[InvisibleDeath]

I was in my 2nd patrol after being reassigned to Perth Australia and my 13th outing overall for the duration of the war. I was to go from Australia to the China Sea and attack all shipping in Philippines. My path took me through numbers passages between Japanese controlled islands that had a great deal of shipping going on.

I had hit a few fishing boats, mostly taking them down with anti aircraft guns, and a large tanker trying to do it alone hoping that speed would be its saviour. After some quiet my sonar man reported that there was a warship closing. We began maneuvers to avoid the shop when we began to pick up a register of two escorts and a single ship between them. We immediately changed direction as this was the typical configuration for troop carriers.

With disappointment we discovered that this was a large convoy but since we were in position we decided to just get into position and take out as many ships as possible.

Instead of our normal strategy to come up into the middle of the convoy, we decided we needed to stay off as it would be too risky to get into position being so close. We quickly aimed and fired at 4 of the ships, dove deep and headed in a direction that would get us away from the torpedo trails. We heard several impact sounds and soon we heard one of them going down. But the escorts did not seem to be reacting so we made a sharp turn back into the convoy.

We ended up 'here' and the escorts ended up 'way over there' so we pushed our speed a bit and came up for a look-around. The view of the convoy was total chaos making it hard to make sense of it all. I called out my reading and had my 2nd mark the ships and headings on the attack map. I was right, it was total chaos.

Best yet, the last destroyer not searching for me in the wrong place was on the far side of the merchants. So I looked for what appeared to be a few lame ducks and finished off my torpedoes on two near ships. Then we dove and took a sharp turn to face our backside to the ships. Coming up once again I saw one ship off in the distance within our running range so we popped off two torpedoes; one against the backside of the ship and the other that was a nice side shot. I watched as we had a mixed results of hits and misses or duds.

It took a while after that as we once again avoided destroyer detection we popped up to see several ships on fire, one was about 2/3 on it's side, and still chaos. It was this time up that the observer reported the ship running away from us was a small personnel carrier. All of my front torpedoes were gone except one but a fairly full complement of rear torpedoes were there. We dove and dove deep to 250 feet. Once there, with no destroyers nearby we took a risk and drove the boat up to standard speed. We pushed ourself away from the convoy to gain distance between us then pushed up harder to get up to a shooting distance.

It took us what seemed like a horribly long time. It felt like the sweat on my face had tripled in volume. The nice part is that while we were driving to get into position the remaining merchants we hit were finally down. By the time we were in position we had an escort on either end of the ship and in good position for a side shot. We did not bother to save shots as we unloaded three torpedoes from bow to stern. After which we dove deep and ran. We ran hard.

It only took two hits to bring down the troop carrier but the third one did become a nice coup de gras. As we moved away without detection then we were able to create distance so that we could move away without even a single can dropped near us. But with our current ammo position it was obvious we had to get back to the nearest port to refit. But first we surfaced and the cook made a fantastic steak dinner! I went into my cabin and broke out a bottle of wine for the crew. We didn't have much to drink but we did have a celebration.