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RE: Achilles heel outside of pressure hull?
Posted by: Ken Dunn ()
Date: April 13, 2001 09:57PM

Hi Tom and Ger,

On 10/12/1942 U-126 was undergoing a depth charge attack and suddenly at 160 meters the boat started sinking out of control. The Chief Engineer, OLt. (Ing.) Hans Schaumlöffel, was finally able to stop the descent at 240 meters by using almost all of her compressed air. There was just enough for one attempt at surfacing left. It took great skill to stop the descent and get her to the surface. When they finally got to the surface they found that some of the torpedo storage tanks outside the pressure hull had been cracked by the depth charges and filled with water and that is what almost sunk U-126. Later in the war the external torpedo storage tanks were discontinued at least partially because of this problem. Another part of the problem was that without control of the air it became too dangerous to surface and extract the spare torpedoes from their containers and load them into the boat. On another occasion, U-126 was caught on the surface by an aircraft with a torpedo from one of the external containers half way in the forward torpedo-loading hatch. She was able to hold the plane off with her anti-aircraft gun while she finished loading the torpedo but the pucker factor must have been tremendous. They couldn’t dive with that torpedo in the hatch and loading a torpedo took quite a while.

Regards,

Ken Dunn

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Subject Written By Posted
Achilles heel outside of pressure hull? Tom Iwanski 04/13/2001 02:03AM
RE: Achilles heel outside of pressure hull? Ger Wallace 04/13/2001 01:39PM
RE: Achilles heel outside of pressure hull? Ken Dunn 04/13/2001 09:57PM
RE: Achilles heel outside of pressure hull? Tom Iwanski 04/16/2001 03:53PM
RE: Achilles heel outside of pressure hull? Rainer Bruns 04/16/2001 08:42PM
RE: Achilles heel outside of pressure hull? Ken Dunn 04/16/2001 10:51PM
RE: Achilles heel outside of pressure hull? Tom Iwanski 04/17/2001 02:52PM
Pressure SuperKraut 04/18/2001 06:39PM
RE: Pressure Rainer Bruns 04/18/2001 08:12PM
More questions Tom Iwanski 04/19/2001 11:54AM
RE: More questions J.T. McDaniel 04/19/2001 12:18PM
More pressure SuperKraut 04/19/2001 03:13PM
air tanks and depth charges kurt 04/19/2001 03:43PM
Second skin SuperKraut 04/19/2001 06:58PM
RE: Achilles heel outside of pressure hull? bernard zimmermann 04/18/2001 03:18AM
RE: Achilles heel outside of pressure hull? J.T. McDaniel 04/18/2001 12:26PM
RE: Achilles heel outside of pressure hull? Rainer Bruns 04/18/2001 01:43PM
RE: Achilles heel outside of pressure hull? J.T. McDaniel 04/18/2001 03:35PM
RE: Achilles heel outside of pressure hull? Rainer Bruns 04/18/2001 08:10PM
RE: Achilles heel outside of pressure hull? Ken Dunn 04/18/2001 09:32PM
RE: Second skin bernard zimmermann 04/22/2001 06:16AM
Higher internal pressure SuperKraut 04/22/2001 07:05AM
RE: Second skin Ken Dunn 04/22/2001 01:53PM
RE: Second skin Ken Dunn 04/22/2001 02:10PM
RE: Second skin bernard zimmermann 04/27/2001 04:06AM


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