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Originally Posted by Aviv
I have a pair of historical questions I thought of in the last week, so I thought you old sea-dogs could give me some information and feed my curiosity.
First, in my reading I read that a lot of submarines (especially uboats) were sunk by aircrafts. Why didn't they just dive straight when they detected the airplane on radar? For example in the game, I can detect and dive to 30 meters before he can even close to me and is over the horizon. Why did air attack cause such a problem to submarine crews? How frequent were the air patrols?
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The crucial difference is that the game's radar is very reliable and leaves you with no doubt - either it's contact, or no contact. Real radar was not this reliable, and could give confusing signals, or let small aircraft slip past. Likewise, diving took time - depending on the submarine's alert state and position, it could be unprepared to dive as quickly as we usually do in game.
Very few US boats were lost to aircraft in any case. Most were lost to destroyers. In fact, almost as many were lost to friendly aircraft as to enemy aircraft.
As far as U-boats, it's a very different story. They did not have effective air search radar like the US boats, while the aircraft they faced had sophisticated radar and other effective ASW equipment themselves. A vast number of U-boat sinkings were by long-range radar-equipped aircraft at night, when the boats had practically no warning.
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Second, I was reading the other day (bored recently) about how crews can escape from submarines. I learnt that those two small hatches at the back of the submarine (with one at almost 45 degrees) is part of the system which allows sailors to escape; the "escape trunk" (more information on Wikipedia). I wanted to know how successfull was that to allow people to escape and survive sunked submarines?
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Not very! All of these systems were designed for escaping subs at depths of no more than 100 ft, and because most subs operated and were sunk at greater depths, this system was not very useful. In practice, some crews escaped from even deeper wrecks (to about 200ft), although this was difficult. Interestingly, the Russians had the most sophisticated escape gear of the time, which allowed them to escape from subs down to 300ft. It still was based on the same principle, and ultimately not terribly effective.
Escape also relied on compartments remaining watertight and able to retain some air to allow the crew to escape - so if the hull had major ruptures, which are often what sunk the sub in the first place, it offered little help. The sub also had to be relatively upright on the bottom - not a guarantee in a sinking. The escape process itself required some time to prepare by partially flooding the compartment being escaped from. Here things like smoke or chlorine gas from batteries, or hypothermia could also kill the crew before they could complete this process. Even after they left the sub, the crew could die of suffocation, hypothermia and decompression sickness on the way up. Escaping from a sub sinking in deeper waters was 100% impossible. Unless it could blow ballast and surface, a sinking submarine = a dead crew. It would be impossible to open escape hatches against pressure, unless the pressure was equalized. Equalizing pressure = flooding most of the compartment. Flooding most of the compartment on a sinking sub = dropping like a rock and being crushed. In other words, submarine crews were doomed once their sub lost its reserve buoyancy in open sea.
However as far as I know, all major submarine-operating countries in WWII had cases of crews escaping from shallow wrecks using these systems. Most of these escapes were partial (i.e. not all of the crew survived, and in many cases, only a few did). The most famous of these in US service would've been the USS Tang, sunk by a circling torpedo. Only 9 of her crew survived (including the captain).