Q: Did the weather conditions cause you trouble?
Oh, almost immediately! At 5:45 on the evening of the 21st of August, a Junkers jumped us from the sun at close range, and dropped two bombs before we could even react. His attack was accurate and one of the bombs - a small one, luckily - hit the upper deck aft of the conning tower. This immediately caused serious damage and made it impossible for us to dive. Both of the electric motors were knocked out, along with one of the diesels. Soon afterward, chlorine gas could be smelled both fore and aft as a few battery cells cracked.
We were stuck on the surface with limited maneuvering ability, and no ability to fire back. Only 40 minutes later, another Junkers dropped in, but missed. We had to hurry with urgent repairs in pitching seas, and while I was certain that we’d survive, I have to admit for a bit that I thought our patrol was already over and we’d need to head to base. The attack shook me up a bit.
Q: Did it shake up the rest of the crew as well?
For the most part, everyone remained calm - a good crew is a well-drilled crew, and when something goes wrong, training kicks in. Not everybody was as professional as we hoped - senior machinist Maidanov again panicked, and I had to get him to a different station before the politruk had his head. Very disappointed in that guy.
By midnight, we were running on diesels quite reliably, but one of the electric motors was still out of order, the batteries were still leaking small amounts of chlorine, and the air compressor wasn’t working, ruling out any attempts to dive. As night fell, we headed north to get out of range of the dive-bombers.
Not all was bad, of course - an update on the radio from fleet reported that the “baby” submarine M-172 broke through to the enemy anchorage at Petsamo and managed to sink a large transport there. That lifted spirits a bit!
By morning, most repairs were complete, save for one electric motor still out of order and uncertainty over hull integrity. For the next day, we were stuck well off shore trying to repair these, while maintaining radio silence to prevent the enemy from finding us. Eventually all repairs were made successfully, but the question of whether we could dive or not still remained. We could try out here in the deep water, but if there was some damage we failed to spot or an undetected hull breach, we risked diving out of control and never coming back.
So our options were either to return to base, scrapping the patrol; or to go to shallow waters near the coast where we could do a test dive, but risked being bombed again. We decided to go to the coast, and returned there by afternoon on the 23rd of August. In about 30m of water, we very carefully submerged, and with a bit of work, got the boat in trim and under control.
That was a relief. From here, we proceeded slowly underwater towards the island of Vanna, hoping to sneak into the fjords by darkness. However, as night fell, weather worsened and we turned back around, heading back to open sea and radioing our situation back to base.
To be continued...