THE LONE WOLF (2025 Edition) by Michel Poulin - HTML preview

CHAPTER 10 – A DESPERATE HUNT

 

15:38 (New York Time)

Monday, January 5, 1942

Headquarters, United States Navy Atlantic Fleet

Norfolk, Virginia, U.S.A.

‘’Show me again that report on this U-800.’’

‘’Yes, Admiral!’’ replied the assistant operations officer of the fleet before going quickly through his pile of messages. Finding the one asked for, he then passed it to a depressed-looking Vice Admiral Royal Ingersoll, Commander of the Atlantic Fleet, who was standing with other senior naval commanders around the big chart table of the operations center. However, re-reading the report sent from Curacao didn’t seem to help his mood, on the contrary. Ingersoll soon looked up from the message and eyed the men around the chart table before speaking.

‘’Some will probably be tempted to say that, since this damned U-800 is now in the Caribbean Sea, it is no longer our concern. However, that German submarine did pass through our East Coast operational zone recently and we failed to stop it. It is thus still partly our responsibility to find and destroy it before it causes yet more damage to

our war effort and to ourselves. Furthermore, we have orders from our new CNO10 to help hunt down and sink that submarine, so any discussion about this is moot. We now know for certain that there are elite commando soldiers aboard the U-800, meaning that we can expect coastal sabotage raids along the eastern and southern seaboards anywhere and anytime, on top of having a German submarine on the prowl and hitting our shipping lanes. We will thus have to reinforce significantly the level of security of our port installations and aboard our ships at anchor.’’

‘’But, Admiral, aren’t we grossly overestimating the threat represented by this lone German submarine?’’ asked Rear Admiral Adolphus Andrews, the commander of the Eastern Sea Frontier area. Ingersoll gave him a distinctly less than friendly look as he answered his question. Andrews had basically done nothing during the enemy rampage of the last months and had ignored the suggestions from the British to form

10 CNO: Chief of Naval Operations. Title of the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Navy.

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coastal convoys in order to lower the losses in merchant ships. In a way, Ingersoll himself was also guilty of negligence in that matter for not having pushed Andrews harder, but he now was about out of patience with him.

‘’We are grossly overestimating the threat from that submarine? Haven’t our recent losses, mostly incurred in your sector, been enough to convince you that it was time to get off your ass, Rear Admiral Andrews?’’

Ingersoll then looked around the table at his assembled subordinates, his expression severe.

‘’The times of half measures and peacetime habits are over, gentlemen! Since what little we have in the Caribbean and in the Gulf of Mexico area is probably insufficient to find and destroy quickly that U-800, I have decided to temporarily transfer three full destroyer squadrons and four maritime patrol aircraft squadrons south, in order to reinforce our defenses there. I will also direct the Marine Corps to assign sub-units from Camp Lejeune to various ports and installations along our Southern Coast, in order to protect them from commando raids. I want a detailed plan for an extensive anti-submarine sweep of the Caribbean Basin and Gulf of Mexico prepared and ready for my review in three days. We will then meet again. You are dismissed, gentlemen!’’ As his admirals left, Ingersoll went to a young lieutenant who had obviously been waiting for a while already with a message in his hands.

‘’You have something for me, Lieutenant?’’

‘’Yes sir!’’ replied the young officer, coming to rigid attention and presenting the message he was holding. ‘’We received this report twenty minutes ago, sir.’’ Taking the message and reading it quickly, Ingersoll had to stop himself from cursing out loud: five tanker ships had been torpedoed and sunk off the Venezuelan coast, while three more tanker ships had been shelled and destroyed while docked at the oil transfer terminal of the Cardon Refinery, in Punta Cardon, Venezuela. The terminal itself, while not directly targeted, had been significantly damaged by the burning of the docked tankers. The worst part was that all this had happened over ten hours ago, with this the first information he was getting about it. Keeping the message, he started walking briskly towards the office of his intelligence officer, intent on telling him what he thought of such delays in the passage of vital information. What he couldn’t possibly know then was that his troubles with German submarines were only starting: the first group of Type IX oceanic attack submarines sent by Admiral Karl Dönitz to attack merchant shipping along the American East Coast was going to arrive soon, just after the planned

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departure of three American destroyer squadrons for the Caribbean Basin to hunt down the U-800.

13:06 (New York Time)

Tuesday, January 6, 1942

Officers’ mess of the U-800

Off the coast of Colombia, Caribbean Sea

Hugo Margraff was the last one to arrive at the officers’ mess of the submarine and found all seven other officers aboard assembled at the dining table, with a chart of the Caribbean Basin and of the Gulf of Mexico spread on the table. Otto Kretschmer, apparently in quite a good mood, smiled on seeing him enter the mess and motioned to him to join the group at the table.

