AHC: Shorten the Pacific War?

[phx1138]

Inspired, in part, by this thread, & by a resulting PM conversation between me & McPherson. The relevant parts of that conversation are copy-pasted below. Comment is invited. And if you've got ways Japan could respond, I'll happily hear them, too. (FYI, I'm quoting myself for clarity's sake. And to avoid deeply nesting the quotes & breaking up the original thoughts, I'm reproducing them as sent.)

Nimitz did have some blind spots and faults that hurt the war effort a bit.

In his defense, AFAICT, his only bias was against minelaying, & that may be a former submariner's dislike & concern, more than a solid reason.

Well... Groping around underwater to properly lay mines is difficult, especially if your vehicle is underpowered and you try to maneuver it in a strong current in shallow water. The sub is incredibly exposed and easy to detect near surface as it floats/flies on its planes and churns wash as it hovers. "Hey, look a wake bubble. Bomb it." That is 1920s early 1930s sub minelaying as I understand it. The U-boat that knocked out Charleston that way must have had a very highly qualified skipper (Giessler U455?) and crew.

I'll agree as far as that goes. Where, exactly, USN boats were laying mines, I can't say, & what the technical limits on laying the available (Mk12, IIRC) sub-laid mine were, IDK. I do know they could swallow the impulse bubble, so laying could be done "covertly"; my understanding is, the mines were "fired" out the stern tubes at low speed. (That, however, is a very, very incomplete knowledge.) Beyond that, all I've really got is the statistics of #mines laid, Japanese losses as a result, & the fact no USN boat was lost; increase the number of mining missions...

Okay, a shallow submerged slow sub (snort/periscope depth) that is moving at hover, causes water to bulge over the (in those days) conning tower and this is the "wake bubble" that is being bombed.

My sense of Nimitz is, he was flexible enough to take a better option, if offered; if somebody had proposed using Hypo to surveil IJN harbors, coupled with mining or not, he might just have said, "Do it" & freed up English's boats for other duty: the need (or desire) for surveillance trumped using them on the firing line; he couldn't afford surprises. If Hypo could have (reliably) kept him from being surprised (& if he'd have trusted Hypo to do it, which is another issue, after 7/12)...

I'm not a fan of Robert English. If Christie was stubborn, inflexible and parochial, then English eclipsed him in those qualities and was not as good an engineer or scientist as Ralph. Abler administrator though. And better connected. He might have pushed the torpedo issue harder than even Uncle Chuck if he could only be convinced. Trouble is... he could not be convinced.

Nor I, for his unwillingness to be moved. Christie gets special hate from me for his actions as CO in Oz (excessive hazarding of his boats; some of that maybe belongs to Jimmy Fife...), on top of being behind the torpedo problems.

Okay. I'm no fan of Fife either.

I'm of the view mining could have stopped IJN offensive operations entire: mine the approaches, keep them mined, & shoot the minesweepers at need. (IJN minesweeping was so bad, that wouldn't have been a high priority need, either.) The inability of IJN to sortie shuts down ops, even if convoys get through (unless they're willing to risk "own goal" mining losses).

I firmly agree that if he (and the rest of the Navy establishment) had paid more attention to mine warfare, as hard as it is to do, the subs would have been far more effective. It will take a year or so before the boats have the mines and the training and can employ the proper laying procedures, but that brings the kill rates and effective blockade a full year earlier than patrolling in killboxes did.

Even at best, with 3 shifts on, NTS was only producing something like 3.5 fish/day. Being out of fish entirely was a very, very real possibility. It is expressly why some boats went out with mines, even when there were supplies of Mark 10s. (Some shortage arose thanks to losses in the P.I. early on, but given those were Mk 14s, that may be a net gain...)

Lot to be said for that argument. Charleston was shut down/handicapped for months

I remember that it took 2000-2400 man hours to make a Mark 14. The Mark 18 took half that much man
hours and could be made by semiskilled labor. By guys working in a car headlamp factory in one case. Battery-powered torpedoes make a lot of sense as merchant ship klilers.

I also agree that the subs were the left handed stepchildren and should have had maybe 5% more resources thrown at them.

IMO, they did okay as it was. I'd have retired the S-boats a bit sooner & freed the crews, & maintenance people, but that takes boats off the firing line... Ramping up the build rate prewar so you get even a couple of dozen more fleet boats would have cured that, but...

This will get complicated because it goes into something called applied military technical philosophy.

It more or less involves where you apply the effort to a war machine or system and is a national characteristic or cultural tradition.

You can easily see it. Germans over-engineer every device and do not do well thinking through end application. Russians produce multiple different versions of different machines to do the same exact thing and are unclear and inefficient as to what the different machines actually contribute to an end result. The British design beautifully but bungle the manufacture of a key component and thus fail before they even attempt to apply the result to their desired object. The French build practical and to the point their machines but actually entirely miss the point of what the machine is supposed to do. Americans build it cheap, build it fast; but often lose sight of what it is supposed to do and what they want it to do. They almost never close that gap until it is almost too late.

I'll agree with all of this. After that, it gets more complicated...because it stops being all "national characteristic" & starts getting bound up in force doctrine.

National characteristics includes doctrinal mistakes when setting goals.

Now let's look at the American attempt to build the WW II submarine.

American doctrine was that a submarine operated with the fleet. It was by treaty and custom prohibited from being a commerce destroyer and blockade weapon. That kind of goes against the launch platform operating characteristics of being a slow diving torpedo boat.

Only if you accept U.S. opposition to unrestricted use. And the original idea of fleet scout wasn't just overtaken by the fact a/c do it better, but as much by the fact sub tech just couldn't match the stated goal in the first place. Why thatwas the goal, IDK, but I sense Mahan's evil hand at work... His theory, adopted as USN doctrine (& RN, & IJN, & maybe KM, too), meant commerce raiding was deprecated as impractical, treaty or no.

Then circumstances bit the U.S. & Mahan perforce went out the window... (I suspect the same in Germany, but have no evidence for it.)

It was first considered in end goal in American operating practice and official doctrine a reconnaissance platform. This is from a device, whose operating characteristics, in the recon role (visually) limited its search capability to at best 700 square kilometers per search sweep and at best 10,000 sq kilometers surfaced search sweep even with radar during a days run on the surface

Note why aircraft carriers get all the money?

(Did not comment, but agree generally.)

Surprise attack and all of a sudden the US submarines are called upon to become commerce destroyers and blockaders. This seems to be a suitable mission and endgoal for what otherwise are overbuilt faster than they need to be on the surface (so they can maintain battleship fleet tactical speed of 10 m/s) submarines.

Yet they are given top priority on fleet targets, where their speed was inadequate... Mahan strikes again? At least until somebody in CinCPac HQ realizes the error & they put tankers & DDs at the top of the list--belatedly... And thank the stars for Dick Voge's good relationship with Jasper Holmes, or Hypo might never have provided any Ultra to the Sub Force at all, for fear of compromise...

However... the platform characteristics are wrong. Now, even the Germans screwed that one up, but they at least tried to address some of the desirable platform characteristics. What do I mean?

Again, per doctrine, bear in mind the USN expected to operate across the Pacific, so USN boats would need to be bigger in any event than U-boats, only expected to need North Sea capability (& not, as learned the hard way OTL, even transatlantic endurance).

SONAR. The Germans called their version GHG. What it was as best described is a bundle of hydrophones in a cylindrical sheave cluster sort of like a Roman fasces arrangement. A switching commutator; like in a telephone exchange, would rotate through the bundle sending signals from each hydrophone to a signal processor that in analog fashion would discriminate for the strongest signal. This was automated, and did not require manual sweep through, and was far more sensitive than British ASDIC or US WFA. It did not require trained ears either. What it did in WW II was allow Germans to detect mechanicals at up to 50 or sometimes 100 kilometers away in a U-boat. Surface ships with GHG had about half that interval. The Germans did not know why, and they certainly misapplied the advantage because they did not train human ears the right way to be plugged into the circuit to understand what they heard, and how to apply it in sprint and drift interferometry to close a target. (USN 1950s) but it was there in WW II as a capability to signal chase a convoy, the U-boat being underwater to do it. We'll come back to that one.

That I did not know. Thx a bunch.

That solves in part the reconnaissance handicap. But I called the submarine a launch platform and I wrote that even the Germans screwed that one up. This comes down to the applied military technology philosophy.

Germans love gadgets. So do Americans. However, it is not gadgets that win wars, but effective results in the employment of means to goals. The means here, the torpedo; the end goal; sink a freighter.

(Did not comment.)

German torpedoes were designed to kill freighters. American torpedoes were designed to kill crippled warships. Hmm. So how come were both families of weapons, equipped with faulty magnetic influence contact exploders, puny warheads, botched steered gyro auto-pilots, too slow and too short ranged to do their respective jobs? Why was the G7a and the Mark 14 designed the similar awful ways they were?
It comes down to that Swiss watch gadgeteer mentality in design philosophy each employed. A wet-heater is a precision instrument. It really is handcrafted together from about 4000 parts. An automobile is simple by comparison to a Mark 14. Civil service types assembled these weapons. A bunch of gadgeteers^1 designed the weapons.

^1a Keel breaking a ship means a smaller warhead. The torpedo can run under the ship and blow it UP like a mine.
^1b Depth setting and exact aim is not as crucial. A torpedo will just have to be good enough to pass under the ship within ten meters depth anywhere along the hull length to do its job. It does not need a rework of 1900 era guidance methods. Goody for us. Saves money.
^1c Existing wetheater designs do not have to be completely reworked with keel breaking ikn mind. Just updated with that new exploder initiator gizmo. Cheap solution. Designing an entirely new big fast torpedo is very very expensive. The Gerrman and American gadgeteers congratulate themselves on being clever.

Can you see where it went wrong?

Yeah, somebody forgot watchmakers weren't going to be assembling them. Doctrine plays a role, too: if you don't expect to fire lots of them, there's no need for them to be able to be made in large numbers, either by design or by factory capacity...

The Japanese wanted a big, fast, large, long-ranged, simple to build, reliable torpedo that could blow a hole in a ship's hull. That was their means and end goal. Long range, good proven guidance, fast enough to hit an American carrier and sink it with a reliable hit into the hull. Keep It Simple Senji.

They picked up on a fairy tale from the British about oxygen-boosted wet-heater torpedoes and spent the money to solve the pressurized bottle and pipe problem and tripled the range of a standard wet heater. OOPs. They had to design bigger, longer, heavier wet-heaters, tweak the depth control pendulum setup and rework the contact pistol (deformed strikers) and it was very very expensive. Especially the testing. Target ships blown up are not cheap either.

The Japanese settled on their copies of German coastal. medium and long ranged cruiser subs and these essentially were little better than repeats of WW I U-boats technology wise. But the torpedoes were jewels of modern mass production. Ends fitted perfectly to goals.

So why did the Japanese fail? Doctrine and incomplete applied technology philosophy. They essentially forgot launch platform characteristics. A warship killing sub has to pace the warships it hunts. Opportunity ambush will do. Too many US warships died even with that faulty set of launch platforms the Japanese used. Poor sonars and wrong training also my chief ping against the Japanese.

You're bang on about quality of IJN torpedoes, & quality of equipment & training. IJN submariners suffered the same "poor cousin" treatment of USN, on top of which they got the worst-quality officers (I can't speak to USN on that score, but some of the same biases were present).

IJN was worst of all WW2 navies (& RN, KM, & RCN weren't enormously better; USN was arguably best, but it's a pretty damn low bar...) for the education of its senior officers, & there was a fundamental training problem (back to "boot camp") of blind obedience & inflexibility, plus a fundamental problem of "philosophy of command" (independence of officers, non-criticism, so forth). You get a perfect storm of SOs ignorant of the value of sonar & radar, unaware of the magnitude of the task they've taken on, too inflexible to alter their tactical approach (even when it fails), immune to criticism for being stupid... Out of this muckhole, the bottom of the class goes to subs.Do you wonder they did badly? (BTW, Kaigun is really informative on this.)

Anyway... the US built warship hunting subs with crappy torpedoes. If the American navy had paid attention to ends goals a bit better, the Mark 14, which is the smallest of the major powers submarine launched torpedoes in WW II, would have been a bit different. Get rid of the two speed selector. Useless. The Mark 10 was already known to be a deep runner. Tank test the Mark 14 and Mark 10: solve that hydrostatic depth valve problem. The propulsion was actually world class, so look at the manufacturing end to develop automobile factory type semi-skill and automated machine tool assembly line methods to make the fish quickly.

And go with the Mark 6 exploder without the influence feature. And test test test test against live ships with real warshots until the ice cream budget is blown and a reliable weapon is in hand. As for circle runs? Until active terminal guidance (wake or acoustic) is introduced (~1938 tech for US and Germany) it is a common gyro control hazard for everybody.

I've only small quibbles with this.

One, when the CNO insists BuOrd (not my favorite people by any means) have to pay for raising a test target eek:) which is destined for scrapping. That one makes my head ache every time.

