Am I Mush Morton?

[jazman]

I've been reading Blair's Silent Victory. The performance of the subs in 41-42 was dismal for a variety of reasons, especially in the Asiatic fleet. After experience with SH3, I jump into an S-class tub and feel like I am Mush Morton.

Anyone know why the US subs didn't seem to learn anything from all the German successes up to the end of 1941? After all, that's what I'm doing game-wise, and the Mark Xs aren't so bad that I can't do OK. I'm playing with Trigger Maru.

[Torplexed]

Probably because they didn't have the wealth of historical info then that we have six decades after the war. For instance you already know that the Japanese have sonar. The US Navy wasn't certain they did before the war. Hearing Japanese destroyers pinging came as a shock to most US skippers. You know where Japanese ships are likely to go. The real wartime commanders could only guess and subs were sent to sulk off harbours that the Japanese had already left. Pre war training wasn't as strigent and intense as in the German Navy which had already fought a submarine war and was staffed with men with that vital wartime experience. Plus, the harsh reality having the lives of several dozen men on the line became as a staggering mental blow that resulted in some skippers being relieved. And real submarines come with a huge host of bewildering problems...mechanical, navigational, personnel, lack of spares and enviromental... that the game doesn't completely simulate.

[Chock]

As you probably know, there were a number of personality clashes in and between the different US sub pacs, and this was one of the major causes of delays to weapon fixes, which is probably the most well known reason for early disappointing results. But beyond that, the US sub fleet had been designed with a very different role in mind to that of the German sub fleet. The US boats were originally intended to be used in much the same way as many are used today, i.e. as part of screen for a carrier fleet, hence being referred to as 'fleet boats', which is why they were larger and with longer range than a typical German sub, German subs, conversely, being really too small for the role in the Atlantic in which they found fame, in that they were essentially a development of earlier 'coastal boats'.

The switch in doctrine that US sub skippers faced at the outbreak of WW2, i.e. essentially being told to go off on their own and sink Jap ships when they had been trained to work as part of a carrier group, did not sit well with a good few US sub skippers who'd been assigned before the outbreak of hostilities, and many were accused of not being aggressive enough, quite a few subsequently losing their boats because of this. Initially the boats were often not in great shape either, and several skippers actually refused to put to sea in them, which led to further skippers getting the chop.

But all that aside, obviously the Allies were not privvy to much of the German's tactics and techniques as we are today, and even if they had been, it's one thing to be told something, but it's another to gain the experience required to do it yourself. You can equate this to fixing a car, someone can tell you what to do, but sometimes you have to scrape your knuckles a few times with spanners in order to learn the best way to do things in a practical sense.

Then you have all the practical U-Boat experiences that the Kriegsmarine could draw upon from already having fought basically the same tactical approach to attempting the defeat of the UK twenty years before in WW1.

I guess when you add all that up, it's apparent why things took a while to get rolling, but there is no doubt that by the end of hostilities, the US sub crews were every bit as good as their German counterparts, as evidenced by the dearth of targets available at the end of hostilities.

Chock

[DeepSix]

Originally Posted by jazman

...Anyone know why the US subs didn't seem to learn anything from all the German successes up to the end of 1941?....

Well, not much was known about German tactics outside of the Kriegsmarine. For obvious reasons, the Germans didn't exactly publicize "what worked" for them. As the war went on, the U.S. implemented a "wolfpack" strategy on a regular basis (but not all the time). Another reason is that the Japanese didn't fight the U.S. the way the U.S. and the British fought the Germans.

But behind all of that, it was a matter of naval doctrine and what you might call geostrategy, which differed from one naval power to another. The U.S. was a relative newcomer the imperial arena, and heavily invested in Alfred Thayer Mahan's ideas about decisive sea battles and naval gunfire.

Basically it's a case of similar weapons used differently and in a different theatre. The Pacific was similar to the Atlantic, but not identical.

[Edit: Torplexed and Chock both posted while I was writing; we're all saying the same thing but they said it better than I did!]

[Torplexed]

Good points by Chock and Deep Six.

I guess I'll also add that the US was also a victim of the 'you fight as you train' dictum made famous in Top Gun. In peacetime target practices it was frequently observed that submarines at periscope depth were clearly visible to airplanes flying above them, and that it was an easy matter for those planes to direct surface escort vessels to the attacking submarine. So, for several years prior to the war, US submarine practices stressed attack by sound alone from deep submergence as the best solution to this problem. Exercise reports stated it was bad practice and contrary to proper doctrine to conduct an attack at periscope depth when aircraft were about. One division commander who permitted his submarines to use their periscopes under such conditions was admonished to see that in the future the subs under his command would more properly conduct their approaches, and if practicable fire by sound. With this mentality prevailing it was hardly a surprise that timidity ended up being a common trait among some of the pre-war skippers.

Attacking blind at depths of over hundred feet turned out to be a poor tactic of course. But it took wartime experience to prove otherwise.

[captiandon]

Yes and we also can recall that before the United States started in the war we still were heavy on the Battleships being the main weapon of choice, At the start of the war we only had Three Carriers in the pacific. We had 4 times that in battleships. The Submarine was seen as a Defencive weapon as much as the Carrier was. It was also seen as a scourge to warfare as it left men to die as there wasn't room to pick up survivors. We saw the Tactics of the Germans as barbaric at best.
We were more in the frame that the British were in that Navy was to be civilized form of Warfare. Both Countries had Navy men as there leaders as well Churchill was In the Admiralty and Roosevelt was in the Department of the Navy.

