[Twelvefield]

Wow, this is interesting to me, given the end of my latest (and shortest u-boat career).

With RUB 1.43, in June 1941, I was trailing a convoy and shooting at targets, when I slipped up and got DC'd by a quick-witted Flower corvette. The damage was weak, but I didn't want to go back to persicope depth for another attack run. As I was slinking away, the escorts started pinging, or at least one boat pinged while another raced over my position and dropped a DC right on my bow planes, destroying them. I started to flood, and my depth increased, so I let my VII-C go below 150 at 3 knots before pulling her out of the dive. In the meantime, I set the damage control team to fix the flooding in the bows. Only, at 150, although the leaking was shored up, the sub did not want to raise her bows, and she continued downward. Helm answered flank speed ahead, but the bow was stubborn, and the depth guage was far into the red. Above me, DC's were coming down, but I don't think they went past 100 meters before their fuses detonated.

I blew ballast, and that levelled the boat at around 165, I think, but the sub would not rise. I reversed the engines full, thinking that the stern planes would pull me up arsy-versy. We did rise to above 120 this way, but the DC's were coming down. More hits, more flooding, and more sinking. I blew ballast twice more, and in full reverse we slowly rose to a depth of 40 meters.

There was no way the destroyers could miss. For a moment, I had hoped they were rejoining the convoy, but they were lining up for the kill. The only way I could get out from under the DC's was to go flank speed ahead, turn helm about, and try to speed away.

Damage to the engine prevented flank speed, and running the screws forward caused the bow to dive again, so I blew the last of the ballast. My U-boat never surfaced. She only made it up to 35 meters depth, and then she made a slow, parabolic dive for the ocean floor. Depth charges caused nearly every compartment to flood, so there was a lot of frantic pumping.

Eventually, we were back below 150 meters, bow pointed down. Once again, I engaged the engines into reverse, which caused the stern to pick up and hold the sub in a near-hover, albeit at a significant down angle. The crew valiantly shored up the leaks and pumped water, but this time the accumulated weight was too great. All I could do was watch the depth needle creep slowly in a clockwise motion. We were continuing downward at a rate of maybe a meter every 5 seconds.

A few kilos of ballast could have made the difference between the needle going clockwise and going anticlockwise. Certainly, we were so close to countering the dive. But the hard fact was that every few seconds were were going closer to Hell one meter at a time, and not Heaven.

The transition past crush depth was leisurely, and I had a lot of time to look around the sub and the various compartments as we settled into the watery tomb. I was actually looking forward to the death screen -- I figure I had spent a good half-hour trying to pull my sub from her terminal dive.

This is probably the kind of drama you are looking for with your own game. SHIII certainly does not lack in shock and suspense when it wants to. It's definitely most harrowing time I have spent just watching a needle guage. Still, I fould that this moment went beyond video-game entertainment, and it actually left me a bit shook-up, and a little unwilling to come back to the game. For some poor crew somewhere in the war, this was their final moment in real life.

So I guess the moral of the story is to be warned that sometimes when you get what you ask for, it may be too much.

Patrick O'Brian (my favorite author) has a great quote in "Letter of Marque" (although I paraphrase it here) : "There are many more tears shed over prayers that were answered than for prayers that were not."