The Sea Hunters Part 22

The heads could not operate below eighty feet. And even if the boat was on the surface, the series of levers used to flush the little commode were so complex that one wrong twist and the contents of the toilet bowl blew back in the user's face.

Germany's U-boats were never designed for comfort. They were designed to kill, and they were as cold and heartless as a tax collector's soul.

Hersing sat down at a tiny table reserved for him and his first officer, and ate a meal of potato soup and sausage, washed down with a cup of cocoa. As he finished, one of the U-21's crew popped his head in the cramped galley.

"Sir, the first officer requests your presence topside."

Hersing rose, jamming his officer's cap on his head at a rakish angle.

Climbing the ladder from the control room, he returned to the conning tower.

"What have you got?" he asked without preamble.

First Officer Erich Herbert handed Hersing his binoculars and pointed toward the northwest. "There, to the northwest, a column of smoke."

Hersing peered at the dark smudge on the horizon. He later described the "thick, black promising smoke as an obscure smear gradually growing into the outline of a s.h.i.+p." Patiently, he waited until it became more distinct. "She appears to be a British light cruiser. Scout cla.s.s.

Alert the crew and give the order to dive."

With a sound like the clanging of a fire bell, the U-21's dive alarm rang loudly inside the tight confines of the submarine. The crew scurried quickly to their duty stations, ducking heads while snaking through the cramped hatchways. The conning-tower hatch was dogged shut, valves were turned to flood the ballast tanks, and U-21 slowly slipped beneath the restless waters of the North Sea.

"Adjust diving planes for periscope depth," Hersing ordered.

Steaming in her patrol pattern off the coast of Scotland, Pathfinder sailed on unaware of the threat. The trail of thick black smoke still bothered Leake, but there was little he could do about it until his s.h.i.+p returned to port.

"Watch report," Leake ordered.

"Watch reports all clear," came the reply of his first officer.

"Time?"

"Sixteen forty hours, sir."

Leake gazed at the great column of smoke that merged from Pathfinder's three big stacks, curling high in the sky without benefit of a brisk wind. "We're throwing out a rather large amount of smoke,"

he said. "We might as well advertise our position to every German s.h.i.+p within fifty miles. Ring down to the engine room and ask if they can reduce it somewhat."

Belowdecks, Sub-Lieutenant Edward Sonnenschein was checking the position of the watertight doors, making notations on a clipboard.

Born in England, Sonnenschein had a distinctly German name, yet he was British through and through.

"Powder magazine door secure," reported a seaman.

"Door secure," Sonnenschein acknowledged.

On it went until all doors were inspected and certified in good working order. Then Sonnenschein slid the checklist into the doc.u.ment slot outside the captain's cabin and reported to the bridge.

"All doors are secured, sir," he said to Leake. "The report is in your slot." "Very good." Leake spoke without turning his attention from the sea ahead. His thoughts were more on German surface s.h.i.+ps than U-boats.

Pathfinder sailed on.

At a keel depth of sixty feet beneath the waves the only sound that came from U-21 was her electric motors, which purred like an army of cats. Fifteen minutes before five o'clock in the afternoon, U-21 began her attack approach. Hersing reversed his peaked cap with the brim to the rear and pressed his eye against the focal adjustment of the two-inch-diameter periscope. After no more than ten seconds, he leaned away.

"Down periscope," he ordered. "Come to heading two-nine-zero."

"TWo-nine-zero," his helmsman repeated.

"If the Britisher maintains his present course," Hersing said to his crew in the control room, "we should be within strike range in another fifteen minutes."

Like a tiger slinking toward its quarry, U-21 methodically closed in for the kill. Hersing raised the periscope again, relocated the target, and made his course corrections to launch a torpedo. The British cruiser steamed into view almost dead ahead. No more than half a mile separated the two vessels.

"Tube one, stand ready," said Hersing. Patience was a requirement for German U-boat commanders. He waited for the range to close as calmly as if he were waiting for a taxi.

First Officer Herbert, standing forward in the weapons room, unscrewed the cover from the firing mechanism and stood poised to carry out the command he knew would be issued shortly.

