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What you mean, you sonofabitch, is: “How am I going to get ashore without getting my shoes wet? Or drowning?”
Von Dattenberg resisted the temptation to reply with what popped into his mind—I don’t really give a damn how you do, just as long as you bastards get off my U-boat—and instead said, “Perhaps we’ll get lucky, Herr Brigadeführer, and the people we’re trying to establish contact with will have a boat of some kind. Otherwise, I’m afraid it will have to be in our rubber boats.”
“Don’t you mean, von Dattenberg, the people we’re going to contact?” Hoffmann asked.
“I think we have to consider, Herr Brigadeführer, the changed circumstances.”
Hoffmann took von Dattenberg’s meaning: Germany has surrendered and the war is over—there may not be anyone waiting for us to arrive.
“The people who will meet us are SS. They will comply with their orders,” Hoffmann said.
“Of course,” von Dattenberg said.
He thought: And if there is no flashing light from the shore, then what do I do?
Comply with that last official order from the Kriegsmarine to hoist a black flag and proceed to the nearest enemy port and surrender?
Himmler’s order told me to ignore that Kriegsmarine order when it came and place myself at the orders of Hoffmann.
Hoffmann and the other SS swine are not going to go docilely into internment. That would carry with it the threat of being repatriated to Germany to face whatever it is the Allies have in mind for people like them.
So what do I do? Kill them all?
I could wait until they’re in the rubber boats and then machine-gun them, “leaving no survivors,” as I was ordered to leave no survivors of the British and American merchantmen I sank and who had made it into their lifeboats.
Nice thought, Willi, but you’re pissing into the wind.
I could not order the machine-gunning of these swine in my rubber boats any more than I could order the machine-gunning of those sailors in their lifeboats.
The dichotomy here is that while Hoffmann and the other SS slime aboard deserve to be shot out of hand, I simply cannot do that.
I still am an officer bound by the Code of Honor.
“So what do we do now?” Hoffmann asked, as he put his eyes back on the periscope.
“The protocol, Herr Brigadeführer, is for us to come to periscope depth at oh-four-thirty for a period of thirty minutes, flashing the signal at sixty-second intervals during that period of time, while proceeding at dead slow speed along the coast . . .”
As you should goddamn well know, Hoffmann.
You’ve nearly worn out the protocol folder reading it over and over with all the attention the Pope would pay to the original version of the Gospel according to Saint Peter.
“. . . and, in the event contact is not made, to submerge and wait until twenty-one-thirty, at which time we are to come again to periscope depth and repeat the process for another thirty-minute period.”
Hoffmann grunted.
“Would you like to look for a signal from the shore, Herr Brigadeführer? Or . . .”
Hoffmann stepped back from the periscope.
“Schröder,” von Dattenberg said, and gestured for Korvettenkapitän Erik Schröder, U-405’s executive officer, to take the periscope.
“Maintain signaling,” von Dattenberg ordered. “Proceed dead slow at this depth for twenty-five minutes.”
“Maintain signaling. Dead slow for twenty-five minutes, aye, Kapitän,” von Dattenberg’s Number One answered.
“You have the helm, Schröder. I’ll be in my cabin.”
“I have the helm, aye, Kapitän.”
