04-13-10, 06:27 PM
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#3
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Ace of the Deep 
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Prince Edward Island, Canada
Posts: 1,077
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Quote:
In older boats, where the pressure hull might fail at a much shallower depth, you could get large breaches that would allow water to pour in and drown everyone, but not fast enough to implode the hull. Going by the results of tests, most American submarine losses during Japanese depth charge attacks probably resulted from the failure of hull fittings that allowed the sea to get in, rather than from the hull being crushed in. Hull fittings, in this case, might include things like torpedo tubes.
There were reports of underwater explosions of German U-boats during the war. At the time it was presumed that ordnance was somehow going off, but in retrospect it appears likely these boats, which were strong enough to hold together as deep as 900 feet (and survive), were probably imploding at extreme depth.
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From reading this, it would seem to have been much much worse in an American sub to die at crush depth, than in a U-boat.
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