The Tango War Read online

  Only then, when the first waves of the open sea were breaking upon the bow, would Captain Suggs pivot and climb narrow metal stairs to the wheelhouse. Before the Richard Caswell had weighed anchor, a U.S. Navy officer had come aboard to present Suggs with an envelope containing the ship’s orders. For security reasons, Suggs had delayed opening the envelope until they were under sail. But it was also protocol for Suggs to wait—he had learned this at his alma mater, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Great Neck, New York.

  Suggs pulled out a piece of cream-colored paper, light as tissue, read carefully, and closed his eyes. Not yet forty, with an open face lightly tanned, Suggs felt the corners of his lips turn up in a faint smile. His ship would not join one of the England-bound transoceanic convoys, now sometimes numbering a hundred vessels yet still prey to the U-boat wolf packs that skillfully picked off individual craft. Then his brow furrowed. At least the North Atlantic convoys were protected by a loose circle of escort ships. The Richard Caswell would sail to the South Atlantic, alone.

  Looking out the wheelhouse windows, Solomon Suggs saw blue-gray clouds rolling up from the south. It was winter in the Southern Hemisphere, not the steamy summer of his hometown of Bradford, Florida, along the green banks of the Suwanee River. The helmsman kept his eyes straight ahead, but he might have heard an exhalation that signaled the weight of responsibility falling on the captain’s shoulders.

  “We sail,” Suggs announced, “south for the Argentine.”

  * * *

  Two thousand miles from the Richard Caswell’s position, U-513 was thirteen days out of flotilla headquarters on the coast of Nazi-occupied France, cruising the surface of the mid-Atlantic. The U-boat was the length of three freight cars, though only as wide as one, with diesel engines that could reach eighteen knots surface speed, almost twenty-one miles an hour. Her low profile served as protection from enemy ships, and she ran past the Azores without incident, bound under clear skies for the coast of Brazil.

  It was nearly a miracle that U-513 sailed at all. Returning from her previous patrol, she had met another U-boat at the harbor entrance at Lorient, on the Bay of Biscay. U-513’s captain on that voyage graciously allowed the other captain to dock first. An honor guard and a military band waited on the pier to greet the U-boats as minesweepers finished their duty. They missed one, though; the forward sub hit the mine, blowing a huge hole aft of the control room, and sank fast. The horrified crew of U-513 launched a rescue, but only eleven men out of fifty-three on the other sub were saved.

  In port, U-513’s engineer officer suffered a case of nervous shock that paralyzed his legs, so he was replaced. The captain, a veteran who already had led three patrols on U-513, left the ship too; he was replaced by a much younger man, Kapitänleutnant (Lieutenant Commander) Friedrich Guggenberger. Six weeks later, U-513 was once more at sea.

  Topside, standing tall and slim, the twenty-nine-year-old Guggenberger lifted his Zeiss binoculars and scanned the seascape. He saw only a blue-green expanse animated by foaming waves. His former hunting ground in the Mediterranean had been more richly blue, more dangerous, more exciting. U-513 was well beyond the uninhabited Ascension islands in the mid-Atlantic and, except for a two-funnel steamer it chased and lost south of the Canary Islands, had found no prey. In the Mediterranean, not only did more enemy ships crawl about a smaller expanse of water, but Guggenberger could attack targets ashore, as he boldly had done at Jaffa, destroying fuel-storage tanks.

  Guggenberger swung himself into the hatch, closed it, and descended the metal ladder. Stepping from the bottom rung into the control room, he stood in place for a moment, allowing his pale blue eyes to adjust to the unnaturally ivory light. In port, fresh fruit and vegetables had been packed into every corner of the sub and were now ripening. The food emitted a mix of sickly sweet smells that collided with the ship’s odors of diesel fuel, a single toilet that served the entire crew, and unwashed men—water was a luxury. Guggenberger removed his wet rubber poncho and handed it to an aide, perhaps wishing he had spent another few minutes in the open air.

  Men turned from their stations and saluted. Faces looked rough because shaving, too, was a luxury. Some, of course, showed barely a beard. At this point Germans were being pulled into the war as young as fifteen or sixteen.

  Even before they had set eyes on him, everyone aboard had heard of Guggenberger. The submarine ace had destroyed more than sixty thousand tons of enemy shipping since the war began. Most famously, as chief of the submarine U-81, he once made a daring run past Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean to sink the British aircraft carrier Ark Royal.

  That enemy ship was the prize above all others that Germans had yearned to destroy. The Ark Royal was one of the ships that joined the British blockade at the Plate River in 1939, when the Graf Spee went down. Two years later, in May 1941, she was one of dozens of vessels hunting the powerful German battleship Bismarck, whose very name struck British sailors with terror. When the Bismarck destroyed the mighty HMS Hood, an imperial legend known for showing the flag at ports around the world as a symbol of British power, Winston Churchill said, “I don’t care how you do it, you must sink the Bismarck.”

  The Ark Royal found the Bismarck in the Denmark Strait, crippled it with torpedo bombs, and chased it until, pummeled by the Ark and its sisters, the ship went down. Six months later off Gibraltar, Guggenberger sank the Ark Royal with a single, well-placed torpedo to its starboard side. The act wrought vengeance for two thousand men lost on the Bismarck and, as a British chronicler wrote, “destroyed the very core of the Royal Navy’s striking power in the Mediterranean.” Hitler himself presented Guggenberger with the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, the highest military award of the Third Reich.

  National hero or not, the new captain imposed a regime that spurred grousing on U-513. Repeated routine submersions, emergency exercises, and crash dives ran the crew ragged, testing men and machine. When Guggenberger considered diving time too slow, crewmen had to cut holes into the space above the forward torpedo tubes to increase air circulation and shave seconds from descent. These extra moments could mean the difference between life and death.

  More than once, Radioman Second Class Hans Zophel leaned out of the cubbyhole where he monitored radio transmissions and sound outside the sub to call for quiet, and the order passed along the length of the sub like a stone skipping on a lake. But they were false alarms, just rattling the men and making them sweat.

  When Guggenberger finally hit his bunk, lying without a pillow, a cloth under his boots to keep the bedcover clean, he probably exhaled with the frustration of a man of action hitched to a drag sail. Perhaps he pulled out a photo of his wife of only three months. Or of his father, wearing the black dress uniform of an officer in the Kaiser’s navy. His father was lost in the Battle of Heligoland in the North Sea during World War I at British hands, a few months before Guggenberger was born.

  * * *

  On June 21, the first day of winter in the Southern Hemisphere, Guggenberger finally encountered the enemy he so wanted to engage, off Brazil.

  The Swedish cargo steamer Venezia had just loaded tobacco, coffee, cocoa, cocoa butter, and drums of vegetable oil in Bahia’s port, Santiago. Bound for Buenos Aires, she sailed past colonial-era Portuguese fortifications. Stockholm sold iron ore to Nazi Germany, allowed passage of German soldiers across its territory, and otherwise cooperated with Berlin. At the same time, Sweden shared intelligence with Great Britain and sheltered Jews. It played both sides, its way of remaining “neutral.”

  Guggenberger gave the order to launch the torpedoes. Any cargo floating in the Atlantic that did not belong to Italy or Germany might end in Allied hands and had to be destroyed. Should the U-boat’s action result in a political flap for targeting a vessel of a neutral country, the deed could always be blamed on the Italians. The Venezia went down so quickly its radio operator had no time to send an SOS. Its demise only became known a week later when surviving members of the crew reached land.
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  Four days later, lookouts on U-513 spied a ship about which there could be no doubt of neutrality, the U.S. oil tanker Eagle. In the darkness, the low, unlit profile of the U-boat was all but invisible. The Eagle’s crew didn’t know what hit them. Recovering quickly, however, the Eagle returned fire, forcing Guggenberger to dive.

  “Alarm, alarm,” repeated voices. For the next twelve hours U-513 pursued the Eagle. The American tanker was old, built in San Francisco in 1917, but managed evasion until a point called Cabo Frio, just north of Rio de Janeiro. There Guggenberger was able to position the U-boat to fire two torpedoes that damaged the Eagle. He ordered a third, anticipating the deathblow, but the Eagle turned sharply to port and the torpedo missed its bow by fifteen feet.

  U-513 fell away, but the sub had found her pace, vanquishing the Venezia and wounding the American tanker.

