A sombre reminder..

[aj906]

Passing through my patrol Grid BE38, I came across the following





I submerged to check for further damage but saw no visible signs as to why the boat would be bow heavy - certainly not considering the damage sustained on the stern.




Despite the rough sees, one of my men bravely attached a line around his chest and swam to the stricken boat, hammering loudly on the hull with a wrench.... There was no reply.

I sat on the surface near the striken boat for 48 hours before finally giving the crew up for dead.

It's one thing to see the enemy floating off in rafts, but quite another to see one of your own dying a miserable death.

Auf Gefallen!

[Teh_Diplomat]

That's intense!

[Venatore]

Poor bastards now get the hell out of there

[aj906]

the stuff of it is, three weeks (and a miserly 21,800 brt) later when I headed back through the area on my way home, it was still floating there. I didn't have the heart to put my last torp into her (to Valhala with negative rep points!) but figured if it where IRL, the crew would want to stay surfaced as a warning to other U-boot crewmen and bait for inquisitive RN ships...

[Subject]

Rule #1: Don't ever let a boat fall into enemy hands!

So - if we're playing WWII - you really should have sunk it!

Otherwise you or the poor Kaleu of the half-sunk boat would risk being put in front of a court-martial. Which did happen.
Even in a POW-camp for german submariners...

[mengle]

I think it was the U 571 , you should have sink it, before the enemy was there for the enigma

[aj906]

but in GWX2.0 how much will that cost me to sink a friendly? Will the game recognise that it is "dead" and therefore sinking it is the right thing to do?

[Kapitan_Phillips]

Relaying their position would have been the only thing you could've done. A loss of two boats would've impacted harder than just one.

As the U-Boat was Obviously Dead?
You could Deck Gun it till it sank and not get credited for that action.
Therefore no negative renown.

A ship can take enuff damage to be 'Legally Dead'
but not take damage in a critical 'sink' area.

And as a note, several U-boats DID wash up on beaches dureing WWII.
I got pictures somewhere of them.

[aj906]

well, I bit the bullet and replayed the mission from the save I made when I first found the sub. Based on pure gestimation (I couldn't lock the target and given its bow heavy attitude in rough seas, I had to guess a decent depth for an eel), my single shot hit mid-ship just below the conning tower from 690 metres. There was no comment from the crew, BdU or marks on the map - the boat just slid beneath the waves rather unceremoniously, leaking oil. Shooting from the hip is always exciting, but I got no joy from making my mark on this shot.

Having replayed the mission from this point, I've since found a second sub in exactly the same predicament - this time, wallowing not far from a stricken medium tanker - in the same grid square. BE38 seems to get massive convoy traffic and it is nice to see this level of detail (although I find it hard to believe two submarines in the space of three weeks can be found floating on the surface with no survivors.)

As has been said already those subs, after taking enough damage, would have been sunk by the crew unless the enemy did that favour for them. The enemy would have liked to have catched those subs, at least earlier in the war.

Would be nice if in the game the doomed subs were sunk by the crews, the survivors would be picked up by either the enemy as POW's or by you, crammed into the sub and dropped off somewhere. Oh well, one can wish.

[Frank0001]

That's an awful thing to see, I don't want to think of what happened to her crew.
Perhaps she was caught in heavy seas and took water through an open hatch?

Again, a terrible sight, but you did the good thing to sink it.