The great Saké massacre of Dec 1941...
 

It was a dark and cold night in December 1941. The war in the Pacific had been just a couple of weeks old, when the crews of an entire japanese Taskfore, consisting of a heavy and two light cruisers, almost a dozen destroyers and a score of freighters and small passenger ships, undoubtly ferrying a large contingent of troops to some important mission, decided to participate in a binge-drinking frenzy of unheard magnitude.

This, of course, caused some rather serious issues with the cohesion of the convoy formation, which soon deteriorated into something vaguely resembling a herd of (drunken) Elephants during mating season.

Unfortunately for his Emperor's Finest, an unexpected guest stumbled right into this confusion: USS Clownfish, a Porpoise-class sub commanded by yours truly...

My aircraft early warning radar (as usual) picked up an enemy surface contact at about 2200. Soon more and more contacts were called out, until I had counted almost 20 ships. Strangely though, they didn't seem to move. I went closer, dived to periscope depth and saw ships sailing higgledy-piggledy through the night, some stopped, some creeping at 1-2 knots, some destroyers racing around like chihuahuas on speed.

I decided to attack and picked my 1st target: A Takao-Class heavy cruiser. Two torpedoes and 30 seconds later it exploded into the night. I unleashed another two and hit a light cruiser, sending him beneath the waves after a giant detonation. The DDs turned on their lights, fired starshells, but none of them came even close to my sub, they probably were busy doing drunken Karaoke anyway... I comfortably sailed through the convoy, or better, the mess of ships facing in all directions and torpedoed a large freighter with two eels from my aft tubes.

I thought about withdrawing, but since the enemy seemed incabable of doing anything remotely resembling actual anti-submarine warfare I stayed right in the middle of the mess of ships and reloaded my torpedoes.

When I was battle-ready again I torpedoed 2 more freighters, and then three Destroyers with suicidal tendencies who slowly crept right into my sights at less than 400 yards. I think I saw the crew of the 2nd one actually performing a massive, nude Kabuki-play on the deck...

AGAIN I reloaded and sank another freighter and a small passenger liner.

Since by now I was out of ammo I set course for Soerabaja and called it a day.

Ok, that was admittedly fun, although in a weird kind of way. :doh:

There was obviously a BIG problem with this convoy, but that could be attributed to some bad waypoint or something like that. What's really important: the escorts are simply incapable of the most basic ASW operations. I think I heard sonar pings maybe three or four times, over the course of two hours. I mean, there were a dozen DDs, and never was there even the tiniest bit of danger. Well, except than one time when I almost rammed a DD while pouring me a fresh Hefeweizen. I suddenly saw a LARGE ship in my periscope and just crash-dived in time below him...

THAT crew must have had a month's Saké ration at least...

Right now the escorts doesn't seem to offer ANY challenge at all. I've so far completed three war patrols, sunk 100.000 tons of enemy shipping and my biggest problems are torpedo duds and my (usually horrible) manual torpedo aiming.

Compared to THIS the "happy times" in the Atlantic were a frightening bloodbath.

:ping: