I just finished both volumes I and II of Clay Blair’s Silent Victory and it was time well spent and must say that tucking into both these volumes (I and II) was well worth the time. It certainly answered a great many of the questions that I had about how the U.S. conducted the submarine campaign against the Japanese.
Frankly I was surprised at how well Blair’s research and writing has held up—it is, after all, almost fifty years since his first volume appeared. Sure, there are points here and there, but he was surprisingly up to date (again, early 1970’s) regarding the brilliant work of Jasper Holmes and others who were reading a nice slice of the Japanese comms (JN-25 for example).
He makes a good point for a Child of the Magenta Line like me that even with perfect intel of time and expected location, in the days of star shot navigation two ships could pass by each other out of sight.
Many of the skippers from the war were still alive and accessible to Blair, but lest memories get clouded, he additionally relied upon post war surveys—surveys that he admits were not in themselves perfect chronicles but still served as decent yardsticks. Notably, these surveys revealed that the tonnage the subs sank was not always quite what one had claimed or been credited with—although in some cases a skipper’s “bag” was actually increased.
Without drama or hagiography Blair also describes action that, even at my age, makes me draw a short breath at the danger that was involved. There are always close calls in any operation of the scale of a major war, but the stories of a sub, with its deck gun(s) firing, raking a Japanese destroyer/escort vessel as it passed 50 meters alongside from the opposite direction is something of the dramas from the age of sail that I read as a youngster. Throw in the number of boats that lost diving control and were nearly driven to crush depth and it gives a good idea of fate at play.
Speaking of ruining your day, it had to have been a bad one when your boat gets “pooped” and nearly sunk when you are not even near the enemy…not to mention getting bombed by your or allied forces or tracked by your own side’s surface forces. A good number of submariners were downright lucky to have made it out alive just from encounters with “friendly” forces, mines, or mechanical failures.
I read with particular interest of those incidents such as the one Ned Beach encountered when he suffered under an 18-hour depth-charge attack in which over 125 cans were dropped around his boat from overhead. (The Puffer, btw, apparently was underwater even longer waiting out an attack--well over 30 hours) How anyone could remain normal after that is a mystery to me and it is this psychological aspect of the battle that holds my greatest fascination.
I also give credit to Blair for giving good sketches as to the overall background of the conflict in this theater. I know many readers of a work such as this could probably easily score a 98 out of 100 on a quiz about WW2 in the Pacific, but it is nice to have reminders as to how the subs efforts fit into the bigger picture—and a big picture it was considering the expanse of the real estate and the expanding rudiments of combined force maneuvers.
Blair reminds us just how much of a slog (with setbacks) it was in 1942 and 1943. It took 18 months to get moving smartly out of the Southwest Pacific/Solomons and to gain momentum. Then, even when things were rolling forward that momentum could prove tricky. Was, for example, Operation Stalemate II even necessary?
Even with the author’s strong points, why should one tuck into a 1000-page work that at times can be monotonous in its recantation of one boat’s patrol after another? If the war was a slog does a book about it need to be? Why not just settle for a shorter, quicker, and broader overview of what was going on?
Well…that is exactly the point. With this slow and deliberate pacing, the reader gets an excellent insight into how the submarine force learned and progressed. It is plodding because that is exactly how it was at the start. One can witness the evolution first-hand and note how the tide (no pun intended) was turned. It is an intellectually rewarding exercise.
Other aspects as dealt with in just the right amount of detail. For example, the trouble the U.S. had with torpedoes is almost criminal. The senior leadership obviously needed to have taken action much sooner by, at the very least, dispatching a senior officer from BuOrd with a very strong personality to crack some heads and get things done. Blair does a good job in this discussion and even talks about how good of “fish” the Japanese had developed. We know that the leadership was slow off the mark, but it is interesting to read just what was going on—including one story of a skipper who had good luck and came back singing the praises of his torpedoes thus giving even more fuel for Admiral Christie’s refusal to budge…there always seems to be one guy…
Although Blair does not touch on it directly, I could not help but feel that the U.S. had badly failed to learn much from how the Germans were applying their subs to the fight. It was frustrating to read how the force needed to re-learn lessons that were already out there. This is an important point for the Germans had shown, by the very latest (and most would correctly argue much sooner) than the beginning of 1942, what concentrated attacks against merchant shipping and supply lines could do.
