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  With age the would-be seafarer took to rowboats and canoes, in which he made the Weser and its tributaries unsafe for Germany’s enemies. Later he caught his first whiff of blue water at the Hanseatic Yacht School in Neustadt, Holstein, from which he made extended voyages to Copenhagen, Skagen, and Göteborg. The admiral of the achting set was an indifferent student in Gymnasium, however. It was clear that the boating life took first place to Latin vocabulary, and eventually the priorities appeared in his deportment, as discovered during World War II when British bombers hit his old school building and a student found among the scattered papers deportment records of “our famous citizen,” which he proudly forwarded to the hero: “Hardegen constantly ill-mannered”; “Hardegen interrupts the class”; “Hardegen eats breakfast during the lesson.” Finally the truth was borne home on this mischievous youth that unless his academic grades and behavior improved, the chances of his admission to naval officers’ training were minimal at best. Hard remedial work, combined with firm counsel from a longtime family friend, Paul König, retired captain in the North German Lloyd merchant fleet, turned his school lite around and he successfully passed his remaining courses and the Abitur (final) exam while improving his deportment. On Kapitän König’s persuasive recommendation the Kriegsmarine accepted Hardegen’s application lor midshipman candidacy in 1932.

  Now the Kriegsmarine would find out whether or not there was any substance to this Bremer youth, and do so w ithin three days’ time, thanks to a battery of tests designed and supervised by naval psychologists of the Göttingen school. The tests, conducted at the Kiel-Wik naval barracks outside Kiel, with one psychologist assigned to observe each group of eight boys, sought to disclose a candidate’s physical prowess, tenacity, courage, leadership, and ability to think and act in an emergency. The physical tests took the form of gymnastic exercises, sprinting, and chinning on a horizontal bar: A boy who struggled to chin a seventh time was rated higher than a boy who chinned himself easily eleven times and balked at a twelfth. Tenacity was measured by the Mutprobe (“test of courage”). Hardegen, like the other-boys in his group, was placed alone in a room with one-way mirrors and told to lift a heavy metal bar. As he did so, the bar was charged with increasing currents of electricity. Those candidates who defied the shock and pain the longest received the highest grades. Hardegen held on.

  In other phases of the testing Hardegen demonstrated his proficiency in carrying out complicated instructions given only once (“Carry this piece of paper over that obstacle, cross the ditch, turn left, run until you come to a tall tree, turn right, walk until you come to a man in a green coat, and say to him, ‘I have been ordered to deliver this paper to you’”); wrote a short autobiography to be graded for style, grammar, and handwriting; wrote two compositions, one on a concrete and one on an abstract subject; conducted a conversation with the team psychologist before hidden cameras that recorded (it was thought) significant facial expressions and gestures; participated in a final group oral discussion on a theme such as “German Forests” or “Bismarck as a Leader” so as to reveal who was the natural leader of the conversation; and delivered an impromptu lecture before ten enlisted men whose reactions to the candidate (did he hold their attention? win their respect?) were carefully recorded. To these measurable data the examiners added their general impressions of the candidate’s appearance and bearing, breeding and table manners. When the final psychological reports were presented to the Naval Board of Review (prior to expansion of the Kriegsmarine in 1935) not more than one candidate in twenty was found to meet the exacting standards. Reinhard Hardegen was one in twenty.1

  Next after the psychological ordeal came basic training at Stralsund with many months of hard life before the mast on a square-rigger. In 1933 Hardegcn’s cadet class became the first to board the spanking-new tall-sail ship Gorch Fock (named after’a poet-sai lor-who went down with his ship during the Battle of Jutland in May 1916) and were ferried out by the white-hulled beauty to the light cruiser Karlsruhe in the North Sea, on which they then embarked on a round-the-world cadet cruise. A (ierce storm near the Orkney Islands north of Scotland gave the cadets their first taste of hazards on the deep, at the same time that it gave Hardegen a preview of the waters where years later he would experience his first success as a U-boat commander. After rounding the British Isles, Karlsruhe sailed south to the Iberian coast, entered the Mediterranean, and passed through the Suez to India, Sumatra, Java, and Australia. The final and most enjoyable stop in the Pacific sector of their voyage was Honolulu in the Hawaiian Islands.

  The U.S. Navy fleet anchorage at Pearl Harbor deeply impressed Hardegen, who, with another midshipman, made friends with the local commanding officer’s daughter and with that entree gained access to the harbor, ships at anchor, and aircraft landing strips. He was particularly struck by the confined interior space of a U.S. fleet submarine that he and his friend were permitted to visit. The living quarters were incredibly small. And he wondered how anyone could make sense out of the spaghetti-like tangle of pipes and valves, hand wheels, levers, and other controls that would become so familiar an environment later in his career. What he remembered most when he was in submarines himself was that the American living quarters he had seen were actually spacious and luxurious compared with those provided in German U-boats. The Americans had a wardroom, a large kitchen, recreational space, several heads (toilets), and, it seemed, a sleeping bunk for every man. In U-boats there were no separate dining or recreational spaces for the crew, there was only one operating head for fifty officers and men, and there were so few bunks they had to be rotated constantly day and night—“hot bunks,” the crew called them, because they were always warm. U-boats were spare, functional fighting machines. The Germans placed the greatest amount of fighting equipment and armament in the smallest possible space. Comfort, therefore, had to take second place. At the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941, by which date Hardegen was a U-boat veteran, he would wonder if the fact that the Americans were caught napping was due to their predilection for luxury and comfort. And he would wonder if they might not get caught napping again.

  The final ports on the world cruise were New York and Boston. Like many other tourists to New York at the time, Hardegen rode the elevator to the observation floor of the Empire State Building and looked out over the city at night. What impressed him most in Manhattan, apart from the skyscrapers, was the huge sea of lights in the night-blackened city. In a matter of weeks Hardegen and his cadet class were back in Germany and enrolled in university-level classes at the Flensburg-Mürwik Naval Academy. For a year their world became physics, engineering, navigation, gunnery, strategy and tactics, and naval history and traditions. Finally, with the officers’ examination successfully behind him, Hardegen moved on to short advanced coursework, including torpedo school and a fourteen-day program at the U-boat defense school at Kiel, where for the first time he experienced underwater travel on board a small three-hundred-ton Type IIA training U-boat of the kind that Germany used in the early 1930s to resurrect her 1914-18 Ubootwaffe and to produce a new generation of undersea officers and crews. The rearmament program excited his interest since he had chosen the military life, though, like his father before him, he took little interest in politics; and, in any event, all forms of party affiliation and activity were now closed off to him by oath and law in his new standing as a commissioned officer. In April 1936 he was promoted from Fähnrich zur See (midshipman) to Oberfähnrich zur See (ensign), and in October 1936 to Leutnant zur See (lieutenant junior grade). His subsequent promotions in grade would come in April 1938 (Oberleutnant zur See—Lieutenant senior grade), December 1940 (Kapitänleutnant—lieutenant commander), and March 1944 (Korvettenkapitän—commander).

  When Hardegen and a number of friends from his commissioning class received their first service orders, which were handed to them in great secrecy and with instructions not to discuss them with anyone, not even among themselves, they were perplexed to find th
at the orders detailed them to the naval air force, which technically did not exist. Like many other young officers Hardegen had heard rumors that, in repudiation of the Versailles Treaty that had concluded the 1914-18 war and had imposed tight constraints on the German military, the Third Reich of Chancellor Adolf Hitler was building a new Luftwaffe (air force). Periodically Hardegen would see officers on the street in blue-gray uniforms that bespoke the new service. Now he learned in quick succession that he and his friends were expected to form a naval air arm (Luftkreis IV, later renamed Luftwaffenkom-mando See) and that they would have to go back to school. So, while most of the others in his class went out to envied sea billets on cruisers and destroyers, a disappointed Hardegen and his comrades went back to the books, this time to learn aeronautical theory and practical aircraft mechanics, all of it, it seemed at the time, a long way from the sea to which he had devoted his life interest. Only when he began flight training over the North Sea and could delight in his independence of action as a pilot as compared with the lot of his shipbound former comrades on tiny vessels far below him did he begin to find satisfaction in aviation.

