Chapter Twenty-Four
[ONE]
Puerto Magdalena
Samboromb¢n Bay
Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
2115 19 April 1943
The voyage of the good ship Coronel Gasparo from El Tigre to Magdalena took just over seven hours. They tied up at five minutes to six, as darkness was falling.
During the voyage, there was plenty of time for Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein, holder of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, to consider the morality of what he was doing and of what he intended to do.
It was, of course, a question of honor. Intellectually, from the day he re-ceived the letter from his father, there was no question in his mind that he was honor bound, as an officer, as a von Wachtstein, to follow the path his father had decided honor required.
Germany was in the hands o
f a collection of unbelievably evil men. These men were not only guilty of unspeakable crimes against the Jews and other peo-ple-including Germans-but were also prepared to see Germany itself de-stroyed. Clearly, a Christian nobleman of the officer class was honor bound to do whatever was required to take Germany back from the Nazis.
That was the intellectual argument, and he had no doubt that it was valid.
Emotionally, however, he had a good deal of trouble personally engaging in activity that was clearly treason, and would very likely cause the deaths of other Germans who were no more Nazis than he was.
It wasn't simply a question, either, of the Americans' moral justification- of his friend Cletus Frade's, in particular-in sinking the Comerciante del Oceano Pacifico. By replenishing German U-boats in protected neutral waters, while flying the flag of neutral Spain, the Comerciante del Oceano Pacifico had given up any claim to be other than what it was, a vessel in the service of a com-batant power.
And when he helped the Americans sink the Oceano Pacifico, which they obviously intended to do, it would obviously hurt the German ability to wage war, and in some measure contribute to the ending of the war, and thus the Nazi regime.
Peter von Wachtstein intellectually understood this, and was intellectually prepared to accept the inevitable death of much of the Oceano Pacifico's crew.
On the other hand, the submarine crews bothered him. There were a dozen or more submarines somewhere in the South Atlantic who were depending on being refueled and resupplied by the Oceano Pacifico.
An hour or so out of El Tigre, as he steered the Coronel Gasparo through nasty choppy waters far enough offshore to avoid being clearly visible, a num-ber of Untersee officers he knew came to mind. And one-Kapitanleutnant Wilhelm von Dattenberg-in particular.
He knew von Dattenberg at Philip's University in Marburg an der Lahn, and ran into him again in Berlin at the Adlon Bar after he himself had just re-turned from a tour on the Eastern Front. At that time he had the private belief that fighter pilots had seen as much of the horror of war as could be reasonably expected of any human being, including one whose family had been fighting Germany's wars for centuries.
Von Dattenberg quickly disabused him of that notion. From the moment he saw von Dattenberg's eyes, Peter knew that he had seen more than his fair share of horror. And Peter saw even deeper into that horror as they got drunk and von Dattenberg talked about service in U-boats.
It didn't take Peter long to realize that he simply did not have the courage, the moral fiber, to endure what von Dattenberg had endured, and what he would again endure when his fifteen-day End of Patrol leave was over and he would take his boat out again.
Like Peter, Willi von Dattenberg was a member of the officer class whose family had been either admirals or generals for generations. Willi shared Peter's moral values, including the sense of responsibility he felt for the men placed under his command.
The moral responsibility for the lives of other men was obviously greater for a U-boat commander than it was for a fighter pilot, even for a fighter pilot given command of a Jaeger Squadron. It had occurred to Peter that he was able to discharge his responsibility to the pilots of his squadron-and in the Luft-waffe, only those who flew fought-by doing his best to see they were properly trained and that their equipment was properly maintained.
. He of course regretted the loss of any of his pilots-often he privately wept for them. But-because it was at least partially true-it wasn't hard to rational-ize their deaths by thinking it was either simple bad luck or a bad decision on their parts that had caused them to go down.
On the other hand, literally during every waking moment, Willi von Dat-tenberg was aware that any decision he made was liable to cause not only his own death but the deaths of every member of his crew.
And it was entirely possible that Willi von Dattenberg was now floating around somewhere in the South Atlantic, low on fuel, running out of food, and praying for word over the radio that it was now safe to head for the River Plate estuary for replenishment.
From a ship that his old friend was about to help the Americans sink.
It was his own crew on the Coronel Gasparo, blissfully unaware that they were doing so, who caused Peter to emotionally understand what he was doing, what he would do, what he was honor bound to do, even though that might mean the death of Kapitanleutnant Wilhelm von Dattenberg and any number of other good Germans.
Peter's first reaction to Herr Gustav Loche, G?nther's father, was unkind, if understandable, given that Peter had been raised to never forget he was a mem-ber of the aristocracy. If anything, he thought the father was even more of a fool than the son, a typical member of the German laboring class.
This perception stemmed from the first time Peter met Herr Loche, when he was both embarrassed and repelled by the man's servility. The plump, bald-ing, ruddy-cheeked sausage maker did everything but tug at his forelock as he made it clear that he felt deeply honored to be in the very presence of a man who was not only Baron von Wachtstein but also a hero of German National So-cialism who had received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross from the hands of the F?hrer himself.