Two, the circular was recognized as a hazard in the Mark 15, & was protected against. Subs didn't get the same deal... I count at least four boats lost to circulars. (I'll let you look in Blair for them; I can't recall offhand, it's been too long. I do count Tullibee & Tang, so add at least 2.)

Three, to get mass manufacturing, you need to overcome the political pressure to keep NTS going, & the USN political/doctrinal pressure (the need to see what the real operational use will be, against what's perceived prewar), & IDK how you manage those two.

Operationally OTL, the two speed settings were pointless, agreed, but...I can imagine ways to use them. That said, I won't defend keeping (because the use may be nothing but a literary device).

Beyond that, it's more a matter of training & equipment, &...command failure, I guess. Whose call was it to leave boats in Oz? Nimitz's? If so, it was the biggest mistake he made in the war; basing them in Hawaii would have done more good than any other one thing he could do (including fixing the torpedoes, believe it or not).

SW Pacific has a lot of beach recon, special ops, raiders, insurrectos support (Philippines) missions. Some subs have to be with the 7th to support those necessary ops. Were too many assigned to MacArthur's circus? I don't know.

Unquestionably. The very existence of SWPA put the most productive patrol area, the Luzon/Formosa Strait, off-limits for fear of fratricide. Beyond that, MacArthur's demands for supply ops to P.I. kept taking boats away from shooting merchantmen (which Lockwood endorsed, too attracted by the romance of it...).

The most SWPA should have had was the big boats (Narwhal & Nautilus, plus Bass & her sisters). The others should've been off Luzon, in the Yellow Sea, & off Tokyo (Bungo & Kii Suido); they should not, as Nimit had them, have been scattered across the Pacific on close surveillance of heavily-defended IJN harbors awaiting IJN TFs they were unlikely to be able to catch & get a shot at even if they managed a sighting...because that job could be done better from Pearl.

I would suggest that Buord killed at least six (possibly ten) USN boats by not fixing reported simple problems such as broaching fish, circle runs, noise short circuits and excessive magnetic signature in US boats.

Some of that you have to lay on BuC&R (BuShips)... For the torpedos alone, I count maybe 4 (possibly 6 or 7, including some unknowns, & counting Tang).

C & R might seem to be a tad conservative to amateurs; but between you and me? During the 1930s they took a lot of calculated risks to get from the R-boats to the Gatos. The things one would like to have:

a. a reliable snort.
b. better periscopes
c. better sonar
d. expendable message buoys
e. noise curtain (bubbler or soda can decoys)

are more BuEng gewgaws and not likely to occur to anyone before the electro-boats fall into allied hands. So I am not counting on that. I put my AH specs on the torpedoes. THAT is where plausible PoDs are possible. As in the Mark 20.

https://www.history.navy.mil/museums/keyport/html/part2.htm

The one thing within BuShips' purview the boats should have had was quieter pumps. And whoever selected the HOR & MAN engines for purchase deserved a steep rate reduction & a permanent assignment inventorying paper clips on Kiska.

Periscopes & sonar weren't terrible OTL. Diving speed could've been better. The hull frames & skins could've started stronger, & rivetted boats should never have seen action. Torpedo stowage aft should've been increased (looking at the hull form, IMO there was room for 16 fish instead of OTL's 8)--but that might mean buoyancy issues...; stowage forward should have been 18 standard, not 16. (AIUI, all the Gato-based boats, up through the Tenches, had space for 2 more, but never carried them; it may be that's only true of the Tenches.)

As for the Mark 20, I would have preferred the Mark 16 peroxide-fuelled fish (accepting the hazard), but practically speaking (since peroxide is unlikely to be approved), a Mark 10 Mod x, with the larger Mark 14 warhead, would have been more likely (& more than good enough). Then build a lot more of them....

All that said, the biggest harm to the Sub Force wasn't technological at all, it was intelligence. Prewar, ONI had broken the maru code. Not knowing this (...), a San Francisco Customs officer (who should be notorious, but I can't recall his name; have a look at Farago's book on codebreaking: the paperback has an appendix with the story), barely <s>days</s> a month before the war began, copied a Japanese merchant codebook, in a way the Japanese could hardly miss, so they promptly changed it... ONI didn't have the manpower to crack it again until 1/43. This screw up hurt more than any other failure, without exception. Fix that, & nothing else, you can probably take a year off the war. https://www.history.navy.mil/museums/keyport/html/part2.htm

https://www.history.navy.mil/museums/keyport/html/part2.htm

Like most tools (see subs comments) if the person using a B-17 in naval warfare does not understand that one has to get down to low altitude and make one's pass over the ship in a beam attack (especially a carrier) and WALK the bombs in (Battle of the Bismark Sea), then one will accomplish nothing. Is it hard on the bombers? Yes. Will casualties be high? Yes. (50%) But will a Japanese flattop or two be dedecked and rendered helpless? YES. Worth it. It is do or die; Torpedo 8 had no chance at all. Those B-17s, in navy aviator hands, would have stood a much better chance.

I will agree with that completely. And given how tough an opponent the Japanese found the B-17, I don't think the losses needed be 50%. Might be? Yes.

Given the performance of the B-26 at Midway I think my estimate is fair. It actually could be too liberal.

I'm not going to argue it. IMO, that's a writer's preference issue: do you get a *VT-8 or a "swarm of mosquitoes" effect? Either one might be right, & IDK which.
https://www.history.navy.mil/museums/keyport/html/part2.htm

https://www.history.navy.mil/museums/keyport/html/part2.htm

Only if you accept U.S. opposition to unrestricted use. And the original idea of fleet scout wasn't just overtaken by the fact a/c do it better, but as much by the fact sub tech just couldn't match the stated goal in the first place. Why that was the goal, IDK, but I sense Mahan's evil hand at work... His theory, adopted as USN doctrine (& RN, & IJN, & maybe KM, too), meant commerce raiding was deprecated as impractical, treaty or no.

If one is ordered and trained to think one way and reality thumps one with the new paradigm; well Newton's laws of insanity kick in and a severe case of psychological inertia asserts itself. Those dud captains will prove to be stubborn. Mahan can be blamed for a lot of things, but he understood that naval siege (blockade) was the decisive tool of naval warfare.

Then circumstances bit the U.S. & Mahan perforce went out the window... (I suspect the same in Germany, but have no evidence for it.)

The Battle of the Philippine Sea validates Mahan. The USN had but to force a situation where the Japanese, who wanted at that stage to operate as a fleet in being, had to come out and fight, because the Marianas Islands was that critical to their defense perimeter against air attack. It is in effect a replay of Midway with Ozawa cast in the role of Fletcher. Only Ozawa did not have the quality of aviators or the advantage of prepared ambush to tilt the odds his way. He tried and did a fairly good job of it. As I noted, Spruance was handicapped by Mitscher, and had a D-Day size operation to manage as well, but he had learned a few things. It is significant that it was submarines that won that naval battle even though my flyboys receive the glory.

Yet they are given top priority on fleet targets, where their speed was inadequate... Mahan strikes again? At least until somebody in CinCPac HQ realizes the error & they put tankers & DDs at the top of the list--belatedly... And thank the stars for Dick Voge's good relationship with Jasper Holmes, or Hypo might never have provided any Ultra to the Sub Force at all, for fear of compromise...

You can add Darter and Dace to the reasons why subs needed to be able to fight in a general fleet action. I wish Taffy 3 had had some more of that kind of aid off Samar. Might have helped. If I need to explicate: those subs blew Kurita's cruiser flagship, Atago, specially set up with radio communications and an operations center, out of the water at the Palawan Passage. He had to swim for it. His staff was scattered. Some of them, key men, drowned. Yamato was not prepared to operate as a substitute flag that operation, so command/control dislocation was a huge factor from then on. Not just that rattled nervous admiral, but the whole center force was psychologically damaged. And it had material effects. Radio coms for example fleet-wide with Nishimura and Ozawa broke down. Station Hypo and an outpost (Frumel?) helped set it up.

Again, per doctrine, bear in mind the USN expected to operate across the Pacific, so USN boats would need to be bigger in any event than U-boats, only expected to need North Sea capability (& not, as learned the hard way OTL, even transatlantic endurance).

Limits of technology. Every cubic foot of fuel added increases hull size 12x and mass by 1 tonne.

Yeah, somebody forgot watchmakers weren't going to be assembling them. Doctrine plays a role, too: if you don't expect to fire lots of them, there's no need for them to be able to be made in large numbers, either by design or by factory capacity...

You're bang on about quality of IJN torpedoes, & quality of equipment & training. IJN submariners suffered the same "poor cousin" treatment of USN, on top of which they got the worst-quality officers (I can't speak to USN on that score, but some of the same biases were present).

USN sub skippers were trained wrong but they were the cream after aviation. It was the surface warfare types; especially after 1935, who were the duds. And it shows.

IJN was worst of all WW2 navies (& RN, KM, & RCN weren't enormously better; USN was arguably best, but it's a pretty damn low bar...) for the education of its senior officers, & there was a fundamental training problem (back to "boot camp") of blind obedience & inflexibility, plus a fundamental problem of "philosophy of command" (independence of officers, non-criticism, so forth). You get a perfect storm of SOs ignorant of the value of sonar & radar, unaware of the magnitude of the task they've taken on, too inflexible to alter their tactical approach (even when it fails), immune to criticism for being stupid... Out of this muckhole, the bottom of the class goes to subs. Do you wonder they did badly? (BTW, Kaigun is really informative on this.)

I'll disagree there. Many senior US admirals (Nimitz, Fletcher, Spruance, Sherman, Lee, Oldendorf, McMorris) did their homework and got up to speed on the new tech and its applied effects. Japan, maybe, you have the point there. I'm not a Yamamoto fan. He thought of subs and carriers as scouts and subordinate tools to opportunity attack so the gun-line could slide in and fight a Jutland. He really is not the innovator when it comes to the naval campaign. Otherwise there would have been a flock of I-boats off the US west coast mining the few harbors and or chasing Hawaii bound convoys. Here is where Nimitz does a lot better. At the worst he still has the subs chasing tankers (and aircraft carriers).

 

[phx1138]

(Conversation continued...)

I've only small quibbles with this.

One, when the CNO insists BuOrd (not my favorite people by any means) have to pay for raising a test target eek:) which is destined for scrapping. That one makes my head ache every time.

Two, the circular was recognized as a hazard in the Mark 15, & was protected against. Subs didn't get the same deal...I count at least four boats lost to circulars. (I'll let you look in Blair for them; I can't recall offhand, it's been too long. I do count Tullibee & Tang, so add at least 2.)

Three, to get mass manufacturing, you need to overcome the political pressure to keep NTS going, & the USN political/doctrinal pressure (the need to see what the real operational use will be, against what's perceived prewar), & IDK how you manage those two.

1. Get another CNO and reallocate the Navy ice cream budget to live warshot test exercises.
2. USS Bagley at Savo Island. Dodged her own wild fish, one of which the Australians still swear wandered their way and blew up the Canberra.
3. Well, you start with Senator Peter G. Gerry and blackmail that SoB. You need J. Edgar Hoover for that one. You have to bribe Senator Jesse H. Metcalf (He'll take one.) and then you have to find a sweet young thing for Carl Vinson or get him drunk. That solves Goat Island. Then you pick between Westinghouse or GE. As for the MIHSWDC crowd at the Navy Department, that is ROOSEVELT. He sets the tone. The USN will follow his lead; doctrine be damned. I really do not know how to turn him into a pirate either before Pearl Harbor. Have to do something.

Operationally OTL, the two speed settings were pointless, agreed, but...I can imagine ways to use them. That said, I won't defend keeping (because the use may be nothing but a literary device).

Fast=warship
Slow=freighter.

One setting, FAST, to limit the right wander over run. The USN finds out that angle solution error over 4000 meters is too large to solve in the gyro settings. (1500-2000 meters for a free swimmer is about ideal.) Get in close and fire narrow spreads of fast fish. Lots of torpedoes needed. This is all mathematics that was learned the hard way in 42/43. If done in 32/33 testing, it would have saved thousands of lives.

The very existence of SWPA put the most productive patrol area, the Luzon/Formosa Strait, off-limits for fear of fratricide. Beyond that, MacArthur's demands for supply ops to P.I. kept taking boats away from shooting merchantmen (which Lockwood endorsed, too attracted by the romance of it...). The most SWPA should have had was the big boats (Narwhal & Nautilus, plus Bass & her sisters). The others should've been off Luzon, in the Yellow Sea, & off Tokyo (Bungo & Kii Suido); they should not, as Nimit had them, have been scattered across the Pacific on close surveillance of heavily-defended IJN harbors awaiting IJN TFs they were unlikely to be able to catch & get a shot at even if they managed a sighting... because that job could be done better from Pearl.

What did I write about US sigint? Subs covered dead gaps. Some of them are going to prowl around sticking up an aerial. As for the Formosa/Luzon Strait... That is a boundary problem. This was seen before in the Solomon Islands. Move the boundary. As for other coverage gaps; build more boats sooner.

The one thing within BuShips' purview the boats should have had was quieter pumps. And whoever selected the HOR &MAN engines for purchase deserved a steep rate reduction & a permanent assignment inventorying paper clips on Kiska.

