I am now reading "Silent Victory" (awesome book!) and Clay Blair states clearly that tankers (japanese in this case but should be mostly the same) were really hard to sink IRL, sometimes being able to take in between 4 and 10 (!) torpedos before sinking.
The main reason was, they are already very well divided in compartments which are isolated, have specialized crew and are overall better built. He wrote that they usually sank/were abandoned from uncontrolled fires, but could be really hard to sink with american torps.
My 0.02 eur!
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