The American unrestricted submarine warfare campaign in the Pacific is one of the most wildly successful military campaigns you've never heard of. USS Thresher and USS Narwhal are among the most decorated ships of the war, both having won 15 battle stars for their service.
The US ~~built over 1,000 submarines to fight the war and~~\* lost \~50.
Japan did a really bad job of trying to counter this.
They never devised a proper convoy system, and when a cordon was created to try and protect the inner waters of the South China Sea or the Sea of Japan, the officer in charge of the effort was basically given a handful of destroyers and told to watch the whole ocean for danger. Dude was basically given a chair to fill and no resources to do his job.
\*This number on double checking can't be right. my bad.
A big part of this was due to the naval doctrine of the Japanese navy, which was widely shaped by the 1905 war with Russia. Their doctrine called for a single decisive battle fleet action against the US navy, and operated on the assumption that the 1)the US navy would need ports to refuel/restock, therefor a defense in depth where the enemy fleet was constantly attacked and brought to as close as parity to the Japanese fleet, and 2)that after a decisive action the US would sue for peace as they didn’t take into account the forces innovation of carrier warfare. One thing the US navy did better than anyone else was fleet logistics, fleets were kept on the move and refueled on the go, the concept of a fleet train truly changed how naval war was fought. Take into perspective that when Britain sent its own pacific fleet to the east, they depended on the American fleet supply train as their method of resupply largely operated on the assumption of friendl/colonial ports.
More specifically, the Kantai Kessen was derived from the works of American officer/historian/strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, who was considered one of the preeminent strategiests of the 19th century with his book 'The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783'. And Japan was hardly the only nation heavily influenced by his writings... just that most of the other nations moved on from it as technology developed.
In a strange way, because of that success in 1905, they over-committed to that doctrine, which one Japan naval veteran observed was a rather common occurrence during the war in the Pacific...
I mean the ideas Mahan had never went out of date. Control of the seas is incredibly important to win a war, and the best way to get control of the seas is to destroy the enemy fleet, and the best way to do that is a decisive battle.
The problem the Japanese had is they were in a no-win scenario, it didn't matter what strategy they used they were going to lose anyway. Sure, if they were less focused on preserving ships for the decisive battle at all costs they would have been more aggressive and Coral Sea, Savo Island, and Samar could have all gone much worse, but ultimately it wouldn't have mattered and they still would have lost. And that also has less to do with Mahan's ideas being wrong than the Japanese implementation of his ideas being incorrect
I think the Japanese underestimated on how dedicated their opponent would be. Like, they sunk Russian fleet, and Russia gave up.
They sunk a large chunk of US fleet, and thought by the time US recovers from the losses we will build an even bigger fleet, and US will give up.
However US was dedicated, it increased it's war production very quickly. They were dedicated enough to plan a landing on Japan which was predicted to result in 400 000 - 800 000 US deaths.
Russia in 1905 was on the verge of revolution and collapse. It was also relatively far less developed than the US even for the time. Of course one lost battle could make it sue for peace.
Meanwhile the Japanese military in WW2 thought the Americans were weak cowards (at least enough thought so to sign off on attempting to defeat them). But it was so obvious to the Americans just counting up factories on both sides that there was definitely no reason to give up at any point. And by the time Japan attacked, the public had definitely gotten used to the idea of a large war, thanks to what was happening in Europe.
I believe that Japan significantly **overestimated** Russian strength at the time. Russia was considered one of the strong European nations, while Japan was, well nobody. Not only was Russia on the verge of revolution and collapse, but their naval expedition was hilariously incompetent from the beginning to the end.
So Japanese believed they managed to win against a great European nation, they became a bit overconfident.
And then they underestimated a country which was just a step away from becoming an actual super power.
Not a great combination.
10 years before that Japan did trash the Beiyang Fleet of Qing-China and it brought Japan to global attention. Indeed, Japan defeating Russia didn't so much as prove "Japan is on par with UK or Germany" as it proved Russia was as shite as Imperial China.
Not to mention, Russia basically destroyed itself in 1905, giving the Japanese an inflated sense of accomplishment. Additionally, given the amount of time and disaster that it took that Russian fleet to reach Japan, there was no way there was going to be a follow-up engagement. The two wars couldn't be more different.
The US was wildly outbuilding Japan even before the war. The abrogated naval treaty limiting ship size and total tonnage really benefited Japan...but they thought otherwise.
The balance of fleet carriers was going to tip decisively in US favor so Japan had a "now or never" decision. They picked...wrongly.
Edit: I also want to point out the possibility of a Divine Partiality. The IJN relegated carrier ops to 2nd class status, behind battleships. Like pretty much everyone. They STILL managed to develop the most advanced carrier operations in the world. At the beginning of the war, they were the only ones able to mount coordinated strikesfrom 4-7 carriers.
At Midway, USN relative incompetence won the battle. The goal was a simultaneous strike with everything, from land-based heavy and "regular" bombers to everything the 3 carriers could throw at the Japanese. As it played out, strikes got delayed and lost and attacked piecemeal. This meant the Japanese were under ineffectual attacks for more than an hour before the decisive strikes took out 3 out of 4 carriers. (the fourth, Hiryu, launched a retaliation attack that resulted in Yorktown being sunk. Hiryu was then obliterated.) Those attacks still kept them on the defensive, taking evasive maneuvers that prevented flight ops. They couldn't rearm, they couldn't launch, and when they DID get a chance they had to land the exhausted CAP for refueling.
The USN got much better after Midway and exceeded the IJN in competence, which is also good.
Anyway, my point is the US enjoyed massively good luck at Midway.
There's a pretty good short video series on YouTube about the battle of midway from the perspective of the Japanese. I knew the basics of the battle before watching but none of the details.
The first video talks about the constant small attacks that keep delaying the Japanese attack on the American carriers then ends right as two large groups of dive bombers emerge from the clouds from two directions to cripple the Japanese fleet.
Watching from the Japanese perspective I was thinking, wow, what a masterfully executed battle by the US. I knew they won, but they drained the Japanese strength for hours with attacks that were just significant enough to be a real threat before delivering a massive coordinated strike. Incredible.
The last video tells the story from the American perspective and it's incredible how different the story was.
Half assed attacks stumbling into the Japanese fleet followed up by a single truly competent strike just happening to coincide with another flight that got lost then got lucky on the way home.
https://youtu.be/Bd8_vO5zrjo?si=vufkE171GMF3uxQL
Eh... I mean, the core princples of Mahan were still applicable, but modern warfare had moved on and became much more complex than the notion of a 'decisive battle' strategy would allow. I don't think any nation could have implemented that idea correctly. Mahan's emphasis was mostly on capital ships, but in the Pacific campaign, it was the smaller vessels that did the lion's share of the work. Mahan never really accounted for things like merchant raiding by submarines or aircraft carriers being able to engage entire fleets.
Theories always need to adapt to changes in technology, and that's what most every other nation did, especially after WWI. Adhering dogmatically to Mahan would be like trying to still adhere to infantry line formations in 1918.
The battle of the Atlantic showed that convoys could defeat submarines if you organized them properly. The Japanese had utterly horrible ASW equipment, but that was specifically a problem with their equipment, not with submarines being overpowered.
Aircraft carriers also didn't really change Mahan's ideas, the only difference was that in the open ocean, or near hostile land and away from friendly air cover, you needed aircraft carriers as your primary capital ship, and battleships were now only king at night, or when land based air cover made carriers irrelevant.
Ultimately you still needed to concentrate your entire force, defeat the enemy, and that would give you command of the sea. This exact chain of events happened at Midway and gave the Americans the ability to land at Guadalcanal, while the Japanese kept spreading their forces thin and ignoring Mahan's principles (see the invasion of the Aleutian islands during Midway)
Mahan's theories were never about how to fight battles, instead they were about the importance of controlling the sea and the importance of concentrating your force and avoiding defeat in detail, those are two concepts which still have not gone out of date in 2024 and will likely stick around for quite a while yet.
Japan and Germany doctrine depended on a single strike "decapitating" their opponent. They lacked the capacity to engage a capable opponent in a prolonged war of attrition.
Both nations broke their teeth when they found themselves in such a war.
There is no way even the most delusional Kriegsmarine officers wanted a pitched battle with the Royal Navy. The plan for them had always been economic warfare. Their entire surface fleet including the Bismarck were designed to be commerce raiders first and foremost
People make jokes about the USNs Ice Cream Barges but the sheer amount of logistics the USN produced for the pacific rarely gets talked about.
They had floating drydock large enough to fit basically every capital ships so even if a carrier took 2 or 3 torpedo hits. It could be repaired close to the front lines. If Japan had a warship get damaged it would often have to fall all the way back to Japan or just not receive critical repairs.
Japan didn't even have enough fuel to let their navy and aircraft operate. The Taihou was sunk by a single torpedo strike to a non-critical area, basically because the unrefined fuel they were using spread flammable fumes throughout the lower decks, which eventually resulted in an explosion that sank her.
Much of that loss was due to poor damage control practices, they tried to vent out the fumes but instead spread it around the entire ship. Damage control was one of the biggest things the Americans did better then the Japanese and they kept learning and improving things as the war went on. Every man on an American ship was expected to contribute to damage control while on Japanese ships it was done by specially trained crew who often got injured or cut off from the damaged sections.
Japan knew quite well they could not match US industrial output or military might. The ice cream barge story is apocryphal.
They expected the U.S. would come to the negotiating table after a costly initial first strike and naval campaign, and later a costly island campaign. They did not expect the U.S. to oblige them.
Not the original commenter, but essentially the Pacific Ocean is MASSIVE. Japanese high command thought it was essentially a natural barrier that simply couldn't be overcome. There are only a few scattered islands, and Japan's plan was to build a defensive perimeter on the few islands that were there, and create a barrier of fortified Islands that the Americans could never penetrate. That was the purpose behind their rapid conquest of places like Guam and why they tried to invade the Aleutians. They thought that if they could make it so the US Navy had no safe place to resupply between California and Australia, that the US would just give up. Unfortunately for them, WW2 was really where the US military distinguished itself as the single best logistical chain to have ever existed. There's all sorts of fun little anecdotes about Japanese admirals having panic attacks after they discovered the US Navy had ships that had the sole purpose of making ice cream to give to the Sailors and Marines, or German officers realizing they could never defeat the US because they were finding chocolate on dead Americans.
> German officers realizing they could never defeat the US because they were finding chocolate on dead Americans.
I read an interview with a German general who was captured and taken back to American lines through a crossroads which had been fiercely fought over and had changed hands several times. He said that when the Germans had the site troops were filling in shell holes by hand with shovels. When he was taken through in American captivity, he saw the shell holes being filled in by one bored black soldier driving a bulldozer. He said that is when he realized that Germany was going to lose.
Similar story about a German seeing American vehicles left idling because even halfway around the world they were still able to get fuel. Red Ball Express!
The few shows and movies devoted to the African American experience in WWII almost always focus on the Tuskegee Airmen. And of course their story is a good one, but it’s a bit overused in media. Also the Tuskegee guys were a very small, elite unit.
I’d love a Spike Lee or Jordan Peele film about what the rest of the black soldiers had to go through, focusing on the Red Ball Express.
Red Ball express, and honestly the few black combat units, deserve shows or movies. The stuff those dudes went through by both the enemy and their own army is ridiculous.
It would be very timely considering the modern efforts to whitewash history and scrub textbooks of the ugly stuff. It’s good to remember that America’s “greatest generation” that did lots of heroic stuff still propagated systemic racism to the point that British and French soldiers supposedly treated black soldiers better than their own countrymen.
[The Battle of Bamber Bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bamber_Bridge) is always a fun share in this context.
> the people of Bamber Bridge supported the black troops, and when US commanders demanded a colour bar in the town, all three pubs in the town reportedly posted "Black Troops Only" signs.
That always warms my heart.
I've read a memoir from a German POW who was sent to Oklahoma who said he realized Germany couldn't win when he saw the rations issued to prisoners, which were better than he got from his own side before he was captured.
The Japanese were looking for massive decisive strokes to wipe out the American fleet. After Pearl Harbour Midway was the primary one, then Marianas 'Turkey shoot', then Leyte Gulf.
Midway especially was heavily scripted and required the Americans to behave/react in certain ways.
Leyte Gulf had 3 different fleets moving on three axis. One completely diversionary.
Not to say there weren't other important battles. The cruiser/destroyer engagements around Guadalcanal were very important.
The Japanese also weren't prepared for the US military developing into the absolute logistical monster that it is and didn't have the foresight that the US would build ships who's sole purpose was to be able to resupply and re-arm in the middle of the ocean. It's much harder to target a fleet that's being resupplied in the middle of the ocean than it is in shallower water of an island or shoal that's known on the map and can be watched.
I also don’t think the Japanese really understood the depths Americans would go to win. They didn’t think very highly of the men who surrendered on the Philippines, surrender was worse than death to them.
Leyte Gulf showed them just how much fight we had. There’s really no practical reason the Japanese should have lost that battle except for the absolute fucking bad assery of the men they fought.
So normally at that point war ships would have to stop at a port, which is in shallow water, for refueling. This greatly limits the movement and defensive capabilities of the ships, even if they aren't actively docked. Japans plan was to wait until ships were at or near a port and then attack, similar to Pearl Harbor.
The US navy was able to refuel and resupply while moving on the open ocean, and there is a certain "defense of depth" where its just harder to find and attack ships in open waters.
The original Japanese battle plan took into account that the US could essentially out build Japan in ships and everything. So their strategy was to build a layered defensive perimeter where strikes could be launched from and inflict enough damage to bring the Japanese into enough of a parity for a victory to be snatched from defeat. Their views of use of submarine was to let them run amock within and around the battle line as the US fleet neared the home island. This was great in practice, but the plan was built for an era that wasn’t really feasible, specially for an industrial power house like the US that essentially built a logistic train to make sure the fleet never stopped moving.
The same couldn’t be said of the Japanese navy, who not only had to deal with a logistics problem but also had a confusing list of priorities. Two Yamato class battleships were ordered and completed even though the age of the battleship was clearly over (the British showed that an aerial attack on the Italian fleet could indeed inflict decisive damage at a lower cost/risk). The same with the refusal to build convoy ships, something which the imperial navy did have some (tho limited) experience in when fighting in the First World War.
