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By Root 1129 0

than earlier editions to the blockade of commerce. Yet a remarkable number of its pages still concerned procedures for submarines operating in support of surface warships, in a fleet action. The cult of the “decisive battle” exercised a febrile influence on American as well as Japanese naval imaginations. “It is the opinion of most submarine officers that any combatant ship is worth a full nest torpedo salvo,” declared Chapter 2 of the 1944 Doctrine—implying that a merchant ship might not be. To the end of the war, submarine captains’ accounts of their successes dwelt most proudly upon sinkings of warships, rather than cargo vessels. Only in 1944, after more than two years of American involvement in the war, were submarine captains explicitly directed to target enemy tankers.

Even at this relatively late stage, Doctrine included oddly anachronistic passages: “In battle, submarines may, through threat or actual attack, serve as the anvil against which own battle line may attack enemy battle line.” Here was an injunction which sounds more relevant to Nelson’s navy than Nimitz’s. Doctrine’s foreword asserted grudgingly: “During probable long periods before fleet action occurs, submarines may usefully be employed in the following tasks: (a) Patrol (including commerce destruction) (b) Scouting (c) Screening,” and so on. Yet, while America’s carrier-led surface forces turned the tide of the Pacific war at Midway and the Coral Sea, then progressively destroyed the Japanese fleet, it was the undersea flotillas which struck at the heart of Japan’s war-making capacity. If the U.S. Navy had addressed itself earlier in the war to systematic blockade, Japan’s collapse might have been significantly accelerated. As it was, only in 1944 did America’s commerce campaign begin in earnest, after torpedo shortcomings had been belatedly addressed, and deployments were better directed.

This became the submarines’ year of triumph. In 520 war patrols, 6,092 torpedoes were fired. The Japanese merchant fleet lost 212,907 tons of shipping in July; 245,348 in August; 181,363 in September. Sinkings declined to 103,836 tons in December, only because the enemy began to run out of ships to attack. In 1944 as a whole, American submarines dispatched over 600 Japanese ships, totalling 2.7 million tons—more than the combined totals for 1942 and 1943. Japan’s bulk imports fell by 40 percent. A hundred American submarines operated out of Pearl Harbor and advanced bases at Eniwetok, Majuro and Guam, a further forty from Australia. Pearl’s boats worked patrol zones around Japan and the Philippines with such nicknames as “Hit Parade,” “Marus’ Morgue” and “Convoy College.” Fremantle-and Brisbane-based boats operated in the South China Sea and off the Netherlands East Indies.

Submariners complained that the navy library at Pearl would never lend its best movies to their boats, because these were either kept out for the sixty-day duration of a patrol, or never returned at all. In the course of the war, Germany lost 781 submarines, Japan 128. By contrast, the Japanese navy sank only 41 American submarines, 18 percent of those which saw combat duty. Six more were lost accidentally on Pacific patrols. Even these relatively modest casualties meant that 22 percent of all American sailors who experienced submarine operations perished—375 officers and 3,131 enlisted men—the highest loss rate of any branch of the wartime U.S. armed forces. Yet there was never a shortage of volunteers for the submarine service, with its extraordinary pride and buccaneering spirit. It was not merely extra money—a 50 percent increase on base pay, matching the premium paid to aviators—which kept crews coming. It was their just conviction that they were an elite. It is a tribute to the quality of personnel that, by August 1945, almost half of all surviving enlisted men from the December 1941 U.S. submarine service had been commissioned.

The long passage from home base to a patrol area, cruising on the surface at fifteen knots, was seldom hazardous, and gave crews a chance to shake down. A quarter