This is not about a full patrol, but part of one as I've yet been unable to finish my lifeguard mission.
My career's 7th war patrol, and my 2nd patrol in the Gar class USS Grayling (SS-209) didn't start off interestingly as I departed on July 10th '42 for a lifeguard mission in the Solomon Islands. I was told to arrive there by December 8th which is absurd. I arrived to the scene on July 14th and saw no planes or survivors for 5 days, taking my frustration on the occasional fishing boats that passed by with my deck gun.
As the days passed by and COMSUBPAC kept telling me to stick with my mission and no change in sight, I said to myself "Screw it!" and set my course towards Truk.
I arrived safely at Truk late at evening of July 24th and my radar showed up almost a dozen seemingly stationary contacts. They didn't seem to be in any kind of formation, but I assumed at least a couple of them might be destroyers so I went to periscope depth and approached, only to find tankers and merchants on a silver platter with no warship in sight. Most of them had deck guns so I took it safe and sent the biggest tankers to the bottom with my torpedoes. There were so many ships that I didn't bother with anything lighter than 4,000 tons.
I spent the night and morning moving from ship to ship, racking up about 30,000 tons. As I was lurking towards my next big targets west of Fefan island and the day was becoming bright, the weather got absolutely horrid with almost zero visibility. I thought, since the visibility is so bad, it will be safe to surface since my CO2 levels were getting high.
As I got to the surface, as expected, I got radar reports of the merchants and tankers I had not torpedoed yet. But suddenly I got nine unexpected radar contacts off to NNW of my location. The ships seemed to be in a formation of two rows or lines, unlike the merchants I had detected until now, so I assumed they must be warships.
Change of plans: I marked the radar contacts on my map and back to periscope depth we go. My fore torpedoes were running low, only 4 left thanks to some duds earlier against the tankers. I still had 6 torpedoes aft. I decided to pick the closest warship as my target and then flee the scene as soon as I've fired off my fore torpedoes. I would save my aft torpedoes for any pursuers or some extra tankers on the way out of Truk. Thanks to the horrible weather, I managed to approach the formation safely without being detected. But as we all know, bad weather works both ways. I didn't want to waste my last four fore torpedoes without knowing the identity of my target, so I had to get close to confirm it. I kept creeping closer and closer squinting my eyes in the periscope, at 1 knot speed scraping the bottom because the other nearest warships were no further than 900 yards away from me. I was getting really nervous as I was less than 150 yards from my mark and still saw nothing, until suddenly...
A Shoukaku class fleet carrier. I hurried to reverse at 1/3 and waited until I was at 700 yards, constantly listening if anyone had noticed me. I launched my last four fore torpedoes in a spread at the carrier I could no longer see and waited. Four impacts. She's going down.
I hurried away as fast as I dared with the storm muffling my prop sounds and nobody seemed to follow me.
I returned back to the three tankers west of Fefan and while I was using my last aft torpedoes on them, it seems the Japs had finally got reinforcements after my over 12 hour raid on Truk. I had four warship sound contacts in different directions, closing fast and that meant it's time to end my raid. I had planned to leave one or two aft torpedoes in case I get found and pursued but the greed got the better of me as I had to use 3 torpedoes on a Nippon Maru tanker who just refused to sink. Luckily I managed to get away from the arriving escorts just barely before they came to check out the vicinity of the sinking tankers, thanks to the storm. In my hurried escape I went too close to the shore and scraped the bottom damaging my aft batteries, but luckily I got away with it.
By 15:00 the storm cleared just as I got into deeper waters. I used up all of my torpedoes, but my 17 hour raid on Truk got me tonnage just short of 87,000.
I may or may not have failed to save some shot down pilots of ours during my patrol's beginning phase, but I think sinking a fleet carrier will more than pay back for that loss in terms of lives saved
