Captain Jugtenberg and the other Dutch officers were excellent navigators, taking regular measurements with compass and sextant, and there was easy cooperation between Ritchie’s staff officers and the Dutch crew. The convoy was carrying a wide range of minerals and supplies-iron ore, bauxite, steel, lumber, diesel oil, gasoline, sulfur, and other general cargo.
Commodore Ritchie had been pleased to have had a fairly uneventful crossing until they encountered heavy swells on September 3rd. One sheep, the SS Condor fell astern with engine trouble, but managed to catch up in time for the planned emergency turn maneuver executed on September 5th. Ritchie remarked that the station keeping and overall speed of the convoy was the best he had ever seen. On the 7th, however, the sea increased at midnight, with a fresh gale force wind from the northwest frothing up rough seas at dawn the following morning. Fimbulwinter was upon them, though no man in the convoy knew it just then.
The ships were spread out in lines of nine abreast, with Ulysses in the number five position on row one. Seven of the ships were newly arriving escorts, sent out to bring the convoy home on this final three day run. They included older Admiralty Class destroyers like HMS Arrow and Winchelsea, the Canadian destroyers Saguenay and Assinboine, and corvettes HMS Heartsease, Clarika and Camelia.
Ritchie felt fairly well protected to have seven sheep dogs escorting his flock now, but the wolves were about on the wild sea that day and they would have more work than they expected. Arrow was part of the Western Approaches Defense Force based at Greenock. Commander Herbert Wyndham Williams, had her out in front of the convoy, nervously sniffing the waters for any sign of the U-boats that made this place a favorite hunting ground. He was supposed to have been destined to take a promotion to the light cruiser Birmingham one day, but that would not happen in this timeline. The Germans had already put that ship at the bottom of the Denmark Strait.
HX-69 was also supposed to have completed its run into British ports without incident, but that history was about to change as well. Williams had already seen evidence of wolves on the prowl when he stopped to pick up survivors of Poseidon, a Greek ship that had been torpedoed a few days ago. Now he was feeling just a little ill at ease, the cold wind biting, with the promise of a hard winter to come in the months ahead.
At 09:00 a signal came in that a periscope had been spotted off the starboard side of the convoy. HMS Winchelsea was on the watch there, and was quick into action churning up the choppy seas even more with a burst of speed. Commodore Ritchie ordered the convoy to make an emergency turn to port, away from the attack but he was too late. A torpedo wake was sighted and within a minute the oiler Charles F. Meyer exploded in an angry red fireball and was soon enshrouded with acrid black smoke.
U-99, a Type VIIB boat under Kapitan Otto Kretschmer, had just taken the first bite out of HX-69. When he saw the massive explosion in his periscope, Kretschmer smiled, thinking his good luck was holding after a shaky start. On his first patrol, he was returning to Bergen with a medical casualty when he sailed into the path of the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst. An eagle-eyed Arado pilot thought he was seeing a British submarine and swooped into attack. Before he reached port the submarine was attacked a second time by German aircraft, and six days later he had to make another emergency dive when a German plane dropped three bombs on his position, sending him all the way to the seabed where he bumped his nose with a hard knock.
Those days were over, and he had settled in to three more good patrols since that time. He logged 22,700 tons on his second patrol, bettered that with 57,890 tons on his third patrol, and already had over 18,000 tons up on this patrol with another two weeks left to hunt. Kretschmer already had one Knight’s Cross for his work, and he was aiming to get his oak leaves this time around, and destined to be the number one U-boat ace in the Kriegsmarine.
“That had to be in oiler,” he said quietly to his First Watch Officer, Leutnant Klaus Bargsten. “Come right twenty degrees. Emergency down bubble, and make your depth 150 feet. There's a pesky destroyer up there looking for us.”
Winchelsea would have no luck that day, because Otto Kreschmer was a fated man. Bargsten nodded with a smile, not knowing at that moment that his own personal fate would be destined to become entangled with that of a mysterious unknown ship. In one telling of those events, Bargsten would command U-563 withorders to join the Gronland wolfpack forming up south of Iceland in August of 1941, but the boat’s Captain would see something in his periscope lens that pricked his curiosity. He spotted what looked to be two British battleships, which were in fact King George V and Repulse hastening west. Both ships were hit and burning, and Bargsten came to believe that there must be other U-boats about. Eager to get into the action, he turned west, and eventually came very near another strange looking vessel, which he tried to engage with a badly planned long shot. He paid for that mistake with his life, because the long shot he took came in a moment of great tension on the bridge of the battlecruiser Kirov.
At that time Captain Vladimir Karpov had just seized control of the ship in the North Atlantic, intending to force a decisive engagement with the Allied fleets that were hunting him. The strident warning called out by Tasarov, torpedo in the water, set Karpov off like a time bomb, and before the incident ran its course, the massive angry mushroom cloud of a nuclear weapon would blight the Earth for the first time in human history.
In so many ways, Bargsten was the match that lit the fuse to begin the great unraveling of the history that had taken so many centuries to weave. His was but a single errant thread, yet, when pulled upon, it precipitated chaos in the loom of fate and time. And there he was again this day, huddled in the conning tower of U-99, smiling at his Kapitan, taking silent lessons as he watched how easily Kreschmer commanded his boat-the devil’s apprentice.
Kreschmer would hit 46 ships in his brief career, under the emblem of the lucky golden horseshoe painted prominently on the sail of the boat. A quiet, methodical man, Kreschmer had earned the nickname ‘Silent Otto’ as he worked his craft. His motto was ‘One torpedo… one ship,’ and he demonstrated that with the swift kill he had just logged against the oiler Charles F. Meyer. He would always say that his mission was to sink ships, and not men, and would render assistance to any survivors he ever could, but this time the close proximity of the British destroyer forced him to evade. But he had his kill, on his way to become the tonnage king of the U-boat service sinking over 273,000 tons.
One day I will get my chance, thought Bargsten as he watched his Kapitan with admiration. He would end up sinking less than one percent of Kreschmer’s unmatched tonnage, just 22,171 tons in the five kills he would log in his career, but the last torpedo he would fire would shatter the history of the world.
“We’ll linger here for a while, then creep up on them again tonight,” said Kreschmer. He was famous for his night attacks, firing from the surface, but with the moon waxing, the weather would have to stay clouded over for him to risk that tactic. He would end up getting one more ship later that day, a vessel carrying sugar and rum called Traveller, much to the chagrin of sailors back in Liverpool who were expecting the rum. That kill convinced Commodore Ritchie that he was in infested waters here, which prompted him to make a fateful decision.