Operation Hartmut

[Tessa]

Originally Posted by Pisces

Hartmut began for me last saturday. Left Wilemshaven on the 5th of April, plenty of time to be there in time. I patrolled between AF58 and AF83, near Molde. On the 8th I harassed a L-class destroyer. But couldn't get infront of it. It detected and shelled me at every attempt. (I guess I'm not yet used to MaGui 3.4) But the repair crew always managed to patch things up. I tried to fling about 4 torpedoes (a mix of type 1 and 2's) at it but failed miserably. In daylight... no wonder. Plenty of map reports to chase over the following days. But all the ones that I managed to make contact with ended up being friendly, or neutral at the time. I felt a proud rush as Gneisenau and Scharnhorst passed in front of me when looking through the scope. Slightly annoyed though that they weren't enemies. Oh well, I warned BDu that this could happen! My previous patrol ended April 1st. That's what they get from cancelling all shore-leaves in preparation for a major offensive!

Unless you run into a high value target, anything say aux. cruiser size or higher I wouldn't waste any more eels. Once you get into Narvik or some of the other hot spots the fjords create the perfect bottleneck that big ships can't manuever in. There'll be ample chance to take on more DD's; but best there are BB's and at least 1 flat top that are floating around at various places. Once in the action there's no shortage of targets, the biggest variable is will your torpedoes be all duds (like it was historically where 100% of the torpedoes didn't detonate properly even with impact pistols)

Then there's also the 150,000+ tons of ships that Prien found while he was there that were sitting ducks (literally, they were moored but left completely unguarded) but every torpedo he fired didn't detonate despite an expert captain aiming at a stationary target.