* * *
MEN WHO BELIEVE THAT THEY ARE ACCOMPLISHING something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time. Bobby Shaftoe has learned most of his practical knowledge—how to fix a car, butcher a deer, throw a spiral, talk to a lady, kill a Nip—from the latter type of man. For them, trying to do anything by talking is like trying to pound in a nail with a screwdriver. Sometimes you can even see the desperation spread over such a man’s face as he listens to himself speak.
Men of the other type—the ones who use speech as a tool of their work, who are confident and fluent—aren’t necessarily more intelligent, or even more educated. It took Shaftoe a long time to figure that out.
Anyway, everything was neat and tidy in Bobby Shaftoe’s mind until he met two of the men in Detachment 2702: Enoch Root and Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. He can’t put his finger on what bugs him about those two. During the weeks they spent together on Qwghlm, he spent a lot of time listening to them yammer at each other, and began to suspect that there might be a third category of man, a kind so rare that Shaftoe never met any of them until now.
Officers are discouraged from fraternizing with enlisted men and noncoms, which has made it more difficult for Shaftoe to pursue his research into the matter. Sometimes, though, circumstances jumble all of the ranks together willy-nilly. A prime example would be this Trinidadian tramp steamer.
Where do they get this stuff? wonders Shaftoe. Does the U.S. government keep a bunch of Trinidadian tramp steamers riding at anchor at a naval yard somewhere, just in case one is needed?
He thinks not. This one shows signs of a very recent and hasty change of ownership. It is a mother lode of yellowed, ragged, multiethnic pornography, some of it very run-of-the-mill and some so exotic that he mistook it for medical literature at first. There is a lot of stray paperwork on the bridge and in certain cabins, most of which Shaftoe only sees out of the corner of his eye as these areas tend to be the domain of officers. The heads are still littered with their predecessors’ curly black pubic hairs, and the storage lockers are sparsely stocked with exotic Caribbean foodstuffs, much of them rapidly going bad. The cargo hold is filled with bales and bales of coarse brown fibrous material—raw material for life preservers or bran muffins, he supposes.
None of them much cares, because Detachment 2702 has been freezing its ass off in the Far North ever since they left Italy a few months ago, and now they are running around shirtless, of all things. One little airplane ride, that’s all it took, and they were in the balmy Azores. They did not get any R and R there—they went straight from the airfield to the Trinidadian ship, in the dead of night, huddled under tarps in a covered truck. But even the warm air that streamed in underneath the tarp felt like an exotic massage in a tropical whorehouse. And once they steamed out of sight of port, they were allowed to come up abovedecks and take in some sun.
This gives Bobby Shaftoe the opportunity to strike up a few conversations with Enoch Root, partly just for the hell of it and partly so that he can try to figure out this whole business about the third category of men. Progress comes slowly.
“I don’t like the word ‘addict’ because it has terrible connotations,” Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. “Instead of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as ‘Morphiumsüchtig.’ The verb suchen means to seek. So that might be translated, loosely, as ‘morphine seeky’ or even more loosely as ‘morphine-seeking.’ I prefer ‘seeky’ because it means that you have an inclination to seek morphine.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Shaftoe says.
“Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It’s leaky all the time—even if it’s not raining at the moment. But it’s only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to ‘addict,’ because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe.”
“So what’s the point?” Shaftoe asks. He asks this because he is expecting Root to give him an order, which is usually what men of the talkative sort end up doing after jabbering on for a while. But no order seems to be forthcoming, because that’s not Root’s agenda. Root just felt like talking about words. The SAS blokes refer to this kind of activity as wanking.