I've read some of the patrol reports. It is as if BuShips had never heard of noise deadening or sound isolation. SJ radar mounts were terrible. Diesels will be an American headache for the war. HOR and MANN were just the worst.

Unquestionably somebody wasn't paying attention...

Periscopes & sonar weren't terrible OTL. Diving speed could've been better. The hull frames & skins could've started stronger, & rivetted boats should never have seen action. Torpedo stowage aft should've been increased (looking at the hull form, IMO there was room for 16 fish instead of OTL's 8)--but that might mean buoyancy issues...; stowage forward should have been 18 standard, not 16. (AIUI, all the Gato-based boats, up through the Tenches, had space for 2 more, but never carried them; it may be that's only true of the Tenches.)

I'll take your word on it. WFA was not the best solution; but then no-one US ever thought of sheaving the hydrophones and trying to get a bearing discriminator put of it like the Germans did; until the USN caught their very own Type IX and played with it. (Chicago Museum?) By that time, the war was too far gone and it had to wait for the GUPPYs to show up in US service.

As for the Mark 20, I would have preferred the Mark 16 peroxide-fuelled fish (accepting the hazard), but practically speaking (since peroxide is unlikely to be approved), a Mark 10 Mod x, with the larger Mark 14 warhead, would have been more likely (& more than good enough). Then build a lot more of them....

I have my mind set on an electric. Acoustic seekers are going to be US available after December *42. Electric fish are kind of slow and short ranged, but that does not matter when the destroyer comes to you. As for a 5 m/s freighter? A 7 m/s wakeless torpedo is good enough to stern chase it provided the launch is close. Either example is a curve into the props and the guaranteed kill the Mark 5/6 exploder equipped keel breakers were supposed to provide. Electrics are quiet enough to allow an acoustic seeker to work. Even against (especially against) enemy subs.

I have some bias against the electric for being finicky. That said, you make a good argument. Except for the homing, because there will never be enough of them in a typical loadout for every escort, & every homer is taking the space of a warshot for a merchant. Learn to hit with a straight-runner & build them so they run well enough to hit shallow-draft cans (less sine-wave depth-keeping...)

All that said, the biggest harm to the Sub Force wasn't technological at all, it was intelligence. Prewar, ONI had broken the maru code. Not knowing this (...), a San Francisco Customs officer (who should be notorious, but I can't recall his name; have a look at Farago's book on codebreaking: the paperback has an appendix with the story), barely days before the war began, copied a Japanese merchant codebook, in a way the Japanese could hardly miss, so they promptly changed it... ONI didn't have the manpower to crack it again until 1/43. This screw up hurt more than any other failure, without exception. Fix that, & nothing else, you can probably take a year off the war.

Hmm. Maybe. Or maybe (like the Japanese) you spend a little extra money on shore based listening RDF posts with standard radio men while you train up another 3000 crypto guys to work on the latest Maru code. The one thing I've seen in the literature is that it did not matter which nation, navy or merchant marine (down to the present) the yakkers cannot stay off the radio. They love to talk to each other. RDF heaven, especially in the Merchant Marine case.

I'm not going to argue it. IMO, that's a writer's preference issue: do you get a *VT-8 or a "swarm of mosquitoes" effect? Either one might be right, & IDK which.

I'm just saying 20 mm cannon firing Zeros are nothing to ignore. Not even for a B-17.

Okay, a shallow submerged slow sub (snort/periscope depth) that is moving at hover, causes water to bulge over the (in those days) conning tower and this is the "wake bubble" that is being bombed.

Okay, gotcha. As noted, IDK how much that applied to the actual missions as assigned. You'd have to read the patrol reports in question, & I haven't...

I remember that it took 2000-2400 man hours to make a Mark 14. The Mark 18 took half that much man hours and could be made by semiskilled labor. By guys working in a car headlamp factory in one case. Battery-powered torpedoes make a lot of sense as merchant ship klilers.

I can't speak to that, but allowing Westinghouse didn't need the same level skill, I'll put my vote on the *Mark 18 Mod 1 (anti-circular protection & improved battery; the OTL battery was sensitive to low charge, & to water temperature, to a degree not helpful to operations).

National characteristics includes doctrinal mistakes when setting goals.

I've never seen it defined, but...somehow, I find that a bit convenient.

If one is ordered and trained to think one way and reality thumps one with the new paradigm; well Newton's laws of insanity kick in and a severe case of psychological inertia asserts itself.

That's true enough.

Mahan can be blamed for a lot of things, but he understood that naval siege (blockade) was the decisive tool of naval warfare.

I've read Influence of Sea Power, & he expressly says the exact opposite: that commerce war cannot defeat nations, & that battles between navies is the only way.

The Battle of the Philippine Sea validates Mahan.

That the Sub Force had essentially crippled IJN for lack of fuel, choked off island bases for lack of spares, & driven the Japanese economy to the brink of collapse, all without "decisive battle", makes me think Mahan didn't know what he was talking about. So does the Anglo-German experience in the Atlantic in both World Wars. Mahan seemed not to realize how much steamships & subs had changed things. (That said, the "like v like" encounters persisted: DDs were designed to hunt torpedo boats, & subs weren't much more than that...)

It is significant that it was submarines that won that naval battle even though my flyboys receive the glory.

With all respect to McClintock (I had to look it up), the report of an inbound task force seems to me to have added confusion, not clarity, just as Murphy's did at Midway.

You can add Darter and Dace to the reasons why subs needed to be able to fight in a general fleet action. I wish Taffy 3 had had some more of that kind of aid off Samar. Might have helped. If I need to explicate: those subs blew Kurita's cruiser flagship, Atago, specially set up with radio communications and an operations center, out of the water at the Palawan Passage. He had to swim for it. His staff was scattered. Some of them, key men, drowned. Yamato was not prepared to operate as a substitute flag that operation, so command/control dislocation was a huge factor from then on. Not just that rattled nervous admiral, but the whole center force was psychologically damaged. And it had material effects. Radio coms for example fleet-wide with Nishimura and Ozawa broke down. Station Hypo and an outpost (Frumel?) helped set it up.

I appreciate the clarification; it's been too long since I read Blair last to recall the details. That's the kind of lucky shot that happens sometimes, & I'm afraid that's all it was.

Having WW2-era boats that were suited for fleet co-operation, & having them suited for (even PTO) commerce raiding is...not quite an oxymoron, but at cross-purposes, IMO. I'm not entirely sure you can have both in the same design. More speed, essential to engage TFs, & more firepower, a good thing for TFs & convoys, both want bigger boats, which are slower to dive (hence more vulnerable) & more expensive to build & operate (manpower), which makes them less commonplace. (Leave off any treaty factors.) If you're attacking a task force, the fast dive may be essential. Higher dived speed would be a good thing, if you prefer to avoid a need for fast dives; you're still looking at a pretty big boat.

Is there an ideal size? IDK...but Gato & Tench were mightily close, if there isn't. (That said, my bias may be showing: they achieved the successes OTL...) Were the Type XXIs bigger than the Type IXs to cope with a need for more battery capacity & more dived power, or something else? (I confess, I have no idea.) That would offer a benchmark to judge a notional Tench variant.

The Australians should have gone with the Oyashi/Barbel pick. The Japanese are expensive up front, but they have bought and built American. And who knows the Pacific better?

Yeah, & yet, even during the war, you had Hart advocating *S-boats, right down to "no air conditioning", critical of the "luxuries" of the fleet boats. (Somebody else who couldn't read a chart...or a weather report on how damn hot it gets in the Tropics)

USN sub skippers were trained wrong but they were the cream after aviation. It was the surface warfare types; especially after 1935, who were the duds. And it shows.

I was thinking of flag ranks generally, in all cases; I'm not naming names & saying individuals were incompetent. IJN, as a force, had a low level of technical education (so a lack of grasp of the need for/value of things like sonar) & a strong tendency to inflexibility. This wasn't limited to IJN, either; IJA was no better, & RN & RCN weren't stellar, either.

In Japan, I think it all traces back to how the recruits are trained: obedience, not independent thought. Contrast Heer: even noncoms are trained to think for themselves, & to be ready to take over if senior officers get killed, & that kind of approach goes all the way up the chain; IMO, it's the very best model.

Sub Force training prewar was pretty unrealistic, & it showed. Also, there was no good way of identifying & weeding out the bad ones, & experience proved that ran a pretty high percentage (based on the number Lockwood bounced).

IDK if it's a lot better now, but I personally like the RN Perisher course idea: flunk, & you will never command a ship at sea; & you don't get engineers & the like simply fleeting up into CO spots. (Not everybody could be Nimitz...)

Had there been a course like it prewar, IMO the Sub Force would have been perceptibly more effective. OTOH, how many unpredictable COs, the school teacher types who did well in command OTL, wouldn't pass? Just frex, would O'Kane have, or been seen as too unstable?

Get another CNO and reallocate the Navy ice cream budget to live warshot test exercises.

Sold. (Nimitz is too junior; got any candidates in mind?)

Well, you start with Senator Peter G. Gerry and blackmail that SoB. You need J. Edgar Hoover for that one. You have to bribe Senator Jesse H. Metcalf (He'll take one.) and then you have to find a sweet young thing for Carl Vinson or get him drunk. That solves Goat Island. Then you pick between Westinghouse or GE. As for the MIHSWDC crowd at the Navy Department, that is ROOSEVELT. He sets the tone. The USN will follow his lead; doctrine be damned. I really do not know how to turn him into a pirate either before Pearl Harbor. Have to do something.
/quote]

Agreed on all counts. You'd have to get rid of the R.I. Congressman with NTS in his district, too (Rice?); plant an underage intern on him? (It can't be too hard.)

FDR might take to heart a history lesson on U-boats in WW1...but you're right: moving him off U.S. policy of freedom of the sea is a big ask.

Subs covered dead gaps. Some of them are going to prowl around sticking up an aerial.

You're not wrong, exactly, but what I'm getting at is, if it's done properly, there aren't gaps you need to plug by parking subs offshore, which is what Nimitz was doing.

I don't imagine IJN being willing to drive heavies through a minefield, when they unexpectedly find one offshore, which forces a retreat, & the bottle is plugged. If it's not, the losses in valuable heavies balances Nimitz not getting the "plug" effect I'm hoping for.

Would you call that a wrong assessment? (This is one of my own pet ideas, so...)

As for the Formosa/Luzon Strait... That is a boundary problem. This was seen before in the Solomon Islands. Move the boundary.

It is, except for MacArthur. So long as he claims P.I., & operates subs at all, the boundary is liable to be in the wrong place: across the Luzon Strait. Even with well-publicized safety lanes, mistakes happen: Seawolf learned the hard way. I wouldn't want to encourage similar hazards.

As for other coverage gaps; build more boats sooner.

Agreed, if you can get USN & Congress to agree to increase the rate in '37-8 or so. With the outbreak of war in Europe, you might argue for two boats per way per yard per year, instead of one, & that would increase the number of fleet boats enough to retire the S-boats by 7/12. (Do it as a jobs measure. Do it to appease the isolationists: strong navy keeps enemies away.)

WFA was not the best solution; but then no-one US ever thought of sheaving the hydrophones and trying to get a bearing discriminator put of it like the Germans did; until the USN caught their very own Type IX and played with it. (Chicago Museum?) By that time, the war was too far gone and it had to wait for the GUPPYs to show up in US service.

That's a sad state of affairs... Even something as simple as hydrophones in the bow buoyancy tank location, & dead astern, would have made a big difference. You'd think, with the emphasis prewar on sonar approaches, the failings of the existing set would have come to light...

Hmm. Maybe. Or maybe (like the Japanese) you spend a little extra money on shore based listening RDF posts with standard radio men while you train up another 3000 crypto guys to work on the latest Maru code.

Oh, more cryppies would have been a godsend, & not just for the maru code. That takes such a big change, in appreciating the operational value of intel (which is so bound by terror of exposure OTL), you're almost asking for Romulan aid. (I don't think it would take 3000 guys, either: a couple of dozen trained linguists & maybe 100 unemployed musicians.) It's not so much a location issue. (Which is odd, since, like a U-boat, you don't really need to know the content of the message if you know its source is a convoy at sea...)

That said, if you're doubting the value of it, don't. The statistics in Blair are clear: sinkings go up dramatically once the maru code is being read again, more than for the torpedoes, more than the dry patrol rate for Oz boats...

I'm just saying 20 mm cannon firing Zeros are nothing to ignore. Not even for a B-17.

I don't mean to imply it. From what I've seen, tho, even the 20mm didn't make a strong impression, unless delivered with a fair amount of precision. Bad ammo? Not enough of it? Or bad aim? IDK. The sample size I have is too small to say (that is, Sakai in either Zero or Samurai...).

I can't speak to that, but allowing Westinghouse didn't need the same level skill, I'll put my vote on the *Mark 18 Mod 1 (anti-circular protection & improved battery; the OTL battery was sensitive to low charge, & to water temperature, to a degree not helpful to operations).

The cure is the seawater battery, but silver and zinc are in extremely short WW II supply. Lithium batteries are unheard of. The cheapest, simplest, and quickest is lead/acid. In WW II in a panic scenario, the drop out discharge and low temp problems are going to insoluble, as is the gas seep. This tech is going aboard boats not designed to deal with it. Germans had even more trouble than the US did. (The G7e was a horrible piece of engineering safety-wise.). Starting with the Mark 1 (battery cells were circular not square) and plugging away at it, There goes the Navy sports budget.) will get one to an iron based deep cycle dry-cell torpedo. Heavyweight at two tonnes and slow (about 15 m/s for 500 seconds) and somewhat expensive (*$8,000?) for an electric torpedo. Drawback? The cells have to be repacked with new catalytic plates after every practice shot and the cells have to be current charged (topped) prior to use. For a 30 knot torpedo that runs 6500 yards, I'll take those drawbacks over the Mark 18. Circle runs... gate limit the gyro for 100 seconds so that it does not uncage to steer and neutral the y axis steer. Correct roll right with a contra-prop. Yaw? Tube the tail control. And Ogive the nose Italian style. Get that extra knot out of her. Warhead bang is about 200 kg; so better steal PBX from the Brits and learn about how shaped charges (HESH) work underwater.

About doctrine in military affairs and applied force.

Briefly; Communists do not think like capitalists do not think like fascists do not think like megalomaniacs do not think like socialists do not think like republicans etc. It is the politics of a culture. What is the core value applied in a military sense? Who is most likely to go freighter hunting? Megalomaniacs and capitalists. Commies will kill ocean liners full of refugees.

About training affecting mindset: See what I wrote about capitalists and megalomaniacs? Megos go for the terror effect and big shows (Prien and Scapa Flow). Capitalists think about the effects on commerce. Freighter is torpedoed in any event. Doenitz was after trade, but his boss was not thinking that way. In the Russians case, those "gentlemen" [scorn] only mount a submarine campaign of note when the Germans can't defend themselves any more and those bastards go after refugee ships packed full of fleeing civilians. I understand revenge, but that is not what medals are handed out for. Not a navy that can be proud of itself, the Soviet navy.

I've read Influence of Sea Power, & he expressly says the exact opposite: that commerce war cannot defeat nations, & that battles between navies is the only way.

What he said was that the use of the sea can defeat nations. How that is done, he says is by denying the use of the sea. He talks about decisive battles and destroying the enemy fleet that way, because as long as an enemy has a fleet he can use, he can wage guerre de course which impedes one's own use of the sea, too. Blockade is the decisive tool to compel battle. Too many people are mesmerized by the battleships and the passages about Trafalgar TO PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT MAHAN IS WRITING IN THE BODY OF HIS THEORY.

Mahan is quite clear on the use of the sea.

That the Sub Force had essentially crippled IJN for lack of fuel, choked off island bases for lack of spares, & driven the Japanese economy to the brink of collapse, all without "decisive battle", makes me think Mahan didn't know what he was talking about. So does the Anglo-German experience in the Atlantic in both World Wars. Mahan seemed not to realize how much steamships & subs had changed things. (That said, the "like v like" encounters persisted: DDs were designed to hunt torpedo boats, & subs weren't much more than that...)

Hmm. Plan Orange.

Explanation. It was clear by 1935 that the geography for the eventual bombing to be used to force the Japanese to the peace table meant there would be a naval battle in the Marianas Islands. The Japanese and the Americans both understood it. It would be decisive. Now that is air power me writing this. But for a USN man, he can see Mahan at work. The road to the Marianas is the sea. Use of that road means a navy. The other fellow to be denied the Marianas has to lose his navy. Submarines are a tool to get one there, but they can be hunted down and killed and defeated. (Battle of the Atlantic. DECISIVE BATTLE. Mahan ) The only way to keep the enemy fleet off your submarine force's back so they can blockade and c ripple commerce, is to use your own fleet to kill his fleet. That is... Mahan.

That was the plan. That was not quite how it worked out...

With all respect to McClintock (I had to look it up.), the report of an inbound task force seems to me to have added confusion, not clarity, just as Murphy's did at Midway.

Hmm. (Taiho and Shokaku were killed by what? See at link.)

I appreciate the clarification; it's been too long since I read Blair last to recall the details. That's the kind of lucky shot that happens sometimes, & I'm afraid that's all it was.

A lot of traffic analysis set up that luck.

Having WW2-era boats that were suited for fleet co-operation, & having them suited for (even PTO) commerce raiding is...not quite an oxymoron, but at cross-purposes, IMO. I'm not entirely sure you can have both in the same design. More speed, essential to engage TFs, & more firepower, a good thing for TFs & convoys, both want bigger boats, which are slower to dive (hence more vulnerable) & more expensive to build & operate (manpower), which makes them less commonplace. (Leave off any treaty factors.) If you're attacking a task force, the fast dive may be essential. Higher dived speed would be a good thing, if you prefer to avoid a need for fast dives; you're still looking at a pretty big boat.

I'm not saying they would be small and agile. (Crash through test depth is a serious problem for a larger [i.e longer] sub. Length tilted DOWN.) What I'm saying is that one cannot have what one wants with WW II tech as defined in Gato. Trade-off some surface speed (2 knots?). Short fat hull insteaf of the long lean hull.

Were the Type XXIs bigger than the Type IXs to cope with a need for more battery capacity & more dived power, or something else?

The Type XXIs were about the same mass size and volume, but shorter and deeper riding than the IX's.

Yeah, & yet, even during the war, you had Hart advocating *S-boats, right down to "no air conditioning", critical of the "luxuries" of the fleet boats. (Somebody else who couldn't read a chart...or a weather report on how damn hot it gets in the Tropics)

The crew can actually sweat and shiver, I'm sorry to say (War after all.). It's the damned machinery [electronics] that needs the AC. That idiot.

I was thinking of flag ranks generally, in all cases; I'm not naming names & saying individuals were incompetent. IJN, as a force, had a low level of technical education (so a lack of grasp of the need for/value of things like sonar) & a strong tendency to inflexibility. This wasn't limited to IJN, either; IJA was no better, & RN & RCN weren't stellar, either.

Hmm. Overconfidence and misunderstanding, yes, but technically backward or incompetent? Maybe not. If you want a USN boob who fits the overconfident and misunderstand category (besides Halsey, who was incompetent.) how about that womanizer, drunk and clueless about submarine warfare otherwise borderline genius; Ernest J. King? I* will name names.

In Japan, I think it all traces back to how the recruits are trained: obedience, not independent thought. Contrast Heer: even noncoms are trained to think for themselves, & to be ready to take over if senior officers get killed, & that kind of approach goes all the way up the chain; IMO, it's the very best model.

Prudent Judgment. Tanaka, Raizo had it. So did Ozawa,Jisaburo. As for the Herr; lots of salute the flag and charge up the hill to be killed tactical idiots in that outfit. vcn Paulus, Student, Model, Arnim, etc.

Sub Force training prewar was pretty unrealistic, & it showed. Also, there was no good way of identifying & weeding out the bad ones, & experience proved that ran a pretty high percentage (based on the number Lockwood bounced).

Not what they trained to do. Not how they were taught to think. To prepare for the war they were going to fight, the submariners would have to attack "ye olde convoy" at least once a year. That actually only occurred twice in the 22 years prior to the war and was in 1918-and 1919. Rest of the fleet problems were "form the scout line, boys, and dive if you see planes." Midway remember?

Sold. (Nimitz is too junior; got any candidates in mind?)

Frank Schofield. A tiger.

Agreed on all counts. You'd have to get rid of the R.I. Congressman with NTS in his district, too (Rice?); plant an underage intern on him? (It can't be too hard.)

He may have liked boys.

FDR might take to heart a history lesson on U-boats in WW1...but you're right: moving him off U.S. policy of freedom of the sea is a big ask.

It would be more of a question of showing him China (films of Japanese atrocities) and putting it to him that this enemy is going to be a problem. He had no problem preparing to total war Germany for example.

You're not wrong, exactly, but what I'm getting at is, if it's done properly, there aren't gaps you need to plug by parking subs offshore, which is what Nimitz was doing.

You are expecting flow strategy and operational art from guys who have never fought a modern commerce war. Raphael Semmes is long dead.

I don't imagine IJN being willing to drive heavies through a minefield, when they unexpectedly find one offshore, which forces a retreat, & the bottle is plugged. If it's not, the losses in valuable heavies balances Nimitz not getting the "plug" effect I'm hoping for.

Would you call that a wrong assessment? (This is one of my own pet ideas, so...)

The Japanese cleared mine fields by driving manned freighters over them.

It is, except for MacArthur. So long as he claims P.I., & operates subs at all, the boundary is liable to be in the wrong place: across the Luzon Strait. Even with well-publicized safety lanes, mistakes happen: Seawolf learned the hard way. I wouldn't want to encourage similar hazards.

Move MacArthur. Eichelberger is a better brass-hat anyway.

Agreed, if you can get USN & Congress to agree to increase the rate in '37-8 or so. With the outbreak of war in Europe, you might argue for two boats per way per yard per year, instead of one, & that would increase the number of fleet boats enough to retire the S-boats by 7/12. (Do it as a jobs measure. Do it to appease the isolationists: strong navy keeps enemies away.)

*42? Manitowoc up and running? Start in 33 and evolve a snort boat. That is what Holland (country) did.

That's a sad state of affairs... Even something as simple as hydrophones in the bow buoyancy tank location, & dead astern, would have made a big difference. You'd think, with the emphasis prewar on sonar approaches, the failings of the existing set would have come to light...

US WW II boats use saddle tanks. Trim tank location? Three channel searchlight (WFA) would have worked. Power available? I don't know for sure.

Oh, more cryppies would have been a godsend, & not just for the maru code. That takes such a big change, in appreciating the operational value of intel (which is so bound by terror of exposure OTL), you're almost asking for Romulan aid. (I don't think it would take 3000 guys, either: a couple of dozen trained linguists & maybe 100 unemployed musicians.) It's not so much a location issue. (Which is odd, since, like a U-boat, you don't really need to know the content of the message if you know its source is a convoy at sea...)

I'm a firm believer in traffic analysis. It gives away patterns and THAT is a better exploit over time than reading a one time order. Example: flyover an Afghan valley and count the goat herds and see where the goat herders flock them. Opium field and Taliban camp will be in the nearest [expletive deleted] clump of hills. Guess where the bombers head?

I don't mean to imply it. From what I've seen, tho, even the 20mm didn't make a strong impression, unless delivered with a fair amount of precision. Bad ammo? Not enough of it? Or bad aim? IDK. The sample size I have is too small to say (that is, Sakai in either Zero or Samurai...).

Altitude, simple altitude. Even the Zero could not claw 7 kms up to fight a Fort on equal terms. They had to gang bang her and with only a minute in unstable air to set up, the time for stable firing passes in effective range (FRFL) is about 2 seconds. Not many shells. In thick air, the Zero can pump in 8 seconds worth. Plenty enough time down low to kill that Fort.

the drop out discharge and low temp problems are going to insoluble, as is the gas seep.

The first is a nuisance, not a problem. The second sounds like it might be serious for a sub...

Circle runs... gate limit the gyro for 100 seconds so that it does not uncage to steer and neutral the y axis steer. Correct roll right with a contra-prop. Yaw? Tube the tail control. And Ogive the nose Italian style. Get that extra knot out of her. Warhead bang is about 200 kg; so better steal PBX from the Brits and learn about how shaped charges (HESH) work underwater.

That's interesting stuff. I was thinking, just adopt the Mark 15's system, 'cause we know it works; I'm not really concerned how it's done, only that it is.

Briefly; Communists do not think like capitalists do not think like fascists do not think like megalomaniacs do not think like socialists do not think like republicans etc. It is the politics of a culture. What is the core value applied in a military sense? Who is most likely to go freighter hunting? Megalomaniacs and capitalists. Commies will kill ocean liners full of refugees.

Megos go for the terror effect and big shows (Prien and Scapa Flow). Capitalists think about the effects on commerce. Freighter is torpedoed in any event. Doenitz was after trade, but his boss was not thinking that way. In the Russians case, those "gentlemen" [scorn] only mount a submarine campaign of note when the Germans can't defend themselves any more and those bastards go after refugee ships packed full of fleeing civilians. I understand revenge, but that is not what medals are handed out for. Not a navy that can be proud of itself, the Soviet navy.

Hmm... I'm thinking it's not as simple as that, but my own bias may be in play. And the Sov example, I have to ask (& to be clear, I'm no defender of SU), how much of that is a) lack of capacity to move sooner (the Sov Navy has never been a paragon) & b) sheer incompetence (in part due to low quality)? Revenge may well have played a part...but, absent clear evidence, I'd doubt that was all of it.

What he said was that the use of the sea can defeat nations. How that is done, he says is by denying the use of the sea. He talks about decisive battles and destroying the enemy fleet that way, because as long as an enemy has a fleet he can use, he can wage guerre de course which impedes one's own use of the sea, too. Blockade is the decisive tool to compel battle. Too many people are mesmerized by the battleships and the passages about Trafalgar TO PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT MAHAN IS WRITING IN THE BODY OF HIS THEORY.

