Secret Honor (Honor Bound 3)

For one thing, he could not deny his first reaction to his orders…both the shame and the immense relief. Relief because he would no longer have to put to sea in U-241 and face the terrors of being depth-charged by British or American destroyers.

Shame because of the simple question of honor. His father had acted dishonorably in using his influence to remove his son from combat service. And consequently, as a man of honor, it was clearly his duty to protest the special treatment and to resist it in any way he could. If necessary, he decided, he would appeal upward in the chain of command all the way to Admiral Dönitz, even if that meant embarrassing his father. That couldn’t be helped. His father should not have done what he did.

When he confronted his father in Berlin with the accusation, Vizeadmiral Boltitz’s response was not at all what he expected.

“I had absolutely nothing to do with your transfer,” his father said.

“I have your word?”

“If you feel that that’s necessary, Karl.”

“In that case, I offer my apologies.”

“Don’t. If I had the influence you think I have, you would never have gone to submarines in the first place. And I have tried and failed ever since you went to submarines to get you out.”

“That’s dishonorable!”

“Let me tell you something, Karl,” his father said. “For reasons we can only guess at, God gives some men authority over others. How a man uses that authority, for good or evil, is between himself and God, as well as between himself and the State. We are engaged in an evil war, if I have to tell you that. If I can keep my son from being killed in an evil war, I will do that, and I think God will be on my side.”

Karl didn’t reply.

“Tell me, Karl,” Vizeadmiral Boltitz said, “do you remember your first cruise out on the U-241?”

Karl did, vividly.

His first patrol aboard U-241—as the gunnery officer, in charge of the deck-mounted cannon and the conning tower–mounted machine guns—had not been quite what he had expected.

For one thing, firing his cannon at an old, battered, and rusty merchantman and watching her sink mortally wounded beneath the waves, and then leaving her crew afloat in lifeboats, three hundred miles from shore in the North Atlantic in winter, had not seemed to be much of a glorious victory at sea.

And what had happened in the captain’s cabin immediately afterward was not in the honorable naval tradition of, say, Admiral Graf Spee.

The captain—Kapitänleutnant Siegfried von Stoup—had been two years ahead of Karl Boltitz at the Naval Academy. They had not been friends, but they knew each other. “Congratulations on your marksmanship, Boltitz,” Kapitänleutnant von Stoup said.

“Thank you, Sir,” Boltitz replied.

“You may examine the entry in the log,” von Stoup said, and slid it across the tiny table to him.

* * *

1550 23 Feb On Patrol Zone A17

Sank by gunfire (oblt Boltitz) ss star of Bombay, Est. 12000 Gross Tons. No survivors.

* * *

“No survivors, Sir?”

“I am sure, Boltitz, that if there were any survivors, you would have seen them. In which case, in compliance with orders from our Führer, you would, as an obedient officer, have made sure there were no survivors. Nicht war?”

“You mean fire at the seamen?”

“I mean ensure there were no survivors, as our Führer has ordered.”

“That’s the order?” Boltitz asked incredulously.

Kapitänleutnant von Stoup nodded. “So far, I have not informed the enlisted men of the order,” he said. “Except, of course, the Chief of the Boat. Some of them might find machine-gunning seamen in lifeboats distasteful.”

“Good God!”