Also It can be seen durring the war that both navys put alot of there hopes and fears into the Battleships as the British sent a good deal of there navy after the Bismark. Also we sent 8 Aircraft Carriers just to sink the Yamato. Overkill in todays standards but you can see just how Battleship based there views were durring the war.

[jazman]

I just now got to page 119-120 of my edition of Silent Victory (Bantam, 1976--yes, it's an old print I picked up used). My original question arose because I was skipping around, reading ahead, about the Asiatic fleet in general, but now I'm not.

In the discussion of Withers' endorsements after the first set of patrols after Pearl Harbor:

"The first endorsements handed down by Withers and his staff came as an unpleasant surprise to many submarine skippers, amounting, as they did, to a complete reversal of peacetime training practices."

about Argonaut: "Withers went a step further, suggesting that Barchet might have made a night surface attack, such as the Germans were finding so successful against Allied convoys in the Atlantic."

Triton: "Pilly Lent in Triton was upbraided in much the same language."

So it seems that there was an awareness of successful German approaches, but it was quite a different matter getting the commanders to act that way.

[Peto]

and very many of the skippers were older men who tended to be more cautious. They had all been taught that "to be detected probably means you will be sunk". Prewar training did everything it could to make them paranoid and it worked.

Many Good Answers in this thread--all adding up to a submarine fleet that just wasn't ready for the type of warfare suddenly required of them.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by jazman

about Argonaut: "Withers went a step further, suggesting that Barchet might have made a night surface attack, such as the Germans were finding so successful against Allied convoys in the Atlantic."

Triton: "Pilly Lent in Triton was upbraided in much the same language."

Does he give any precise quotes? I only ask because of the possibility of Blair using hindsight, and Withers not actually referring to the German night attacks at the time.

[DeepSix]

Yeah, I wondered about that ^ too. IIRC Blair consistently makes it sound like Withers (or Lockwood) knew something about German tactics, and I think it's likely that there was a general awareness of them. There is always an intelligence report about the enemy, it's just a matter of how detailed it is.

But I also think it took time for gathered intel to trickle down to individual skippers. First there has to be some espionage or interrogation of captured u-boat crews, or at least a study of RDF readings from the last convoy attack. Gradually, comparisons of multiple enemy approaches are pieced together and assembled into "what they appear to be doing when they attack." And at that point, pride runs deep. Doubtful if anybody would have advocated simply copying German approaches outright. Japan was a German ally - if we had attacked them using the same tactics as their ally, how long would that have worked? And there's always an underlying desire to figure out what works and then try to improve on it. As Torp said, the doctrine of submerged approach on sound bearings was driven into submariners' heads at the point of a court-martialing if they deviated from it, because the Japanese fought in their own unique way, and we had to figure out how to best counter them. We were studying the Japanese rather than the Germans, because in the 1930s the Japanese were a greater strategic threat (from our point of view).

I still think, though, that basically it took a little while for everybody to realize that there would be no Jutland in this war. So on that note I might play devil's advocate and suggest the U.S. actually learned its lessons very quickly in adapting to an unforeseen strategic situation. Deprived of the ships with which it might have tried to fight a second Jutland, the U.S. found itself in an off-balance position, not unlike that of Germany, and in combat with a superior fleet. Not quite what I'd call a mosquito fleet situation but not far from it either.

While the Japanese were dithering around trying to get us to the decisive battle, we were cutting off the fuel that they planned to fight it with. One might also argue that we learned quickly because we had already broken Japanese naval codes, and once German codes were compromised also, we could accumulate information and react even more quickly....

[Rockin Robbins]

Originally Posted by jazman

After experience with SH3, I jump into an S-class tub and feel like I am Mush Morton.

Yeah? Mush Morton is dead! So, you still feel like him?:rotfl:

I don't know how possible it would be to accurately model actual Japanese performance in ASW. They were so inconsistant! Sometimes, they were excellent though. Here from the US Subvets Website is a case in point:

REMEMBER THIS USS TRIGGER?

After attacking a convoy of 20 ships, with 25 escorts, on 23 March 1944, Trigger (Harlfinger) was attacked by six of the escorts for over 17 hours. When she surfaced, Trigger's forward torpedo room was flooded up to the deck plates, her hull air induction was flooded, bow planes, trim pump, and sonar gear and both radars were dead and her radio antennas grounded. After making repairs for the next four days, she rendezvoused with Tang, borrowed air compressor parts, and continued her patrol.


Even Ducimus with his cursed periscope depth bombers hasn't come up with this! Six escorts! Seventeen hours! Look at that list of damages! This is way beyond the feature set of Silent Hunter 4. Writing off such ASW tactics and results as "inept" or "lousy" is just plain funny. However they were frequently inept and lousy. What the individual sub skipper actually encountered was random.

But make no mistake, 3,617 submariners gave their lives to achieve a submarine victory that was anything but easy for those who were selected to wage that part of the war. We are playing a game. They were afraid for their lives. Not one of them considered themselves expendable. No game can reproduce that.

But the game is a fitting tribute to those who did not come back. I'll turn over the podium to one of my greatest heroes, Admiral Charles Lockwood:

This is also from ussubvetsofwwii.org.