it the right way up. He glanced at his Number One, Engelhardt – not a flicker of concern showing there – and Mohr, his stolid-faced Number Two might have been out on a routine training exercise. He was lucky with his officers, lucky with the whole crew. Fear was natural under bombardment, but they kept it under control. On his first boat, he'd seen a man suddenly go berserk and lay about him wildly with a spanner, smashing everything within reach. He'd been quickly overcome by the others and the Old Man, who kept a loaded gun locked up in his cabin, had put him under close guard. The man had been removed from service as soon as they had returned to port. Fear was contagious.

The depth charges were all wide of the mark and he realized that the escorts had no idea where they were. Not often, but sometimes the ocean turned guardian angel. Layers of sea water at different temperatures and density could confuse the ASDIC's ultrasonic sound waves and make a submarine undetectable.

Another hour passed without any more depth charges being dropped, and Reinhard took the U-boat to the surface. He sent a signal to headquarters about the liner:
Sinking noises clearly heard. Depth charged but no damage.

By the time they returned to Lorient at the end of the patrol they had sent four more enemy cargo ships to the bottom, one of them a six-thousand tonner, and it was Grossadmiral Dönitz, no less, who greeted them, his stern, spare figure standing on the quay, flanked by high-ranking officers. The military band struck up a fanfare, as if for royalty.

Reinhard was congratulated on his tonnage of enemy shipping and awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. The Grossadmiral placed the brilliantly coloured ribbon around his neck and said a few words. He was noted for the personal interest he took in his submariners.

‘Your father lives in Hamburg, I believe, Kapitänleutnant?'

‘That's correct, sir.'

‘Have you received any news?'

‘News, sir?'

‘You didn't hear about Hamburg on the radio while you were at sea?'

‘No, sir.'

There had been too much wearying propaganda. They had listened instead to records or to the American jazz on the radio.

‘I'm sorry to have to tell you that the city has been badly bombed by the Allies. I regret that I can give no news about your father, though. The situation is very unclear. I hope you find that he is safe.'

‘Thank you, sir.'

He saluted and, with a nod, the Grossadmiral moved on along the line of men. A smiling girl in uniform thrust a huge bouquet of flowers into Reinhard's arms – sweet-smelling, full-blown summer roses. He shook hands with more people, was offered more flowers, more smiles, more congratulations, a bottle of vintage champagne, which he waved aside. A staff officer gave him more details about the Hamburg raids.

‘They've bombed it twice – the second time just two nights ago. Nearly eight hundred aircraft. There was a terrible firestorm – at least forty thousand people dead, they think . . . Shocking business.'

He took the first available train to Paris, another to Frankfurt and then another to Hamburg, which crawled along for the final part of the journey. From the train window he could see a gigantic grey cloud hovering over the city.

He walked from the railway station into devastation. The dense cloud had blotted out the sun and the air beneath it was oven hot and so thick with smoke and dust and soot that it was difficult to breathe. Before him lay street after street of burned-out ruins, fires still flickering and flaring. Corpses lay buried in the rubble. He saw a clenched claw poking out, the pathetic foot of a child, a woman's scorched head, hair frizzled, face blackened, mouth stretched wide in an agonized scream.

He found a way through to the lakeside and the apartment block where his father lived. The building stood at the edge of the area of devastation but it had not escaped. The roof and floors had collapsed and only a shell remained.

The police headquarters had been destroyed but a workman labouring in the ruins directed him to an emergency station that had been set up. He found it crowded with people coated in grey ash, dazed with shock, weeping hysterically, children screaming. He caught an official by the arm.

‘Who is in charge here, please?' The man would have moved on, but Reinhard held on to him. ‘I must have news of my father.'

A pause, a glance at his uniform, at his face. ‘I doubt if there will be any, but you had better come with me, sir.'

He followed him into a room at the back where a senior police officer sat at a desk, studying a street map laid out in front of him. Another officer was standing beside him. They both looked up at him wearily.

‘I am here to ask for information about my father, a resident of the city.'

The senior man said, ‘I am very sorry, Herr Kapitänleutnant, but there is very little information that we can give you at the moment. There are thousands of people missing, you understand. Some may be safe, others still buried alive in the ruins, but most must be dead. We cannot know for sure who or how many until the survivors have registered with us, and in many cases it may be impossible to identify the bodies. It will all take time. If you will give us your father's full name and address, as well as your own, we will see what we can find out.'

When he had written it down, the police officer said, ‘I know your father by repute, Herr Kapitänleutnant, and I sincerely hope that he has survived this terrible tragedy. The apartment building was not within the firestorm area and so there is a chance that he may have survived. I will inform you at once if there is any news of him. Did he live alone?'

‘We had a servant, Greta Nord, but my father had sent her away to the country.'

‘That was fortunate for her.'

‘I've never seen such devastation. What happened?'

‘The enemy has found a new way of making war. First they bombed the city centre, then they dropped a ring of high explosives. And, after that, an outer ring of incendiaries. Unfortunately, we've had no rain for some time and the weather has been very warm. The result was a huge inferno as one fire joined up with another – so hot that buildings collapsed in the heat. People had no chance of escape. Nowhere safe to go. They were suffocated in the shelters, or blown along by the violent winds and sucked into the fires to be burned to cinders. It was the most dreadful thing that you can imagine. Even in your war at sea, I do not think that you will have seen anything so terrible.'

