OK. So here it is. I'm claiming, on behalf of my 12 year old son, the record for the toughest sub in the Seven Seas.
Picture this. Its a moonlit night with reasonable visibility (not like those pitch black horrors mid winter in the far north), on his 3rd patrol out of St Naziaire (7th/13th Flotilla) in a VIIC. Its 11-06-'42 in BF55.
Heading south when he shouts, "Hey Dad, another sub!" Great - I pull up a chair to see what he does. Its North and West of him, heading East. He dives, goes silent, heads North, ups scope and does his calculations. The sub is about 7km WNW, and "we" (by now, I'm hooked) are about 4.5km South of his course line.
The boy locates the sub in the scope at 10x and discovers that it is an S-class on the surface doing 9-10 knots. A target! Yeh! He ups our speed to 3 knots and waits. He asks what we do if the sub hears our launch and dives. We decide to set the second tube to 5m deeper and set the speed to 6 knots, hoping that the second fish may tag him if he does go down. We get a green triangle at about 2.2kms and launch both tubes.
Of course, I half expected to see him respond - but NO, he just sails merrily along ! (Keel-haul their sonar operator! Hah!) Bang! First fish hits, then the second! What the?! Expecting the music to start and for us to be able to watch him go under, was I surprised to see him drop to 8Knots and start zig-zagging!
Long story short. Out of sheer bloody-mindednes, it took another fish and 27 rounds from the deck gun to register the kill and it was still floating!
Now. I want to know just what the Brits were using in their super-sub. If anyone thinks they've met a tougher opponent, my boy would sure like to read about it!
Keep you popinty sides up.
