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Originally Posted by Kpt. Lehmann
1. If the deck gun is in operation, there are most likely crewmen who have little to do inside the sub and would naturally be part of a human conveyor belt removing waterproofing (airtight tubes w/ rubber gaskets containing shells I believe... similar to what we used for our propellant charge) and handing off projectiles to the next man.
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Strict limits were imposed restricting the number of crewmen on deck at any time due to the threat of aircraft attack. It was suicidal to place more than a few men on deck at any time, and even more so when the deck gun was in use, since they were probably firing on a ship that had radioed the position of the attacking U-boat to anyone who would listen. For these reasons you simply could not have a human chain on deck for conveying shells to the gun.
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I do not mean to offend anyone's sense of what may be realistic. It will naturally remain a point of debate. Reload and firing times are highly situational.
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But the numbers aren't debatable. There are timed examples of 'in combat' gunnery, and all of them that I've seen show definitive average reload times of over 1 minute per shell. In the end, it doesn't matter what the specifics of reloading a gun are, because we have actual details of times and ammo expended: we have the time spent firing and the number of shells expended, and this gives us an unambiguous figure that is not hampered by the vagueries imposed by guessing how long it would take to get a shell to the gun. We know for a fact that if a crew attacked a ship with the deck gun in a protracted engagement, it took over a minute on average to load each shell expended.
I have asked on numerous occasions to see if people can disprove the 60 second reload time I have used (which, by the way is 10 to 20 seconds faster than the real life figures show). All anyone needs to do is show me an example of a U-boat firing 40 rounds or more at a rate of less than 1 shell per minute, and I will consider that seriously. No one has yet done that. Perhaps no one has tried, but in any event, there is nothing that I've seen to suggest that a deck gun could engage in protracted gunnery with a reload rate of less than a minute when averaged out over the length of the shoot. What I have seen are examples that show guns in action that required a minute or more per round expended.
Again, my figures aren't based on 'best guesses' about people running shells up to the deck, or how many men you could put in a human chain, or how fast you could reload based on the breech design of an 88 or 105mm gun. You don't need to guess based on those things. You get a much better estimate when you use actual documented combat reload rates (as I have done) which show start and end times for the shoot, and how many rounds were expended. You don't need to get into greater detail when you have such clear and fundamental info.