Over the course of three patrols and most of 1942, I've been puttering around the south Pacific in S-42 at blistering speeds of under ten miles per hour. Now, in most respects, this thirty-year old boat is not to be underestimated. Its small torpedo loadout is offset by the fact that the old S-boats are outfitted with the reliable Mark 10 torpedo, meaning that my torpedos tend to sink their targets, rather than themselves. The S-boats have a tiny profile and similarly low weight, making them agile underwater and harder to detect than the bigger fleet boats. Hell, with some duct tape and ingenuity, the crew even fitted an SJ radar system to give us an edge over the eagle-eyed IJN watch crews.
That point about the point about surface speed, though, has plagued me since the onset of the Pacific war. Time and again, I have found myself able to detect a convoy, transport, or task force and totally unable to do anything with that information. Why? Because a two-inch wave or a gentle breeze or a passing school of fish will have my boat's top speed limited to thirteen knots. It's been absolutely maddening to see ten-thousand-ton transports, tankers, and whole convoys escape, unscathed, all because my boat's engines just don't have the same sprint capability as the newer fleet boats.
Setting out from Brisbane in early October, I promised not to return without bloodying the nose of the Japanese navy. Heading north, through the Coral Sea, the radio was abuzz with reports of skirmishing between US and Japanese battlegroups just east of the Solomons. Merchant-hunting orders be damned; I ordered a course plotted to the area, in the hopes that we could get there, before the action died down.
Also, totally not because I have history books at my disposal from sixty years in the future telling me where a couple of IJN battleships might soon be found.We arrived at Tulagi, just north of Guadalcanal in the first days of November. A tanker and subtender had arrived a few weeks ahead of us, allowing us to replenish our diesel reserves. We were advised to stay on station, in case the order should arrive for us to support the marine force on Guadalcanal or the carrier group in the area, but between the bay's shallow waters and a constant stream of air raids and bad weather, I elected to depart the vicinity of Tulagi and patrol the length of The Slot. A few odd tankers and supply ships presented themselves, but the light traffic suggested that the Japanese were likely committed to the idea of a massive counterattack at Guadalcanal, rather than slowly streaming in reinforcements.
That in mind, after about a week of back-and-forth runs, I returned the boat to Tulagi to replenish our supply of torpedos and top up the diesel reserves again. In the night, we received Fox Traffic reporting a sighting of a major Japanese task force on approach to Guadalcanal. This was opportunity knocking! Finally, a chance to punch the IJN fleet in the nose with a few thousand pounds of Torpex! I ordered the whole crew to the deck to assist with loading the final torpedos, then immediately severed the refueling lines, so that we could get away from Tulagi and out to open water, where our radar could actually do some good.
And what good it did! Just after repositioning the boat, just west of Savo island, the radar operator called out two large contacts, one entering the area via a channel to the west of Tulagi, and one from the waters just west of Guadalcanal. One would be the Japanese fleet, intending to clear a path for their troop transports, while the other would be an American task force. The question was, who was who? Owing to S-42's abysmal top speed, there would only be time to intercept and identify one of the contacts, and if we chose the wrong contact, there would be no time to try again.
I plotted an intercept course for the northern task force and had the helmsman ring up flank speed, before I went above to join the watch crew. Around 1:30am, a sharp eye noticed smoke on the horizon. How he could see a puff of black smoke against the night sky was a mystery to me, but once it was pointed out, I could spot the outline myself. The Japanese were known for having watch crews capable of spotting ships five miles away in the dark of night, so being ahead of the task force and not wanting to prematurely alert them to our presence, I ordered a dive to 190 feet, a hair's breadth above the S-boat's test depth.
Feeling sorry for the planesmen, I called for silent running on the way down. They would have to finish the dive without the benefit of noisy hydraulic assistance. The Japanese, assuming that's who was out there, had to be kept unaware of our presence, though. What's more, tracking the incoming task force was now solely the job of our hydrophone operator, whose life would be made that little bit easier by not having our own boat drowning out the sound of the other vessels' screws.
The tension became palpable as time passed. Wierdly, it was the hydrophone operator who seemed most relaxed. He had a sense of what was going on on the surface. The rest of us were effectively blind to the situation above. Something would have been mentioned, had the leading destroyers sped up, right? Though it was barely fifteen minutes, it felt like a day-long ordeal, but finally, the silence was broken by a whisper, "The screen is past, but the center is really close." The destroyers had run overhead, apparently without noticing us, but if their charge was too close, it might already have been too late to have a hope of sinking anything. Caution dictated letting the task force pass.
The German submariners have a saying, "He who wishes to be victorious at sea must always attack!"
I ordered the boat secured from silent running, and immediately the hydraulic pump whirred back to life. I called for a rapid ascent, and the boat responded, practically leaping to periscope depth. The action came at a cost. As soon as the periscope breached the surface of the water, it was apparent that the task force had heard the old S-boat roar to life, as they were just beginning to accelerate and make a hard turn. More striking still, though, was the rising sun adorning the flag of the 34,000 ton battleship eight-hundred yards in front of the scope. Immediately I began calling out bearing and range information, for my first officer to calculate a shooting solution. Spurred by the urgency of the situation, he sent his figures to the torpedo room and had all four tubes ready to fire in under a minute.