The U-boat and the cruiser were only fifteen hundred yards apart when Hersing shouted in the same breath, "Away torpedo! Periscope in!

" The torpedo leaped from the bow of U-21. Like a spear thrown from a mythical G.o.d's hand, the deadly tube streaked toward Pathfinder Hersing waited anxiously for the sound of a m.u.f.fled explosion and the following concussion. He was as ignorant as Lieutenant Dixon fifty years before about the effects of underwater explosions. He tapped one foot nervously on the cold steel deck.

Thirty seconds ticked away. Then a full minute. A miss, Hersing thought. Considered the best scorer in practice with torpedoes in the U-boat flotilla, he could not believe his calculations were not correct.

A minute and fifteen seconds. Too long for a run of only fifteen hundred yards.

"Torpedo!" the lookout high in Pathfinder's crow's nest cried.

"Starboard aft!"

Captain Leake reacted instantly. "Full speed, hard to starboard."

Pathfinder rolled on her starboard beam, stern deck nearly awash, as her big propellers bit into the water and turned it white, her powerful engines racing to escape certain doom. In a desperate gamble, Leake attempted to throw the torpedo off course with Pathfinder's prop wash.

Set on a collision course, the torpedo narrowed the gap. Fifty yards, thirty, ten. Watching from the wheelhouse, Leake felt as if time had stopped and gone on hold. Then it was abruptly released.

The torpedo's warhead slammed into Pathfinder under the forward funnel, fracturing the steel plating and piercing one of the boilers.

Superheated shrapnel punctured the bulkheads surrounding the powder magazine and igniteda ma.s.sive explosion that ripped out the guts of the s.h.i.+p.

The concussion was far more severe than Hersing had conceived. An immense surge of water pressure pounded the hull of U-21. Several crew members were knocked off their feet and injured as they fell against any steel object that got in their way. The lights blinked out and came on again as the battery connections were shaken loose.

"Up periscope." Hersing leaned against the eyepiece and was pleased at what he saw across the water.

The British cruiser was clearly in its death throes. As Hersing watched, another explosion rocked the already shattered vessel as the forward ammunition locker detonated. Pieces of the wheelhouse burst through the air and splashed the water like a heavy rain. She plunged bow-first, stern lifting until it was straight in the air, propellers still spinning and seemingly clawing at the sky. Hersing scanned the water for lifeboats. He saw one half swamped, but no evidence of survivors.

Standing firmly at the periscope, he watched the unfolding spectacle in growing astonishment. Another explosion rocked the s.h.i.+p as a boiler burst from the sudden contact with cold sea water. Hersing stared as if hypnotized as Pathfinder slid beneath the waves and was gone as if she had never existed.

"Down periscope," Hersing muttered quietly, in awe. "Come around to zero-three-zero."

Running silently underwater, U-21 distanced herself from her first victim and turned away in search of another.

All but a handful of men from Pathfinder were denied the opportunity to abandon s.h.i.+p. None were given time to launch lifeboats, most of which were destroyed before the s.h.i.+p sank. None were given time to scramble from the bowels of the s.h.i.+p. "If you were not on the open deck when the torpedo struck, you were dead," Lieutenant Sonnenschein recalled. He had emptied the bridge locker of all the life belts before jumping into the water. He tied them around a cl.u.s.ter of men left struggling amid the floating debris. He felt sickened at seeing so pitifully few.

Captain Leake, though badly wounded, was alive. As Pathfinder lurched from the initial torpedo strike, he was thrown through the wheelhouse door, seconds before the structure was blown out of existence. The chief surgeon was also wounded but conscious. He had been on deck smoking a cigarette.

"I say," he muttered through teeth clenched with pain. "Could someone help keep me afloat? I seem to have broken both my arms."

"Physician, heal thyself," Sonnenschein said with a tight grin.

He swam to the chief surgeon and lashed him to a plank that once had been part of a motor launch. Then Sonnenschein towed him toward the only lifeboat and two rafts that somehow survived intact.

