Escorts less effective in fog..

[Kaiser_W]

I was doing an attack run on a convoy in heavy fog, about 300M visibility and heavy seas, at time surfacing my boat even though I was periscope depth. On the way there, I was nearly T-boned by a destroyer who had no idea I was there. Once in the convoy, I picked off 3 troop ships, a T3 and a Liberty, not much, but lots of tonnage. Sneaking away fromt he convoy, one of the convoys was doing a depth charge run about 500M of my stern and in the wrong direction at shallow depth, I was well over 200M down...

The convoy itself was strange, it was either one small convoy following a bigger one or they got seperated in the fog, altogether there were about 5 escorts...

[twistedpretzel]

First convoy i found was in no formation and in the fog much like how you described. There was absolute confusion inside the convoy, it was very erratic.

[Kaiser_W]

On top of that, they were crusing along at close top speed.

[paulhager]

Originally posted by Kaiser_W:
I was doing an attack run on a convoy in heavy fog, about 300M visibility and heavy seas, at time surfacing my boat even though I was periscope depth. On the way there, I was nearly T-boned by a destroyer who had no idea I was there. Once in the convoy, I picked off 3 troop ships, a T3 and a Liberty, not much, but lots of tonnage. Sneaking away fromt he convoy, one of the convoys was doing a depth charge run about 500M of my stern and in the wrong direction at shallow depth, I was well over 200M down...

The convoy itself was strange, it was either one small convoy following a bigger one or they got seperated in the fog, altogether there were about 5 escorts...

I'm guessing that this was early in the war. My personal experience was that I was in about as much danger of being rammed as of bagging merchants, so I decided to delay attacks until the weather improved.

I did post about making a successful radar only attack on a single merchant (1942) in heavy fog. I'd counsel against doing that against a convoy because the escorts will be all over you.