I will have to read it again, then. I don't recall that.

Plan Orange.

Presuming commerce war? I don't recall it did...but I may have to reread on that, too.

The only way to keep the enemy fleet off your submarine force's back so they can blockade and c ripple commerce, is to use your own fleet to kill his fleet. That is... Mahan.

Except that's not what happened, at least as I understand it. Commerce protection was a low priority, & ASW training was dismally bad, because IJN expected the decision to come from a thundering exchange between battle lines. When that didn't obtain, it's not like the entire strength of IJN DDs (forget anything bigger) was assigned to defending her SLOCs (which might actually have been the sensible approach).

Taiho and Shokaku were killed by what?)

Yes, well-positioned (& due credit to Hypo, I don't mean to diminish them), but still lucky. IMO, given how hard it was to get a shot at a fast-moving TF (CV or BB), any sinking of a heavy was lucky (because, even knowing route, date, & time from Hypo, you still need to be close enough to the TF's track to actually get a shot), & those two were aided by IJN incompetence.

I'm not saying they would be small and agile. (Crash through test depth is a serious problem for a larger [i.e longer] sub. Length tilted DOWN.) What I'm saying is that one cannot have what one wants with WW II tech as defined in Gato. Trade-off some surface speed (2 knots?). Short fat hull insteaf of the long lean hull.

Lose surface speed, you've given up any chance of catching a TF at all; even flat out, the Gatos & their sisters couldn't chase successfully. I'm picturing the mooted SS-551s, which were longer (on the same hull form) & had more hp. If you have to sweat passing test depth in a dive, you're doing something wrong... (With the depth gauge reading 250, the bow torpedo room is at test depth in Tench, & I don't know how many operational dives that went even that deep. Morton pushed Wahoo to a claimed 600 for trial purposes, but that wasn't operationally, even if true.)

The Type XXIs were about the same mass size and volume, but shorter and deeper riding than the IX's.

That goes with optimized for dived performance...

The crew can actually sweat and shiver, I'm sorry to say (War after all.). It's the damned machinery [electronics] that needs the AC. That idiot.

Right on part two, a clear lack of understanding. I'd disagree on part one; morale is an issue, & so is crew effectiveness. Taking away the ice cream machine, OTOH...

Overconfidence and misunderstanding, yes, but technically backward or incompetent? Maybe not.

As I said, USN was better than the rest, broadly speaking. And the reason I won't name names is because I'm thinking in terms of the entire flag rank "ensemble", of the system, not the individuals in it. Even IJN produced some stars, & I'd name Tanaka (& Yamamoto is a bit over-rated, but above average for IJN).

Prudent Judgment. Tanaka, Raizo had it. So did Ozawa,Jisaburo. As for the Herr; lots of salute the flag and charge up the hill to be killed tactical idiots in that outfit. vcn Paulus, Student, Model, Arnim, etc.

Again, you will find exceptions: it's the system that is at issue.

Not what they trained to do. Not how they were taught to think.

To a degree, yes. OTOH, over-reliance on sonar for firing solutions (& inability to see it wasn't working), excessive fear of a/c & excessive reliance on torpedoes (yes, doctrinal issues at work)...

Frank Schofield. A tiger.

Done.

He may have liked boys.

I'm not picky, & there are male interns.

It would be more of a question of showing him China (films of Japanese atrocities) and putting it to him that this enemy is going to be a problem. He had no problem preparing to total war Germany for example.

I don't think it's "preparation" as much as understanding the changed nature of the war that's going to be fought. Simple preparation will see more BBs & CVs built, but not (perforce) more subs.

You are expecting flow strategy and operational art from guys who have never fought a modern commerce war. Raphael Semmes is long dead.

I'm trusting they can read history (WW1), pay attention to current events (Atlantic ops), & read a chart of the Pacific (notice the Luzon chokepoint): from professionals, I'd expect that. I have the benefit of hindsight, yes; they have years of experience & training: IMO, we should be about even.

The Japanese cleared mine fields by driving manned freighters over them.

(Still not quite the same as sending CVs or BBs into them...which was what I meant.)

Move MacArthur. Eichelberger is a better brass-hat anyway.

I'd happily push him under a bus. And give the job to Wainwright. Or Eichelberger. Or...

*42? Manitowoc up and running? Start in 33 and evolve a snort boat. That is what Holland (country) did.

If you want to push harder, yeah, open Manitowoc in '32 or '33, increase the build rate at Groton & Portsmouth & Mare Island ditto, & while you're at it, increase the build on DDs (with a repeat Porter?) so FDR can surplus off the 4-pipers to Britain in '39 or '40.

US WW II boats use saddle tanks. Trim tank location? Three channel searchlight (WFA) would have worked. Power available? I don't know for sure.

Yeah, don't delete the retractable search set, but add bow & stern arrays. More battery capacity in the Gato hull plan is an issue...but maybe (maybe) that's solvable with a new battery design. Rearranging the layout might solve it. Ultimately, you may need to add a plug, per the GUPPy boats; fortunately, with welding, that's easy, & a retrofit to (some) earlier boats might be done (if this is a prewar idea & accepted soon enough).

I'm a firm believer in traffic analysis. It gives away patterns and THAT is a better exploit over time than reading a one time order.

I'll agree with that completely. Just looking at the traffic through the Japanese legation in Hawaii prewar would've been a tipoff Pearl was a likely target, if anybody'd been looking...

Altitude, simple altitude. Even the Zero could not claw 7 kms up to fight a Fort on equal terms. They had to gang bang her and with only a minute in unstable air to set up, the time for stable firing passes in effective range (FRFL) is about 2 seconds. Not many shells. In thick air, the Zero can pump in 8 seconds worth. Plenty enough time down low to kill that Fort.

Huh. The factors I failed to consider... I should be ashamed.

The first is a nuisance, not a problem. The second sounds like it might be serious for a sub.

Boom or fire or both. Same reason I am not a fan of Navol torpedoes.

That's interesting stuff. I was thinking, just adopt the Mark 15's system, 'cause we know it works; I'm not really concernedhow it's done, only that it is.

Its parts of how the Germans solved their G-7e issues.

Hmm... I'm thinking it's not as simple as that, but my own bias may be in play. And the Sov example, I have to ask (& to be clear, I'm no defender of SU), how much of that is a) lack of capacity to move sooner (the Sov Navy has never been a paragon) & b) sheer incompetence (in part due to low quality)? Revenge may well have played a part...but, absent clear evidence, I'd doubt that was all of it.

The Russians had some L-class submarines laying idle at Leningrad since 41. AIUI the Russians had to lift the siege, roll back the Finns and clear a pathway to the Gulf of Finland through Neva Bay (1944). Once out; those bastards could have run mining missions to throttle coastal trade among the German held ports. Many Russian boats were equipped and trained for that kind of work. Instead, they went looking for shipping. Marked ships (red crosses)_were their favorite prey.

I will have to read it again, then. I don't recall that.

Uses of the Sea.
Napoleonic Wars.

Except that's not what happened, at least as I understand it. Commerce protection was a low priority, & ASW training was dismally bad, because IJN expected the decision to come from a thundering exchange between battle lines. When that didn't obtain, it's not like the entire strength of IJN DDs (forget anything bigger) was assigned to defending her SLOCs (which might actually have been the sensible approach).

I'm not just speaking of the Japanese. It is the USN carrier force keeping the IJN busy and looking in the wrong direction. 42-43 was a bad time to be a US surface warfare sailor (squid). Japanese cruisers and destroyers sinking them were not sinking bubbleheads.

Yes, well-positioned (& due credit to Hypo, I don't mean to diminish them), but still lucky. IMO, given how hard it was to get a shot at a fast-moving TF (CV or BB), any sinking of a heavy was lucky (because, even knowing route, date, & time from Hypo, you still need to be close enough to the TF's track to actually get a shot), & those two were aided by IJN incompetence.

And maybe I should distinguish between "good luck" & "good fortune"...

Palawan Passage was ideal. Not much of an accident.

Lose surface speed, you've given up any chance of catching a TF at all; even flat out, the Gatos & their sisters couldn't chase successfully. I'm picturing the mooted SS-551s, which were longer (on the same hull form) & had more hp. If you have to sweat passing test depth in a dive, you're doing something wrong... (With the depth gauge reading 250, the bow torpedo room is at test depth in Tench, & I don't know how many operational dives that went even that deep. Morton pushed Wahoo to a claimed 600 for trial purposes, but that wasn't operationally, even if true.)

Hmm. Solve it with watts. Down angle at 5 degrees can put your mid-hull through the 100 meter line in about 100 seconds if you drive her down on the planes. Not good.

Right on part two, a clear lack of understanding. I'd disagree on part one; morale is an issue, & so is crew effectiveness. Taking away the ice cream machine, OTOH...

1. The boat is meant to fight. US submarine crews found their living conditions and said so; "good to fair" but when actually compared to other navies, their living conditions were no better or in some cases much worse.
2. Dived, the physical air plant had to shut down. NOISE.
3. Sorry about the ice cream machines, but I want torpedoes that work and 1600 fewer submariners dead.

To a degree, yes. OTOH, over-reliance on sonar for firing solutions (& inability to see it wasn't working), excessive fear of a/c & excessive reliance on torpedoes (yes, doctrinal issues at work)...

I mean practicing as you expect to fight. Night convoy attack is not something to OJT after 7 December *41. Neither is night ops in general. Savo Island and Kolambangara should never have happened.

I don't think it's "preparation" as much as understanding the changed nature of the war that's going to be fought. Simple preparation will see more BBs & CVs built, but not (perforce) more subs.

If the Rape of Nanking has not jolted FDR to reality, what will?

I'm trusting they can read history (WW1), pay attention to current events (Atlantic ops), & read a chart of the Pacific (notice the Luzon chokepoint): from professionals, I'd expect that. I have the benefit of hindsight, yes; they have years of experience & training: IMO, we should be about even.

Uncle Chuck was arguing flow versus tonnage with Nimitz in *44. The concepts were brand new. How the hello is anybody supposed to make a guess based on WW I Atlantic data? We look with too much hindsight. Just getting the tanker order approved was a bit of operations genius and good staff work by Subpac. Those guys for what they knew, done damned good.

(Still not quite the same as sending CVs or BBs into them...which was what I meant.)

Remember what I wrote about megos? No value placed on people or on precious goods? Stalin marched political prisoners through landmines. Tojo sent ships through sea mines.

I'd happily push him under a bus. And give the job to Wainwright. Or Eichelberger. Or...

Geiger

If you want to push harder, yeah, open Manitowoc in '32 or '33, increase the build rate at Groton & Portsmouth & Mare Island ditto, & while you're at it, increase the build on DDs (with a repeat Porter?) so FDR can surplus off the 4-pipers to Britain in '39 or '40.

Sounds fair. Want more money for research.

Yeah, don't delete the retractable search set, but add bow & stern arrays. More battery capacity in the Gato hull plan is an issue...but maybe (maybe) that's solvable with a new battery design. Rearranging the layout might solve it. Ultimately, you may need to add a plug, per the GUPPy boats; fortunately, with welding, that's easy, & a retrofit to (some) earlier boats might be done (if this is a prewar idea & accepted soon enough).

What about the signal processing? Three channels, are we going to triple up on the sound men?

I'll agree with that completely. Just looking at the traffic through the Japanese legation in Hawaii prewar would've been a tipoff Pearl was a likely target, if anybody'd been looking...

FBI. Fell down on the job.

Huh. The factors I failed to consider... I should be ashamed.

The higher you go the more difficult things become in the air. Stability is a primary one; especially if you are underpowered as most WW II aircraft were. The opposite I presume holds for underpowered subs.

Next send off O will discuss what a wish list USN sub force should look like by 1938.

Boom or fire or both. Same reason I am not a fan of Navol torpedoes.

I'm not world's biggest fan of peroxide in torpedoes, either, given Sidon (& maybe Kursk, too). I was thinking chlorine gas poisoning. IDK how WW2 boats dealt with battery outgassing issues, but if it's perennial for torpedoes (it wasn't for the main battery)...that's a non-starter.

Its parts of how the Germans solved their G-7e issues.

I was thinking, "If it ain't broke...". Clean sheet of paper, doing it that way might make sense; simply copying (or closely copying) the Mark 10 might make more sense. I'm split on which.

Mark 10 torpedoes are going to be slow and short ranged. Rather have working electrics of the characteristics I described or a rationalized Mark 14 (Basically a Mark 26 as developed for and by industry to make in WWII.)

I'm not world's biggest fan of peroxide in torpedoes, either, given Sidon (& maybe Kursk, too). I was thinking chlorine gas poisoning. IDK how WW2 boats dealt with battery outgassing issues, but if it's perennial for torpedoes (it wasn't for the main battery)...that's a non-starter.

The chlorine problem is only half. Hydrogen is the other half.

I was thinking, "If it ain't broke...". Clean sheet of paper, doing it that way might make sense; simply copying (or closely copying) the Mark 10 might make more sense. I'm split on which.

