A single shot of what?

Jack Daniels?:D

Nope you bolster mine. You are just sighting the fact that both Fluckey and O'Kane successfully detected and avoided Japanese planes even when equiped with radar. Which means you can afford to be on the surface to prosecute attacks on merchants. Hence the whole submersible PT boat thing.

Just in case we have lost sight of where this originated:



Fluckey used his deck gun and he did so late in the war in enemy territory and it did not mean death for him.

Wow, this old argument again.

I have always been clear that overall, IJN ASW was clearly ineffective.

That is not the same as saying that individual prosecutions were poor, or even that their technical capabilities were terrible.

They had a decent DC in the Type 2 Mod 1. 3m/s sink rate, decent warhead (167kg). They had acceptable sonar, and they had MAD gear, as well as radar after '43/'44.

The principal failures in A/S compared to the Allies were:

1. Poor signals doctrine and encryption. This cannot be stressed enough. The Allies put ships where u-boats WERE NOT, and put A/S assets where u-boats were. This is why u-boats were the abysmal failure they were looking at the big picture. The "Happy Time" was just a battle, not the war. Both the KM and IJN were FAR too chatty, and sigint ALONE would have done them in, even without code breaking. The rule for subs should have been to STFU. Period.

2. Late, and half-hearted adoption of convoys. ~1% of allied ships convoyed were sunk by u-boats. 1%, and a fair % of those were stragglers out of the convoy proper. Convoys concentrate A/S capability, which for the limited IJN would have made a critical difference.

3. Culture. IJN culture was pathologically weighted to offensive action, and A/S was considered defensive. As such, it was a temp assignment, and there was little continuity to pass on knowledge.

4. Technology. This is important early where their shallow settings really hurt them, but in the grand scheme less important, IMO.

#1 is huge when comparing the 2 forces. Huge. #2 is lesser, but very important. #3, and 4 are relatively minor.

Simple reality check what-ifs. Remove allied sigint vs u-boats, and make tiny convoys, if any. Result of thought experiment? Endless "Happy Time," even with hedgehog, etc. (even if slightly less happy).

tater

PS—none of the above addresses another very important factor. USN sub doctrine was actually pretty good (aside from pre/early war attack doctrine that was not aggressive enough). The boats were quite, and they fought their strengths against enemy weakness. KM doctrine worked playing the sub vs the lone merchant, but vs Allied strength, it was an abject failure.

US forces were more likely to use the gun later in the war, but again, only on craft they deemed not worth a torpedo. They sank many picket boats, etc. In addition, the japs went to a distributed shipping system where they banged out thousands of small ships from ~1000t Fox Tare types, to wooden "sea trucks" well under 1000 tons (150-300t being common).

Those were DG targets.

Emile Miguet notes
 

My father Léon Caron was second officer on the Emile Miguet . I was told me the first officer went away out of the convey meet the germans, He was prosecuted after the war.

A Young sailor called 'Le Maou' who died in my fathers' arms, he was wounded by a shot or by the torpdedo coup de grace ?.

The survivors were picked up by the American steam merchant Black Hawk

After that in June 18 1940 my father was captain on the tanker 'Palmyre' in St Nazaire harbour. He fled when the germans get there. Is ship not being finished he droped is propeller in tn the middle of the river 'Loire' ans was taken back to the harbour.

Welcome to Subsim! Now THAT is a very interesting story. So the ship that was sunk left the convoy. That explains why the gun action was prosecuted to begin with, as surfacing in the midst of a presumably armed convoy to initiate a gun battle wouldn't have been very bright.

So this gun sinking was an anachronism, not a normal sinking at all. Even then the U-Boat was risking air attack for a prolonged period of time while helpless on the surface. It's possible that air attack wasn't that likely so early in the war.

WELCOME ABOARD, Caron!:sunny:

Thanks for that interesting story, and for reviving this thread. It prompted me to have another look at Uboat.net, and this time I noticed the part that agrees with what you said about the attack itself:
So, the tanker was stopped by gunfire, finished by a coup de grâce (which indicates a torpedo), and still didn't sink until the next day, when she was scuttled by the crew of a British destroyer. Interesting, for a ship "sunk by gunfire".