  With the satisfaction, however, came danger, as he learned the hard way when a Junkers W-34 aircraft in which he was a passenger crashed on takeoff and broke apart. When he regained consciousness, he beheld a broken leg hung suspended over a hospital bed and white bandages across contusions on what seemed every other part of his body. Internal injuries took the longest to recuperate from, six months altogether. The accident would leave him with a shortened right leg and a bleeding stomach, both of which threatened to end his active-duty career. For the present, though, he overcame his disabilities and completed the flight course, something that only a fraction of pilot candidates succeeded in doing, with the rest posted back to ships. By 1935, Hardegen was one of a select group of naval airmen on whom the Kriegsmarine was counting to man three hundred aircraft in twenty-five squadrons. With his own squadron he exhilarated in the experience of flying far out to sea, where he practiced both attacks on enemy submarines and maneuvers in support of Germany’s own U-boats. Everything he learned about aircraft would stand him in good stead later, when as watch officer and commander on U-boats he had to contend with enemy planes, or “bees,” as U-boat men called them, and he could count himself fortunate to know intimately the capabilities and the limits of airborne weaponry, the most dangerous threat to U-boats.

  In 1939, after he had spent four years in naval aviation, Germany invaded Poland and, in November of that year, Hardegen together with the other navy pilots in his same date of rank were suddenly and without warning assigned to the Ubootwaffe. Luftwaffe Commander in Chief Hermann Goring had declared, “Everything that flies belongs to me.” Naval aviation was no more. And Hardegen had to begin yet another career from the water up. It was a keen disappointment that he expressed in four-letter words fueled by alcohol. But, orders in hand, he soon found himself on board a seaplane to U-boat school at Flensburg. As the plane took off and made a last sentimental circle over the air base bordering “his” Kamper See, he could see below the attractive fishing village and then his own house in the pine forest where his wife Barbara, holding their first child, five-month-old Klaus-Reinhard, stood on the terrace waving.

  Course followed course at U-boat school, and soon Hardegen was crammed with knowledge about the complicated diving boats. The confusion of valves and dials and handwheels that had made such an impression on him at Pearl Harbor began to clear, and eventually he and the other former aviators were actually on or under Lübeck Bay in a type IIA training boat, learning how to dive and how to keep a U-boat in trim. Their training base now was at Neustadt, Holstein, and the commander of their training boat, U-5, was Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock, who would go on to become one of Germany’s leading aces and a recipient of the coveted Eichenlaub zum Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes (Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, with Oak Leaves).2 When this phase of the training was completed, Hardegen had the good fortune to spend three months assigned to the Torpedo Trials Command (Torpedoerprobungskommando) at Kiel and Eckernförde, where he developed exact skills in computing range and angle-on-bow of target vessels against which torpedoes with dummy warheads were launched. Afterward, because of his age and years in service, he was sent directly to U-boat Commanders School. It was at Commanders School on the Baltic that one day he saw two U-boats together that were both to have a major place in his future career. They came in one evening from torpedo-launching trials. One, with an edelweiss blossom painted on its tower, would be known in the fleet as the Edehveissboot. The other, colorfully camouflaged from bow to stern, had been used for all the outboard shots of a popular motion picture called U-Boote westwärts (U-Boats Westward). Both were Type IXB boats, the largest and most modern boats in the service. As fate would have it he would soon serve as watch officer on the first boat, U-124, and as commander on the second, V-123.

