The Land God Made in Anger. John Davis Gordon
Читать онлайн книгу.
places on this boat to hide treasure.
He sighed and retraced his steps, to start going through the boat again, foot by foot, taking photographs and making notes. Until he knew every nook and cranny.
It was mid-afternoon when he finished. He had been through the U-boat four times. It felt as if he knew every corner and crevice, and he would scream if he stayed inside it a minute longer. He came out of the cold submarine into the freezing grey day.
He crossed the road towards the rest of the museum, and mounted the long path. He entered the massive memorial built in the shape of a conning tower.
He stared at the wall. It was a gigantic mural depicting thousands of ships and submarines, all in relief. Every German ship that was sunk, every submarine that went down, was represented here, to scale, in bleak grey sculpture.
McQuade stared. It was awe-inspiring. Staggering. And horrifying, that this is what men did to each other when they went to war. The horrifying waste of human life. Written in stone, in huge Gothic letters: ‘120,000. Sie Starben Für Uns.’ You died for us.
McQuade turned away from it abruptly. Trying to push the shrieking image of that black soupiness out of his mind, trying to feel tough, like a fortune-hunter. He grimly crossed the courtyard to the second building.
Here was the other half of the horrifying story. There were seven maps of the world, representing seven stages of the war on the sea. Red dots indicated where every Allied ship was sunk by U-boats. Blue crosses represented sunken German submarines. In the first three maps, representing the periods up to December 1941, red dots of sunken Allied shipping were densely packed around Britain, Portugal, Gibraltar, France, West Africa and even South West Africa, and there were very few blue crosses. In the maps representing January 1942 to May 1943 these red dots were massively concentrated around the east coast of America, the Caribbean, West Africa, South Africa and the north Atlantic – but there were many more blue crosses now. The last two maps, depicting the period June 1943 to mid-1945, showed the way the war was going for Germany, the terrible price her submarines were paying: the red dots were sparse and the blue crosses were numerous. He then took the stairs that descended into a large, circular mausoleum. And he wanted to get out of the place. It was ghostly. Dull light filtered through a glass opening to the courtyard above. Laid into the walls, and on a raised dais in the centre, were coats of arms, and flags of U-boat squadrons that went down. McQuade hurried through it, to the exit staircase on the other side, almost feeling the ghosts behind him. He found himself reentering the massive conning tower again, with its sculptured mural of sunken shipping and the inscription, ‘You died for us’.
There was an elevator leading to the very top of the memorial. McQuade had had enough; but he entered the elevator. He emerged onto a balcony at the top of the tower.
It was freezing up here. He looked down.
Hundreds of feet below him, down on the bleak beach, lay the U-boat he had just examined so carefully, long and mean and dangerous. And beyond lay the Baltic Sea, grey and icy under the leaden sky. Beneath his feet was the sculptured mural, the haunting mausoleum, the maps with all those blood-red dots and funereal-blue crosses. McQuade looked down at that grim submarine, and he saw again that ghostly shape under the freezing Atlantic off the Skeleton Coast with its pitch-black horrors. He tried to force the image from his mind, and think of the loot waiting for him. But he could not make it; all he could see and think and smell and taste and feel was that charnel house, that ocean tomb, a war grave that he was going to desecrate, the bones and soup of brave German boys he was going to wade through.
He turned abruptly, back to the elevator.
He hurried back along the freezing seafront, to catch a ferry back to Kiel. To catch a train to Sylt, where the U-boat archives are. He felt like a grave-robber all the way.
You drive out of the flat little town of Sylt with its solid houses, onto the airfield road, past cold, military-fenced fields, before reaching a big gate. You show your passport, and drive on through numerous, long, low red-brick buildings, past a football field, and rows of no-nonsense apartment buildings. There follow aircraft hangars and depressing buildings that look like warehouses, all painted grey under the leaden-grey sky. The taxi stopped outside one of them. ‘U-Boot Archiv,’ the driver said.
McQuade opened the grey door uncertainly. There was no vast hall filled with submarines. A concrete staircase led upwards.
He mounted the stairs, his footsteps echoing. There were paintings of German submarines in stormy, wintry seas. He came to the first floor where an open door led into an office. A grey-haired man sat at a desk, in a grey tracksuit. ‘Ja, guten Morgen?’
McQuade said, in English, ‘Good morning. The German Naval Attaché in London suggested I come here to see Herr Horst Bredow, the U-boat archivist.’
The man got up, his hand extended. He wore sandals and yellow socks. ‘I am Horst Bredow. How is Karl?’
They sat on the carpet at the bookshelves while Horst Bredow plucked volumes off and thrust them at him. ‘You must be right in your facts! The rubbish people write about submarines! You must read books like this, and this, and this …’
The books piled up: Submarines of World War II, U-Boats Under the Swastika, Few Survived. ‘I am one of the few who survived. So I keep this museum in memory of those who did not. It is my own museum. The German government does not pay me, except my war pension, but it provides this building.’
‘I see.’
He crinkled his brow: ‘And please don’t write too much rubbish about the Nazis.’
‘I won’t …’
‘The English seem to think all Germans were Nazis. No submariner was a member of the Nazi Party. We served only the state. We saluted like this –’ he brought his fingertips up to his brow – ‘not like this –’ he gave the Heil Hitler salute. He glared, then demanded, ‘What’s your story about?’
McQuade said: ‘My hero is trying to trace the family of a German U-boat man who was sunk. Do you have records of every U-boat of World War II?’
‘Yes.’ He waved his hand at the next room.
‘And the crew members of each boat?’
‘Yes.’
‘And details of the crew’s families? Wives, for example? Where they are today?’
‘Sometimes. If they wish to tell me such details. If the man is alive, his family is his business. If he was killed in action, his widow is probably drawing a war pension – which is also a private matter. The details of such widows are kept by the pension office, the Deutsche Dienststelle in Berlin.’
‘Can you write that down for me?’ He handed Herr Bredow his notebook.
Bredow scribbled the name and address for him.
‘Thank you. So if I gave you the name of a crew member, you could trace which U-boat he served on?’
‘Yes.’
‘And once we know his boat number can you also tell me where it was sunk?’
‘Usually. But not necessarily.’
‘Why’s that?’
Bredow said, ‘Passiermeldungen. Every day the submarine commander had to radio to Berlin in code, telling his position and what he was doing, what enemy shipping was about, and so on. This is called a Passiermeldung. He also received any orders Berlin wanted to give him. So, if that submarine is thereafter sunk, we know approximately where, because the commander gave us his recent position. But a U-boat could go a long way in twenty-four hours, chasing a ship Berlin knew nothing about. Or, it may happen that a commander cannot radio his Passiermeldung on time, because of bad weather, for example. Then, if he gets sunk,