  Late on June 30, U-513 was chasing a large steamer south of São Paulo when a rain squall fell like a curtain between the vessels. Midnight came and went. When the air cleared, the prey was gone, but a smaller steamer, the Brazilian merchant Tutoya, appeared in range, and Guggenberger hit it midship with a single torpedo. The Tutoya sank bow first, with the loss of the ship’s master and six crew. Two days later, Guggenberger sank the U.S. Liberty ship SS Elihu B. Washburne, bound for New York full of coffee, a provision for troops almost as critical as ammunition. Within seventy-two hours the U-boat destroyed two more ships, the English merchant Incomati and an American freighter bound for New York with a cargo of hides and leather, the African Star. On U-513’s voyage, she was served by Milchkühe, the Nazi “milk cow” supply subs whose only purpose was to refuel fighting U-boats. Now Guggenberger had to call for another kind of supply: more torpedoes.

  One night the U-boat decided to take stock of Rio’s harbor defenses. So close did it stand to shore that the men took turns coming onto the deck to gaze at the city’s lights. Guggenberger discovered that a single old destroyer patrolled the harbor’s entrance. He ordered attack positions and maneuvered several times, but the position was never right. U-513 slipped below, staying in place. Hours later the sub broke surface and, to the crew’s shock, found itself only fifteen hundred yards ahead of the destroyer.

  “Flood! Quick dive tank. Flood!” Guggenberger commanded. Loose objects flew, men fell hard against iron walls. When no depth charge or torpedo came, U-513 headed for open sea. Apart from skill and valor, Kapitänleutnant Friedrich Guggenberger was blessed with luck.

  He was also blessed with hard information about enemy movements. Operation Bolívar might have been under pressure from J. Edgar Hoover’s men, but Axis vessels continued to be on the receiving end of the Abwehr intelligence. And there was likely an Enigma Machine aboard U-513—submarines had them, too.

  * * *

  Wrapped in a greatcoat against the Southern Hemisphere winter, Solomon Suggs stood on the bridge of the Richard Caswell. A cargo of tungsten, the miraculous metal mined in Argentina’s northern highlands, awaited the Liberty ship in the harbor at Buenos Aires. Four times as hard as titanium and twice as hard as steel, tungsten, when mixed with ordinary carbon, became a key component in manufacturing armor-piercing weapons strong enough to stop the tanks of the Nazi Wehrmacht.

  In Buenos Aires, Suggs staggered shore leaves, limiting them to four hours, and did not leave the ship himself, supervising deliveries that came by hand and crane and their placement in the holds. The Richard Caswell turned around in forty-eight hours.

  Steaming out of the harbor and bound for New York, the Liberty ship carried nine hundred tons of the tungsten, cargos of canned meat, animal hides for army boots, manganese ore, and fertilizer. The Plate River roiled around it, carrying the dirt of Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina and giving waters the cast of coffee made with the dregs. Suggs steered fast and clear in the middle of the river, which was so broad that neither shore was visible. Pale, blue-white fingers of salt water entered the stream, embracing the Richard Caswell, pulling it toward the open sea.

  A cadet appeared. “Message from the first officer, sir,” he said. “Approaching mouth of the River Plate.” The war had required young cadets like this boy to forgo the usual four years of marine education and full training.

  “North,” Suggs ordered. “North, for Florianopolis.”

  Close to the bustling cities of coastal Brazil, Florianopolis possessed such an independent sense of itself as a tropical island that its road signs pointing northeast said simply, “The Continent.” Rumor ran that points on its sandy rim served as U-boat refueling stations operated by Brazilian collaborators. But Suggs felt confident about the isle and its nearby seas. Its port hosted a base for U.S. Navy ships, including seaplane tenders that accompanied the hunt for U-boats.

  * * *

  Some future day, these months would be remembered as the most deadly in the Battle of the Atlantic, when U-boats destroyed more Allied vessels than in any other period of the war. England nearly starved. Winston Churchill, otherwise stalwart in his memoirs, wrote that the Battle of the Atlantic “was the only thing that ever really frightened me.”

  On U-513, Captain Friedrich Guggenberger took a message from the radioman. A U.S. merchant ship would pass the waters off Florianopolis during the night. The spies of Operation Bolívar were doing their job. And the ship was carrying tungsten! The metal had become one of the most valuable on earth. Could it be recovered? Would its crates bob in salt water, even for a while? The Americans had once saved blocks of rubber from a sunken ship near the mouth of the Amazon, paying local fishermen for each boatful they recovered, so the idea wasn’t far-fetched. And the intelligence gave the sub an advantage: time to prepare.

