For the last several weeks, I've been using WB and Evan's excellent 1939 Type XXI mod, plus extensive custom modifications to the "timeline" of the game, to play (and stream on Twitch) an alternate history scenario in which just about everything in the u-boat war happens 1-2 years early. Rather than being a "Total Victory" scenario, the campaign ends in 1945 with the outcome uncertain but with Britain effectively starved out.
This started as a practical hypothetical, "
could the Elektroboote have won the Atlantic War, especially if they were using the French bases?" but has since also become a fun excuse to go places in the game that I don't typically visit when doing a more historical career. I try to keep things challenging, largely by not relying too heavily on endgame torpedoes like the LUT and T-X or on the overpowered endgame sonar decoys. With that out of the way,
We are U-3053. Took command in February 1943, first war patrol departed from Kiel in May 1943. We've completed two patrols in the North Atlantic, one in the Caribbean off Curaçao, one off equatorial Africa, and our fifth patrol was a transit from France to Penang. So far things have gone pretty well. We've sunk about nine escorts and immobilized another five (homing torpedoes sometimes blow off the enemy's screws without sinking the ship) and sunk 50,000-70,000 tons of merchant shipping in each patrol. Currently it is late February 1944, we've just passed through the treacherous shallows off Port Moresby and are en route to New Zealand waters. Following this patrol we will be returning to France, and after that, perhaps the Med? It's getting a little late to head there...
Here we are meeting
Charlotte Schliemann 
One thing I've learned just recently is that we need to be more proactive about attacking the escorts where we find them. In 1943, I had mostly relied on the XXI's incredible performance to avoid escorts when possible, in order to take more ordinary anti-merchant torpedoes and fewer acoustic homing weapons. During this patrol, in the Timorsee, we carried out the only convoy attack of 1944 thus far. Let me tell you, the escorts were ferocious. Even though we only tangled with 3-4 of them, they hounded us harder than I've ever experienced. Just one sloop kept us under his thumb for about 45 minutes, and when we had enough of getting pinged and successfully sunk the contact with a T-V, the convoy sent two more frigates to avenge him, making it an even more harrowing disengagement. Clearly, if we're to have any hope of racking up 40,000+ ton patrols against convoys in 1944, it'll hinge on attacking the escorts more aggressively. The trouble is, attacking escorts is an inexact science. You don't necessarily want to go in shooting - sometimes you'll sink escorts that didn't really pose a serious threat, plus it alerts the merchants and makes shooting them much harder - but you also definitely don't want to wait until you're already being pinged by two or more at once, since the odds of scoring multiple homing torpedo hits in quick succession without getting murdered by hedgehogs can be pretty slim. The perfect attack involves penetrating the escort screen, shooting the merchants 4-6 times, and then putting homing torpedoes on 1-2 escorts right before going deep, but even this formula may not guarantee success in 1944.
When we find ourselves leaving Brest again, it will be with at least six T-Vs!
U-3053, sporting some thematic local markings stolen from the historical U-1224, being escorted by an IJN subchaser past Surabaya
