A Twist of Sand

When I had finished, he said quietly: "I owe you an apology, Peace. When I saw you there I thought I was seeing what I have seen so many times: a fine officer, but his battle reflexes shot to hell. I had three submarine commanders on my list for this job, and it was the battleship that tipped the scales in your favour. A moment ago I had doubts. Now I am ordering you to do it." He smiled slightly. As a once a brilliant submarine commander in World War I, he still knew that you can only push a submarine commander so far and then -- the enemy gets him.

He leaned back in his leather chair.

"Three men know about this thing. I will tell you who they are: Myself, the Director of Naval Intelligence, now you. One other man knew, but he is dead. The Gestapo saw to that. I tell you that the fate of the whole war at sea depends -- and I do not say may depend, but depends -- on the success or otherwise of the mission I have for you."

He pressed a button and lapsed into silence, but the cold eyes watched me, probing, mesmerising, seeking out the hidden weakness of the instrument he had chosen.

"Show in the Director of Naval Intelligence," he said.

I got to my feet as the grave, sad-eyed man came in.

"Hallo, Peter," he said. He spoke like a world-weary diplomat. He seemed to have reached a stage beyond sadness at human ferocity and had only compassion left. He looked at me. "So this is your man ?" It was a different type of scrutiny, a subtle, diagnostic friendliness, but not less deadly than the scalpel-like probing of the Flag Officer (S).

"Tell him," he said curtly.

The newcomer sat on the edge of the desk with one leg swinging idle. He lit a cigarette and gazed for a moment at the cold view beyond the windows, as if mustering his thoughts.

"You will see," he said didactically, "that I have no papers with me. There are no papers. All I have is a message sent by our agent at the Blohm and Voss yards. It was a longish message, and that is probably why they caught him. His Majesty's Government will never have the opportunity of rewarding him." He said it without a trace of irony, but rather with pity. It might have been an epitaph for a Spartan.

"You may guess," he went on, "although you may not know, that the Germans have been working on forms of submarine propulsion other than conventional methods for some time."

I shook my head.

"You've been too busy sinking things to keep upto date," he murmured reprovingly. "What would say were your two main problems in a submarine ? You, as a practical exponent of the art?"

The schoolmasterly chiding held no hint of the venomous subject it treated: slow coughing to death in a steel coffin in fifty fathoms of water; no hint of our excruciating passion for more speed to evade the hunter.

"Fresh air and speed," I replied.

"May I congratulate you on your man, Peter? I suppose a submarine commander doesn't have much time to waste his words."

"Fresh air and speed," he went on quietly. "Yes. Four words tell the whole story. The Germans are getting the answers, too. They are well ahead of us."

The Flag Officer (S) stirred slightly in his chair. The burden of that terrible summer and its more terrible winter in the North Atlantic lay heavily on his heart. Half a million tons a month sunk, they said.

"They seem to have given priority to air," the easy voice went on.  "They are working on a kind of hollow tube that will supply air to the vessel while it remains submerged"   He consulted his mind.  "The Dutch had something of the sort at the outbreak of war.   They called it something like . . . ah, yes, snort or snorchel."

I listened in amazement. "Why" I exclaimed, "give a submariner a thing like that and, and . . ."

"Precisely," he smiled. "And one poses a whole new series of tactical problems of the greatest import. I am simply a glass through which rays of information shine, I hope not too dully." He smiled faintly at the stern eyed man at the other side of the desk.

"Now the Blohm and Voss people" -- he said it as one might name a favourite tailor of close acquaintance -- " have evolved a prototype which they are calling Type XXI. It is fully streamlined and is fitted with what we will conversationally call a snort. It will do sixteen knots submerged, has six bow tubes and carries twelve spare torpedoes. I evaluate its firing power at eighteen torpedoes -- I think kipper is a distressing piece of naval slang -- in thirty minutes."

The man behind the desk stirred again. That schoolmasterly voice meant, translated into the practical, a burning hell of tankers sinking, men dying in agony, or freezing to death in perishing seas. The cold eyes were so cold that years later I was still to remember them.

"The Type XXI also has a new kind of range-finder --  again, well in advance of us or the Americans -- which enables him to fire his torpedoes from thirty-five metres down without using his periscope at all."

I jumped to my feet.  "No, that's impossible!"