“I knew nothing about submarines,” he remembered. “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.”
When he reached the short conning tower, Keyes gripped the periscope and levered himself over the tower rail. Just as he dropped onto the conning deck, the fourth crewman’s head emerged through the hatch. When Keyes kicked him in the face, the submariner slipped back into the craft. The lieutenant heard waves splash against the conning tower. Another minute, and the sub would slip below the surface.
“Lights were still on in the control room below. I gripped the hatch ring and lowered myself as far as my arms allowed. My feet didn’t find anything, so I let go, and landed on the German crewman. I don’t know whether I’d kicked him into unconsciousness or whether landing on him did it, but he was out by the time I gathered my feet under me.”
The lieutenant found himself in the only crew space on the midget submarine, the control room. “It was filled with wheel controls, cables, tubes, compasses, fuse boxes, gauges, and all the plumbing. The room was so narrow I couldn’t extend my arms in any direction. I have no idea how four men fit in there.”
The sea was gushing up into the room from the grate over the control room deck, swirling and bubbling around Keyes’ knees. The lights flickered. The German sputtered. Keyes looked quickly about him. The submariner’s head hung limply.
I asked, “How’d you shut off the water?”
Another modest grin. “I started turning every wheel in the place. No small task, mind, there must have been a dozen of them. The deck was by then at a considerable angle, and I kept slipping, sometimes to my knees. All the while, the water rose. Drowning, that’s the real drawback of joining the Royal Navy. And that’s all I was thinking about. Jesus, I didn’t want to drown. I turned those wheels in a panic.”
“But you finally found the right one.”
“Something lost is always found in the last place you look. That’s how it must be with submarine controls. Yes, I found the shut-off valve, and I swear it was the last one in the room.”
By then the water was to Lieutenant Keyes’ chest. The light sputtered out and plunged the chamber into darkness as black as the sea bottom. The submarine groaned and hissed. Water splashed into Keyes’ mouth, and he gagged and spit. He reached for pipes to support him as he waded toward the hatch. He was startled when the unconscious floating German bumped him. The lieutenant found the rungs and climbed toward the night air.
Only the rim of the conning tower and the bow were still above water, but the sub had stopped sinking. Two of the topside Germans were in the water, both clinging to life rings which had been thrown from the trawler. The third submariner was still on the bow, his gaze shifting uncertainly between the British ship and Keyes.
“Come here,” the lieutenant yelled as his head crested the conning tower’s rail. He signaled the German with an arm, then pointed down the hatch.
“I give that fellow credit. I didn’t have to tell him again. He slid down the deck toward the tower. I lowered myself back into the control room to water level, now about three feet below the hatch. I reached around underwater until I found that fourth German, not knowing if he was alive. I dragged him up as far as I could, and the topside German pulled him up the rest of the way. I hurried out of there. Carrying the German, we jumped into the water.”
Keyes and the German submariners were hauled to the trawler’s deck. The fourth German was quickly resuscitated. The Kriegsmarine sailors were locked in a storeroom and armed guards were posted outside the hatch. After a line was rigged to the submarine, the control room was emptied of water with the Pettibone’s portable pump. The sub was still low in the water, but stable. The trawler made slowly to port, its prize in tow.
In the British fashion, the Pettibone’s captain said nothing to Lieutenant Keyes. Not until the DSC was announced did Keyes learn what his captain, who made the recommendation, had thought of his little swim.
I have chosen these incidents virtually at random. There were many others that morning. Little incursions by the Germans, deceptions picayune and otherwise, touches of violence. As General Clay had warned, the Germans were parrying and feinting with Allied intelligence, and a shroud of confusion was descending on Great Britain.
Several days earlier the general had exclaimed, “I don’t want to go down in history as America’s great blind commander, another Custer, who was told by scouts that there were more Sioux and Cheyenne over the next hill than the 7th Cavalry had cartridges. If I could just have a glimpse over the next hill.”
Well, he couldn’t, at least not an accurate glimpse. The Germans were making sure of that.
4
German planes had not settled for destroying the landscape. They also devastated the language. A full moon, once a lovers’ moon, had become a bombers’ moon. A cloudless night was termed a smoking night, due to the smoke screens from oil-burning canisters, the most bothersome of all bomber defenses. Londoners had begun calling the River Thames Bombers’ Lane, because Luftwaffe planes flew to the city along the estuary.
We were flying along Bombers’ Lane toward London. To our right were the ruins of the oil tanker farms at Thameshaven. The fires there had been burning for months. The joke was that the Luftwaffe used the smoke column as a navigation aid, and the Heinkels returned to the tanks at once whenever the smoke threatened to die down.
The general and I came to London almost daily for meetings, and there was usually some new smudge on the horizon, some neighborhood which had ceased to exist the night before, some factory destroyed, some new outrage to peer at as we flew overhead. The Germans had begun their all-out bomber attack on August 13, 1940, which they called Adlertag, or Eagle Day. They had been coming back since, each bomber escorted by two fighters, which often flew fifteen thousand feet above their wards, ready to pounce on anything that dared interfere. As the months passed and the ranks of RAF interceptors had dwindled, many Luftwaffe bombing runs were made at only four thousand feet. A plane hardly needed a bombsight at that height.
The East End and the docklands had suffered most. Bethnal Green, Stepney, Hackney, Brick Lane, Bow, and East and West Ham were gone. There were only crater-pocked, wreckage-strewn, ash-covered expanses, which from the air appeared as one imagines the moon might. Industrial areas to the west of the city had also been gutted. Brentford, Hounslow, many more.
“Will you look at that, Jack?” the general said from the copilot’s seat. “I’d heard it’d been hit yesterday, scarcely believed it. But there’s the proof.”
Coming into view under the Cub’s fuselage was the Tower of London. I could see its dry moat, double castellated walls, and the four towers of the White Tower. From our angle, it should have been framed by the Tower Bridge, to my eye the loveliest structure in the city. Built in 1894, with Gothic towers over two hundred feet high, it was the last bridge over the Thames before the river flows into the sea, the pride of the river.
The bridge was not there. Instead, only the two foundation piers remained, topped by mounds of rubble. The bascules had fallen into the water, as had the decks to the north and south of the foundations. Steel suspension spans lay over the rubble, twisted together like snakes basking on rocks in the sun. The neighborhood south of the bridge was still on fire. Spots of flame were visible through the smoke. Bricks and stone and shattered glass covered Tower Bridge Road. Glittering in the sun, the glass made the road appear like a river, as if bright light was reflecting off waves.