The Quiet Pacific: An AAR/Gripe-fest

[CRM114]

Hello skippers-

You most likely don't recognize my name; how could you? I've got less than 100 posts under my belt, and at the rate that I make them, I won't hit even that modest mark until sometime after robots have taken over the earth.

That notwithstanding, I'm an old hand with sub sims. From the time spent playing Sid Meier's Silent Service and watching Das Boot with my dad when I was a boy, I was hooked. I won't bore you with the width and breadth of my sub gaming.

I bought Silent Hunter III right when it was released. I even wrote a review of it for a fairly popular gaming website where I was an occasional contributor. I liked the game, warts and all, and kept up with the modding scene here on the SubSim forums. There'd be times where I'd walk away from the game and come back a few months later with a fresh install and a new mod. At the end of last year, I tried GWX 2.0 for SH3 and was just blown away. It took a good game and turned into perfection. I played the heck out of GWX, and was continually impressed with it. I like realism, though where it needs to be sacrificed for fun, I'm OK with that, too.

Dud fish? No problem.

Zig-zagging convoys? Bring it on.

No external camera? Whoa there. I like my external camera. And my event camera, for that matter. That's the kind of grognard I am. Keep that in mind if you decide to keep on reading.

This past month, to commemorate the construction of a new desktop, I belatedly bought Silent Hunter IV and the U-Boot add on. Being the old hand at mods that I am, and reading some off-putting things about the stock game, I immediately installed Trigger Maru Overhauled and Run Silent, Run Deep with JGSME, and dove right in.

The First Patrol

Commanding the Sargo, with an upgraded SD radar to show for my initial renown expediture, I left Pearl on 8 December of 1941 and charted a course west for Honshu. I had the good fortune of leaving the harbor at sunrise, and the color effects on the water were just breath-taking. Nice first impression, SHIV.

Not figuring on seeing any IJN for a while, I cruised on the surface at standard and cranking the new-and-improved time compression as high as it would go. The new hands-off crew management pleased me as well as the sunset did though I felt a twinge of abandonment, maybe like a newly-empty nested mother. Watching our progress on the map, the difference between SH3's North Atlantic and SH4's PTO was really driven home for me; it was like going from a teacup to an Olympic pool.

Honshu

I arrived at my designated patrol area, south of Honshu and cruised for a while there, taking care to submerge at daybreak and rise again at night, as I would have in the Irish Sea with a U-boat. Days went by. No contacts. I start to get a bit impatient.

All right fine, I say to the IJN (where ever they may be). If you don't care to mind your own front yard, then I'll just cruise on the surface day and night. And I did. Broad daylight, unlimited visibility, a stone's throw from Takamatsu, and no one shows up to challenge me. Not a merchant ship (which in late 1941 should be all over the damn place, given my location), not a patrol aircraft, not a DD, not a schnellboot (do the Japanese have those?), nothing. I am so close to Nippon that I would be able to see the night lights of Osaka on the horizon if that were modelled in the game, for a good solid week, and I have yet to see a ship.

But then:

MERCHANT SPOTTED, sir!

Well dive to periscope depth, boys! Ahead full!

The Sargo gamely dives to 40 feet and charges ahead along the bearing given me by the watch officer just before we closed the conning tower hatch behind us. The sun is going down, but there's still enough light to warrant use of scope #1.

The water is choppy, and splashing over the lens distorts my view. Finally! After all this time, a contact! I'm prepared for it to be anything, anything at all with a rising sun flying from the mast - and I'll put it under the waves. The seas are still for a moment, and my target comes into view.

It's...

It's a junk.

Gentlemen there are two kinds of skippers in the world. There are the kind of skippers who think to themselves: Boy, there hasn't been much action on this patrol, and I don't want to go home to Freemantle with an empty captain's log. I'm going to sink this junk.

Then there's another kind of skipper. This skipper, in my situation, thinks: Boy, there hasn't been much action on this patrol, and I'd rather go home with every single torpedo in the hold and zero tonnage sunk than go home with one junk on my log.

I'm the second kind of skipper.

