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Originally Posted by johnm
question 1 - surely if I'm on bottom I can't sink any further and the two compartments still affected would be sealed off from the rest of the sub. After all they were being repaired anyway.
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You don't mention which compartments were flooded but it really doesn't matter, especially with
two of them fully flooded.
First off, IIRC it's not as if every section of the boat was compartmentalized and bulkheaded with watertight doors.
Also, the sheer weight of having any one compartment flooded would make surfacing impossible. That's even assuming you've workable electric engines still and full compressed air tanks to blow your ballasts.
Worse is that any major flooding of the bow or stern compartments wound up flooding the batteries as well. This not only shorted them out (and so you've no power to the electric engines) but generated
huge amounts of chlorine gas. So now you've a small enclosed steel cylinder rapidly filling with a highly toxic gas.
As a good example of what the result is from having your forward torpedo compartment abruptly flood, read here:
ww.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_23/s5.htm
The crew were
very lucky to escape. And it was only due to the combined luck of the length of their boat and the shallow depth of the water that enabled them to manage the manuever they did that resulted in their rescue.
And here is a second example; one, unfortunately, not as lucky.
http://homepage.eircom.net/~navalassociation/thetis.htm