About EITHER WAY DEAD
Espionage Sabotage
Did the German High Command know that Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff were
aboard the Queen Mary in August '43?
Had there been a security leak at the highest level?
Had Philby told the Russians?
Was Leutnant Schultz going to his death?
Leutnant Schultz of the Kriegsmarine was a brave man.
If he succeeded in his mission he would be his own executioner.
If he failed the hangman's noose awaited!
Either way he would be dead.
This is his story.
The embryo for Operation Königin was not dreamt up by admirals surrounded by staff officers in some beautifully panelled room of an occupied French Chateau. Instead it began in a glorified whore-house, in Lorient, in a smoke filled room stinking of spilt beer, over-perfumed women and the body odour of men who knew that their lives could be very short. One of those men, the captain of a U-boat, made a drunken remark about 'Putting one up the Queen'which grew to become a ribald cartoon on the notice board in naval Headquarters in Berlin. There it caught the eye of an admiral who detailed a commander to find out what was behind it.
EITHER WAY DEAD is the chronicle of the conception, gestation and final birth, in the distant unforgiving cold waters off Iceland, of Operation Königin. Had it succeeded it would have totally devastated the allied cause. That it did not was in no way due to bad planning or the lack of physical courage by Leutnant Schuiltz.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
In the services during a war rumours abound, some have substance others are pure fiction and depend on how disgruntled the perpetrator was at the time as to how good the story. In 1943 a rumour with substance was rife in the Royal and Merchant Navies that the giant troopship Queen Mary had collided with and sunk her anti-aircraft escort cruiser HMS Curacoa.
A year later another rumour was circulating in the merchant navy that once again involved the Cunard trooper. This time it implied that there had been an attempt to sabotage her. When this reached the ears of Naval Intelligence it was quickly nipped in the bud by a counter rumour, deliberately spread, that the incident was no more than that one of the ships radio officers had been unable to take the strain of war any longer and had run amok while on duty.
At the time of the incident, August 6th 1943, Churchill, together with the Chiefs of Staff and their retinues, one hundred and fifty persons in all, had been aboard on their way to the first Quebec conference. Naturally MI5 had been thrown into a panic that such a thing could have happened for they assumed that the Prime Minister and Chiefs of Staff were the object of the attack. What made things worse was that despite, at that time, reading the German codes and thus being able to keep tabs on current spies, they knew nothing about the agent concerned. Had there been a security leak and if so from where? They hunted for an answer and found none.
After the cessation of hostilities the Curacoa collision was admitted and human error given as the cause. The incident with the radio officer was forgotten by all except the Intelligence service. When in 1963 Kim Philby, who had been recruited as a spy in 1935 by the Russians, fled to Moscow someone in MI5 remembered the incident on the ship and the fact that the Prime Minister had been aboard. Since Philby had been well up in the hierarchy of MI6 at the time (to the point of being touted as a possible future head) had he been the leak and the Germans, through their own agents in Moscow, made Churchill and his staff the real target? MI5 blew the dust off their files but were still unable to come to a definite conclusion.
The story which follows is based on a manuscript written by my father and on a chance meeting with a certain Kapitän zur Zee Weiner. In order to make the narrative flow more easily it has been necessary, in places, to use my imagination based on the very frank admissions made to my father by the agent concerned. Together with much research I hope I have been able to pen a readable story.
Michael Brent
Author