“Our entire unit will load the ship on March fourteenth. We will sail for two days beyond the German naval blockade to the open Atlantic. There you will be released to hunt for live targets.”
During that two-day cruise I saw what Uncle Martin had been talking about with the heavy traffic of German naval ships arching across the ocean, sealing in most of northern Europe.
We were allowed out on deck at night while the ship was sailing with all its running lights off. No one was allowed to smoke on the decks at night. Almost every hour planes could be heard crossing overhead. Both British B-17 and Grumman P-65’s, and German Ju 88s and Dornier Do 177s lobbed bombs at one another. Then came the lone whine of long-range Messerschmitt reconnaissance planes thrumming through the dark sky. On March 16, when the battleship we were on was due south of Iceland, we were given our orders by Major Oldif. Each Negro pilot was to push off from the ship in his assigned direction and engage any Allied vessel, either navy or merchant. The battleship would do a wide circle, dropping off Negro subs at a prearranged dot on the ocean map close to shipping lanes. Each sub would sail from its drop-off point and return to that spot twenty hours later, where the battleship would collect it on its second circle.
“Timing and precision will be the measure of success for this mission,” Major Oldif said. “This mission is part of a large-scale Atlantic attack force beginning tonight. Do your country and your Führer proud.”
With that we were ushered to the holding bay. Pauwel drummed at his hips with his open hands, hammering out some wild beat. When he shook my hand, his eyes were wide with fear of the unknown and he said, “I hope to see you again.”
Seven subs launched from the cargo bay door of the battleship before Pauwel went. Ten more subs deployed before it was my turn.
“Ready, Dutchman?” Major Oldif asked.
“Yes, sir,” I said. The sailors around my sub closed the glass cockpit case, clicked it shut, and looked down at me through the little half-bubble. One of the sailors held up his hand to me with his fingers splayed. Then he tucked in his thumb, then his pointer finger, and then the next until his pinkie wrapped into his fist, and with that they pushed my Negro down a sliding ramp out the cargo hold into the sea.
The nose submerged and then scooped upward to right itself. The small chop of the waves rolled the Negro from side to side, until I hit the ignition and the hum of the motor growled to life. The engine rattled the whole sub and the torpedo connected beneath. A wave from the wake of the battleship rolled over the glass and the white foam rolled off.
Panic ran through me as the ship sailed away, leaving me in my tube in the middle of the vast ocean. That night a blue haze slid from the sky. I steered my boat on its designated course and then focused on the sliver of moon to calm my nerves. I breathed in the moonlight. My father had told me and my brother to “breathe in the moonlight” when we were younger and lay scared of the dark in our beds. “Breathe the moonlight into your lungs, let it beat through your veins, fill your heart like a lightbulb, then exhale it and send it all the way back. That’s how you become one with the night and stop being afraid of it.”
But there in the sub, breathing deep in the hold, I only tasted burning diesel and the heartburn bile that the food supplement pills had left. The silver light on the endless dark water scared the living hell out of me. It was the first real emotion I’d felt since leaving my mother on the wheelhouse deck of the Lighthouse Lady. I’d sealed up that part, the feeling part. Now, whatever cord that had run so taut between my mind and my heart tore loose. There in the hold, I focused on the chart to quell my rising fear.
My chart had me follow a northwest track to the southern end of Iceland for several hours. In the mini-sub, my thighs itched, my legs were sore from the vibrations, and being crammed in upright made each link of my spine feel welded together. After several hours, everything in me ached to be out of that machine and a newly formed claustrophobia seized me. Where the clouds broke, a wide swath of stars above poured through. Where the cloud cover was dense and hid everything, I felt like the last living person on earth.
I cruised on course for five hours without seeing anything. Then, in the distance, something shifted in the dark. Through my lenses, the small halos of light beneath the running light covers of a large ship slipped past. The ship had a conning tower and large guns mounted on the fore and aft decks. The flags were dark but the white paint trim along the bow told me it was an Allied troop transport vessel. A British light cruiser of the Aurora class. It was sleek and graceful, low to the water and slow as it cut through the swell. I marked my exact position on the chart and deviated my course forty-two degrees to face ahead of it. The ship didn’t have spotlights on so I stayed on the surface to close the gap faster. Within ten minutes I was five hundred meters away and could make out the transom, stern, antenna mast, funnel, and the ship’s boats.
I wish to god I had another story to tell—but I have only this one.
I fired.
I led my shot ahead of the ship to hit aft of the centerline at its fuel tanks. The torpedo disengaged from the hull, its propeller roiled up the water as it dug forward and made a tunnel of white bubbles for about fifty meters before it disappeared. For a moment, just as the weapon released, I felt an overwhelming mixture of exhilaration and power.
Fifty-six seconds later by my watch, a volcanic blast of water leapt up from the ocean. The ship flinched like a wounded creature. An explosion from the ribbed framework of the ship and the long waterline of the vessel bent off the surface and slammed back down. The concussion of the blast rippled through the water and wobbled the jelly between my bones. The echo rocked my sub in waves.
The hit broke the ship’s back, and it heeled to starboard. A large fire billowed out of the hull even as the hole the torpedo created flooded with seawater. The shot hit right at the watertight doors separating the middle and aft sections at the fuel tanks.