91. Mediterranean Holiday
Accademia Navale di Livorno
Livorno, Kingdom of Italy
7 July 1943
Wilhelm's lungs burned.
He knew how to swim, of course - there had been days in the early thirties where it seemed that had been all there was to do, and he had spent so much time alongside rivers during their travels that Ernst had thought it an excellent form of exercise - but this was something new. This business of swimming underwater, with but a thin glass mask between his eyes and the sea, was madness as far as he was concerned.
The goal was to dive to a depth sufficient to retrieve a submerged outboard motor. There were four of them diving, and the other three were all Italian. His Italian was weak, but that hardly mattered at fifteen meters under the surface. They had had no luck finding the motor, and their stone-faced instructors, veterans of North Africa, had made it clear that unless they found the motor, they weren't leaving the old drainage channel. They could die here, just as they would at sea without the outboard.
A hand grabbed at his shoulder and he saw one of the Italians, dark hair waving like seaweed, gesturing frantically to the side. He nodded, kicking his finned feet and angling in that direction. The motor was lying propeller-up in a thick, dark layer of silt, though it appeared to be otherwise intact. He and the Italian grabbed at it, tugging it, and with just the two of them, it would not budge. For the first time today, he felt a sense of despair, looking up at the surface longingly. He needed air. He released the motor and surged skyward.
Not for the first time, he wondered why he was here, wondered why he had accepted Hippel's drily offered cross-training recommendation. He could have gone to the motorcycle battalion, or done what he was best at and become their master parachutist. Instead... instead he was at the bottom of a drainage canal in Italy wrestling an outboard motor. As he thought this, he breached the surface. No sooner than he had done so, a rock struck him in the shoulder. Fortunately, it had skipped twice before hitting him, spending most of its force. "
Regolare! Regolare, Tedesco!" The speaker was a thinly built Italian major with the badges of an African veteran dating back to Ethiopia. Wilhelm gasped and the major continued. "If you break surface like that in the field, it'll be a rifle, not a rock. Now try it again!"
Volkmann had begun to dive again almost as soon as he had surfaced, taking a series of quick breaths followed by one deep breath, upending and kicking powerfully downward. He felt the water pressing in around him, and saw the others coming down on the same kind of errand, albeit with their snorkels tipped back now. He felt foolish - his need for air had driven him upward without regard to that basic piece of equipment, and he was so unused to swimming with it that he had forgotten he had it. It would probably have spared him a lecture.
The four of them got their hands on the outboard, and he looked to each of their faces, receiving a nod in return. He raised a hand, counting down - three, two, one - and they all heaved, jerking the motor up out of the silt. Once it was free, there was no good way for four men to carry it, so Wilhelm and the first man to get his hand on it dragged it upward. This time, when they surfaced, they stayed just below, only snorkels breaking the still canal water. Now came the hard part.
Next they had to get the outboard aboard an inflatable boat and climb aboard themselves. They struggled with their load across the length of the canal, two hundred meters of agony with the outboard slung between them. The Italian switched out with one of the others; Wilhelm already knew he was at a disadvantage here, as the outsider, and stayed grimly in place. When he reached the boat, he tried to heave the outboard over the side. Nothing doing - it simply would not rise above the water. He was forced to switch out with one of the Italians after all. He got a fatalistic shrug in response, and dropped back gratefully to rest for a moment.
Once the outboard was aboard, they climbed after it, even Wilhelm, whose arms felt leaden now. He flopped aboard, then sat up, kicking off his fins and taking his place at the oarlock. The outboard was useless, since it had no fuel in it, and the boat still had to get back out of the canal. One of the Italians acted as coxswain, his hand slapping the rubberized fabric to keep time. Finally they reached "shore," and rolled once more into the water. Here, Wilhelm was in his element, racing forward and flopping on his belly to take watch as two of the Italians dragged the boat clear of the water.
