What Did They Do In Real Life?

[Fish40]

This is something that has me thinking everytime I come across it in either SH3, or 4. You are given orders to patrol a specific area. What happens (I'm sure this happened in RL as well) if en route to your patrol area, you happen to be in the vicinity of a convoy, or other juicy target? This happens to me constantly, and I always end up useing my torpedoes befor I reach my patrol area.

Did the guys in RL take advantage of this kind of opportunity (I can't see how they could'nt), or did they duck all other targets until they got to their specified patrol zone?

[Torplexed]

If you spot a juicy target before reaching your patrol area, by all means attack. There is no penalty for showing up in your patrol grid with empty tubes. You still get the renown after putting in your 24 hours whether you sink something there or not. In real life the U-Boats were constantly being shifted about by Bdu. They rarely had just one grid to patrol. Boats without torpedoes but with fuel still in the tanks usually ended up weather-reporting or re-fueling other boats. :cool:

[bigboywooly]

No doubt they would have been given orders to shadow and to allow time for a wolfpack - or told to attack

IIRC the only times they avoided anything were when on specific missions so as not to endanger the boat

[Sailor Steve]

You are ordered to patrol a certain area, but the reason is that that area is a known or suspected route for enemy shipping. Your purpose is to sink enemy merchants and starve them into submission. Where you do it is less important than where they end up...at the bottom.

[Subnuts]

I can think of one major exception in real life. At the beginning of Operation Drumbeat, the first five IXs sent to the United States were ordered to avoid sinking any Allied ship they came across under 10,000 tons (I think), to make their arrival more of a surprise.

[Fish40]

Thanks for the input fellas. Makes my decision makeing that much easier;)