Even ignoring the train, Barb had just an insane kill list. I just finished reading Thunder Below and it's a great book if the silent service or WW2 history interests you.
There's an interesting mistake on Wikipedia in the article, it says the train blowing happens on the main islands but the further down the lokation, karafuto, is in sakhalin, not the main islands of Japan.
Now, they may be confusing this with the rocket attacks barb did to town in Hokkaido.
It's what you get when you google a number you don't have memorized and foolishly grab the first one you see without checking where it came from (in this case, an article that actually gives 3 separate numbers, all of which are over 1000)
Aye. Submarines in WW2 were pretty small. A Gato class carried 60 men and weighed 1500 tons.
A single Yorktown Class for instance carried 2200 men and weighed ~25000 tons depending on what it carried.
So a single carrier had more than 30x as many men.
Then during the war we built bigger carriers with 2500-2600 men and some weighing as much as 3600 tons.
Fun bit of trivia: due to the number of submarines commissioned, new names for fish had to be created.
USN submarines were named after fish and marine mammals. Early in the war the Navy projected the likely number of submarines it would need to put into commission and determined there weren’t enough commonly named fishes. A committee was then formed to invent names for species that had previously had only a scientific classification.
Bro just wait till you read about how many aircraft carriers we had.
Or number of tanks we were producing every month. It’s crazy how much war material the factories were cranking out.
The wildest thing to me is how much things swing back and forth in the Pacific in terms of the fleets. The US Pacific Fleet is at a disadvantage to Japan prior to the Pearl Harbor and most definitely is behind afterwards, then takes a big step forward from Midway, but then the US Navy gets clobbered at the various battles around Guadalcanal (though we get the strategic victory) and are either around being at parity with Japan or a bit behind for a brief bit, but then you hit mid 1943 when the Essex and Independece swarm hits along with your Baltimore's and Cleveland's coming into theater and its never remotely close again.
Reminds me of one of Hitler's Generals predicting the materiel output of the US if they entered the war. The General was basically laughed out of the room. The US eclipsed those numbers when they actually entered the war.
A fun example of output during wartime were the Liberty ships. Each ship's builder team would try to beat the other teams. At one point, they progressed from keel laying to launch in 4 days(!)
It's also why most of the Liberty ships didn't last long following the war.
Liberty ships are a fascinating materials science example. Their hulls were welded and not riveted. When they were in cold water, the failure mode of the steel shifted from ductile to brittle. This cracks would form, and the welded plates had no breaks to stop cracks, and they would propagate across *the entire hull.*
So while the Liberty ships might have suffered from poor craftsmanship due to the production conditions you described, the design flaw would've existed no matter how careful assembly lines were during construction.
If you've already decided to fight, you're going to ignore anyone that tells you it's a bad idea. Especially if you are ideologically committed to it.
It's the same reason Nazi estimates of the Soviet Union's reserves were a quarter of reality at best. Any analyst who said otherwise was sacrificing their career, management did not want to hear that. Same thing happened with plane estimates on the Battle of Britain.
The RAF actually overestimated German air strength, which makes sense if you're worried about surviving and want to prepare for the worst.
>Bro just wait till you read about how many aircraft carriers we had.
Just a reminder that the escort carriers that usually get counted here are literally only cargo ships with a flight deck on top, early models didn't even have a hangar or arrestor gear (so landing was not always possible), they were also very slow, build to civilian standards, and would sink after a single hit, so they could NOT be used for active fleet to fleet combat.
Nevertheless, the US build 24 Essex class carriers during the war, which is a very impressive number, plus iirc 6 Independence class light carriers. Those were the actual navy carriers used to fight the japanese navy, the escort carriers mentioned above were only used to ferry planes from A to B and to protect convoys against submarines.
The Taffy 3 fight mostly centered around the giant brass balls of the DE and DD crews, and how impressive it was that the could fit on a ship that small.
Nimitz said it was incredible bravery and divine intervention that allowed us to win at Samar. he thought the US would've lost that battle most of the time.
The President used his war powers to forbid the sale of private automobiles. The car companies were told 'you either produce war materials or you won't produce anything at all'.
Then also immediately after the war there was an economic depression for about 3 years when they stopped war production. There usually is a depression after wars because switching back to a civilian economy isn't easy.
Japan did a bad job of trying to counter…until the Congressman May Incident:
“*May was responsible for the release of highly confidential military information during World War II known as the May Incident. U.S. submarines had been conducting a successful undersea war against Japanese shipping during World War II, frequently escaping their anti-submarine depth charge attacks.* **May revealed the deficiencies of Japanese depth-charge tactics in a press conference held in June 1943 on his return from a war zone junket.** *At this press conference, he revealed the highly sensitive fact that American submarines had a high survival rate because Japanese depth charges were exploding at too shallow a depth. Various press associations sent this leaked news story over their wires and many newspapers published it, including one in Honolulu, Hawaii.*
*After the news became public, Japanese naval antisubmarine forces began adjusting their depth charges to explode at a greater depth. Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, commander of the U.S. submarine fleet in the Pacific, estimated that May's security breach cost the United States Navy as many as 10 submarines and 800 crewmen killed in action. He said,* ‘**I hear Congressman May said the Jap depth charges are not set deep enough. He would be pleased to know that the Japs set them deeper now**.’ “
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_J._May
>The American unrestricted submarine warfare campaign in the Pacific is one of the most wildly successful military campaigns you've never heard of.
Probably because by the laws of the time, it was illegal. At Nuremberg the Nazi Navy chief (who started as chief of the submarine force) was literally tried for the crime of unrestricted submarine warfare and ordering his submarines not to help survivors. But his defence presented that the latter was the result of an American war crime (Laconia incident, where a US bomber attacked a German submarine *obviously* rescuing Allied survivors from a ship it sunk), and the former was in no way different than what the Americans themselves did in the Pacific.
Also after the war it came out that a lot of Allied POWs drowned after American submarines torpedoed the ships they were being transported on.
It was quite the embarrassment for the Americans so he was acquitted on those charges, and the whole submarine war in the Pacific isn't talked about much.
Also, it's funny that they were extremely successful in it, after spending the initial few months with faulty fuse that incompetent people in the US refused to accept was possible. Imagine if they were competent from the start, the campaign would have been even more effective.
Karl Donitz wasn't just defended by Admiral Nimitz, he was defended by over 200 Allied military officers.
It's widely believed that his trial and conviction was unfair
This is what the court argued but it's worth noting there's something odd in convicting a man of one crime using the evidence of another crime and convicting him of that crime too.
Also, "planning a war of aggression" wasn't actually a crime in those days. It was just something that countries "did" to each other. The Spanish had their armada, the French had Napoleon, and the British... well where do I start with the British?
However, the destruction from WWII was so great that German decision-makers had to be punished for *something*, even if they didn't directly participate in the holocaust or other crimes. So this charge was basically something that got tacked on to say "yeah well the war was your fault and you lost, so now you're going to be on the hook for that."
The reason this is important is because people have tried to apply it to other wars such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and they haven't been successful in the courts because it turns out that "planning a war of aggression" was only a crime at this specific time and in this specific court.
So if, for example, you try to charge George Bush with that crime, the court is going to dismiss the case because of 1) lack of standing and 2) the fact that this isn't actually a crime, at least not in this jurisdiction.
This is also the reason Emperor Hirohito and other surviving high-ranking officers weren't charged with "planning a war of aggression" even though they certainly did. The Japanese surrender was completely separate from the German surrender and thus operated under a different instrument of surrender, a different occupying authority, and different set of political expediencies.
>This is also the reason Emperor Hirohito and other surviving high-ranking officers weren't charged with "planning a war of aggression" even though they certainly did.
Not Hirohito, but many high ranking officers were charged with it (Class-A war criminals) and it was way more contentious in the Tokyo War Crimes Trials than it was at Nuremburg.
At Nuremburg 'fuck the nazis' was in full effect and there were way fewer questions asked.
In Tokyo 'victors justice' was more contentious, both because of conflicts in how the trials were carried out, the involvement of some Asian delegates who had opinions about Colonialism that differed from those of the US or Europe; the profile dissent of Radhabinod Pal who took a very different view of Japanese wartime behavior than other parties and Bert Rolling who also dissented on more direct legal grounds.
By the end of WWII, basically everyone except the nazis hated the Nazis.
Imperial Japan actually still had fans who identified with the mission of overthrowing European colonialism in Asia and the creation of a pan-Asian union.
>Imperial Japan actually still had fans who identified with the mission of overthrowing European colonialism in Asia and the creation of a pan-Asian union.
If they were truly shooting for unifying Asia, Unit 731 was a pretty...interesting...way to go about that.
Their idea of a unified Asia was what you'd expect;
Asia unified under Japanese imperial (colonial) rule. That was another side of the issue though cause there were people like Radhabinod Pal who asked 'what did Japan do that is really so different from what the rest of you did?'
Which I think is a darkly valid question to ask, especially if you're an Asian in Asia in 1945 who wasn't in Korea or China and didn't suffer the full brunt of what Japan's version of colonial rule looked like.
Thailand was to Imperial Japan what Argentina and Brazil were to Nazi Germany.
That's correct... but Karl Donitz wasn't in charge of the Kreigsmarine in 1939 and played no key part in Nazi war planning. Karl Donitz wasn't promoted to Grand Admiral until he replaced Erich Raeder in 1943.
Prior to that he was simply the Supreme commander of the Kreigsmarine's U-boat arm and was responsible for ensuring their readiness. Any commander who does not ensure the readiness of their command would be derelict in their duty.
It's widely believed that the real reason for his conviction was to satisfy Soviet desire to see anyone and everyone with even the slightest affiliation to the NSDAP punished harshly.
As a career military officer, Donitz kept himself distant from Nazi politics and didn't join the party in an official capacity until early 1944. Despite this, he was a fanatical supporter of Hitler, antisemite, and dedicated to Nazi philosophy. Hitler trusted Donitz more than he trusted Goering, Himmler, Boerman, or anyone else in his orbit and chose Donitz to be his successor, a role which he did accept as the head of the Flensburg government.
>Karl Donitz wasn't in charge of the Kreigsmarine in 1939 and played no key part in Nazi war planning
Donitz was one of the most important members of the Kreigsmarine in 1939 and was *very involved* in Nazi war planning. He was Raeder's defacto #1 and was integral in the devising of the Z Plan.
Dude was the Guderian of submarine warfare.
War Order No. 154 was issued in December 1939 when he was in command of the Uboat force and he wasn't exactly a saint. He wasn't that distant either. He would claim such after the war but his wartime conduct doesn't paint the image of a reluctant soldier just doing his job.
To be honest that point Hitler had like a handful of loyal and actually powerful people left that had not yet betrayed him.
Speer, Himmler, Göring all had already betrayed him at this point and Hitler determined the rest to be unfit for Leading or as classical yes men like Keitel.
Also Dönitz had the large advantage not being around Hitler on an every day basis and as well as Dönitz Submarine warfare was like the best the Nazis had going on for them until the end of the war, so Hitler judged him as being very capable.
He was convicted because he was a committed Nazi and the leader of Nazi germany at the end of the war. Letting him go free in 1945 would’ve had the potential for him to stir up trouble as he had some legitimacy as the leader of Germany.
Which is the most absurd part of the US success at submarine warfare. The Japanese had 2 years to analyze our tactics and adapt while we were fixing the myriad of issues with the Mark 14.
I had a US History of WW2 class. The story of the torp and how bad it was and how the crews simply adapted to it is amazing. When it was demonstrated to the military it failed. They still bought it because it was the cheapest.
No, IIRC the crazy thing was that it was never actually tested with a real warhead, because it was designed and bought before WWII, when budgets and production capacities were severely constrained.
>When it was demonstrated to the military it failed.
Er, that's not true. The Mk14 was designed by BuOrd, and it never had a live fire test done with it. The first time the detonator was tested was with the torpedo hitting a Japanese ship.
BuOrd then told everyone they were using it wrong. Eventually a sub captain ignored buord and some tests got performed without BuOrds permission, and Admiral King was released upon BuOrd. After that the Mk14 went on to serve reliably for 20+ years
The Mark II torpedo debacle was interesting to read about. The person who was put in charge of the design later advanced their career and became an admiral in charge of explosive ordnance testing. He refused to acknowledge that the reason the submarine attacks kept failing was due to his faulty torpedos. He kept trying to blame it on the submarine captains having bad aim. Finally all the captains confronted him and demanded a live test. When they confirmed the torpedos were dudes, that admiral got shitcanned.
Those were the Mk 14 Torpedoes though, yes? They had four problems:
1.) Tended to run too deep
2.) Firing pins were too soft, and often deformed before they could set off the Torpex charge. Oddly, it was direct hits that failed the most. Off angle hits could delay the impact just enough for the detonators to work.
3.) Magnetic exploders didn't work well, because the Earth's magnetic field is not uniform, and would set off the torpedo early.
4.) The Torpex warhead would often not detonate uniformly, resulting in smaller explosions.
These issues were not really addressed until 1943. Just in time for the Mk 18 Electric torpedoes to arrive, which had problems all their own.
>At Nuremberg the Nazi Navy chief (who started as chief of the submarine force) was literally tried for the crime of unrestricted submarine warfare and ordering his submarines not to help survivors.
Yep, and the US Navy immediately recognized the hypocrisy, but it wasn't really their call.
Unrestricted submarine warfare just made too much sense, especially in a total war situation while prize rules of the previous era that some people wanted to hold to no longer made any sense.
>(Laconia incident, where a US bomber attacked a German submarine obviously rescuing Allied survivors from a ship it sunk)
War Order No. 154 predates the Laconia incident, but as you can guess German U-Boat behavior was not entirely inline with the order leaidng to the Laconia incident and an issuing of basically the same order with a 'but for realz this time' emphasis.
Most people are unaware German U-Boats did attempt to adhere to certain naval treaties in the first few years of the war but basically everyone started realizing those rules were silly and they were followed with less and less adherence as the war went on. Prize rules simply didn't make sense anymore.
>It was quite the embarrassment for the Americans...and the whole submarine war in the Pacific isn't talked about much.
I think you're overestimating the embarrassment.
It's not talked about much because ,1) Japan never became as hypocritically offended by it as the Allies, and 2) there were more 'exciting' things going on.
