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Originally Posted by Trout
Accounts I've read from both theatres indicate that destroyers and other sub hunters simply don't bugger off that quickly.
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The big problem with reading anecdotal accounts is that they are part of the entertainment industry. Boring accounts simply don't get published. If you were a publisher, would you publish accounts of a 5 minute engagement where the sub easily avoided depth charges, or would you publish the ones where it was a 12 hour life and death struggle? Anecdotal evidence is often misleading. It leads people to believe that all depth charge attacks were long, drawn out, deadly duels. That simply wasn't the case.
It's the same with gun camera footage. Have you ever seen gun camera footage where a pilot put hundreds of rounds of ammo into an enemy plane to no effect? I haven't. Yet these types of things happened most of the time. But for a TV documentary they need gun camera footage where something explodes or breaks up after a few seconds. This is why air combat simulations give such a poor representation of air combat - the people making the sim assume that infotainment of the sort we get on The Military Channel represents real data and hard fact. So we get sims where air combat lasts the same amount of time as a two-second snippet of gun camera footage from an air war documentary (yes, I'm talking about IL-2), or we get sub sims where every depth charge engagement is an endurance test. This is why campaigns in most air combat and sub combat sims have been impossible to survive - in real life half of WW2 fighter pilots survived the war, and 3/4 of U-boat commanders survived the war, but in every air combat and sub sim I've ever played it's virtually impossible to survive for more than a few weeks. Modern media mislead us because they need sound and visual bytes - a couple of seconds of film that shows a gripping story, or a sentence that grossly misleads the viewer about casualty rates in WWI air combat: who hasn't heard the sentence "The life expectancy of a pilot in WW1 was two weeks"? It's completely false - the true life expectancy was between one and two years. Documentaries often use the life expectancy for untrained pilots thrown into the breech during the worst month of the war, and 'accidentally' use this statistic as if it applies to the whole conflict.
In other words, documentaries and anecdotal evidence should be taken with a pinch of salt. They're entertaining, and single experiences can even be true in themselves, but unless you have the whole context it's just not realistic to rely on anecdotal evidence when you need to find data relating to the entire experience (such as you need when building a simulation). One U-boat's exceptional experiences never equate to the entire experience of the U-boat war. Reality is a lot more mundane than anecdotes would have you believe.