Did you ever met an armed tug boat?

pampanito · 09-23-05, 05:34 PM

I just had an interesting patrol under RuB and the latest IC, in grid BF14 I found at night a small ship, identified through UZO as 'tug boat'. It looked harmless enough, but the flag was not easily visible and I did not want to lose renown by sinking a German ship (BF14 is quite near France), so I closed to about 700 metres. Flag mainly red but still dubious, so I decided to fire a starshell to illuminate it. As soon as the starshell ignited, the 'innocent' tug boat switched two searchlights on (I believe they were on the top of her masts) and opened fire with gun and machine-gun, mortally wounding my Watch Officer.
I dived and withdrew to a safe distance, surfaced again and sank the pesky little boat by gun (she took some twenty hits before exploding).
She was not so small after all (1,139 tons). So much for 'tug boats...'

BTW, what starts bad ends worse. Two days after losing my WO I contacted a convoy in BF15, crash-dived under depth-charge attack, and when reaching 119 metres I rammed the sea-bed with such force that forward torpedo and battery rooms flooded instantly, and five seconds later I was looking at a dark screen informing of the loss of U-101 and her entire crew.

09-23-05, 05:34 PM	#1
pampanito Mate Join Date: May 2005 Location: Spain Posts: 59 Downloads: 12 Uploads: 0	Did you ever met an armed tug boat? I just had an interesting patrol under RuB and the latest IC, in grid BF14 I found at night a small ship, identified through UZO as 'tug boat'. It looked harmless enough, but the flag was not easily visible and I did not want to lose renown by sinking a German ship (BF14 is quite near France), so I closed to about 700 metres. Flag mainly red but still dubious, so I decided to fire a starshell to illuminate it. As soon as the starshell ignited, the 'innocent' tug boat switched two searchlights on (I believe they were on the top of her masts) and opened fire with gun and machine-gun, mortally wounding my Watch Officer. I dived and withdrew to a safe distance, surfaced again and sank the pesky little boat by gun (she took some twenty hits before exploding). She was not so small after all (1,139 tons). So much for 'tug boats...' BTW, what starts bad ends worse. Two days after losing my WO I contacted a convoy in BF15, crash-dived under depth-charge attack, and when reaching 119 metres I rammed the sea-bed with such force that forward torpedo and battery rooms flooded instantly, and five seconds later I was looking at a dark screen informing of the loss of U-101 and her entire crew.