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Originally Posted by gutted
if you don't use your snorkel much.. then you obviously dont use your hydrophones all that much to find stuff that BDU doesn't report to you.
the snorkel is a blessing for listening on the move.
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??
Not sure exactly what this means - what does the schnorkel have to do with hydrophone checks? When I'm conducting routine hydrophone checks (which I do, as the term implies, rather routinely), I always do it at dead slow or all-stop, since at any higher speeds the noises from my own boat's engines/props would tend to drown out any more distant screw noises I might otherwise detect, and I always do it at about 20m depth, as that appears historically to have been more or less optimum depth for such checks. I would assume that running on diesels using the schnorkel would be way louder than on electrics (or stopped), plus you'd be closer to the surface (where surface/wave noises would be increased, thus also masking the more distant screw noises). Therefore, I would not think that the schnorkel would really be "a blessing for listening on the move".
Thanks for all the input folks - sounds like Ducimus pretty much summed up where I was coming out on this:
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Originally Posted by Ducimus
Snorkel ONLY to recharge battiers when needed, and establish a routine. For example id only run the snorkel at 0 hour and would lower the mast immediatly as soon as the batters were fully recharged. Usally around 0500. Chances of airstrikes at night are *slighly* less. .
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And I certainly agree with what seems to be the consensus opinion that while the schnorkel may thus provide some additional chance of survival, it basically was too little/too late and was an admission that the U-boat had failed in its essential mission 'cause it could no longer really function as it needed to in order to accomplish any meaningful result in terms of affecting the outcome of the war.