Dear Pilot,
I don’t think anyone’s ever called me wise before. And surely there must be wiser engines than me. A thing I do know is if your people say they’ll see to your repairs, then at the very least, they want for them to happen. I’ll admit, I didn’t actually know if you ever would be operational again when I said I thought you would be. Sometimes people say they want things to happen, but other things get in the way. Sometimes the hope is enough to see everything else through and make sure it happens though.
To the point, U-505 says you seem kind enough not to make too much fun of him so he’ll share his Christmas story for this letter. He had to think about it for a few days because we engines – particularly us passenger engines – care quite a lot about smells. We keep a mind to it because smells sometimes mean something is wrong and needs to be fixed. Other times, they just make things unpleasant for passengers. And then there’s just the difference in smell between a steam engine and a diesel. Some people like one or the other or neither. Suffice to say, engines are very aware of how we smell.
Submarines are not. They spend much of their time underwater and so don’t smell things all that often.
They themselves smell quite a lot though! U-boats were nicknamed schweinboots, “pig boats”, because of how they start to smell once they’ve been on a patrol.
People – I had never considered and so I assume you hadn’t either – start to smell bad when they’ve not washed for a few days. It explains why people are so sensitive to smells since most of them are quite diligent with their hygiene. But U-boats don’t have showers so U-505’s crew would go months without washing. They would get sweaty and smelly and U-505’s interior would stink of them. It still stinks of them! It’s the first thing his visitors notice. It’s been thirty years since his crew has been aboard, after nearly everything in his interior had been ripped out and stolen, and it still smells! Their sweat is soaked into his steel. (U-505 says this with some pride actually, but quietly because 2903 is sleeping.)
Rank as it all was though, my guides explained to me that people will also forget about a bad smell after a while. The smell is still there, but with enough time their noses just ignore it. They say this is called nose blindness. So even though U-505’s crew could smell how pungent he was after coming back from their furlough, they’d forget about it after a day or two, just as they were starting to stink again themselves.
Which is exactly where U-505 and his crew found themselves on December 28th, 1943.
They had just left port on Christmas Day and were given orders to meet with four other ships who were assisting German Destroyer ship Z-27, who had gotten into a battle with some British ships. At first, everyone was excited to go because they thought there might be a chance they could sink an enemy cruiser. U-505 says that U-boats are not really meant to get into fights like that though and while they did have the order to attack any enemies they saw, they got more important orders shortly after: to search for survivors from Z-27. U-505 and his crew assumed that meant Z-27 had been sunk.
It was very cold and U-505 was worried for his own crew in the weather, but they were worried for their fellow sailors who would be cold and wet. People don’t survive very long in cold water. It was early morning and the waves were very choppy so it was nearly impossible to spot anything in the dark, but his crew kept watch and prepared coffee and blankets in the hope that they would.
And amazingly, they did! They found two sailors adrift together on life rafts. They were injured and suffering from hypothermia (which is when people are so cold that it’s dangerous for them). U-505’s crew put them in the engine room where it was warmest and got them dried off.
Meanwhile, his captain stayed on deck to keep looking for more. This was U-505’s first patrol with his new skipper, a man named Lange, but he says he liked him quite a bit more than his previous captain. Lange stayed out well into the night, chain-smoking his cigarettes as he looked for more survivors through his binoculars, while waves ten feet high crashed over U-505’s deck.
Early the next morning, they finally spotted more survivors on the waves. A little more than two dozen! These weren’t from Z-27 though, they were from a torpedo ship, T-25. She had been sunk too. As it turned out, T-25 had herself rescued crewmen from U-106 who had been sunk earlier that year. U-505 says it is then a great honor to return such a favor.
It was a challenge too because U-boats are only built to hold as many men as are needed to operate them. The German navy had decided to add even more crewmen earlier that year too so U-505 was operating at a surplus. He was also fully stocked with provisions since he’d only been at sea for a few days, so every spare spot had boxes of food in it. His crew set to work trying to get their rescued survivors dry and warm, but they didn’t have much place to put them!
On top of the problems of space, the survivors were also sick from hypothermic shock, not being used to how a U-boat moves on the waves compared to their own ship, and (U-505 suspects) the general stink of his interior. His own crew put out spit pans for them to be sick into, but a lot of them just threw up into his bilge which just added to the smell. He says they felt quite bad about making a mess, but his crew made jokes about their cook serving their sick-up for dinner and brushed it off.