Bliss Leavitt it is.

I could probably live with that. Supplies of Mark 10s as a fallback, if the *Mark 26 doesn't function as advertised, & be ready for a *Mark 10 Mod 2 or Mod 3, with bigger warhead & anti-circular gear.

...til I thought of the depth-keeping issue... Your clean sheet design avoids that (hopefully). (I don't suppose a modern variation on the Howell is practical...?)

I'm not just speaking of the Japanese. It is the USN carrier force keeping the IJN busy and looking in the wrong direction. 42-43 was a bad time to be a US surface warfare sailor (squid). Japanese cruisers and destroyers sinking them were not sinking bubbleheads.

Fair point. OTOH, they weren't going out of their way to find subs anyhow, because fleet doctrine & philosophy put attack over defense & trade protection was well down the list of priorities.

Palawan Passage was ideal. Not much of an accident.

Not accidental contact. Lucky being in exactly the right place to get the shot, & even more to make it count. There were several other encounters with TFs for the duration where the pursuing sub just couldn't get close enough, never mind the ones where the exploders failed.

Hmm. Solve it with watts. Down angle at 5 degrees can put your mid-hull through the 100 meter line in about 100 seconds if you drive her down on the planes. Not good.

Can, but...a typical "deep" dive would be about 150'. Is that cautious, to avoid breaking crush depth (or test depth)? Maybe. It was deep enough in the circumstances.

The boat is meant to fight. US submarine crews found their living conditions and said so; "good to fair" but when actually compared to other navies, their living conditions were no better or in some cases much worse.

The S-boats were the worst of the lot, so... The fleet boats beat that, & that's the standard I'm at; if that's worse than aboard a Brit or German boat...

Dived, the physical air plant had to shut down. NOISE.

Dived under pursuit, yes. Not normally; ventilation would be left running.

Sorry about the ice cream machines, but I want torpedoes that work and 1600 fewer submariners dead.

I could live with it.

IDK if you manage losses so much lower, all else being equal. Sustained force of 75 boats (instead of 65 OTL, +1/3 of the increased build) means you shorten the war about 6mo (if I have my math right). That saves six boats lost (including Trigger), & charitably a couple more for different dispositions & increased IJN DD losses & such.

Remember what I wrote about megos? No value placed on people or on precious goods? Stalin marched political prisoners through landmines. Tojo sent ships through sea mines.

Okay, so why did Ozawa (& others) keep his heavies in harbor for most of the war? Fuel shortages excepted.

Geiger.

Flip a coin. You can have who comes up. I don't care either way.

Sounds fair. Want more money for research.

Okay, so how do we sell FDR on it? Is he really going to buy the "job creation" deal? And will Congress? Or can we make the case shipbuilding draws from enough states, all their districts (or most of them...) will benefit, & argue down the isolationists with the "strong navy" angle?

What about the signal processing? Three channels, are we going to triple up on the sound men?

I'm thinking it might be selectable; maybe a mixer for the bow & stern sets, so they feed a single headset. Honestly, I'll leave that for the techies to sort out; I'm over my head.

FBI. Fell down on the job.

No, that really is an ONI/SIS problem. Nobody was doing the traffic analysis, because there wasn't the manpower for it--& you can lay that at Stimson's door, the "Gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail" attitude...

Next send off O will discuss what a wish list USN sub force should look like by 1938.

To start? 85 Gatos or equivalent, based entirely in Hawaii. I'd be happy if they all had *Mark 10s & accept that means more need to be fired to achieve OTL results; stowage for 18 forward & 8 aft (plus 10 in the tubes), which may require more length for buoyancy. Quiet pumps, Winton (GM) or Fairbanks-Morse diesels, 4"/50cal on deck (2 is asking too much; that, & port & starboard TBTs, will have to wait for war experience), this silhouette (not the "Conestoga wagon" prewar OTL), radar mast akin a periscope (which is pushing; fixed *SD & *ST mounts are more realistic for 12/41), test depth 400' (so heavier frames & skin, somewhat), & bow/stern sonars; for livability, the long conning tower (trialled late war on in the GUPPy boats, I don't recall which), more A/C (to handle the heat from the electronics, & the added crewmen), more fresh water distilling capacity, & bigger freezer or cold spaces (which probably means more battery, & that probably means she's longer overall, if the added electronics don't do that alone).

For all that, though, good comm/liaison with Hypo is more important, so select Dick Voge as ComSubPac's CoS, & put Lockwood in as his boss, junior or no; there's a shakeup after 7/12, so let Withers get replaced by him then. (That said, he might be too junior anybody {who doesn't have hindsight...} would even consider it...) Good liaison with AAF would be a help, if only to avoid subs being bombed at every opportunity.

You're probably not going to persuade anybody not to have subs in P.I. in '38-9, but I could happily have all the surviving S-boats assigned (prior to them being surplussed off to Oz, the Dutch, Canada, or Free French, with U.S. entry), & not replaced with fleet boats as MacArthur retreats to Oz. HQ liaison between Hart (or Doyle) & Brereton would be good, if it helped subs find targets (& Hypo was blacked out).

Too much was asked of the acoustics as assumed in 1930. Not enough underwater sound research. Refraction and mirror effect not understood.

That's not the half of it (tho you're completely right). Sub Force boats were expected to get firing solutions on passive sonar bearings, with gear not able to resolve them accurately (unlike PUFFS).

IJN sailors, even in 1944, would have laughed at us for it

I'll give them credit for that: realistic training was a strength. It was about the only thing IJN did better.

Nimitz was following this script called “Plan Orange” and was trying to keep MacArthur from fouling up the Pacific war…

Orange didn't limit his options, but it may have unduly narrowed his vision. And I've already said what was wrong with SWPA, & my view of MacArthur...

After Cartwheel, the Japanese had to replace about 7,000 + dead aircrew. Repair or replace 6 flattops, train about 10,000 aircraft mechanics, about 2700 radio men and replace or retrain about 15,000 + other sailors. Not to mention replace or reassign about a dozen senior admirals, a score of captains and several hundred junior officers. There was a tanker shortage (before the tanker order, maybe somebody at ONI passed it on to SubPac?) and of course the planes have to be replaced and this all takes time. About a year if everything goes right. Just the pilot training takes that long.

Given. Nevertheless, Ozawa didn't use his BBs for anything...except, arguably, floating bait. (Am I overestimating the value of mining? Maybe...)

1. Bribe Lindbergh.

2. Father Conklin has to go.

3. Promise the congress bastards from Mississippi and Florida fat navy construction contracts. Same for Wisconsin and Illinois.

Sold.

Analog mixer? (Digital is impossible in *38.) Seriously I would prefer espionage and steal the GHG, but if it is WFA, might have to go with a pair of soundme and the pencil and paper route. Chart it.

Suits me fine. I doubt stealing it was likely, but what the hell, FBI (or ONI, or somebody) was stealing codebooks all over the place, so...

The FBI was doing B and E safecracker jobs all over the place in foreign (Russian, Japanese, German, Italian, French, Dutch etc.) consulates in 1940. How is it not their mission also not to wiretap and open diplo pouches and

grab the occasional errant merchant radioman?

I think we're at cross-purposes, here. Go back to June '41. ONI has broken the maru code (somehow; I don't recall the method). Leave that in place by warning Customs officers & others to avoid seizing codebooks, in some way that doesn't reveal ONI is reading the code.

The other half is traffic analysis, which is to say, nobody was paying attention (AFAIK) to the number of messages out of the Japanese legation in Hawaii, which would've been a tipoff. No breach of diplomatic bag needed, just the same deal as intercepting & reading PURPLE.

AFAIK, nobody in ONI or SIS was doing anything like watching traffic volume...

claiming to change policies

I've understood that was a fact, beginning in 1929. It may not be... In any case, manpower in both ONI & SIS was too low to read J-19 (which Yoshikawa was using) or do traffic-volume analysis.

1. I think 85 Gatos is a pipe dream. For one thing Pearl cannot logistically support it. For two, I don’t think New London can train enough personnel. For three, I don’t think the treaties allow that much sub tonnage yet. Realistically? About enough to keep 15 on patrol in Hawaiian waters. 45 it is.

Pearl alone, IDK. Add Midway early, save doing it when the shooting starts, 'cause you're going to want it anyhow. And recall Pearl, like Midway, might just be a staging area, with boats held at San Francisco (or maybe also San Pedro), if needed.

Groton's program can be expanded, & will have to be anyhow, given we're adding yard capacity & more contracts.

The idea is for ComSubPac/CinCPac to have minimum 65 boats under command (that gives an OTL war duration); with 85 in service (about), that puts just under 30 at Pearl at once. (Yeah, 85 is about triple the assigned number in 12/41...but during the war, the sustained force was around 65, so about 20 in harbor at any one time...)

The treaty issue is moot, since Japan has abrogated as of 1936. (If we start in '32-3, maybe we're in trouble...but if we wait, no worries.)

I’ll give you that, but you will have to give me this.

Logistics. Midway needs a protected service pier and fuel farm before the war. The Americans cannot wait on this until after the Battle of Midway. If the Japanese ask, it’s for the Pan Am Clippers. LIE about it.

I won't give it to you. I'll insist on it. And better crew quarters ashore, with an actual movie theatre. (Recall, I've read about this for a lot of years...)

3. Radar is not ready.

4. 20 mm autocannon. REACH and PUNCH is important.

AA def less so. 4"/50cal for larger targets & cripples, 40mm for junks & sampans & such.

5. Test depth 100 meters early and 150 meters later as construction techniques improve.

Agreed. (That may be conservative, actually: test depth was 300' in the Gatos already.)

6. Better piping. Pumps (Archimedes not bellows), DC motors.

Better & simplified piping layout would be good, as a cost & weight measure. Better pumps unquestionably.

DC motors--for prop drive, or elsewhere? I'll offer no opinion, since I'm unqualified to argue the merits.

8. Small conning tower with tall lookout perches. There is a bad lean effect with a big sail underwater.

Crowding, with all the wartime added gear, is an issue, so the longer conn is a good thing. Taller, no.

Taller lookout perches are a good idea, with (approximately) shoulder-height rails, to reduce fatigue holding binoculars.

9. Thin Sargo II plate cells in the battery. Faster recharge/discharge rates. Downside is replacement of the battery in 1 year instead of 5.

Replacement period in wartime is moot; swap 'em at every yard visit, if you have to. A major refit every 6mo, where that gets done, is no biggie. My question is, is that technically feasible, yet? (Or do you want to rely on the prewar increase in the research budget?)

10. Snort.

A bit outside the box for USN boats, & I'm not sure it's essential...but I wouldn't oppose it. Maybe as a feature of the *Balaos (unless we presume these changes accumulate in the *Tambors as the last prewar class, & heavier frames & snorkel & such follow with the *Gatos as the first wartime class).

And a suggestion: first wartime class name should be Wahoo or Trigger. (The first is obvious, the second my sentimental fave.)

11. Radios: both short and long wave AM and FM. Lots of aerials to listen. Trained crewmen who know how to RDF with them. A sub can snoop where a land-based station cannot.

Agreed. And at least one Japanese linguist, probably Nissei.

12. The R-class included a retractable deck gun for high underwater speed. Guess what? Good idea to repeat.

Interesting, but IMO not really needed, given so much time will be spent surfaced.

14. More tenders.

15. More torpedoes.

16. More psychiatrists for the captains and crews. Submarines, if it is anything like air ops is probably extremely rough duty, peace or war.

17. Pre-war rec facilities ashore. Let the rest of the navy howl. Subs are cramped. Rats in a lab cage live better than sub crews.

Sold on all counts. I'd add, something like a tour of duty as CO, if possible (5 patrols?), then sent to new construction Stateside (which is an effective long vacation, without beaching them entirely); tired skippers get themselves killed & their boats sunk. (As witness Morton & Wahoo.)

18. Exercises (claim it is ASW training) with the subs “attacking” the fleet.). Battleships can stand in for freighters. Locate chase and attack.

That would actually be valid ASW training... The issue is making the DC effect credible.

Which reminds me: take one boat prewar & DC to destruction, to test how the boats actually respond under attack.

Hate to say this, but unless MACARTHUR is replaced, it is going to be a lost cause in the Philippines. And of all the asshats to bring up, you mention Brereton? Do you know what kind of gentlemen he is? How do you think Clark Field happened? Sutherland is another bozo. Better to have Hart move his circus to Oz as soon as Lingayen Gulf happens. Now you see why I want tenders and floating logistics?

I'll agree on MacArthur without reservation. Push him under a bus in '34 or '35, & let his replacement get the P.I. really ready for Japan.

Brereton, AFAIK, got a raw deal from Sutherland & MacArthur. Should he have sent the B-17s to Formosa on his own authority, rather than wait? Maybe. Not his fault the Japanese lucked in just as the bombers were coming back.

On Schofield: looking at the WP bio page, he's retired in '33 & dead by '42. Do you propose keeping him on past retirement? And who replaces him (even presuming he doesn't get bounced 7/12)? Nimitz, again? Or someone else? (Butterfly: this may well mean Lockwood is detailed elsewhere, maybe as Edwards' CoS in Britain... Which puts Christie in line as ComSubPac when English dies, presuming he still does as OTL.)