‘’Ahh, Leutnant Margraff! Please sit down with us: we have strategy to discuss.’’ Taking place beside Leutnant zur See Franz Streib on one of the pivoting seats, Margraff kept silent then, expecting the discussion to be mostly about naval matters. In that he was proven wrong rather quickly. Pointing at a spot on the chart spread on the table, Otto Kretschmer spoke in a sober tone to his assembled subordinates.

‘’Here is our last position, calculated an hour ago from a fresh sextant measurement. We are now about 265 nautical miles from our next objective, the Colombian port of Cartagena and its maritime traffic. Apart from being a very active port, Cartagena also happens to have a large refinery and oil tanker terminal, which I consider as primary targets for us. I know that most submarine commanders would say that the business of submarines is to sink ships, but if we could destroy the refineries that fill the tankers we normally concentrate on, then why not do it? Refineries, as we amply showed in Curacao, are large, easy to spot and very vulnerable to any sort of damage. Another reason for my interest in refineries is that we only have a finite number of torpedoes aboard. In fact, we already have expended 42 of our sixty torpedoes and I intend to save what’s left for truly worthy targets at sea. On the other hand, we still have over 170 rounds for our 10.5-centimeter deck gun and I intend to use those in the most efficient manner to help save on torpedoes. Another way I have in mind to save torpedoes is to keep using you and your men, Leutnant Margraff, since you have proved to be quite good at boarding ships and blowing shit up.’’

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Hugo smiled on hearing that: the actions at Cape Lookout and in Miami had given him the taste for more of the same.

‘’What do you have in mind for me and my men, Herr Kapitän?’’

‘’Well, that’s one of the points of this discussion: I don’t know yet for sure. What I intend to do is to present you all a list of our potential targets around the Caribbean Basin and the Gulf of Mexico and to then discuss which ones we should strike in priority and with what kind of weapons, meaning either torpedoes, guns or saboteurs. Keep as well in mind the psychological factor while discussing: we want our enemies to be confused and to wonder where we will strike next. Even if you think that a particular target is way too risky to attack, don’t dismiss it offhand: the Americans have proven so far to be surprisingly amateurish and ill-prepared in terms of defensive measures. If they think that a port or facility is unlikely to be attacked by us, then it may just give us a chance to strike at it by slipping around the American defenses, thanks to their negligence. So, gentlemen, the floor is now open to everyone and everything, including crazy ideas!’’

17:29 (New York Time)

Coastal lookout post, Bocachica

Southern entrance to the Bay of Cartagena

Colombia

The Colombian Coast Guard officer focused as best he could his eyes while examining with his binoculars the large tanker ship entering the Bay of Cartagena an hour after Sunset. He then briefly looked at his NCO, who was sitting nearby in front of the radio set of their lookout post.

‘’I see an American flag flying from the stern of that tanker. The name on the bow is ‘TEXACO UNITED’. Is it on the ship’s manifest for today, Petty Officer Guzman?’’

‘’One second, Teniente!... Yes, the TEXACO UNITED was expected today to arrive from Boston to fill up with gasoline at the oil terminal of the Empresa Colombiana de Petroleos Refinery. It was supposed to arrive in the afternoon, but it could have been delayed by a storm.’’

‘’We have the right name and flag: that’s good enough for me. Record its entry in the bay at this hour.’’

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‘’Yes, Teniente!’’

The Colombian officer then all but forgot about the American tanker, looking more for a rumored German submarine supposedly prowling the Caribbean Basin and making the Americans paranoid.

On the bridge of the TEXACO UNITED, Hugo Margraff smiled while scanning the bay around the tanker ship with his binoculars.

‘’No sign of a reaction by the Colombians. I think that our little stratagem worked.’’

Matrosen Obergefreiter Peter Schültz, at the wheel of the captured American tanker ship, grinned in response.

‘’To be fair to these Colombians, who would think that we could pull such a stunt as this? I just hope that these American merchant sailors will quickly enough be rescued from their lifeboat floating off the coast. I have the refinery and oil terminal in sight, four nautical miles ahead. There are two tankers presently docked at the oil terminal.’’

‘’Excellent! Do as a normal visiting tanker would do, but head directly for the biggest of those two tankers. Uh, what kind of impact can we expect in a collision at ten knots between tanker ships?’’

Peter Schültz wiggled his left hand at that question.

‘’With a 12,000-ton tanker doing the ramming? We will probably cut that other tanker in half, on top of crushing part of the loading jetty. Believe me, Herr Leutnant: you don’t want to be still aboard when that will happen.’’

‘’Oh, I certainly don’t intend to stay longer than what is needed to ensure that we do hit that tanker and terminal, especially with that white phosphorus incendiary round rigged to explode on deck.’’

Hugo then resumed his watching, concentrating on the two tankers and the wide expanse of the refinery beyond the oil terminal.