Meanwhile, the conditions on the surface were getting too rough so Lange ordered U-505 under the water and his own crew had to step over their rescued sailors to do their jobs. The torpedo ship crewmen weren’t used to diving so some of them started to panic. In such close quarters, they couldn’t have anyone tossing themselves about so U-505’s crewmen had to tie them up in hammocks and stuff them in the aft crew quarters to keep them from distracting operations. U-505’s crew was very resourceful when it came to compounding problems like this.
“Alles kleine fische,” he says.
Lange and T-25’s captain, whose name was von Gortzen, kept looking through the periscopes for more survivors but for a long time, all they found after that was empty life rafts. It was disheartening and Lange insisted von Gortzen finally get some rest. Just before sunset, though, Lange spotted an emergency signal light. U-505 charged towards it and when they arrived, they found five more men. They were almost dead, but U-505 and his crew found them in time.
After that, they were feeling emboldened and turned on their searchlight to keep looking. This was risky because if any enemy ships saw them, it would give away his position, but they thought it was worth it. Eventually, they were told a neutral Irish ship was searching in the area and Lange decided to take the survivors he found back to port. Obviously U-505 and his crew hoped they would have found more, but he does wonder where they would have put them if they did. As it was, they rescued thirty-four sailors which is quite good for a U-boat!
But there was still the trouble of getting the back to shore.
We call U-505 a submarine, but technically he’s a submersible. What this means is he can go underwater, but he can’t stay there indefinitely. When he’s underwater, he runs on batteries but the batteries drain if he moves and he has to surface to recharge them. Being on the surface is dangerous because planes might see him though. It’s tricky then to get back to port without being seen.
There’s also that he runs out of air when underwater. My guides explained it to me that air is made of oxygen and people breathe in oxygen but when they breathe it back out, it’s turned into carbon dioxide which people can’t breathe. So in an air- and water-tight container like U-505’s interior, as his crew breathe, there gets to be less oxygen and more carbon dioxide. And since he had so many more people on board than usual, the oxygen would run out faster.
More people also make more… waste. U-505 has two restrooms, but only one of them was available to his men because the other was always packed full of provisions at the beginning of a patrol. With all the extra men on board, they’d resorted to using buckets. Their rescued survivors were still ill, but now from the other end and the buckets were quite full by now. So on top of the sweaty, unwashed men and the puke smell, there was also that.
Eventually the sun set and they were finally able to surface. When he was on the surface, U-505 could move much faster with the use of his diesel motors. The motors also sucked air into his interior too so at least for a little while, all the stink of this rescue operation would be flushed out and replaced with nice, crisp sea air. It made everyone feel better and quicker to work. There was much scurrying about to empty buckets, pump out the bilges, and fix their position to find their way home.
So it was that as he was cruising along on New Year’s Eve, his captain got on the intercom and wished everyone a happy New Year and the hope that they’d see each other to the next. Like a good omen, from then on out, the water was glassy smooth and though they had some mechanical error that put U-505 a little off course, they made it back to port safely.
But… when they were finally moored in the U-boat bunkers and it was time to finally disembark, one of T-25’s men tried to climb the ladder to the bridge in too much of a hurry, fell off, and knocked into the rudder control, causing U-505 to crush his diving plane against the pier. The accident bent the drive shaft in that plane and he had to stay in port for two months while they found a new one and made repairs. A fine thanks for his assistance!
All the same, U-505 considers this his best Christmas. Despite all the unseemly stenches it involves, he thinks it’s got all the hallmarks of a good Christmas story: selflessness, togetherness, and gifts. Just as he considers rescuing her crew to be a final gift to T-25, who gave that same gift to U-106, his own crew were rescued when he was captured as well (and as a result they did indeed live to see each other to 1944). He enjoys the knowledge that even machines for war like him sometimes get the chance to show each other such kindness.
And anyway – as he always finishes this story – that wasn’t even the worst smelling thing that’s happened in his interior.
I quite prefer that pine and cinnamon and orange scent that people seem enjoy this time year. I hope you and your yard are also enjoying fresher air this holiday season. Congratulations on your return to operational service. I expect (hope!) you’ll get more than just one run next year.
Your friend,
Pioneer