A Game of Birds and Wolves, page 7
Prior to the sinking of the City of Benares, the U-boat had not been an entirely foreign entity in Britain. In fact, many people had seen the inside of one. Two decades earlier, on 2nd December 1918 a captured U-boat, the Deutschland, had been towed up the Thames and docked, provocatively, next to Tower Bridge. Part trophy, part morbid attraction, hobbling veterans and inquisitive day-trippers alike could pay a shilling to poke around its confines. Squat and tubby, the Deutschland began life as a cargo carrier. It immediately distinguished itself as the first German submarine to cross the Atlantic. In its maiden voyage in 1916, it carried $1.5 million worth of gemstones, valuable dyes and pharmaceutical drugs from Europe to Baltimore (much to the protestations of the panicky British, who beseeched the Americans not to classify U-boats as merchant ships, arguing that submergible vessels cannot be easily stopped and searched for illicit munitions).
In February the following year the Deutschland was transformed into a wartime vessel with a refit that added six bow torpedo tubes and two naval guns borrowed from a battleship. It was sent to war, where it sank a harbour’s worth of forty-two Allied ships. Then it was surrendered to the British at the Armistice. The Deutschland was one of a hundred or so German U-boats that were towed to England at the end of the First World War to be scrapped for metal, and the reliable, German-made diesel engines removed and used in industrial factories.
Even in peacetime, the Deutschland continued to wreak havoc both major and minor. While being towed up the Thames, it collided with a passing steamship. (This was the second accidental impact the U-boat had been involved in; when departing the port of New London before the war, it rammed a tugboat, killing all five crew members.) Then, after its stay in London, the decommissioned vessel conducted a tour of the UK for exhibitions in Great Yarmouth, Southend, London, Ramsgate, Brighton and Douglas on the Isle of Man, further raising the U-boat’s profile in the national consciousness. In September 1921, the vessel was finally towed to Birkenhead, just outside Liverpool, to be scrapped. During the process of breaking up, an explosion killed five young apprentice fitters, a final act of devastation by a submarine much of whose brief existence had been characterised by wanton destruction.
In more recent times, too, the British civilian had been made aware of the U-boat menace. It was a U-boat that had made the primary attack on the first day of the war. A few hours after Britain declared war on Germany at 11:00 a.m. on 3rd September 1939, Lieutenant Fritz-Julius Lemp, captain of U-30, sighted the transatlantic passenger ship SS Athenia north-west of Ireland, en route to Canada from Glasgow. Lieutenant Lemp sank the liner. The attack, in which 117 passengers and crew members died, violated the Hague convention, which prohibited attacks on unarmed passenger vessels, and ensured that the start of war was marked by national awareness of the lethal U-boats stalking British shipping lanes.
In the early months of war, Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, had sought to allay these fears. (Later he famously wrote that the U-boat terror was ‘the only thing that ever really frightened me’.) In a speech at Mansion House on 20th January 1940, at a moment when British forces had sunk just nine of Germany’s fifty-seven U-boats, Churchill claimed to have sunk ‘half the U-boats with which Germany began the war’.
To arrive at this dishonest conclusion, Churchill had added sixteen U-boats that the Admiralty believed may have been sunk to the nine U-boats known to have been sunk. To this number, for good measure, Churchill also added a further ten U-boats of his own imagining, to bring the total to more than half of the U-boat fleet as British intelligence understood it to be.
This exaggeration of gains and suppression of losses, be it by accident or scheme, had, as the author of a classified inquiry into publicity around the Battle of the Atlantic wrote immediately after the war, ‘a heartening effect on the British public’. The political advantage apparently justified the damage caused to truth.5 Arguably, had the full miserable extent of the Allied performance in the Battle of the Atlantic to date been fully known, it may have had an invigorating effect on the coordination of efforts to find an urgent solution. The author of the inquiry, Admiral V. Lt. Godfrey* concluded, however, that Britain ‘never came quite clean about the progress of the war at sea’.6
There was, however, no possibility of maintaining public denial when news of the City of Benares broke, the discussion of which dominated newspapers and pubs alike. Speaking at the House of Commons, Geoffrey Shakespeare, the director of the evacuee programme who had interviewed Colin when he landed, spoke of his sense of ‘horror and indignation’ that any ‘German submarine captain could be found to torpedo a ship over 600 miles from land in a tempestuous sea’. This deed, he said, ‘will shock the world’.