Shaftoe has had little direct contact with that Waterhouse fellow during their stay on Qwghlm, but he has noticed that men who have just finished talking to Waterhouse tend to walk away shaking their heads—and not in the slow way of a man saying “no,” but in the sudden convulsive way of a dog who has a horsefly in his middle ear. Waterhouse never gives direct orders, so men of the first category don’t know what to make of him. But apparently men of the second category fare no better; such men usually talk like they have an agenda in their heads and they are checking off boxes as they go, but Waterhouse’s conversation doesn’t go anywhere in particular. He speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff he’s already figured out, but as a way of making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along. And he always seems to be hoping that you’ll join in. Which no one ever does, except for Enoch Root.
After they’ve been out to sea for a day, the captain (Commander Eden—the same poor son of a bitch who got the job of ramming his previous command into Norway) staggers out of his cabin, making use of every railing or other handhold that comes within flailing distance. He announces in a slurred voice that from here on out, according to orders from On High, anyone going abovedecks must wear black turtlenecks, black gloves, and black ski masks underneath their other clothes. These articles are duly issued to the men. Shaftoe gets the skipper really pissed off by asking him three times whether he’s sure he has the order worded correctly. One of the reasons Shaftoe is so highly regarded by the enlisted men is that he knows how to ask these kinds of questions without technically violating the rules of military etiquette. The skipper, to his credit, doesn’t just pull rank and yell at him. He takes Shaftoe back to his cabin and shows him a khaki-covered Army manual, printed in black block letters:
TACTICAL NEGRO IMPERSONATION
VOLUME III: NEGROES OF THE CARIBBEAN
It is a pretty interesting order, even by Detachment 2702 standards. Commander Eden’s drunkenness is also kind of disturbing—not the fact that he is drunk, but the particular type of drunk—the sort of drunk of say, a Civil War soldier who knows that the surgeon is about to remove his femur with a bucksaw.
After Shaftoe has finished getting the turtlenecks, gloves, and ski masks passed out to the men, and told them to simmer down and do the lifeboat drills again, Shaftoe finds Root in what passes for the sickbay. Because he figures it is time to have one of those open-ended conversations in which you try to figure out a bunch of shit, Root is his man.
“I know you’re expecting me to ask for morphine, but I’m not gonna,” Shaftoe says. “I just want to talk.”
“Oh,” Root says. “Should I put on my chaplain hat, then?”
“I’m a fucking Protestant. I can talk to God myself whenever I goddamn well feel like it.”
Root is startled and bewildered by Shaftoe’s burst of hostility. “Well, what do you want to talk about, Sergeant?”
“This mission.”
“Oh. I don’t know anything about the mission.”
“Well, let’s try to figure it out, then,” Shaftoe says.
“I thought you were just supposed to follow orders,” Root says.
“I’ll follow ’em, all right.”
“I know you will.”
“But in the meantime I got a lot of time to kill, so I might as well use that time to figure out what the fuck is going on. Now, the skipper says to wear this stuff if we are abovedecks, where we might be seen. But who the hell is going to see us, out here?
“An observation plane?”
“Germans d
on’t have no observation planes, not out there.”
“Another ship?” Root asks rhetorically, getting into the spirit of the thing.
“We’ll see them at the same time they see us, and that’ll give us plenty of time to put that shit on.”
“It would have to be a U-boat that the skipper is worried about, then.”
“Bingo,” Shaftoe says, “because a U-boat could look at us through its periscope, and we’d never know we were being looked at.”
But that day, they don’t get much further in their attempt to figure out the deeper question of why their commanding officers want them to make themselves look like Negroes in the eyes of German U-boat captains.
The next day, the skipper plants himself on the bridge, where he evidently means to keep a close eye on things. He seems less drunk but no happier. He is wearing a colorful short-sleeved madras shirt over a long-sleeved black turtleneck, and rope sandals over black socks. Every so often he puts on his black gloves and ski mask and goes out to scan the horizon with binoculars.
The ship continues westwards for a few hours after sunrise, then turns north for a short time, then heads east for an hour, then goes north again, then turns back to the west. They are running a search pattern, and Commander Eden does not appear to be looking forward to finding whatever it is that they are searching for. Shaftoe runs another lifeboat drill, then checks the lifeboats himself, making sure that they are lavishly stocked.
