Q: Did something force you to stop the pursuit?
Oh, another air attack. Inevitably - and we pretty much expected it - two Messerschmitt fighters arrived from beyond Soroy island on the horizon (we wound up near it again after chasing the merchant on its northeastern course), attacking very aggressively with machinegun fire and bombs. We grudgingly gave up the chase, got ourselves closer to the coast underwater, and bottomed the boat until evening to save battery power.
Q: Did you head home after you ran out of torpedoes?
Yes, there was little else for us to do. We took a heading to the northeast, following the coast at 20-25km distance to report any traffic we ran into. The weather improved, but planes kept showing up, so we ran at a reduced freeboard and frequently went under. In the evening of the 3rd of September, we left our patrol area after nearly 2 weeks of non-stop patrolling.
Q: Any further contacts that you encountered, or was it a quiet way home?
We saw a couple of patrol ships which we didn’t approach, and a Norwegian fishing boat we spotted in very rough seas, so we did not attack him either. There was a warship mast that we saw over the horizon near cape Sletnes, which was moving fast - we figured it to be a destroyer and reported it by radio. But not much beyond that.
The most noise was on the radio. Those were some of the tensest days of the war - the Germans completely surrounded our forces in Estonia and forced our naval base at Tallinn to be evacuated; they broke through at Kingisepp towards Leningrad; and by September 5th Kiev was surrounded in the Ukraine as well. But as I said many times before, we stayed confident in our ability to eventually stop the Germans. We just didn’t know when and how.
We did have one last action during that patrol, though.
To be continued...