The Browns, by contrast, had never had any great teams. They were the only American League franchise without a pennant to their name. When you played in the same town as the powerhouse Cardinals, drawing crowds was tough. The Phillies, at least, were as wretched as the A’s, and historically even more so.
Peggy listened to the game till the bottom of the hour. The A’s botched a rundown. The Browns’ left fielder dropped not one but two fly balls. Both clubs were in midseason form. At half past, she switched stations again (not without regret, for the ballgame was funnier than the comic making wisecracks about rationing) and found some more news.
She got the international reports, but they mostly consisted of both sides’ lies about what was going on in Russia. Whoever finally came out on top in the war, truth had been one of the first casualties. She wondered if anything could bring it back to life. She doubted that. After Dr. Goebbels’ ministrations and those of his Soviet counterparts, it would need Jesus’ touch even more than Lazarus had.
Then the newsman talked about skirmishes on the Franco-German frontier. Peggy smiled. With a two-front war on his hands, the Fuhrer wouldn’t be doing the same.
Sometimes you had to take the long way around to get where you wanted to go. Julius Lemp and the U-30 certainly had. Setting out from Wilhelmshaven after a refit more thorough than the U-boat could have got in Namsos, he’d taken it all the way around the British Isles to reach the western end of the Channel. Minefields and nets kept German warships from making direct attacks.
He had to be careful in these waters. The Royal Navy and the RAF knew that U-boats might come calling. The welcome they laid on was warm but less than friendly. Along with the enemy patrols, there were also nets and minefields on this side of the Channel. That forty-kilometer-wide stretch of water was vital for getting soldiers and supplies from the island to the Continent.
If a U-boat could slide past the barriers, it might hurt the enemy badly. Plenty of U-boat skippers curled up in their cramped cots each night dreaming of sending a fat troopship to the bottom or of blowing a freighter loaded with munitions halfway to the moon.
Dreams like that came with a price, as Lemp had better reason to know than most. Even if you did sink an important vessel in the English Channel’s narrow waters, you might not come home again to celebrate. The Royal Navy viciously hunted submarines, and had all the advantage in these parts.
Or you could make a mistake. Lemp’s mistake, back when the war was new, was the reason he remained a lowly lieutenant more than three years later. Sinking a troopship or a big, fast freighter was splendid. Sinking a liner with Americans aboard when you thought it was a troopship or a big, fast freighter …
Well, they hadn’t beached him. And if he could get into the Channel, anything he found there would be a legitimate target.
He ascended to the top of the conning tower. It was night now, with a fat moon, nearly full, in the sky. He wouldn’t want to venture into the Channel surfaced in daylight hours. Going in submerged would be too slow-so he told himself, at any rate. He’d sneak in under cover of darkness, pick his spot, and go down to periscope depth. Then he’d see what came by and what the U-30 could do about it.
Even though it was dark, ratings with field glasses scanned sea and sky. You never wanted to get taken by surprise, and seven times never in waters like these. The U-boat would be hard to spot, and an enemy ship or plane might take it for one of their own rather than a German vessel, but … you never wanted to be taken by surprise.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than he heard what could only be airplane engines approaching rapidly from the north. The plane didn’t sound very high. “Go below, boys,” Lemp told the ratings. He shouted down the hatch: “Dive!”
Half a minute was all the U-30 needed to submerge. A good thing, too, because not long after the U-boat went under a bomb burst in the ocean not nearly far enough away. It shook the submarine. A couple of light bulbs popped. A wrench fell off a rack and hit the deck with a clang of iron on iron.
“Good thing we got under in a hurry,” Gerhart Beilharz said.
“Ja.” Lemp nodded, not very happily. “That was a damned good night attack, damned good. He really rattled our teeth there.”
“The moon is bright,” the engineering officer said.
“Ja,” Lemp repeated, even less happily than before. “As bright as that, though? I don’t think so.”
“Luck.” Beilharz was always inclined to look on the bright side of things: a useful attitude for a man who nursed along the sometimes-temperamental Schnorkel.
“Well, I hope so,” the skipper said.
“What else could it be?”
“I know for a fact the English have radar, the same as we do,” Lemp answered. “If they’ve found a way to make a set small enough to stuff it inside an airplane …”
Beilharz looked horrified. “That would be awful!”
“It would make our lives harder, that’s for sure,” Lemp said.
“How can we find out?” Beilharz asked.
“Carefully.” Julius Lemp’s voice was dry. The thought of surfacing and seeing whether they got attacked again had crossed his mind. No sooner had it done so, though, than he torpedoed it. Things were dangerous enough in these waters. Inviting an attack when you didn’t have it might add injury to insult.
“You want to make our approach at Schnorkel depth, then?” Of course the engineer would plump for his favorite toy.
Lemp nodded, though. “Yes, I think we’d better. We won’t get where we’re going as fast as I’d like, but we have a better chance of getting there in one piece. And the Channel seems calm enough. We probably won’t have waves tripping the safety valve and making the snort suck all the air out of the boat.” He made a popeyed face, miming what happened to the submariners when the Schnorkel did just that.
“It doesn’t happen very often … sir.” When Beilharz used military formality, he wanted Lemp to know he was affronted.
“Once is plenty,” Lemp said. “but the beast does have its uses. I can’t imagine a radar set that could spot a Schnorkel tube.” The engineering officer beamed when he added that. Lemp smiled to himself. You had to know what made your crew tick, all right.
It was as if the war were new. Ships carried England’s soldiers and everything they needed to fight with over to France. Get into a likely sea lane and you could make them sorry. It would take longer chugging along with only the Schnorkel and periscope surfaced, but once they did it …
He heard occasional distant pings from enemy ships’ echo-locating systems, but no vessel fired on the U-30 and started an attack run. Overhead, day slowly vanquished night. Lemp could see much farther with the periscope. He could be seen more readily, too. He had to remember that.
There! That was what he wanted: several freighters waddling across the water, escorted by a sleek destroyer that chivvied them along like a sheep dog guiding a flock of animals too stupid to remember where they were going unless they got some help.
He stayed on the Schnorkel as long as he could. The diesels gave him that unexpected extra submerged speed. Then, when he feared some alert sailor might spot the tube, he ordered it lowered and proceeded on battery power.
He fired three eels, one after another. He kept the last one in a forward tube in case he had to use it against the destroyer. The U-30’s bow tried to break the surface as it got lighter after the torpedoes zoomed away. One missed, but the other two struck home: the explosions and the breaking-up noises from the stricken ships came clearly through the hull. The men raised a cheer.