Well, it's not that they neglect their duties completely, but they are too "stressed" (I believe the expression for beery's mod was "combat stress", not "fatigue") to do it right, to the point that they need assistance just brushing their teeth.
My view: I'm sitting in an iron coffin under water, too deep to escape swimming (and it wouldn't matter anyway since I'm in the middle of the North Atlantic and I wouldn't last too long if I did). If a single depth charge goes bang 10 m away from me I'm sure my chances of survival are practically nonexistent.
Then, a bunch of destroyers, flower corvettes and whatnot start pinging. Only that scares me to death because of the stories I've heard from U-Boot captains and, after all, I'm nothing but a simple sailor. Eventually, they find us and start their attack run.
If the first depth charge explosion isn't enough to make me soil my pants directly, there's a second one. And a third one. And a fourth one. Each explosion could mean my death and all of the crew's. As the charges go off, I remember the line "all hands lost" I read in virtually every report of a lost sub.
And the thing goes on for more than 5 hours. 5 hours! 5 hours hearing the hammering of certain death a few meters away and with only a sheet of metal to shield me, that seems thinner every minute.
Even if I don't simply faint two hours into that ordeal, I swear I wouldn't even be able to hold a cup of coffee straight afterwards without spilling all of it on my sailor uniform. If you ask me to load a torpedo, I wouldn't countermand, but my hands would be too shaky to even open the tube, and my arms too weak after having puked a week's worth of canned food.
What surprises me - honestly - is how your crew didn't crack and start calling their mom while sobbing. I'm sure they didn't because it's not modeled in the game, but that's about it.
For what I have seen, the black mark on a crewman's representation means basically that in the case of green sailors, general hand trembling in experienced mates and a paper-white face in the case of the hardest of officers. 5 hours of depth charge run is easy to say, but I'm sure I would consider death to be a reasonable alternative if I were in your crewmen's shoes.
Regards,
Jack Doolan
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