[Texas Red]

At 1320 hours, the 3rd watchman, Matrose Ernst Hein, spots a large smoke funnel bearing 230°. I look and spot the same thing. I couldn’t believe it at the time, we were about to get our first chance to prove ourselves! So, prepare, say a prayer!

“ALARM!” I scream down the hatch. The bell rings as every man drops what they are doing and heads to their battle-stations. Helmut heads to the command room since he is the Executive Officer (XO) it is his duty to conduct weapons attacks and maintaining the boat weapon systems.

Walther calculates the course of the ship from the observation periscope in the command room while I’m in the conning tower, looking through the attack periscope. He finally decides on the course of the ship and tells me we are running on a perpendicular course to the ship.

I increased the speed to 14 knots. My grin gets bigger and bigger as I see the ship get bigger and bigger on my scope, meaning that she is getting closer. I could see two weapons on the ship. A large gun at the bow, and another large gun at the aft of the ship. This excludes her from me firing a warning shot. I identified her as a Medium Tanker weighing in at approximately 7,500 tons. Dieter works out the solution to the torpedo attack while I wait to be able to fire the torpedoes. We have 3 TI torpedoes in tubes 1,3, and 4 and one TII torpedo in tube 2. Due to it being such a nice day, I decided to use the TII. It was already preheated to reduce the risk of being a dud. Since this is an electric torpedo, she doesn’t have a pistol setting. I decided for her to run at only 1 meter below the waterline. I hoped that the watch crew on the Medium tanker doesn’t spot the torpedo itself as it cruises along in the glass-like waters.

The crew was silent, no one spoke a word. A pool of sweat formed around me as it quickly rose to above 32.2 °C. We have no air conditioning unit in the submarine, so it can get dangerously hot sometimes. I yelled down to the chief engineer and asked, “What is our battery percentage, chief?” he replied, “86%, sir!” I then asked, “What is our Co2 percentage, chief?” he responded after a while, “Sir, we are at 2%”. Since 10% of Co2 is good enough to kill, we were fine.

Helmut yelled from the command room, “Sir, all calculations have been put in, we are ready to fire!”. I called out, “Flood tube 2, set it to run 1 meter below the waterline!”. A few seconds passed before Dieter informed me that we were ready to fire. “Torpedo, LOS!”, I yelled as loud as I could. I heard the torpedo go from the tube and then Dieter informed me, “Sir, the torpedo is in the water!”. “Good now, reload tube 2 with another TII. Flood tube I and standby to fire.”

I start my stopwatch, the torpedo goes around 30 knots and the ship is 950 meters from us, it should take the torpedo 31 seconds to hit her.