‘’That refinery complex is certainly big by any standards: it easily covers over one square kilometer of surface. I can see plenty of juicy oil storage tanks all over the place. Once we lit a fire at the oil terminal, the illumination should make it easy for our gunners on the U-800 to target those storage tanks.’’

As he said that, Hugo couldn’t resist throwing a glance towards the starboard side of the tanker, where the surfaced U-800 was navigating on a parallel course and very close to the tanker, using the dark mass of the American ship’s hull to hide itself from coastal

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observers. Only the most observant lookout would be able to make out in the obscurity the low, dark silhouette of the submarine against the background made by the tanker’s black hull. The whole scheme was actually an idea from himself and Hugo was quite proud of it, while Otto Kretschmer had certified his idea as crazy enough to just work. Normally, Otto would normally have avoided to directly attack the coastal installations of an officially neutral country, but the directives he had received on that subject from Admiral Dönitz had been clear: if a supposedly neutral country actually supported openly the war efforts of the United States and of Great Britain, then Germany was going to ignore, at least unofficially, that so-called neutrality. Besides, Colombia had already cut all diplomatic relations with Japan, Germany and Italy, so there was in truth little left to talk about on that matter.

At the oil terminal loading jetty, the lonely sailor on night bridge watch aboard the Canadian tanker ship JOHN IRVING got on his feet, becoming nervous as a big tanker ship was approaching the jetty and was showing no sign of slowing down. That tanker seemingly accelerated further when it got within 800 meters from the jetty, heading straight towards the JOHN IRVING. That convinced the sailor to pick up the telephone receiver on the bridge and call his captain’s cabin. He got a sleepy answer after four rings.

‘’Captain Kinnock speaking! What is it?’’

‘’Captain, a ship is heading for us at full speed. It is now less than half a mile away and is still not slowing down.’’

‘’WHAT? I’M COMING UP!’’

Captain Kinnock never had time to get to the bridge before the TEXACO UNITED slammed at twelve knots, its maximum speed, right into the unlucky JOHN IRVING. The bow of the American tanker, which was much bigger than the Canadian tanker, sliced the JOHN IRVING in two, with enough residual energy left to continue on and hit directly the oil loading jetty behind it, badly warping it and breaking in multiple places the pipelines connecting the jetty with the oil tank farms. Refined gasoline and diesel fuel then gushed out in massive quantities from both the broken pipelines and from the ripped tanks of the JOHN IRVING, spreading on the surface of the water around the jetty. The panicked sailors of the JOHN IRVING who had survived the collision then scrambled to evacuate their doomed ship, while the few Colombian workers present around the jetty ran away as fast as they could. Two minutes after the collision, the

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white phosphorus incendiary shell on the bow of the TEXACO UNITED burst, sending burning white phosphorus particles all around in a radius of fifty meters and igniting the puddles of gasoline. A huge fireball then rose in the evening sky with a mighty roar, illuminating everything within two kilometers. A few seconds later, the servants of the twin 10.5 cm deck gun turret of the U-800 opened fire, aiming at the oil storage tanks of the refinery. The 15.1 kilo explosive shells easily pierced the thin steel walls of the giant storage tanks, exploding inside them and literally bursting them open like balloons filled with water, raining either gasoline, diesel fuel or crude oil around. Because they needed to mix first with some oxygen from the surrounding air, that fuel did not ignite immediately but flowed out of the ripped open tanks, flooding the grounds of the refinery. After a dozen 10.5 cm shells were fired, the forward deck quad 20mm anti-aircraft gun of the U-800 then opened fire, sending explosive incendiary rounds in thick streams around the refinery and igniting the spilled fuel. A titanic detonation resulted, thanks to fuel-air explosive mixture effect, creating a shockwave which shook the gunners of the U-800, and this at a distance of over three kilometers. Hugo Margraff’s team, which had evacuated the TEXACO UNITED after setting it on its final collision course, was also nearly thrown into the water as their commandeered motor boat from the American tanker nearly capsized due to the blast. The Germans then stared with awe at the gigantic fireball which rose above the now destroyed refinery.

‘’Mein Gott!’’ uttered Hugo Margraff, transfixed by that vision. ‘’What a sight!’’ Taking back hold of himself, he then pointed at the U-800, now less than fifty meters away.

‘’Come on! Let’s hurry and get back to our submarine!’’

Peter Schültz, at the commands of the motor boat, didn’t need more encouragement and pushed his outboard motor to the maximum. Soon, they were bumping against the hull of the U-800, with sailors on the deck of the submarine throwing ropes at them. Two minutes later, all the Germans were inside, with the access hatches firmly closed and locked and with the two deck gun mounts retracted under the upper deck plating. Staying on the surface for the moment because of the shallowness of the Bay of Cartagena, which wasn’t deep enough to allow the U-800 to dive to periscope depth, the submarine turned around and made its way at top speed towards the bay’s southern entrance. The Colombian Coast Guard men at the Bocachica lookout post, not having an artillery gun at their disposal, could only watch as the German submarine sped out of the bay and disappeared into the night.

