[DaveyJ576]

I will be on a family vacation all next week, so here is a long post to keep you busy:

In general, USN submarine skippers in the pre-war period were by and large a very cautious group. This led to some serious issues when the war started. There were several reasons behind this:

1. Being Lieutenants or Lieutenant Commanders they were too junior to have any experience from WWI. Even if they had, our contribution submarine wise to the first war was very limited and nothing on the order of what the Germans and British had. We just didn't have the time to develop comprehensive and cohesive strategies and tactics for the sub force during the first war. With the exception of this less than one year limited taste of combat, the U.S. Submarine Force was completely untested.

2. Several notable submarine accidents with the resultant losses of the boat and/or the crew in the interwar years (S-5, S-51, S-4, and O-5 among others) had focused a lot of negative publicity on the force. The problems in the Submarine Service mirrored what was going on in the rest of the Navy (USS Mississippi turret explosion, Point Honda disaster). Pressure on the Navy Department from the press and the Congress to stop the accidents caused a new emphasis on safety and caution to creep into operational orders. Placing your boat in any situation that smelled of danger was frowned upon to put it mildly.

3. Despite the problems of caution noted above the Navy was eager to showcase what it could do. Heavy emphasis was placed on the annual Fleet Problem (a fleet wide exercise), various smaller exercises, and the Presidential pass-in-review. These things were hyped up and promoted and the desire to have them come off seamlessly and problem free was foremost in the minds of the admirals. Excellence in performance during these exercises became one of the prime considerations for promotions. Aggressive sub skippers were judged to be reckless and their boats were ruled as “sunk” in the exercises. Given the relatively small size of the Navy after the post-WWI draw down and the lack of promotional opportunities this provided for officers, the desire to not screw up and follow the script became paramount in the minds of many sub skippers. Innovation had been effectively stifled.

4. The Navy at the time was dominated by the "Gun Club", a group of like-minded senior officers that had staked their long and distinguished careers on the idea of the primacy of the big gun battleship. They believed (not without reason) that the battleships and cruisers were the center of the fleet and that their long range guns would carry the day in any battle. Unfortunately, these ships were extraordinarily expensive and getting large numbers of them built was hard to push by an isolationist and passive Congress. They placed in jeopardy a great deal of their personal reputations, literally placing their careers on the line, to convince everyone that this was the way to go. These admirals held virtually all the senior positions in the fleet. They made almost all the major decisions, including the format of the fleet exercises. With the best of intentions in mind, and sometimes with not, weight in the exercises was placed on the gun line, other elements such as aviation and submarines were de-emphasized and sometimes the rules were even skewed to make the gun line virtually omnipotent. These men were not stupid; they fully understood that the airplane and submarine were tremendous threats to their precious battleships and in some cases vehemently opposed them. Submariners were bullied into a supporting role for the battle line, and had been cowered into a position of impotency in the face of destroyer opposition by the Gun Club officers, mostly to preserve the idea of the battleship as the queen of the fleet. Eventually the restrictive and unrealistic nature of the exercise rules became so prevalent and accepted that many of the submariners themselves came to believe in their supposed vulnerability. These false beliefs were reflected in some of the tactics that became standard in the pre war years and that proved to be totally useless or unwarranted once the war started. Some of these false beliefs included:

• Attacking on sonar bearings only from 100 feet depth or more. This was done to remove the potential of the periscope being sighted. Unfortunately, the fairly primitive sonar gear of the day and the lack of emphasis on proper sonar training produced information that was not accurate enough to allow precise fire control solutions to be generated.
• Unwarranted and unjustified fear of aircraft and destroyers and their ability to detect you. It is actually very difficult to visually detect (remember, no radar in the pre-war years) a surfaced submarine in most conditions. This led boats to dive too early and thus loose their all important asset of surface speed and maneuverability.
• Depth charges held tremendous destructive power, were instantly fatal, and one or two is all it takes to destroy a sub. This is actually true, but only if the depth charge explodes less than 75 feet away from the boat! Actual tests showed that much beyond that range, a depth charge may give you a good shake and scare the hell out of you, but they rarely caused fatal damage. Only a large accumulation of damage over time caused by these far off misses would prove fatal. That is not to say that depth charges were not dangerous. Indeed they were. You still had to fear them, but not to the extent that was previously believed. They were very hard to accurately target and only very near misses or direct hits would be instantly fatal.

When the occasional submarine skipper raised the bull**** flag and tried something different, he was quickly hammered back into place by the exercise referees. These sore thumbs were quickly reported up the chain and the only thing that saved their careers was the occasional sympathetic squadron commodore.

Were am I going with this? Sub skippers of the USN in the late 1930’s and early 40’s could be broken into three main groups.

Some understood that the state of affairs prior to the war was complete rubbish, but kept their mouth shut and only rarely spoke out or acted on their beliefs. They understood that banging their head against the unmoveable wall of the Gun Club was useless. They worked from within the Submarine Force to improve things the best they could and bided their time until the conditions were right (the war) then unleashed their beliefs in a cold hard fury against the Japanese. Strange as it may seem, this group produced some outstanding skippers early in the war. They also mentored and trained the junior officers who commanded boats later in the war that shot the bottom out of the IJN and the Japanese Merchant Marine.

Another group spoke out strongly against the silliness of the policies and tried radical new tactics during exercises. They were determined to change the system and felt that they had the best interests of the Navy at heart (and they did). They sometimes proved their point, but they didn't last. The Gun Club wielded enormous power; they did not like being proved wrong and often squashed these mavericks like a bug.

The last group were the careerists and ladder climbers. They were so immersed in the system that they couldn't see the faults. They were utterly confident in their ability to drive a submarine effectively and believed their tactics to be sound. When the reality of war hit them like a sledgehammer, proving their entire belief system to be horribly flawed, they couldn't handle it and failed miserably. If the Japanese didn't get them then our Navy did and they were relieved of command.


As the USN moved into 1941 and the inevitability of eventually getting into the war became clear, a new attitude of getting ready came to the forefront of naval policy. This provided an avenue to implement some of the long sought changes in tactics and doctrine that some submarine officers had been wishing for. Unfortunately, it proved to be too little, too late and the U.S. Submarine Service entered into war on December 7th woefully unprepared for the battle that awaited them.

This post may seem like an indictment of the USN. It is not meant to be. I actually find a great deal of pride and inspiration in this. Despite terribly inadequate tactics and doctrine, and despite torpedoes that were one step away from being useless, the U.S. Submarine Service and the men who served it learned quickly from their mistakes, corrected their mechanical problems, and in three short years utterly destroyed one of the world’s largest merchant fleets and the navy that implemented their enemy’s draconian policies. It is this rapid progress up a very steep learning curve that I am the most proud of.