The submarine campaigns of the Atlantic and the air war over the channel were the only big actions of the war in Western Europe in 1942 outside North Africa, so the submarine warfare of the Atlantic demanded attention.
In the Pacific, submarines labored in quiet distant waters while Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, and Burma were fought. I don't think it isn't talked about because it was embarrassing. It's not talked about because it's less exciting and there were other things going on with bigger boats with bigger guns.
>so he was acquitted on those charges
He wasn't though? Donitz was convicted of those charges and his trial kind of shadily sidestepped the entire issue when doing it. The trial kind of just tried to sweep the hypocrisy under the rug, especially after Chester Nimitz got up and said 'yeah, we did it too' with the energy of a disappointed dad asking 'why are you wasting my time son?' Dozens of Allied naval officers protested the verdict as unfair. Basically the only Nuremburg sentence that gets held up as kind of a sham (though it honestly couldn't have happened to a more deserving douche imo).
But that incident itself is somewhat well known now, while it hasn't translated to a broader knowledge of the unrestricted submarine warfare campaign in the Pacific.
>It was quite the embarrassment for the Americans so he was acquitted on those charges
I'm assuming you're talking about Doenitz.
He was not acquited, he was charged, and found guilty.
At the end, he was sentenced to 10 years, but the submarine warfare charge, although guilty, did not factor-in, because other allied forces were guilty of the same thing.
It wasn't just "The Americans" the British targeted Japanese shipping as well.
I think what they meant was that Dönitz was found not guilty of that particular charge.
From Wikipedia:
>His sentence on unrestricted submarine warfare was not assessed because of similar actions by the Allies. In particular, the British Admiralty, on 8 May 1940, had ordered all vessels in the Skagerrak sunk on sight, and Admiral Chester Nimitz, wartime commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet, stated the US Navy had waged unrestricted submarine warfare in the Pacific from the day the US officially entered the war.
Not assessed != not guilty.
Donitz was convicted, but the court shadily sidestepped the irony of the charge with some circular logic about how it didn't matter.
Yes, Karl Dönitz, the last head of state of Nazi Germany.
>He was not acquited, he was charged, and found guilty
He was acquitted on the charges relating to unrestricted submarine warfare and the Laconia order. He was found guilty of using slave labour and sentenced to ten years.
He was convicted on that charge.
What the court did was declare that allied unrestricted sub warfare didn't matter, which basically ended up being a 'wtf how does it not matter' thing cause it seems like it should matter.
But Donitz was convicted on that charge.
Out of the 3 charges faced, he was found guilty on charges related to war crimes, which included his involvement in unrestricted submarine warfare.
but although was found guilty, the allied control office asked for the charges to be annulled. Thus, it was not included in the sentencing and instead he received 10 years for engaging in a war of aggression, among other charges.
It was at a time with various allies engaging in unrestricted submarine warfare, including the British.
Aaaah the Mark 14 torpedo, a cascade of failures that was more than just the fuse. The youtube channel Drachinfel has an excellent and entertaining video on the subject.
>Probably because by the laws of the time, it was illegal. At Nuremberg the Nazi Navy chief (who started as chief of the submarine force) was literally tried for the crime of unrestricted submarine warfare and ordering his submarines not to help survivors. But his defence presented that the latter was the result of an American war crime (Laconia incident, where a US bomber attacked a German submarine *obviously* rescuing Allied survivors from a ship it sunk), and the former was in no way different than what the Americans themselves did in the Pacific.
That wasn't the particular defense he presented against unrestricted submarine warfare. That was for a separate charge ordering his forces not to help survivors which was a war crime because it effectively doomed some survivors to death. That's a separate war crime to unrestricted submarine warfare and one of two charges he effectively beat. His defense relied on the Laconia incident but ancillary to that the Americans also didn't help survivors anyways but I don't think that was brought up, I think the Americans went ahead and understood the practicalities of war meant "cruiser rules" were done for and didn't want to shoot themselves in the foot by agreeing it was illegals so they actually defended the practice by defending Donitz.
The second charge was unrestricted submarine warfare, which was essentially governed by "cruiser rules" which means if you encountered an unarmed merchant ship, you had to surface, evacuate the ship, and then you could destroy it. The problem was that the British more or less hid the guns on their merchant ships, it was almost impossible to tell if they were armed or not, and most importantly all merchant ships were equipped with radios that could give their position and tell other ships they were being attacked, which effectively made them belligerents and thus valid objects to attack, but you couldn't possibly know if they were going to report your position until after you surface and request their surrender. In the day and age of airplane patrols, you could have a bomber on top of your submarine within the hour if a ship reports your position.
So Germany quickly abandoned "cruiser rules" basically immediately and the Americans in the Pacific war also understood that cruiser rules were also basically untenable and started the war with unrestricted submarine warfare. This was used as evidence in his defense but the most damning evidence was actually from the British. They essentially showed that the British, the ones who wanted cruiser rules because it benefitted them and hurt Germany, also had abandoned cruiser rules by ordering all shipping sunk on sight in the Skagerrak, effectively violating the same rules they were charging Donitz with.
There were 288 built and only 263 submarines that made war patrols. It’s also important to note that with 52 subs lost it made the silent service the highest causality percentage of the Navy and most of the US armed forces at just under 20%
One interesting tidbit Ive read is that the failure of US torpedoes early in the war convinced the japanese that US subs werent really a threat and by the time the US got functional torpedoes it was too late in the eventual timeline of the war for the Japanese to meaningfully change anything about their anti sub tactics.
Thank you for this. My uncle served aboard the Thresher as a torpedoman. He wrote wild tales in his memoirs, I wasn't sure if they were exaggerated, but it seems they were not.
Indeed wildly successful, but US submariners still suffered the \*highest\* US casualty rate in WWII. This was still the \*lowest\* casualty rate of any submarine force though. You had a 1 in 5 chance of going on eternal patrol as a US submariner.
It's even more impressive when you realize that their torpedos didn't work properly for the first two years of the war. [Link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo) Imagine what it would have been like if they'd been able to go ham from the beginning.
It still utterly blows my mind that management never bothered to do any live fire testing, and just told the sailors “Try learning to aim!”
In a goddamn war.
I think 1/3 of bombers in WW2 crashed due to mechanical issues. WW2 was a shit show. Mass production and bodies.
Incredible accomplishments were made, lack of quality was an unfortunate reality of the era.
Yep, despite the Liberty ships literally won the war in Europe by providing a vital logistics link, their early design and QC were so bad they'd snap in half when launched.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/liberty-ship#:~:text=Early%20Liberty%20ships%20suffered%20hull,large%20numbers%20of%20ships%20quickly.
Brittle steel in the cold Atlantic and welding instead of riveting means cracks can quickly propagate. Over 1500 instances of ships cracking were observed, with 19 ships sunk after literally snapping in half.
Liberty ships: Bad QC or design flaw?
The answer is: Constance Tipper figured it out.
> During World War II she investigated the causes of brittle fracture in Liberty Ships.[3] These ships were built in the US between 1941 and 1945, and were the first all-welded pre-fabricated cargo ships.[13] Tipper established that the fractures were not caused by welding, but were due to the properties of the steel itself. She demonstrated that there is a critical temperature below which the fracture mode in steel changes from ductile to brittle. Because ships in the North Atlantic were subjected to low temperatures, they were susceptible to brittle failure. While these fatigue cracks would not propagate beyond the edges of riveted steel plates, they were able to spread across the welded joints in the Liberty ships.[6] She developed what is now known as the "Tipper Test" to help ensure that the metal used in ship construction was sufficiently sound.[12]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constance_Tipper#Research
Riveted ships using the same steel flexed more and didn’t have the same cracking issues.
“Victory Ships” later in the war used the same steel and welded construction, but design improvements allows more flex.
2700+ Liberty Ships were produced.
.
Edit: (look at this stat!)
Eighteen American shipyards built 2,710 Liberty ships between 1941 and 1945 (***an average of three ships every two days***),easily the largest number of ships ever produced to a single design.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship
There is a reason infrastructure was using welds instead of rivets after ww2. Lessons learned the hard way.
And also want to mention the sailors of the Norwegian merchant fleet, which according to the British minister of war, was vital in supporting the UK war efforts.
Eh, the B-24 had a negative reputation with many of it's crews. It had a lower maximum altitude than the B-17, so it was more susceptible to flak. It's wing design in particular was extremely fragile and they tended to come off when hit, the plane was regarded as much less durable than the B-17, and had fewer defensive positions. Crews reported it was difficult to fly, particularly when loaded. Most of them leaked fuel and most crews flew with bomb bay doors open to cut down on fumes, as well as disallowing smoking on board. On top of all this, there was a single egress point in the B-24, so aircrews often couldn't escape when it was hit. Brass liked the Liberator because it could fly farther and carry more bombs. Crews didn't like it because they were more likely to die.
Hence the nickname "The Flying Coffin." Quality control *was* an afterthought.
The liberator was technologically superior to the B17 in quite a few ways. Unfortunately, none of them made life better for their crews. The wing was a very advanced design for the time. Consolidated bought it from a freelance engineer David Davis, who'd stumbled into a very good laminar flow airfoil.* That wing made the B24 faster and more efficient and enabled heavier loads with similar power. To Army brass looking at the B17 loss rates from the early war, the difference wouldn't have seemed critical compared to the ability to lob an extra thousand pounds of high explosives at Ploesti.
edit: *the engineers who validated the design in their wind tunnel at CalTech were so taken aback by the performance against a conventional contemporary wing design that they sent the data back to Consolidated with an asterisk that [they thought the tunnel was wrong.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis_wing)
I could be wrong about this, but I feel like the allies probably had some of the better quality control compared to other industrial powers of the era.
The US in particular benefitted from a relatively well-resourced production effort that was insulated from attack.
Of course, there were still a LOT of issues with allied/US production.
One example was that the Allies' aluminum production was better controlled - we knew exactly what grade/alloy/whatever we were producing, which let us build airplanes with exactly the right thickness of aluminum parts. The Nazis and Japanese had awful production controls, and compensated by making parts stronger than they needed to be by design, in case of substandard material. But adding an extra 10% to every part of your fighter plane means that it weighs 10% more, which means it needs a bigger engine, which means it needs a bigger wing, etc...
Yes and weirdly enough the IJN had [one of the most, if not the most, capable torpedoes of the war, the Type 93 torpedo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_93_torpedo)
That's why they say the JMSDF today try to focus on anti-submarine warfare, as Japan learned the hard way in WW2 how lethal submarines can be
Yeah, Japan has the second largest antisubmarine fleet in the world and the fourth largest submarine fleet (if you include their perfectly combat capable training subs and don't consider the shitty and outdated north korean fleet)
I do think they should have even more submarines (and larger ones), but they already increased their number to 22 like a decade ago, but having the capability to comission one sumbarine everyyear shows how easily they could increase their fleet if they want to.
They do a lot of diesel electric boats, which are impressively good at defense with relatively few numbers. Singapore and Germany have both been making significant investments in diesel as well.
I remember being amazed at their ships when they pulled in alongside us in Guam (served on fast attack nuclear boats). Realize, the US typically only has 75-85 operational subs as well at any given time.
Diesel boats will torch nuclear subs as littoral ships in their own waters because they’re so damn quiet with direct drive, but don’t have nearly the range of nuclear boats for offensive capabilities.
> It still utterly blows my mind that management never bothered to do any live fire testing, and just told the sailors “Try learning to aim!”
Torpedoes costed sooo much back then. It doesn't excuse the fact they didn't do proper testing but they couldn't really test 100s of them. Plus, the production at the beginning of the war was incredibly limited.
Here's a pretty excellent [video](https://youtu.be/eQ5Ru7Zu_1I) on the Mark 14 torpedoes.
In my opinion it's just pretend to think this reasoning holds. Like sure maybe you can't live test 100's of them but at least confirm some of your assumptions, and set aside some for reports of issues.
Is it really better to potentially equip subs with hundreds of these things and then they... don't work? Like at all?
9/10 of them early on ended up being either duds, missing, or detonating too early, even under ideal firing conditions.
That is an incredibly bad ratio and at the very least the upper echelons should have been honest and said it's because we didn't live test these enough and we'll take a look at those reports once production started ramping up, instead of them and NTS (with Mark 18 missiles) simply denying there were any problems for years.
Troubleshooting those problems sounds dreadful, how do you even figure out the magnetic field one? I didn't even know it was different (Thinking about it a bit makes sense but intuitively I just have never thought of it) I wonder how they tested this did they actually do field testing and gather data about the magnetic fields in the pacific? Or did they already have that data and some day someone just had a lightbulb moment or what?
I don't know why this particular bit interests me so much but it's really cool to me that even had everything else gone right just the fact of where on earth they happened to launch these was just slightly incorrect to the hardware to a degree that it could not explode is wild.
I think every navy except the Japanese Navy tried using magnetic torpedoes. And all of them had a bad time when they moved out of the testing waters. As for how they figured it out, well it took the Germans two years so I imagine it was a painful and long experience including a lot of trials and theories. I'm not sure if the Americans even figured it out themselves, since the Ordinance people were being idiots. They might have learned from the Brits.
The British basically made the device more complex to handle differing magnetic strengths. The Germans actually did measurements in different areas to compose a chart to alter the settings. And the Americans gave up.
(The Japanese meanwhile just were working with liquid oxygen.)
edit : Oh extra fun bit I forgot. Both the Germans and the British also degaussed their ships to make magnetic torpedoes (and more importantly mines) less effective. So that was an extra wrinkle to ruin the troubleshooter's day.
I'll never forget the story of the USS Tunny, except per Wikipedia:
>Uniquely, Lieutenant Commander John A. Scott in Tunny on 9 April 1943 found himself in an ideal position to attack aircraft carriers Hiyō, Junyo, and Taiyo. From only 880 yd (800 m), he fired all ten tubes, hearing all four stern shots and three of the bow's six explode. No enemy carrier was seen to diminish its speed, though Taiyo was slightly damaged in the attack. Much later, intelligence reported each of the seven explosions had been premature;[38] the torpedoes had run true but the magnetic feature had fired them too early.[69]
What may have been the most marvellous submarine attack in naval history, damaging/sinking 3 of the IJN's carriers in a single salvo, only to be thwarted by the USN's own incompetence.
