Strictly speaking, "On the bridge" is not right, because the boys do not stay on the tower as usual, but on the platform behind the tower, which was generally called the "Winter Garden".
The first VII boats (Type A, like the one by Jeff) had no anti auircraft weapons there ...
... which changed fast! (Type C) ..:
During the war, the Winter Gardens" became bigger and bigger and at the IXc boats a whole arsenal was installed there...:
... then the 8.8 cm cannon mounted in front of the tower fell of...:
Helped the more and more reinforced air defense armament nothing!
To serve the two twin MGs and the 3.7 machine cannon (or alternatively the 2cm quadlet) six to eight people were needed ...:
... the probability of a successful defense was low because a submarine working in the sea was not a good gun platform.
And until the gun crew had boarded in case of alarm diving, the boat had usually already received a bomb hit in the pressure hull (this was already enough a seam hit) and the Fla operation was cut down by MG fire ...:
Then the boat sank like a stone!
It also did not change some semi-fiction inventions, such as the so-called "Quick Dive Back" (the drafted bug) ...
Result:
Out of 863 boats leaving for patrols, 784 were sunk. Of nearly 40,000 submariners, 32,000 remained at sea.
This was the highest loss rate of a single weapon genre of all participating nations during the Second World War.
Lothar-Günter Buchheim (the author of the book "The Boat") wrote...:
"The entire submarine orlog was a huge children's crusade, and we had 16-year-olds on board, at the end of the war there were
19-year-old Chief Engineers and 20-year-old Commanders, in the form of a quick-haul process, made ready to die in one of the most dreadful ways from life to death. I have always resisted that death news from submarine drivers meant they had fallen. They're drunk, drowned like surplus cats in a sack. "
Cheers
