Black May sucks.
 

Well made it to May of 43 and i'm patrolling off the US coast in my IXD2. Attacked one convoy at the beginning of May and was lucky to survive it. I never had a chance to get a shot off as the escorts caught me on their radar before I was close enough to submerge and was held under for nearly 30 hours.

Decided to go back to picking off ships sailing in ones and twos again and have been bombarded with messages from other U-Boats that are sinking. My crew and I are beginning to wonder if we are the last boat alive in the Atlantic.

BE MORE AGGRESSIVE ~BDU


All in good fun ;)

Screw aggressiveness. Me and my crew know by heart where to find ships sailing alone or in pairs without escorts and will go after them and them alone. Surviving the war takes precedent from now on.

It's been a long time since I was under that long.

What did you do to shake them off?

Dove deeper then I ever had before. I thought the boat was going to implode from the amount of creaking I heard. Also getting lucky with decoys in the last couple hours helped.

I've taken my boat down to 258 without issues. How deeply did you go?

Bought as deep as well. Maybe a bit higher at 250 or so but still deeper then I would've wanted to go. I'm just glad I didn't have to deal with any hedgehogs.

Escorts
 

Head for the NE coast of Cuba. Easy pickins. Lotsa fat T2s and T3s and I have never seen a warship in the area. Park your butt at periscope depth halfway between the easternmost tip of Cuba and the island of Hispaniola and man the hydrophone. It's a bottleneck most of them have to go thru to get to (I'm assuming) to the oilfields in Venezuela. If you don't pick up an easy 100K tons there, I don't know what to tell you. Just watch out for aircraft. (That's the other reason why I stay submerged most of the time.):up:

Funny enough me and my crew are heading there as I type this. I'm staying slightly inshore of the Eastern Seaboard as i head down there as I find a lot of solo ore carriers in the shallows.

Escorts
 

Once you get into Cuban waters you won't see any warships. Who needs convoys when there are 11K tons of oil merrily swimming in front your bow tubes? (At least in vanilla SH3; I don't know about GWX.) See my remarks below after the German one?

I'm not actually worried about lone escorts at any point in time. Having played the game for a couple years now I've discovered a convoy with a single escort means the escort never runs ahead to check for subs. I can thus sit off the port or starboard sides of the convoy and launch torps at every ship and I more often then not at least hit the escort. It's convoys with two or more I worry about.

Beware of convoys in the English Channel, or as in my last patrol, exiting the Channel SW of the Scillies. This one was very large, I recall 8 columns of 4, with an armed trawler in the van, and a likely second trailing behind. Sank the AT in the dark (best use of AP ammo IMHO), and was just going down to periscope depth to pass through unobserved to attack the other, when we we picked out by a searchlight - a V&W searchlight as it turned out, accompanied by shells bursting just ahead of the boat. Brown trousers were issued to all personnel immediately. Sneaky British Navy had a habit (in SH3) of concealing a DD at the end of the outer port column of Channel convoys. I should have remembered...

Sneaky Kriegsmarine commander turned head on to said V&W (as could now be identified), and shot our last Type I up his fo'csle at 400 metres. Battling it out with the second AT in the middle of a zig-zagging convoy was not a good option, so we gave the motors a few amps while the AT was outside sonar range, surfaced, and zapped it from astern. Ammo was now in short supply, so contented myself and the crew with two C3s - 5 shots for the first, and 9 for the second, leaving just 2 in the locker. Returned to Brest in triumph, after a fruitful patrol with a nice (but hard-won) bonus at the end.

We made it back to port on June 17th with over 40000 tons sunk having spent the past 60 days at sea. Crew's feelings were mixed even though we had one of our best patrols yet. However all those subs sunk during May, all our comrades gone..... Mein Gott

Black May is right around the corner for me.

U-802 is on its 4th patrol, and is currently off the coast of Cuba (en route to Key West). This old IXC has been getting the long range treatment lately. The first 2 patrols took us off Capetown, SA, and the 3rd was to the Caribbean. The 4th was back to SA, grid GR99. Once that was over, we headed back to Aruba and to the oil ports of Curacao.
I could benefit from the use of the Metox, for sure...

Run silent; Run deep.