19th March 1941, afternoon, Bay of Biscay
Imagine water. Just water. Most of you picture a blue liquid, yet pure water is colourless. A glass of water isn’t blue. Water in a bathtub isn’t blue. Water in rivers may come in a lot of different colours, but most rivers aren’t blue. Yet rivers feed seas and oceans, and those are mostly blue. Why?
Oceans, seas and bigger lakes have two reasons to be mostly blue, and neither was their choice. The first one is a matter of optics, which can be described in a long and tiresome way, including terms like wavelength, molecules, scattering and other science-y stuff. Let’s just say optics and be done with it. The deeper the water the bluer the colour. The other reason of this blue lies above the water – the sky. A clear sky is blue, most of the day, thanks to a similar optical trick. Bigger bodies of water reflect this blue, making them more blue. Blue, what a colour! A calm, pleasant thing.
Now imagine the Atlantic on a sunny afternoon. Blue water, blue sky. A soothing sight. Yet this world of blue is a battlefield. A vast battlefield on which the course of human history is being decided. The blue of the Atlantic has witnessed many, many battles in recent months, still even more will come.
Very near the edge of this blue world, in the Bay of Biscay, a different colour makes its way just between the cold blue of the sky and the colder blue of the seawater. A tiny speckle of grey heads back to its home on the French coast once again. It may be a peaceful sight, but this grey thing, looking so little in the vast Atlantic, is one of the combatants on this battlefield.
On closer look, this German U-boat, a fierce metal beast, isn’t as small. Over thousand tons of steel, fuel, men and their few belongings, courage and pride. A watchful observer can tell that there is something different about this U-boat’s crossing of the Bay of Biscay. Firstly, there are the two British comrades of the young German men. A very strange sight in these times, men of these two nations being so friendly to each other. Secondly, this U-boat, the U-104 “Lucky Halibut”, traverses the Bay a bit differently. In these calm waters, it banks a bit to its right side. In the left fuel tank of the Lucky Halibut, the diesel fuel is being slowly drained by the boat’s engines while being properly replaced by saltwater. On the other side, no fuel at all floats above the water as it should – there is only water in the right tank. This weight unbalance causes the U-104 to tip by just a few degrees to the side – still enough to irritate some men. It also makes course corrections a bit more frequent than usual.
Still, the wounded Lucky Halibut plunges toward the port a Lorient, eager to return to the blue battlefield and make its mark in the Second World War.
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