Around noon, a lookout hollers. The ship changes course, headed roughly northeast. The skipper emerges from the bridge and, with an air of sepulchral finality, presents Bobby Shaftoe with a crate of dark brown shoe polish and a sealed envelope containing detailed orders.
Minutes later, the men of Detachment 2702, under orders from Sergeant Shaftoe, strip to their briefs and begin coating themselves with shoe polish. They already own black Shinola, which they are ordered to massage into their hair if it’s not already black. Just another example of how the military screws the little man—Shinola ain’t free.
“Do I look like a Negro yet?” Shaftoe asks Root.
“I have traveled a bit,” Root says, “and you don’t look like a Negro to me. But to a German who has never seen the genuine article, and who’s looking through a periscope—what the heck?” Then: “I take it you’ve figured out the mission?”
“I read the fucking orders,” Shaftoe says guardedly.
They are headed towards a ship. As they get closer, Shaftoe checks it out with a borrowed spyglass, and is startled, but not really surprised, to see that it’s not one ship but two ships side by side. Both of these ships have the long fatal lines of U-boats, but one of them is fatter, and he figures it’s a milchcow.
Beneath his feet, he feels the engines throttling back to a dim idle. The sudden quiet, and the palpable loss of momentum and power, are not reassuring. He gets the usual sick, electric, nauseous, hyperactive feeling that always makes combat such a stimulatin’ experience.
* * *
The beat-up Trinidadian steamer has plied the waters of the Atlantic without incident throughout the war to date, running back and forth between African and Caribbean ports, and occasionally venturing as far north as the Azores. Perhaps it has been sighted, from time to time, by a patrolling U-boat, and judged to be not worth spending a torpedo on. But today its luck has changed—for the worse. They have, by random chance, blundered across a milchcow—a supply U-boat of the Kriegsmarine of the Third Reich. The steamer’s normally jaunty crew of shoe-brown Negroes has gathered at the rails to peer across the ocean at this peculiar sight—two ships tied together in the middle of the ocean, going nowhere. But as they draw closer, they realize that one of those ships is a killer, and that the other is flying the battle flag of the Kriegsmarine. Too late, they cut their engines.
There is wild confusion for a minute or so—this might be an interesting spectacle to the lowly, deck-swabbing Negroes, but the smart Negroes up on the bridge know they’re in trouble—they’ve seen something they shouldn’t have. They swing her around to the south and make a run for it! For an hour they dash desperately across the seas. But they are trailed implacably by a U-boat, cutting through the waves like a Bowie knife. The U-boat has its whip aerial up, is monitoring the usual frequencies, and hears the Trinidadian steamer fire up her radio and send out an SOS. In a short stream of dits and dahs, the steamer broadcasts her location—and that of the milchcow, and in so doing taps out her own death warrant.
Pesky untermenschen! They’ve really gone and done it now! It won’t be twenty-four hours before the milchcow is located and sunk by the Allies. There is a good chance that a few U-boats will be hounded to their deaths as part of the bargain. That is not a good way to die—being chased across the ocean for several days, suffering the death of a thousand cuts from strafings and bombings. Stuff like this really drives home, to the common ordinary Obertorpedomaat, the wisdom of the Führer’s plan to go out and find all of the people who aren’t Germans and kill them.
Meanwhile, our basic Kapitänleutnant has got to be ask ing himself: what the hell are the chances that a tramp Trinidadian steamer is going to just happen upon us and our milchcow, out in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean?
You could probably work it out, given the right data:
Nn = number of Negroes per square kilometer
Nm = number of milchcows
AA = Area of the Atlantic Ocean
. . . and so on. But wait a sec, neither Negroes nor milchcows are randomly distributed, so the calculation becomes immensely more complicated. Far too complicated for a Kapitänleutnant to mess around with, especially when he’s busy trying to effect a dramatic reduction in Nn.
