gilbertf
02-17-06, 01:38 AM
That's my eighth patrol and I barely escaped alive.
Using RuB + Not your grandma's stuff. Well, full set of mods as advised by the Avon Lady.
I was en route to some far away coordinates on my fellow U-50 VII-B and on my path, a convoy is reported to me using radio. So I prepare an intercept course and at the middle of it, I go to 25 m deep. Here is it, on my left.
I change heading and get close to convoy. It's night so I am going to use the two first Type-I torpedoes and the two Type-II ones. First target I would like is the T2 Tanker but there are too many ships between me and that almost 8000 tons tanker. So I select two large cargos and set torpedoes to 13 meters. Sea is calm and I'm running at 3 knots, silently.
I first the two T1 and the two T2 then go down at 60 meters, still slowly.
The two T1 hit the large cargo and she goes down ! Good. The two other torpedoes did miss, probably because there has been too much time between the two spreads and the other ship started zig-zagging.
I start to shadow the convoy : full speed at 110 meters deep while the first four tubes are reloaded. Half a hour later, I come back to periscope depth and start aiming again. I aim a large cargo using 2 Type-II and this time, I keep it slow : one ship at a time. I fire my two fishes and I start to hear bullets around my periscope. The sonarman did probably felt asleep again and I got a destroyer a few meters near me. Trouble..
Crash dive while I lower periscope. The depth charges go around me. One does explode very close to my engines : the starboard engine is dead. Massive flooding in the diesel engine : it's already half full of water. The crash dive is going pretty fast. I organize a repair crew and check damage : electric engines and diesel engines are flooding. Flooding in diesel is pretty bad. Depth is coming fast. This is not looking good.
Depth charges keep going on around me. I see the boat take pretty bad angles and lights go out. Men start to yell around and the compressor has a leak : there is a huge smoke coming from the compressor while water floods in the command center. Depth is over 80 and closing to 100 rapidly. I order full ahead and depth of 80... the depth is still increasing but a bitter slowly.
Coming back to damage, the flooding in diesel is pretty bad. 80 % full of water but the repair crew has almost stopped the flooding in the electric engines I need to avoid crush depth. After 30 seconds of a LOOOOOONG wait the flooding in electric engines is under control. I move the repair team to the diesel compartement and start to pray god.
They need over 8 minutes to stop flooding and the second icon says the compartement will be totally flooded in 3 min. So I stare at the screen and see my depth coming to 86 then 87.. 88.. I wonder how deep I can go before the damage I took makes us all die suddendly.
The repair team is still at work. Slowly, their "stopping flood counter" goes down and the other counter for full flooding goes down. Slowly.. after two minutes it seems the counters have reversed : there is about 30 sec before total flooding of compartement and 1m30 before they can stop it. Depth is now 110 but the boat is still holding. It's doing a lot of pretty bad noises. I wonder if I should hit or not the blow ballast command and die in surface combat.
After another minute, the second counter keeps between 24 and 30 and slowly, the repair team is able to stop the flooding. Depth is now going close to 80 meters and the damage screens says 6 min before flooding recovery.
Then started a 53 min 2 knots north course with destroyers (3 of them) circling me and throwing depth charges. A few get close but I avoid most of them. Battery is down to 50 % and we keep going north.
After over an hour later (almost 2 hours) we are clear of the destroyers. We surface. The starboard engine is dead. I no longer got any noise from the engines, but the left engine is still working. I still have 1300 Km to travel to get to my cruising orders area.
The patrol went on. I sunk a large cargo using my two other T1 torpedoes and did a few small boats using the deck cannon (took ages...).
Went home. It's now february 1941 and I left in December at the beginning of the month. Almost a two month patrol. 11500 tons.
We just went from 1940 to 1941 and they almost nailed me.
:arrgh!:
Using RuB + Not your grandma's stuff. Well, full set of mods as advised by the Avon Lady.
I was en route to some far away coordinates on my fellow U-50 VII-B and on my path, a convoy is reported to me using radio. So I prepare an intercept course and at the middle of it, I go to 25 m deep. Here is it, on my left.
I change heading and get close to convoy. It's night so I am going to use the two first Type-I torpedoes and the two Type-II ones. First target I would like is the T2 Tanker but there are too many ships between me and that almost 8000 tons tanker. So I select two large cargos and set torpedoes to 13 meters. Sea is calm and I'm running at 3 knots, silently.
I first the two T1 and the two T2 then go down at 60 meters, still slowly.
The two T1 hit the large cargo and she goes down ! Good. The two other torpedoes did miss, probably because there has been too much time between the two spreads and the other ship started zig-zagging.
I start to shadow the convoy : full speed at 110 meters deep while the first four tubes are reloaded. Half a hour later, I come back to periscope depth and start aiming again. I aim a large cargo using 2 Type-II and this time, I keep it slow : one ship at a time. I fire my two fishes and I start to hear bullets around my periscope. The sonarman did probably felt asleep again and I got a destroyer a few meters near me. Trouble..
Crash dive while I lower periscope. The depth charges go around me. One does explode very close to my engines : the starboard engine is dead. Massive flooding in the diesel engine : it's already half full of water. The crash dive is going pretty fast. I organize a repair crew and check damage : electric engines and diesel engines are flooding. Flooding in diesel is pretty bad. Depth is coming fast. This is not looking good.
Depth charges keep going on around me. I see the boat take pretty bad angles and lights go out. Men start to yell around and the compressor has a leak : there is a huge smoke coming from the compressor while water floods in the command center. Depth is over 80 and closing to 100 rapidly. I order full ahead and depth of 80... the depth is still increasing but a bitter slowly.
Coming back to damage, the flooding in diesel is pretty bad. 80 % full of water but the repair crew has almost stopped the flooding in the electric engines I need to avoid crush depth. After 30 seconds of a LOOOOOONG wait the flooding in electric engines is under control. I move the repair team to the diesel compartement and start to pray god.
They need over 8 minutes to stop flooding and the second icon says the compartement will be totally flooded in 3 min. So I stare at the screen and see my depth coming to 86 then 87.. 88.. I wonder how deep I can go before the damage I took makes us all die suddendly.
The repair team is still at work. Slowly, their "stopping flood counter" goes down and the other counter for full flooding goes down. Slowly.. after two minutes it seems the counters have reversed : there is about 30 sec before total flooding of compartement and 1m30 before they can stop it. Depth is now 110 but the boat is still holding. It's doing a lot of pretty bad noises. I wonder if I should hit or not the blow ballast command and die in surface combat.
After another minute, the second counter keeps between 24 and 30 and slowly, the repair team is able to stop the flooding. Depth is now going close to 80 meters and the damage screens says 6 min before flooding recovery.
Then started a 53 min 2 knots north course with destroyers (3 of them) circling me and throwing depth charges. A few get close but I avoid most of them. Battery is down to 50 % and we keep going north.
After over an hour later (almost 2 hours) we are clear of the destroyers. We surface. The starboard engine is dead. I no longer got any noise from the engines, but the left engine is still working. I still have 1300 Km to travel to get to my cruising orders area.
The patrol went on. I sunk a large cargo using my two other T1 torpedoes and did a few small boats using the deck cannon (took ages...).
Went home. It's now february 1941 and I left in December at the beginning of the month. Almost a two month patrol. 11500 tons.
We just went from 1940 to 1941 and they almost nailed me.
:arrgh!: