The War That Came Early: West and East (22 page)

Distant across a much longer stretch of seawater, reports from the enemy’s guns also reached Lemp’s ears. And the
Admiral Scheer
sent another signal his way. “Turning … toward … you.” The words came out one by one, maddeningly slow. “Surprise … unsuspecting … targets.”

“Donnerwetter!”
Lemp muttered. No doubt the order seemed easy to Captain Patzig—which only showed he didn’t know much about how U-boats operated. Could the
Admiral Scheer
bring the enemy warships by on courses that would let the U-30 get a decent shot at them? Or would the U-boat turn into a harmless spectator the moment it submerged? Only one way to find out—and an order was an order. Lemp nodded to the bosun. “Send ‘I shall conform to your movements,’ Matti.”

“‘I shall conform to your movements.’ Aye aye, sir.” Matti sounded much more serious than usual.
And well he might
, Lemp thought. The signal lamp’s louvers clacked yet again.

Lemp wanted to stay on the surface as long as he could, to get the best notion of what course the Royal Navy ships were sailing. That would tell him what he could do—and whether he could do anything. The English skippers wouldn’t notice him right away—he hoped. They’d focus all their attention on the
Admiral Scheer
—wouldn’t they?

If he turned out to be wrong about either of those, he’d have a thin time of it. He wondered if that bothered spit-and-polish Captain Patzig, with all the gold braid on his sleeves. Lemp doubted it. To a surface officer, a U-boat was as much a service vessel as an oiler.

No help for it. Here came the pocket battleship, firing as she fell back from the enemy. What was going through the English captains’ minds when they watched a stronger ship run from them? Contempt, probably. German U-boat commanders had an arrogant certainty that they were
the best in the world. On the surface, that kind of pride had filled the Royal Navy since the eighteenth century.

Maybe it would come back to haunt them now. Their guns blazed as they pursued the
Admiral Scheer
. Like the
Panzerschiff
, they zigzagged over the sea to make themselves more difficult targets. They were firing faster than the German ship. Their guns were lighter, which made ammunition easier to handle. And they were English, damn them. Their ships undoubtedly had plenty of officers and sailors who’d fought in the last war. They had reason to be sure they were good.

Enough reason? Maybe not. Captain Patzig was doing a better job than Lemp had thought he would of leading the John Bulls onto the U-boat matador’s hidden sword.
We might have good shots at them after all. I wouldn’t have believed it, but we might
. All Lemp said out loud was, “Let’s go below, men.” He was last off the conning tower. As he dogged the hatch shut behind him, he called fresh orders:
“Schnorkel
depth! Up periscope! Ready forward torpedoes! Ready reloads!”

His men sprang into action without any fuss. Yes, they knew how good they were. He told the officers and chiefs what was up, and they passed the word to the ratings. The more you knew about what you were doing and why, the better you’d perform. That was U-boat gospel, anyhow. In the surface navy, the ideal still seemed to be turning men into blind, unthinking machines. It looked that way to Lemp, anyhow. He was willing to admit he was anything but unbiased.

He twisted dials on the gadget that helped him plan his shots. The targets would be at long range, and they were steaming ungodly fast. He didn’t have time to wait and plan perfect shots, the way he might have with a lumbering freighter. He had to find something that would serve, then do it and hope for the best.

“What have we got up there, sir?” Gerhart Beilharz asked. The storklike engineering officer wore a
Stahlhelm
to keep overhead fittings from knocking him for a loop.

As long as he kept the
Schnorkel
behaving, Lemp didn’t care what he wore. The gadget would give the U-30 twice the underwater speed it could get from battery power—if it worked. And the boat might need
every bit of that and then some in the next few minutes. “Looks like two heavy cruisers, one light,” Lemp answered absently. “Now shut up and get out of my hair.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Beilharz said.

Lemp hardly heard him. He felt the diesels surge through the soles of his feet as the U-30 went into her attack run. He steered her himself, his eyes on the the periscope. The first ship was coming into range.… “Torpedo one
—los!
Torpedo two
—los!”
he shouted.