I'm finding the discussion of an ideal Pacific War sub force intriguing. Would you object to that part of this discussion being posted as a new thread? I'd like to hear broader opinion on the subject.

 

[phx1138]

(Conversation continued...)

That makes it strike 3, for me. Better a reproduction Mark 10.

That is why I suggested iron based deep cycle dry-cell batteries.

I missed that, somehow... See my remarks on the clean sheet, too.

There's a deep & abiding lack of understanding of just how deep a mess they're getting into with the U.S.

It goes to the strange split in the Japanese command setup, duplication of effort and the practical political culture that cemented that army/navy split all the way up to the emperor. It is the German model of 1890 and it has the same built in schizoid effects. The IJA was Russia fixated or munching on China and off in spiritual lala land with a fight between the Bushido faction and the technologists. The IJN was looking at the US as its Pacific competitor and was digesting a bad meal of Misunderstood Mahan on the side. Insofar as anyone had a warplane anywhere for the United States, it was a mirror image of Orange. Whittle the US Navy down with submarine and light surface forces in a series of night battles (Carolines, Gilberts and Marshalls), until the decisive battle in the Marianas Islands. That is about 1921. Sprinkle that plan with island based naval air forces (1933) and apply. Raid Pearl Harbor (first proposed 1935). Once the decisive battle is fought, negotiate. The Japanese assumed the war would last no more than a year and did not understand that the US would persist through defeat.


Then the IJA (1937) loses control of the Manchukuo railroad troops and middle grade officers. Instant full scale war, and now Japan needs oil, tin and rubber to fight an expanded China Incident. So; (1938), a new southern resources area operation gets tacked on to the IJN defensive plan to support the IJA China war. Nobody with the slightest case of brains (army or navy) has any faith in the IJA annex plan tacked onto the navy plan. In the IJA, those guys are mostly upset that the Indonesia, Indochina, Philippines operations will swallow 14 divisions or about 1/4 of the Japanese army at the time. On the navy side, the treaty faction (Yamamoto) wants negotiation but has no faith in Matsuoko, the Japanese foreign minister, who Ribbentrop called “completely insane”. Now that is what leads to the ad hockery of Pearl Harbor (1941). Of course the British Raid on Taranto does not help matters. (Look up Sempill, real piece of work, there. And you can add the Russian spy Richard Sorge, and the Kuhn family, too.)

It's the shallowness that makes me cringe. And badly charted, like much of SWPA. Luzon/Foromsa Straight is almost as tight, but there's plenty of deep water to evade into, at need.

This is where I would think mine warfare would have helped.

I'd be inclined to mine Balintang & Bashi Channels (btw Luzon & Batan I & Batan I & Formosa, respectively), & leave the Formosa Strait (unobstructed by islands) for subs.

Presuming IJN can actually score, which takes more work than they think. Heavier frames will help.

Sound curtains, maneuver and decoys. Japanese sonar is defeatable.

Even without *Bold or autonomous decoys, yeah.

I hate to keep saying it, I do, but...Blanchard got a lucky break, when Lockwood redeployed. Ozawa came by at around 9000yd, which is about as close as any TF ever did (for any of the contacts of the war), & Blanchard closed to 5300 & fired, which was a pretty long shot on a fast target, & got one hit of six fired. You can't count on that amount of good fortune everywhere. Overall, if you want pursuit, you need higher surface speed than Gatos had.

Nautilus at Midway?

That sub was repeatedly within less than 4,000 meters of its three attacked targets (Kirishima, an unidentified cruiser (Tone?) and Kaga). Anyway, the subs need sustained underwater (snort) speed to use an interior arc advantage to close to a lead pursuit ambush position. USS Cavalla does a surface version of this kind of stalk.

And I'm beginning to think my recollection of the number of missed opportunities is mistaken. I can't help recall how frustrated the skippers sounded by TFs or fast heavies that were just out of reach. There may've been fewer missed than I recall.

I'm not saying it was hellish aboard a fleet boat, exactly...

Referring to the USS Nautilus citation? Cramming 94 men into a four bedroom house equivalent living space, sounds kind of like hell to me.

The Germans, Brits, & S-boat sailors were crammed tighter than that, with fewer showers & less fresh water...

That's not the half of it (tho you're completely right). Sub Force boats were expected to get firing solutions on passive sonar bearings, with gear not able to resolve them accurately (unlike PUFFS).

You cannot generate a firing solution on a SCALAR. You need complete time motion data from no less than three ranged points to calculate a vector.

I wouldn't have known what to call it, except "impossible"... Not far from getting a DF cut on a single bearing. Good luck with that.

Why didn’t the Japanese deploy their fleet after Cartwheel and before the Turkey Shoot?

I can't answer that...

Given. Nevertheless, Ozawa didn't use his BBs for anything...except, arguably, floating bait. (Am I overestimating the value of mining? Maybe...)

The reasons I gave; personnel shortages, equipment shortages, fuel (your reason), and logistics (damage had to be repaired in Japanese yards.). Some of the fleet actually went on various wild goose chases in late 43/44. But mostly they practiced fleet in being.

And I am overestimating effectiveness...& underestimating the complexities.

The FBI still screws up. Sorge, Kuhn and Sempill. Merest luck that the Dynavision car accident did not kill that British traitor. Make for an interesting PoD. The Japanese botched up the Akagi and Kaga and needed British help to sort it out. Sempill provided some of that help.

I won't defend that.

The other half is traffic analysis, which is to say, nobody was paying attention (AFAIK) to the number of messages out of the Japanese legation in Hawaii, which would've been a tipoff. No breach of diplomatic bag needed, just the same deal as intercepting & reading PURPLE.

That is on Charles Edison, Lewis Compton and Frank Knox.

Looks like the cellblock with Christie & Co on it is going to get crowded...

Pearl alone, IDK. Add Midway early, save doing it when the shooting starts, 'cause you're going to want it anyhow. And recall Pearl, like Midway, might just be a staging area, with boats held at San Francisco (or maybe also San Pedro), if needed.


Groton's program can be expanded, & will have to be anyhow, given we're adding yard capacity & more contracts.


The idea is for ComSubPac/CinCPac to have minimum 65 boats under command (that gives an OTL war duration); with 85 in service (about), that puts just under 30 at Pearl at once. (Yeah, 85 is about triple the assigned number in 12/41...but during the war, the sustained force was around 65, so about 20 in harbor at any one time...)


The treaty issue is moot, since Japan has abrogated as of 1936. (If we start in '32-3, maybe we're in trouble...but if we wait, no worries.)

This is simple enough to say, but it has to be financed, built, administered and hidden. And with all the espionage going on that nobody catches, it will be hard to hide.

IMO, the financing (Congressional approval) is the hard part: persuading Congress to build facilities on Midway (in the middle of nowhere) before war starts (or is clearly imminent) isn't going to be easy, & I'm not sure even a "strong navy keeps enemies away" argument will sell, not even after '36-7 & Japan abrogates. It's after that I'm seeing fewer (if not no) difficulties.

Hiding it, much the same applies. Developing shore facilities might be hidden behind Pan Am. Adding fuel storage, maybe just, too. If the U.S. waits for '37, & completes the build by 12/41, & IMO that's not unreasonable, espionage (or hiding) is moot.

Clutter and drag. The point is not to have clutter and drag, but just enough to sink a freighter by gunfire.

Sinking cripples isn't that easy, let alone intact merchants. Even 40mm is marginal. Beyond which, the 4" could work when the tubes are dry...or on targets not worth a torpedo, but too big for 40mm.

100 meters =328 feet

Yes, whence "conservative"... I'm thinking we might start the war with a test depth at least 400' (equal Tench).

For noise. AC motors are noisy as they spin up.

Suits.

Use belts. Rails mean drag.

If we were designing a USN equivalent of the Mark XXI, I'd be concerned more.

Sargo II is possible in 1938.

Use 'em!

A snorting sub puts 2x-4x the noise as a surfaced diesel boat into the water. BUT, Japanese sound gear is no better than American or British so a snorter can run at 9 knots semi-submerged fairly safely in WW II to within optical horizon limit of a convoy or fleet. An aircraft overhead would have a much smaller wake to notice A cruising surfaced sub crawled at 10 knots. This looks to be a good period reason to try for a snort besides the obvious reason of recharging batteries underwater without attracting undue attention from mister patrol plane.

Unless you're very close to a convoy, detection by escort sonar seems improbable, so...

The prospect of boats swamping (or choking) with waves over the snorkel head aren't attractive in this period, but if we say the boats run shallower (with more snorkel exposed), I could live with that.

The need for submerged (or "awash") operations IMO is overblown, against an enemy with demonstrably less good or complete air coverage than the WAllies. However, in the interest of reducing losses... Not to mention the cool factor.

It’s the difference between 7 knots underwater at snort and 9 knots. And flow NOISE.

I'm not seeing searches "awash" (which seems to be implied, here) being a really desirable option, when surfaced search can go from 10kn to 20 faster than surfacing & doing it.

Flow noise, against OTL hostile sonars, shouldn't be an issue. Blanketing the boat's own sonar might be, but at 7kt or 9, no.

The point is to blanket the coverage. US WW II sigint success is vastly exaggerated. The yakkity Japanese provided lots of missed opportunities and exploits.

And you're putting subs on another mission that takes them away from shooting merchants... Build a handful of specialist boats (per Nautilus, even build them that size).

That would actually be valid ASW training... The issue is making the DC effect credible.

Hard to simulate a depth charge.

It is. More to the point, tho, is over-estimating their lethality, & that colors how frightening DDs are. So test to destruction.

Escape and evasion systems and tactics may be more important. Hard to saimulate.

No argument. Lessons need to be learned, & these may only be learned the hard way.

Actually I’m thinking of the operations orders he screwed up then; his excessive drinking; his mistress, his failed marriage, the fact that he offended superiors and subordinates alike and the proven fact that he was dumber than dirt when it came to military operations. Later on he would screw up an airborne operation (OVERLORD) in Europe and generally duplicate his lousy Philippines performance in Europe due to his politicking, drunkeness and inability to play with others.

I have to confess ignorance.

On Schofield: looking at the WP bio page, he's retired in '33 & dead by '42. Do you propose keeping him on past retirement? And who replaces him (even presuming he doesn't get bounced 7/12)? Nimitz, again? Or someone else? (Butterfly: thi s may well mean Lockwood is detailed elsewhere, maybe as Edwards' CoS in Britain... Which puts Christie in line as ComSubPac when English dies, presuming he still does as OTL.)

Royal Ingersoll or James O. Richardson Brains or brawler. Take your pick. Both effective.

Ingersoll. He understood logistics, so selling him on better dispositions should be easier.

 

[Coulsdon Eagle]

AHC: Shorten the initial posts on shortening the Pacific War.

 

[phx1138]

AHC: Shorten the initial posts on shortening the Pacific War.

Is that all you've got?

The conversation had been ongoing awhile before I started this thread. What would be the point of breaking it into more posts?

 

[James Ricker]

Have Japan make their mistake with the Yamato earlier. Gas guzzling power plants on all major naval units.

 

[galveston bay]

There are entire timelines and many potential points of departure

3 of those timelines are ongoing now, while others (some really good ones) have been written for this board.

Nimitz is not the problem in the Pacific War

If you really want to shorten the Pacific War the Germans are the big problem anyway

 

[CV12Hornet]

No, the problem with shortening the Pacific War is the fleet train and warships that need to be built before the US Navy can properly move into the Western Pacific. Change all you like, but unless the addition of either is sped up somehow, then the US simply isn’t going west until late 1943. Period. The Germans did not require much of either, and thus were not much of a factor in lengthening the Pacific War.

(They did cause problems in the South Pacific, but that was a bit of a sideshow, strategically.)

(Incidentally, this is why the US could fight a two-front War so well; the two fronts had very different material requirements, though also a good number of similarities)

And as long as Japan continues to hold Truk, you can’t really shorten the Central Pacific campaign; the landings were determined by airfield placement, and can’t really be trimmed. Mine the harbors all you want, the US still needs to haul troops to a dozen heavily fortified islands.

 

[hzn5pk]

Speeding up the Pac war would mean to speed up Nimitz central thrust of Gilbert's to Marshalls to Marianas.

CV12Hornet is correct that the thrust to the Marshalls and Marianas while pounding/isolating the Carolines had to wait until the Essex's arrived in 43.

The Gilbert islands may be vulnerable enough in second half of 1942 and early 1943 to take

POD is USS Yorktown survives Midway by either:
part of the dive bombers from Hornet flight to no where turn coordinates and find IJN Hiryu before launch planes against Yorktown.
USS Saratoga is sped up a few days and joins Yorktown, finds Hiryu

Planes from Midway score hits against Hiryu in the morning.

Yorktown and Saratoga support mission in Gilberts, raid of Makin is first step to gain island and turn into fighter base.

Enterprise and Hornet support main action against Guadalcanal.

Japan reaction is to fortify Marshalls.

