"You screwed up last night, Herr Kaleun."
Carlewitz throws this onto the table as I finish a late breakfast with my officers. We've been up all night, supervising the reloading of torpedoes, getting the external reloads into the hull, and performing routine after-action maintenance.
I set my fork down on an empty plate. I hadn't brought last night's engagement up, and had been fairly sure that my officers didn't know about my blunder. A torpedo miss was generally attributed to the torpedo, not human error. I pick up my napkin and wipe my mouth, trying to find the words. Hartenstein, Carlewitz, and Friederichs eye me, and wait. Totenhagen and Vowe, my other two officers, are elsewhere in the boat, having had breakfast hours earlier.
"And how do you ascertain that, Lieutnant Carlewitz," I finally manage, putting an edge into my voice. Gott, all I needed was dissension among my fellow officers...
Carlewitz is fast to apologize. I realize he means no harm; I guess I'm still hyped up from the night's events. "What I mean, Herr Kaleun, is our maneuver after the initial eels were fired."
I tried to remember. "Tube einz, los! Tube zwei, los!" I had shouted. Then, "Left full rudder! New course southwest!" Yes, that was it. We were getting close to our targets, and I wanted to put some distance between us...had we been spotted, our victims would have had time to maneuver out of the eels' path.
"What of it," I ask, my curiosity aroused.
"Well..." Carlewitz hesitates. He now has Friederich's and Hartenstein's full attention. "What I mean, sir, is you...ah...we...exposed the entire starboard side of the boat to the enemy during that turn. With as much moonlight as we had, we could have been spotted right then and there...and Tommy likes to mount a few guns on his merchies nowadays." He spits the sentence out as fast as he can, then retreats behind his coffee cup.
I sit, stunned. Verdammt! Carlewitz was right. Had those two merchies been armed...
I have barely enough time to stew on it when a chilling report is broadcasted through the voice tube:
"Destroyer, bearing 041, closing fast!"
"Alarm!"
WO Conrad drops through the hatch just as I enter the compartment, and for a second I wonder if he even bothered to hang on to the ladder. The rest of the watch crew follows in rapid succession, Ebert being the last. I silently hope he remembered to dog the hatch down.
I order flank speed, full down angle on the planes, and a hard turn to port. Verdammt! Stuck south of Ireland, in shallow waters, with a destroyer bearing down on us. I can only hope we weren't seen...a false hope, as the day is bright and clear.
I don't know it yet, but U-186 is about to receive her baptism.
To be continued...
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