The water in the North Sea felt bitter cold to the men struggling to live. They paddled or gripped flotsam to stay afloat, struggling to reach the boat and rafts, then waiting for a rescue they were sure would come too late. They knew death from hypothermia was only a matter of time, and they began to lose faith and talk of death.

Sonnenschein would have none of it. "d.a.m.n your hide!" he shouted.

"Don't give up. Help is on the way."

A sailor spat a mouthful of salt water through his teeth. "It's no use, lieutenant. I doubt Sparks got off an SOS."

"Keep the men close together," Leake said weakly to Sonnenschein.

"Don't let them drift off."

Sonnenschein began to recite Rudyard Kipling's poem "If." "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you Slowly, one by one, the survivors began to rally as Sonnenschein made them repeat the poem over and over again.

Pathfinder had gone down in four minutes. A vast majority of her crew went with her. The lucky ones in the water were rescued shortly after the sinking. The explosion was seen from land and reported. A British destroyer in the neighborhood was diverted almost immediately and pulled the survivors out of the water a short time later.

Out of a complement of nearly 350, only 11 survived. The second s.h.i.+p ever sunk by a submarine, and the first in a long line sunk by German U-boats, Pathfinder carried a far greater loss of life than Housatanic.

Otto Hersing and his U-21 made history by becoming the first submarine to sink a s.h.i.+p and escape. Together, they went on to great glory and gained other firsts.

After rendezvousing with a tanker off the coast of Spain, U-21 became the first submarine to be refueled at sea. She was the first to sail into the Mediterranean, where she sank two battles.h.i.+ps off Gallipoli.

Her score also included over twenty merchant vessels that she sent to the bottom.

There were other U-boat commanders who sank more s.h.i.+ps than Hersing, but none matched his tonnage. He went after the wars.h.i.+ps, often pa.s.sing up several merchant vessels to send his small supply of torpedoes into a destroyer or cruiser.

Of Germany's first hundred submarines, only a small handful survived the war. U-21 was one of them. After the Armistice, on November 20, 1918, Hersing was ordered to surrender his boat to the British Navy at Harwich, England, where it was to be impounded and sc.r.a.pped. On the voyage from Kiel, Germany, he reported to his British escort that his boat had sprung a leak. Too late to prevent the scuttling, British seamen could only pick up the German survivors.

Defiant to the end, Otto Hersing had sent his beloved U-21 to the bottom of the North Sea rather than Turn her over to the enemy.

Several years after the war, famed explorer and correspondent Lowell Thomas visited Hersing in his village just thirty miles from the North Sea. The legendary U-boat commander, now a gentleman farmer, lived in a small cottage surrounded by fruit trees and gardens. After he was pulled from the North Sea and sent back to Germany, the British belatedly put a price on his head, but he managed to elude arrest until feelings of hatred had died away.

When Thomas asked the former scourge of Allied s.h.i.+pping how he kept busy, Hersing replied, "I grow fine potatoes."

Down in Eighteen Minutes May 7, 1915 ajike a wandering specter, U-20 materialized out of the fog in the Sea, and slipped alongside a small square-masted schooner before it was noticed. "Man the gun," Kapitanleutnant Walter Schwieger ordered quietly.

Beneath his boyish good looks, blond hair, and fair skin, an undercurrent of ruthlessness ran through Schwieger's veins. Sending a s.h.i.+p to the bottom with noncombatants on board did not interrupt his sleep. On an earlier voyage, he had crept up on a well-marked hospital s.h.i.+p and sent a torpedo after her. Fortunately it missed, or his future reputation as a ghoul would have been even further enhanced.

The gun crew quickly rammed a two-inch sh.e.l.l into the breech of their weapon and aimed it at the schooner. Schwieger reached for a megaphone and shouted across the foggy surface of the water. "What s.h.i.+p are you?" he asked, noting the British cross of St. George flying from the halyards.

"Earl of Latham, " the surprised captain answered, staring wide-eyed at the menacing submarine.

"Prepare to be boarded," Schwieger instructed him.

The five-man crew of the small schooner a.s.sembled on deck as the submarine's inflatable boat rowed across, and Schwieger's first officer, Raimund Weisbach, climbed on board. "Where is your manifest?"

