fail, or start a war and be crushed, or very likely get assassinated.
“I can’t understand why somebody hasn’t shot him long ago, the way he shows himself. He bears a charm,” Tudsbury shouted, as the car careered out on the two-lane road to pass a long line of thundering trucks full of new gray-painted army tanks. Pug Henry clutched at an armrest, for another truck was approaching head on, swelling like a balloon; it went by in a howl and a screech half a second after Pamela whisked into her own lane between two trucks, brushing hair off her forehead with one relaxed little hand. “But the charm is based on success. It may lapse once he stops moving ahead. He’s murdered a lot of people on the way up. They all have relatives.”
Commander Grobke came to meet them at the base gate in a small car, which Tudsbury could barely squeeze into. Pamela roared off to a hotel, and Grobke took the two men for a long tour, by car and on foot, through the Swinemunde yard. It was a gray afternoon, with low black clouds threatening rain. The dank east wind off the Baltic felt pleasantly cool after the sultriness of Berlin. The flat, sandy, bleak seacoast base was much like New London, Victor Henry thought. If one ignored flags and signs, in fact, the naval facilities of big powers were hard to tell apart. They were all in the same business, imitating the British navy, which had first brought the industrial age to war at sea. The low black U-boats tied in clusters to the long piers or resting on blocks in dry docks; the smell of tar, hot metal, and seawater: the slow clank and screech of overhead cranes; the blaze of welding torches, the rattle of riveters; the flat or curved sections of steel, painted with yellow or red primer, swinging through the air: the gigantic open sheds; the mounds of piping, cables, timbers, and oil drums; the swarms of grease-blackened cheerful men in dirty coveralls, goggles, and hard hats; the half-finished hulls propped with timbers on rails slanting into dirty water — he might have been in Japan, France, Italy, or the United States. The differences that counted, the crucial numbers and performance characteristics, were not discernible.
He could see that the Germans were not changing the classic double hull of a submarine, and that, like the Americans, they were doing more welding. He would have liked to apply his pocket tape measure to a steel pressure hull section. The plate seemed thinner than in American submarines. If this were so, U-boats could probably not dive quite as deep, unless the Germans had developed a remarkably strong new alloy. But on such a visit one used one’s eye, not a camera or a tape measure.
A low sun broke out under the gray clouds, and the car cast an elongated shadow when Grobke stopped near the entrance gate at a dry dock where a U-boat rested on blocks. From one side of the dock a gangway with rails, and from the other a precarious long plank, slanted down to the submarine’s deck.
“Well, that’s the tour,” said Grobke. “This is my flagship. Since I cannot have you aboard, Tudsbury, much as I would like to, I suppose we all part company here.”
Henry picked up his cue from the German’s smile. “Look, let’s not stand on ceremony. If I can come aboard, I’ll come and Tudsbury won’t.”
“Good God, yes” said the Englishman. “I’ve no business here anyway.”
The U-boat commander spread his hands. “I don’t want to drive a wedge in Anglo-American friendship.”
A whistle blasted as they spoke, and workmen came trooping off the boats and docks, and out of the sheds. The road to the gate was soon thronged with them. They came boiling out of the U-boat, up the gangway. “The old navy yard hazard,” Henry said. “Run for your life at five o’clock, or they’ll trample you to death.”
Grobke laughed. “All civilians are the same.”
Tudsbury said, “Well, in my next broadcast I’ll have to say that the U-boat command is humming like damn all. I hope they’ll take notice in London.”
“Just tell them what you saw.” Grobke shook his hand through the car window. “We want to be friends. We know you have the greatest navy in the world. These silly little boats can do a lot of damage for their size, that’s all. One of my officers will drive you to your hotel.”
Since workmen were jamming the gangway, Grobke grinned at Henry, and pointed a thumb toward the plank on the other side of the dock. Pug nodded. The German with a gesture invited him to go first. It was a very long drop, something like seventy feet, to the greasy puddles in the concrete dock. Pug made his way around the rim and walked down the shaky paint-spotted plank, trying to look easier than he felt. Stolid eyes of side boys in white watched from below. As he set foot on deck, they snapped to attention. Grobke stepped off the rattling plank with a laugh. “Well done, for two old blokes.”
