Wow - that was weird - 1st encounter with a mine?

[panthercules]

Was about to return to base, having expended all but 3 torps sinking 2 C2s in bad weather and finding nothing going on around Dunkirk despite the rumored evacuation of the BEF taking place in early June 1940, but I decided to cruise on up the English coast toward Hull and see if I could pick off a stray merchant before heading back.

Was about to dive 'cause the sun was coming up and I was well within aircraft range, when all of a sudden I hear loud damage noises and I start getting frantic damage reports from my crew. There were no reports of enemy ships or planes, but my boat was immediately red and flooding in several compartments, and 4 of my guys were dead and one wounded.

I scrambled to get my damage control team together and get them going on the repairs, and scattered the rest of my crew into the various compartments hoping they could at least make a start on stuff till the repair team could get around to fixing their compartments.

Once things seemed reasonably under control in the worst-flooding compartments, I went up to the bridge to see what was going on and see if maybe some planes or ships were in the area that hadn't been reported, but fortunately nothing was in sight. However, as I looked aft I could see that my boat was on fire and smoking! It looked like the pictures I saw the other night in a thread about smoking U-boats.

Once my repair crew got all the flooding under control and most of the compartments repaired, I decided to dive to periscope depth to see if that would put the fire out on the bridge. Although I did not seem to be taking on any new water after diving, I could not hold my boat at 'scope depth and she kept heading downward

Fortunately, the water was pretty shallow so I wasn't too worried about that but I didn't want to take any more damage from hitting bottom so I did an emergency blow and only grazed the bottom before she started to rise again very slowly. That's when I discovered that I could not move submerged because both fore and aft batteries had been destroyed

I figured this was going to be a risky journey back home on the surface in daylight this close to England, but I figured I might as well get started. That's when I found out I couldn't move on the surface either Never did figure out why not, as both diesel engines and everything which seemed to be engine-related (other than the batteries) appeared to have been undamaged or to have been successfully repaired. :hmm:

After trying several tricks, like moving the engine telegraph backwards and forwards a few times (which used to fix a problem with not being able to start diesels in undamaged boats if you shut them down on the surface) I finally decided that it just wasn't gonna let me go anywhere, so I hit the magic escape button and warped home. Before I did, I went ahead and buried my 4 dead crewmen at sea, with proper military honors (or as close to it as we could get while worrying about British airplanes arriving on the scene at any moment).

I didn't seem to lose too much renown by doing that, and in the crew screen it showed me with 4 fewer crewmen than I'd had before and even let me award the wound badge to my wounded sailor, BUT the log function does not seem to have picked up on the fact that I lost 4 crewmen - I got credit for the C2s and all, but it showed no lost crewmen and it only showed my hull integrity as having been 97.something percent - I would have expected far more hull damage given the overall destruction of several compartments and all that happened.

This was the first time I had experienced this just random-seeming damage - I assume it was probably a mine, but I wonder if it was one of ours or one of theirs - guess it doesn't matter, since they both go boom and can sure put a damper on your day. I guess I'll have to go looking to see if I can figure out how/where to edit some .cfg file or something to reflect the loss of my poor dead crewmen - doesn't seem right to just let their memory be erased from our patrol records like that.

Good luck and good hunting!