Shakespeare’s outrage was echoed and amplified in every headline that week. ‘Nazis Torpedo Mercy Ship, Kill Children’, read the front page of the Daily Sketch. The Daily Mail, which only a few years earlier had offered fascism its full-throated support, ran an editorial that urged readers to dwell on every ‘dreadful’ detail of the story, so that they might be ‘burn[ed] into our minds as proof of the character we are sworn to defeat’. Still unaware of the Holocaust, an editorial in The Times went so far as to argue that no Nazi brutality would stay ‘longer graven upon the records than the sinking of the City of Benares’.
While Kapitänleutnant Bleichrodt unwound at the U-boat hotel in Lorient, British propaganda began to depict the U-boat captains as fanatical Nazis, and their crews as pitiless killers. On the latter count, the reputation was often earned. In the five months from June to October 1940, during which the City of Benares was lost, U-boats sank 274 merchant ships and sustained just two losses. By the end of the year the U-boats had sunk more than 1,200 ships, about five years’ worth of construction work in typical peacetime conditions, and more than the rest of the German navy and Luftwaffe combined.
The numbers told, if not the whole story of the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’–as, with characteristic flair, Churchill had memorably christened the front–then the salient point: the British were losing catastrophically.
After weeks at sea, the U-boat crew members’ first steps ashore were faltering, a clumsiness that betrayed the cramped conditions they had laboured under, and the need to acclimatise.
A so-called Marine Helferimen, the German equivalent of a Wren, greeted Kretschmer with a fat bouquet of flowers. It was the German’s first taste of the VIP treatment that was to come. While Colin and the other survivors of the City of Benares had returned to a country of thrift and rations, the U-boatmen landed in a country of wine and plenty. Lothar-Günther Buchheim, a war correspondent who travelled with a U-boat crew, later described France as ‘a kind of paradise’ to the crews who had, in the first year of war, become grimly accustomed to German shortages.7 The exchange rate for the occupying forces was fixed at twenty francs to the Reichsmark8–three more than the rate quoted on the Berlin stock exchange–a favourable discrepancy that enabled crew members, who received a U-boatman salary on top of their service pay, to spend their downtime living the high life.
Beak-wetting went all the way to the top. When he first arrived in France, Doenitz promptly commandeered a hotel and requisitioned all of its supplies, including its stocks of champagne, bottles that he made available to his U-boatmen for a token sum. Many of these men would destroy themselves with booze, numbing the harrowing reality of their position.
Some crew members took the BdU Zug, an express train reserved for U-boatmen that ran from Nantes through Le Mans and on to the German cities of Bremen, Hamburg and Flensburg, and would be home within two days. Those who chose to remain in France were sent to the U-bootsweiden, luxury hotels or chateaux that had been commandeered to be used as rest camps. These safe havens were far from the ports targeted by Allied bombers, where people were routinely forced to seek shelter, either from bombs or from falling debris from downed planes, whose pirouetting wings seemed as harmless as falling feathers, till their weight was felt through the ground.
In Lorient, relationships between the Germans and the locals varied. In the week after the Germans marched into Paris, and before they arrived in Lorient, on 21st June 1940 the port’s préfet maritime, Admiral Penfentenyo, prepared to resist the impending German arrival. He ordered all Lorient ships to sail, some of which, like the Victor-Schoelcher, were loaded with crates of gold and money. Warehouses and oil depots were torched, unseaworthy vessels scuttled. Two platoons of French naval riflemen held back the German advance for two hours, till a false report that Admiral Penfentenyo had died resulted in a French colonel ordering a ceasefire and the raising of a white flag of surrender.
