Neptune's Pitchfork

[Bosje]

My grandfather's brother passed away at the ripe old age of 94, there was the socially acceptable amount of sadness and mourning and there was a perfunctional funeral attended by several dozen people who were mostly invited to make sure the church wasn't empty. He never had any kids of his own and most of his friends were long gone. As such, the only family was us, his brother's descendants. After the funeral we had our coffee and cake and that was that, all that remained was a house full of junk. He'd been a bit of a herder.

My mum was in charge of clearing it up and two weeks ago she showed me a box with stuff from the war, asking me to look if there was anything I might like to keep. As it turned out there was: A medal for serving in 1940 in the drafted Dutch army, some trinkets remembering his old infantry regiment, a piece of plexiglass which i knew had once been part of the cockpit of an Allied bomber shot down over Holland and a tattered diary. How he came to possess this diary I have no idea but it was in German and at first glance it seemed to have belonged to a man called Berthold Bauer. That's what it says inside the cover, anyway. The first entry reads:

'November 26th 1939. Neptune's Pitchfork goes on her first war patrol. Destination: coast of England grid AN44. The 1.WO takes her through the Kiel channel while I try to get my first hours of sleep on board. Est reaching open sea at sunrise, eagerly anticipating speed and dive trials.'

Reading this, the hairs on my neck stood up as I realized this was the war diary of a German naval officer. Parts are too damaged to decipher and other parts are simply unintelligeable but I'll try to translate some of it here because there are some interesting bits in it. As far as I can tell, Neptune's Pitchfork is a small submarine, possibly a Type II. The crew, which seems to be quite small, have been on patrol before but this is their first time out in their new boat. Mr Bauer doesn't seem to say which number his boat has. He just calls it 'Neptune's Pitchfork', for unknown reasons, or more often simply 'her' or 'she'.