There is no Tarawa, Tarawa is easier than otl, us marines have baptism of fire in Marshalls.

Japan has to choose in 42 to defend Guadalcanal or Gilbert's. IJN chooses Guadalcanal and strengthen Marshalls leaving Gilbert's for USA to pick off.

Is this feasible?

Basically, would speed up drive to capture Marianas by three months. Bombing of Japan starts 3 months earlier as b29's come off the line.

Where would the men come from?
1st marine div is still tagged for guadal
Could the initial Raiders with follow on units from Hawaii be used for Gilbert's 42?

The gamble is to weaken Hawaii defences of army units and army air force to set up base in Gilbert's.

Are there enough men and planes in second half 42 and 43 to secure Gilbert's and defend Guadalcanal?

Marshalls are then second part of 43 and Marianas are first part of 44

 

[SpicyJuan]

A good way to shorten the Pacific War is to have Yamamoto's fears at Pearl Harbor come true, that is Midway comes 6 months early.

If you want a Japanese victory, have them go South in 1941 without PH, the US declares war along the way but suffers a major naval loss in the beginning of the war bringing about a quick peace like the Japs wanted all along.

 

[phx1138]

as long as Japan continues to hold Truk

How long is that possible, if subs are cutting off supply convoys & minefields are keeping them from arriving?

Mine the harbors all you want, the US still needs to haul troops to a dozen heavily fortified islands.

Defending with a starving garrison that's short of fuel, ammo, & spares is a lot harder...

 

[Insider]

That dispute out there you cited, was it some private message? I have so many questions about torpedoes and hydrophone trivia but browser makes "The requested conversation could not be found." answer
I do not want to clutter your thread any further.

How long is that possible, if subs are cutting off supply convoys & minefields are keeping them from arriving?

Defending with a starving garrison that's short of fuel, ammo, & spares is a lot harder...

Couldn't they simply sail around the minefield? Or blast through with a hulk filled with wood and empty barrels?

 

[High Plains Drifter]

I've always liked the idea of a combined TF 11 and TF 14 (Saratoga and Lexington) not giving up on the relief of Wake and getting into it successfully with the Hiryu and Soryu as a first step towards a shorter Pacific War.

 

[phx1138]

That dispute out there you cited, was it some private message?

Which one, exactly? It is from a PM.

I have so many questions about torpedoes and hydrophone trivia but browser makes "The requested conversation could not be found." answer
I do not want to clutter your thread any further.

The answer should be in the quotes (somewhere). If it's not, ask. That's why this isn't just a PM exchange any more.

Couldn't they simply sail around the minefield? Or blast through with a hulk filled with wood and empty barrels?

Around, no, not if the mining is done right. Just plow on through? That's what McPherson is saying Japan would do... I'm thinking IJN can't (won't) do that with the likes of DDs or heavies, & given that, needs to sweep--& IJN minesweeping is pretty awful...

Clearing a minefield by driving merchant hulls through it is really a non-starter, too, realistically. Japan can't spare any...

 

[tomo pauk]

Inspired, in part, by this thread, & by a resulting PM conversation between me & McPherson. The relevant parts of that conversation are copy-pasted below. Comment is invited. And if you've got ways Japan could respond, I'll happily hear them, too. (FYI, I'm quoting myself for clarity's sake. And to avoid deeply nesting the quotes & breaking up the original thoughts, I'm reproducing them as sent.)

Fromm what date the changes need to be made?

 

[phx1138]

I've always liked the idea of a combined TF 11 and TF 14 (Saratoga and Lexington) not giving up on the relief of Wake and getting into it successfully with the Hiryu and Soryu as a first step towards a shorter Pacific War.

Agreed. At a minimum, evac Wake...

Fromm what date the changes need to be made?

I hadn't thought about it... I posited FDR maybe agreeing to make changes as far back as '33. Maybe Japan's 1936 abrogation of the treaty makes more sense, tho, so let's agree that's our POD.

 

[tomo pauk]

...
I hadn't thought about it... I posited FDR maybe agreeing to make changes as far back as '33. Maybe Japan's 1936 abrogation of the treaty makes more sense, tho, so let's agree that's our POD.

1936 POD simply crushes Japan. I'll toss in some changes that other people might accept as plausible.
Have the Philliphine army commanded by someone competent. Let them have a number of tanks available, as well as some AT guns and mortars to keep the ground units maneuverable even on rough terrain. Take notes from the European war once it starts. Radars - more of them, train the operators sot they are proficient in their job. Recon aircraft also need radars. Trained radar operator is worth dozen of trained pilots. Provide competition to the Rhode Island-based torpedo facility, makign sure that torpedo models are fully tested and reliable, with emphasis on submarine torpedos. Reinforce Australia with LR bombers, so the captured oil fields can be bombed if that arose.
Twin engined bombers must include speed, range and firepower, future A-20 included. Have Marines procure A-20s, even the DB7 will make sense for the starters. Make a deal for Merlin license production in 1939. License production of the Mosquito? Train the bombers' crews in low altitude high speed bombing of ships. Make a fighter around a big radial earlier, so at least 1000 of such are produced before 1942, for all three 'combat' services. With start of war, push for fighter-bombers with that powerplant. Fighters are nothing without range, so plan accordingly to have them outfitted with drop tanks. Once P-51 is there, embrace it fully (= 3 factories at least within a year), both fighter and recon variants are needed. Flight refueling?
The 1.1in is neither fish nor fowl on a big ship, better have the 37mm AA adopted by Navy before 40mm Bofors is ready. Have the AA crews training to include both surface and air targets.

 

[phx1138]

1936 POD simply crushes Japan.

Agreed. Anybody wants to give them a (credible) break to counter, feel free.

Also agree with most of the rest. Except:

Recon aircraft also need radars.

AFAIK, the U.S. had no a/c-capable radar (akin ASV.II) yet, even one suited for PBYs or B-17s.

Provide competition to the Rhode Island-based torpedo facility, makign sure that torpedo models are fully tested and reliable, with emphasis on submarine torpedos.

Absolutely. As noted a number of times upthread, a new design (all-electric, not running on a sine wave, & produced in large numbers) should've been a high priority. And all torpedoes should've been considered: DDs used them, & an air-launched version that actually worked would've made PTs much more effective.

Reinforce Australia with LR bombers, so the captured oil fields can be bombed if that arose.

That, unfortunately, conflicts with British needs for ASW patrol B-24s.... Unless we can increase production of B-17s or B-24s before the Japanese attack...? Which would probably need an end to the Neutrality Act(s) (& that seems unlikely).

License production of the Mosquito?

When it flies, maybe--but I'm a bit dubious the U.S. forces would fly it.

Make a fighter around a big radial earlier, so at least 1000 of such are produced before 1942, for all three 'combat' services.

The F4U was in the pipeline, & I'm not sure the R2800 was ready sooner; AFAIK, there wasn't another "early" design suitable. Merely re-engining a P-36 on F4F with the R2800 seems like a non-starter. Can the P-43/P-44 be accelerated?

Once P-51 is there, embrace it fully (= 3 factories at least within a year)

I'm going to disagree, now, & with the single-engine concept generally; PTO has loooong flying distances, & a twin is a good idea. I'd say, don't allow the cross-country "stunt" flight that led to the wreck of the only prototype P-38. That gets it in service about 2yr sooner--in time for Pearl Harbor. Then, build the daylights out of it, including licence deals with NAA, Convair, Bell (instead of the P-63), & Northrop (instead of the P-61).

The 1.1in is neither fish nor fowl on a big ship, better have the 37mm AA adopted by Navy before 40mm Bofors is ready. Have the AA crews training to include both surface and air targets.

Quibble: I'd wait on the Bofors.

 

[Insider]

McPherson said: ↑
SONAR. The Germans called their version GHG. What it was as best described is a bundle of hydrophones in a cylindrical sheave cluster sort of like a Roman fasces arrangement. A switching commutator; like in a telephone exchange, would rotate through the bundle sending signals from each hydrophone to a signal processor that in analog fashion would discriminate for the strongest signal. This was automated, and did not require manual sweep through, and was far more sensitive than British ASDIC or US WFA. It did not require trained ears either. What it did in WW II was allow Germans to detect mechanicals at up to 50 or sometimes 100 kilometers away in a U-boat. Surface ships with GHG had about half that interval. The Germans did not know why, and they certainly misapplied the advantage because they did not train human ears the right way to be plugged into the circuit to understand what they heard, and how to apply it in sprint and drift interferometry to close a target. (USN 1950s) but it was there in WW II as a capability to signal chase a convoy, the U-boat being underwater to do it. We'll come back to that one.

If it was automated and far more sensitive than human ears, then why not try visual display? I realise that hydrophone gives you surprisingly a lot of pieces of data, namely where is the source of noise (just azimuth, not range), and more or less what is it. The operator could discern whatever it is a whale, a diesel engined vessel - possibly sub, a fast steamer like warship or ocean liner, a slow going merchant, or this shrimp that stuns its prey with supercavitation. You can also guesstimate whatever object is closing or running away, and which way it goes compared to you (does azimuth changes to left or to right?) The automatic piece would rob you from everything but the azimuth, except unless you can process the signal digitally, which is way too advanced for WWII, and most likely for Cold War as well. But, what keeps you from having both, super sensitive array to check where your hydrophone operator should listen for things, AND standard issue one to actually listen.

Actually. Is there anything that stops from using towed hydrophone arrays in WWII? That could be very useful for both subs and the ASW...

German torpedoes were designed to kill freighters. American torpedoes were designed to kill crippled warships. Hmm. So how come were both families of weapons, equipped with faulty magnetic influence contact exploders, puny warheads, botched steered gyro auto-pilots, too slow and too short ranged to do their respective jobs? Why was the G7a and the Mark 14 designed the similar awful ways they were?
It comes down to that Swiss watch gadgeteer mentality in design philosophy each employed. A wet-heater is a precision instrument. It really is handcrafted together from about 4000 parts. An automobile is simple by comparison to a Mark 14. Civil service types assembled these weapons. A bunch of gadgeteers^1 designed the weapons.

^1a Keel breaking a ship means a smaller warhead. The torpedo can run under the ship and blow it UP like a mine.
^1b Depth setting and exact aim is not as crucial. A torpedo will just have to be good enough to pass under the ship within ten meters depth anywhere along the hull length to do its job. It does not need a rework of 1900 era guidance methods. Goody for us. Saves money.
^1c Existing wetheater designs do not have to be completely reworked with keel breaking ikn mind. Just updated with that new exploder initiator gizmo. Cheap solution. Designing an entirely new big fast torpedo is very very expensive. The Gerrman and American gadgeteers congratulate themselves on being clever.

Can you see where it went wrong?
PHX1138 said:
Yeah, somebody forgot watchmakers weren't going to be assembling them. Doctrine plays a role, too: if you don't expect to fire lots of them, there's no need for them to be able to be made in large numbers, either by design or by factory capacity...

I cannot, which bothers me to some extent. I agree with the first part, I read Buchenheim's Das Boot, I know that torpedoes are more like automated minisubs, rather than dumb projectiles. While I know about the crisis with US torpedoes, and know that navy responded to claims these torps do not work as intended, first with saying that crews do not know how to use and take care of them, and secondly by putting blame on individual mechanics who build them. But, wasn't it so that all the flaws that plagued the US torpedoes were in design? Mechanics in factory weren't incompetent, because they build machines according to bad plans... It is like blaming robots form Fiat assembly line, that the Multipla doesn't look like a car. Calling them semiskilled workforce as one of you does later seems to be buying into Navy's smokescreen.
Or am I missing something here?

And lastly about running "unsinkable"* ship through minefield. Germans did it to punch through minefields Brits sow around their U-boat bases, British did it to punch through the minefields lied by Germans, because they didn't have time to clear them, harbours had to work or the GB would starve. These ships were equipped with trawling equipment to try to make the mines explode ahead of them, were filled with all sorts of flotation aids but, yes, they were very dangerous posts, *and yes they werent really unsinkable. Why Japanese couldn't use them?

 

[phx1138]

But, wasn't it so that all the flaws that plagued the US torpedoes were in design?

You're entirely right. I was completely wrong & should know better.

hydrophone gives you surprisingly a lot of pieces of data

It does indeed.

Actually. Is there anything that stops from using towed hydrophone arrays in WWII? That could be very useful for both subs and the ASW...

I doubt it it occurred to anybody (not AFAIK, anyhow). Why it did postwar, IDK...especially since nukes are noisier.

And lastly about running "unsinkable"* ship through minefield. Germans did it to punch through minefields Brits sow around their U-boat bases, British did it to punch through the minefields lied by Germans, because they didn't have time to clear them, harbours had to work or the GB would starve. These ships were equipped with trawling equipment to try to make the mines explode ahead of them, were filled with all sorts of flotation aids but, yes, they were very dangerous posts, *and yes they werent really unsinkable. Why Japanese couldn't use them?

It may be Japan would do exactly that, & mining wouldn't be as successful as I think. Did she ever do it OTL, when the U.S. heavily mined her coast? I've never heard it. (That said, I was unaware the Brits & Germans did it, either...)