After the junk was out of sight, I gave the order to surface and shot a status report (a rather aggressive one, I like to think) to COMSUBPAC and waited for a reply. MAKE FOR THE STRAIT OF LUZON the response came, AND CONDUCT ANTI-SHIPPING OPERATIONS.

Fair enough, I thought. Hopefully Formosa won't be a ghost town like the southern coast of Japan is. I plotted the course and off we went.

Luzon

The trip to Luzon passed on high time compression, on the surface all the way. I cursed the invisible Japanese Navy and merchant marine. GIVE ME SOMETHING TO SHOOT. We arrived after a couple of days, and I entertained myself by making amusing patrol patterns over our designated area. Still, more time passed, and there was nothing to be seen anywhere.

I tried staying in deep water. No ships.

I tried spending a few days in coastal waters, assuming perhaps that the Japanese would rightly try to stay as green as possible to keep their American bubblehead hunters in the shallows. No ships.

Finally, having played several hours across three seperate sessions, I was prepared to tell COMSUBPAC where to shove their patrol grids. I was going to go off the reservation.

If Muhammad will not go to the mountain, bring the mountain to Muhammad. I was going to raid a Japanese-controlled port. I plotted a course for Vung Tau.

Vung Tau

Vung Tau, situated opposite Saigon, was a couple day's sail away from our current position. Having made the long trip from Pearl, fuel was starting to become a concern, so I didn't want to go far out of my way to make my raid. Vung Tau had the double benefit of lying on the way back to Darwin (in a round-about sort of way) and also lacking the claustrophobic natural protectedness of Manila and the harbors on Formosa.

Much of the approach to Vung Tau was in very shallow water, so submersion would be dicey. After arriving in the deep water off the Indochina shelf, we waited there submerged until nightfall.

Once the sun was all the way down, the purple of dusk given way completely to night, I ordered the boat to the surface and we sailed into the harbor at flank speed. I didn't want to be caught in daylight bracketed between the harbor patrols of the twin ports.

We were about to make the 90-degree turn into the Vung Tau harbor when the watch crew spotted a ship; only the second one sighted the entire cruise until that point. I ordered that we stay on the surface - there was no point in crash diving with only 40 feet of water below the keel, and I wanted to ID this one myself. Looking through the binoculars, I saw a tugboat, on her way out of the harbor. The deck gun would have made short work of her, but we had bigger fish to fry, and I didn't want to alert the IJN ships that would surely be in the area. We dove to 38 feet, just enough to put our masts under the water. The keel was surely mere feet away from bottom, though I dared not use the active sonar to ascertain exactly how many.

At 1 knot, it took a while to put the tug behind us. Almost as soon as the tug vanished into the dark, my sonarman picked up a contact on the Saigon side of the bay - a warship. Through the night scope, it looked like a DD, but it was too dark and too far away for me to be certain. The destroyer was headed away from us, into Saigon. Surely, once the fireworks started, she would be back and would need to be reckoned with. Mindful, we continued our creep along the bottom of the bay towards Vung Tau harbor.

After twenty long minutes, the harbor and her treasure trove of ships were in sight. It wasn't exactly Scapa Flow, but after hours of real-time playing without spotting a target worth sinking, it looked like heaven.

Five cargo ships (give or take one) were moored idly at the docks. So too were a pair of DDs. That gave me pause. Saigon, just a couple of minutes' steam across the bay contained at least one DD for sure - here were two more, certain to leap into action as soon as our first torpedos hit home. And there was nowhere to hide - we were as deep as the harbor would allow, and even that was comically shallow. This was starting to look like a suicide mission undertaken by a desperate captain.

But desperate was exactly what I was. With less than 50% of my diesel remaining, and Australia our only hope for port, this was likely going to be my only shot at sinking a Japanese ship on this cruise. I order the crew to action stations.

I set all of my torpedos to run as shallow as possible, and set the variable speeds for slow. The plan was to loose all 4 forward tubes at the warships at dock, two apiece, and then spin the boat around and give the merchants the aft tubes on our way out. I set the plan into motion and emptied the forward tubes.

TORPEDO IN THE WATER! Finally! Excited though I was, I was sure this was the end. The laziest, most tin-eared Japanese sonar operator would be able to hear the high-speed motors of the fish I had just fired from anywhere in the bay, certainly. At two-thirds ahead, we began our semi-circle to bring the aft tubes to bear on the harbor.