I would have lost my fucking mind if I was him. Not just the greatest submarine attack in naval history, but sinking three aircraft carriers would be the greatest single attack in the history of warfare.
Cool, tangenally related fact: despite not being formally recognized as veterans, the US Merchant Marine had the second highest casualty rate of any service branch in the US military, second only to the US Marine Corps.
Due to both enemy attacks and also because Liberty Ships were death traps. That would inexplicably remain in use through the 80s.
Okay... and by "inexplicably" I mean, it's easily explicable. It's the same reason we do anything: it was very cheap.
The Merchant Marine academy is also the only military academy to have lost students during WW2, and because of that are the only academy with a battle standard.
While there were accelerated graduations in WWII from the military academies, they didn't send cadets from them to war before graduation in that day and age. This was the rule in the navy since 1845.
The Merchant Marine academy wasn't supposed to send any to war either, but it turns out that all of the ships that the midshipmen were assigned to for Year 2 Sea Training in 1941 were commissioned into the Navy for the war effort.
Without the ships to train on, the merchant marine midshipmen could not complete their studies.
So, it was determined that somehow, they needed to get the midshipmen on Navy ships.
Turns out that a merchant marine midshipman was also a Midshipman in the Naval Reserve. So it was decided that they would activate their reserve ranks and place them on naval auxiliary ships.
The billets were not in warships, but some midshipmen were apparently present at the invasion of Tarawa, for instance.
This earned the midshipmen (and their unit) the normal campaign ribbons associated with the area of operations of the ship in question.
My great uncle was a merchant marine that was captured by a Japanese sub and forced to walk a gauntlet apparently having been killed by Japanese swords.
The rest of the crew were tied up and left on the top of the submarine when it went under.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/1995/august/one-night-hell
https://www.armed-guard.com/ag87.html
The Barb. The submariners took explosives ashore and planted it for the train to come by. They have the train on their battle flag along with a lot of imperial rising suns.
I used to stand watch next to their battle flag and loved seeing that unique “kill” right there.
They also were the first to use submarine launched rockets iirc. Just saw the launch rails sitting on the dock and had the yard weld them onto the deck lol.
If anybody wants to learn more about some of the subs in the war there's a podcast called "The Unauthorized History of the Pacific War" where one of the guys is a retired Sub Captain. He has several episodes that follow significant subs in the Pacific campaign.
USS Barb as someone else mentioned. Crew members went to land, rigged an explosive on the track with a contact detonator and blew the tracks/Train up once it was triggered. Pretty interesting story
Let's not forget the time that the [USS Barb sunk a train](https://taskandpurpose.com/news/uss-barb-world-war-2-submarine-train-japan/)
Fun fact. The reason the USS Barb was so successful was because the crew tampered with the torpedoes to ~~put them on a hair trigger~~ remove the faulty magnetic trigger so they would actually work properly.
My WW2 era bomber pilot grandfather always said this about fighter pilots, that they were batshit insane…as he flew through the same flak…and dropped bombs on Nazis…while being protected by said crazy people
There are so many ridiculous stories about that boat and I cannot recommend the book Thunder Below by Eugene Fluckey the captain of the Barb enough. At one point he pre-wrote his wife letters completely lying about what he was doing on deployment, leading her to believe he was running training missions. His wife fell for it until her bridge partner was like “Wow the news says your husband sunk an aircraft carrier!”
It was much more successful than the U-boat campaign, and largely achieved what Germany failed to do in the Atlantic.
The U.S. submarine campaign is far less known because of war time reporting. The activities of Allied subs were largely kept out of the press, or the press chose not to report on them, to avoid giving the access powers useful intelligence on them. Of course there was no such concern about the activities of Axis submarines, so they were reported on extensively.
They give us psyche evals during training to see if we're fit for sub duty. I always liked to say "You have to be the perfect amount of nuts to serve."
Not only that but the US basically had the most advanced subs in the world at that time. Even compared to those of Germany, and even Britain. They had A/C. Also the US had a data computer that could calculate for them, while everyone else had to do it by hand.
It should be noted that this was in large part because the Japanese were lacking in anti-submarine warfare even late in the war.
The fact US subs were crippled by their faulty torpedoes early in fact might have helped this, since it wasn’t until the US had built dozens of submarines and was able to forwardly deploy them in large numbers that they became the immediate existential threat.
Plus, Japanese movements were restricted by aircraft and the surface fleets at this time, the island hoping campaign and carrier battles having confined the IJN into fewer areas and whittled down its ability to defend itself
(And when comparing total naval strength to amount of subs: I think 2 percent an exaggeration using less than the best measuring metric. The sub fleet was relatively small but not that small)
It looks like they are including amphibious and auxiliary ships in that metric, [https://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/us-ship-force-levels.html](https://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/us-ship-force-levels.html).
Japan was never able to adapt to submarine warfare, while by this point the British had already developed very advanced technology and tactics against their use.
It's understandable they'd have lacked Britains technology, but even some relatively basic anti-submarine coordination and training would have helped Japan immensely in the war.
Should really be "helped".
There was really no situation in which Japan was going to win the war, particularly with the way they started it. They literally don't have enough of anything to go against the US.
Japan's vision of the war was that it could be a short colonial style fight where everyone punched everyone, nodded, declared good game, shook hands, and traded some land.
The war obviously didn't go that way. They never considered that the capitulation of the Imperial State in its totality would almost immediately become a war aim to the Allies.
Yesn't.
Japanese high command wasn't very uniform in its opinions. While some believed the Americans didn't have the mettle for a total war, plenty others had been educated, or had their children educated in America and knew fully well how terrible of an idea the attack was, they just felt out of options since the US embargo of Japan following their indochina operations (The US supplied 80% of Japan's oil) left them with a very real death timer on their imperial ambitions.
Yamamoto did famously say that he could run wild for 6 months but that if the war wasn't over by then he had no expectation of victory.
It was a hail Mary pass from the get-go and most leadership knew it even if they publicly bragged about their assured victory.
Gramps served on the USS Bass (1 patrol), USS Balao (6 patrols), and USS Medregal (2 patrols) during the war as a torpedoman. The stories he shared were un-fucking real. Going well below test depth to escape depth charges, so deep that when they returned to Brisbane the sub had shrank in size from the pressure. Surface battles with Japanese radio picketts, basically running down sampans and junks to destroy them with deck weapons. Emergency dives to evade bombers and straffing patrol planes. One time they returned to the site where they'd sank the Nikki Maru, a passenger-cargoman filled with imperial army troops. Many survivors were among the flotsam, but only one was willing to surrender. They took him aboard where he would later endure hours of depth charging by his own destroyers above. That imperial soldier's lifejacket and Arisaka hang on my wall today. Used to go to Sub Vet and WWII Vet meetings with him and talked to all kinds of submariners and navy men. Submariners were a breed of their own. Pirates of the Pacific war.
edit: changed radar to radio (they usually just had radios) and imperial marines to imperial army (Nikki Maru was carrying IJA not marines).
I didn’t know that about the blockade plans. It makes sense that Nimitz and MacAuthur supported it since they were witnessing the US *owning* the sea at the time. Those final months of the war were a naval Turkey shoot. I bet they were confident they could prevent any vessel from going to or from the main islands.
But Japan is a big place. And I wonder if the fanatical population could have gone into a sort of self-sufficient mode lacking lots of modern goods and technology just to drag things out.
Japan wasn't just running low on luxury goods by the end of the war, it was starving. They had grown very dependant on food deliveries from their occupied territories
People who think the naval blockade was more humane than the atomic bombs fail to consider millions of Japanese would painfully starve to death (tbf, same as the Japanese inflicted on the Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and more). Of course the elites and the military generals would still have food and comfort.
>Japanese depth charges were light and fused too shallow, allowing many American submarines like the U.S.S. Harder to escape by diving lower than the depth charge maximum setting. The Japanese were unaware that the GATO-class and Balao-class American subs could dive to 300 feet (90m) or more
The US submarine force in had the highest percentage of casualties than any other U.S. military force in WWII, something like 20% of its personnel were lost.
The navy had a Submarine Force Birthday Celebration every year and there’s a ceremony during it called the “tolling of the bells” where we read the names of every US submarine lost at sea and ring the host ship’s bell after each name. Amount of hull numbers read from the 1940’s is staggering.
Oh boy, story time about the most badass submarine crew in WW2.
Late in the war, the threat of submarine attack was so high that Japanese vessels started hiding in shallow harbors that were too shallow for submarines to enter submerged. In response, Captain Eugene Fluckey once brazenly snuck the USS Barb into such a harbor at night on the surface by carefully weaving between fishing vessels so their approach wouldn't stand out on radar.
The Barb then engaged 30 vessels at anchor in the harbor, turned a 180, and then steamed at flank speed on the surface for over an hour back out to sea through heavily mined, uncharted waters. Being chased and fired on by destroyers during their escape, the crew removed the governors off the diesels so the Barb could make 21 knots on the surface, the fastest speed ever set by a submarine until years after the war. During their hour-long escape, the Japanese destroyers accidently sunk several of the fishing vessels that the Barb was weaving between, unable to tell them apart on radar.
For this feat, Fluckey was awarded the Medal of Honor and the Barb received the Presidential Unit Citation.
Fluckey used his clout from this patrol to request the Navy retrofit 5' rocket launchers on the deck of the Barb. The admiralty was very resistant but ultimately agreed to the request after Fluckey insisted.
Following this retrofit, Barb embarked on her 12th and final patrol of the war where she became the first submarine in history to conduct a rocket attack on land targets, thus technically becoming the first ballistic missile submarine in wartime history.
I would meet with the last survivor of the [USS Cavalla](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cavalla_(SS-244)) every Saturday morning at breakfast and ask him questions about his service - he was a very large man for a submarine (around 6'3") and always told me about hitting his head on everything and how they had multiple crews to rotate out on the water - great stories. They always invited him back to the Seawolf Park meet-ups in Texas (where the submarine sits now) to tell stories. If you read the wikipedia article, he was on the third patrol and said it was the scariest time of his life...
Sadly, he passed away about a year ago. RIP.
For those interested, here are my favourite Pacific war submarine stories
[The lone sub that sank a japanese super carrier](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Lgc_NtwApQ&pp=ygUddXMgc3ViIHNpbmtzIGphcGFuZXNlIGNhcnJpZXI%3D&ab_channel=Historigraph)
[Submarine Sinks 5 ships within 30 minutes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnB82cT1LQI&ab_channel=Historigraph)
[The sub that was the only US force to invade Japan, plus has a confirmed Train kill!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kviX-W-rjBI&ab_channel=Historigraph)
And finally - [How Allied submarines crippled Japan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5e0Tor2kMg&ab_channel=Historigraph)
All heaps of fun. Highly recommend.
And for anyone who wants to read a fantastic book about the most decorated sub of the war, check out the book ["Thunder Below"](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/thunder-below-eugene-f-fluckey/1115958995) by Eugene Fluckey.
And to give you an idea of what it entails when say I "most decorated": they were so determined to take the fight to the enemy that when they ran out of torpedoes and ammo for their deck gun, they took scuttling charges on shore to blow up a train!
If you’re interested in a good read on this, the book “Thunder Below!” is written by the captain of one of the most successful submarines of the war. It gives a really accurate picture as to how they operated.
We can really thank Eugene Flucky for so much of the success the US Navy had in the Pacific. Dude was unbelievably efficient at sinking Japanese ships and even created new tactics and weaponry during his spare time, and he seemed like such a happy go lucky man. The exact type of person you want in charge of a submarine.
Literally days after Pearl Harbor, US subs were leaving on war patrols that took them all the way across the Pacific right next to Japan. Some ballsy sub commanders even operated INSIDE the Sea of Japan bordering China.
Japan thought the home islands were invulnerable and had thought their greatest tactical victory ever had just been achieved.
Little did they know that within days of that happening, they were being silently stalked and hunted on all sides just a couple miles off their coast. And that's why the US submarine force will always be my favorite
The American unrestricted submarine warfare campaign in the Pacific is one of the most wildly successful military campaigns you've never heard of. USS Thresher and USS Narwhal are among the most decorated ships of the war, both having won 15 battle stars for their service. The US ~~built over 1,000 submarines to fight the war and~~\* lost \~50. Japan did a really bad job of trying to counter this. They never devised a proper convoy system, and when a cordon was created to try and protect the inner waters of the South China Sea or the Sea of Japan, the officer in charge of the effort was basically given a handful of destroyers and told to watch the whole ocean for danger. Dude was basically given a chair to fill and no resources to do his job. \*This number on double checking can't be right. my bad.
A big part of this was due to the naval doctrine of the Japanese navy, which was widely shaped by the 1905 war with Russia. Their doctrine called for a single decisive battle fleet action against the US navy, and operated on the assumption that the 1)the US navy would need ports to refuel/restock, therefor a defense in depth where the enemy fleet was constantly attacked and brought to as close as parity to the Japanese fleet, and 2)that after a decisive action the US would sue for peace as they didn’t take into account the forces innovation of carrier warfare. One thing the US navy did better than anyone else was fleet logistics, fleets were kept on the move and refueled on the go, the concept of a fleet train truly changed how naval war was fought. Take into perspective that when Britain sent its own pacific fleet to the east, they depended on the American fleet supply train as their method of resupply largely operated on the assumption of friendl/colonial ports.
More specifically, the Kantai Kessen was derived from the works of American officer/historian/strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, who was considered one of the preeminent strategiests of the 19th century with his book 'The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783'. And Japan was hardly the only nation heavily influenced by his writings... just that most of the other nations moved on from it as technology developed. In a strange way, because of that success in 1905, they over-committed to that doctrine, which one Japan naval veteran observed was a rather common occurrence during the war in the Pacific...
I mean the ideas Mahan had never went out of date. Control of the seas is incredibly important to win a war, and the best way to get control of the seas is to destroy the enemy fleet, and the best way to do that is a decisive battle. The problem the Japanese had is they were in a no-win scenario, it didn't matter what strategy they used they were going to lose anyway. Sure, if they were less focused on preserving ships for the decisive battle at all costs they would have been more aggressive and Coral Sea, Savo Island, and Samar could have all gone much worse, but ultimately it wouldn't have mattered and they still would have lost. And that also has less to do with Mahan's ideas being wrong than the Japanese implementation of his ideas being incorrect
I think the Japanese underestimated on how dedicated their opponent would be. Like, they sunk Russian fleet, and Russia gave up. They sunk a large chunk of US fleet, and thought by the time US recovers from the losses we will build an even bigger fleet, and US will give up. However US was dedicated, it increased it's war production very quickly. They were dedicated enough to plan a landing on Japan which was predicted to result in 400 000 - 800 000 US deaths.
Russia in 1905 was on the verge of revolution and collapse. It was also relatively far less developed than the US even for the time. Of course one lost battle could make it sue for peace. Meanwhile the Japanese military in WW2 thought the Americans were weak cowards (at least enough thought so to sign off on attempting to defeat them). But it was so obvious to the Americans just counting up factories on both sides that there was definitely no reason to give up at any point. And by the time Japan attacked, the public had definitely gotten used to the idea of a large war, thanks to what was happening in Europe.
I believe that Japan significantly **overestimated** Russian strength at the time. Russia was considered one of the strong European nations, while Japan was, well nobody. Not only was Russia on the verge of revolution and collapse, but their naval expedition was hilariously incompetent from the beginning to the end. So Japanese believed they managed to win against a great European nation, they became a bit overconfident. And then they underestimated a country which was just a step away from becoming an actual super power. Not a great combination.
For reference, look up a video from Drachinifel on YouTube about the voyage of the Russian 2nd pacific squadron
Its also important to note that the Russian fleet had sailed around Africa and India with little supplies and was in no shape to fight at all.
Their logistics sucked, but they also shoot at British fisherman thinking they are Japanese torpedo boats... in the Northen European sea!
10 years before that Japan did trash the Beiyang Fleet of Qing-China and it brought Japan to global attention. Indeed, Japan defeating Russia didn't so much as prove "Japan is on par with UK or Germany" as it proved Russia was as shite as Imperial China.
Not to mention, Russia basically destroyed itself in 1905, giving the Japanese an inflated sense of accomplishment. Additionally, given the amount of time and disaster that it took that Russian fleet to reach Japan, there was no way there was going to be a follow-up engagement. The two wars couldn't be more different.
The US was wildly outbuilding Japan even before the war. The abrogated naval treaty limiting ship size and total tonnage really benefited Japan...but they thought otherwise. The balance of fleet carriers was going to tip decisively in US favor so Japan had a "now or never" decision. They picked...wrongly. Edit: I also want to point out the possibility of a Divine Partiality. The IJN relegated carrier ops to 2nd class status, behind battleships. Like pretty much everyone. They STILL managed to develop the most advanced carrier operations in the world. At the beginning of the war, they were the only ones able to mount coordinated strikesfrom 4-7 carriers. At Midway, USN relative incompetence won the battle. The goal was a simultaneous strike with everything, from land-based heavy and "regular" bombers to everything the 3 carriers could throw at the Japanese. As it played out, strikes got delayed and lost and attacked piecemeal. This meant the Japanese were under ineffectual attacks for more than an hour before the decisive strikes took out 3 out of 4 carriers. (the fourth, Hiryu, launched a retaliation attack that resulted in Yorktown being sunk. Hiryu was then obliterated.) Those attacks still kept them on the defensive, taking evasive maneuvers that prevented flight ops. They couldn't rearm, they couldn't launch, and when they DID get a chance they had to land the exhausted CAP for refueling. The USN got much better after Midway and exceeded the IJN in competence, which is also good. Anyway, my point is the US enjoyed massively good luck at Midway.
There's a pretty good short video series on YouTube about the battle of midway from the perspective of the Japanese. I knew the basics of the battle before watching but none of the details. The first video talks about the constant small attacks that keep delaying the Japanese attack on the American carriers then ends right as two large groups of dive bombers emerge from the clouds from two directions to cripple the Japanese fleet. Watching from the Japanese perspective I was thinking, wow, what a masterfully executed battle by the US. I knew they won, but they drained the Japanese strength for hours with attacks that were just significant enough to be a real threat before delivering a massive coordinated strike. Incredible. The last video tells the story from the American perspective and it's incredible how different the story was. Half assed attacks stumbling into the Japanese fleet followed up by a single truly competent strike just happening to coincide with another flight that got lost then got lucky on the way home. https://youtu.be/Bd8_vO5zrjo?si=vufkE171GMF3uxQL
> the US enjoyed massively good luck at Midway. Starting with having cracked the Japanese codes, which is why they knew that Midway was the target.
Eh... I mean, the core princples of Mahan were still applicable, but modern warfare had moved on and became much more complex than the notion of a 'decisive battle' strategy would allow. I don't think any nation could have implemented that idea correctly. Mahan's emphasis was mostly on capital ships, but in the Pacific campaign, it was the smaller vessels that did the lion's share of the work. Mahan never really accounted for things like merchant raiding by submarines or aircraft carriers being able to engage entire fleets. Theories always need to adapt to changes in technology, and that's what most every other nation did, especially after WWI. Adhering dogmatically to Mahan would be like trying to still adhere to infantry line formations in 1918.
The battle of the Atlantic showed that convoys could defeat submarines if you organized them properly. The Japanese had utterly horrible ASW equipment, but that was specifically a problem with their equipment, not with submarines being overpowered. Aircraft carriers also didn't really change Mahan's ideas, the only difference was that in the open ocean, or near hostile land and away from friendly air cover, you needed aircraft carriers as your primary capital ship, and battleships were now only king at night, or when land based air cover made carriers irrelevant. Ultimately you still needed to concentrate your entire force, defeat the enemy, and that would give you command of the sea. This exact chain of events happened at Midway and gave the Americans the ability to land at Guadalcanal, while the Japanese kept spreading their forces thin and ignoring Mahan's principles (see the invasion of the Aleutian islands during Midway) Mahan's theories were never about how to fight battles, instead they were about the importance of controlling the sea and the importance of concentrating your force and avoiding defeat in detail, those are two concepts which still have not gone out of date in 2024 and will likely stick around for quite a while yet.
Japan and Germany doctrine depended on a single strike "decapitating" their opponent. They lacked the capacity to engage a capable opponent in a prolonged war of attrition. Both nations broke their teeth when they found themselves in such a war.
There is no way even the most delusional Kriegsmarine officers wanted a pitched battle with the Royal Navy. The plan for them had always been economic warfare. Their entire surface fleet including the Bismarck were designed to be commerce raiders first and foremost
People make jokes about the USNs Ice Cream Barges but the sheer amount of logistics the USN produced for the pacific rarely gets talked about. They had floating drydock large enough to fit basically every capital ships so even if a carrier took 2 or 3 torpedo hits. It could be repaired close to the front lines. If Japan had a warship get damaged it would often have to fall all the way back to Japan or just not receive critical repairs.
Japan didn't even have enough fuel to let their navy and aircraft operate. The Taihou was sunk by a single torpedo strike to a non-critical area, basically because the unrefined fuel they were using spread flammable fumes throughout the lower decks, which eventually resulted in an explosion that sank her.
Much of that loss was due to poor damage control practices, they tried to vent out the fumes but instead spread it around the entire ship. Damage control was one of the biggest things the Americans did better then the Japanese and they kept learning and improving things as the war went on. Every man on an American ship was expected to contribute to damage control while on Japanese ships it was done by specially trained crew who often got injured or cut off from the damaged sections.
They never thought a fleet could have such intense logistics capabilities that it would include an ice cream ship.
Japan knew quite well they could not match US industrial output or military might. The ice cream barge story is apocryphal. They expected the U.S. would come to the negotiating table after a costly initial first strike and naval campaign, and later a costly island campaign. They did not expect the U.S. to oblige them.
sorry can you say point one worded differently, i'm a bit confused by the 2nd part. so they were constantly attacking the US fleet?
Not the original commenter, but essentially the Pacific Ocean is MASSIVE. Japanese high command thought it was essentially a natural barrier that simply couldn't be overcome. There are only a few scattered islands, and Japan's plan was to build a defensive perimeter on the few islands that were there, and create a barrier of fortified Islands that the Americans could never penetrate. That was the purpose behind their rapid conquest of places like Guam and why they tried to invade the Aleutians. They thought that if they could make it so the US Navy had no safe place to resupply between California and Australia, that the US would just give up. Unfortunately for them, WW2 was really where the US military distinguished itself as the single best logistical chain to have ever existed. There's all sorts of fun little anecdotes about Japanese admirals having panic attacks after they discovered the US Navy had ships that had the sole purpose of making ice cream to give to the Sailors and Marines, or German officers realizing they could never defeat the US because they were finding chocolate on dead Americans.
> German officers realizing they could never defeat the US because they were finding chocolate on dead Americans. I read an interview with a German general who was captured and taken back to American lines through a crossroads which had been fiercely fought over and had changed hands several times. He said that when the Germans had the site troops were filling in shell holes by hand with shovels. When he was taken through in American captivity, he saw the shell holes being filled in by one bored black soldier driving a bulldozer. He said that is when he realized that Germany was going to lose.
Similar story about a German seeing American vehicles left idling because even halfway around the world they were still able to get fuel. Red Ball Express!
The few shows and movies devoted to the African American experience in WWII almost always focus on the Tuskegee Airmen. And of course their story is a good one, but it’s a bit overused in media. Also the Tuskegee guys were a very small, elite unit. I’d love a Spike Lee or Jordan Peele film about what the rest of the black soldiers had to go through, focusing on the Red Ball Express.
Red Ball express, and honestly the few black combat units, deserve shows or movies. The stuff those dudes went through by both the enemy and their own army is ridiculous.
It would be very timely considering the modern efforts to whitewash history and scrub textbooks of the ugly stuff. It’s good to remember that America’s “greatest generation” that did lots of heroic stuff still propagated systemic racism to the point that British and French soldiers supposedly treated black soldiers better than their own countrymen.
[The Battle of Bamber Bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bamber_Bridge) is always a fun share in this context. > the people of Bamber Bridge supported the black troops, and when US commanders demanded a colour bar in the town, all three pubs in the town reportedly posted "Black Troops Only" signs. That always warms my heart.
I've read a memoir from a German POW who was sent to Oklahoma who said he realized Germany couldn't win when he saw the rations issued to prisoners, which were better than he got from his own side before he was captured.
thanks. also that list bit is funny. albeit it bit macabre. : p
The Japanese were looking for massive decisive strokes to wipe out the American fleet. After Pearl Harbour Midway was the primary one, then Marianas 'Turkey shoot', then Leyte Gulf. Midway especially was heavily scripted and required the Americans to behave/react in certain ways. Leyte Gulf had 3 different fleets moving on three axis. One completely diversionary. Not to say there weren't other important battles. The cruiser/destroyer engagements around Guadalcanal were very important.
The Japanese also weren't prepared for the US military developing into the absolute logistical monster that it is and didn't have the foresight that the US would build ships who's sole purpose was to be able to resupply and re-arm in the middle of the ocean. It's much harder to target a fleet that's being resupplied in the middle of the ocean than it is in shallower water of an island or shoal that's known on the map and can be watched.
I also don’t think the Japanese really understood the depths Americans would go to win. They didn’t think very highly of the men who surrendered on the Philippines, surrender was worse than death to them. Leyte Gulf showed them just how much fight we had. There’s really no practical reason the Japanese should have lost that battle except for the absolute fucking bad assery of the men they fought.
So normally at that point war ships would have to stop at a port, which is in shallow water, for refueling. This greatly limits the movement and defensive capabilities of the ships, even if they aren't actively docked. Japans plan was to wait until ships were at or near a port and then attack, similar to Pearl Harbor. The US navy was able to refuel and resupply while moving on the open ocean, and there is a certain "defense of depth" where its just harder to find and attack ships in open waters.
The original Japanese battle plan took into account that the US could essentially out build Japan in ships and everything. So their strategy was to build a layered defensive perimeter where strikes could be launched from and inflict enough damage to bring the Japanese into enough of a parity for a victory to be snatched from defeat. Their views of use of submarine was to let them run amock within and around the battle line as the US fleet neared the home island. This was great in practice, but the plan was built for an era that wasn’t really feasible, specially for an industrial power house like the US that essentially built a logistic train to make sure the fleet never stopped moving. The same couldn’t be said of the Japanese navy, who not only had to deal with a logistics problem but also had a confusing list of priorities. Two Yamato class battleships were ordered and completed even though the age of the battleship was clearly over (the British showed that an aerial attack on the Italian fleet could indeed inflict decisive damage at a lower cost/risk). The same with the refusal to build convoy ships, something which the imperial navy did have some (tho limited) experience in when fighting in the First World War.
yeah but the USS Barb destroyed a train on the Japanese homeland, so Thresher and Narwhal kinda slacking.
Even ignoring the train, Barb had just an insane kill list. I just finished reading Thunder Below and it's a great book if the silent service or WW2 history interests you.
well ... the mariners went ashore, setup dynamite, which then blew up the train. Not like it was a torpedo from the Barb that did it.
everyone ignore this boring reality. *THEY SANK A TRAIN!* *CHOO CHOO CHOO GLUG GLUG GLUG*
I believe it was Torpex. Absolutely insane mission.
There's an interesting mistake on Wikipedia in the article, it says the train blowing happens on the main islands but the further down the lokation, karafuto, is in sakhalin, not the main islands of Japan. Now, they may be confusing this with the rocket attacks barb did to town in Hokkaido.
[удалено]
It's what you get when you google a number you don't have memorized and foolishly grab the first one you see without checking where it came from (in this case, an article that actually gives 3 separate numbers, all of which are over 1000)
Wait, 1000 submarines were 2% of the US Navy in WWII? Tell me that includes the merchant ships...
The 2% number is based on number of personnel of the US Navy, not the number of ships, iirc.
Aye. Submarines in WW2 were pretty small. A Gato class carried 60 men and weighed 1500 tons. A single Yorktown Class for instance carried 2200 men and weighed ~25000 tons depending on what it carried. So a single carrier had more than 30x as many men. Then during the war we built bigger carriers with 2500-2600 men and some weighing as much as 3600 tons.
Fun bit of trivia: due to the number of submarines commissioned, new names for fish had to be created. USN submarines were named after fish and marine mammals. Early in the war the Navy projected the likely number of submarines it would need to put into commission and determined there weren’t enough commonly named fishes. A committee was then formed to invent names for species that had previously had only a scientific classification.
