Copyright © 2005 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

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Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

20.

20. U-234 Sails From Kristiansand—April 15, 1945

As Fortress Germany began to crumble, the Nazi war machine churned on in surviving cities like Kiel on the North Sea. Nuremberg in the east had just fallen into Soviet hands. Italy, Austria, the Balkans, Poland, France—the litany of lost empire was a list a mile long and now Germany was like an insect on its back being plucked apart one leg at a time. In the west, the Allies had crossed the Rhine into Remagen and roared into the ancient cathedral cities of Cologne and Speyer, cutting supply lines and decapitating command centers.

In the Pacific, Japan was fighting her way backward to the homeland, leaving a trail of bitterly contested blood on every tiny atoll and island, but her cause seemed doomed. Tokyo was being firebombed night and day, as were most major cities across the Land of the Rising Sun. Still, on both sides of the world, the victorious Allies were leery of marching into some unknown death trap. There were ominous legends of an impregnable redoubt in the Alps of Europe from which Hitler’s legions could continue the war for years, and there was every indication the mainland of Japan would fight to the last man, woman, and child rather than surrender.

The dark romance of Fascism and Nazism seemed to have everlasting life, and fanatics everywhere were prepared to continue the fight at all costs. In Germany, specially trained teenagers, perhaps the ultimate in a series of vengeance weapons starting with the V-1 and the V-2, roamed about at night as “werewolves” assassinating Allied occupiers and their German sympathizers. Across Europe and the Pacific, millions were still dying as the war raged on. And in the surviving pockets of Nazi power, plots were still being hatched to save the Third Reich from the doom whose necrotic breath was blowing down its back.

In the midst of this chaos, where often the most basic rules of law and order were breaking down day by day, many pragmatic individuals could see the coming doom of the Nazi order and sought practical ways to ensure their survival. One such individual was the handsome and rugged captain-lieutenant of a giant sub, the U-234, named Johann Heinrich Fehler.

In the badly damaged concrete redoubts of the harbor in Kiel, one of Germany’s preeminent seafaring cities, several surviving submarines were being hastily outfitted for their desperate last-minute missions on behalf of the Fuehrer and the Reich.

The Germans had been developing a dizzying array of so-called Wunderwaffen, or wonder weapons, during the last year of the war to stave off the growingly inevitable defeat. They were launching rocket ships with explosive warheads hundreds of miles downrange from Northern Germany into England. They were rapidly perfecting the early jet fighter and bomber aircraft such as the Messerschmidt 262 and the Arado 310 Blitz. When their runways were bombed out, they invented the Jet Assisted Take-Off (JATO) rocket which helped lift propeller-driven cargo planes off the ground in a golden shower of light. Their ingenuity was boundless, though they were behind the allies in certain critical technologies. Two such technologies, whose development by Britain and the United States was shadowed at every turn by Nazi and Soviet spies, were RADAR and the atomic bomb.

Captain Fehler himself had no real idea, and only half-heartedly cared, what top secret cargo was being loaded into his gigantic submarine in the desperate days of April 1945. U-234 was a 1600-ton boat, 270 feet long, one of the two largest submarines ever built in her time. By comparison, at 882.5 feet (269 meters) and a beam 92 feet (28 meters), the late Titanic was just over three times that length. U-234 had been designed as a minelayer of the XB Class but circumstance and strategy had changed her to a long-range heavy underwater transport, meaning she would now be used to ferry her 250 tons of cargo halfway around the world between Germany and Asia. She could make 20 knots on the surface, or 12 knots submerged, and could dive to 300 meters (over 900 feet). She was, in effect, a Wunderwaffe in her own right.

Johann Fehler needed to make no excuses to anyone. Now 34, he was a much-decorated war hero who had sunk 22 Allied vessels in his first major wartime assignment as mines and explosives officer on the raider Atlantis, rescuing scores of sailors from death in the icy Atlantic after the Atlantis was sunk. In its own way, the journey might be classified as one of the minor epics of seafaring, since he’d ordered his men to tie their rubber life rafts together in a chain, which was then towed surreptitiously by a German submarine, U-126, over 1,000 miles to a safe German port through high seas patrolled by powerful Allied sea and air forces. His brilliance and heroism had earned him an Iron Cross and command of the huge new submarine. However, Allied air raids had destroyed many of the subs in the Kiel pens, severely damaging the U-234 so that she required months of repair. She’d sailed surreptitiously from Kiel to Kristiansand, Norway, where she now lay in a secure bunker with a row of other boats awaiting their cargo and orders for desperate final missions around the world. A collision shortly after arrival with another sub had left her damaged, with a leaking outer hull and a cracked fuel tank, but those repairs had been completed by now at round the clock, breakneck speed.