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10:42 (New York Time)

Thursday, January 8, 1942

Headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic Fleet

Norfolk, Virginia

Vice Admiral Ingersoll looked up from the report just brought in by his chief of staff, Captain Olaf Hustvedt, and threw a discouraged look at the ethnic Norwegian.

‘’If not for all the damage they caused in Cartagena, I would be tempted to clap my hands to congratulate those Germans: they have huge balls and imagination aplenty.’’

‘’They certainly showed some very unorthodox thinking last night, Admiral.’’

‘’Then, how about thinking ourselves in an unorthodox manner in order to guess where they will attack next, Olaf?’’

‘’I already did a bit of that, Admiral. If we look at the trail of destruction left behind by this U-800, we can actually see some continuity in it. It probably started here in Norfolk, when it sowed a minefield to block our harbor entrance, then went up along the coast towards New York before turning around and sprinting to Miami, probably to throw us off. From Miami, it went down along the Cuban and Dominican coast, where those Germans picked up the Kaiser family, then went straight to Curacao, ignoring the dense ship traffic around Bermuda. From Curacao, the U-800 apparently followed the South American coast westward, hitting Punta Cardon on its way before finally hitting Cartagena. One pattern that I believe I see in this is the priority given by this Captain Kretschmer to targets connected to oil, be they tanker ships, oil terminals or refineries, which he probably considers key strategic targets. My bet is that the U-800 will continue westward and then northward towards the next biggest target of strategic importance: the Panama Canal Zone. Once in that area, Kretschmer would find himself in what I would call a ‘target-rich environment’, with dozens of ships waiting daily in line to pass through the Panama Canal locks and waterways. Apart from our main coastal ports, the Panama Canal is probably the most vital maritime installation we have and is the doorway between the Atlantic and the Pacific.’’

Ingersoll thought over those words for a moment before nodding his head slowly.

‘’What you just said certainly makes much sense, Olaf. Very well: tell two of the three destroyer squadrons we just dispatched south to head at best speed towards the

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Panama Canal Zone, with the mission to hunt the U-800 once there. Alert also the Panama Zone Commander about this German submarine and ask him to double up his anti-submarine air patrols. With luck, we will be able to catch that fox before he can again enter the hen house.’’

‘’I’m on it, Admiral!’’

16:25 (New York Time)

Monday, January 12, 1942

Headquarters, U.S. Atlantic Fleet

Norfolk, Virginia

‘’I have both good news and bad news, Admiral.’’

Ingersoll passed a hand on his face before replying to his chief of staff: the last two weeks had been truly exhausting and stressful ones for him and for everybody at Fleet Headquarters.

‘’Alright, Olaf: give me the bad news first!’’

‘’We now have a group of German submarines which is confirmed as operating along our East Coast, Admiral: four ships have been torpedoed and sunk in the last five hours between New York and Atlantic City, two of them nearly simultaneously and over a hundred miles apart. It is thus not the U-800 at play, especially in view of the distance to Cartagena: The U-800 simply could not get from Cartagena to New York this fast.’’

‘’And the good news?’’

‘’We have not heard from nor seen the U-800 since its attack against Cartagena, five days ago. Maybe it ran out of torpedoes and is now on its way back to Europe.’’

‘’Thank God if that’s truly the case! That Kretschmer was becoming worse than the Black Plague! On the other hand, he still could be hiding somewhere, waiting for us to lower our guard before striking again. Keep those destroyers searching for the U-800 around the entrance of the Panama Canal waterway, just in case it reappears there, but tell them to stay in passive sonar mode and to wait in quiet, ambush positions. With luck, we could just attract Kretschmer into our nets.’’

‘’And the other German submarines now operating along our East Coast, Admiral?’’

Ingersoll’s shoulders sagged a bit at that question.

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‘’Deploy the destroyers we have left the best you can, Olaf. Our heavy units will stay in port for the moment, so that they don’t eat up our limited destroyer availability with escort duty taskings. As for me, I will be contacting the governors of our coastal states to implore them again to enforce a night curfew along the coast. Hopefully, they will prove more reasonable and realistic this time.’’

Unfortunately for Ingersoll and for hundreds of American and Allied merchant sailors, his pious hope proved unfounded. The pack of German Type IX submarines now sailing up and down the American East Coast had just started what would be called later on ‘The Happy Time’, thanks to the stubborn refusal by American politicians and many military leaders to look at reality in the face. It was going to take another three months before common sense prevailed over inertia and old habits.