Twin whooshes as the eels leaped free. Lemp forgot about them as soon as they were gone. He swung the U-boat to port, lining her up on the other heavy cruiser—or where the cruiser would be when the torpedo got there. If he had her range and speed right, if she didn’t suddenly swerve, if, if, if …

“Torpedo three—
los!”
he said. Away the eel went. Lemp steered to port again. The light cruiser was trailing the other two warships and making more smoke than she should have. Battle damage from the
Admiral Scheer
? Lemp could hope so. “Torpedo four
—los!”
One more whoosh. “Reload forward torpedo tubes!”

That was backbreaking work—each torpedo weighed close to a tonne. Till it was done, though, the U-30 had only the single eel in her stern tube with which to fight. The “lords”—the junior ratings who bunked forward—would be happy when it was done, though. Now they’d have more room in which to sling their hammocks. Nobody’d have to sleep on top of a torpedo any more.

An explosion shook the U-30’s hull. Sailors whooped. Lemp swung the periscope to starboard. The first English heavy cruiser lay dead in the water, though her guns kept firing. A few seconds later, another deep rumble rattled the submarine’s crew like peas in a shaken pod.

People pounded Lemp on the back. “Two, skipper!” Matti bawled. “Way to go!”

Damned if he hadn’t hit the second heavy cruiser. She was still moving, but down by the bow and slowing fast. Had he got the light cruiser, too? He waited for one more blast … waited and waited. It didn’t come. He swore under his breath. When you did well, you wanted to do better.

With the light cruiser still among those present, he couldn’t surface. She’d slaughter him if he did. Those 155mm guns weren’t much for a surface ship to carry, but they made his lone 88mm deck gun look like a cap pistol by comparison.

Water spouts suddenly sprang up around the less damaged English heavy cruiser. The
Admiral Scheer
must have seen what the U-30 had done. Now the pocket battleship was coming back to finish off her crippled foes. Hits brought gouts of smoke and fire from the damaged warship.

The English light cruiser charged the
Panzerschiff
, guns blazing, doing her best to protect her wounded sisters. That was brave—even heroic. She scored hits, too. Then two rounds from the
Admiral Scheer
’s big guns slammed into her. She might have run headlong into a brick wall. Fire burst from her. She might almost have been broken in half.

“Skipper, we’ve got two eels in the tubes,” the chief torpedoman reported.

“Good job, Bruno.” Lemp hadn’t expected them for another five minutes. “We are going to approach the enemy cruiser that has stopped, and we are going to sink her.”

“Right,” Bruno said. “They’ll put a
Ritterkreuz
around your neck when we get home, too.”

They would do no such thing, and Lemp knew it. Nobody who was in the brass’ doghouse would win a Knight’s Cross. No point wishing for one or thinking he’d earned it, because he wouldn’t get it any which way. But he might get—partway—out of that damned doghouse.

Stubborn as any Englishmen, the sailors on the halted cruiser kept firing at the
Admiral Scheer
even as the pocket battleship teed off on a stationary target. Then the second torpedo from the U-30 slammed into her. This one broke her back. She had listed to starboard. Now she turned turtle and sank in a couple of minutes.

That left one Royal Navy ship still able to fight—but not for long. Even as Lemp turned toward her, a shell from the
Admiral Scheer
must have touched off her magazine. She went up with a roar that dwarfed the explosions from the torpedo hits.

“Der Herr Gott im Himmel!”
Lemp said, shaken in spite of himself. How many men had gone up in that blast? How many more would struggle in the Atlantic—for a little while? The U-30 couldn’t hope to pick up survivors; the boat was packed to the gills as things were. Would the
Admiral Scheer
?

A question from the bosun broke into Lemp’s thoughts: “Uh, skipper, what just happened there?”

“Oh.” Lemp remembered he was the only man in the U-boat who could see out. “That was the last British cruiser, not our ship.” More cheers rang through the pressure hull.

He only half-heard them. If he commanded the pocket battleship, he wouldn’t stick around. The Royal Navy would know exactly where this fight took place. Every warship within a couple of thousand kilometers would be hustling this way at flank speed. If the
Admiral Scheer
wanted to see home again, she’d have to get out without wasting time.

And that was just what she was doing. When Lemp turned his periscope on her, she was speeding northeast as fast as she could go. He nodded to himself. That was only sensible. The U-30 would have to run the Royal Navy’s gauntlet to get back to the
Vaterland
, too, but it was easier for a sub.