The Trinidadian steamer is brought up short by a shell fired across her bows from the U-boat’s deck gun. The Negroes gather on the decks, but they hesitate, just for a moment, to launch the lifeboats. Perhaps the Germans are going to give them a break.
Typical, sloppy, sentimental untermenschen thinking. The Germans brought them up short so they would hold still to be torpedoed. As soon as they realize this, the Negroes stage an impressive lifeboat drill. It’s remarkable that they even have enough lifeboats to go around, but the calm, practiced skill with which they launch and board them is truly phenomenal. It’s enough to make a German naval officer reconsider, just for a moment, his opinions about the shortcomings of darkies.
It is a textbook torpedoing! The torpedo is set to run nice and deep, and as it passes underneath the ship, the detonation circuit senses a change in the magnetic field and triggers the explosive, neatly snapping the ship’s keel, breaking its back, and sending it down with incredible speed. For the next five or ten minutes, bales of brown stuff erupt from the water, released from the cargo holds as the ship plummets towards the bottom. It gives the whole scene an unexpectedly festive air.
Some U-boat skippers would not be above machine-gunning the survivors, at this point, just to let off a little steam.
But the commander, Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff, is not yet a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party and probably never will be.
On the other hand, Bischoff is wrapped in a straightjacket and blasted half out of his mind on drugs.
Acting commander of the U-boat is Oberleutnant zur See Karl Beck. He is a card-carrying National Socialist, and, in other circumstances, he might be game for a bit of punitive machine-gunning, but at the moment he’s exhausted and pretty badly shook up. He is intensely conscious of the fact that he’s probably not going to live very long now that their location has been reported.
So he doesn’t. The Negroes are jumping out of the lifeboats, swimming to the bales, and clinging to them with just their heads out of the water, realizing it would take forever to hunt them all down. OL Beck knows the Liberators and the Catalinas are already airborne and vectored towards him, so he has to get the hell out of there. Since he has plenty of fuel, he decides to head south for a while, planning to double back north in a day or two, when the coast might be a b
it clearer. It is the kind of thing that KL Bischoff would do if he had not gone crazy, and everyone on the boat has unlimited respect for the old man.
They run on the surface, as they always do when they are not making a positive effort to sink a convoy, so they can send and receive radio messages. Beck gives one to Oberfunkmaat Huffer, explaining what has just happened, and Huffer gives it to one of his Funkmaats, who sits down in front of U-691’s Enigma machine and encrypts it using the key for the day, then taps it out on the radio.
An hour later, they get a message back, straight from U-boat Command at Wilhelmshaven, and when the Funkmaat runs it through the Enigma, what he comes up with is: CAPTURE SURVIVING OFFICERS.
It’s a classic example of military commandsmanship: if the order had come in a more timely fashion it would have been easy to obey, but now that they are an hour away it will be extremely difficult and dangerous. The order doesn’t make any sense, and no effort is made to clarify it.
Given the time lag, Beck figures he can get away with giving this one a half-assed try. He really should swing round and approach the wreck on the surface, which would get him there faster, but which would be nearly suicidal. So instead, he closes the hatches and descends to periscope depth as he draws closer. This cuts the U-boat’s speed to a crawling seven knots, so it takes them about three hours to get back to the atoll of bobbing brown bales that marks the site.
A damn good thing, too, because another fucking submarine is there, picking up survivors. It is a Royal Navy submarine.
This is so weird it makes the hairs on the back of Beck’s neck stand up—and there’s a lot of hair there, because like most submariners, Beck hasn’t shaved in weeks. There’s nothing weird, though, that can’t be settled with a single well-placed torpedo. Seconds later the submarine explodes like a bomb; the torpedo must have touched off her munitions. Her crew, and most of the rescued Negroes, are trapped within, and don’t have a chance of getting out even if they survived the explosions. The submarine drops off the surface of the ocean like the wreckage of the Hindenberg tumbling down on New Jersey.