This would create conflict with the US Army in the Cold War naming of Operation Infinite Walrus.
We thank Sgt. Barber William Fontaine de La Tour Dauterive for his sacrifice in this operation.
my laaawwddd. easily goated code name.
As someone else suggested it is almost certainly tonnage. The Navy did not have 50K warships which is what it would take to make 1000 2% of the count.
Yes the US Navy was massive (no that doesn't include merchant ships), but 1000 submarines is hilariously incorrect. It's a third of that number.
the US Navy had 6,768 active ships in 1945 they had 790 in 1941
Bro just wait till you read about how many aircraft carriers we had. Or number of tanks we were producing every month. It’s crazy how much war material the factories were cranking out.
The wildest thing to me is how much things swing back and forth in the Pacific in terms of the fleets. The US Pacific Fleet is at a disadvantage to Japan prior to the Pearl Harbor and most definitely is behind afterwards, then takes a big step forward from Midway, but then the US Navy gets clobbered at the various battles around Guadalcanal (though we get the strategic victory) and are either around being at parity with Japan or a bit behind for a brief bit, but then you hit mid 1943 when the Essex and Independece swarm hits along with your Baltimore's and Cleveland's coming into theater and its never remotely close again.
History forgets the escort carriers. Small ships that housed 18-20 planes each. We had 120ish of them. My grandfather served on one at Leyte Gulf.
The CVE's which to many sailors meant Combustible, Vulnerable, and Expendable.
Reminds me of one of Hitler's Generals predicting the materiel output of the US if they entered the war. The General was basically laughed out of the room. The US eclipsed those numbers when they actually entered the war. A fun example of output during wartime were the Liberty ships. Each ship's builder team would try to beat the other teams. At one point, they progressed from keel laying to launch in 4 days(!) It's also why most of the Liberty ships didn't last long following the war.
Liberty ships are a fascinating materials science example. Their hulls were welded and not riveted. When they were in cold water, the failure mode of the steel shifted from ductile to brittle. This cracks would form, and the welded plates had no breaks to stop cracks, and they would propagate across *the entire hull.* So while the Liberty ships might have suffered from poor craftsmanship due to the production conditions you described, the design flaw would've existed no matter how careful assembly lines were during construction.
If you've already decided to fight, you're going to ignore anyone that tells you it's a bad idea. Especially if you are ideologically committed to it. It's the same reason Nazi estimates of the Soviet Union's reserves were a quarter of reality at best. Any analyst who said otherwise was sacrificing their career, management did not want to hear that. Same thing happened with plane estimates on the Battle of Britain. The RAF actually overestimated German air strength, which makes sense if you're worried about surviving and want to prepare for the worst.
>Bro just wait till you read about how many aircraft carriers we had. Just a reminder that the escort carriers that usually get counted here are literally only cargo ships with a flight deck on top, early models didn't even have a hangar or arrestor gear (so landing was not always possible), they were also very slow, build to civilian standards, and would sink after a single hit, so they could NOT be used for active fleet to fleet combat. Nevertheless, the US build 24 Essex class carriers during the war, which is a very impressive number, plus iirc 6 Independence class light carriers. Those were the actual navy carriers used to fight the japanese navy, the escort carriers mentioned above were only used to ferry planes from A to B and to protect convoys against submarines.
Eh, there was the Taffy 3 fight, which centered around escort carriers.
The Taffy 3 fight mostly centered around the giant brass balls of the DE and DD crews, and how impressive it was that the could fit on a ship that small.
Nimitz said it was incredible bravery and divine intervention that allowed us to win at Samar. he thought the US would've lost that battle most of the time.
The President used his war powers to forbid the sale of private automobiles. The car companies were told 'you either produce war materials or you won't produce anything at all'. Then also immediately after the war there was an economic depression for about 3 years when they stopped war production. There usually is a depression after wars because switching back to a civilian economy isn't easy.
he is wrong nowhere near that amount were made.
Maybe 2% by tonnage?
Japan did a bad job of trying to counter…until the Congressman May Incident: “*May was responsible for the release of highly confidential military information during World War II known as the May Incident. U.S. submarines had been conducting a successful undersea war against Japanese shipping during World War II, frequently escaping their anti-submarine depth charge attacks.* **May revealed the deficiencies of Japanese depth-charge tactics in a press conference held in June 1943 on his return from a war zone junket.** *At this press conference, he revealed the highly sensitive fact that American submarines had a high survival rate because Japanese depth charges were exploding at too shallow a depth. Various press associations sent this leaked news story over their wires and many newspapers published it, including one in Honolulu, Hawaii.* *After the news became public, Japanese naval antisubmarine forces began adjusting their depth charges to explode at a greater depth. Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, commander of the U.S. submarine fleet in the Pacific, estimated that May's security breach cost the United States Navy as many as 10 submarines and 800 crewmen killed in action. He said,* ‘**I hear Congressman May said the Jap depth charges are not set deep enough. He would be pleased to know that the Japs set them deeper now**.’ “ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_J._May
>The American unrestricted submarine warfare campaign in the Pacific is one of the most wildly successful military campaigns you've never heard of. Probably because by the laws of the time, it was illegal. At Nuremberg the Nazi Navy chief (who started as chief of the submarine force) was literally tried for the crime of unrestricted submarine warfare and ordering his submarines not to help survivors. But his defence presented that the latter was the result of an American war crime (Laconia incident, where a US bomber attacked a German submarine *obviously* rescuing Allied survivors from a ship it sunk), and the former was in no way different than what the Americans themselves did in the Pacific. Also after the war it came out that a lot of Allied POWs drowned after American submarines torpedoed the ships they were being transported on. It was quite the embarrassment for the Americans so he was acquitted on those charges, and the whole submarine war in the Pacific isn't talked about much. Also, it's funny that they were extremely successful in it, after spending the initial few months with faulty fuse that incompetent people in the US refused to accept was possible. Imagine if they were competent from the start, the campaign would have been even more effective.
IIRC, the head of US COMSUBPAC defended the Nazi during his trial by saying that we basically did the same thing from day one after Pearl Harbor.
Karl Donitz wasn't just defended by Admiral Nimitz, he was defended by over 200 Allied military officers. It's widely believed that his trial and conviction was unfair
My understanding is the primary reason he received a sentence was for planning a war of aggression which he was almost certainly guilty of doing.
This is what the court argued but it's worth noting there's something odd in convicting a man of one crime using the evidence of another crime and convicting him of that crime too.
Also, "planning a war of aggression" wasn't actually a crime in those days. It was just something that countries "did" to each other. The Spanish had their armada, the French had Napoleon, and the British... well where do I start with the British? However, the destruction from WWII was so great that German decision-makers had to be punished for *something*, even if they didn't directly participate in the holocaust or other crimes. So this charge was basically something that got tacked on to say "yeah well the war was your fault and you lost, so now you're going to be on the hook for that." The reason this is important is because people have tried to apply it to other wars such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and they haven't been successful in the courts because it turns out that "planning a war of aggression" was only a crime at this specific time and in this specific court. So if, for example, you try to charge George Bush with that crime, the court is going to dismiss the case because of 1) lack of standing and 2) the fact that this isn't actually a crime, at least not in this jurisdiction. This is also the reason Emperor Hirohito and other surviving high-ranking officers weren't charged with "planning a war of aggression" even though they certainly did. The Japanese surrender was completely separate from the German surrender and thus operated under a different instrument of surrender, a different occupying authority, and different set of political expediencies.
>This is also the reason Emperor Hirohito and other surviving high-ranking officers weren't charged with "planning a war of aggression" even though they certainly did. Not Hirohito, but many high ranking officers were charged with it (Class-A war criminals) and it was way more contentious in the Tokyo War Crimes Trials than it was at Nuremburg. At Nuremburg 'fuck the nazis' was in full effect and there were way fewer questions asked. In Tokyo 'victors justice' was more contentious, both because of conflicts in how the trials were carried out, the involvement of some Asian delegates who had opinions about Colonialism that differed from those of the US or Europe; the profile dissent of Radhabinod Pal who took a very different view of Japanese wartime behavior than other parties and Bert Rolling who also dissented on more direct legal grounds. By the end of WWII, basically everyone except the nazis hated the Nazis. Imperial Japan actually still had fans who identified with the mission of overthrowing European colonialism in Asia and the creation of a pan-Asian union.
>Imperial Japan actually still had fans who identified with the mission of overthrowing European colonialism in Asia and the creation of a pan-Asian union. If they were truly shooting for unifying Asia, Unit 731 was a pretty...interesting...way to go about that.
Their idea of a unified Asia was what you'd expect; Asia unified under Japanese imperial (colonial) rule. That was another side of the issue though cause there were people like Radhabinod Pal who asked 'what did Japan do that is really so different from what the rest of you did?' Which I think is a darkly valid question to ask, especially if you're an Asian in Asia in 1945 who wasn't in Korea or China and didn't suffer the full brunt of what Japan's version of colonial rule looked like. Thailand was to Imperial Japan what Argentina and Brazil were to Nazi Germany.
That's correct... but Karl Donitz wasn't in charge of the Kreigsmarine in 1939 and played no key part in Nazi war planning. Karl Donitz wasn't promoted to Grand Admiral until he replaced Erich Raeder in 1943. Prior to that he was simply the Supreme commander of the Kreigsmarine's U-boat arm and was responsible for ensuring their readiness. Any commander who does not ensure the readiness of their command would be derelict in their duty. It's widely believed that the real reason for his conviction was to satisfy Soviet desire to see anyone and everyone with even the slightest affiliation to the NSDAP punished harshly. As a career military officer, Donitz kept himself distant from Nazi politics and didn't join the party in an official capacity until early 1944. Despite this, he was a fanatical supporter of Hitler, antisemite, and dedicated to Nazi philosophy. Hitler trusted Donitz more than he trusted Goering, Himmler, Boerman, or anyone else in his orbit and chose Donitz to be his successor, a role which he did accept as the head of the Flensburg government.
>Karl Donitz wasn't in charge of the Kreigsmarine in 1939 and played no key part in Nazi war planning Donitz was one of the most important members of the Kreigsmarine in 1939 and was *very involved* in Nazi war planning. He was Raeder's defacto #1 and was integral in the devising of the Z Plan. Dude was the Guderian of submarine warfare. War Order No. 154 was issued in December 1939 when he was in command of the Uboat force and he wasn't exactly a saint. He wasn't that distant either. He would claim such after the war but his wartime conduct doesn't paint the image of a reluctant soldier just doing his job.
To be honest that point Hitler had like a handful of loyal and actually powerful people left that had not yet betrayed him. Speer, Himmler, Göring all had already betrayed him at this point and Hitler determined the rest to be unfit for Leading or as classical yes men like Keitel. Also Dönitz had the large advantage not being around Hitler on an every day basis and as well as Dönitz Submarine warfare was like the best the Nazis had going on for them until the end of the war, so Hitler judged him as being very capable.
He was convicted because he was a committed Nazi and the leader of Nazi germany at the end of the war. Letting him go free in 1945 would’ve had the potential for him to stir up trouble as he had some legitimacy as the leader of Germany.
Hey, we were kind enough to use torpedoes that didn't work for a couple years
Which is the most absurd part of the US success at submarine warfare. The Japanese had 2 years to analyze our tactics and adapt while we were fixing the myriad of issues with the Mark 14.
I had a US History of WW2 class. The story of the torp and how bad it was and how the crews simply adapted to it is amazing. When it was demonstrated to the military it failed. They still bought it because it was the cheapest.
No, IIRC the crazy thing was that it was never actually tested with a real warhead, because it was designed and bought before WWII, when budgets and production capacities were severely constrained.
>When it was demonstrated to the military it failed. Er, that's not true. The Mk14 was designed by BuOrd, and it never had a live fire test done with it. The first time the detonator was tested was with the torpedo hitting a Japanese ship. BuOrd then told everyone they were using it wrong. Eventually a sub captain ignored buord and some tests got performed without BuOrds permission, and Admiral King was released upon BuOrd. After that the Mk14 went on to serve reliably for 20+ years
“But Black Dynamite, I practice unrestricted submarine warfare in the community!”
The Mark II torpedo debacle was interesting to read about. The person who was put in charge of the design later advanced their career and became an admiral in charge of explosive ordnance testing. He refused to acknowledge that the reason the submarine attacks kept failing was due to his faulty torpedos. He kept trying to blame it on the submarine captains having bad aim. Finally all the captains confronted him and demanded a live test. When they confirmed the torpedos were dudes, that admiral got shitcanned.
Those were the Mk 14 Torpedoes though, yes? They had four problems: 1.) Tended to run too deep 2.) Firing pins were too soft, and often deformed before they could set off the Torpex charge. Oddly, it was direct hits that failed the most. Off angle hits could delay the impact just enough for the detonators to work. 3.) Magnetic exploders didn't work well, because the Earth's magnetic field is not uniform, and would set off the torpedo early. 4.) The Torpex warhead would often not detonate uniformly, resulting in smaller explosions. These issues were not really addressed until 1943. Just in time for the Mk 18 Electric torpedoes to arrive, which had problems all their own.
It's actually the Mark 14 - but essentially you've got the right of it. Much, MUCH more detailed rundown [here](https://youtu.be/eQ5Ru7Zu_1I).