09:06 (Texas Time)

Wednesday, January 14, 1942

Control Room, U-800

Coast of Texas

‘’I’m sorry, Herr Kapitän: this area of the Texas coast is too shallow for us to operate safely. The continental plateau along the whole coast this side of the Gulf of Mexico is unusually wide and shallow, with barely enough water depth to operate at periscope depth, and this with only a few meters to spare under our keel. Our high-definition sonar readings are formal: with the tiny gradient of the sea bottom in this region, we would have to cover a good eighty to a hundred nautical miles from the coast just to get to waters deep enough to dive past thirty meters. We would be an easy prey for any maritime patrol aircraft flying overhead while we sailed over this shallow continental plateau.’’

Otto made a bitter smirk on hearing the judgment of his navigator, Franz Streib. Since his charts of this region were old and incomplete, he had decided to conduct first a reconnaissance sweep before attacking his intended target. Now, it seemed that the port of Galveston was out of reach for him, short of taking suicidal risks to get there.

‘’Very well! We will thus forget about Galveston and the other Texan ports on our target list.’’

‘’So, where will we go next, Herr Kapitän? Do we return to Lorient now?’’

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‘’I will be damned if I would return to port with eighteen eels still aboard, Franz. I want to expend those torpedoes on worthy targets before we go back home.’’ Grabbing the list of potential targets he had made with his officers eight days ago, Otto scratched off his intended targets along the Texas and Louisiana coasts, then looked at what was left for a long moment, with his navigator waiting silently for his decision. Otto finally put his finger on one entry in his target list and spoke in a firm tone.

‘’This one holds the most promises for us, even though it is supposed to be strongly defended. Turn the boat around and head South-southeast.’’

‘’Yawoll, Herr Kapitän!’’

14:52 (Central America Time)

Monday, January 19, 1942

Control room, U-800

On silent submerged cruise off the port of Colon Caribbean coast of Panama

Otto was sharing the forward underwater observation dome with three of his sailors as the U-800 glided quietly in a parallel course to the ledge of the continental shelf off the coast of Panama. One of them was a watchman on duty but the two others were playing underwater tourists, like Otto. With the U-800 navigating at a depth of eighty meters and with the local waters being quite clear, some sunlight reached all the way down to the ledge and made it visible to the men of the U-800 as a dark gray slope which suddenly dived into blackness. It was a sight both fearsome and majestic: fearsome, for reminding mere men of the crushing depths of the ocean; majestic for showing how vast the ocean was. Even for a seasoned seaman like Otto, the spectacle of the continental shelf’s slopes plunging into the darkness of the abyss was truly a sight to behold. For that reason, and in order to help maintain the morale of his crew during this long war patrol, he had been encouraging his sailors and officers to come periodically to the two underwater observation domes in order to enjoy viewing the sea from under its surface.

Otto was about to go down the hatch of the observation station to return to the control room when one of the sailors sharing the dome with him suddenly pushed a shout of alarm while pointing at something outside.

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‘’OVER THERE!’’

Snapping his head around and fearing that his sailor had just seen a sea mine close to his submarine, Otto suddenly felt his heart stop for an instant: four giant, nightmarish tentacles had appeared from under the submarine and had slapped themselves against the forward upper deck. His eyes bulging from the surprise and emotion, he soon saw to what the tentacles were attached to: a giant squid of the kind you saw only in some marine museum or horror movie. Going quickly over his surprise, Otto activated the intercom of the observation dome, shouting in it.

‘’SOMEONE GET UP IN THE FORWARD DOME WITH A CAMERA AND FLASH UNIT, QUICKLY!’’

To his credit, Maschinen Obergefreiter Norbert Straube clambered up to the observation dome within a minute, a still camera with flash unit slung from his neck. Looking up at his captain as he set foot in the observation tower, he asked a question to Otto in an excited voice.

‘’What is it, Herr Kapitän? Are we passing by a wreck?’’

‘’Better than that! A Kraken is attacking us! Take a few photos of it quickly before it disappears! It is glued around our forward hull.’’

‘’MEIN GOTT!’’ could only say Straube when he saw the giant squid, whose head and body was now visible less than twenty meters away. He however didn’t lose time and took in quick succession three pictures with flash of the sea monster. In the meantime, Otto made the two other men who were off duty go down, so that more men could have a chance to see the squid. He himself went down as well, giving his place to the young Hermann Spielberger. Werner Nielinger, who had just come down from the dome with his captain, looked and grinned at Otto.

‘’This reminds me of the part in Jules Verne’s book ’20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’, when a giant squid attacked Captain Nemo’s submarine, the NAUTILUS, Herr Kapitän. Why would it attack us like this?’’

‘’Well, we are the right shape for looking like a sperm whale, which giant squids are reputed to attack and eat, even though we are much bigger than a whale. We are also presently moving slowly and quietly, thus making that poor squid trying to eat steel plates right now.’’

‘’Poor squid? It is scary enough for anyone, Herr Kapitän.’’

‘’True! Well, that is one more sight you will be able to tell your family about once back home, Nielinger.’’

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‘’And…when could we expect to return home, Herr Kapitän? I have a baby girl whom I am missing very much lately.’’

