THE FACTS

The story of An Honorable German takes place in five unique settings, each one based on actual events and locations. The five settings are: the German ‘pocket battleship’ Admiral Graf Spee, the German auxiliary merchant raider Meteor, German occupied Europe, the German U-Boat U-114, and in WWII POW camps in the continental United States. My desire was to create a seamless tapestry which blended these five settings to serve as the backdrop of the story about the main character, Max Brekendorff. This isn’t a novel about the German Navy in World War Two. An Honorable German is about Max, who is in the German Navy in World War Two. As in any well researched work of historical fiction, the drama and action of the novel are built atop the framework supplied by the actual historical events. The task of the historical novelist is to create realistic characters from the era then paint them into the story of the actual events in a seamless way.

German ‘Pocket Battleship” Admiral Graf Spee and the Battle of the Rio Plata

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The first five chapters of An Honorable German take place aboard the German "pocket battleship" Admiral Graf Spee. I think I could find my way around that ship blindfolded. The other day I was reading a book about naval battles in World War II and I was struck by how many shells would be fired off during a maritime engagement and yet how few hit the enemy ship. I looked up the figures for the Battle of the Rio Plata, which is recounted in the novel, and found these numbers, which I had forgotten and were so unusual: the Graf Spee fired 414 rounds from her main batteries--almost two-thirds of her main battery ammunition supply. She hit HMS Exeter eight times, HMS Ajax twice, and never hit HMS Achilles. She fired 457 rounds from her secondary batteries and didn't hit anything. Even worse were the British ships. Taken together, the three Royal Navy ships fired a total of 2,257 rounds at the Graf Spee and hit her 20 times.

This is not unusual. In fact this is better than many other engagements. Every nation-state of the time measured its naval power in terms of big ships but in battle these ships had a very hard time scoring hits on their opponents. The technology to balance out all the factors and adjust for them instantly simply did not exist.

German Auxiliary Raider Meteor in the Indian Ocean

The main character, Max, spends time on the auxiliary raider Meteor, which patrols the Indian Ocean seeking easy prey – lightly armed Allied merchantmen transporting much needed war goods. Based upon stories from actual merchant raiders such as the Atlantis, the Kormorant, Thor and others, ships like the Meteor would often disguise their true purpose through false deckhouses, funnels, masts, and paint jobs. To top it off, they would fly the flags of their enemy, their enemy’s allies, or neutral countries to lull the target in close enough for capture. As long as they disclosed their true nationality before opening fire, they fulfilled the requirements of international law. Utilizing floatplanes, various types of naval cannons, torpedoes, and mines, German merchant raiders are believed to have sunk or captured over 800,000 tons of Allied shipping. While used in An Honorable German during WWII, the real Meteor was sunk by the British in 1915 after its crew and prisoners escaped to a neutral Swedish ship.

German Occupied France and Germany

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Most German U-Boats fighting in the Battle of the North Atlantic were based in French ports. This gave easier and more immediate access to the North Atlantic and the vital shipping lanes of the Allied war effort. The OKM,Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine, the German Navy High Command  ordered the construction of 4 submarine bases in occupied France. At first Allied air forces were not strong enough to mount sustained attacks on these U-boat bases. Eventually, massive U-Boat bunkers, most with roofs 20 feet thick, were built to protect the moored submarines from aerial attack. These structures are so massive almost all of them remain intact today; several were used for decades as the mooring shelters for French nuclear submarines.

Of all the unknown challenges the U-Bootwaffe had to meet in the Second World War, the ferocity and success of Allied air attacks on U-boats was never anticipated. Those of us who have watched a lot of World War Two movies know that it’s always the very gallant and very small Allied escort ships dropping depth charges which sank all the U-boats. Like many things we believe about World War Two, this isn’t true at all. Over half of all German U-Boats sunk were sent to the bottom by Allied aircraft.

German U-Boats were almost obsolete by the third year of the war. It was less their ability, and more our inability to protect conveys, that allowed for so much Allied shipping to be sunk. Once all the countermeasures we had been working on came together, the Allies decimated the U-Bootwaffe, killing over 80% of all those who served in the U-Boat force.