With four fish in the water, my focus shifted to survival. The leading destroyers had doubled back and the destroyers at the back of the task force were weaving their way through the cruisers and battleships, all of them seeking to split S-42 like so much firewood. The planesmen pitched the boat downward again, and on the way back to our previous depth, I again called for silent running.
That silence was broken almost immediately by the sound of a muffled explosion, then another, and a third, and a fourth! Four for four!
Those wouldn't be the only distant explosions of the morning, but the destroyers found themselves without the time to properly hunt us. Apparently the torpedo impacts had set our target aflame, giving the friendly task force a very good idea where they needed to be shooting. Under cover of gunfire and nearly two-hundred feet of water, we silently crept toward the friendly battle line. By the time we arrived, the guns had silenced, and the Japanese were in retreat.
Surfacing the boat brought ill news. The battleship that we had punched in the nose was the first to leave the field of engagement, so despite its burning calling the US fleet's attention to the hostile task force, it was able to limp away. Moreover, once the remaining ships of the friendly task force managed to return to formation, they intended to steam toward the last reported location of the Japanese troop convoy at a steady fifteen knots. We steamed up and down The Slot one more time to see if our radar could pick up any Japanese stragglers, but there was nothing moving so slow as to come within our reach. S-42's involvement in this engagement, it would seem, was over.
The tanker and supply ship from earlier in the month were certainly a victory, but being unable to finish off the IJN battleship left my morale low, as I plotted out a return course to Brisbane. It would be a long few weeks, crossing the Coral Sea, with so little to show for our efforts in that battle west of Savo.
On our way back, though, the radar operator called out another massive contact. We had caught another task force that had apparently slipped south, into the Coral Sea and was on a course to steam right across our nose! Again, we dove as deep as our hull could tolerate and slowed to a crawl. Again, the destroyer screen passed by us, unaware of our presence, and again, we raced back up to periscope depth, before the bulk of the task force could have a chance to slip past. My mouth was practically watering as the scope rose. What potential prize would present itself, when it breached the surface?
Flat tops! A gaggle of escort carriers! So much tonnage and so little armor that I almost started to call out targetting information, without checking the flags.
Stars and stripes. Dammit. We surfaced, wove our way through the task force, and continued back to Brisbane.
Footnotes
Historical inaccuracies abound!
Even omitting the involvement of a US submarine (which was admittedly my own doing), Silent Hunter IV gets the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal pretty wrong. In reality, the US and Japanese task forces practically ran headlong into each other in the sound between Savo and Guadalcanal, at which point pandemonium broke loose, and both fleets wound up limping away, albeit with the Japanese markedly worse for wear. In SHIV, the Japanese fleet won't even enter the sound between Savo and Guadalcanal, before turning around and heading for home! In fact, the game plays the Japanese fleet as being so timid that, left to their own devices, only the outermost elements of the destroyer screen get within range of US guns, without a plucky, suicidal submarine captain there to try to lure the two forces closer to one another. It's kind of like Tomorrow Never Dies, except that instead of a stealthy missile cruiser, you're in an itty-bitty tin can.
The composition of the US task force in the Coral Sea should also strike you as being quite suspect. I called them "escort carriers" in the patrol story, but those carriers are modeled loosely on the Yorktown-class fleet carrier. Being that I ran into this task force in late November, 1942, there was only one fleet carrier left in the whole of the United States Navy, markedly less than the five seen in the screenshot I took (with more hidden or outside of my field of view). It's not the first time something like that has happened to me in SHIV, as I did once encounter a Japanese task force with three Yamato-class battleships when only two were ever produced.
The patrol story itself doesn't even accurately reflect everything that happened in the game. For example, when I was first patroling The Slot, I sank a ridiculous 37,000 tons of merchant shipping with my deck gun. Not only is this total ludicrous, but the power of the piddly four-inch gun is way too high in-game to be able to sink multiple tankers and freighters, without those vessels first being torpedoed. Moreover, when the time came, I did sink four torpedos into the IJN Fuso, at which point it capsized and sank in under two minutes. I'll grant that four Mark 10 torpedos collectively carry about a ton of Torpex, but even putting all four of them in below the Fuso's armor belt, it seemed to sink awfully rapidly. Ultimately, I decided to let the ship get away in the story to really emphasize the frustration I had been feeling in my previous patrols.
And in a little bit of the game getting history wrong and a little bit of me lying, the S-boats in SHIV utilize the same torpedo data computer as the fleet boats. In fact, S-boats operated a lot more like German U-boats, in that a firing solution had to be computed by hand, because S-boats were too small to actually have anywhere to put the American TDC. Therefore, historically, things would have played out similarly to what I wrote, though in-game, I was entering data into a simulated TDC.
Finally, after this patrol, the game assigned me to the USS Stingray, a Salmon-class fleet boat, with a top speed on the surface of twenty-one knots. I'll be doing radar-assisted end-arounds with the best of them on my next patrol!
If you enjoyed this, and I manage to make this career last another two in-game years, I'll probably have another patrol story to post. I've got this funny feeling I'll either be in the Surigao Strait or just east of Samar in October of '44.tl;dr - S-boats are slow.
