[in_vino_vomitus]

When we got our orders to sail into Taipei harbour and take some pictures I asked around. The consensus seemed to be that the best bet would be to stay at home, throw a huge party and try to drink ourselves to death. The Navy would be minus a crew, but would at least get to keep the boat. A net gain on the probable result of an attempt at harbour infiltration. The trouble with orders is all in the name. Requests can be denied, suggestions can be dismissed, but orders are, in the end, orders. So that was that.

Approaching the harbour via the deep water channel in the small hours revealed a Subchaser and a DD on picket duty. With impeccable timing and some luck, we might have slipped between them, but my timing is generally held to be pretty poor, and luck is a thing that, if not for the bad kind, I'd have none of at all. In any case, dawn was going to break while we were in there, and there was no way I was doing this in daylight, so we withdrew a few miles offshore to think.

The obvious thing to do seemed to be to go around, and this we did, at dusk that evening, heading into shallow water to the west of the harbour and running in at about 7 knots with decks awash, cutting speed to 4 knots as we passed what I thought would be the Subchaser's closest point of approach. As the lighthouse hove into view we went to radar depth, and then, once we'd charted the positions of the two groups at anchor, we went to PD and went silent.

To my surprise, this tactic seemed to be working. I'd got off a couple of photos and was on my way to look at the TF at anchor, when my sonarman reported a warship at medium speed closing. Had he detected us? [How??] was it his normal patrol track? Was it the evil machinations of a certain Captain Scurvy? I'd heard he'd given some kind of intelligence boosting formula to Japanese DD captains, this seemed more like a superpower......

Right then, the situation looked decidedly sub-optimal. We were in shallow water, in a harbour, with a destroyer approaching our beam, between us and the open water. Our only hope of survival seemed to be him not spotting us. No sooner had I let that thought fly, than his active sonar started playing that delightful tune we all know and love.....

I went to flank speed, he passed close astern, dropped a pattern of depth charges, that we survived with minor damage, I swung hard to port, wanting more water under the keel and to be closer to open water. His second pass seemed to be taking longer to arrive than I'd thought. I popped up the periscope and saw him parallelling our course about 500 yards off our port beam. He seemed to have smoke and the glow of a fire at his stern. An own goal, from one of his depth charges?

It didn't take him too long to reacquire us, and I didn't hold out much hope of evading repeated attacks. After all, we could dodge him a thousand times. He only had to hit us once. As he steamed towards us, I wished I'd loaded some mark 10's into the stern tubes.......

Anyway, I figured since he knew where we were, and we'd be sunk soon enough, there was no point in saving ammo until we had a perfect solution. I set the stern torpedoes for minimum depth. Set the target speed for zero and the range to the maximum. The bearing wasn't changing much, and I thought that by hitting the send button on the ADT before each shot, I could fire a spread of torpedoes, one of which he might catch as he tried to evade the others. Provided none were duds or prematures or just ran deep, there was very definitely a slim chance of a hit.

No.7 was a premature detonation, two of the others just plain missed, but imagine my surprise when one of the four detonated under his stern. By the look of it, a near miss that the magnetic exploder had set off. I was less happy about the fact that he was still afloat and still pinging, but the fact is, that was the closest he came to us from that point on. He seemed to find the other side of the harbour far more interesting, so we left him checking out the Western approaches, while we slipped away to the Northeast.

And to add icing to the cake, while we were scurrying around after his first run, I managed to get the photos that we came for. Harbour infiltration? nothing to it. - Only joking... - my advice is to stay at home and have the party.......