Free Black May by Michael Gannon Page A

Officers’ accommodation
(Unteroffizierraum)
and, after that, the galley (
Küche
) with its little Vosswerke stove, short refrigerator, sink, and pantry that served the single cook
(Smutje).
From there the boat’s one central, single-level gangway opened to the oily and smelly, but now silent, engine room
(Dieselmotorenraum),
where twin MAN 6-cylinder, 4-cycle engines of 1,160 horsepower each provided surface propulsion.
    The humming dynamotors were in the next compartment aft, the
E-Maschinenraum
, or maneuvering room. Here, by contrast to the appearance of the engine room, two clean E-Motors that sparkled beneath equally gleaming control panels drove the boat’s two propeller drive shafts underwater. There was other equipment in this room as well, including an electricity-driven air compressor on the port side and a Junkers diesel-driven compressor on the opposite side, which were used for filling containers of the compressed air that the control room required for blowing water from the ballast tanks when the boat surfaced and for launching torpedoes. Here, too, was an auxiliary steering wheel for use in moving the double rudders in the event the electrical steering buttons in the control room were disabled. From the maneuvering room it was then just a few steps into the aft torpedo room with its lone white-faced launch tube. Every three days the Eto that occupied that tube, or the one spare stowed beneath the E-motors, would be opened up and inspected by the torpedo mates, called “mixers.”Under wire-shielded lights the mixers would unscrew inspection plates and test the eel’s battery level, electric motor, guidance system, and depth-keeping mechanism. 46
    The mixers and other crew members who occupied the interior space of U-659 were, like the crewmen of all U-boats, a selective, highly trained group. The four officers were all graduates of the Naval Academy (
Marineschule
) in Flensburg-Mürwik, a cadet training establishment through which the future officer passed after a year of practical experience that included three months at sea. Following the Academy curriculum, they would have spent eight to twelve weeks at
U-boot-Schule
in Neustadt in Schleswig-Holstein or Pillau (after 1940). Twenty-seven-year-old Stock, the Commander, had been a member of the 1935 entering class
(Crew 35).
After receiving his commission and completing several operational training courses, he had served as I.W.O. with Kptlt. Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock on U
-96.
(It was on the cruise of U
-96
in late 1941 to the North Atlantic and Mediterranean that Lothar-Günther Buchheim, a twenty-three-year-old war correspondent who accompanied the crew, based his much later novel [1973] followed by a motion picture, both named
Das Boot
[“The Boat”].) After Commander’s Course with the 26th Flotilla at Pillau, Stock was given the new boat U-659, which he commissioned on 9 December 1941 and took on four patrols prior to this one.
    By 1943, with most of the surface Navy frozen in port, the majority of young officers, such as Stock’s I.W.O., II.W.O., and L.I., were assigned to U-boats. By contrast, most of the boat’s petty officers and lower ratings were volunteers. Twenty to twenty-four years in age, they had entered the Kriegsmarine from hometowns situated largely in northern and central Germany: Hamburg would be an example of the former, the Ruhr and Saxony districts examples of the latter. Their formal schooling prior to trade schools did not exceed the requisite eight primary grades, and their religious affiliations were roughly three-quarters Protestant, one-quarter Roman Catholic. Some crewmen had volunteered directly from civilian life for the U-Bootwaffe; others had served previously on light surface vessels.
    Generally speaking, the crewmen fell into two categories: seamen (
Seemänner),
which included helmsmen, planesmen, lookouts, gunners,the deck force, cook, and stewards; and the engineering/technical personnel (
Techniker
),