The next day a notice, signed ‘WELCKER, commander-in-chief of German troops’ and printed in the local newspaper Le Nouvelliste du Morbihan, called for ‘calm and order’. Welcker warned against ‘thoughtless acts’, and assured citizens that the mayor and police would be held responsible for maintaining order. The sale of spirits was forbidden, and a ten o’clock curfew implemented, during which residents could no longer drive or assemble unless they were doctors, priests or midwives.
‘Resistance and acts of sabotage… [were] pointless,’ Welcker wrote.9
From the first week of occupation, the Nazi flag flew above all public buildings. Road signs were rewritten in German in black Gothic lettering, and residents were warned that for every German soldier killed by the Resistance, ten Frenchmen would be shot in return. Tuning in to British radio was punishable by death.10 Yet an uneasy peace developed between the French and their occupiers, who had been ordered to make a good impression on the locals, distributing chocolates and cookies to the children, and staging parades and concerts for the adults.
Life ashore was comfortable. The German crews were allowed to visit the local cinema Rex in rue de la Comédie, where the films changed every five days or so, for free. Some U-boatmen used brothels, which all German soldiers were permitted to frequent, providing they cleared out before half-past ten each night.11 While the Germans established quasi-official bordellos in France, there were not enough workers, and some Frenchwomen, all of whom were in desperate need of money, joined. Some of the women passed information to the Resistance, who then relayed it to London.12 Other crew members took local girlfriends, relationships that came at a significant cost when, after the war, 189 women were tried for so-called ‘horizontal collaboration’ and deprived of certain civil rights.13
On their first night ashore, Kretschmer and his crew dined at the Beau Séjour hotel. After toasting their successes, the crew was told that in the morning they were to be sent to a U-bootsweiden in Quiberon for a week’s recuperation. Most of the men headed out into the night. Kretschmer, ever studious, joined Prien to discuss the nascent wolfpack’s successes, and Prien assured his friend and rival that he had sent a signal to command correcting the miscrediting of U-99’s kills to Bleichrodt. Neither man was yet aware of a kill that undeniably belonged to Captain Bleichrodt: the City of Benares.
Just then, another captain from the wolfpack–the third famous ace of the young war, Joachim Schepke–clattered into the lounge, haggard from two days partying in Parisian clubs. Kretschmer made his excuses and retired to his room and began to write up his standing orders for U-99, a document that laid out the rules for the efficient and successful running of a U-boat. This twelve-point plan covered everything from the need for an effective lookout (the ease with which Kretschmer had managed to sneak up on Prien a few days earlier was fresh in the mind) through to the need to set aside time for cleaning dishes.
Most of Kretschmer’s instructions were commonsensical. Point nine, however, went against the written advice that U-boat captains maintain a minimum distance of 1,000 metres between the U-boat and its target. Kretschmer countered, plainly, that at every given opportunity, torpedoes should be fired at extreme close range.
‘This can only be done’, he wrote, ‘by penetrating the escort’s anti-submarine screen and, at times, getting inside the convoy lanes.’
Having scored three kills in quick succession, Kretschmer knew that there was no more efficient way to cause havoc on a British convoy, causing the escort captains to flounder.
‘This should be the objective of all our attacks,’ he added.
In two sentences Kretschmer had outlined a tactic that would, in the months to come, lead to the deaths of thousands of Allied sailors and raise the line on the chart of shipping losses at the Admiralty in London perilously close to the red threshold of starvation. It was a tactic so effective that it would lead to the formation of a British unit staffed by a ragtag crew of women, led by a captain with a life-changing disability, dedicated to its uncovering.
VI
Never at Sea
Madge Barnes ran along the Edinburgh cobbles and, with a flutter of adrenaline, dropped the envelope into a postbox. It was not the first time the teenager had applied to join the Wrens. A year earlier, on the eve of her seventeenth birthday and less than a week after the outbreak of war, she had sent much the same application letter to London. The eventual reply, that Barnes was, alas, too young, had stung, but at least the rejection was temporary. A year later, a week or so before the City of Benares left Liverpool, Barnes promptly re-sent her application. It was timed to arrive at Wrens headquarters in London on 5th September 1940, the day of her eighteenth birthday.