Still, lingering here seemed the very worst of bad ideas. “Back to the surface,” he ordered, “and then we’ll shape course for Germany. Nobody can say we haven’t done our job this cruise.” The sailors cheered once more.

ONE OF THE PRIVATES
in Alistair Walsh’s section was reading the
International Herald-Tribune
with a long face. The
Herald-Trib
struck Walsh as annoyingly American, which didn’t keep him from reading it, too. In France, it was one of the easiest ways to get your hands on news in English. If you didn’t have a working wireless so you could hear the BBC, it was damn near the only way to get news in English.

“What’s got you buggered up now, Jock?” Walsh said. “Something has, by the look on your mug.”

“Damn Fritzes sank three of our ships, Sergeant,” Jock answered in his broad North Country accent. Like several other men who’d joined the company at about the same time, he was from Yorkshire.

Walsh understood why he sounded so affronted. Everyone knew the Germans made good infantry. They’d proved that time and again. But when they took on the Royal Navy in what had been England’s element for lifetime after lifetime … That was a bit much, or more than a bit.

Jock was still reading. “Says a fuckin’ U-boat helped their bloody pocket battleship.” For a moment, he seemed a little less irate. The Germans were good with U-boats not least because they couldn’t match up on the surface. They hadn’t in the last war, and their surface fleet was smaller this time: they’d had to start over from scratch once Hitler took over. Then Jock got mad again, mad enough to turn pink. Like a lot of Yorkshiremen, he was big and fair, which made his flush all the easier to see. “You ask me, it ain’t cricket.”

“We use planes and tanks to help infantry,” Walsh said. “We do when we’ve got ’em, any road.”

“That’s different,” Jock insisted. “It’s not sneaky-like, the way a submarine is.”
Soobmahreen
—the broad Yorkshire vowels turned the word into something that might have been found in a barn. (People who talked as if they were doing their best to sound like BBC newsreaders thought Walsh’s Welsh vowels sounded pretty funny, too. Over the years, he’d had to punch a couple of them in the nose. If they didn’t twit him too hard, though, he just ignored them.)

“I expect we’ll sink the surface raider sooner or later, and we dealt with the U-boats in the last war. We can do it again,” Walsh said.

“Aye—but the cost! All them drowned sailors!” Jock said. “Hundreds of men on a cruiser, and not many left alive after three went down.”

“It’s a bastard,” Walsh agreed. It wasn’t as big a bastard as Jock thought it was, though. England had taken 50,000 casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 20,000 dead … for a few square miles of cratered, poisoned mud that weren’t worth having to begin with. Walsh hadn’t been in the army yet in 1916. If he had, he probably would have been there. And if he’d been there, he probably wouldn’t be here now.

“We’ve got to do something about them buggers, we do,” Jock said, as
if Walsh would know exactly what that something was. Maybe Jock thought he did. Common soldiers often seemed to think staff sergeants knew everything.

Staff sergeants sometimes thought they knew everything, too. When it came to dealing with common soldiers, they did, or near enough. When it came to setting Hitler’s mustache on fire … “I’m open to suggestions,” Walsh said dryly.

Before Jock could give him any, a German machine gun stuttered to hateful life. Things had been quiet lately. That made the short, professional bursts even scarier than they would have been otherwise. Three French machine guns started spraying the German lines a few seconds later. One of the froggies was also a professional: three rounds, pause, three rounds, pause, four rounds, pause. The other Frenchmen plainly didn’t care how many gun barrels they burned through.

Walsh didn’t get excited about the machine guns. He and Jock weren’t out in the open. Machine guns could have kept banging away till doomsday without endangering them in the least. Then somebody threw a French grenade. Maybe a
poilu
saw Germans coming. Maybe he just imagined he did.

Any which way, the bursting grenade seemed to give the
Landsers
a kick in the arse the French machine guns hadn’t. Something came down out of the sky with a whispering whistle and blew up with a bang much bigger than a hand grenade.

“Oh, bugger!” Walsh said.
“Down
, Jock!” He dove for the dirt himself. When the damned
Boches
started throwing mortars around, things stopped being fun. You could hide from machine guns. Not a thing you could do about mortars except pray one didn’t land in your hole.