The stopwatch ticked away with an ominous soundtrack as I swivelled the night scope about, searching for the DD that had vanished towards Saigon. If the sounds of the torpedos didn't bring him around, surely the explosions will. Tick-tick-tick-tick. He wasn't anywhere to be seen yet, and my sonarman couldn't hear him, either. The fish continued on their way.

An explosion reverberated through the water. In my preoccupation with the absent DD, I had missed my first salvo hitting the mark. Or half of it, anyway. The auxilliary gunboat was burning at the dock, listing mightily but holding on to bouyancy for the moment. The other two torpedos clanged loudly off of the hull of the moored destroyer - duds.

I held my finger over the periscope controls, ready to slip the night scope back down into the conning tower. But there was no search light: not from the DD, not from her burning but still unsubmerged companion, not from the harbor itself.

I ask sonar to report all contacts. Nothing. Where is the cavalry? There should be a DD coming full bore across the bay right now. Surely the Japanese have radios. Surely in 1941, there is a firewatch on all of these ships in this harbor.

Surely the AI on the ships in the harbor is not completely disabled. It appears to be. Neither of the Vung Tau warships has made a move on me. Sonar, report all contacts. Still nothing. The DD headed for Saigon has gone to bed. More brazen than ever, I give the order to surface.

Now, in the pitch black night, illuminated only by the soft glow of the lighthouses and the now-fading fire on the deck of the crippled gunboat, I order the watch crew to man the deck gun and put fire on whatever's closest. Aim for the waterline, my GWX 2.0 brain volunteers helpfully.

Now the Vung Tau warships take note of my presence. Their shooting is inaccurate at best, and I almost have a clear shot with my stern tubes on the freighters. I fire off the four aft torpedos. One of the enemies lands a shot then, one that disables my foreward batteries and causes some minor hull damage. Other shots are starting to land close enough to splash the hull. I decide to make my way out while the getting is good. Flank speed ahead.

Looking nervously north for the DD, I am started by a silhoutte on the horizon. Finally, the other shoe drops - I am going to pay for my recklessness. But the silhoutte is not my iterant destroyer: it's a fishing boat.

I look back at Vung Tau. The completely undamaged destroyer has not gotten underway. I have loudly and brazenly infiltrated an key enemy harbor with almost no consequences of note, and no resistence worth mentioning. After all my torpedos hit home, I have sunk two ships and crippled another. We round the bend out of the harbor at 14 knots.

On our way back to Freemantle, we cruise on the surface the whole time. Never once do we see an IJN or other enemy ship. Southwest of the Celebes, days later, we spot a Dutch merchant. It is the last ship we see on the patrol.


After the Patrol/Begining of the gripe-fest

I am well and truly surpised by SH4. My war patrol lasted for more than two months, and I never saw another warship or even a merchant other than a junk on the open ocean. The ships I tangled with in Vung Tau were eunuchs who couldn't even leave their slips, or communicate their predicament to a functioning warship less than a mile away. This is a sub sim?

• Where the hell is everybody? I realize that the Pacific Theater is enormous, and that the target-rich North Atlantic is an entirely different universe. But in months at sea, I saw almost literally no one? That's not fun. There were no Royal Australian Navy ships guarding Australia from foreign incursion outside of the mouths of their harbors. The waters around Japan were completely devoid of traffic where (to my mind) they should be teeming. It is 1941 and the Japanese Empire is at its zenith and is the undisputed master of the Western Pacific basin. Where are their damned ships? How can I cruise from Tokyo to Freemantle on the surface the whole way and see no one at all? I like realism, but this doesn't seem like realism! Ubisoft has made this huge world, but has forgetten to put anyone in it.
• Aren't there radios in 1941? How did I get away with my Vung Tau harbor raid? With a destroyer so close by, I should have been toast in the shallow harbor water. I'm prepared to understand the Vung Tau warships not leaving their slips to pursue me, but how could the AI not have alerted their friendly ships in the area about my obvious torpedo attack (made more unintelligble by my surfacing).

I'd love to read some of your thoughts on this, but I suspect I'll be going back to GWX and SH3 soon.