Quick Silver

I remember when the thermometer broke when I was a kid. There was a thin column of quicksilver, mercury, which transformed into several astonishing spheres on the counter. It was magical stuff. Pure mercury is a liquid metal, an element all its own, linked to the Messenger God of classical times. Swift as thought, and regal in aspect.

I don’t think I got in trouble about the breakage, or maybe the maternal scowl was clouded by the wonder of the rolling silver. I poked at the spheres, and they rolled effortlessly together, absorbing the little satellites into a single sphere of pure cold beauty.

I wanted to keep the mercury so I could play with it later. I do not recall what happened to it, and I feel generally all right, so I have to assume it probably went into the trash, which is what happened when mercury was as valuable as gold, and not considered a toxic and deadly menace.

I recall when that happened, too. A documentary they showed about a Japanese village that subsisted on seafood, which had internalized the metal up through the food chain, small fish to larger ones, and finally into the nets and onto the dinner table.

The food chain ends with humans, or at least that is the way we like to think of it. In its most concentrated form, quicksilver causes a failure of the nervous system and strange wasting sickness. It was an unsettling documentary, and it conveyed the panic that went along with not knowing what it was in the natural world that was killing them.

Mercury is a naturally occurring element is found in air, water and soil. It exists in several forms: elemental or metallic mercury, inorganic mercury compounds, and organic mercury compounds. Pure mercury volatizes readily, a property that made it useful for thermometers, switches, and some light bulbs.

Mercury is found in many rocks, including coal. The Germans were rich in the coal deposits of the Saar River valley. Toward the end of the Third Reich, they even ran their Mercedes cars with crude but effective coal power. In the processing, they recovered tons of pure mercury.

They say that the only thing more expensive than waging a war is losing one.

The tightening ring around Europe made basic materials expensive indeed for the Germans. An industrial machine like Hitler’s Reich needed a lot of pure strategic materials. Diamonds were acquired from a variety of sources for precision grinding machines. Pure gold was needed for unique heat-transference properties in electronic and aerospace applications. Platinum was needed for missile components to rain down on England . And mercury, of course, was needed for switches and light bulbs and thermostats.

Whether the Fuhrer would acknowledge it or not, the party bureaucrats began to take inventory and see what could be done, what things of value might be salvaged for a new start with the as-yet unvanquished Japanese in the Far East, or perhaps in South America, where it appeared a good German could get a new start.

In order to do so, escape by submarine seemed like the best bet. A Type IXD2 unterseeboot was available from the 33 rd Flotilla, the U-864. It was a sleek boat, quicksilver under the waves, built in 1943 at the Weser AG yard at Bremen on the cold Baltic Sea .

U-864 had only one commander, Korevettan-Kaptain Ralf-Reimar Wolfram. He was a dashing officer, though his time had been spend mostly in training assignments. As the last Christmas of Nazi Germany passed, the decision was made to load precious cargo on board his boat, and dispatch it to Japan as a reserve for the rainy day that seemed inevitable.

Wolfram’s sleek warship was loaded with VIP passengers, and one of the most valuable commodities left in the Reich’s vaults- nearly seventy tons of pure glittering mercury.

The mercury was contained into large waterproof flasks and stowed in the neutral buoyancy area between the outer hydrodynamic hull and the tubular inner pressure hull. Even with a normal combat complement of 54 officers and men onboard, the U-boat was cramped. In these extraordinary times, 73 souls were packed in as the submarine got underway at the end of January, 1945.

The voyage was perilous. Wolfram set a course to pick his way out of the Baltic. U-864 snuck through the shallow Skagerrak and Kattegat straits south of Denmark , and out into the North Sea , ever mindful of Allied radar and patrol boats. He stayed on the periscope constantly to watch for hazard. His guests were packed into the compartments and the men and the provisions stacked on the decks began to smell.

Once in the open sea, Wolfram began to creep north, along the Norwegian coast. It was a desperate run. U-864 would have to proceed far enough north to escape the eyes of land-based aviation, cross the Atlantic north of Iceland , and head south for the tip of South America . His boat relied on the schnorkel tube to get oxygen for the diesel engines and stay below the waves. It was winter, and the ice-pack meant he could not go north. The shorter passage under the Pole would not be possible until the advent of nuclear power.

Submerged, he might make six knots speed of advance. Once clear of the sea lanes and the watchful eyes of the Allies, he could surface and make seventeen. It was still a long trip, and would require help from the Japanese when he got to the Pacific.

Wolfram and the U-864 never needed it. This was Wolfram’s first combat deployment, and his use of the periscope proved to be his undoing.

Lieutenant James Launders, commander of His Majesty’s submarine Venturer , ended the desperate dash for Japan . He had taken up station on the approaches to the port of Bergen . He stood in the control room of a state-of-the-art submarine, the first of fourteen “V” Class submarines built between 1943 and 1944. He was an accomplished and seasoned commander, having killed the U-771 the previous year.

This day he was using the new acoustic Anti-Submarine Detection gear that the Americans knew as Sonar. Launders used it in passive mode, which meant there was no tell-tale ping to alert the German radiomen.

He obtained bearing information from the ASDIC, and came to periscope depth to see if he could localize the target. In the de-briefing of the action, he was contemptuous of Wolfram’s skills, saying he got localization data from “the most shameful periscope drill on the U Boats part.”

Concluding the U-boat was crossing his bow, he directed the firing of a spread of four MK VIII torpedoes from a range of 3,000 yards. The small propellers whirled and Launders watched the second hand on his watch to time the arrival of the weapons. U-864 took one of them amidships, a direct hit.

Breaking-up noises were detected by ASDIC as the cold water breached the pressure hull and roared through the compartments, cutting lights and sweeping the sailors and guests into bulkheads with the blunt and unrelenting force.

This was the first time a submarine had killed another while both were submerged, and presaged the cat and mouse games of the Cold War that would follow. All seventy-three souls on board U-864 were drowned, if they were not lucky enough to be killed outright.

There the matter lay, in the dark chill depths, as the humans ashore ended the war and embarked on another, longer one. But the mercury still glitters in the flasks in the broken hull. Perhaps seventy tons of it.

Some of the flasks were breached in the sinking, and others began the long process of disintegration. Once in the water, microorganisms change the quicksilver into methyl mercury, a highly toxic form that builds up in fish, shellfish and animals.

In the 1970s the Norwegians began to notice high levels of methyl mercury in fish and shellfish caught in the area. Methyl mercury builds up more in some types of fish and shellfish than others, depending on what they eat, how long they live and how high they are in the food chain. They went to the old records and realized with horror what was happening below the waves.

The wreck of U-864 was discovered by the Norwegian research ship Tyr in the spring of 2003, exactly where Lt. Launders and the Venturer left her, near the island Fedje and the north inlet to the Bergen channel. It is resting and rusting in two large pieces at a depth of over 400 feet.

The experts agree that it must be raised, regardless of tradition that holds that sunken warships are military cemeteries, and remain the property of the nation that lost them, wherever they are. This is a matter of the public health, and is thus exempt from sentiment. The cost of lifting the boat and removing contaminated bottom silt is going to cost around fifty million euros.

According to Norwegian sources, there are high levels of quicksilver in the silt as far as 300 meters from the wreck.

U-864 is one of those gifts that keep on giving.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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