Since the Army was doing him a favor, even if with no great enthusiasm, McGill kept his opinion of it to himself. But he remained damn glad he was a Marine. And now he was a Marine who could fly!
When Julius Lemp brought the U-30 into Namsos, he wondered whether the U-boat base in the far north of Norway would be ready for him and his rowdy crew. Namsos had been a nothing town before Germany occupied it. But its position made it important in wartime. German U-boats staging from Namsos could easily get out into the North Atlantic. Or they could go up into the Barents Sea and harry the English convoys bringing supplies to the Russian ports of Murmansk and Archangelsk.
Proper U-boat bases had bars and brothels where sailors who’d been cooped up inside a smelly steel tube for weeks could blow off steam. The last couple of times the U-30 put in there, Namsos had been badly deficient in such amenities. His men sparked disorders that came within centimeters of turning into open mutiny.
When the U-boat tied up at a pier this time, Lemp discovered it had a welcoming committee, all right. A couple of dozen stalwart shore-patrol men stood waiting in the planking in naval-infantry uniforms that looked a lot like what the Wehrmacht wore. Each of them had a Stahlhelm on his head, a truncheon on his belt, and a Schmeisser in his arms.
“What the devil is this?” Lemp called from the conning tower as his soldiers tossed lines to ordinary Kriegsmarine personnel on the pier, who made the U-30 fast.
“Sir, we don’t want any trouble when your men come ashore,” answered the young lieutenant, junior grade, who seemed to be in charge of the shore-patrol detachment.
“I don’t want any trouble, either. And my men don’t,” Lemp said irately. “They just want to be able to have a good time.”
“What you mean by having a good time is tearing the place to pieces … sir,” the junior officer said.
“Leck mich am Arsch! That’s a bunch of Scheisse!” Lemp yelped. “They never would have got out of line if there were anything to do here. But I guess when you’ve got to stay am Arsch der Welt, you don’t notice things like that.”
“Sir,” the puppy said one more time, his voice so stiff it would have snapped if you tried to bend it, “accommodations have improved since the last time the U-30 made port here, sir.” He plainly used the title of respect twice in one sentence to convey the exact opposite: insubordination by supersubordination, you might say. After a long, angry breath, he went on, “Your men will be allowed out from the barracks in small groups, with armed escorts. They may drink. They may enjoy female companionship. If they put one foot out of place, I promise we will jug them … sir.”
“Christ on His cross! I think you’d treat an English U-boat crew better than you’re treating us,” Lemp said.
“They’d probably behave better, too, sir,” the junior officer retorted. “Your other choice is remaining confined to the boat during refitting.” That was no choice at all, as he and Lemp both understood. The first thing you wanted to do when you came into port was get the hell off the cramped, stinking boat. Lemp was tempted to swing the deck gun around and start lobbing 88mm shells at the base commandant’s headquarters. The scary thing was, he knew his sea wolves would not only do it if he gave the order, they’d cheer while they were doing it.
But no, you had to act like a grownup, even-often especially-when you didn’t want to. “All right,” Lemp said with a sigh. “We’ll do it your way. We’ll come out peacefully, and we’ll play nice. Wait here. I’ll go below and give the lads the good news.”
They took it as hard as he’d expected. Their objections were loud and profane. “You should have told that Schokostecher where to put it, skipper!” one of them shouted. He was a petty officer with several years’ service, too, which really alarmed Lemp.
“No, dammit. We’ve got to play nice,” he said, as he had to the punk on the pier. “This isn’t a joke.”
“You bet it isn’t!” another sailor yelled.
“This is for the boat,” Lemp said-if that didn’t hit them where they lived, nothing would. If nothing would, Lord help them all. “We’ve got into trouble twice here. Third time and they really would scuttle us. Drink some beer. It sounds like they do finally have a brothel, so screw the girls. But don’t brawl and don’t break things. You hear me?”
They heard him. They didn’t like it, but they did. They came up the ladder, down the conning tower, along the deck, and onto the pier in their filthy clothes, with long, greasy hair and badly groomed beards. They hardly looked like members of the same species as the spick-and-span shore patrolmen, much less members of the same armed force.
But they had their own pride. As they passed the neat men with helmets and machine pistols, they asked them things like “Ever been seasick, pal?” and “Ever done any fighting?” and “Know what fuel oil smells like?” and “Did you tell your mommy you were coming way up here?” The shore patrolmen didn’t answer. They gave a good, game try at not changing expression. Try as they would, though, they couldn’t keep the backs of their necks and their ears from going red as hot coals.
Julius Lemp waited in front of the junior lieutenant until that worthy, his own ears on fire, saluted. With a certain irony, Lemp returned the gesture. Escorted by the shore patrolmen, the U-30’s men went off to the ratings’ barracks. The lieutenant, junior grade, took the U-boat’s tiny contingent of officers to the slightly better quarters their rank entitled them to.
“Is there an officers’ brothel, too, sonny?” Lemp inquired. “Or wouldn’t you know about that?”
“Sir, there is one,” the puppy answered stiffly, and his ears went red all over again.
“Well, isn’t that nice?” Lemp scaled his unstiffened, white-crowned officer’s cap onto a cot. “Might as well freshen up a bit before I go find it. Somebody ever tell you where it was at?”
Biting the words off between his teeth, the junior officer gave precise directions. Then he spun on his heel and hurried away, as if to escape before he said something that might not be in the line of duty. Lemp’s quiet chuckle behind his back only made him go faster.
Lemp had a duty call to the base commandant to make before he could visit the brothel or the officers’ club. Cleaning himself up before he saw Captain Böhme also seemed a good idea. He couldn’t give his superior the same kind of hard time he’d inflicted on the very young lieutenant. After a bald report about the latest patrol, he did say, “I think singling out my crew the way you have is unfair, sir.”
The commandant fixed him with a cold gray stare. “That, Commander, is too damned bad,” he growled. “I did not single out your hooligans. They did it to themselves when they tried to turn this base inside out and upside down two leaves running.”
“If they would have had a better chance to relax-” Lemp began.
Waldemar Böhme cut him off: “It’s a rough old war for everyone, Commander. You are dismissed. Try to keep your nose clean, too.”
“Zu Befehl, mein Herr!” Lemp put as much spite as he could into his salute. He feared the commandant was immune to such childish gestures, but it was all he could do.
Having been dismissed, he drank bad schnapps at the officers’ club and had a skinny blonde in the brothel perform an unnatural but enjoyable act on him. Afterwards, they talked a little, a luxury his men wouldn’t enjoy. She spoke fair German, with a singsong Scandinavian intonation. “What will you do after the war?” he asked her.
“Change my name and move away,” she said matter-of-factly. “What will you do?”
He started to answer, then realized he hadn’t the faintest idea. He’d made no postwar plans. It was as if he didn’t expect to be around to worry about it. And maybe he didn’t. When you were a U-boat skipper, the odds weren’t on your side.