Sinking Passenger Liners
 

Titanic has been on TV tonight.. it got me thinking.

Do you think if we, the captain, saw through the periscope the horror and fear the people on board were facing, with women and children also being killed cruelly, do you think we'd think twice on siking passenger liners? instead of thinking of the tonnage?

There came a point in the war after 1940 where most passenger liners were hauling troops, not civilians and if they weren't they soon would be.

*Salute

In my war patrols (at the moment im starting a new caraer, 3rd war patrol
October 1939) all ships are targets, with exception of the Hospital Ships, they are the only type of ships wich i never attack or sunk! :salute:

I sink them both.

Is there a penalty if you sink the pasinger liner in gwx gold?
Gwx manual quote
"GWX adds lighting to the stock Silent Hunter III Passenger Liner and restricts it to neutral countries."

This just means that only Neutral liners will have lights on at night. Bdu gives you permission to sink any ship with its lights off, so this way you wont end up sinking a neutral at night.

Oh yaeh your right.
I was wrong to interpret because of my English. I do not understand all that wery well.
Thanks for the explanation.

In real life I met an englishman born in Brazil. He was heading to join the RN on a ship bound for the UK. The vessel was full of Brits from Brazil, Argentina and CHile. The ship was torpedoed. Once the liner was abandoned by passengers and crew, the submarine surfaced. Presumably the captain, asked the people on the life boats if they had everythin they needed. he then told them whic course to take for nearest land.

The U-boat sailed away.

That was farily common, as far as I've read. Peter Cremer discussed it in U333.

The skippers/crews didn't like to think of the people they were killing. They tended to think of them as fellow seamen, and also understood they themselves could be in the same situation.

I read U-109 did this several times to crews of Merchant vessels early in the war. They gave them food, water and blankets as well as directions.

I also remember a U-boat picking up many survivors from a ship, so many they filled the entire deck and they were taking them to a port.

Those were the U-Boat orders in the first couple months of the war, as Hitler and the Germans tried to comply somewhat with the 1928 (?) convention on seaman and hoped to forestall a full war with Britain and France.

At the very beginning, a U-boat would surface and give warning to a ship before sinking her.

This all changed after the Laconia incident. Also remember that later in war U-boats rarely came close to ships and thus saw little of the horrors they inflicted on ships. But they knew what happened to the sailors.

Oh yes, and later you have a renow penalty (negative renow) for both actions!
Specialy for sunk a Hospital Ship! :/\\chop

There are also documented cases of early days in the war of U-boats taking torpedoed boat survivors on their decks (or towing life rafts) to a near by port. This practice was however short lived as allied aircraft took the opportunity to strafe these U-boats which inevitably both resulted in German and Allied seamen casualties.
It all got nastier from then on in……..:nope:

(Ooops - *Uncle Goose* correctly mentions this already - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconia_incident)

and this ones too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Lusitania

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Wilhelm_Gustloff

Passenger Liner in convoys: No. Not realistic.
They generaly sailed alone and on a straight course, without zig zagging.
Good luck trying to bag one of The Great Atlantic Liners.
There was no naval escort that could keep up with them.
30+ knots ALL THE WAY. I met one once, and he almost ran us over before my guys even saw him. There was no time to do anything but get out of his way. I wanted him, but there was no way I was getting him. He was too close for a torpedo . . .then he was gone.
I have to hand it to SH3, the whole encounter was pretty realistic and super tense.
Hospital Ships are, of course, off the menu. Something one might want to think about before sinking one is that they did stop to pick up survivors, from both sides. One of those survivors might one day be you or me.

Weren't the Titanic sister ships Olympic and Britannic impressed into Wartime service? I seem to remember one was converted into a hospital ship and either this or the other struck a mine?

Yes but in WW1
Britannic was sunk by a mine and Olimpic survived to be scrapped in the 1930's

apparently Britannic may well not have sunk had all the nurses not insisted on having all the port holes open to air the wards. the water rushed in through these open port holes into the wards.