Yes there are certain points in the translation that need fine tuning IMO
Here is how I understand some of the relevant sentences should be in english, with some additional comments in brackets to better ilustrate the meanings:
Quote:
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“How long a U-boat could travel underwater depended very much on the crew's oxygen consumption. If (Or "when") only the (minimum) necessary crew-members were at their stations (The minimum stations that had to be manned necessarily for the uboat to be under control), and the remainder lay in their bunks, then the oxygen lasted longer, than if the whole crew was in action. Depending on that, oxygen was already added after a few hours, or only after about 12 hours
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It is my understanding that with full crew in normal activities, pure oxygen had to be added after only a few hours, and at barebones crew situation, only after 12 hours.
Sadly it is not clarified if normal compressed air was added first for breathing, before pure oxygen, but it seems to imply that it was not used for that purpose. Probably because normal air would add oxygen and dillute the proportion of CO2, but not restoring the correct and ordinary proportion of oxygen in the air, which can only be done both by adding Oxygen and by absorbing CO2 with chemicals.
We know however as you already reasoned. that UBoats could cross the Bay of Biscay submerged for long periods, and I see it pointless to asume that BDU would order them to do so if the Oxigen supply was exhausted in little time. So I guess that the key is probably in that the compressed oxygen reserve in the UBoat was larger than what we thought, maybe because of number of bottles carried or most probably because of higher compression than what we considered.