I think that was partly an issue of Japanese doctrine or culture. The Japanese did not spend a lot of time on "defensive" issues, like ship damage control or air-sea rescue. That was part of the reason why they did not setup a proper convoy organisation until late 43.

You can thank Alfred Mahan for a good portion of this. It just amazes my how rigid they were to clinging to their naval doctrine. They don't adapt for anything.

Karl von Clausewitz's famous maxim that "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy," probably never had a less enthusiastic audience than the Imperial Navy or the Japanese military as a whole. The Japanese were not prepared almost to the bitter end to admit that had made a mistake. Throughout the war, the Japanese preferred sticking with a plan, even a bad plan than to question one. In their military ethos, dying in the act of undertaking hopeless orders was seen as preferable and far more honorable than exercising initiative and defying higher authority. When they succeeded they scored highly by determination. When they failed they paid heavily for a lack of flexibility.

A good example of how the US adapted and learned from the past was the "unrestricted submarine warfare" change in tactics.

Post WWI, everybody was outlawing the use of unrestricted submarine warfare, but the second the US was attacked, we dropped that law/rule. Atleast somebody in the naval college had paid attention to what Germany was almost able to achive with u-boats. The Japanese were married to the "subs-as-fleet-support" strategy.

An interesting bit of trivia is that the skipper of the first boat to make a patrol to Japan in dec. 41, Joe Grenfell in USS Gudgeon, carried a written order personally signed by his commander to carry out unrestricted submarine warfare. They were worried that they could technically be tried as pirates if they were captured by the Japanese.

I think that you guys are, in general being far too hard on the pre-war USN. If they were wedded to the false god of A.T. Mahan, they were certainly not alone and in many respects the USN proved to be doctrinally superior to everybody else where it mattered.

It was the belief that the submarine could act in concert with the Battle Fleet that lead directly to the design of the Fleet Boat. This resulted in the near perfect marriage of submarine design and unrestricted warfare doctrine that made the USN's operations in the Pacific the only truly successful submarine campaign to date. Without the extraordinary range, firepower and growth potential that was built into the Fleet Boat designs it is arguable that the submarine war against Japan would have been much different. Admiral Hart, himself a submariner who had studied German sub ops in the Great War, wanted smaller boats, S-Class sized but the Navy General Board insisted that only bigger boats would be compatible with fleet operations. Thus it was a happy coincidence that designs produced for a role they could never effectively fulfill were superbly adapted for duties that had been inconceivable before Pearl Harbor.

So, while it's easy to laugh at the Gun Club with 20/20 hindsight, it's important to recall that after 27-months of total war no battleship had been sunk by aircraft while at sea and only one sunk by submarine when under weigh, HMS Barham lost a month before Pearl Harbor.

Also one should not forget that the peacetime USN got it's air-sea doctrine pretty much on target. Seven months after Pearl, Midway, fought with pre-war aircraft using pre-war doctrine, training and commanders won perhaps the decisive naval battle of the war at Midway.

At Midway, submarines on both sides contributed to the outcome of the battle performing as adjuncts of the Fleet much as envisioned by the pre-war theorists. With I-168 scoring essentially the only Japanese success of the battle; sinking Yorktown and Hammann this tended to reinforce Japan's battlefleet oriented submarine doctrine. Meanwhile the Silent Service's lack of results in the battle provided the USN with further evidence that submarines were largely ineffective in the fleet support role and could serve best as commerce destroyers.

It is also interesting to note that up until the war, the primary target of the submarine was the combat ship.

-- Struma, M., (2011) Surface and destroy. University Press of Kentucky p. 16.

I am working on a review of this book to be posted in the book forum.

Nevermind Silent Victory, bring on Roscoe's book:
http://books.google.com/books?id=5lT...attack&f=false

S38 vs the odds:rock::Kaleun_Periskop:. I just did this in my career. I sank 1 minesweeper, 1 transport 7000 tons, and 1 sub chaser.:Kaleun_Party:

The Dilemma of SD RADAR
 

I found an interesting observation about the early use of SD RADAR in Blair's book, "Silent Victory": Pearl Harbor, December, 1941; First Patrols to Empire Waters":
". . . In addition to her Mark VI magnetic exploders, Plunger carried another secret weapon into combat: a primitive radar set known as the SD. The SD was new. It had extremely limited range, 6 to 10 miles. It was "nondirectional," useful primarily for detecting enemy aircraft. Its mast could be poked up before the boat surfaced.
Like many submarine skippers, (Dave) White was leery of the SD. In limited tests, he had found it temperamental and unreliable. It gave off a powerful signal which could be picked up by Japanese RDF stations. Unsparing use of the SD, White believed, was tantamount to breaking radio silence. It would make his presence known and reveal his exact location. The Japanese could send antisubmarine vessels or aircraft to attack him and route their shipping well clear of him. White preferred to depend on alert lookouts for spotting Japanese planes."