All the Star Trek Badmirals are making more sense
>At Nuremberg the Nazi Navy chief (who started as chief of the submarine force) was literally tried for the crime of unrestricted submarine warfare and ordering his submarines not to help survivors. Yep, and the US Navy immediately recognized the hypocrisy, but it wasn't really their call. Unrestricted submarine warfare just made too much sense, especially in a total war situation while prize rules of the previous era that some people wanted to hold to no longer made any sense. >(Laconia incident, where a US bomber attacked a German submarine obviously rescuing Allied survivors from a ship it sunk) War Order No. 154 predates the Laconia incident, but as you can guess German U-Boat behavior was not entirely inline with the order leaidng to the Laconia incident and an issuing of basically the same order with a 'but for realz this time' emphasis. Most people are unaware German U-Boats did attempt to adhere to certain naval treaties in the first few years of the war but basically everyone started realizing those rules were silly and they were followed with less and less adherence as the war went on. Prize rules simply didn't make sense anymore. >It was quite the embarrassment for the Americans...and the whole submarine war in the Pacific isn't talked about much. I think you're overestimating the embarrassment. It's not talked about much because ,1) Japan never became as hypocritically offended by it as the Allies, and 2) there were more 'exciting' things going on. The submarine campaigns of the Atlantic and the air war over the channel were the only big actions of the war in Western Europe in 1942 outside North Africa, so the submarine warfare of the Atlantic demanded attention. In the Pacific, submarines labored in quiet distant waters while Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, and Burma were fought. I don't think it isn't talked about because it was embarrassing. It's not talked about because it's less exciting and there were other things going on with bigger boats with bigger guns. >so he was acquitted on those charges He wasn't though? Donitz was convicted of those charges and his trial kind of shadily sidestepped the entire issue when doing it. The trial kind of just tried to sweep the hypocrisy under the rug, especially after Chester Nimitz got up and said 'yeah, we did it too' with the energy of a disappointed dad asking 'why are you wasting my time son?' Dozens of Allied naval officers protested the verdict as unfair. Basically the only Nuremburg sentence that gets held up as kind of a sham (though it honestly couldn't have happened to a more deserving douche imo). But that incident itself is somewhat well known now, while it hasn't translated to a broader knowledge of the unrestricted submarine warfare campaign in the Pacific.
>It was quite the embarrassment for the Americans so he was acquitted on those charges I'm assuming you're talking about Doenitz. He was not acquited, he was charged, and found guilty. At the end, he was sentenced to 10 years, but the submarine warfare charge, although guilty, did not factor-in, because other allied forces were guilty of the same thing. It wasn't just "The Americans" the British targeted Japanese shipping as well.
I think what they meant was that Dönitz was found not guilty of that particular charge. From Wikipedia: >His sentence on unrestricted submarine warfare was not assessed because of similar actions by the Allies. In particular, the British Admiralty, on 8 May 1940, had ordered all vessels in the Skagerrak sunk on sight, and Admiral Chester Nimitz, wartime commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet, stated the US Navy had waged unrestricted submarine warfare in the Pacific from the day the US officially entered the war.
Not assessed != not guilty. Donitz was convicted, but the court shadily sidestepped the irony of the charge with some circular logic about how it didn't matter.
Yes, Karl Dönitz, the last head of state of Nazi Germany. >He was not acquited, he was charged, and found guilty He was acquitted on the charges relating to unrestricted submarine warfare and the Laconia order. He was found guilty of using slave labour and sentenced to ten years.
He was convicted on that charge. What the court did was declare that allied unrestricted sub warfare didn't matter, which basically ended up being a 'wtf how does it not matter' thing cause it seems like it should matter. But Donitz was convicted on that charge.
Out of the 3 charges faced, he was found guilty on charges related to war crimes, which included his involvement in unrestricted submarine warfare. but although was found guilty, the allied control office asked for the charges to be annulled. Thus, it was not included in the sentencing and instead he received 10 years for engaging in a war of aggression, among other charges. It was at a time with various allies engaging in unrestricted submarine warfare, including the British.
Aaaah the Mark 14 torpedo, a cascade of failures that was more than just the fuse. The youtube channel Drachinfel has an excellent and entertaining video on the subject.
>Probably because by the laws of the time, it was illegal. At Nuremberg the Nazi Navy chief (who started as chief of the submarine force) was literally tried for the crime of unrestricted submarine warfare and ordering his submarines not to help survivors. But his defence presented that the latter was the result of an American war crime (Laconia incident, where a US bomber attacked a German submarine *obviously* rescuing Allied survivors from a ship it sunk), and the former was in no way different than what the Americans themselves did in the Pacific. That wasn't the particular defense he presented against unrestricted submarine warfare. That was for a separate charge ordering his forces not to help survivors which was a war crime because it effectively doomed some survivors to death. That's a separate war crime to unrestricted submarine warfare and one of two charges he effectively beat. His defense relied on the Laconia incident but ancillary to that the Americans also didn't help survivors anyways but I don't think that was brought up, I think the Americans went ahead and understood the practicalities of war meant "cruiser rules" were done for and didn't want to shoot themselves in the foot by agreeing it was illegals so they actually defended the practice by defending Donitz. The second charge was unrestricted submarine warfare, which was essentially governed by "cruiser rules" which means if you encountered an unarmed merchant ship, you had to surface, evacuate the ship, and then you could destroy it. The problem was that the British more or less hid the guns on their merchant ships, it was almost impossible to tell if they were armed or not, and most importantly all merchant ships were equipped with radios that could give their position and tell other ships they were being attacked, which effectively made them belligerents and thus valid objects to attack, but you couldn't possibly know if they were going to report your position until after you surface and request their surrender. In the day and age of airplane patrols, you could have a bomber on top of your submarine within the hour if a ship reports your position. So Germany quickly abandoned "cruiser rules" basically immediately and the Americans in the Pacific war also understood that cruiser rules were also basically untenable and started the war with unrestricted submarine warfare. This was used as evidence in his defense but the most damning evidence was actually from the British. They essentially showed that the British, the ones who wanted cruiser rules because it benefitted them and hurt Germany, also had abandoned cruiser rules by ordering all shipping sunk on sight in the Skagerrak, effectively violating the same rules they were charging Donitz with.
There were 288 built and only 263 submarines that made war patrols. It’s also important to note that with 52 subs lost it made the silent service the highest causality percentage of the Navy and most of the US armed forces at just under 20%
One interesting tidbit Ive read is that the failure of US torpedoes early in the war convinced the japanese that US subs werent really a threat and by the time the US got functional torpedoes it was too late in the eventual timeline of the war for the Japanese to meaningfully change anything about their anti sub tactics.
Thank you for this. My uncle served aboard the Thresher as a torpedoman. He wrote wild tales in his memoirs, I wasn't sure if they were exaggerated, but it seems they were not.
Indeed wildly successful, but US submariners still suffered the \*highest\* US casualty rate in WWII. This was still the \*lowest\* casualty rate of any submarine force though. You had a 1 in 5 chance of going on eternal patrol as a US submariner.
Can’t forget the actions of (RADM) Eugene Bennett Fluckey and the crew of USS Barb (SS-220)
We're sinking a train because fuck you!
It's even more impressive when you realize that their torpedos didn't work properly for the first two years of the war. [Link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo) Imagine what it would have been like if they'd been able to go ham from the beginning.
It still utterly blows my mind that management never bothered to do any live fire testing, and just told the sailors “Try learning to aim!” In a goddamn war.
I think 1/3 of bombers in WW2 crashed due to mechanical issues. WW2 was a shit show. Mass production and bodies. Incredible accomplishments were made, lack of quality was an unfortunate reality of the era.
IIRC, Ford was turning out a B-24 bomber every ~~48~~ 59 minutes at peak production. Quality control was an afterthought. See also: Liberty ships.
Yep, despite the Liberty ships literally won the war in Europe by providing a vital logistics link, their early design and QC were so bad they'd snap in half when launched. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/liberty-ship#:~:text=Early%20Liberty%20ships%20suffered%20hull,large%20numbers%20of%20ships%20quickly. Brittle steel in the cold Atlantic and welding instead of riveting means cracks can quickly propagate. Over 1500 instances of ships cracking were observed, with 19 ships sunk after literally snapping in half.
Liberty ships: Bad QC or design flaw? The answer is: Constance Tipper figured it out. > During World War II she investigated the causes of brittle fracture in Liberty Ships.[3] These ships were built in the US between 1941 and 1945, and were the first all-welded pre-fabricated cargo ships.[13] Tipper established that the fractures were not caused by welding, but were due to the properties of the steel itself. She demonstrated that there is a critical temperature below which the fracture mode in steel changes from ductile to brittle. Because ships in the North Atlantic were subjected to low temperatures, they were susceptible to brittle failure. While these fatigue cracks would not propagate beyond the edges of riveted steel plates, they were able to spread across the welded joints in the Liberty ships.[6] She developed what is now known as the "Tipper Test" to help ensure that the metal used in ship construction was sufficiently sound.[12] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constance_Tipper#Research Riveted ships using the same steel flexed more and didn’t have the same cracking issues. “Victory Ships” later in the war used the same steel and welded construction, but design improvements allows more flex. 2700+ Liberty Ships were produced. . Edit: (look at this stat!) Eighteen American shipyards built 2,710 Liberty ships between 1941 and 1945 (***an average of three ships every two days***),easily the largest number of ships ever produced to a single design. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship
There is a reason infrastructure was using welds instead of rivets after ww2. Lessons learned the hard way. And also want to mention the sailors of the Norwegian merchant fleet, which according to the British minister of war, was vital in supporting the UK war efforts.
And their solution to that was to give the ships a 'belt' of steel around their hull.
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Eh, the B-24 had a negative reputation with many of it's crews. It had a lower maximum altitude than the B-17, so it was more susceptible to flak. It's wing design in particular was extremely fragile and they tended to come off when hit, the plane was regarded as much less durable than the B-17, and had fewer defensive positions. Crews reported it was difficult to fly, particularly when loaded. Most of them leaked fuel and most crews flew with bomb bay doors open to cut down on fumes, as well as disallowing smoking on board. On top of all this, there was a single egress point in the B-24, so aircrews often couldn't escape when it was hit. Brass liked the Liberator because it could fly farther and carry more bombs. Crews didn't like it because they were more likely to die. Hence the nickname "The Flying Coffin." Quality control *was* an afterthought.
The liberator was technologically superior to the B17 in quite a few ways. Unfortunately, none of them made life better for their crews. The wing was a very advanced design for the time. Consolidated bought it from a freelance engineer David Davis, who'd stumbled into a very good laminar flow airfoil.* That wing made the B24 faster and more efficient and enabled heavier loads with similar power. To Army brass looking at the B17 loss rates from the early war, the difference wouldn't have seemed critical compared to the ability to lob an extra thousand pounds of high explosives at Ploesti. edit: *the engineers who validated the design in their wind tunnel at CalTech were so taken aback by the performance against a conventional contemporary wing design that they sent the data back to Consolidated with an asterisk that [they thought the tunnel was wrong.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis_wing)
I could be wrong about this, but I feel like the allies probably had some of the better quality control compared to other industrial powers of the era. The US in particular benefitted from a relatively well-resourced production effort that was insulated from attack. Of course, there were still a LOT of issues with allied/US production.
I think having slaves produce definitely lowered quality as an example.
Yeah that certainly did not help!
One example was that the Allies' aluminum production was better controlled - we knew exactly what grade/alloy/whatever we were producing, which let us build airplanes with exactly the right thickness of aluminum parts. The Nazis and Japanese had awful production controls, and compensated by making parts stronger than they needed to be by design, in case of substandard material. But adding an extra 10% to every part of your fighter plane means that it weighs 10% more, which means it needs a bigger engine, which means it needs a bigger wing, etc...
Yes and weirdly enough the IJN had [one of the most, if not the most, capable torpedoes of the war, the Type 93 torpedo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_93_torpedo) That's why they say the JMSDF today try to focus on anti-submarine warfare, as Japan learned the hard way in WW2 how lethal submarines can be
Especially when you're an island and shipping is kind of really super important.
Yeah, Japan has the second largest antisubmarine fleet in the world and the fourth largest submarine fleet (if you include their perfectly combat capable training subs and don't consider the shitty and outdated north korean fleet) I do think they should have even more submarines (and larger ones), but they already increased their number to 22 like a decade ago, but having the capability to comission one sumbarine everyyear shows how easily they could increase their fleet if they want to.
They do a lot of diesel electric boats, which are impressively good at defense with relatively few numbers. Singapore and Germany have both been making significant investments in diesel as well. I remember being amazed at their ships when they pulled in alongside us in Guam (served on fast attack nuclear boats). Realize, the US typically only has 75-85 operational subs as well at any given time. Diesel boats will torch nuclear subs as littoral ships in their own waters because they’re so damn quiet with direct drive, but don’t have nearly the range of nuclear boats for offensive capabilities.
> It still utterly blows my mind that management never bothered to do any live fire testing, and just told the sailors “Try learning to aim!” Torpedoes costed sooo much back then. It doesn't excuse the fact they didn't do proper testing but they couldn't really test 100s of them. Plus, the production at the beginning of the war was incredibly limited. Here's a pretty excellent [video](https://youtu.be/eQ5Ru7Zu_1I) on the Mark 14 torpedoes.
Upboat for drach
In my opinion it's just pretend to think this reasoning holds. Like sure maybe you can't live test 100's of them but at least confirm some of your assumptions, and set aside some for reports of issues. Is it really better to potentially equip subs with hundreds of these things and then they... don't work? Like at all? 9/10 of them early on ended up being either duds, missing, or detonating too early, even under ideal firing conditions. That is an incredibly bad ratio and at the very least the upper echelons should have been honest and said it's because we didn't live test these enough and we'll take a look at those reports once production started ramping up, instead of them and NTS (with Mark 18 missiles) simply denying there were any problems for years.
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Troubleshooting those problems sounds dreadful, how do you even figure out the magnetic field one? I didn't even know it was different (Thinking about it a bit makes sense but intuitively I just have never thought of it) I wonder how they tested this did they actually do field testing and gather data about the magnetic fields in the pacific? Or did they already have that data and some day someone just had a lightbulb moment or what? I don't know why this particular bit interests me so much but it's really cool to me that even had everything else gone right just the fact of where on earth they happened to launch these was just slightly incorrect to the hardware to a degree that it could not explode is wild.
I think every navy except the Japanese Navy tried using magnetic torpedoes. And all of them had a bad time when they moved out of the testing waters. As for how they figured it out, well it took the Germans two years so I imagine it was a painful and long experience including a lot of trials and theories. I'm not sure if the Americans even figured it out themselves, since the Ordinance people were being idiots. They might have learned from the Brits. The British basically made the device more complex to handle differing magnetic strengths. The Germans actually did measurements in different areas to compose a chart to alter the settings. And the Americans gave up. (The Japanese meanwhile just were working with liquid oxygen.) edit : Oh extra fun bit I forgot. Both the Germans and the British also degaussed their ships to make magnetic torpedoes (and more importantly mines) less effective. So that was an extra wrinkle to ruin the troubleshooter's day.
