[Bosje]

January 6th, early in the afternoon. Stabsbootsmann Heinz Schmidt, senior sonar operator, turned the hydrophone head around like he had been doing all week, just in case. The boat crashed her bow down into the sea with every wave and the sonar station was manned on the off-chance that the sound of a merchant's propeller made it through to the earphone. It seemed a longshot and Heinz was terribly bored with it after almost a week. To be honest, he had already been terribly bored with it after two days but like all men on board, he got used to the endless watch duty with nothing to report. Another week or two, he thought, and then the fuel situation would force to boat back to St Nazaire where the bars were waiting for his wages and the girls were waiting for his stories about the hard life on board. Suddenly, he sat up straight and turned the wheel back to bearing 280. He waited, nothing. Hang on, yes, there it was again! Very faintly and only during the short interval when the bow was dipping into the sea, but it was there!

'Sound contact, slow screws, closing, bearing 280!' His triumphant call caused quite a stir in the boat and commander Hans Bremer smashed into the paneling as he flung himself out of his cabin, not four feet away from the sonar station, just as the boat rolled over to starboard. His yells added to the air of urgency as the crew scrambled to their action stations.

The men on the bridge tried to penetrate the mush around them with their eyes but all they could see was gray rain, gray fog, gray sea and gray clouds. In the radio room, they switched on the radar set, something they usually never did for fear of detection by enemy RWRs. Back on the bridge, the commander was commenting on the weather. His repertoire allowed him several minutes of foul language before he had to repeat himself and the watchmen couldn't help grinning. Profanity was funny for some reason, even though there was nothing funny about the situation. Navigator Gunter Esselmann yelled into the commander's ear: 'Jorg can't get the radar to work properly, Sir, the waves interfere too much.' As if to prove his point, a roller crashed into the bridge, forcing the men to duck behind the casing. Their radar was a rather basic design consisting of a series of devices mounted to the conning tower. The waves kept towering high above them on all sides, rendering the device near useless. The navigator continued his summary of the situation: 'We will not be able to get a fix on the target, Sir, this is insane, the conditions are just too bad for an attack!' Hans Bremer cared not: 'I'll be damned if this bastard gets away from me, flood all the forward tubes, we will fire on estimated gyro-angles. And tell those idiots in the radio shack to give me an approximate target bearing or I'll go down there and personally put my boot up their bare bottoms!' Poor Gunter tried again: 'But it's useless, Herr Kaleun!'

The commander exploded into another session of elaborate cursing to send the navigator on his way but he was interrupted by the sight of a huge dark shadow which majestically parted the curtain of gray in front of him. 'All back emergency, hard to port!' Five seconds of maneuvering brought his bow more or less to bear on the target which appeared to be a large merchant. He looked at the ship and his mind suggested: 8 knots. His eyes replied: fair enough, then he fired a fast running torpedo on an 8 degree lead angle. As soon as the torpedo left the tube he realised that he had missed, the merchant was sailing at an undeterminable angle away from them and he sent three more torpedoes after it, on decreasing lead angles. Before the last torpedo left the tube, the second one struck the merchant just aft of the engine room and then it vanished out of sight through the gray curtain. The U-boat was still in reverse. They quickly went after their prize through the rain, spurred on by the cursing commander and guided by the fire which now blazed on the freighter like a torch. They came alongside and then turned away from her to starboard, lining up the sterntube for the coup de grace. Then it was over, as suddenly as it had started.

His heart still pumping from the adrenaline kick, Hans Bremer climbed down into the control room where he was greeted by cheering crewmen and by the LI who said: 'Congratulations, Herr Kaleun, but that was madness.' Bremer grinned and replied: 'Yeah but wasn't it fun, though?' and then he dictated the entry for the log which ended with: -14:59 – merchant approx. 10.000 tons sunk after firing five torpedoes of which two hits, no survivors found owing to rapid sinking and poor visibility.
He then called his navigator for a private meeting and told him to never ever second guess his decisions again and finally he announced that the whole crew would be enjoying a shot of victory schnapps that evening. Another cheer from the men and that was the messy and rude story of his third kill.