Otto Steiger, commander of U 160, stared out through binoculars at the small bay where the submarine’s dinghy was headed. Overhead, the Milky Way blazed with a billion stars.
Anyone with a less jaundiced eye might have been enthralled at the sight. But Steiger had other things on his mind.
Immediately, he was worried that the dinghy might be too visible from the shore in that starlight. And, from behind the hills, the moon would soon be up. He would much have preferred cloud cover. He worried also that the contact vehicle had not yet arrived. Above all, he worried about the war and his own plight.
Below Otto Steiger, as he stood at the top of the conning tower, was the emblem he and his crew had decided on when the vessel was commissioned more than two years earlier. It was supposed to be a rabbit’s foot, a symbol of luck, but the member of the engine room crew who had volunteered to paint it had overstated his artistic talents. So, instead, what he eventually achieved looked rather like an overweight lily or, some thought, a leek.
Yet, up to now, the emblem had brought a fair deal of luck to U 160. The fact that it was still intact after two years and some months, particularly in the seas off Africa, spoke for itself. But that had been the time when the war was running in Germany’s favour, as detailed in regular bulletins from naval headquarters to the U-boat fleet. Since then, the bulletins had dried up, younger and younger men were being conscripted into the services, and Steiger was enough of a realist to know what all of that indicated. During his last furlough, just a month earlier, he had heard that the German navy was losing submarines at the rate of twenty a month.
Whether or not the information was right, it sent a chill up Steiger’s spine. He just hoped luck would not abandon him and his crew in this outlandish part of the world.
How had the mighty fallen! Steiger remembered the day he had been offered a transfer from destroyers to the elite submarine corps. It was hardly an offer, more an order he could not refuse, but the role of the submarine in modern naval warfare had been so romanticised that he was elated at the chance.
Of course, they never told you the truth about submarines. They never told you how precarious it was to command a vessel not much more than half the length of a football pitch in combat against ships of much greater size, speed and strike power.
They never told you – or maybe they never knew, those admirals, those toffee-nosed relics of World War I – the dangers of diving in the Indian Ocean. These waters were so clear that you could not hide from the bombs and depth charges of enemy aircraft. Yet, deep down, they concealed rocks and coral sharp enough to penetrate any submarine’s inner hull. And, when the weather turned around, they could produce waves that made the North Atlantic look like a millpond.
Instead, what naval bosses tried to instil in you was an entirely false sense of security in the one facility the submarine had that the other naval craft did not – the ability to submerge and thus, allegedly, become invisible.
In reality, submarines spent most of the time on the surface, plodding along on their diesel engines at the pace of tramp steamers, pitching and rolling, forcing the crew to grab at any possible appendage in the interior structure of the vessel to stay upright.
They never told you, although they surely did know, those old admirals, what it would be like sharing such cramped quarters with fifty other males, breathing the same polluted air, day after day, week after week, bumping against one another in the narrow gangways. Sardine cans, the other naval men had begun to call submarines, and they weren’t far out.
As Otto Steiger scanned the coast around the river mouth, he caught a flash of headlights from the contact area and signalled back with the Aldis lamp. So the dinghy should be back within the hour, with the jerry cans of water they desperately needed and possibly some fresh meat and fruit, bananas or paw paws.
Exactly what the contact could supply didn’t really matter. In the end, it would all taste of diesel fumes.