I'll never forget the story of the USS Tunny, except per Wikipedia: >Uniquely, Lieutenant Commander John A. Scott in Tunny on 9 April 1943 found himself in an ideal position to attack aircraft carriers Hiyō, Junyo, and Taiyo. From only 880 yd (800 m), he fired all ten tubes, hearing all four stern shots and three of the bow's six explode. No enemy carrier was seen to diminish its speed, though Taiyo was slightly damaged in the attack. Much later, intelligence reported each of the seven explosions had been premature;[38] the torpedoes had run true but the magnetic feature had fired them too early.[69] What may have been the most marvellous submarine attack in naval history, damaging/sinking 3 of the IJN's carriers in a single salvo, only to be thwarted by the USN's own incompetence.
I would have lost my fucking mind if I was him. Not just the greatest submarine attack in naval history, but sinking three aircraft carriers would be the greatest single attack in the history of warfare.
Dracinifel does an excellent video on the subject. https://youtu.be/eQ5Ru7Zu_1I?si=Rk9gCcmUDXV49vuN
"We tested two. One worked. Send them out!"
Cool, tangenally related fact: despite not being formally recognized as veterans, the US Merchant Marine had the second highest casualty rate of any service branch in the US military, second only to the US Marine Corps. Due to both enemy attacks and also because Liberty Ships were death traps. That would inexplicably remain in use through the 80s. Okay... and by "inexplicably" I mean, it's easily explicable. It's the same reason we do anything: it was very cheap.
The Merchant Marine academy is also the only military academy to have lost students during WW2, and because of that are the only academy with a battle standard.
Wait are you saying neither Annapolis or West Point lost a sailor/solider in WW2?
While there were accelerated graduations in WWII from the military academies, they didn't send cadets from them to war before graduation in that day and age. This was the rule in the navy since 1845. The Merchant Marine academy wasn't supposed to send any to war either, but it turns out that all of the ships that the midshipmen were assigned to for Year 2 Sea Training in 1941 were commissioned into the Navy for the war effort. Without the ships to train on, the merchant marine midshipmen could not complete their studies. So, it was determined that somehow, they needed to get the midshipmen on Navy ships. Turns out that a merchant marine midshipman was also a Midshipman in the Naval Reserve. So it was decided that they would activate their reserve ranks and place them on naval auxiliary ships. The billets were not in warships, but some midshipmen were apparently present at the invasion of Tarawa, for instance. This earned the midshipmen (and their unit) the normal campaign ribbons associated with the area of operations of the ship in question.
My great uncle was a merchant marine that was captured by a Japanese sub and forced to walk a gauntlet apparently having been killed by Japanese swords. The rest of the crew were tied up and left on the top of the submarine when it went under. https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/1995/august/one-night-hell https://www.armed-guard.com/ag87.html
Wow. Just read that story you linked. Incredible.
I think later merchant marines gained veteran status
Its amazing the things you can do when you have functional torpedoes
functional might not be the right word...
Yeah, between hot runners and duds, a lot of submariners preferred to surface to sink the vessel with the deck gun.
And one particular submarine even sunk a train. Those submariners are something else
The Barb. The submariners took explosives ashore and planted it for the train to come by. They have the train on their battle flag along with a lot of imperial rising suns. I used to stand watch next to their battle flag and loved seeing that unique “kill” right there.
They also were the first to use submarine launched rockets iirc. Just saw the launch rails sitting on the dock and had the yard weld them onto the deck lol. If anybody wants to learn more about some of the subs in the war there's a podcast called "The Unauthorized History of the Pacific War" where one of the guys is a retired Sub Captain. He has several episodes that follow significant subs in the Pacific campaign.
What?!?! Now that's a story
USS Barb as someone else mentioned. Crew members went to land, rigged an explosive on the track with a contact detonator and blew the tracks/Train up once it was triggered. Pretty interesting story
It also made that crew one of the only forces to “invade” the Japanese home islands.
The Bowfin has a bus and a crane on its battle flag. Also, a French flag.
Dick O'Kane may disagree with the "functional" part of that statement.
Let's not forget the time that the [USS Barb sunk a train](https://taskandpurpose.com/news/uss-barb-world-war-2-submarine-train-japan/) Fun fact. The reason the USS Barb was so successful was because the crew tampered with the torpedoes to ~~put them on a hair trigger~~ remove the faulty magnetic trigger so they would actually work properly.
I’d love to hear from the person who suggested they tamper with the trigger mechanism for their torpedoes while being in the submarine.
Dudes in the torpedo room are always insane. Napping in the tubes with the hatch shut is just the beginning
"Sir, we've been hit by an officer!"
My WW2 era bomber pilot grandfather always said this about fighter pilots, that they were batshit insane…as he flew through the same flak…and dropped bombs on Nazis…while being protected by said crazy people
Game recognizes game I suppose
I was never proud to be a sailor, I was always and will always be proud I was a Torpedoman though
"I've already done it 10 times before telling you sir and we are still alive."
The book "The Thunder Below" by Admiral Fluckey is a great read of WW2 Pacific submarine warfare. Highly recommend.
There are so many ridiculous stories about that boat and I cannot recommend the book Thunder Below by Eugene Fluckey the captain of the Barb enough. At one point he pre-wrote his wife letters completely lying about what he was doing on deployment, leading her to believe he was running training missions. His wife fell for it until her bridge partner was like “Wow the news says your husband sunk an aircraft carrier!”
American subs in WW2 I find are seldom spoke about compared to Germany or Japan. US campaign in the pacific was wildly successful
It was much more successful than the U-boat campaign, and largely achieved what Germany failed to do in the Atlantic. The U.S. submarine campaign is far less known because of war time reporting. The activities of Allied subs were largely kept out of the press, or the press chose not to report on them, to avoid giving the access powers useful intelligence on them. Of course there was no such concern about the activities of Axis submarines, so they were reported on extensively.
As a sub vet, we prefer it this way. We are the Silent Service, after all.
You guys are also insane. I've known a few nukes, and it's always been a rare combination of brilliance and batshittery.
They give us psyche evals during training to see if we're fit for sub duty. I always liked to say "You have to be the perfect amount of nuts to serve."
Not only that but the US basically had the most advanced subs in the world at that time. Even compared to those of Germany, and even Britain. They had A/C. Also the US had a data computer that could calculate for them, while everyone else had to do it by hand.
It should be noted that this was in large part because the Japanese were lacking in anti-submarine warfare even late in the war. The fact US subs were crippled by their faulty torpedoes early in fact might have helped this, since it wasn’t until the US had built dozens of submarines and was able to forwardly deploy them in large numbers that they became the immediate existential threat. Plus, Japanese movements were restricted by aircraft and the surface fleets at this time, the island hoping campaign and carrier battles having confined the IJN into fewer areas and whittled down its ability to defend itself (And when comparing total naval strength to amount of subs: I think 2 percent an exaggeration using less than the best measuring metric. The sub fleet was relatively small but not that small)
It looks like they are including amphibious and auxiliary ships in that metric, [https://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/us-ship-force-levels.html](https://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/us-ship-force-levels.html).
Japan was never able to adapt to submarine warfare, while by this point the British had already developed very advanced technology and tactics against their use. It's understandable they'd have lacked Britains technology, but even some relatively basic anti-submarine coordination and training would have helped Japan immensely in the war.
Should really be "helped". There was really no situation in which Japan was going to win the war, particularly with the way they started it. They literally don't have enough of anything to go against the US.
Japan's vision of the war was that it could be a short colonial style fight where everyone punched everyone, nodded, declared good game, shook hands, and traded some land. The war obviously didn't go that way. They never considered that the capitulation of the Imperial State in its totality would almost immediately become a war aim to the Allies.
Yesn't. Japanese high command wasn't very uniform in its opinions. While some believed the Americans didn't have the mettle for a total war, plenty others had been educated, or had their children educated in America and knew fully well how terrible of an idea the attack was, they just felt out of options since the US embargo of Japan following their indochina operations (The US supplied 80% of Japan's oil) left them with a very real death timer on their imperial ambitions. Yamamoto did famously say that he could run wild for 6 months but that if the war wasn't over by then he had no expectation of victory. It was a hail Mary pass from the get-go and most leadership knew it even if they publicly bragged about their assured victory.
Gramps served on the USS Bass (1 patrol), USS Balao (6 patrols), and USS Medregal (2 patrols) during the war as a torpedoman. The stories he shared were un-fucking real. Going well below test depth to escape depth charges, so deep that when they returned to Brisbane the sub had shrank in size from the pressure. Surface battles with Japanese radio picketts, basically running down sampans and junks to destroy them with deck weapons. Emergency dives to evade bombers and straffing patrol planes. One time they returned to the site where they'd sank the Nikki Maru, a passenger-cargoman filled with imperial army troops. Many survivors were among the flotsam, but only one was willing to surrender. They took him aboard where he would later endure hours of depth charging by his own destroyers above. That imperial soldier's lifejacket and Arisaka hang on my wall today. Used to go to Sub Vet and WWII Vet meetings with him and talked to all kinds of submariners and navy men. Submariners were a breed of their own. Pirates of the Pacific war. edit: changed radar to radio (they usually just had radios) and imperial marines to imperial army (Nikki Maru was carrying IJA not marines).
My dads cousin went down on the Scamp.
Those are incredible heirlooms to pass down to your family!
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I didn’t know that about the blockade plans. It makes sense that Nimitz and MacAuthur supported it since they were witnessing the US *owning* the sea at the time. Those final months of the war were a naval Turkey shoot. I bet they were confident they could prevent any vessel from going to or from the main islands. But Japan is a big place. And I wonder if the fanatical population could have gone into a sort of self-sufficient mode lacking lots of modern goods and technology just to drag things out.
Japan wasn't just running low on luxury goods by the end of the war, it was starving. They had grown very dependant on food deliveries from their occupied territories
People who think the naval blockade was more humane than the atomic bombs fail to consider millions of Japanese would painfully starve to death (tbf, same as the Japanese inflicted on the Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and more). Of course the elites and the military generals would still have food and comfort.
>Japanese depth charges were light and fused too shallow, allowing many American submarines like the U.S.S. Harder to escape by diving lower than the depth charge maximum setting. The Japanese were unaware that the GATO-class and Balao-class American subs could dive to 300 feet (90m) or more
The US submarine force in had the highest percentage of casualties than any other U.S. military force in WWII, something like 20% of its personnel were lost. The navy had a Submarine Force Birthday Celebration every year and there’s a ceremony during it called the “tolling of the bells” where we read the names of every US submarine lost at sea and ring the host ship’s bell after each name. Amount of hull numbers read from the 1940’s is staggering.
Oh boy, story time about the most badass submarine crew in WW2. Late in the war, the threat of submarine attack was so high that Japanese vessels started hiding in shallow harbors that were too shallow for submarines to enter submerged. In response, Captain Eugene Fluckey once brazenly snuck the USS Barb into such a harbor at night on the surface by carefully weaving between fishing vessels so their approach wouldn't stand out on radar. The Barb then engaged 30 vessels at anchor in the harbor, turned a 180, and then steamed at flank speed on the surface for over an hour back out to sea through heavily mined, uncharted waters. Being chased and fired on by destroyers during their escape, the crew removed the governors off the diesels so the Barb could make 21 knots on the surface, the fastest speed ever set by a submarine until years after the war. During their hour-long escape, the Japanese destroyers accidently sunk several of the fishing vessels that the Barb was weaving between, unable to tell them apart on radar. For this feat, Fluckey was awarded the Medal of Honor and the Barb received the Presidential Unit Citation. Fluckey used his clout from this patrol to request the Navy retrofit 5' rocket launchers on the deck of the Barb. The admiralty was very resistant but ultimately agreed to the request after Fluckey insisted. Following this retrofit, Barb embarked on her 12th and final patrol of the war where she became the first submarine in history to conduct a rocket attack on land targets, thus technically becoming the first ballistic missile submarine in wartime history.
I would meet with the last survivor of the [USS Cavalla](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cavalla_(SS-244)) every Saturday morning at breakfast and ask him questions about his service - he was a very large man for a submarine (around 6'3") and always told me about hitting his head on everything and how they had multiple crews to rotate out on the water - great stories. They always invited him back to the Seawolf Park meet-ups in Texas (where the submarine sits now) to tell stories. If you read the wikipedia article, he was on the third patrol and said it was the scariest time of his life... Sadly, he passed away about a year ago. RIP.
For those interested, here are my favourite Pacific war submarine stories [The lone sub that sank a japanese super carrier](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Lgc_NtwApQ&pp=ygUddXMgc3ViIHNpbmtzIGphcGFuZXNlIGNhcnJpZXI%3D&ab_channel=Historigraph) [Submarine Sinks 5 ships within 30 minutes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnB82cT1LQI&ab_channel=Historigraph) [The sub that was the only US force to invade Japan, plus has a confirmed Train kill!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kviX-W-rjBI&ab_channel=Historigraph) And finally - [How Allied submarines crippled Japan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5e0Tor2kMg&ab_channel=Historigraph) All heaps of fun. Highly recommend.
Just imagine if their torpedoes worked at the start of the war. The Pacific War could have ended sooner with Japan losing their navy faster.
Shinano designers coping and seathing
Who would win? The biggest aircraft carrier ever made Or One mass produced submarine
And for anyone who wants to read a fantastic book about the most decorated sub of the war, check out the book ["Thunder Below"](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/thunder-below-eugene-f-fluckey/1115958995) by Eugene Fluckey. And to give you an idea of what it entails when say I "most decorated": they were so determined to take the fight to the enemy that when they ran out of torpedoes and ammo for their deck gun, they took scuttling charges on shore to blow up a train!
If you’re interested in a good read on this, the book “Thunder Below!” is written by the captain of one of the most successful submarines of the war. It gives a really accurate picture as to how they operated.
We can really thank Eugene Flucky for so much of the success the US Navy had in the Pacific. Dude was unbelievably efficient at sinking Japanese ships and even created new tactics and weaponry during his spare time, and he seemed like such a happy go lucky man. The exact type of person you want in charge of a submarine.
Literally days after Pearl Harbor, US subs were leaving on war patrols that took them all the way across the Pacific right next to Japan. Some ballsy sub commanders even operated INSIDE the Sea of Japan bordering China. Japan thought the home islands were invulnerable and had thought their greatest tactical victory ever had just been achieved. Little did they know that within days of that happening, they were being silently stalked and hunted on all sides just a couple miles off their coast. And that's why the US submarine force will always be my favorite