SUBSIM Radio Room Forums

Thanks for the advice ... and warnings. I too thought about giving it a miss, but hey, Uncle Dönitz says we gotta do what we gotta do. :salute:

So far it's been a really strange experience. We left Brest on the evening of the 4th and kept very close to the French coast until Pleubian, then we cut up northeast and passed between Jersey and Guernsey. We passed a few kilometers off the peninsula by Saint Germain and then turned due east.

Up till that point everything was quiet -- apart from an air raid on Brest as we left. Indeed, too easy I thought.

Then it started with air attacks. Endless attacks from groups of small single propeller planes. Literally 20+ times we dived. Sometimes I only got 10 minutes or less on the surface before the next group came. Luckily my radar detector functioned beautifully and I always had ample warning to slip beneath the waves.

However it got tiring and I got careless. I surfaced one time without doing a good enough search for planes through the scope first and we were immediately jumped by a flight of 4 engine bombers. They hit the area not long after we got under and did some moderate but repairable damage, but dropped my hull integrity to 85%.

We did get a few good runs on the surface though and I kept my batteries topped up.

We made it to about 50km due north of the DDay beaches. It was the afternoon of June 6th. We started getting contact reports for numerous small fast convoys, but we still hadn't seen or heard anything.

At that point it started getting really intense with the air attacks and I decided to stay under. I was also expecting contact with enemy warships and didn't want to get picked up on their radar. We submerged and contined south in very shallow waters until about 10km or so north of the beaches. Still no sonar contacts! (Lot's of messages from Dönitz though about the invasion). But where?

Finally I was startled to put up my scope and find I'd almost stumbled upon a ring of destroyers, all of them motionless (thus no hydrophone contact). They were guarding a line of ships further up ... very close to the beaches.

It was now the early morning hours of the 7th. The sky was lightening already. I gave up on the ring of ships very close to the beaches and fired from 2 km away at two Hunt Class destroyers guarding the perimeter. They were motionless and easy targets. Both were sunk.

I expected all hell to break loose but the other destroyers in the area never came after me. :hmmm:

It seemed a bit surreal to me. With daylight coming, I retreated to about 40km north of the beaches, pretty much due north of Bayeux. My air by this time was bad and I had to surface several times to air out the boat. Each time I was up for mere minutes before being forced under again by planes.

And that's where I am at now. Still alive. Two destroyers sunk. Boat aired out but battery at only 60%. It doesn't look likely that I'll be able to surface long enough to do much charging and I'm contemplating trying to make it Le Havre harbor. Perhaps I can run in circles on the surface inside the harbor long enough to top up my batteries. (I don't really want to "dock" there -- it seems a bit gamey to get my boat fixed up ... I doubt in real life that I could have gotten any repairs done there.)

That's how things stand for me at about 11am on the 7th of June, 1944.