[DaveyJ576]

Originally Posted by Stormende

If the American torpedoes were that bad at the beginning of the war, how come the kill ratio between surface vs submerged vessels favored the subs?

You have to remember that for most of the first year of the war, submarines were the only contingent of our armed forces that were effectively carrying the hurt to the enemy. Everything else was sidelined or distracted into defensive actions. Submarines were out there making offensive patrols, seeking out and engaging enemy vessels from day one and didn't stop until the last day of the war. Our surface forces (destroyers, cruisers, and battleships) didn't enter into combat against other ships until the Guadacanal campaign in August 1942, and even then when boiled down to pure numbers, we lost more ships than the Japanese did in the Solomons. The surface forces were tasked with seeking out and destroying the relatively sparse IJN fleet units, leaving submarines and the air forces to engage the more numerous merchant vessels. They simply had more targets to shoot at and therefore the kill ratio favored the boats.

Yes, our torpedoes sucked initially, but they did work some of the time, often enough for aggressive and skilled skippers like Chester Smith, Mush Morton, and Creed Burlingame to put some ships on the bottom.

Originally Posted by Stormende

How often did the submarines use their deck guns and how effective they were?

There is a rather romantic vision in many people's minds of submarines engaging in heated gun battles with merchant vessels. From the American side at least, this actually was pretty rare. The 3" and 4" guns that were carried by the boats in the first two years of the war lacked sufficient punch to dispose of a merchant vessel quickly enough to warrant the danger of exposing the boat to counter attack. Therefore their usage quickly evolved to finishing off cripples (even this was fairly uncommon) and destroying sampans and small coastal luggers. It wasn't until the appearance of the 5"/25 cal gun in the last year of the war that the boats had an effective and fairly powerful gun. However, by this time the torpedo problems had been solved and there was even less incentive to risk your boat in a surface gun battle.

Without a stable element and centralized fire control, accuracy from the pitching and heaving deck of a submarine was poor even under good conditions. You ended up expending a lot of rounds (when misses were figured in) to sink a decent sized vessel, and this took too much time for most skippers.

Submarines are not tolerant of holes in the pressure hull. One small hole and assuming you don't sink, your patrol is over right there and you head home. It is fairly easy to punch a hole in a submarine and disable it, but even a moderate size merchant ship with all its reserve buoyancy can absorb a comparitively large amount of damage and not sink. Therefore the odds favor the merchant ship in a gun battle.

Originally Posted by Stormende

Were the English torpedoes better (reliable) than the Americans ?

Comparitively speaking, British torpedoes were mechanically more reliable than their American or German counterparts. The RN conducted an exhaustive series of firing trials on the China station prior to the war and were thus able to work out most of the bugs. However, the RN also fell prey to the siren-song lure of the magnetic influence exploder. Theirs didn't work any better than the ones used by the USN and the Kriegsmarine and the last of them were not discarded until late 1944.