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Originally Posted by Werewolf13
In the book Clear the Bridge by Richard O'Kane he states that while on sea trials he took the Tang down to 625+ feet. He mentions that the depth gauge pegged out at 600 feet.
While serving on USS Sandlance, SSN-660 the very first watch I stood was monitoring a pressure gauge in the Engine Room Upper level while doing angles and dangles. I was on sound powered phones and was required to read out the pressure at regular intervals during the exercise. Boring as hell and at the time I had no clue why I was doing it (backup to depth gauges up forward). So if WWII subs had pressure gauges it would have been easy for them to keep track of depth using pressure - someone could have just made a table that could have been read from.
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Certainly they had pressure gauges. From the item I referenced above:
"In one action in the Pacific the Tang lost depth control, leaving the control room depth gauge pinned past its max reading of 600ft for a LOOONG time. Long afterwards, when they were both POW's,
a forward torpedoman told O'Kane that he saw an external pressure gauge in that compartment go past 375psi (750ft [sic - should actually be 850!] depth), but decided not to tell O'Kane lest he decide the boat was safe to such an extreme depth and use it routinely in battle!"