If you are looking for WWII fiction, I can recommend Final Harbor by Harry Homewood. Homewood started out in the S-boats and made 11 war patrols during WWII.

The main character of the book is the submarine itself as this book recognizes that crews change.

Anyone else read Final Harbor and can give an opinion? I think it is a good fiction book but I would be interested in other opinions about it.

I have not read any of his other books though.

I just picked up SSN and Scorpion Down at the store.
 

I guess we'll see about SSN. Has anyone read Scorpion Down? Sounded good for nonfiction. Got both for a total of 7$

Toilet paper would have been cheaper. :damn:

I reviewed Scorpion Down for this site around the time it came out, but these two reviews on Amazon basically sum it up:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1GHNHP...tag=&linkCode=

http://www.amazon.com/review/RTOGWK2...tag=&linkCode=

Well. The subsim community hates SSN. I won't get around to reading it for awhile.
 

I thought Scorpion Down sounded good so I picked it up. SSN was just there and cheap so.....

It matters not what the Community thinks, although I suspect that Ed Offley was on drugs, delusional or hopelessly paranoid (perhaps all three) when he wrote Scorpion Down. Read both and form your own opinion.

I know, but...
 

The community hated U-571. I personally loved that movie. Bought it on DVD and everything. I don't know everything about subs. When people talk about figuring out the TDC, I have no idea how to manually do the TDC. I play on automatic. I'm not extremly technical because I know that I don't know it all about subs. I look forward to learning a lot more here, in my books, and in my subsims. I just might like SSN. I might like Scorpion Down. I'm not a stranger to being apart from the group. So, to sum that up, I love this website and forums and look forward to being the greatest Skipper to ever be in my basement.

I will admit to being a nearly fanatical U-571 hater but that does not translate to thinking less of Forum Member's who might enjoy it for whatever reasons. The topic comes up almost quarterly around here so be patient and you will see usual arguments for and against.

Submarines represent a fascinating aspect of naval warfare and it's probably not unreasonable to say that they were high amongst the decisive weapons of the 20th Century. There's millions of printed words and hundreds of websites with submarine content so you suffer from a abundance of data and putting things into their place can be challenging.

A couple of reasonable primers on the subject are:

Thomas Parrish - The Submarine

Peter Padfield - War Beneath the Sea: Submarine Conflict 1939-1945.

Both are reasonably objective, written for general audiences, are well researched, readily available and should be held at better public libraries. With a relatively unbiased background of the submarine at war you might move into reading about the post-war era and so can better understand the submarine in the Cold War putting works like SSN and Scorpion Down into context. You may come to share other's disdain at these particular works or perhaps not.

Anyway, Good Hunting on the search for more submarine knowledge.

The style of writing in this book is terrible, it is very stiff and formulaic.

It is essentially a non-fiction factual reporting of submarine warfare dressed up as a fiction novel.

yes love it. Follows an actual submarine.

Say what you will about the book. It is nevertheless, the prime reason that I came to be a member of this forum.

I bought the PC game SSN back when it came out. Then a friend bought me the book. There was a particular scenario on the game that I was unable to affect a solution for. A friend at work was an ex-Navy E-3 Orion crew member. When I diagrammed the scenario out to him on the wet-board, he told me I was screwed and there was no place to hide. He told me that any solution in the game was extremely unrealistic.

Since I was extremely fond of that PC game, and being a veteran of the Falcon 4.0 flight-sim and F1 2002 racing sim, I searched for something suitable WRT submarine simulation. That search lead me to Sub Command.

That has brought immense enjoyment in and of itself. That being said, what I've worked on off and on is developing a Sub Command campaign that plays out SSN within the purvue of the realism afforded by Sub Command. I'll concede that the SSN story is an extreme fantasy and the SSN PC game is kindergarten in contrast to Sub Command.

SSN begins with the first mission as being tasked to transit from San Diego Naval Base to Naval Station Pearl Harbor. I spent some time at www.marinetraffic.com and generated a list of normal traffic near San Diego. My Sub Command campaign generates random entities out of this extensive list.

The Los Angeles skipper must exit undetected, i.e., run the gauntlet of USN and CG vessals that are on training excercise or outright running interdiction for DHS, in addition to the overwhelming majority of traffic that is of commercial - tanker, cargo, cruise, fishing - and to smaller degree private craft. The fact of the matter is San Diego and vicinity is a hornet nest of activity. Not overlooking inbound / outbound traffic to HI & Asia. The skipper can either ignore the entirety of it, or get points for each vessel ID'd, remaining undetected, receiving ELF transmissions notifying enemy contact established W of Los Angeles postion by E-3 on ASW excercise, detecting the incoming enemy Han, and based on ROE - weapons hold / weaponss free - as received from ComSubPAC in response to LA sitrep pertaining to enemy contract relayed to ComSubPAC, address any threats that impugn the mssion of transit to PHSB.

That's just egress from SDNB. Ingress to PHNB is another matter completely (albeit merely a beehive in contrast to SDNB). Again, I've spent time at marinetraffic.com and logged normal HI marine traffic which the inbound LA must contend with as adjunct to enemy contacts scripted by SSN storyline.

The LA skipper must be intimately familiar with all aspects of driving LA class SSN, e.g., SOP, sonar, TMA, weapons systems, environmental conditions, tactics and strategy, etc.

From that perspective, I find SSN to be a usefull template for my campaign. That notwithstanding, the storyline of SSN itself is pure fairytale.

SSN was a decent book. It could've been better but I liked it.

And frankly, your opinion is really all that matters. If you got enjoyment out of the book, then it was worth you reading it. :up:

It is OK to ask other people's opinion about books, but don't let anyone steer you away from a book you think you might enjoy. :yep:

Every book out there is liked by some and not liked by others. There are no "bad" books from an entertainment standpoint


Now about that U-571.....:D

Tom Clancy - SUBMARINE
 

Tom Clancy's SUBMARINE, A Guided Tour Inside a Nuclear Warship is another book that I found interesting too.

The softside book I have was published by Berkley Publishing Group, New York, New York 10014

+1 :)

That was a dark time...long, long ago...of which we shall not speak.

I actually just got a copy of that a few weeks back. :cool: