Comedy? I'm guessing the joke's on you nerd.
Scuba? In 1940 whatever. Granted the first aqua-lung was made in 1943. There was one and it was destroyed by shelling France. I'm guessing those guys swimming round' their civies a hundred feet below the surface would have died of hypothermia in about 5 minutes.
Actually they were Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus not scuba, if youlook at a picture you'll see they are clearly the same as depicted in the film.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Davis_Submerged_Escape_Apparatus.jpg They were used many times by submariners to escape from submarines both pre and during WWII. They were used extensively in WWII not to mention used to lay mines on ships from X Class Submarines, so I doubt the wearers would be dead in five minutes.
No WWII sub had a air-lock -- wouldn't work with a vessel pressurized to surface pressure. Boy I sure feel sorry for the guys who came from the "Oil Tank Repair" I hear the bends is a horrible way to go. Coors was lucky to get conked on the head.
Wrong again. The above mentioned X Class subs had an airlock for the divers, that was back in 1942, so I am sure that other subs did too during WWII, after all they all had pressurized air that could be used to clear a sealed room just as well as blowing the ballast.
As for the bends, I am no expert but I am fairly sure that the bends comes about from rapid changes in pressure, i.e. rising from depth to the surface too fast. In which case one would need to enter a decompression chamber. Now I don't know how deep they were but say periscope depth - that is just 12m. Regardless they stayed the same depth, didn't surface and then re-entered the sub, which itself is a kind of decompression chamber, so I am not sure the bends apply at all.
I also found the use of the underwater search light by the German sub hunter, um, improbable.
I don't remember that scene but it is not improbable. They used search lights when hunting subs at night in WWII, primarily to detect surfaced subs and periscopes but depending on the water and the depth of the sub a search light could show a sub below the surface as a darker shadow.
The hydrogen explosion is the best. A depth charge within a hundred or so feet will kill a sub. So several thousand cubic feet of hydrogen do what? burn the pain a little? OK.
Not true, otherwise why bother with a depth gauge on the depth charges? If a sub is at 150m (450ft) and the a depth charge goes off at 135m (400ft) the sub is undamaged. Depth charges are only effective at less than 15m and lethal at less than 5m, despite what they usually show in films, indeed hedgehogs were the most effective anti sub device, depth charges were really just pot luck.
I admit though, I didn't get the hydrogen aspect at all. Never heard of such a thing before. Aside from that though the film was highly historically accurate, assuming of course that unlike you, one doesn't get their knowledge from other historically inaccurate films.
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