Q: Did you leave the straits after that?
Actually, you would think that would be logical, but that would mean going back to where we had just been detected and where we knew the convoy and its escorts headed. I decided to instead go all the way through Soroysund and exit on the west side. This proved to be a good decision, because around 6:30 the next morning, we ran into an unescorted merchant vessel flying the German flag, silhouetted cleanly against the cliffs on the island of Stjernoya.
This time our position was perfect and I fired just two torpedoes at his port side. The first missed, but the second struck dead center. The ship - which I estimated to be about 4.5 thousand tons - blew up in a series of large explosions, which I figured were caused by ammunition it was carrying on board. Once again, it was satisfying to take out a target of such military value, knowing that we were helping our soldiers fighting on the front near Murmansk.
We then stayed submerged; we did run into another convoy entering Soroysund from the west late that afternoon, but were not in a good position to attack it. So we kept moving away. On our way out, we also observed a pair of German mine warfare ships passing by and heading out to do their business off the islands of Soroya and Stjernoya, which I took as a response to our sinkings here. I think it was quite obvious to the Germans by then that this was not a safe shipping lane and they needed to do something.
Q: But you were gone by the time they could react?
Not quite. We headed north into open waters right away, but the next day, the 31st of August, planes came after us. We had a close call with a large German seaplane some 200km off the coast. After that, weather started deteriorating a bit, and we headed towards the coast further to the south of our previous patrol area. We spent the evening of the 1st of September dodging a small patrol ship, and in the early hours of September 2nd we saw a transport.
Q: Another German sunk, then?
Norwegian. He might have seen us, or just been alerted as he was making frequent zig-zags, but nevertheless we managed to get into a firing position. Unfortunately, from here things did not go our way. We fired two torpedoes at it in our initial attack; one missed, the other ran under the hull of this fairly small ship without hitting it. At this point we had only 1 torpedo left in the forward and 1 in the aft tubes. I ordered depth settings adjusted and tried again before the Norwegian got away, but with the same result - one missed, one ran too deep.
Cursing the weather - which prevented us from surfacing and using guns to dispatch the ship - I was still not willing to give it up. We crept behind the ship and surfaced once he got far enough; and until 7 in the morning, as the sun kept rising, we followed at 9-10km distance in his wake, hoping the weather would eventually make it possible for us to gun him down.
To be continued...