When Berta Doff met Ben Cohn, in 1936, she was twenty-one years old, tall and confident, with the diction of an elocution instructor, which in fact she was. Having attended college in Boston, she also worked as the host of radio programs, in New Haven, Connecticut, where she had grown up. On one program, she asked people questions about the news, and if they answered correctly they won a hat. Ben was running a Loews movie theatre in New Haven. They became friends, then dated briefly, but soon Ben accepted an offer to manage a Loews theatre in Calcutta, India. Berta found other lively radio and theatre people to spend time with. Still, she and Ben corresponded. “Stop playing strip poker,” he wrote in 1938, in response to a letter about her recent exploits. “Come to India and marry me.” She answered with a telegram: “Please elucidate.”

The couple married in Calcutta and held a large reception at the theatre there, at which Berta wore a borrowed gown and met most of Ben’s colleagues for the first time. In the era of Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Greta Garbo, Ben screened movies for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the Hollywood studio owned by Loews, and the couple hosted parties and dined with other British and American expatriates. Three years later, Ben was offered another position with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Durban, South Africa, managing a theatre and weighing in on which of M-G-M’s recent releases would play well overseas.

The couple returned briefly to the United States to see their families, and then, on May 6, 1941, set out from New York harbor on the Robin Moor, a three-hundred-and-ninety-foot commercial freighter, which had crossed the seas for over twenty years. Americans had fewer options for travel due to the escalation of war between Germany and Britain, and Berta and Ben were grateful to have secured one of the five cabins available to passengers. The ship carried a heavy cargo of canned goods, steel rails, radio-receiving sets, ladies’ hosiery, and bags of mail. Automobile crates labelled Studebaker and Dodge, which didn’t fit in the hold, were packed on the deck. Berta noted with confidence the American flags and “U.S.A.” in freshly painted letters on the side of the ship; as Germany was targeting British ships in an effort to cut off supplies to the island, American steamers took pains to underscore their official neutrality.

Berta and Ben anticipated a journey of almost a month, and they settled into a routine of reading, writing, and playing cards. Two weeks into the trip, they ate dinner in the ship’s saloon, then played poker with other passengers until two in the morning, pleased with their twenty-dollar winnings. They had slept for only a few hours when, at 5 A.M. on May 21st, they were awakened by loud knocking. It was the ship’s wireless operator, who ordered them to get up and to dress. There was a German submarine alongside the ship, he said, and the Robin Moor had been ordered to stop.

Berta heard hushed voices and running feet outside the door, and the gentle lapping of waves against the side of the ship. For a moment, she and Ben stood beside their bunks, too stunned to do anything. Ben said that he was sorry for getting her into this mess; she told him it was pointless to feel that way. She pulled on a pair of pants and two sweaters over her pajamas, wondering if perhaps the Germans simply wanted food or supplies. After all, she reasoned, the United States had not yet entered the war.

At that moment, the first mate of the Robin Moor, Melvin Mundy, was out on the open water in a lifeboat. Mundy, who grew up in South Carolina, was a seasoned mariner. He had been on watch that morning when blinking lights flashed the code letters “C.S.,” meaning, “What is the name of your vessel?”

Mundy responded with the four-letter code of the S.S. Robin Moor: KJJU.

The lights that signalled back indicated that the vessel was pursuing the ship, and instructed the Robin Moor not to use its wireless, and to send a boat out.

Together with several other members of the crew, Mundy rowed toward the submarine in semi-darkness. He was no stranger to belligerence. At age seventeen, he had falsified a birth certificate so he could join the military and, after the Great War ended, had entered the Merchant Marines as a cabin boy and worked his way up through the ranks. He kept a trunkful of books on seafaring and, during brief visits home to Pennsylvania, where his family lived, he sat on the porch and taught his children to navigate by the stars. By the time war broke out again in Europe, he was commanding a cargo ship called the S.S. Black Osprey, which made regular trips across the Atlantic; in 1939, it had been detained by the British, who held the ship and its crew off the coast of Dover. For several weeks they had come under German fire, until the British finally released them.

Mundy could see that the submarine before him was roughly two hundred and twenty feet long, with guns mounted on the conning tower and a painted image of a laughing cow, in red. The commander, in a brown coat and tweed pants, called out to Mundy in accented English, demanding to see the Robin Moor’s papers. When Mundy said he hadn’t brought them, the commander became upset. He asked after the ship’s cargo. Mundy answered that he was carrying general merchandise for South African ports. The commander had noticed heavy machinery on board the American ship; Mundy explained that this was simply automobile parts that did not fit in the hold.

The commander ordered Mundy to board the submarine. Somehow, as the lifeboat rocked in the rough water and Mundy climbed up from it, the U-boat shifted and crushed his ankle; jagged bone protruded through the skin. And yet he proceeded onto the vessel, apparently without delay.

The submarine commander, whose name was Jost Metzler, had been instructed not to destroy American ships; even as tensions flared over American aid to the British, Hitler wanted to avoid provoking the United States into entering into the war. Still, U-boat commanders placed a premium on sinking as many tons of shipping as possible, since their supervisors kept detailed statistics and rewarded high performers, and sometimes these incentives trumped explicit orders. Metzler, who was on his third patrol with the submarine, U-69, and had already sunk more than twenty-seven thousand tons of British shipping since the start of the year, regarded auto parts and engines as contraband. He told Mundy that the American ship carried supplies for Germany’s enemy, and that therefore he had to sink it.

If Mundy was surprised, he did not say so. He asked how long the Robin Moor had. The commander said twenty minutes. Mundy asked for more time, arguing that the ship carried eight passengers, including a small child. Metzler refused. Mundy emphasized that there were women aboard as well as an elderly couple. Metzler said that he would perhaps give them thirty minutes, but warned that, if they tried to send an SOS, he would sink them immediately.