Barnes was one of tens of thousands of young women who sent off similar applications for, initially, one of just 1,500 vacancies in the Wrens. Christian Oldham was another. Having attempted to bandage her step-grandfather’s bald head as a try-out, Oldham had decided that nursing was not for her, and chose the Wrens instead. Oldham had a twin advantage in securing one of the hotly contested spots. Not only was her father an admiral, but her bridge partner was Colonel Frank, brother of Vera Laughton Mathews. And Laughton Mathews, or VLM as she was often called, was the newly appointed director of the Wrens.
Vera Laughton Mathews had joined the first incarnation of the Wrens, formed in 1917 to support the First World War effort, in her late twenties after reading an advertisement in The Times under the headline: ‘Women for the Navy: New Shore Service to Be Formed’. Like Barnes, it was not the first time that she applied. Three years earlier, in 1914, long before there was any talk of allowing women to share the work of naval men, she strode up to the imposing Admiralty building and asked for a job. The man on the front desk looked her up and down and replied, curtly: ‘We don’t want any petticoats here.’
The rejection bounced off Laughton Mathews, who since the age of twenty had been involved with the suffragette movement, fighting for women’s right to vote, and who often boasted that she was descended from pirates on both sides of her family.1 Principled, idealistic and usefully confrontational–the necessary characteristics for any young activist–Laughton Mathews felt the full force of society’s prejudice just as she was entering the adult world. While standing at the side of the road handing out issues of the Suffragette newspaper, on which she worked as a journalist, passers-by would spit in her face.
With characteristic eagerness, Laughton Mathews showed up at the first temporary Wrens office on the same day that she read the advertisement in The Times. Three women in plain clothes–including the inaugural director of the Wrens, Dame Katherine Furse, a ‘tall, handsome, athletic woman who, despite her youth, had the quiet, determined authority that accompanies a natural leader–conducted the interview. Laughton Mathews volunteered the nugget that she had been a suffragette. As her interviewers’ faces darkened, she tried to make amends with mention that she also had a brother in the navy.
‘Ah,’ said one of the women, witheringly. ‘Does that mean you also have lots of boyfriends in the service?’
Despite her fears, Laughton Mathews had not in fact thrown the interview. She was told to enrol on the first Wrens officers’ course, scheduled for the end of December. The next month, she arrived at an old naval training facility in Crystal Palace–the only naval establishment at the time that was willing to receive a woman officer–wearing a bottle-green coat and beige hat (an official uniform was some way off, and the stylish haute-couture cut of the later Wrens uniform decades away). The Wrens’ motto at the time was ‘Never At Sea’, a pledge that also carries with it a sort of negative space assurance: we know our place. What other organisation is defined by what its members are forbidden from doing, rather than what they hope to achieve? Nevertheless, 7,000 women joined the Wrens in the First World War, more than double the anticipated number. In addition to cooking and clerical work, they performed an array of duties. At the Anti-Aircraft Defence Corps, Wrens worked as telephonists calling up gun stations during air raids to pass on orders for gunfire and barrage. At the Battersea Experimental Workshops, Wrens were employed in drawing, tracing and preparing designs for new machinery and weapons. Seventy Wrens worked as drivers for the Admiralty.2
Then the war was over. Just a year after Laughton Mathews had read the advertisement in The Times, the training depot at Crystal Palace became an Army Demobilisation Centre. Before the last of the recruits had been demobbed, Laughton Mathews fell victim to influenza, the great plague spread by the Great War in France, where men fought in trenches that flowed with blood, rats and urine, before returning in their infected millions to their home countries around the world. By the time the virus had run its course, almost three years later, as many as 100 million people had died–a higher toll than that of both world wars combined.
The pandemic’s symptoms were like spells cast by a cruel yet imaginative witch. Most commonly, hands and faces turned a pale shade of lavender, the result of a condition known as heliotrope cyanosis. After a few days, some victims’ skin turned black, before their hair and teeth fell out. Others gave off a curious smell, like musty straw. One medic described seeing men choking to death, ‘the lungs so swamped with blood, foam and mucus that… each desperate breath was like the quacking of a duck’. The American novelist Katherine Anne Porter survived, but the disease permanently turned her ebony hair pure white.
