From what I've read, it seems simple enough.
1. ALAAAAARM!
2. All men go forward, the boat starts tilting up to a max of 40-45 degrees.
3. The men are called to their diving stations almost right away, the boat levels back.

So They would stay at 45 degrees for just a couple of seconds. That's just my educated guess.

Edit: more precisely I should say;
2. All men go forward and are called back almost right away
3. The boat tilts up to 45 degrees and levels back

where does this 45 degree angle idea come from?

has anyone ever tried just standing on any surface at 45 degrees? you would barely be able to stay in position much less do even the simplist tasks. such angles would disable your sub as well as your crew.

30 degrees is very extreme and more likely the maximum angle ever done where the crew had any chance of still functioning and recovering from

just look at the dive planes settings used, they say a lot



also ww2 subs cant take extreme angles without shifting balast around and the physics of floatation fight against you unlike an airplane that is free to do what it wants to only fighting gravity

trying to apply 20th century subs fast crash dives and how they can be made to jump out of the water manuvers to what was possible in ww2 is just wrong.

Well, personally, I get 45 degrees from mainly 2 things (as stated in my previous posts).

1. "(iii) Diving Angles.
During a normal crash dive, the angle tower increases from roughly 2 at the commencement to 10° as the bridge screen dips. Thereafter the angle down is normally from 12-15°, though angles up to 45 have been reported, after complete submersion."
http://www.uboatarchive.net/KTBNotes...iveEdition.htm

2. and Buchheim's Das Boot (assuming he wasn't exaggerating the angle simply to make his book more interesting)
Page 194,
"The Chief slowly levels the boat out and orders, "Man diving stations!" The seamen who rushed forward now work their way back hand over hand up the slope. The sausages act like a scale: we're still a good thirty degrees bow heavy."

To me that sounds like "still a good 30 degrees" while the boat is leveling off, hence it went a little more than 30.

I think there was another place in Werner's Iron Coffins that indicated a very steep dive angle, I'll have to look at it again.

Edit: But I must say that I think the average angle was probably around 25 degrees, but for sure some boats pushed it to 45.

Being a old sub sailor myself any angle more than 20 degrees and you got problems in the control of the ship. You would be damn lucky to walk even up hill at this angle also.
The fastest dive we ever made was in 17 seconds to periscope depth and the sub was traveling at close to 18 knots when we pulled the vents. Our sub was 309' long and when you dove you put the bow and stern planes on full dive until you got to or close to periscope depth then the diving officer would give commands how to set them up and by that time you were lucky to be doing 4-6 knots as the water drag is tremendous, besides the electricians have to switch to the battery mode on the motors and I am sure there are drag time on the screws coming off of 18 knots to the 4-6 knots.
Just to let you know the Pickerel made a up bubble surface of 45 degrees and when the boat settled down the stern went to about 700', crush depth and was lucky it did not pop the after torpedo room.
I don't recall what happened but when on the Blackfin we had an incident were the after torpedo room also went to around 720' and the torpedomen back there were screaming their heads off to get theis damn pig boat up.
I suppose there were some pretty wild manuvers during the war but just can't see going either way more than 20 degrees.
Bert68

Great post Bert! :up: Always good to hear it straight from the horses mouth. Maybe Buchheim was full of it after all... If only we could get a post from somebody who served on type 7C U-boats. :hmmm:

Remember that Buchheim was a war artist not a trained submarine officer. Even in Das Boot he never performs any duty more technical than bridge lookout so I treat his operational observations with a great deal of caution.