Originally Posted by Bubblehead1980
Something weird....did a follow up night surface attack on same convoy....
full moon so had to fire from long distance, fired four Mark 14's at 4600 yards at another Nippon Maru tanker.During torpedo run, was spotted and forced to dive, reset speed to 5 knots instead of 6 during dive in case tanker made evasive movements and slowed, so atleast two hits would maybe do the job, fired the last two as boat was going down.Seas were absolutely calm still as I passed 250 feet, BOOM....all 6 torpedos hit the large tanker, huge explosions.Leveled off at 300, escorts ran right over my head, no pinging, went to my old position abou 700 yards behind me, dropped nearly 100 charges altogether, never heard pinging, they never found me, in ideal sonar conditions again.They did hang out long enough that the convoy was able to slip away, when I tried to come up at dawn and catch up, planes and a straggler escort kept me away, only four bow fish left and not enough fuel to pursue and out of my area, turned back.
Found another convoy 4 days later near Balabac Strait, had an escort carrier on far side, once I saw this, set fish to run at 18 feet so could fire under some shallow draft freighters and try to take the CVE out.Seas were kind of rough so some high speed runs at 100 feet went undetected.Fired all four fish from 4,600 yards at the CVE....3 hit a large freighter that sped up for some reason, one made it through and was going to hit then passed right under the carrier.ID book said it had draft of 24 feet, figured set at 18 feet even in heavy seas would get it, I had external camera on so saw it run, it scraped bottom of hull, if had megnetic detonator, wouldve been nice.
Anyway, again escorts were pushovers, no pinging, no attacks close to me.Somethings up, its May 1944 and im dealing with the D team here.
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