Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

When Ahlrichs asked Schmidt whether he had been to see a doctor, the Canadian trapper smiled sheepishly. He didn’t have gonorrhea. He had injected his penis with a soda solution in order to get out of going to America. 27

WHEN HE WELCOMED the four saboteurs on board his submarine on the evening of May 28, Kapitänleutnant Hans-Heinz Linder had been in charge of U-202 for just over a year. It was his first command, and he was proud of what he and his men had accomplished during their previous five patrols: several trips across the Atlantic, half a dozen enemy ships sunk, and many hair-raising escapes.

A stout man with blue eyes and a ruddy complexion, Linder made no claim to being one of the aces of the German submarine fleet. Unlike the U-boat captains whose feats in sinking dozens of Allied ships and threatening Britain’s lifeline to North America were celebrated by the Nazi propaganda machine, Linder had the reputation of being a solid, reliable officer who was calm during a crisis and did not take too many risks. At twenty-nine, he was already a veteran of the U-boat service, older than many of his fellow skippers. His crew members, most of them boys just out of school, looked up to him as an ancient.

On board his ship, a U-boat captain had almost godlike status. He was required to exude confidence at all times, even in the face of disaster. If a U-boat was “a community bound together by fate,” in the phrase of the fleet commander, Admiral Karl Dönitz, the captain was at once its savior and its scourge. 1His exploits could bring glory to the ship and the crew, but a single mistake could send them all to their deaths.

Of the various branches of the German armed forces, the U-boat fleet was perhaps the most glamorous but also the most deadly. Before the end of the war, the Third Reich would lose 785 out of 1,162 submarines, and 28,000 out of 41,000 crewmen. Even during the early part of the war, when the U-boats achieved their greatest successes, the life expectancy of a German submariner could often be measured in weeks or months. In these circumstances, it was an achievement for a captain to bring his men back alive. The survivors felt they belonged to an elite.

Linder and his men had had a very narrow escape on their fourth patrol back in December, when they were ordered to break through to the Mediterranean via the Strait of Gibraltar, which was controlled by the British. 2A Royal Air Force plane had dropped four bombs on the U-boat, destroying its diesel engines. For thirty-six hours, the ship lay on the seabed at a depth of six hundred feet, waiting for the enemy to disappear, then limped back to the French port of Brest on its electric motors. When asked about the incident, Linder would shrug his shoulders and say simply, “I was lucky to get home.” 3

After major repairs, U-202 set out again in March to join the submarine “wolf packs” that were causing havoc along America’s Atlantic coast in Operation Drumbeat, one of the most successful Nazi naval operations of the war. According to Dönitz’s figures, U-boats managed to sink 303 Allied ships, a total of two million tons, in a period of just four months. This rate of destruction would soon outpace America’s ability to build new ships. Linder’s luck held once again. This time, he and his men survived a depth charge attack by a U.S. destroyer.

Linder only found out about the mission for his sixth patrol a few hours before his submarine was due to sail from Brest, when he received a sealed package labeled “MOST SECRET” direct from Dönitz. The orders specified that he was to take a group of saboteurs across the Atlantic and land them on the southern coast of Long Island. The landing should be timed to coincide with a “new moon night” in the middle of June. 4Since darkness was vital to the success of the “special operation,” it would take priority over the sinking of enemy ships. Nevertheless, Linder was authorized to seize “opportunities of attack” if they presented themselves.

The U-boat High Command war diary listed the following objectives of Operation Pastorius:

To carry out sabotage attacks against vital economic targets.

To stir up discontent and lower fighting resistance.

To recruit fresh forces for these duties.

To reestablish disconnected communications.

To obtain information.

THE CREW of U-202 were in a good mood as they took their ship out of the harbor at Brest, the headquarters of the German submarine fleet, on the evening of May 27. There were cheers of “Hurrah” and “Good luck” from their comrades and friends gathered on the pier. 5All the crew members knew was that they were setting off on another mission across the Atlantic. Before heading out, they had been instructed to put in at Lorient to receive supplies. There were rumors that a war correspondent would join them: the navy sometimes allowed reporters to accompany the U-boats and write up their exploits for a public eager for nautical victories.

The next day, they took on board not just one civilian but four, along with four wooden crates and a large seabag. The civilians were all dressed in navy fatigues. Except for Linder, none of the crew knew who they were, or what they were meant to be doing. They did not look like war correspondents: for one thing, they seemed far too reticent for reporters. New rumors began to circulate: could they be secret agents?

Linder showed the men their bunks in the petty officers’ quarters, on either side of his own minuscule cabin. In order to make room for the saboteurs, he had had to leave several less essential crew members behind, including the ship’s doctor. Every square inch of available space in the U-boat seemed to be occupied by bodies, torpedoes, crates of food, or some kind of dial or gauge. 6For the next two months, forty-five men would be living, working, eating, sleeping, and fighting for their survival in a cigar-shaped space just 211 feet long on the outside and 142 feet on the inside, about the length of two subway cars. Linder, who was six feet tall, could barely stand erect in his own control room. Most parts of the ship were no wider than ten feet; much of that space was crammed with equipment, leaving just enough room for one person to squeeze by at a time.

As his ship sailed out of Lorient harbor on Thursday evening, Linder made a note of the time in his neatly kept ship’s log: 1957. He invited his guests up to the bridge to see U-202 leave the concrete submarine pens constructed by the Germans as protection against Allied air raids. The sub was accompanied by a small flotilla of ships: patrol boats on either side and a minesweeper in front, trailing a long wire with various electronic antimine devices. Leading this procession was a large tramp steamer weighed down with concrete. Linder explained that this ship was a “punch absorber,” to shield U-boats from floating mines dropped by British warplanes. 7If a mine went off, it would do little more than damage one of the steamer’s many airtight compartments.

As U-202 left the harbor, the crew tested out the antiaircraft gun mounted to the rear of the bridge, firing some tracer bullets into the night sky. An officer was able to steer the boat from a panel on the conning tower underneath the bridge, which duplicated the instruments in the control room below.

The escort ships pulled away once the U-boat had cleared the most dangerous waters in the immediate vicinity of the port. For the rest of the night, the ship remained on the surface, tossed around on the ocean like a cork on a rushing stream. Four seamen stood watch on the bridge, scanning the horizon with binoculars for any sign of an enemy plane or warship. Each man faced in a different direction, and was responsible for a ninety-degree segment of sea and sky. A few seconds’ delay in spotting a plane and ordering an emergency dive could mean the difference between life and death. In order to make any headway at all, they had to travel on the surface as much as possible. On the surface, the boat could use its diesel engines and travel between ten and twelve knots, about the speed of a bicycle. Submerged, it was restricted to its electric motors, and could go no faster than two and a half knots, the pace of a leisurely walk.