Has an armed merchant ever...

[SteamWake]

Has an armed merchant ever scored a sub kill in real life?

Last night I was on a patrol not much going on on the open water so I decided to raid a harbor. Long story short The DD picket went down along with a Large modern, and four other merchants sank at their moorings.

Pleased with ourselves and only one mark 10 left (lots of misses from bad solutions and that pesky DD) we set back out for the patrol center to kill time then head home.

Of course along the way we run accross a large composite. We line her up and take the shot with our last torpedo. Deep runner ... So as I was bored and... "Well the weather is fine lets surface and duke it out with the deck gun" .

We exchanged rounds and well the merchant won sinking us after at least an hour of gun battle.

Yes of course I should have broke off much earlier but as I said I was bored and just wanted to see if we could get 'one more kill'. :rotfl:

Im just wondering if an armed merchant scored a sub kill in WW2.

Oh... RFB & RSRD

[Diopos]

Well there is this story about a bored capatain that got sunk by a merchie after a port raid...
Bored to death...

On the actual question I think not, but in the almost 6 years of all out madness, which wwII was, who knows? Maybe the more serious scolars of the era will provide both of us with an answer. Interesting question though!

[doulos05]

Very true, 6 years of madness. I don't know about merchant's sinking anything, but I do know that Suriname sank a German freighter using a 20 lb cannon. Not, mind you, a breech-loading, WWII-era cannon. A muzzle-loading, Civil War-era, black powder cannon.

[Quillan]

USS Grunion

They found the wreckage recently, and it was supposedly sunk by a hit from a deck gun on a troop transport.

Edit - fixed link. Must have doubled-tapped the CTRL+V keys when pasting the URL into the link. Oops, it's Monday.

[SteamWake]

Something wrong with that link Quillan... sorry.

Try this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Grunion_(SS-216)

I also found this http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1003193648.htm

Wherein it states

Unfortunately, the cause of Grunion's sinking remains a mystery. No matter what the cause, the end result was the loss of all hands

[Arclight]

Originally Posted by Quillan

USS Grunion

They found the wreckage recently, and it was supposedly sunk by a hit from a deck gun on a troop transport.

Edit - fixed link. Must have doubled-tapped the CTRL+V keys when pasting the URL into the link. Oops, it's Monday.

Well, most people agree a shell hit may have been a contributing factor, but not decisive. It's still impossible to conclude that it was in fact the Kano Maru that sank Grunion.
http://ussgrunion.com/blog/attack-analysis/
http://www.999info.net/Grunion/HypothesisReport.pdf