Moving forward in the bottleneck, he ducked through the low round hatches in bulkheads that separated each compartment, acknowledging greetings from his men. Many of the off-duty seamen took advantage of the silence and peace of underwater travel to sleep in narrow berths with a swing-up aluminum guardrail that sandwiched them between the edge and the closest wall.
The aft compartment held the machinery and electrical equipment, the air compressor, and three torpedo tubes. Two diesel engines capable of driving the boat at nineteen knots on the surface smelled of fuel oil and grease. Beside them the two electric motors, with their giant storage batteries, now drove the boat while it was submerged. The batteries would need to be recharged after a few hours, and that could be done only by running the diesel generators, which meant returning to the surface. The convoy would be far out of sight by then, and U-415 could continue in peace.
The galley, a single washroom, and the petty officers’ quarters were located between the aft compartment and midships. Werner smiled when he thought of the first time, as an ensign aboard U-557, he had attempted to use the washroom, trying to master the ballet of opening and closing pressure valves in their proper sequence.
The control room in midships was overloaded with pipes and ducts, valves and hand wheels, gauges and switches. The captain had been aboard U-boats long enough to be intimately familiar with everything there, the pumps, the freshwater producer, the periscope, the magnetic compass. A covered lamp let a soft glow fall on the maps on the chart table, but the navigator had left them unattended. U-415 was on a straight course.
Captain Werner undogged the round hatch into the forward section. He nodded to the radio operator, who had nothing to do while they remained submerged; all the other bunks were occupied. One man snored loudly, and the noise echoed in the otherwise quiet boat. The captain’s corner, with a green leather mattress and a green curtain for privacy, lay up front. Executive Officer Gormann no doubt assumed Werner meant to take a nap.
Instead, he wanted another look at the deadly rockets.
The foremost compartment normally held four standard torpedoes. Now the captain stopped and stared at the sleek, ominous rockets. They had been installed in a submarine bunker at Brest on the Normandy coast. The modifications had taken months, but no other U-boat in the German fleet had weapons such as these. If he could succeed in this one mission, Captain Hans Werner and his U-415 would be remembered long after the end of the war.
The rockets, painted with alternating red and black triangles that arrowed toward the snub nose, looked similar to torpedoes, but much larger. Stabilizing vanes made of dull black carbon angled outward. The forward compartment seemed cramped with only three of them and the machinery for launching the missiles.
Captain Werner had never seen such devices fired before, though he and the exec had been tediously briefed on their operation. Werner remembered the frustrated-looking man in his gray civilian suit walking among the construction bays in the echoing submarine bunker. He had introduced himself as Professor Abraham Esau. Esau had steel-colored hair oiled back neatly, and his face looked as if it did not know how to smile. An ugly scar twisted his upper lip into a threatening expression. Professor Esau made sure he had Werner’s attention and began explaining how the weapons worked and what they would do to the enemy.
The front third of each missile had been filled with deadly radioactive dust. Neither Werner nor Executive Officer Gormann understood the details about nuclear physics, but the captain also knew that Germany had claim to the most brilliant scientific minds in the world. Germans had repeatedly won Nobel prizes for their astonishing successes. Werner could not doubt they might use their new discoveries to develop a weapon that would terrorize the Allies into immediate surrender.
His U-boat would launch that weapon.
The captain had not commanded U-415 in its previous mission, when his predecessor had narrowly escaped destruction from British depth charges. The boat had been undergoing routine structural repair in dock when Admiral Donitz forwarded the order from Reichminister Speer. U-415 would undergo new modifications, for a new mission. Professor Esau had stood on the quay at Brest, looking across the dock to where U-415 lay under the arms of two cranes lowering steel plate down to its deck.
“These three rockets will fill the enemy with terror beyond anything seen in the Blitzkrieg, or even in your earliest days with the U-boat wolfpack.” Esau spoke without turning. The exec scowled at what seemed to be an insult, but Captain Werner waited for the professor. Sounds of construction reverberated in the long bunker, and gentle lapping waves splashed against the metal hull of the submarine. Dim light slanted through the narrow windows along both walls of the bunker.
“This assault will be invisible and deadly. The Americans will have no way to defend against it, no place they can hide. It will continue its effects for years to come. A fitting lesson, don’t you think?” Esau asked.
“If it works,” Captain Werner answered.
“It will work—if you get it to your target intact.”
Now, in the foremost compartment of U-415, the rockets took up space that would normally have been filled with smaller torpedoes. As it was, since these rockets would not be launched until they reached New York harbor, the crew members did not need to keep the area ready for firing; they could use the precious storage space for piling supplies that would otherwise have cluttered the rest of the ship.
Special compartments held shells for the 8.8-centimeter cannon and the two-centimeter antiaircraft gun, but the foodstuffs could go up front with the missiles. This also meant that the crew could free up the second washroom, which was usually used for storage until midway through the mission, when the supplies had been consumed enough to clear it out. The opening of the second washroom normally provided a minor celebration after weeks at sea, but Captain Werner felt the overall morale would be better if his crew had use of both washrooms from the beginning of the voyage.
The rotting smells of damp bread and fruit hung in the air, mixed with the oil and grease of mechanical parts in the new front section. Cans, barrels, and crates of food were wedged along the wall and placed alongside the radioactive warheads. In a locked front compartment, to which only Werner had a key, were stored the most precious supplies such as butter, whipped cream, coffee, and tea, beside a strictly-against-regulations bottle of brandy, which Werner planned to open after they had successfully launched the rockets. From pipes above the rockets hung smoked hams and rolls of salami. For weeks the loaves of bread had escaped the feathery blue mold, a fact so remarkable that some of the seamen considered it a miracle.
Werner ran his hand over the rounded warhead of the black-and-red rocket. The metal felt warm to his touch. He drew back, but then checked all three rockets. Each nose emanated heat that hinted at the boiling power trapped inside. He saw the external paint beginning to show signs of blistering along the edges.
He was glad the submarine had nearly reached its destination. The captain wanted to be rid of these strange new weapons.
U-415 slid into calm New York harbor under cover of darkness. The sky was smeared with a whitish-gray overcast of spring clouds, under lit by the glow of New York City. Splashes of black night and glittering stars showed through where the overcast cleared.
Executive Officer Gormann joined the captain on the conning tower as soon as the hatch opened. Water ran off the wood planking and steel plates of the submarine’s hull. Moving under the silent power of electric motors, they had crept up the Lower Bay after sunset, through the Narrows, and emerged into the Upper Bay under full darkness.