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By Commander Richard Compton-Hall, Royal Navy (Retired)
Te< one had only to follow one’s nose
litre
Submariners are not, on the whole, superstitious. Living packed together in a steel tube, they are too concerned with fighting the greatest enemy of all—the sea itself—to bother themselves about the supernatural. On the face of it, there is no more unlikely place for a ghost to materialize than in the starkly mechanical and crowded confines of a submarine. Yet, sometimes, odd happenings do occur that cannot easily be explained— none stranger than the series of weird and tragic events that befell UB-65 some 70 years ago.
For six months, Germany had been engaged in a ruthless, unrestricted U-boat campaign against merchant shipping, irrespective of nationality, as UB-65 launched on 26 ■tune 1917. The little boat of the UB-III class, 55.83 meters (183 feet) long and displacing 647 tons submerged, Was commissioned just two months later. Her commander, with two other officers and 31 men, was Kapitan- icutnant Martin Schelle.
From the start, UB-65 was accident prone. While she mas still being built in the Vulcan shipyard at Hamburg, a heavy girder fell, killing one workman and fatally injuring another. Then, during preliminary engine trials, carbon m°noxide fumes from a faulty exhaust system leaked into he engine room; three more men died. During initial sea jrials in the Baltic Sea, a man was swept overboard and °st in rough weather. And on her first dive, exhaust gases again escaped into the boat while the diesels shut down, nearly asphyxiating the entire crew.
Conditions on board were bad enough anyway. The sfench of oil fuel, unwashed bodies, revolting bilges, the Slngle, reeking, unsanitary Klosett or head, and in bad leather, slopping buckets half full of vomit from seasick Sa'lors, pervaded everything on board. Unchanged °thing—nobody ever undressed at sea—soaked up the 'deous fetor, while oilskins and leather jackets, continuity drenched by waves breaking over the unprotected ^ridge, would never dry on patrol. Foul breath was normal Wause of poor food and a natural reluctance to use the readed Klosett behind its green curtain. Some officers sVen used opium pills to avoid visiting what could
'freely be called a convenience. To find a U-boat man on
shoi
Fhus, morale in Unterseebooten depended not on crea- comforts but, absolutely, on success against the enemy, trust in the captain, and comradeship. If any of these three factors failed, the crew could not be expected to perform efficiently. But comradeship was dogged by misfortune at the outset of UB-65's brief career. And worse would follow.
Finally, her sea trials completed, the U-boat was hastily outfitted for active service with provisions, diesel oil, and foul-weather gear. Ammunition for the 10.5-cm. (4.2- inch) gun, and ten 50-cm. (20-inch) torpedoes for the single stern and four bow tubes were being loaded on board when disaster struck.
Nobody knows quite what happened or why, but while Schelle’s second-in-command, the first watch officer or Ems WO (eins Vee-oh), supervised on the forward casing, one warhead exploded. The blast killed him and four ratings instantly. Several other crewmen, laden with boxes of stores, were seriously injured. One of the inexperienced sailors had apparently shipped the detonator prematurely and, somehow, the one-ton weapon, suspended from a shoreside crane, went out of control, crashing against the guide-rails that led down through the circular torpedoloading hatch. Alternatively, the magnetic element in the pistol may have been actuated accidentally. There were safety devices to prevent such happenings, but everything that could go wrong duly did go wrong.
A few days later, while dockyard workmen set about repairing the damaged structure, a seaman rushed down from the casing and along a narrow passageway to the tiny wardroom. He was shaking with fear and shouting wildly: “The Eins Vee-oh—he is on board, Herr Kapitan! Up there. I have seen him.”
Schelle tried to calm the terrified sailor, who continued to insist that the apparition was real. So, the Captain agreed to come on deck to see for himself but deliberately took his time.
There, in the open air, he found a notably steady and reliable man named Petersen cowering behind the conning tower. White-faced, Petersen fully substantiated his shipmate’s story. Reluctant to face his Captain squarely, he flatly stated in a low voice, that the dead first officer had just walked up the brow and stood on the bows with his arms folded. Yes, he was gone now. He had vanished after a while—but he had been there.
More than an autumnal chill gripped the submarine. In a general air of uneasiness, Petersen awaited his chance and deserted—a crime punishable by imprisonment or even death in the Kaiser’s war. Meanwhile, an ominous hush blanketed the seamen “Lords” in the forward crew space like a cold sea mist. None of the usual healthy banter, none of the smiles that customarily greeted a submariner’s greyish attempts at humor, were in evidence.
Schelle must have known that an important element was now missing from the three crucial morale factors— comradeship. But he believed that personal leadership and success, attended as always by shared danger, might weld the crew into a fighting unit again. He was, therefore, relieved when the boat was once more ready for service. On 10 October 1917, he took UB-65 out of Bremerhaven for her first war cruise.
The route assigned, via the Kiel canal, the Kattegat, and the Skagerrak to the Shetland area, kept the U-boat clear of ever-watchful British submarines in the North Sea. But alas, no targets showed up either. The patrol drew a blank, and morale remained dismally low.
The second sortie, out through the dangerous Dover Straits to the Bristol and St. George’s channels, drew blood. A Swedish barque succumbed to gunfire, while torpedoes sank the sloop HMS Arbutus and two steamers— one British and one Norwegian.
The men in UB-65 responded as expected, although the older Lords, who had been with the boat from the beginning, were still very nervous. Their disquiet evidently reached a climax on the evening of 21 January (dates around this period are still uncertain), when the submarine was on the surface 15 miles south of Portland Bill in heavy weather. The starboard lookout suddenly noticed a figure on the wooden deck, close to the conning tower. He called out, thinking that a shipmate had inexplicably gone onto the sea-swept casing—but when the figure turned to face him, he knew that the dead watch officer was still on board.
The man jumped back with a cry of terror. The present officer of the watch urgently called the captain to the bridge to witness the specter, but it vanished as a wave crashed over the submarine.
The crew, to a man, now dreaded going topside at night when the boat surfaced to recharge the batteries. The bridge watch must have been very inefficient thenceforth. Nevertheless, Schelle sank or damaged five more vessels between February and May 1918.
Meanwhile, distressing incidents continued to plague the unhappy U-boat. On one patrol a torpedoman, screaming that the dead officer was haunting him, leapt overboard and disappeared. A gunner washed away and drowned a short while later. Then, in the Dover Straits, depth charges heeled the boat hard over and the coxswain, striking his head on the Zentrale bulkhead, was fatally injured. In February, a bomb splinter killed one officer while he returned to the boat during an air raid on the harbor. Crew members carried his body on board in somber silence.
Schelle maintained an air of stolid skepticism throughout; but he was, on more than one occasion, greatly agitated by the experiences.
Discrepancies in the various accounts—times, dates, and positions—do not by any means invariably tie up, despite an investigation by the celebrated German psychologist Professor Hecht. But the fact is that UB-65 gained an evil reputation, which lost nothing in the telling when circulated among other crews in port. It is conceivable that British agents had a hand in spreading this tale. Although there is no evidence to substantiate the possibility, rumors of all kinds were habitually fueled by both sides in an escalating war of nerves. Even the renowned English author Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote a widely published tale, “The Lusitania Waits,” in which the ghostly figures of drowned passengers tap insistently on a guilty U-boat’s hull.
However that may be, it seems that Fiihrer der Uboote Flandern (Commander of the Flanders submarines) Kor- vettenkapiton Bartenbach, a hard-headed man who certainly did not believe in ghosts, decided, in light of sworn testimony by men of good character, to take UB-65 temporarily out of commission—probably for the month of June 1918. Most of the crew were transferred and replaced, but Schelle remained in command.
At the same time, a Lutheran pastor accepted an invitation to exorcise the devilish influence brooding over the submarine. All too clearly, the service failed.
The U-boat sailed westward from Heligoland for her sixth—and last—patrol on 2 July 1918. This is where the most baffling mystery—ghost or no ghost—commences.
Only one event can explain why Schelle and his men never returned to the Fatherland. This took place 15 miles south of Fastnet Rock, Ireland, late in the afternoon of 10 July.
The U.S. submarine L-2 (known in the Allied fleet as AL-2 to distinguish her from British L-boats) was patrol- ing on the surface when her officer-of-the-deck sighted something that looked like a buoy a mile or two away. The commanding officer, Lieutenant Foster, altered course to investigate, but had only proceeded for five minutes when his boat shook from a violent explosion. A high column of water shot up 80 yards off the bow. When it fell back, AL-2 could see six feet of periscope 100 feet beyond. Foster dived immediately and maneuvered to ram what had to be a U-boat. It was a desperate, dangerous measure, but he was too close to fire torpedoes. He could hear propellers running at high speed close by.
After a few minutes, the C-tube (sonar) listening apparatus reported not one, but two submarines in the vicinity—' one fast and very near, another slow and probably distant- Some twenty minutes later, the faster contact went silent, and its screw noises were never heard again. But for another twenty minutes, what seemed to be the other submarine (the presence of which cannot be explained by postwar analysis of German operations), transmitted oscillator calls on morse—dash-dash-dash/dot (OE), which represented no known message.
