Silent Victory - tactics discussion

[Roger Dodger]

I've just started reading "Silent Victory: The US Submarine War Against Japan" (2 volumes), 1975 by Clay Blair, Jr. The Introduction to the book pointed out that the faulty Mk-14 torpedoes were not the only problem the Navy had to explain the rather poor showing during the first year of the war. With your kind permission, I'll post some of the Introduction, and invite your discussion. Since we're getting a little off-topic with the Mk-28 torpedo, I'll also repost this under a new topic.

During the naval conflict in the Pacific between the United States and Japan, 1941-1945, there was a little-known war-within-a-war: the US submarine offensive against Japanese merchant shipping and naval forces. A mere handful of submariners, taking a small force of boats on 1,600-odd war patrols, sank more than 1,000 Japanese merchant ships and a significant portion of the Japanese navy, including one battleship, eight aircraft carriers, three heavy cruisers, and eight light cruisers.
A strong merchant marine was vital to the economy and war making potential of the island nation of Japan. Its ships imported oil, iron ore, coal, bauxite, rubber, and food stuffs; they exported arms, ammunition, aircraft and soldiers to reinforce captured possessions. When submarines succeeded in stopping this commerce, Japan was doomed.
. . . .
Even so, it was no easy victory. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States had sworn in various international treaties never to engage in "unrestricted submarine warfare," that is, submarine surprise attacks against merchant vessels. During peacetime years, U.S. submariners hoped to become part of the US battle fleet mostly concentrated their training on tactics aimed at sinking important enemy men-of-war - carriers, battleships, cruisers - and their boats known as fleet submarines, were designed with this goal in mind. After December 7, 1941, however, the United States abandoned its high-minded moral position and ordered unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan. By an accident of history, the fleet submarine proved to be the ideal weapon for war against the Japanese merchant marine. However, the shift in missions caught the submarine force flat-footed. It required new strategy and tactics. Many months went by before the submarine force got the hang of this new role.

There were other problems. Peacetime exercises, most of them unrealistic and artificial, had let submariners to believe that aircraft, sonar gear, and powerful depth charges made the submarine highly vulnerable to enemy counterattack. This belief in turn had led to extreme caution in the submarine force. The best way to survive, the peacetime submarine commanders believed, was to make an attack from deep submergence, using sonar apparatus. The daylight periscope attack, the night periscope attack, and the night surface attack were considered hazardous, and for a submarine to operate on the surface within 500 miles of an enemy airbase was considered fatal. Too many months went by before submariners discovered these preconceptions to be wide of the mark.

The cautious peacetime training leg to serious personnel problems in wartime. In peacetime bold, reckless, innovative skippers who were "caught" in war game maneuvers were reprimanded, and older, conservative, "by-the-book" officers, who were strict disciplinarians and conscientious with paperwork, rose to command. When war came, too many of these older men failed as skippers. During the first year and a half of the war, dozens had to be relieved for "lack of aggressiveness" (a disaster, both professionally and emotionally, for the men involved) and replaced by brash and devil-may-care younger officers, some of whom would never have attained command in peacetime. This general changeover took months to accomplish, and many valuable opportunities were lost before it became effective.

The failure in leadership extended to the highest levels of the submarine force. When the war began, the forces were commanded by officers who had risen to the top by the safest and most cautious routes, who did not understand the potential of the submarine. They placed a premium on caution; bring the boat back. Yielding to higher authority, they allowed their forces to be fragmented and employed in marginal, fruitless diversions. At least a year and a half went by before these command problems were ironed out and men with a good grasp of how submarines could be most profitably employed took over the top jobs.

. . . . Countless times, US submarine captains were vectored to such (high value military) targets only to find that, because of navigational errors on the part of the Japanese or themselves, these high-speed prizes passed just beyond attack range and could not be overtaken. Months went by before it dawned on the force commanders that a Japanese tanker - easier to find and sink - was as valuable to the overall war effort as a light cruiser.

Last - but not least - the submarine force was hobbled by defective torpedoes. Developed in peacetime but never realistically tested against targets, the US submarine torpedo was believed to be one of the most lethal weapons in the history of naval warfare. it had two exploders, a regular one that detonated it on contact with the side of an enemy ship and a very secret "magnetic exploder" that would detonate it beneath the keel of a ship without contact.

After the war began, submariners discovered the hard way that the torpedo did not run steadily at the depth set into its controls and often went much deeper than designed, too deep for the magnetic exploder to work. When this was corrected, they discovered that the magnetic exploder itself was defective under certain circumstances, often detonating before the torpedo reached the target. And when the magnetic exploder was deactivated, the contact exploder was found to be faulty. Each of these flaws tended to conceal the others, and it was not until September 1943, twenty-one months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, that all the torpedo defects were corrected.

Had it not been for these command weaknesses, misconceptions, and technical defects, the naval war in the Pacific might have taken a far different course. Intelligently employed, with a workable torpedo, submarines might have entirely prevented the Japanese invasion of the Philippines and the Netherland East Indies. Skippers emboldened by swift and certain torpedo success, instead of puzzled and dismayed by obvious torpedo failure, might have inflicted crippling damage on the Japanese navy much earlier. The war in the Pacific might have been shortened by many, many months.

Clay Blair, Jr. (May 1, 1925 - December 16, 1998) was an American historian, best known for his books on military history. He served on the fleet submarine Guardfish (SS-217) in World War II.