Another part of the U-Boat myth is this: the men were a highly trained elite. Not exactly. The crewmen who had entered the Ubootwaffe in the years before the war were a highly trained elite. But as the war went on, those men were killed or brought ashore. Their replacements did not have the dash and training of the prewar men. Performance deteriorated. According to U-boat historian, Jak Mallman-Showell, the Kriegsmarine commissioned 1,171 U-Boats. Of that number, 850 U-Boats—three quarters of the U-Boat fleet-- neither attacked, nor sank, nor damaged an Allied ship. This is not the performance of a highly trained elite. An extraordinarily small number of U-boats sank most Allied shipping.

Mareth, Max’s love interest from An Honorable German, lives in Berlin, capital of the Greater German Reich. It is a terrible irony of history that Berliners were the most opposed to the Nazis and in the last free election in Germany the Nazi Party received less then 22% of the vote in Berlin. As the capital of the Reich, the largest manufacturing city in the Reich, the central locus of finance in the Reich, of entertainment, really of everything, Berlin was a key target of the Anglo-American bombing campaign and during the course of the war over 80% of the city was destroyed.

As controversial as this tactic of area bombing or carpet bombing became after the war, the Anglo-American bombing campaign on Germany and its allies was a brilliant success. For much of this, including the best way to firebomb a city, the Allies had an excellent instructor: the German Luftwaffe-- which firebombed numerous cities throughout Europe, London being the most well known. When the Germans began the nighttime bombing of British cities, known as “the Blitz”, which lasted from September of 1940 to May of 1941, they came up with a new tactic: dropping incendiaries mixed in with bombs. This combination set English cities aflame but the RAF took careful note and when they began heavy night bombing of German cities in mid 1942, they used this tactic, the reality of which is recounted in An Honorable German. “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

During “the Blitz”, German aircraft flying only at night, bombed British cities with London the most common target, at one point hit being hit fifty-seven nights in a row. Over 43,000 British civilians were killed during “the Blitz”, half of them Londoners.

The photograph below shows St. Paul’s Cathedral, still intact, rising above the smoke and flame of London after a night of heavy bombing by the Luftwaffe on 29 December 1940. This iconic photograph became one of the most famous of the war and came to symbolize Great Britain’s defiance of Nazi Germany. Only strong efforts by volunteer members of the parish, who stood guard both within and without the dome, and who threw hundreds of flaming incendiary bombs off the dome, and heroic efforts by the London Fire Brigade, saved the Cathedral. Although it wasn’t particularly bombproof and hadn’t the facilities to serve as a shelter, people nearby streamed into the cathedral for protection as they would have done in the Middle Ages

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Like St. Paul’s Cathedral, London survived. Berlin did not. And so the sound so familiar to Londoners, the warbling, ear splitting blast of the air raid siren, became a sound Berliners came to know well.

German U-Boat 114

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The actual German submarine U-114 was designed as a Type XIB, a very large ‘cruiser’ submarine meant to carry an Arado AR 231, a lightweight seaplane. Construction had only just started on U-114 when the war broke out and the project was cancelled in favor of building more submarines of the Type VII, the workhorse of the U-Bootwaffe. As depicted in An Honorable German, U-114 is a Type VIIC. I used the number 114 to avoid confusion because it was assigned to a U-Boat that was never built

"Nasty, brutish and short," would best describe daily life on a German U-Boat. There were no bathing facilities on either Type VII or Type IX, which made up the majority of the German U-Boat Fleet. There were no showers. Each man was given one small cup of water a day for personal use such as brushing his teeth. Because fresh water was rationed, most of the men were thirsty. So they just took the water and drank it. A crewman could only bring one change of uniform and there were no laundry facilities except for a bucket of sea water and some salt water soap.

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Without the ability to bathe or launder one's uniform, most U-Boat men suffered from skin rashes, boils, constant itching and skin irritation. No one shaved. Everyone stank. Take 46 men and lock them in a metal tube the length of two subway cars for a few months and you create a special stink. Add to that the contents of the cans the men used to relieve themselves when they couldn't use the one toilet on the boat, the rotting food, the smell of diesel fuel and an almost tangible fog of stink was created.