Heroic but practical men like Fehler, watching the war grind to an ignoble end, had to gauge the best course of action for themselves and their sailors while Germany’s ruthless leaders continued to exercise their last mad plans. As he stood with his hands in the pockets of his leather coat on a warm spring day in Kristiansand, Norway, Fehler had a lot to think about. While overseeing the preparations for U-234’s long journey to Japan, he had to fight the imperatives of his deeply ingrained German Pflicht, or sense of duty. He avoided speaking about his dark ruminations with the other skippers—Schness of the U-2511, Preuss of U-874, Petersen of U-875, and others—who were taking on mysterious cargoes and passengers. Fehler understood the desperation of the Reich’s logisticians and strategists, and nothing surprised him—not the advanced Messerschmidt ME 262 twin-jet fighter plane being loaded disassembled into his cargo holds along with schematic plans for mass manufacture by the Japanese; not the 74 tons of lead, 26 tons of mercury, 12 tons of special steel, 7 tons of optical glass, or aircraft support parts, ammunition, and plans; not the routine medical supplies and mail including diplomatic pouches; not even the 1,232 pounds of weapons-grade uranium 235 in heavy gold-lined containers, capable of making at least a half dozen atomic bombs. There were also special proximity fuses and other exotic scientific toys whose criticality Fehler understood, along with the danger of carrying them on his boat. That these were Wunderwaffen, Fehler had no doubt. That they would not save Hitler and his clique, he knew forthrightly.

Fehler did not have control over the nature or the loading of the cargo. That was in the hands of a Commander Becker of the Marinesonderdienst Ausland, or Special Foreign Naval Service. Fehler normally had the final say as to whether the boat was seaworthy or not, and that included the method of cargo storage, lashing, and so forth, but more than ever this support organization conducted the loading of the highly sensitive cargo while Fehler was expected to twiddle his thumbs. And twiddle Fehler did, but with a purpose and no small amount of humor. There was always a deep, irrational loyalty between a larger than life skipper and his hand-picked crew, and this was more evident than ever in the U-234 in these final days of the war. Thus, Fehler could safely order his officers to have his own men conduct a clandestine loading program of their own. There had always been, in the German soul, a thirst for adventure in faraway places. For generations, the average German had been enamored of the fanciful stories of the writer Karl May, who wrote of the mythical North American Indian hero “Leatherstocking” (Lederstrumpf) and his exploits. Every German boy was at heart both a cowboy and an Indian. The trouble was, today North America was a hostile land, and Fehler and his officers had to look a bit farther for their plans. Like so many things about wartime, their plans and actions would have been unthinkable in peacetime. In wartime, however, the improbable and the impossible happened every day and nobody questioned much. Their plot was as exotic and crazy as the times in which they found themselves. In the remaining 75 tons or so of empty cargo space, Fehler ordered his men to secretly store enough food rations to support the complement of six officers and 44 enlisted men. He also ordered brought on board hunting rifles, ammunition, fishing poles, and other survival equipment, in addition to 900 bottles of whiskey. Fehler’s plan was to follow through on any good German boy’s childhood adventure plans. After delivering cargo and passengers to Japan, Fehler would take his boat by force, if necessary, and sail on to some remote, uninhabited island in the South Seas, where they would hide their vessel and then live on coconuts, fish, wild pigs, and whiskey until the war was safely over. A lark! It was the only dream that kept Fehler going as he grimly surveyed the loading activities on this misty, drizzly North Sea dock.

And what a crew of mystery guests came aboard! Along with the ME 262 and the other wonder weapons came a Luftwaffe general, Ulrich Kessler, who made no secret of his disdain for the likes of Hitler and Goering while maintaining his profound loyalty to the Fatherland. Along with Kessler came his own staff, to serve him while he helped set the Japanese up as jet-flying atomic powers capable of annihilating Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other major U.S. cities in mushroom cloud blasts. As Fehler understood the stratagem, Germany was now putting her greatest remaining eggs in the Japanese basket, hoping Japan could still defeat the Allies and then restore the Third Reich. Aside from Kessler, Fehler’s “guests” included two Japanese Imperial Navy officers; three Luftwaffe officers of Kessler’s staff; four German Navy officers who were technical experts (whom Fehler well understood, with his background in naval artillery and ordnance); two civilians from Messerschmidt to go along with the plane and its manufacturing plans; and a naval judge on a separate diplomatic mission.

While Kessler’s disaffection for the regime reflected somewhat Fehler’s opinions, Kessler was a much more political and outspoken individual than the quietly competent Fehler. Kessler set the tone aboard the sub by his open tirades against Hitler and Goering, among others. In previous years, Kessler might have been shot; in today’s desperate times he was a necessary evil, simply being shuffled as far from Berlin as possible to help bolster Japan’s defenses against her common enemies with Germany.

U-234 steamed from Kristiansand April 25 under cover of night. Given Allied air supremacy, the once-proud Kriegsmarine now had to run subs at slow speed underwater. U-234 had just been modified to use a new snorkel technology. Atop her hull lay a long mast, or Schnorchel, that would let her travel weeks at a time without surfacing for air or to recharge batteries. As a trade-off, she must plod along at 12 knots with her periscope ready to pop up any minute in a nervous search for enemy antisubmarine hunter-killer planes or depth charge-ready destroyers. Standing grimly in his control room, Johann Fehler planned to discharge his final duties to the Third Reich and then hijack his crew on a glorious South Seas adventure.

Then came sudden, stark news out of Berlin: Hitler was dead.