Words Without Words

It was 1939, and I had just enlisted aboard U-boat 1981. We were about to embark on an assignment to rid the North Sea of enemy passenger vessels. We had only been at sea for about a month, but we had already sunk three ships and two other U-boats. Each time, our commander took the crew onto our vessel and held them until they could be shipped back to land.

Ship after ship yielded to us. We were undefeated in the North Atlantic, until we met the Doric Sun, a small but potent vessel guiding a cruise ship.

At the time we entered the vicinity of the enemy vessels, I was manning the enigma machine, a device used to send encrypted messages to and from High Command. I could type a message, and the machine would swap the letters. So, I could type, “HELLO” and it might come across the machine as “OCFKI” . The operator on the other line could use the machine to decipher the code and receive the message. The words became meaningless gibberish before becoming words again, hence, they were words without being words.

A message came through the machine from High Command, “We are aware that there are enemy vessels in your midst. You are to initiate combat.”

I relayed this to the Captain. “We can’t do that,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked. After all, these were the orders.

“My son is vacationing in England and is supposed to return home on that cruise ship,” he answered.

“But we have to follow orders,” I said.

“I am not going to risk killing my only son,” he answered. “We will not fire.”

There wasn’t much I could do about this. He was my superior and I had no place questioning him. So we continued to sail, without fire.

He commanded the U-boat to surface. We were fine for a moment, but then…BAM we were hit.

The alarms sounded, and the ominous red glare filled the cabin. There was no longer a choice; we had to act. We fired torpedoes at the Doric Sun as it fired back at us.

This went on for about 45 minutes before the Captain gave the order to disengage.

The vessel was barely seaworthy at this point and would surely sink if we remained in combat. We threw up a smokescreen and limped into port. The Doric Sun followed us into port and waited. To get away from it we would have to either fight an uphill battle against it or hand the sub over to the enemy.

That evening we had a service to remember those killed in the day’s battle. Afterwards, I found the Captain sitting by a freshly dug grave.

“I didn’t think it would come to this,” he said to me. “If I had followed orders I would have thrown the first punch and we may not have been here.”

“What are we going to do now?” I asked him.

“I know what I’m going to do,” he said, “The only honorable thing I can do…” He then got up and went towards the sub. I saw him board and go below. I retired to the barracks.

In the morning, around 8:30, the entire town headed to the coast to see a great sea battle. Instead, they saw something else. At 8:45, two hands of a clock touched and a bomb went off, and the ship was scuttled, with the Captain on board.

Later High Command revealed to the world the Captain’s suicide note, wired to them over the enigma machine just minutes before the hands of the clock touched:

Your Excellency,

I imagine you are very unhappy with how this has turned out, but I was simply following my sense of honor to my family by not assaulting the Doric Sun. I was not about to just hand over the sub to the enemy, yet at the same time I could not justify exposing my crew to death in a battle we had no hope of winning. So I did the only other thing there was to do: I sank it. And, as a captain with a sense of honor must share the fate of his ship, I have gone down with her.

I learned a great thing from that man - how to take responsibility for screwups while still keeping your honor intact.