U-46 looked much like an American submarine, but the cleanliness, polish, and order were unusual. A United States ship in dry dock, with civilian workmen aboard, soon became squalid and dirty. No doubt Grobke had ordered a cleanup for the American visitor, which Pug appreciated, being himself a spit-and-polish tyrant. Even so, he had to admire the German display. The diesels looked as though they had never turned over, their red paint and brass fittings were unsullied by a grease spot, and the batteries seemed fresh from the factory. The sailors were starched pretty fellows, almost a crew for a nautical musical comedy. As for the U-boat design, when you took the essential spaces and machines of a war vessel and stuffed them into the sausage casing of one long tube, the result was the same in any country: change the instrument legends to English, move the captain’s cabin from port to starboard, add two feet to the wardroom, alter a few valve installations, and you were in the
“Smells pretty good,” he said, as they passed the tiny galley, where cooks in white were preparing dinner and somehow managing to perspire neatly.
Grobke looked at him over his shoulder. “You wouldn’t care to eat aboard? It’s awfully cramped, but these chaps don’t eat too badly.’
Pug had a dinner appointment with the Tudsburys, but he said at once, “I’d be delighted.”
So he dined elbow to elbow with the captain and officers of the U-boat in the narrow wardroom. He enjoyed it. He was more at home here than in his silk-walled dining room in Berlin. The four young officers were thin-lipped, ruddy, blond, shy; like Americans in their features, but with a different look around the eyes, more intense and wary. They sat silent at first, but soon warmed to the American’s compliments about the boat, and the joking of Grobke, who got into an excellent mood over the food and wine, Stories passed about the stupidity and laziness of navy yard workmen. One of Pug’s best yarns, an incident of crossed-up toilet plumbing on the West Virginia brought uproarious laughter. He had noticed before the German taste for bathroom humor. The officers told tales which they considered comic, of their early training: first about the cleaning of latrines, then of electric shocks to which they had had to submit without flinching while their reactions were filmed; exposure to cold and heat past the point of collapse; knee bends until they dropped; the “Valley of Death” cross-country run up and down hillsides, wearing seventy-pound loads and gas masks. An officer emerged the better, they said, from such ordeals. Only Grobke disagreed. That Prussian sadism was old-fashioned, he asserted. In war at sea, initiative was more important than the blind submission that the ordeals implanted. “The Americans have the right idea,” he said, either because he sensed that Pug was shocked, or out of maverick conviction. They feasted on cabbage soup, boiled fresh salmon, roast pork, potato dumplings, and gooseberry
Streaks of red sunset showed through the black rain when Henry and Grobke left the submarine. On the dock some crewmen, naked except for trunks, were wrestling inside a cheering circle, on gray mats laid over the crane tracks. Henry had seen everywhere this love of young Germans for hard horseplay. They were like healthy pups, and these U-boat men looked stronger and healthier than American sailors.
“So, Henry, I suppose you join your English friend now?”
“Not if you have any better ideas.”
The German slapped him on the shoulder. “Good! Come along.”
They drove out through the gate. “Damn quiet after five o’clock,” said Pug.
“Oh, yes. Dead. Always.”
Pug lit a cigarette. “I understand the British are working two and three shifts now in their yards.”
Grobke gave him an odd look. “I guess they make up for lost time.”
A couple of miles from the base, amid green fields near the water, they drove into rows of wooden cottages. “Here’s where my daughter lives,” Grobke said, ringing a doorbell. A fresh-faced young blonde woman opened the door. Three children, recognizing Grobke’s ring, ran and pounced on the paper-wrapped hard candies he handed out. The husband was at sea on maneuvers. On an upright piano in the tiny parlor stood his picture: young, long-jawed, blond, stern. “It’s good Paul is at sea,” Grobke said. “He thinks I spoil the kids,” and he proceeded to toss them and romp with them until they lost their bashfulness in the presence of the American, and ran around laughing and shrieking. The mother tried to press coffee and cake on the guests, but Grobke stopped her.
