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Originally Posted by Kilhmar
I wonder why you would say that? The video showed no cannon fire (.50 cals are not cannon), nor did it show any damage done. A lot of water splashes and a few incendiary flashes yes, but no evident damage done to the U-boat.
Also you should always take these video clips with a grain of salt. I don't know if it was an outtake from Discovery or a WWII propaganda film, but it shows us three distinctly different U-boats. In the first U-boat scene the U-boat is clearly diving, its turm just about to be submerged. The second (very brief) U-boat scene shows a smaller U-boat, probably a VII with a small turm maneuvering on the surface. The third and final U-boat scene shows a mid-late war IX with a large turm configuration being strafed. The fate of these U-boats remain unknown since we don't actually get to see any of them being sunk.
Always remember that wartime footage was filmed for a purpose, and that purpose seldom had anything to do with the truth.
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What do you mean by "evident" damage? If you're looking for huge gaping holes, then those you won't see, however, even a .50 would have devastating effects upon the pressure hull of a U-boat, keep in mind it only takes one hole to compromise the pressure hull and make it less effective. Holes such as that wouldn't be evident in that video because they wouldn't be huge, but each hole would have compromised the hull integrety further. Enough of those small holes and you might as well not have a pressure hull since it wouldn't be able to do it's job at all.
I really wish I still had copies or links to all the documentation I had bookmarked back when I played World War II Online. The effectiveness of aircraft guns vs. ground vehicles was always a huge topic of debate.
Here are a couple of pages I managed to find on the WarBird's forums that list the armor penetration values of some of the common aircraft guns.
http://img59.exs.cx/img59/919/ap19az.jpg
http://img59.exs.cx/img59/9960/ap23wz.jpg
Also, keep in mind that no matter what you see in movies regarding the cannons on aircraft, you're not always going to see big explosions or such. Cannons on aircraft usually had several different types of ammo. Some would fire HE (High Explosive) rounds, some fired AP (Armor Piercing) rounds, and some would fire a mixture of the two (3 AP rounds followed by 1 HE or something similiar to that). AP rounds hitting would show no explosion on impact, meanwhile HE rounds would.
Really, in a U-boat, there's no reason outside of the training mission that you should be sitting on the surface exchanging blows with an aircraft.