00-01.The Heart Mender - Andy Andrews

The Heart Mender 15Pausing for a moment, I sat back and stared at thebadge/pin/medal/whatever on my desk. I had literally scannedthe pictures of more than one hundred German decorationsand military awards, but hadn’t come close to anythingresembling this impressive piece of masculine jewelry. Pickingit up, I placed the silver badge on the gray background of mylaptop. Then, I saw something that, unbelievably, had escapedmy attention. On the left side of the pin, from the anchor’sflange at the bottom to its cross bar at the top, rested a largeU. Matching it on the right side was a B of equal dimension.Both letters appeared as mere decorative support, so I reassuredmyself I wasn’t a total idiot for having overlookedthem. But now that I did see them, it was as if I could seenothing else—like the optical puzzles that, when you finallysee the picture, you wonder how you could have ever missedit in the first place.U B . . . I wondered. My eyes narrowed. U-boat?Immediately I typed in Kriegsmarine U-boat silver anchorbadge and got the hit that led me to a picture of the badge inmy possession. Subsequent searches using several differentsearch engines finally gave me a fairly complete backgroundon the medal.Interestingly, it was commissioned by the German governmentin 1910 and worn at that time by officers in the submarinecorps. For some reason, the Nazi regime chose not toinclude the medal in its official notices of recognition. Thus, Ifound that this particular design was worn by several U-boatofficers during World War II as a deniable way of protestingHitler and his policies. These officers, who either inherited thebadge from a relative or had a copy made by a jeweler, consideredthemselves Germans, not Nazis—a curious butapparently not uncommon distinction.