This patrol has turned out to be one of the best I've had. The previous patrol was frustrating. U-502 returned to Lorient damaged, and with only about 21k tons sunk after many months at sea. We were unable to score any successes in the Caribbean aside from a pair of destroyers sunk at anchor in the Key West harbor and a lone medium freighter near Trinidad.

But this patrol has been quite productive. As mentioned, we sank the battleship and cruiser off Casablanca, then proceeded on toward Freetown, then turned west toward the Caribbean, meeting the tanker U-460 along the way, refueling, and replacing the eight torpedoes fired in the attacks on the Torch invasion fleet.

Our patrol grid was at the southern entrance to the Windward Passage. Airborne ASW patrols were everywhere, but now we have the Metox, and all were easily avoided by diving. Not a single attack was made on us, a nice change!

After completing the objective, and vainly chasing a reported convoy we sailed south to have a look around Curacao and Aruba. During the war Curacao was an important refinery and oil hub so I thought we might find some tanker traffic. No traffic developed but we closed the port at night and found several T3 tankers are anchor. Two of these were sunk at Curacao and two more at Aruba. T3 tankers are among the largest merchant ships in the game, at 11000 tons.

Way too easy to slip in to enemy ports, but it is what it is and I can't well pass up such inviting targets now can I? After that we set course back to the east. Plenty of fuel on board, but no word of any sheduled U-tankers, so better to err on the side of caution until word from Control.

U-502 headed for Trinidad, with a view to patrol along the Trinidad-Freetown route, a commonly used convoy route (in real life anyway, didn't know about in SH4). After many more planes avoided, we made contact with a convoy inbound to Trinidad, unescorted.

Making repeated submerged and surface night attacks we hit the convoy hard.

Here's where I was going to post some screens but the site doesn't upload bmp's.

Anyhow, 5 or 6 ships went down from this convoy. Without escorts, and at night, there's little they can hope for other than the periscope doesn't fall on them. At present we are on the way home having sunk over 120,000 tons (with one reload of 8 fish as mentioned). What a contrast to the previous patrol, and I love the 'Biscay Cross'. I guess the game doesn't model centrimetric radar, which the Cross can't detect, so we have it far easier than the real skippers did. But as long as I don't get trapped submerged, the Cross is enough to give us hope of surviving the war. But there is still a long way to go.







No, now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!