“There they are, sir.” A spotter pointed dead ahead.
Fromm allowed himself a smile. Two navigational lights floated on the surface of the sea, directing him. The Kapitänleutnant looked aft. Six submarines were following him in a precise line through the gap in the sub net.
Once through, Fromm and the spotters returned below. U-502 dove, but stayed near the surface, with the first officer directing them from his post at the periscope. The pack moved past Roan Head into the flow at periscope depth, then bore northwest in a line abreast.
Before departure from Narvik in northern Norway, Lieutenant Commander Fromm had been told only part of the battle plan. The Führer der Unterseeboote (flag officer commander for submarines), who had flown from Berlin for the briefing, had assured him that once the submarines were inside the flow, the Royal Navy would come to them. After twenty minutes in line abreast on the east side of the island called Flotta, the admiral was proven correct.
“Target, sir,” the first officer called from the tower. “Enemy position off bow left. Angle forty, speed twelve knots, range three thousand meters.”
Fromm climbed into the tower to relieve the first officer at the attack periscope. He sat astride the periscope saddle with his face hard against the rubber cup. His feet pressed pedals allowing him to spin the periscope and saddle left or right. A lever at his right hand could raise or lower the scope.
Fromm called out, “Stand by tubes one to four for surface firing.”
The tubes were flooded. The first officer manned his position calculator, which was connected with the gyrocompass. He adjusted the torpedoes’ steering mechanisms. When the submarine’s course was altered, the new position was automatically changed for the torpedoes.
“Comparison, now,” Fromm said. “Variation, zero. Open torpedo doors.”
The first officer called, “Tubes one through four ready to fire.”
“Connect tubes one and two.”
“Aye, sir.”
Fromm whispered, “My God, it’s the Nelson.”
In his sight was the Rodney’s sister ship, same silhouette, same battery of sixteen-inch guns, over 1,300 sailors aboard.
The chief engineer yelled from the sound room, “Herr Kaleun, I’ve got an earful here.”
Fromm ignored him. His prize was too close. “Report angle.”
The number came from the control room below.
The commander said, “Tubes one and two, fire.”
“Fire, one and two,” the first officer answered.
A blast of air propelled the torpedoes from the submarine.
“Starboard ten degrees,” Fromm ordered. “Connect tubes three and four.”
“Aye, sir,” from several.
The chief engineer shouted, “Herr Kaleun, check ninety degrees to port. We’ve got something coming at us.”
The periscope motor hummed. Fromm looked north for an instant, but kept what he saw to himself. He spun back to his prey.
“Give me the angle.” He waited several seconds more. “Fire tubes three and four.”
“They’re off, sir.”
Fromm called, “Flood. All hands forward. Let’s get under.”
But it was too late, both for the Nelson and U-502. As the first two torpedoes hit the battleship midships, the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Garrity plowed into the submarine’s quarterdeck, its prow slashing into the engine room, lifting the submarine almost out of the water, then breaking it in two like a board snapped over a knee.
Fromm was pitched off the periscope saddle to the deck grating. He slapped the alarm button. The first officer climbed into the tower. “We’re through. The aft section has vanished.”
“Call the abandon ship.”
Of the fifty-one officers and crewmen aboard U-502, nineteen, including Fromm, were eventually plucked from the waters of the flow. They spent the remainder of the war interred in Scotland.
Here, too, the trade-off worked to the Germans’ advantage. A U-boat for a battlewagon. The Nelson cruised under its own power into the Pentland Firth south of the flow, but there it went down, smoke billowing from it until the tip of the ensign staff on the stern slipped below the surface.
The Battle of Scapa Flow was over in sixty minutes. The toll was dreadful. The battleships Rodney and Nelson, cruisers Sussex and Norfolk, six destroyers, four corvettes, and twelve other ships including mine-sweepers, net-layers, depot and repair ships, and an oiler were sunk or gutted. Four British submarines were also caught on the surface and destroyed.
The Luftwaffe lost every plane it sent, 123 dive-bombers. Nine U-boats also failed to return to Narvik, victims of Royal Navy destroyers or mines. But it was a cheap price to pay to break the Royal Navy’s back.
Victoria Haselhurst was strolling through Eaton Park when the second destruction of Norwich began. The first had been by the Danes, who razed the town in 1004. Now it was the Germans’ turn.
Not that the people of Norwich, in the county of Norfolk, had been complacent through the centuries. Norwich citizens had taken part in the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and Kett’s Rebellion in 1549. And an ancient poem pointed to their importance in any invasion: “He who would old England win / Must at Weybourn Hoop begin.” Even so, this war had largely spared them.
Norwich was a town of less than a hundred thousand people in East Anglia, northeast of London, eighteen miles inland from the North Sea on the River Yare. Little in the town had interested the Luftwaffe, until the waves of Dorniers and Heinkels appeared over their town during the same hour that the Battle of Scapa Flow raged.
Haselhurst worked in a boot-manufacturing plant. She was a striking woman, with blond hair, cut short so it would not get caught in machinery, and blue-gray eyes that spoke of Viking ancestry. When the air raid sirens had begun ten minutes before, she had left the plant for the park, rather than descend into the factory’s musty basement with all the old people and their smells and dull chatter. She preferred the park’s oaks and elms. And most of the plant evacuations were false alarms anyway.
This one certainly was not. She had never imagined so many planes. She recognized the flying pencil shape of the Dorniers from the airplane recognition chart at work. Above them were escort fighters, dots against the blue sky.
It seemed to her the bombs would all miss the city, for they fell from the planes’ bellies too early. Could the Germans be bombing the old manor house south of town? But as they fell, the bombs followed the planes forward, reaching for the town. They were tiny things, wiggling in the air, dropping in batches. They came by the thousands. She told me after the war that for a moment she was oddly pleased that the town had finally merited some attention. She was later ashamed by the thought.
Fascinated rather than fearful, she watched as the bombs, still appearing harmless, fell in tight patterns that opened as the bombs descended further. Several escort Messerschmitts banked out of formation to face approaching fighters, although she could not see the RAF planes.
The bombs hit with a peculiar bubbling noise, nothing like she expected, splats rather than blasts. Waves of flame flickered from rooftops. They were incendiaries, designed to set the town on fire. Each bomb was a gray cylinder, a little over a foot long and weighing two pounds. The first clusters hit along Cecil and Townclose roads, then worked their way north into the ancient neighborhoods of crow-stepped gabled buildings and half-timbered houses, made to burn. Victoria watched silently, raising her hand to shade her eyes. There was nothing she could do.