Once the boat was fully ashore, the Italian major came over, raising his hand and yelling out, "FINITA!" That done, he turned to where the four of them were laying prone, Wilhelm with his eyes closed for a brief moment of rest. "Thirty-two minutes and forty-eight seconds, pigs." 'Pig' was what all of the instructors called the trainees; it had something to do with the two-man minisubmarines they used. "You - flying pig -" the Major gestured at Volkmann - "you with the medals, you have that much time in combat?"
Volkmann knew the response, and started to rise to give it. "Did I say get up? Could still be under fire here!" the major snapped. "No, sir, and no, sir, in order," Volkmann replied laconically. The major grunted noncommittally. "I've seen worse first tries. Before you leave it will be under twenty minutes. Next team, take the boat!" he yelled out, stalking away from them. Four more men scrambled forward to grab the boat, and Wilhelm and his three were finally allowed to rest for a moment, but only a moment, before they had to haul themselves to their feet and jog to the next station.
Wilhelm had thought the Fallschirmjäger training regime could be grueling, and, to be fair, still did. The difference was that it was on land. There was nothing here he was being asked to do that he could not manage, it was just underwater, and after a month here, he still had not fully adapted to the difference in elements. The nights he made it back to his rented quarters at all, he was waterlogged and exhausted. Rita had enjoyed the transition to Italy in the summer, and the only thing that preserved him from being an exceedingly jealous husband was the fact that within hours of him arriving, she had sweetly told an Italian submariner that her husband was a German parachutist, a terribly jealous man who was not all right in the head, and would doubtless turn his innards into sausage casings were he to not move his hand. Word had spread quickly.
As they went through the land side of training, Wilhelm was more at home. Even having to learn how to use the ridiculous Mannlicher-Carcano carbine, how to swim with it in a rubberized bag, he was more proficient than most of these sailors. There was a key difference between these men and stereotypical Italians, though: every single one of them knew the risks of being a combat swimmer. The 'pigs' had a loss rate that even parachutists shied from.
It was two months into the three-month program before they were introduced to the Maiale. This was the reason they were called 'pigs,' and the torpedo that was the backbone of the Italian combat swimmer corps. The introductory lecture was by a colonel with the typically impressive, bristly Italian moustache. He exuded easy confidence, and was surprisingly not pompous despite his fearsome reputation. His name was Teseo Tesei, and he had been the first man ashore at Malta. Wilhelm had never been technically inclined, and paid less attention to the lecture than to Tesei.
He was unimpressed by Tesei physically; the man was certainly not Jack Fitzgerald. That said, neither was Wilhelm himself, and he knew there were probably still men in Germany who told stories of the week at Reims when they were out drinking. He remembered none of it, but from what Bechtel and Fitzgerald had said, that was for the best. Tesei had taken his Maiale into the heart of Valetta and blown the outer harbor defenses, then had held on around their beached submarines despite all odds for two hours while the Folgore and Alpini had come in. It was said that Tesei had been more dead than alive after that; Wilhelm certainly knew how he felt.
Wilhlem occupied a peculiar place in the Livorno hierarchy, as a foreign officer, a qualified Luftwaffe General Staffer, a parachutist, and a man decorated twice by the Kaiser himself, and found himself and his family invited to attend functions that other trainees did not attend. This brought him into contact with Prince Borghese, the commander of the field component of Tesei's combat-swimmer brigade. Borghese was a pompous ass, as far as Wilhelm was concerned; he was peacock-conscious of every single one of his medals, and used the fact that his submarine had been shot out from under him by Cunningham's airplanes as proof of his valor. To Wilhelm's mind, the loss of a vessel that could easily escape from aerial attack, and the total loss of one's command, reeked of incompetence. Against that, though, he had apparently led a scratch battalion of marines to secure the vital Nile crossing which had let Italian troops into the Nile Delta just days ahead of Kluge's advance. Kluge had given him the Iron Cross for that, and he spoke fluent German, so as often as not, it was Borghese who was Wilhelm's dinner partner. He was intensely taxing.
