Thomas F. Monteleone
Submerged
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest depth a lower deep
Still threat’ning to devour me opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.
I could not help feeling that they were evil things — mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.
Part One
Chapter One
His boat was going to die.
And all his men? Yes, they were going to die as well.
He sat in his quarters trying to argue with his terrible conclusions. The death of his crew as well as his boat. The two interconnected facts had been threading through Captain Bruckner’s thoughts for weeks. He railed against such fatalism because it challenged his natural tendency to be an optimist.
His colleagues had always branded him an arrogant, prideful bastard, but they respected him because of his record of successes. Victory came more easily to those who believe they cannot be beaten, and Erich Heinz Bruckner had always been a huge believer in himself and his abilities.
But this war and its maniac-leaders had proved to be larger than anything Captain Bruckner had ever encountered in his twenty-five years — so young to be a U-boat captain, but Admiral Doenitz was quite simply running out of men, especially qualified officers. Sworn to defend the Fatherland, Erich had not wavered when the European campaign called him. He’d been raised in a military family — father and older brother had both been German Navy men. His father had distinguished himself at Jutland; and his brother, Gunther, had gone down with his crew in the U-201 east of Newfoundland almost two years ago to the day.
The Bruckners had always been “regular” Navy officers, which meant their first allegiance had been to their Armed Service rather than to any political party or faction. Military families in Germany had been part of a kind of centuries-old aristocracy, but the National Socialists had changed the nature of that tradition. With the creation of the schutzstaffel, the SS, the face of the German military had been twisted into something more grotesque, less honorable.
But the U-boat Service had managed to escape the direct corruption of any purely political constructs. Erich believed this with all his being. He had to believe it. The young sailors who had served in the submarine war had been the bravest and the most unselfish of any German warriors caught in the web of madness they called the Second World War.
If Erich had not been privy to personal dispatches from the office of Admiral Doenitz himself, he would not believe the hideous statistics which described the obituary of the Submarine Service. At this late hour of the war, more than 700 U-boats had been sunk; of almost 39,000 seamen in the Service, more than 32,000 had been killed. Captains were getting younger and younger — like himself — absurdly so. He purposely didn’t cipher the exact percentage of the dead; it would be such a gut-wrenchingly high number.
Better not to think about it…
But he could not ignore the almost certain odds of not returning from a voyage. The allies had become so proficient at detecting the movements of the U-boats, it was absolutely impossible to not undergo depth charge or air attacks while at sea. Erich and some of his more astute colleagues were convinced the Brits or the Yanks had somehow decrypted the Enigma messages which relayed all critical data on the positions and missions of the remaining underwater flotillas. And although to say this publicly, or in any official communiqué, would be tantamount to heresy, or signing a decree to have one’s own throat cut, Captain Bruckner firmly believed it had happened.
Somehow, the allies had done it. They knew far too much.
That is why Erich had insisted on radio silence and no Enigma messaging during this initial cruise of the U-5001. If Germany’s newest, and possibly last, best, secret weapon would survive the odds, and fulfill its outlandish mission, Erich would do nothing foolish to jeopardize a chance for success.
He had fallen in love with this boat from the first moment he’d seen her on the drawing boards in Koenigsberg. The submarine was a prototype vessel which incorporated the latest technologies and the most visionary functions imaginable. Almost twice the length and tonnage of the workhorse Type VII–C, the U-5001 carried the designation of Type XXX-A. Although it bristled with 8 tubes fore and aft, and carried a standard compliment of 40 torpedoes, its armament was secondary to its real mission — as an underwater aircraft carrier.
The boat looked more like a humpbacked whale than the standard barracuda-silhouette. The reason — a bulbous, second-deck air-tight hangar, located aft of the conning tower and housing an ingeniously compact plane. Built by Messerschmitt, with an official designation of ME-5X, the two-man, pontoon bomber was known under its code name as the Little New Yorker because of its size and intended target.
Erich had heard of the original “New Yorker” bomber, which — in the spring of 1945—still remained in the design-stage. Where it would most likely die. He knew the possibility of the Reich actually launching a squadron of super-bombers capable of making round-trip, transatlantic bombing sorties to America’s East Coast cities was remote indeed. The concept of an undersea armada of boats like the U-5001 was a far more likely scenario for striking deathblows to the cities of the United States.
And this was to be the first.
Inside the U-5001’s hangar-deck, in the bomb bay of the experimental plane, lay a new kind of weapon. He had been told the exact nature of the bomber’s payload and mission, but had been ordered not to share this with his crew — none of them. When the U-5001 secretly launched, rumors throughout High Command circulated wildly. Having been treated to some of the Fuhrer’s more ludicrous pipe-dreams in the past, Erich wondered if he might be the victim of another madman’s scheme.
As far as his crew of 52 was concerned, Erich’s present mission was to ascertain the capabilities and performance limits of the boat. With the help of an outer hull sheathing of black rubber designed to make her less visible to Asdic and other types of sonar scans, Erich should be able to slip out of the waters north of the North Sea, angling past the Shetland and Faero Islands. If his luck and skill held, he could drop below Iceland and the convoy lanes to enter the nominally safer waters of the open Atlantic.
Then on to the Eastern seaboard of the United States.
But the recent history of such great numbers of U-boat sinkings — many before they could escape their homewaters west of Hamburg — had stirred a dark current of pessimism in him. Despite the technological wonders of his new boat, the allies could still stumble upon him and his crew, raining down enough hell to send them to the bottom. The sense of dread, an almost palpable expectation of failure, like the stink of sweat, simply would not leave him.
And so, Erich Bruckner had been reduced to thinking of his life and that of his crew in terms of “ifs.”
If they escaped detection; if they withstood any attacks; if they reached the open seas… If the boat had no fatal flaws… if the equipment was as good as the Admirals claimed, then they would perform a series of test-dives, and execute a complex program of maneuvers and battle tactics with the intention of pushing the new boat to her design limits. With a submerged speed of 25 knots, she was fast, but her increased size might present problems of evasiveness and reaction to aggression. One of the points of this maiden voyage would be to challenge the boat’s handling limits. Under less stressful conditions, Erich would have looked forward to the challenge of proving the U-5001 seaworthy with his usual élan.