Q: What did you find at Nordkapp?
At first, just rougher seas. We got there by next morning and there was a really high swell with white caps by then, which was rocking the boat pretty firmly. We’d got to within sight of the coast, and then turned back around - and then suddenly, just after 7 in the morning, the watch calls out a contact on our port quarter. We dive, slowly as usual; about 5 minutes later I raise the scope and observe a small ship to our north.
Now, there was something pretty strange about that whole situation, and we still haven’t quite figured out what they were doing. The ship was sitting there, not moving, and making a fair bit of greasy smoke; we thought at first they were on fire, but I’m not so sure. I’d thought at the time that it was hit by an air strike, but that was some 800km from the nearest friendly aerodrome, and nothing turned up in our side’s records. On the other hand, after the war, not much turned up about it in the German records either.
Regardless, they sat there, drifting at 1-2 knots maybe. It was this small motor vessel - something like an ocean-going tug. At first I thought it was flying a Norwegian flag, but eventually I made out guns and a German marine flag. I remember that this boat reminded me of my own previous ship, the harbor guard Tuman - just like it. It looked a bit down by the bow, but there wasn’t any sign that it was in distress. They may have been stopped for a rescue, or laying mines, I’m not sure. I had a bit of a lump in my throat approaching it, but as they say, war is war.
Q: Did you sink this patrol ship?
By about 7:45, we reached an attack position just off his starboard beam. We couldn’t really hear much on the acoustics, but it looked like his motors were on and he was still puffing smoke. I ordered a torpedo set to as shallow as we could for the weather, which was about 3m depth, and opened the first tube. A minute later, we lined up our bow with his, I ordered “1 Apparat, pli!”
[“Tube 1, fire!”], and the torpedo was on the way. I lowered the scope immediately; 40 seconds later, we heard an explosion, followed by a lot of secondaries. I raised up our scope, and only caught sight of the boat going down by the bow.
I stayed up at scope depth for about 5 minutes, saw some debris and possibly also some bodies floating around, and ordered 40m depth. We stayed down for the rest of the day, and I ordered the boat to move closer inshore to elude any searches for it. There weren’t any as far as we could tell, but we stayed down for a full 12 hours just in case.
Q: You didn’t try to get on the surface and rescue or capture some of the Germans?
That was not the right weather for it, and we were not the right vessel for that job. War is war, as they say.
Q: Did you know the identity of the ship you sank?
At the time, no. I was able to identify it later though, it was what the Germans call a Vorpostenboot - so, a guard ship very much like my Tuman, listed at 885 gross tonnage. I thought of it a lot afterwards, I suppose it was fate. But we’d soon forgotten about it, because that was not the last ship we were to sink.
To be continued...