Otto smiled and patted the young sailor’s shoulder.

‘’Don’t worry: we should be able to expend a last batch of torpedoes soon. Then we will go home.’’

Less than an hour later, and with the squid having left in disgust after a few futile minutes, Otto was called to the sonar room adjacent to the control room. There, the senior operator on watch, Michel Hartmann, showed him three closely connected spikes on his passive hydrophone array’s display.

‘’We have three warships coming on a path perpendicular to our own bearing, Herr Kapitän. They are traveling as a group and are going at a minimum speed of fifteen knots. One of the ships is continuously pinging on active but is actually going too fast to hear much on its sonar. My bet is that two destroyers are escorting a heavy unit, with one destroyer pinging actively in order to chase away pesky nuisances like us.’’ Otto smiled in amusement at the term used by his sonar operator.

‘’But he is only pinning a target on himself by doing so. Decidedly, those Americans still have a lot to learn. How far from us are they, in your opinion?’’

‘’From the noise level, I would say about twenty nautical miles, Herr Kapitän. They are presently to our ten o’clock and will pass from left to right in front of us in about one hour.’’

‘’Then, we will make sure to be well positioned by then, in order to say ‘hello’ to them. Any other ship in the area?’’

‘’I have a few other ships at a distance to our two o’clock, probably merchant ships either approaching Colon or coming out of the Panama waterway. Even if those three speedy warships would not have shown up, we would still have had plenty of targets to use our torpedoes on.’’

‘’Well, some of them might still get a gift or two from us afterwards. But first, let’s prepare for our three next guests.’’

Grabbing the intercom microphone from its box fixed to the sonar room’s partition, Otto activated it and spoke with his usual calm voice.

‘’Helm, steer five degrees to port, accelerate to eight knots. Torpedo rooms: load G7a eels in all tubes and set them to short arming distance and top speed. We will then reload with G7e eels for our second salvo. To all: go to battle stations, but quietly!’’

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The next fifty minutes or so were tense aboard the U-800, as its crewmembers expected the incoming fight and prepared for it while making as little noise as they could. Otto even had his forward torpedo tubes flooded and their external doors opened in advance, in order to prevent that noise from alerting the American destroyers at the crucial moment. Otto also kept his periscopes below the surface of the ocean to avoid offering a radar target to the enemy, instead relying on direct sight from his forward underwater observation dome to spot the underbellies of the American warships when they would pass by him. In that he mentally thanked again the late Gustav Premingen for designing such a useful novel feature of his submarine. Those domes had up to now helped him many times in close fights, allowing him to target enemy ships from up close while avoiding both visual and radar detection. The observation domes were also equipped with AZO optical target tracking units which allowed the pointing and firing of torpedoes as well as it could be done from the control room’s periscopes. For this attack, Otto had decided to go up into the forward observation dome to direct the action from there. When his sonar operators announced by intercom that the American warships were about to cross the bow of the U-800, Otto already had the three of them in visual contact.

‘’You were correct, Hartmann: I see one destroyer leading what must be a battleship, with a second destroyer in the tail. Herr Wittgenstein, be ready to enter my target bearings into your fire control director.’’

‘’Ready when you want, Herr Kapitän.’’ replied his second-in-command from the control room.

‘’Gutt! Range to targets is approximately 500 meters, will probably go down to 400 meters by the time the battleship crosses our bow. The first two pairs of torpedoes will go to the destroyers, then we will fire four eels at the battleship, using time-on-target technique. Giving now the first bearing on the lead destroyer.’’ Giving in succession the bearing to each of his three targets, Otto then waited fifteen seconds before announcing fresh target bearings. A few seconds later, Ulrich von Wittgenstein spoke up on the intercom, his excitement audible.

‘’We have fire solutions on all three targets, Herr Kapitän.’’

‘’Then, match bearings and shoot all forward torpedo tubes! Helm, turn around 180 degrees as soon as all eight forward tubes are discharged.’’

‘’Understood, Herr Kapitän!’’

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The noise and vibration from the departure of the first torpedoes from their launch tubes followed only a second later. Fired from a distance of barely 400 meters, the G7a torpedoes rushed to their targets at a speed of 44 knots. In this case, the G7a’s visible trail of bubbles in their wakes was not a factor, as the twenty seconds or so they took to get to the American ships was too short to allow the targets to start making evasive actions. As the U-800 was starting to swing around with its phenomenal agility, Otto was able to see that all of his eight torpedoes hit their marks squarely, with only the tail end destroyer having barely started to turn to starboard in an attempt to present less of a target to the incoming torpedoes. As his crew was screaming with triumph, he bent down and quickly slid inside the narrow steel tube linking the forward and aft observation dome towers. Crawling quickly to the stern observation tower, he emerged from the connecting tube as his helmsman was completing his half turn, with the U-800’s stern now pointed at the American warships. All three were still under power, but it was evident that their speed was now drastically reduced. Otto, jumping on the target tracking unit, announced at once new target bearings to von Wittgenstein and fired all four of his stern torpedo tubes, two at the battleship and one each at the destroyers. Fired from about 500 meters at targets that were now doing a mere ten knots or less, all four torpedoes exploded against the hulls of the enemy warships, prompting more cheers aboard the submarine. That was when Otto decided to go back down to the control room, where he raised the head of the attack periscope above the surface for the first time in the fight. On his orders, a sailor also stood by, ready to change films in the camera hooked to the periscope’s base as Otto consulted a ships recognition guide book and compared the silhouettes in it with the actual ships now burning and sinking nearby.