  One morning while Hardegen was working in the cellar of his new house in Kiel, constructing shelves from old packing cases, a messenger arrived with orders to report in two hours’ time to Holtenau airport for transport to a new assignment. He had been called up by the System Greif, literally “grasp system,” that identified officers needed quickly for specific duties. While his wife, Barbara, made a box lunch, he hurriedly threw together his uniform and gear. A friend drove him to the airport, which he reached in good time. When the plane that was to pick him up landed and taxied to a stop, he was surprised to see a Konteradmiral flag hoisted atop the cabin.3 As he approached the plane none other than Rear Admiral Karl Dönitz disembarked, took his salute, and reached out to shake his hand. Hardegen was instantly impressed by the clear eyes and firm handshake of this man whom the Ubootwaffe called Der Löwe— “the Lion.” Dönitz suggested that while the plane was being refueled the two of them go into the canteen nearby and have a drink. Hardegen was still a young officer, untried and unknown to Dönitz, yet the admiral treated him with courtesy and showed genuine interest in his replies to questions.

  When the admiral’s aircraft was finally refueled and airborne, Hardegen thought that they might be headed to one of the new French bases. German land forces had just captured the Bay of Biscay harbors on the Brittany coast, and Dönitz was establishing U-boat bases at Lorient, Brest, St.-Nazaire, La Pallice, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux that would give U-boats direct access to the Atlantic, 450 miles west of their previous bases, without having to transit the Strait of Dover or travel north around Scotland as before. Instead, the plane landed at Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea where he learned that he was to be a replacement there for a second watch officer who had broken his hand. On reaching the pier he saw that the boat was U-124— the Edelweissboot.

  When war began, fleet numbers were removed from U-boat conning towers because of their intelligence value to the enemy. Many boats chose an emblem to replace the painted numerals. Thus one boat sported a jumping dolphin, another three fish, or red devils, or golden horseshoes, and so forth. U-124 was commanded by Kptlt. Wilhelm Schulz. He had lost a previous boat, U-64, when it was bombed by British aircraft near the Norwegian coast on 13 April 1940, during the Battle of Narvik. Schulz and his men were rescued by German Alpine troops on shore who came after them in rowboats. The insignia of the Alpine troops was the mountain flower edelweiss. As a gesture of gratitude Schulz emblazoned the device on the tower of his next boat, U-124, and had the flower design sewn onto his blue wool forage cap. Knowing this story, it was with a certain excitement that Hardegen presented himself to the commander on the deck: “Oberleutnant zur See Hardegen reporting as watch officer, Herr Kaleu!” Schulz returned his salute, shook his hand, and almost immediately called out, “Aft line free!” Hardegen looked up at another WO on the bridge and asked him what was going on. “We’re going to meet the enemy,” he said. “It’s the boat’s first Atlantic cruise. We were just waiting for you.”

  So, at last, he was going against England! The boy’s dream became the man’s realit
y. He stowed his gear below while mine sweepers came alongside to begin escorting the boat out of the harbor. Soon after departure the IXB ran into heavy weather, and at midnight he drew watch on the narrow bridge atop the conning tower for the first time. Not knowing quite what to expect, despite all his training, he went up to bridge duty without changing his clothes. Soon afterward he was soaked to the skin. Violent stern seas slapped the tower. Breakers sprayed over the bridge continuously. Often he and the other members of the bridge watch were standing in water up to their hips. In those circumstances it was difficult to keep the mine sweepers’ shadows in sight, as was their duty. By the time he crept into his designated bunk at 0400 hours, thoroughly chilled, soaked, and tired, he had learned a lesson about U-boats that did not come from school-books, or even from training. Then at breakfast the next morning he learned something else. Suddenly there was a loud double Click-CLANG! C/z’cfc-CLANG! He thought a couple of hatch covers had sprung shut or something of the sort, until he saw a watch officer fall into the control room and watched his soup tilt to one side of the bowl. They were diving! No alarm bell had sounded, but they were diving. Everyone was watching the manometer, or depth gauge. Then another, louder C/i’cfc-CLANG! Someone told him that a British bomber was dropping charges. Here he was, fewer than twenty-four hours since the messenger had come to his home, and he was being bombed!