Reinhard said, ‘The Luftwaffe has bombed enemy cities, but never on such a scale as this.'

‘It's just the beginning. The RAF will be back by night, the Americans by day. Their aim will be to destroy all our great cities and leave us with nothing but ruins. People are fleeing and many believe that we should capitulate – give up and give in while we still can.'

‘They're wrong.'

‘I agree. The enemy may destroy our buildings but not our spirit.'

As he left, the police chief said, ‘Don't give up hope about your father, Herr Kapitänleutnant. He may have been away from home. Perhaps visiting friends or relatives?'

‘Perhaps.'

But Father was a creature of habit and routine. The directorships that he held occupied his days satisfactorily and most of his old naval friends also lived in Hamburg. His only sister was many kilometres away in Munich and, so far as Reinhard knew, his father had not seen or visited her for years. Aunt Ursula had been widowed in the Great War and his childhood memories were of a thin and bitter woman.

He tried to contact Bruno at his fighter station, but there were no telephone lines working in Hamburg. There was no gas, lighting or water either. In the end, he went back to Lorient, hoping that there would eventually be some information for him there, but the only news from the city was of more Allied bombing raids that took place over the following nights.

The oil tanker blew up in a blaze of flame and white-hot metal and burning wood. A crimson glow and a pall of black smoke rose up out of the bowels of the ship as the eruptions continued in a spectacular firework display that must have been visible for kilometres. Neutral ships nearby had answered the tanker's SOS and Reinhard dived his U-boat to the sea bottom and left them to what rescue work was possible.

The tanker had been sailing unescorted, which was unusual in the North Atlantic, but those enemy ships who could make more than fifteen knots sometimes went alone, relying on speed. Reinhard had had dreams of catching the
Queen Mary
, or the
Queen Elizabeth
, their decks loaded with Allied troops, but they were virtually uncatchable. He might have had some regrets at sinking such fine and famous ships, but in the case of this tanker he had none. The inferno was payment on account for Hamburg, and there would be plenty more to come.

Until Hamburg, he had not hated the enemy – on the contrary he had respected him for his courage and determination. But now it was different.

They had been at sea for six weeks and orders now took them towards the Western Approaches where the Allied convoys drew closer to home and safety. It was a fruitful hunting ground; the U-boats could gather and wait expectantly for their arrival. Unfortunately, it was also very well defended. They made contact with a convoy during the night. The telegraphist rushed out of his cubby-hole with its position and Reinhard made rapid calculations on the chart. Two hours later they had come within three miles of the convoy – several large freighters, plus escorts, steaming steadily towards England.

The U-boat surfaced to a clear moonlit night with excellent visibility and only a moderate ocean swell. Good in some ways, bad in another. They would be able to sight the enemy ships from a greater distance, but their white bow wave and phosphorescent wake would be much easier to spot and they would be unable to get as near as he would like. Reinhard closed on the convoy on a parallel course, choosing his victim – the biggest freighter. A single well-aimed torpedo took care of all eight thousand tons of her. It hit her amidships and within ten minutes she was gone. As expected, the dark shape of an escorting destroyer had detached itself immediately from the convoy and was heading straight for them.

‘Alarrrm! Dive! Dive! Dive!'

The klaxon shrieked, the main vents were opened and men tumbled down the conning-tower ladder, the last one spinning the hatch wheel tight as the sea closed over the U-boat. Reinhard ordered all hands forward at the double and those men not at action stations hurled themselves through the bulkhead hatchways towards the bows so that the boat's nose dipped sharply to help speed up their descent.

‘Destroyer bearing twenty degrees to port.' The hydrophone operator turned his wheel a fraction. ‘Getting louder.'

As usual, it was a guessing game. With luck, the enemy would cross their course astern, but then which way would he turn? Port or starboard? There was no crystal ball to peer into; no way of reading the British commander's mind. Unluckily, Reinhard guessed wrong. The destroyer arrived dead overhead and circled slowly until it stopped for a while, its ASDIC groping for their hull like a blind man, fingertips pitter-pattering. He ordered the boat deeper, and then deeper still, down to 150 metres. The destroyer was on the move again, circling round, getting ready to drop depth charges. Luckily, it had to be done at full speed or the enemy would risk blowing themselves out of the water; if they'd been able to simply lob them over the side, their job would have been easy.

It was a cat and mouse game without many options for the mouse. He'd seen it played out in reality once – a tabby cat biding its time patiently, the mouse faking death until the moment when it made a frantic dash for life. There was no question of a U-boat dashing anywhere but it was possible to slip away silently by degrees. He'd done that successfully many times but the game was getting harder to play. The enemy had new and improved weapons and devices and gadgets; they had studied tactics and strategy and they had learned a lot about U-boats. They knew what they were doing. But, in the end, it came down to two men guessing – the commander of the escort ship and himself.

The destroyer's captain was guessing well. His depth charge explosions were too close for comfort – slamming blows that shook the U-boat from bow to stern, shattered glass, cracked metal and burst open valves. Even Engelhardt, with his nerves of steel, had flinched. Reinhard whispered the order to dive another 50 metres and then slow ahead with both electric motors. They began to creep away, holding a straight and steady course. The enemy commander would expect him to be up to the usual tricks and dodges – doubling back and doubling back again, constantly changing depths and direction – but the man could only take a stab at which way they'd turn and whether they'd go up or down. No tricks could be the best trick of all. Reinhard kept going and the explosions gradually faded away.