favorite anecdote
 

'..In January 1943 part of B5 Group had escorted a convoy of nine tankers on a new convoy route from Trinidad to Gibralter. German U-Boats found this convoy and attacked it, sinking seven of the nine tankers. The four-ship escort was so small that a U-boat trailed the convoy quite openly by day and, at one stage, an officer on the destroyer Havelock ordered a light signal to be flashed to the U-Boat, 'Why dont you go away?'

Back came the reply 'Sorry, we have our orders.'

from the book CONVOY by Martin Middlebrook. it is a very good read :yeah:

haha thats awesome!

I've posted several good stories over the years, mostly discovered in my quest for ship names.

Like the tanker that had its back broken in a harbor. They raised her, cut out the whole middle, welded the bow and stern together and sailed her from Malta to New York that way so she could be cut apart and rebuilt whole.

now that sounds insane! I would hate to be the ones sailing that on the open ocean. id be very nervous :cry:

The air attacks on U-30 during sinking of SS "Fanad Head" on September 14, 1939 were... well, embarassing - the boat, which has sent the prize crew to stopped merchant in order to scuttle it, has been bombed in sequence by several Skua and Swordfish aircraft from HMS Ark Royal while attempting to retrieve its prize crew. One aircraft missed, two not only missed but blew themselves up with their own bombs and one didn't have anything to attack with because it earlier dropped its ordnance into the sea by mistake. The pilots swam to the comandeered merchant and were taken prisoner when U-30 finally managed to retrieve its men.

Later, when Winston Churchill met one of the unfortunate pilots, he supposedly said "You were the bloody fool who failed to give me my first naval victory of this war. Weren't you?"

Found it!
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...=tanker+welded

Of course I completely misremembered the locales. It was Aruba, not Malta (they're near each other, aren't they? :damn:) and Baltimore rather than New York.

And another.
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...=tanker+welded

And yet another.
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...=tanker+welded

..i think what i was getting at here is the odd/strange sence of playfullness. the Havelock officer is speaking to man who could well kill him. 'why dont you go away?' is the sort of thing you'd say to an idiot at school - he's not worth hitting, he's just an irritant like a fly: but this is a killing machine sending back 'sorry, we have our orders.' its soo dry.

i think the term is Bathos - the irony here is massive: there is an Elephant in the room called Death. and these two soldiers/seamen are having a chat. i can sense the Humanity in both of them. i could guess they are the type of men who could quite easily have a beer together after the war without any hatred for each other, and laugh it off - remaining friends too.

i think its a classic moment, not unlike when the troops played football together in WWI at X-Mas.

The deepness of your statements has chilled me.

As for anecdotes, I'm currently reading "Diary of a U-boat Commander". It's free on the kindle (The copyright has expired, you can get a Kindle for the PC free too). Interesting POV piece on WWI sub life. Also shows the arrogance and aristocracy present at that time in German culture.

thanks Gargamel for your comment. its good to think that you have understood me:up:
for me, this game is about the total history from both sides. and very often an anecdote like the one i have put up says more in two sentences than potentially a whole history book can try to say. these insightful moments blow me away, the more i read it the more i saw the scene in my head - i could not get away from such a tragic and wonderful incident: it compressed the good and the bad of the war into one moment - awesome

cheers

One war previously, on the night of 26-27 October 1916 the Tribal Class destroyer HMS Zulu was blown in half by a torpedo fired during a night action in the Channel. The bow sank but the stern was successfully towed to port. A couple of weeks later her sister HMS Nubian lost her stern to a mine and the bow section was towed to port.

The shipyard joined Zulu's stern to Nubian's bow and the resulting HMS Zubian served out the rest of the war even sinking the U-Boat UC-50.

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

Heard from the inside of an SSBN reactor room during a refit in the 1970's:

"Hey Chief, toss me in the biggest spanner you've got."

"Will 1 1/2" do?"

"Should be ok, just need it as a hammer anyway."

USNI Proceedings, 1972.