Flotilla engineers who went aboard U-Boats which had just returned to port often threw up. There was little fresh air on a U-Boat and almost no ventilation. The only way to get a stream of fresh air into the boat was to open the interior hatch to the diesel room, open the main hatch way which led to the bridge, close the outboard diesel air intakes and the diesels would draw air from the main hatch, thus creating some movement of air in the boat. For various reasons, this could not be done often and even when it was done, the small bit of fresh air did little to reduce the putrid smell. At sea, the boats constantly rolled a few degrees side to side which made many of the sailors slightly dizzy. Because of the limited amount of fresh water each man was allowed to drink, the constant rocking of the boat, and the canned food, constipation became wide spread and left the men listless.

There was absolutely no privacy for anyone except the kommandant of the boat who could draw a green curtain across his small sleeping space. Only officers and chief petty officers had their own bunks - everyone else "hotbunked". As soon as one man came off duty, he took the just vacated bed of a man who had gone on duty. Since the sheets and blankets could not be washed, even the bunk one slept in was filthy.

After the war, veterans of the U-Boatwaffe insisted that all of the men who served in the U-Boat force were volunteers. Yet that is completely untrue. Many men were "volunteered” or just ordered to the U-boat fleet as some make clear in their memoirs.

POW Camps in the Continental United States

The Provost Marshal General of the U.S. Army had official custody of all prisoners of war in the United States. By the end of World War Two, the Provost Marshal General operated over seven hundred camps of varying size with camps in every state except for Nevada, North Dakota, and Vermont. The majority were located in the south because this reduced the fuel needed to heat the prisoner’s barracks and because there was a huge shortage of farm labor in the heavily agricultural southern states.  Germans and Italians were confined in separate camps and when the Royal Italian Government switched sides in the middle of the war, the Italians were no longer technically prisoners of war.

There were two Geneva Conventions in effect at the time and they specifically governed the treatment of sick or wounded soldiers and Prisoners of War. (The ‘rules of war’ at that time were embodied in the Hague Convention of 1907---not the Geneva Conventions). Any nation which held of prisoners of war was legally obligated to treat those men exactly the same as it would treat is own men of similar rank. Thus German POWs in the U.S. were fed as if they were U.S. soldiers stationed in the U.S. This meant that American frontline combat troops in France and later Germany, ate a far worse diet with smaller amounts of food than German POWs in the U.S. The reason? Getting the requisite amount of food to frontline soldiers was difficult and the supply services in the U.S. Army were indifferent to the frontline troops in World War Two.

Regarding Continuity

The scenes in An Honorable German, which are based on actual events such as the Admiral Graf Spee, mirror those events to a fault. For example, I spent a significant amount of time plotting out the entire Battle of the Rio Plata on charts with all the times and distances marked and reviewed those charts at length with several naval officers to ensure the narrative was correct and that all helm and engine orders given at specific times were correct. I corresponded with Jürgen Wattenburg, the former Senior Navigation Officer of the Graf Spee and he answered several questions. One of the reasons cited in the narrative for scuttling the Graf Spee were the cracked motor mounts on the auxiliary engines and some on the main engines. Historians have missed this detail but the former Senior Navigation Officer told me this himself, in writing. That’s an example how detailed the research was.

 All the ships mentioned in the narrative as being seized by the Graf Spee are the actual ships. If the cargo of a ship were mentioned, that was the actual cargo that ship was carrying. Certain characters in the narrative, such as Captain Patrick Dove of the Africa Shell, are taken from life. Fortunately, Captain Dove wrote a book immediately after the Battle of the River Plate and the subsequent events. His book, I Was Graf Spee’s Prisoner, is the source for some excellent detail about the ship and about Captain Langsdorff, whom Captain Dove came to greatly like and admire. Dove said so many positive things to the press in Uruguay about the excellent way he had been treated aboard the Graf Spee that the British military attaché summoned him to tea and politely told him to shut up.