Summer of 43 once again tasked for the Caribbean this time just northeast of Aruba. As we transited the Bay of Biscay we began the dance anew of crash diving the moment we got a whiff of radar or sight of a plane. East of the Azores we caught a lone merchant on hydrophones we tailed him and then eventually sank him with a surface torpedo attack during a storm. This time I decided to go south and give the Azores a wide berth and it worked.
It was fairly smooth sailing west of the Azores well the weather was awful but it kept the planes away. Just east of Barbados we got a whiff of radar and dived lucky too as it turned out to be a destroyer. Sadly surfacing west of the chain of islands tragedy struck and some planes caught us charging our batteries. 2 men died one an enlisted and another fresh NCO. With a handful of others wounded. We left to our patrol zone to lick our wounds. We decided to again go south to Curaçao as it had been a while.
A pair of destroyers were patrolling between Aruba and Curaçao but we dived deep and ran silent and slipped past. Checked out the harbor again in Curaçao and found there was a Defender this time but it was a lone armed trawler. So we slunked past and sank two tankers and a small merchant. Decided we had done our fill it was back across the Atlantic to Lorient. We were harassed by a lot of planes until we left the Atlantic. Otherwise the journey was uneventful.
Great patrol other than the two dead from the aircraft attack. Could have been worse could have lost the whole boat.
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