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The submarine is meant to attack out of the darkness and disappear without a trace in the bloody game of naval warfare chess. They were not hunted, they hunted, silent, soundless, murderous. But it was during the World War II when one of the bold German U-boats found out that sometimes, despite the victory, the sea could retaliate, and in a cruel way. It had scored a murderous bulls-eye--to receive a face-full of flaming, high-explosive pay-back--of the ship it had just sunk.

This was 1942 and the Atlantic was a slaughtering ground. The Germans U-boats were wolfing the ocean and the Allied cargo ships were sunk by the dozen in a desperate attempt to choke Britain. Among these hunters was U-210, a Type VIIC submarine and Kapitubernantartetic Lemcke. The VIIC was the workhorse of the German underwater fleet, tough, dependable, and lethal, yet small enough to conceal, yet able to kill.

On 6 th August U-210 was propaganda-stalking a slow-moving Allied convoy off the coast of Newfoundland. Warships escorted these convoys and the U-boats did not rush. Lemcke bided his time and then sneaked up and launched his torpedoes against HMCS Assiniboine, a Canadian destroyer which was running with the convoy. However, then something did not work out. The destroyer was not struck. Rather it sighted the U-boat--too near.

Then the devil flung.

U-210 had been spotted on the surface, unable to get away, and had scrambled as the Assiniboine came racing up in alarm. The hunted in a blink of a second turned into a hunter. The collision of the two ships gaming metal on metal and smoke coming out of the two ships. The destroyer gunners were firing at point-blank range--so near, in fact, that hand held weapons had to be used and they even threw grenades over the narrow strait. The sub crew man desperately manned their deck gun and machine guns but they were hopelessly outclassed.

Then there was the moment which no submarine crew ever desires to see, a direct hit--at nearly point-blank range--by the very destroyer it had just attempted to destroy.

The Assiniboine with its 4.7 inch main gun, sent round after round into the conning tower and pressure hull of U-210. Fire broke out, men were blown overboard, and the U-boat started on fire. damage was terrible. The submarine began to sink--not in a quiet withdrawal of stealth, but in a lingering, agonising death-drift under the waves. The destroyer, now himself badly damaged by ramming and fighting at close quarters, saw the sub disappear in the sea.

Lemcke and a few of his crew fled into the water, and were hauled out of the ocean by the very ship which had just blown their own vessel to matchwood and fire. The sarcasm was heavy. U-210 had ghosted the convoy, fired upon a warship and engaged in one of the most ferocious, near-in naval battles of the Atlantic campaign. And after all, it was sunk by the same ship it had endeavored to destroy--at point-blank range, too, almost within spitting distance.

And rare and brutal was the moment in the naval history. Submarines were not designed to fight face to face. Destroyers were not meant to bump into their opponents like war galleys of the ancient times. Yet on this day both those rules were violated. It was gritty,/unorganized, and intimate,--more akin to a knife fight in a phone booth, than modern warfare.

And it was but once.