Foster concluded that the faster U-boat had sunk after struggling to keep up following the observed explosion; the submarine obviously could not blow main ballast ia order to surface because of the American submarine s presence. He reported accordingly upon return to Bantry Bay.
There, the staff told him that two U-boats had exchanged messages by radio an hour before the encounter involving his submarine. Moreover, they said, at about midnight on 10 July, the assumed surviving U-boat made a signal that probably reported the sinking of a sister boat. This simply does not tally, however, with either German °r French radio-intercept records, positively ascribing this signal to U-92, which was damaged and in trouble far from the scene. Nor do the records reveal any messages from UB-65 after 4 July, when Schelle reported that an enemy submarine (HMS G.6) had fired two torpedoes at him, but had missed. No other U-boats had been deployed to UB-65's area, and there were no other losses anywhere near that position. All available facts point to only one U-boat in AL-2's proximity. What, then, did the mysterious series of “OE’s” on morse indicate?
The likelihood is that the second “slow” contact heard by AL-2 was a non-sub (classification by underwater sound was rudimentary in the extreme), and that the morse—which is presumed not to be a figment of the Pagination, although that is not entirely inconceivable— actually came from a stricken UB-65 on the bottom. At about 100 meters, the charted depth, she might well have held together for a short time before being totally flooded. The standard diving depth for a World War I U-boat was hO meters, but that figure excluded a substantial safety Margin. It is quite possible, then, that there were some survivors—although they could not have lived long under lhe mounting pressure, as seawater at 135 pounds per Sc)Uare inch inexorably poured in.
As for the messages being credited by AL-2 to the “slow” contact, it would have been all too easy for underwater listening apparatus, at that state of the art, to mistake bearings. Whether or not “OE” was a recognized call cannot now be confirmed, unfortunately.
What caused the explosion in the first place? It could only have been one of UB-65's own torpedoes. At that position, south of Ireland, mining was out of the question. Bearing in mind the accident that triggered the whole chain of uncanny events, it could be that the fairly sensitive magnetic pistol in one torpedo functioned before the torpedo left the tube. It certainly appears that the explosion was internal, and exploding hydrogen gas from the battery, a common culprit, would not have given the same result. Another suggestion at the time, which cannot lightly be dismissed in view of quite frequent torpedo failures, was that a weapon circled and hit the firing submarine. On the whole, an explosion in the tube is the most likely cause.
The reason for this particular ill-fated U-boat’s loss will probably never be established with certainty, but U-boat veterans from World War I had their own theory. Many were convinced that UB-65 went to the bottom carrying a member of her complement who had long been struck from the Fatherland’s list of officers. His malevolent shade was doomed to repeat, in the dark world underwater, the tragedy which had ended his own young life alongside the harbor wall.
Commander Compton-Hal! is the director of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum.
----------------------------------------------------------------------- Pass the Word __________________________________
Flag Officer Commanding the Western Fleet (FOCWEF) of the Indian Navy sent the following message to the commanding officer of the INS Ranvir:
I WILL ARRIVE ON BOARD YOUR SHIP AT 1000 TOMORROW TO INSPECT YOUR SHIP’S COMPANY AND THEREAFTER TALK TO THEM.
The word moved quickly down the chain of command:
- Commanding Officer to Executive Officer: FOCWEF will inspect the ship’s company at quarters tomorrow and talk to them afterward. This is his first visit to our ship. Please ensure the men are smartly turned out. Muster them at 0930.
- Executive Officer to Chief Boatswain s Mate: FOCWEF will inspect the ship’s company at quarters tomorrow. All hands will be smartly turned out. Muster at 0900.
- Chief Boatswain’s Mate to Divisional Petty Officers: FOCWEF will inspect tomorrow. All hands to be neatly dressed. Muster your divisions at 0830.
- Divisional Petty Officers to Leading Hands: FOCWEF is coming aboard tomorrow for inspection. Muster your men at 0800. -
- Leading Hands to Junior Sailors: You will have the opportunity to meet FOCWEF tomorrow, and also be inspected by him. Muster on the main deck at 0730.
- And the scuttlebutt on the mess decks: FOCWEF is inspecting tomorrow, and the entire chain of command is scared silly. Better be squared away and up on deck by 0700 or there will be hell to pay.
—Captain R.P. Khanna, AVSM, Indian Navy (Retired)
(Proceedings pays a $25.00 honorarium for original anecdotes.)