A Twist of Sand

My informant looked at me mildly. "By no means, my dear Lieutenant-Commander. It is a reality. By this coming winter in the North Atlantic there will be scores of the Type XXI at work. I assure you you have no reason to doubt my information."

I looked at the glum face of the man in the chair and accepted, as best I could, what the chief of Intelligence was saying.

"Air and speed, you said Lieutenant-Commander," he went on.

My words tumbled out: "But the Type XXI solves them both sir -- all the air you want, and all the speed."

"By no means," he replied. "Both are a step forward, But by no means absolute."

"What do you mean by absolute, sir?" I asked with heavy humour. "My boat might make a single burst of nine knots in an emergency, but three or four would be more like it. I'd have to charge batteries the next night when the air was foul anyway. This Type XXI -- why, it's unbelievable."

"Your problem," he replied dogmatically, "is having to come absolutely to the surface, stop and recharge, or run on the surface and recharge. The Blohm and Voss beauty sails below at snort depth, runs her diesels and charges her batteries. She is still vulnerable, and that snort is vulnerable too. Her motive power is only an improved version of the old  -- ours, for example."

"Give me a boat like that, and I'd go damn near anywhere, sir," I said vehemently, for the idea fired me. Think, if I had had a fast, manoeuvrable ship like that for that battleship attack . . .

"I say the Type XXI is quite vulnerable," he said. quietly, "and I am sure with -- ah developments -- we shall be able to cope with it."

This high-level talk was sweeping me off my feet.

"But you know, Lieutenant-Commander, the Germans are an imaginative lot. If we had had the initiative to develop the Type XXI, we would have concentrated exclusively on it. But the German is a perfectionist. He wants something better than that. So instead of concentrating, he diversifies his energies. Air and Speed. Absolutely. I can say that the TYpe XXI is obsolescent.

Astonishment robbed me of speech. I gestured feebly at the Flag Officer (S). He nodded curtly.

"Not that she won't go into service," went on the evenly moderated voice. "She's quite lethal you know."

OF all the gross understatements, that surely took the biscuit, I thought. It made Trout and her like seem like things used in the Napoleonic wars.

"What do you know about hydrogen peroxide, Lieutenant-Commander?"

A flippant reply about ladies' hairdressers rose to my lips, but died without utterance at the abstracted face before me.

"Only what I learned at school, and that I've almost forgotten," I replied.

"The Germans arc using it to propel yet another experimental type," he said coolly. I wondered if the effects of the depth-charging and the long flight were really making me rather addle-headed. Hydrogen peroxide!

"We have good reason to believe that they are using hydrogen peroxide as a main fuel, and then feeding it through a complicated system of burners, mixed with oil fuel, and driving U-boat turbines."

"Air and speed?" I asked wryly.

"Not quite," he smiled back. "But damn nearly. Without boring you with what few technicalities we know, I can say that this type -- we just call it HP on our files -- is faster than the Type XXI. The air problem is almost solved, for she can remain submerged ----"

"But the air to burn the fuel . . ."

"In the hydrogen peroxide," he said. "She doesn't need a snort for her engines, but there are a maze of technical problems to be beaten (I should say) before she becomes really operational. Although she might be fundamentally sound, she might still be too complicated to build more than a few. I doubt whether they could mass-produce them with any degree of success for some years. And then there's the R.A.F. bombing to take into account also."

"I feel that I would have the same chance against one of these hellish things as I would taking H.M.S. Victory to sea against the Scharnhorst" I said grimly.

The Flag Officer (S) tightened his compressed lips.

"They aren't invincible," he said with a grate in his voice. "You don't know what they have coming to them in the Western Approaches."

I suppose his cold rage was more terrifying than any bombast or bluster. Here was a man who weighed up the facts. He was interested in facts only. The weight of one fact against the other. Death and counter-death. An icy level of cold command, I thought, wondering why I as a mere submarine commander ever had cause to feel the isolation of command.

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked the Intelligence Chief.

"I haven't finished telling you," he rebuked me gently. In his prim voice he went on, "As you see, the Type XXI is lethal, but suffers from the conventional maladies which have beset submarines since their inception. In truth, I would call it more of a submersible in the strict sense than a submarine. To my mind submarine means a permanent ability to operate under water. The surface is only incidental to it."