[DaveyJ576]

There is currently a debate going on in the Submarine Trivia thread concerning the reliability of author Norman Friedman's book U.S. Submarines Through 1945: An Illustratred Design History. This book, while I consider it to be a authoritative reference work, has to be read and absorbed with a certain degree of caution. I can not emphasize this enough: this is not a book for a novice, or even average, reader. He wrote it for an experienced reader with a naval history or engineering background.

Mr. Friedman's writing style is not the best in the world. It is very academic in nature, with a choppy and broken paragraph structure. He will frequently drop interesting morsels like "The Electric Boat S-boats had to be rebuilt", then utterly fail to explain or expand on that statement. He also frequently refers to an extensive notes section, often leaving very important and illuminating information to a section in the back of the book, forcing the reader to constantly flip from the page you are reading to the notes section. This serves to break up your line of thought and makes his material hard to understand, and very easy to take out of context. I have also occasionally found some minor typos. Whoever his editor was did a poor job of keeping him on task and writing a well formulated and readable book.

I have a feeling that when he took on this project he didn't realize what a massive and detail loaded work it would become. A well intentioned attempt to cram as much detail as he could into the book backfired and the result was a sometimes confusing mass of data.

That is not to say that he is unreliable. Rarely have I found an out-and-out error in his works and in general he gets it right. He primarily works from original sources, i.e. Department of the Navy planning and construction documents, construction plans, materiel vendor documents, etc. Therefore, I consider him to be an authoritative and reliable author. But this also puts him at the mercy of the very material he uses. Planning documents will sometimes contradict the construction orders. Construction orders and plans are sometimes changed on the fly as needed to get the job done. These changes were sometimes not properly documented and this leads to contradictions from one document to the other. As the years have passed, some of the original documents have been lost and some destroyed, leaving gaps in the knowledge base and this leads to further confusion and contradictions.

My background has given me the experience necessary to "read between the lines" so to speak and interpret what Mr. Friedman writes. Even still, I have to read his works very carefully in order to understand what he intended.

For the average or novice reader, Mr. Friedman's book should only be used as a backup resource. The book that I can highly recommend is John D. Alden's The Fleet Submarine in the U.S. Navy. In this book, Mr. Alden hit solid gold. He has a well formulated and very readable writing style. It flows well and he makes this sometimes arcane subject easy to understand. I have never caught Mr. Alden in a mistake and his material has always checked out as accurate against other sources. I have refered to my copy of this book (which I have had for about 27 years) so many times it has become a little dog eared and worn. I consider it a true treasure and it is my prime source of info on the fleet boats. Unfortunately, I believe that this book is out of print so it may be a little difficult to find.