Weisbach asked the captain.

The captain silently walked below and returned, holding out a single sheet, which listed the schooner's cargo. "Mostly potatoes and bacon, en route from Limerick to Liverpool. Nothing worth concerning yourself about." "Food for your troops," guessed a shrewd Weisbach.

"Make to your boats. We are sinking this vessel."

As the crew of Earl of Latham lowered their boats and pulled for the sh.o.r.e, only three miles distant, Weisbach returned to U-20 and reported to Schwieger. "Potatoes and bacon. Since we still have plenty of potatoes, I suggest we help ourselves to the bacon."

Schwieger smiled. "Please do so, Leutnant. But be quick about it.

We can't risk being found by a British wars.h.i.+p."

"Shall we scuttle or burn her?"

"I think it faster if we use grenades and the deck gun. She certainly isn't worth wasting a torpedo on."

After fifty pounds of bacon had been carried on board and lowered into the hull, the submarine's crew lobbed grenades into the hatches of Earl of Latham. Then the deck gun opened up, blasting three holes below the waterline. The crew of the schooner looked back and watched sadly as their s.h.i.+p rolled on her beam ends, sails hanging limp from the yards, and plunged below the waves.

Two hours later, U-20 sighted a steamer, fired a torpedo at her, and missed. The s.h.i.+p steamed on, her crew blissfully unaware of how close they had come to being blown up. Then Schwieger spotted the Norwegian flag flying from the s.h.i.+p's mast and called off the attack.

So far, the voyage of U-20 was coming up hollow. They needed a real target. Something worth using their last torpedoes on. Then Schwieger got lucky. In quick succession, he torpedoed the pa.s.senger liner Candidate and the freighter Centurion. Miraculously, all pa.s.sengers and crews of both s.h.i.+ps were saved.

Schwieger was down to his last torpedo. He decided to linger, for another day in hopes of adding to his score before turning about and heading for home port in Germany to refuel and refit.

Fog lay thick across the sea as Lusitania, on her voyage from New York, neared the rugged southern coast of Ireland. Captain William Thomas Turner prowled the bridge of his s.h.i.+p, staring into the dense mist, listening for an echo from his foghorn that signaled the presence of another vessel. Watching from the bridge window, he saw the crewmen on the forward deck appear and disappear like phantom apparitions as they went about their duties.

Never stepping more than a few paces away from the helmsman, Turner stayed close in case he had to shout the order "Full astern" if another s.h.i.+p suddenly appeared from the curtain of gray. He gazed into it as if attempting to see through to the other side.

"Keep a sharp eye to avert a collision," said Turner to the officers peering through the wheelhouse window. "We're not the only s.h.i.+p in the Sea."

"Better another s.h.i.+p than a German U-boat," muttered the junior third officer, Albert Bestic, under his breath.

Turner overheard and replied caustically, "No submarine can find us in this soup, Mr. Bestic. Any blind man can tell you that."

"Sorry, sir, I was only thinking out loud about reports of German torpedoings." "All this talk of submarines and torpedoing," Turner snorted. "No submarine I ever heard of can make twenty-seven knots."

Bestic wasn't about to continue his argument with the Lusitania's master. It was an argument he could not win, especially if he wanted a good efficiency report on his record with Cunard Lines. But it was no secret among the crew that because of a shortage of stokers, many of whom had been inducted into the Royal Navy for the duration of the war, and the high price for coal caused by scant supplies, Lusitania was running at less than two-thirds her normal speed. With six of her twenty-five boilers unlit, Lusitania was making only eighteen knots.

On a good day, if all her furnaces were properly fired, her engines could generate seventy thousand horsepower, which swirled her four great bronze propellers, thrusting her through the sea at thirty knots, enough speed to outrun any torpedo fired at her.

A seaman approached Turner and handed him a radio message that read, "Steer midchannel course. Submarines off Fastnet." Fastnet Rock, off the southern tip of Ireland, was a prominent landmark for mariners.

This message had been repeated throughout the night.