Now I know why those pesky patrol/float planes always seem to be vectored right at me - THEY ARE! :damn: The SD RADAR is always on in the game while surfaced, and I regularly do a search for aircraft with extended antenna at periscope depth before surfacing.
If I spot a plane while submerged, I just lower the antenna and dive to around 150'. If I spot a plane on the surface, then I crash dive and make a 90 degree turn to right or left at 40' and continue down to 160' at flank speed, then slow to 1/3 ahead and continue down to below 200'. The planes do sometimes drop bombs or DCs, but I haven't been hit yet. :rock:
This is the first time I've seen the RDF triangulation problem noted anywhere.

I always thought that was from Helmuth von Moltke. :hmmm:

Anyway it was some old dead guy with von in his name. :up:

Thanks for the link. I got so jazzed after reading this that I ordered the book (Used - Good Condition) from one of the dealers on Amazon.com
United States Submarine Operations in World War II

by Theodore Roscoe
$32.95
Link to this title: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listi...condition=used

More books are available at a similar price. Thanx again :salute:

You have to factor in the achievement there: The US won our submarine war and the Germans lost theirs. I think that was not due to the quality of the brass, but to the quality of the submariners themselves. Who ever heard of an American sub coming to the surface to scuttle, largely undamaged? Happened so much with the U-Boats that Admiral Daniel Gallery actually planned on it when setting up to capture the U-505. In the event it worked out just as planned. The U-Boat was pounded a bit and came up to scuttle. Gallery pounced and had himself a trophy.

But I really believe that the largest reason the Americans succeeded and the Germans failed was one of strategy, not tactics. In the Atlantic, U-Boats were not an appropriate weapon because they could not attain victory in any event. British supplies came in on neutral shipping. Sinking the neutral shipping guaranteed they wouldn't be neutral any more. Wonder what side they would come in on?

As the enemy became stronger as more and more neutral nations were pushed into the war by the U-Boats, the end of that story was pretty obvious. Had the money and men wasted on U-Boats been used to other purposes, at least Germany could have fought longer and had more success.

Japan, however, brought all supplies to Japan on Japanese bottoms. We were already at war with Japan. There was no downside to sinking the supplies. In that case, we actually were denying them what they needed to fight more effectively and the submarines were an important part of the eventual victory there. In the Pacific, submarines were an appropriate weapon which could contribute to the overall war effort.

Regardless of the better American submarines and perhaps better sub commanders as a whole, those differences were small. The strategic situation, to which the Germans were entirely blind, trumped everything and guaranteed German defeat.

I disagree RR, don't think Uboats failed so much on strategy as they did technology and not given enough resources. I think had they gotten the support they needed from Hitler, who knows, certainly it was a waste for Germany to build BB's, CA's, etc...


The biggest failure was Germany didn't figure out we could read their code.

Anyway, no matter what they did, it would be a matter of time nonetheless.

I tend to agree with RR. If Pearl Harbor hadn't abruptly brought the US into the war, then eventually the U-Boats would have as they did previously in World War One. The USN and Kriegsmarine were already trading heavy blows in the fall of 1941. The indiscriminate sinking of ships just brought the Reich more enemies when it already had more than it could handle.

One wonders if the resources poured into U-Boats and the German Navy as a whole might have been better spent on a few extra armored divisions on the Eastern Front where the land war was really decided. The Germans were basically outnumbered from the opening day on the invasion of the Soviet Union and eventually Russian quantity caught up with German quality.

That would be an arguable point except that there WERE no more resources. Almost from the beginning of the war the Germans were playing a zero sum game. Adding resources here meant taking them from there.

Had they put twice as many resources in the submarines it would have made no difference. They sank less than 1% of total cross-Atlantic shipping. Making that 2% would have changed what? Then what results? No tanks for Rommel? No, something had to give and it should have been U-Boats.

Donitz and Raeder didn't give a hoot about plans for winning a war. All they were concerned with was expanding their particular realms to the largest extent possible. They continually pressured for a larger navy in spite of the fact that a navy only made sense from a coastal defense standpoint.

Without control of air and water surface somewhere, the U-Boats were doomed. A plurality were sunk before they had downed even a single target. An appalling number were sunk before firing a single torpedo in anger.

Of course, we are reasoning here and World War II was not the product of reason. It was the product of a raving madman without the capacity for rational thought. All he had was irrational desires.