After patrolling the Solomon Islands and finding nothing but Sampans and Junks, I decided to spend my last fuel travelling to the port of Lae. When I entered the bay it was storming outside. Winds blazing, downpoor and mist, I couldn't see anything. The only thing I could see were the the fainth lights of the two lighthouses.
I kept closing at 1/3, anxiously looking for ships docked for the storm. As it probably was my last action before returning to port, I got hasty and messed up bigtime. I didn't check my map or I would have seen I was no 200 meters away from the harbor. Out of nowhere 2 big fat merchants popped out of the mist and instantly started firing into my sub. I backed up full and dove to periscope dept, but not before sustaining major damage.
Remembering at which docks the merchants were tied up, I fired 2 torpedoes at each dock using only the map as I couldn't see anything. I hit the left one but couldn't hit the right. So I made a second, rather stupid, move and surfaced the boat. Using the map I could quite accurately figger out at what position and range the remaining ship would be, and started blasting away with the deck gun. I hit her a dozen times before more bad luck.
Out of nowhere, literally in one second, the weahter changed. It stopped raining and visibility became normal. Now the last ship is firing back at me as I have my boat in a 90 degrees angle towards here, a perfect target. Flank speed down again, now I can finally get a good look and sink her with 2 more torpedoes.
After that I had enough and went back to port with about 80% hull damage. The fleet commander wasn't to happy with these results, probably because I just got the sub brandnew of the warf.
He proposed I get an honorary discharge and put an end to my carreer and save us all a lot of trouble.
I had to decline, so he trasferred me to Pearl Harbor. Out of the Asiatic Fleet, I am now somebody elses problem.
