That morning it was Karl Hanneken’s target. He lifted an inflatable boat and an air hose through the hatch. His team quickly unrolled the boat and attached the nozzle. The boat filled rapidly with air. Two crewmen joined them on deck and were handed air tanks, regulators, and fins from below. Because the team members would not have fit through the hatch wearing their equipment, they had frequently rehearsed suiting up on a pitching submarine deck. The crewmen helped the team into their equipment, then helped strap Schmeisser submachine guns wrapped in oil cloth to the midriff belts of two members of the team.
Within moments. Hanneken and his men were ready. The boat was lowered down the hull on lines, and the team followed it down the side of the sub. Hanneken slipped on the steel, and his face slapped against the hull. He could not see the blood and did not realize for hours that he had broken his nose. Equipment boxes were lowered to them. The team cast off and began paddling north.
Hanneken told me how clumsy he had felt, encased in the dry suit, crowded into the inflatable boat, an awkward craft that seemed to fight them. Every few seconds a wave would crest the low-riding boat, drenching the team. One crewman did nothing but bail. There were no visible landmarks. Lights on the island were blacked out. Every so often Hanneken would cup a hand around the waterproof flashlight and illuminate the compass attached to the boat. They paddled for an hour toward the Sound of Hoxa, the mile-and-a-half-wide passage between South Ronaldsay and Flotta islands that led into Scapa Flow.
Hanneken was a member of the Aufklärungsstreikräfte, the Reconnaissance Forces. The Germans had no equivalent of the American Rangers or the British Special Service Brigade. With the exception of the paratroopers, German special forces were created ad hoc, as need demanded. The Navy Reconnaissance Force, under Vizeadmiral Hermann Densch, was largely for intelligence gathering, but hidden in the organizational chart was 10th Marineabteilung, the obscurely named 10th Naval Detachment, in which, after vigorous examinations, Hanneken had found himself. Hanneken had joined the navy to escape the army and the Waffen SS. “I thought boats would be easier. I misjudged that, I suppose. At the 10th, all I did was train for twelve months.”
All his training was for this journey, paddling in a rubber raft between two Scottish islands. He might have seen Stranger Head and Hoxa Head to his left and right, smudges on the horizon, black on black, just before the team came to the buoys. It was too dark to be sure. A submarine net was strung across the sound, hung from a line of black buoys. Hanneken tied the boat to a buoy, scraping his hand on barnacles. His team members unfastened their submachine guns and lowered them to the boat’s deck. The equipment box was secured to a strap that ran along the side of the boat. They wiped spit on the glass on their masks, fitted the masks over their faces, inserted mouthpieces, and slid into the water.
For half an hour, the sailors attached explosive charges to the net, along the buoy line and under the floats. The waves were high enough to break over their heads. The charges were modified s-minen-42s in glass cases. Hanneken retrieved from the boat a battery pack and timer enclosed in waterproof cloth. He secured the mechanism under a buoy.
Another half hour was spent connecting the charges to the battery. Finally, Hanneken tied to buoys on each side of the charges small red and green navigation lights, ingenious spring-loaded pop-up devices manufactured by a toy company in Munich, which would not be noticed by early morning Royal Navy patrols. Each light was on a timer. The team climbed back into the raft and grabbed the paddles.
Hanneken was exhausted and numb to his soul, but he and the others paddled mightily. In one hour, the U-boat would resurface for only ten minutes. If the sailors of the 10th Marine Detachment were late or lost, they were on their own.
U-513 was not the only German submarine working the waters near Scapa Flow that early morning. There was at least one other net-mining operation, launched from U-478, and there was the commando raid on Wideford Hill on Pomona (Mainland) Island. These raiders, also of the 10th Marineabteilung, concealed their boat in the rocks at Quanter Ness, then climbed in the darkness uphill past Chambered Cairn.
Near the outer barbed wire defenses, the five raiders dug shallow trenches and lay down to wait, covering themselves with camouflaged tarps. Not one of these commandos survived the day.
William Dawes was a locomotive engineer whom I spoke with while interviewing his son, Lawrence, after the war. Lawrence had been a Hurricane pilot with the 96th Squadron at Cranage. Lawrence invited his father along with us to a pub in Durham, where he proposed I conduct the interview.
I had my first glass of porter that day, which alone would have made our talk memorable. Research for this work required me to sample most of England’s beers and ales. After a pint with an American, an Englishman begins to remember our common heritage and becomes more voluble and takes on the tone of one addressing a younger brother.
Lawrence commented that many RAF pilots hid injuries so they could continue flying. One day his crew was mounting a refurbished 20mm cannon in his Hurricane, and the cannon was dropped on his foot. He flew with a fractured instep for the rest of the war. He added, “But I was scarcely injured as badly as my father here.”
The senior Dawes flicked his fingers in a deprecating manner. He had used a crutch on the way to the pub.
“He lost his leg,” Lawrence said, slashing with his hand, indicating the abruptness with which the leg had gone. The son had leaf-green eyes and a narrow nose with a small bulb at the tip. “Just before the Germans came, in one of their last rail-yard raids, it was. He wears a wood peg now.”
“Your locomotive was hit?” I asked.
William Dawes gently shook his head. He was sixty-eight and had a mesh of lines around his mouth and patchy gray hair. We expect everything on older people to wrinkle and fade. But the color of the eyes always remains true to youth. William’s eyes were still the same sparkling green of his son’s. “It was four in the morning. By that point in the war, most rail stock was moved only at night, to be sure. My engine, an American Southern on Lend Lease, was out of service for a while because the coal tender was being loaded. I was in the barn, in the switchroom.” He sipped his ale. “Of a sudden the walls blew inward. I wish there were more to tell.”
“There certainly is more, Father,” Lawrence said, probably not for the first time.
William stared at his porter. “They believe it was a five-hundred-pound bomb, and it landed about a hundred feet away.”
Lawrence annotated, “The Germans were using what they called Knickebein, which means something like dog-leg, a system of directional radio beams, transmitted from German stations which intersected over the bombers’ target. Accurate at night.”
“Accurate enough to find me, anyway.” William waved away further technical explanations. “The sirens had just gone off, but they were late. I wanted to roll my engine into a cement roundhouse to protect it. I just got to the door when the bomb hit. For a split second, I thought I’d been lifted off my feet and pitched against the wall. What actually happened was that the wall was thrown at me, and everything on it. The calendar, a framed photograph of an old steam engine, a clock—all right at me. Half the building hit me. Then, as soon as you could say knife, the rafter came down, crushing my left leg. How the timber got only one leg, the doctors never guessed. And only then came the sounds of the explosion, like thunder in my ear.”