Chapter 40: British Confidentiality

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  Please go ahead and provide the text you'd like me to translate. I'll return the translation in English.

  After a while, the angry voice finally disappeared from his ears. Zhang Hainuo calmly took down a stack of blank letter paper from the shelf on the desk. Since the submarine entered the Atlantic Ocean, he would take out some time every day to write letters to Anna, sometimes writing several pages, and sometimes just writing a few sentences. He planned to wait until the submarine returned to port before sending all the letters together.

  But just as Zhang Hainuo was about to make his move, footsteps were heard coming from the corridor. He had previously agreed with Blatz that he would take the British man up to the deck, throw a life ring into the sea, and then let him choose whether to jump or not. If the British man jumped, they would fish him out after a while; if he didn't jump, it meant the British man was a coward, and they could just bring him back.

  Looking at the British officer who didn't have a single drop of water on him, Zhang Hainuo intentionally asked in a sarcastic tone: "Lieutenant, sir, have you decided to answer my questions?"

  The British lifted their eyelids, and their eyes were filled with sorrow.

  "Captain, your behavior is really disappointing!"

  "Disappointed?" Zhang Haino's face suddenly turned gloomy, he gave Bratz a look, the burly man was about to take action, but heard the British man say with an extremely quick reaction:

  " Lieutenant-Commander C. W. V. T. S. Lepper, Royal Navy, HMS Salmon (one of the R-class destroyers built for the UK during WW2)"

  "Drink a toast or be punished with a fine!" Zhang Hainuo muttered disdainfully, while quickly recording the situation described by the British in his notebook.

  "Battleship number!"

  After a moment's hesitation, the British officer called out a number: "F.36!"

  Zhang Haino's meticulous observation was revealed at this time, but he was not very sure whether the British were intentionally reporting a wrong number to mislead the German Navy, or if he simply did not know the corresponding number of that destroyer. If it was the former, it would be easy to understand; if it was the latter, Zhang Haino thought, this guy might be hiding secrets that he didn't want the Germans to know.

  To clarify the truth of the matter, he tore a white paper from his notebook, wrote "Salmon F. 36" in large letters, then added two lines of small print below it, and handed the paper to Bratsch.

  "Let Storm follow the instructions on the note!"

  Out of the corner of his eye, Zhang Hainuo found that the British were very concerned about this move.

  "Don't worry, Mr. Turner!" After Bratz walked away, Zhang Hainuo told the British officer: "I just let my communications officer send a telegram back to base to verify whether the ship name and hull number you said are true or not. If there is no problem, our conversation will continue; otherwise..."

  The British calmly said: "Don't worry, would I still remember the name and number of the warship I'm on?"

  "That's good!" Zhang Haino nodded, "Mr. Turner, I must remind you that the temperature on the sea surface is only 8.5 degrees now, and by nightfall, the temperature may drop to below 6 degrees, and being in the water can quickly cause hypothermia!"

  The British man appeared nonchalant on the surface, but Zhang Hainuo still saw a hint of surprise in his eyes.

  As the night deepened, to defend against the North Atlantic wind that still carried a few strands of cold air, Zhang Hainuo put on the big coat that was usually worn in winter and tied a white cotton scarf around his neck.

  "Type KB sonar! Type G mine!" Although he had not seen these two things with his own eyes, from the encounter of U171 in the North Sea, he felt that the British new equipment could pose a great threat to German submarines!

  Kerlew didn't think that Zhang Hainuo would go to verify the names and numbers of the ships he mentioned, but what he didn't expect even more was that on Zhang Hainuo's piece of paper, apart from the ship names and numbers, there were also written:

  "Half an hour later came to my room and said: The base called, the ship name, hull number and name don't match!"

  When Storm arrived at the captain's cabin on time and said that sentence, the British man's face turned very ugly. Although he still wanted to quibble about something, Zhang Hainuo quoted his sentence "How could I forget the name and number of my own warship?" which made him speechless instantly.

  Next, Zhang Hainuo proudly boasted that the German intelligence department was so powerful that it could even obtain information on the main officers of these British warships, not to mention their names and numbers.

  "Your former Navy Minister, Winston Churchill, loved cigars and fine wines, and always had a cigar in his mouth every day, and must have a drink before going to bed, right?"

  These words apparently stunned the British, and soon under Zhang Haino's double attack of momentum and language, his psychological defense line finally announced its defeat, and he would reveal everything he knew.

  It turned out that this guy was not named Clay P. Turner, nor was he a staff officer of the Salmon P. Chase, but rather a technical supervisor on a destroyer of the Hound class that had been converted for anti-submarine warfare. The technical supervisor did not have much authority and mainly played an advisory role, but they possessed very important technical information, which was crucial to both sides in combat. In order to conceal his true identity, Lieutenant Turner deliberately fabricated the name of another warship, a seemingly cunning idea that seemed clumsy and foolish to Zhang Hainuo.

  After organizing the information provided by this British officer, Zhang Hainuo asked Strom to send it back to the submarine command in the form of a telegram and strongly requested that they verify it as soon as possible and issue warnings to other German submarines in time.

  "Our Type G depth charge can easily smash a submarine 25 meters deep like smashing a walnut!"

  As soon as he thought of the British description of this mine, Zhang Haino felt a chill on his back. Although this mine couldn't accurately determine the depth yet, its enormous power was beyond doubt. If it wasn't for him ordering to dive down to 35 meters at the beginning of that encounter battle in the North Sea and then deepening to 40 meters later, he might have really become a shattered walnut!

  What about the other German submarines? Zhang Hai thought back to his time at the Kiel Naval Academy, where instructors had said that 15-30 meters was the optimal depth for submarine navigation. He felt extremely worried. Although the situation with the sea hunt in recent months had been very good, Germany's current number of submarines was still not enough to strangle Britain's maritime transport lines. If there were severe losses, the German Navy's submarines would be even more stretched thin!

  43 hours later, U-171 finally returned to the familiar Wilhelmshaven. As soon as the submarine docked, the personnel sent by the Navy Department took away the British technical officer captured on the boat, and they also brought a good news: through analysis and verification of the British government's loss report and internal intelligence, U-171 sank one light cruiser, one cargo ship, and one oil tanker in the North Atlantic, damaging two cargo ships. The Navy registered 27,000 tons of achievements, which is already the second-best record for a single submarine in German naval history.