‘’Okay…we have here a NEW MEXICO class battleship. Both of the destroyers are of the BENSON class. I am going to try to read now their hull numbers. Hum…the hull number of the battleship is ‘41’. The destroyer numbers are ‘407’ and ‘408’.’’

‘’They are the battleship MISSISSIPPI and the destroyers STERRETT and WILSON, Herr Kapitän.’’ added von Wittgenstein, who had also been consulting a ships guide.

‘’Gutt! Add that information to our ship’s log. Herr Lüdemann, we are going to start taking pictures now.’’

As Otto was methodically taking pictures of his sinking targets, one of his electronic warfare operators shouted a warning from his adjacent section.

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‘’HERR KAPITÄN, THE AMERICAN BATTLESHIP IS SENDING RADIO DISTRESS SIGNALS IN CLEAR. ONE AMERICAN DESTROYER, THE USS

WAINWRIGHT, HAS RESPONDED AND SAID THAT IT IS RUSHING IN AND WILL BE HERE IN FORTY MINUTES, ALONG WITH ANOTHER DESTROYER.’’

‘’WERE YOU ABLE TO DETERMINE THE RADIO AZIMUTH OF THAT DESTROYER?’’

‘’YES, HERR KAPITÄN: IT WAS FROM APPROXIMATE BEARING 260.’’

‘’EXCELLENT! HELM, TURN TO BEARING 260, GO TO MAXIMUM

UNDERWATER SPEED!’’

‘’AYE, HERR KAPITÄN!’’

As his U-800 quickly accelerated to its maximum submerged speed of 31 knots, a speed underwater well above the usual seven to ten knots of other existing submarines around the World, Otto went to see his First Watch Officer at the tactical plot table.

‘’Ulrich, I intend to rush towards those incoming destroyers in order to take a surprise ambush position ahead of the point where they would normally slow down in order to operate their sonar sets. With luck, they will then blindly run into our torpedoes. However, in case they prove to be more competently led than I expect them to be, replace our G7e eels by G7a torpedoes in two of our forward tubes and two of our stern tubes. In fact, let’s clear two stern tubes right now by firing two G7es at the MISSISSIPPI, to make sure that it sinks.’’

‘’A fine idea, Herr Kapitän.’’

Two more torpedoes soon hit the unlucky American battleship, giving it the coup de grâce, with Otto then taking pictures from a distance as the MISSISSIPPI sank at the vertical. He was now playing a risky game with the two incoming destroyers, as he was quickly depleting his reserves of energy in his batteries as a consequence of his high underwater speed. He was in fact going to start the next fight with only a quarter of his battery power left and would be in possible trouble if he missed his opening salvo, being then unable to escape underwater at high speed. He toyed for a moment with the idea of slowing soon and raise his schnorchel, in order to partly replenish his batteries, but he quickly ruled that out: the little benefit that this would bring him would be more than cancelled by the much higher level of noise his submarine would then produce, noise that could in turn give away his position to the American destroyers. It would also offer a radar target, however small and faint, to the American destroyers. He finally decided to

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stop and take an ambush position at about twice the distance a typical Type IX or Type VII would be able to cover underwater in forty minutes. A competent destroyer commander would normally slow down within that distance from the sinking battleship in order to start his sonar search. If that happened to be the case, then the two incoming destroyers would be still rushing it at 35 knots or more, at which speed their sonar sets were totally deaf, when he would be firing his torpedoes.

17:49 (Central America Time)

Destroyer U.S.S. WAINWRIGHT (DD-419)

Approaching the area off the port of Colon

Captain (Navy) Don Pardee Moon, Commander of Destroyer Squadron Eight, was both furious and despondent at the news that two of his destroyers, along with the battleship MISSISSIPPI, had been torpedoed and were sinking. Five of the nine destroyers in his squadron had now fallen victim to German submarines in the last two months, and this without destroying a single enemy ship or plane yet in this war. If this continued on, he could very well expect to be relieved of command soon and find himself stuck in a desk job for the rest of the war, thus marking the end of his career in the Navy. The captain of the U.S.S. WAINWRIGHT, Lieutenant Commander Lewis approached him on the bridge as Moon was looking at the pillars of smoke marking the site of the latest battle.