Yet in the Pacific the initial quest seemed to tilt (and Blair is somewhat oblique about whether this was relayed to the skippers in orders or if it was understood implicitly) toward bagging a capital ship vice a merchant ship. Perhaps these numbers have been updated, but the Germans did sink (as per Blair’s research) a whopping 5,078 (11 million tons) of merchant shipping with their primitive boats in WW1. Even with the ROEs of the time up until the war regarding merchant shipping, surely there had to have been obvious takeaways from the German efforts. Yes, peacetime inertia had a lot to do with it, but Doenitz was serving up instruction daily.
Blair argues that the leadership should have immediately identified choke points and set up attacks there instead of spreading subs over a wide area. The Luzon Strait, for example, would have been one of these fertile hunting grounds. He goes so far to as argue that the entire operation should have been run solely out of Pearl Harbor and not with the adjunct set-up in Australia.
Yet, with time, the game shifted and by the end of 1944 there were effectively few targets left. I know the animus that was involved against the Japanese, but at the beginning of 1945 our subs were sinking hundreds of sampans and fishing trawlers that were not even crewed by Japanese but rather by natives of the various islands—this seems just downright vicious and completely out of hand. I could not help but thinking that it had turned into bloodlust in a number of cases…
Yet as Lee Sanlin so eloquently examine the war’s momentum in his brilliant long-form essay Losing the War, there was no stopping. Admiral Lockwood and his staff, right up to the end, were pursuing ways to get into the Sea of Japan in force and stood up groups such as the Hellcats to do so. One clearly sees the noose that was drawn tightly around the Japanese home islands. How long it would have taken for a full submission/surrender Blair wisely does not tackle although it did seem to be only a matter of time given the level of inflicted pain.
In the spirit that Sanlin wrote about of there being no halt, I noted that 8 fleet boats were lost in 1945—one as late as the 6th of August. Three of those reveal an interesting irony of consonance of the first letter of their names: the Barbel, the Bonefish, and the Bullhead. Sure, no one knew the end was not that far away but still…so close The Bonefish was sunk near Java on 6 August and it reminded me that the Japanese still held real estate far afield.
I did find my answer as to why so many skippers were cashiered out of command. Obviously non-productivity were primary reasons, but so were personality deficiencies, alcoholism, and the like.
I hedged a bit of sympathy for some of these skippers as there did not seem to be a clear operational doctrine at the beginning of the war as to exactly how U.S. subs would be employed—just past practices and a mindset that led not only to be overly cautious at times when a dollop of aggressiveness would have been in order, but also a distinct lack of skills in how to prosecute the attack and act in concert with other subs to do so. In other words, how to harness an aggressive spirit with the tools to successfully attack the enemy—this goes back to the point about what we should have been learning from the Germans. Sadly, these lessons were learned on the go and some men were up to facing the learning curve while others were not. The interesting point is that one could not tell beforehand who would make the good skipper and who not.
Blair does at times go a bit far up the chain of command in laying blame for things. I am not sure modern scholarship would go quite that far up--there were a lot balls in the air at that time after all, but the questions about decision making are always worthy of examination.
Blair is known for many other works—especially the one on the war in Korea, and while I am just starting Roscoe, Silent Victory has to be considered one of the standards in U.S. submarine efforts in the Pacific. I don’t see a modern author tackling this topic anew in this level of detail so Silent Victory will have to remain one of the best testaments that we have of this theater of underseas combat.
Neal Schier
February 2020
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This book is excellent. I loved it from beginning to end
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 25, 2018john d harper
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 8, 2014Klaus Intemann
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