  The Richard Caswell and U-513 sailed toward each another throughout the day. The sea was enormous, but the encounter was as inevitable as the coming night. Merchant ships often lost to U-boats. But the merchants were armed with U.S. Navy gunners, and the contest could go the other way.

  On the night of July 16, 1943, dead winter in the Southern Hemisphere, the moon rose full, blue light falling on icy waves. The wind seemed to blow up from Antarctica, only a few hundred miles south. On the Richard Caswell, perhaps only the Black Gangers like Pike and Groutman felt warm in their hissing, clanging, three-tiered engine rooms amid the fiery boilers.

  About 9:00 p.m. from a position on deck, Guggenberger spied the tower of a ship breaching the horizon, a tiny but unmistakable reflection of moonlight coming his way. In fuller profile, the vessel revealed itself to be a U.S. merchant ship. His submarine black against black even in moonlight, Guggenberger decided not to submerge. He called orders to battle stations.

  “Fire!”

  At 9:15, 150 miles southeast of Florianopolis, a torpedo struck the Richard Caswell on the starboard side at the aft end of the engine room, killing three men on watch and destroying the ship’s engines. The navy guards began to fire all ten guns in the direction from which the missile came. Officers and crew scrambled, and Suggs assessed damage and chances for survival. He made a call: “Abandon ship!”

  In less than ten minutes, seven officers, thirty-four crewmen, twenty-four armed guards, and two passengers boarded three lifeboats and one raft and pushed away. Master Suggs, the last to leave, boarded a second raft with two officers and three crewmen, including the Black Gangers Pike and Groutman.

  On U-513, Guggenberger watched through his binoculars as the last raft pushed off from the U.S. ship. Then an extraordinary thing happened. The raft began returning to the damaged Richard Caswell.

  Seeing that the ship did not sink at once, Suggs returned with the men in the raft to collect the ship’s papers and smash every piece of equipment they could.

  When Guggenberger saw what the Americans were doing, he ordered a second torpedo fired. It struck at the forward end of the engine room. The explosion blew the captain and crewmen, including Pike and Groutman, over the side, ripping apart the midship deck and superstructure. In minutes the Richard Caswell broke in two and sank. Of those who had reboard
ed, there were no survivors.

  Three days later, on July 19, 1943, a U.S. Navy plane from the seaplane tender USS Barnegat spotted U-513 and sunk it with depth charges. The British Admiralty paid tribute to crews of the German U-boat corps like the men of U-513 after the war: “Their morale was unimpaired to the bitter end.” Besides U-513, 782 submarines went down in the war. The loss of life was staggering. Twenty-eight thousand men of the submarine fleet died out of a total seagoing strength of thirty-nine thousand.

  The Barnegat’s airplane pilot dropped life belts and rafts to men struggling in the waters, and within four hours the Barnegat arrived to pick up the survivors of U-513, including Guggenberger. Three days later, the Barnegat’s other plane reported seeing survivors in another raft, and the ship hurried to the indicated position. There the Barnegat found two rafts lashed together and boarded seventeen survivors from the SS Richard Caswell. In Rio the Barnegat transferred its German prisoners to authorities and disembarked the men of the Richard Caswell—at separate berths.

  Friedrich Guggenberger was imprisoned in U.S. camps, making two escapes. On his second escape he was recaptured just ten miles from the Mexican border. After the war and repatriation, Guggenberger attended the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He was promoted to admiral in the German Navy and served as deputy chief of staff of NATO’s Allied Forces in Northern Europe.

  In October 1943, three months after Solomon Suggs was lost at sea to a torpedo fired by Guggenberger’s U-boat, his son Solomon Jr. signed on as an able seaman on the Liberty ship Edward D. White out of Brunswick, Georgia.

  12.

  SMOKING COBRAS

  High in the Apennine Mountains stands a medieval tower among ruined walls, a reminder of ferocious fighting between Nazis and Allies that upended life in one small town during the campaign Germans called “Winter Storm.” Today gardens with chestnut trees and trim houses dot the slopes of Sommocolonia—the name echoes its Roman origins. The town is whisper quiet, giving little hint of the fire and shelling that tore through this and every other city and hamlet along the Gothic Line where war raged through the 1944–45 winter, one of the worst in European history.