Less so was the commander of the flotilla's first squadron, Luigi Durand de la Penne. He was a boyish-looking man with curly-wavy hair and a touch with handling his sailors that Wilhelm frankly envied. They joked with him, treated him as one of them, and if he ordered it, they would do anything he could imagine. He butted heads with Borghese at practically every opportunity. At dinner one Friday, the situation became so difficult that Borghese, chalk-white with anger, had stood and angrily challenged Durand de la Penne to a duel. Tesei had been forced to step in as their commander and smooth the waters; even so, Borghese had sulkily begged to be excused. Tesei had watched him go and sighed, shrugging at Volkmann. "This sort of nonsense happens every few months with him," he explained. "The Prince thinks that men are like ships, that you can simply drive them and drive them until a part breaks, then replace the part. Commander Durand, though..." Tesei had coughed in apparent embarrassment before continuing, seeing the commander blush deeply as he continued. "Do you know why they follow him like that? They know he'd sooner die than let one of them die. You've heard about Borghese's submarine, I'm sure?"
"Sir, I'm sure that Capitano Volkmann does not wish to hear our old war stories," Durand protested, and was waved aside. Tesei continued amiably, "We were both aboard. This was at Taranto, you understand. Borghese's boat was the mothership for most of our Maiale operations. We were loaded aboard, and to his credit, Borghese even got the boat underway after the Royal Navy appeared. Underway, and out into the main channel... into a Swordfish torpedo." His face tightened at the memory. "Broke the boat in half. Both halves went down separately, and Borghese was thrown clear, made it to shore in the general wreck. So young Durand there is in the stern section with the rebreathers, and gets his squad free... then goes forward with three men to try to rescue the crewmen." Durand looked away, face gloomy, as Tesei reached his conclusion. "He got all of them out but one."
"Two of them died before we reached shore, sir." Tesei waved away the objection. "They died in sunlight, and that was better than they had a right to expect at that point." Tesei leaned forward on his elbows, nodding in thanks as a sailor began to clear the dishes. "So that's where this duel nonsense comes from. Borghese lost his boat, and such of the crew that lived owe it to Durand. Wasn't even Borghese's fault, he was unconscious. That's part of the reason he's so... tense. He thinks everyone blames him for the
Iride."
Volkmann nodded, bone-tired and only half-following the story. "Thank you for the explanation, sir," he managed, determined to stay awake through the remainder of the dinner. As coffee and dessert followed, he proved incapable of that much, finally dozing in his chair. Tesei and Durand finished without him, Tesei smiling indulgently at the exhausted German trainee. "Get the boy home, Durand," he murmured, quietly enough to keep from waking Volkmann, and Durand nodded in acknowledgement.
When Wilhelm awoke in his own bed the next day, he groaned at the knowledge that he had passed out at dinner, and emerged to find Rita in the apartment's tiny kitchen, radiant with glee. "Well, look who slept in!" she laughed, throwing herself at him with a kiss. "Come see, this came this morning." She handed him a note and pulled him over to where a brass and wood contraption dominated their countertop.
Dear Hauptmann Volkmann,
It is somewhat unorthodox to sleep at meals, especially as a guest. In the interests of international friendship, I have taken the liberty of delivering you this gift. It is the same model which better-appointed ships' captains use, so I trust it can produce something sufficiently strong to keep you awake.
T. TESEI
"What is it?" he asked sleepily. "An espresso machine," she answered in delight, passing him a tiny cup filled with black-as-night coffee. "I suspect it's worth more than our car."
but the death of the son of the Kaiser has led to a lot of trouble, as a lot of men still struggle to get over it. Anyways can't look forward to the battle with the USSR...hopefully the Germans will now be able to capture Moscow and install a nice and shiny Grand Duke of Muscovy or something like that...split the whole nation up...