‘’Sir, the MISSISSIPPI has stopped transmitting and is now presumed sunk. The STERRETT was declared sunk in the last transmission, while the WILSON was slowly going down by the stern. We are now twelve nautical miles from them, with the WILSON just visible at the edge of our radar display screen.’’

‘’Any radar contact of possible submarines yet?’’

‘’None, sir! As for our sonar, we would have to slow down drastically in order to be able to scan properly, but that would more than triple the time it would take us to arrive and be able to help the survivors from our ships.’’

Moon thought over that for a moment: his instincts told him that rushing like this to the site of a torpedo attack only invited trouble. Yet, he also had to think about all the men now swimming in the ocean and depending on him to be rescued quickly from shark-infested waters.

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‘’Slow your ship to ten knots, Mister Lewis, so that it could start to operate its sonar. Then signal the U.S.S. STACK to continue on at best speed to the site of the sinkings, in order to help our men in the water.’’

‘’Understood, sir!’’

Lewis first passed the order to slow down to ten knots, then instructed his signals officer to tell the U.S.S. STACK to continue on. However, that officer never had the chance to transmit that order, as the STACK suddenly shuddered under the impact and explosion of two torpedoes against its starboard flank. At nearly the same time, a lookout on the WAINWRIGHT shouted out loud.

‘’TORPEDOES CROSSING OUR BOW FROM STARBOARD TO PORT! THEY NEARLY HIT US!’’

Moon froze for a moment then as cold sweat suddenly formed on his forehead: his last order had just saved the WAINWRIGHT from suffering the same fate as the STACK.

‘’ZIGZAG COURSE NOW! INITIATE SONAR SEARCH!’’ Moon next crossed over to the port-side open bridge wing, to see in what state the STACK really was.

On the BENSON-Class destroyer U.S.S. STACK, things were already beyond help. The two torpedoes which had hit it in a tight group had open wide its starboard side boiler room and engine room, killing outright most of the American seamen in those two compartments and either puncturing or rupturing the high-pressure steam lines from both port and starboard boiler rooms. Those who were not killed by the torpedo blasts or drowned by the sudden flood found themselves trying to desperately flee the machinery spaces while scalding superheated steam filled those compartments. With the destroyer doing 36 knots at the time it was hit, the water rushed in with tremendous force, flooding section after section. All power went out only seconds after the torpedo hits, leaving the survivors in the dark as they frantically fought their way up to the open decks. With the emergency pumps out of power, the list to starboard grew alarmingly fast. The BENSON-Class destroyers were already known to be top-heavy and the U.S.S. STACK proved no exception. Less than two minutes after being hit, it capsized and rolled belly-up, pulling all but 23 of its 250 crewmembers to their death.

Watching with dismay and horror that tragedy unfold, Moon nearly forgot that he still had to deal with a very dangerous adversary. When he regained some control of

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himself, Moon went to Lieutenant Commander Lewis, who was passing frantic orders via intercom, and tapped his left arm to get his attention.

‘’Do we have any sonar contact yet, Commander?’’

‘’None, sir! Despite pinging our sonar on active mode, we haven’t yet gotten a single underwater contact within more than a mile. We also have no radar contact yet.’’

‘’But, that’s impossible! A submarine has to be hiding nearby.’’

‘’Maybe they fired their torpedoes from maximum distance, from outside the range of our sonar, sir.’’

‘’That would make those shots incredibly accurate ones. We however have to find that submarine before he sinks us as well. Continue your sonar search while I radio a message to alert our land-based patrol aircraft. They should…’’ A nearly shouted warning coming from the overhead intercom speaker then cut him off.

‘’CAPTAIN, THIS IS THE SONAR! TORPEDOES APPROACHING FAST FROM OUR STARBOARD SIDE!’’

Lewis shouted at once to his helmsman, while Moon ran to the starboard side open bridge wing.

‘’HELM, HARD STARBOARD! REVERSE STARBOARD PROPELLER!’’ Captain Moon was not able to spot the two incoming G7e electrically-propelled torpedoes before they exploded just as they were passing under the keel of the destroyer, set off by their magnetic influence pistols. Their combined blasts bodily raised the destroyer out of the water, breaking its back and splitting the ship in two. The two parts then sank quickly, with less than six men being able to swim away from the sinking wreck.

A mere 600 meters away, Otto watched that drama through his attack periscope, taking a couple of pictures as well of his latest victim as its parts sank separately. He finally gave a somber look at his second-in-command, still sitting at the nearby tactical plot table.

‘’The last enemy warship is now sinking and we have only two torpedoes left aboard. Steer to Heading 085, speed ten knots and depth of eighteen meters. Raise the schnorchel and switch to diesels. It is time to go home.’’ All the men inside the control room then cheered loudly on hearing those last words.

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