Chapomatic

Two months ago John helped me push some ideas into the head of a three star involving Afghanistan. I don’t know if the ideas stuck, but I know those ideas were (a) good and (b) informed from conditions on the ground. So I owe him one here for his “Paging All Submariners” request and have some ideas below. Feel free to add on. The list below will be addled by codiene; the surgery went well, thanks…

1. The standard narrative: Gasoline engines blew up; diesel engines sucked half the time; we lost some boats and so did other countries for reasons we still compensate for today even if we forget the reasons why we learned them; nobody named names at the Bureau of Ordnance who screwed up the Mk 14 torpedo; we were completely wrong about how to use subs; the Germans had a better idea but milch cows killed them later.
2. The Naval Submarine League has a quarterly journal which over the years has put out history and context you won’t find anywhere else, ever. It’s good to dig through.
3. Cmdr Richard Compton-Hall was a frequent contributor to NSL Journal, and his work on special operations forces and subs was revelatory to me. Most of that was improvised during the war, although there’s a little interwar work to look into. In that vein Paul and Kemp’s Underwater Warriors was also very good, and the great Crabb has a popular biography by Pugh called Frogman…but I digress.
4. The Nautilus sub museum in Groton has an excellent library of submarine history. Check that bibliography, too; it’s rather large.
5. Stephen Peter Rosen’s Winning the Next War has a piece on subs. It’s an overview but a good start.
6. Gugliotta’s Pigboat 39 describes what it was like actually on the boat in the Pacific before the war and an entertaining memoir that doesn’t end so well–there was a war on.
7. Nimitz and Momsen are names you should know between the wars as well as during the war: Nimitz for diesel engine development, and Momsen for submarine rescue.
8. The historians at the Naval Historical Center at the Navy Yard in DC are wonderful people. You just missed their annual symposium at the Navy Memorial, but they’ve got unique resources and are more than willing to help. Dr. Gary Weir, for instance, wrote a book called Building American Submarines, 1914-1940.
9. There are two submarine veteran’s organizations, both of which are trying to merge together. They have first hand history you can’t get anywhere else–particularly since the written history of the subs tends to hide the achievements of the enlisted because the commanding officers wrote the patrol reports the standard histories copy. You need to know about Chief Charles Spritz, an extremely unlikeable leader who nonetheless made the submarine force work. One short recollection is here.
10. Foreign submarine journals like Sharkhunters are also good gouge.
11. John Alden and Norman Friedman both have books on interwar sub development that I haven’t read, but they’re in that bibliography I mentioned above.
12. Professors Barry Posen and Harvey Sapolsky at MIT and James FitzSimonds at the Naval War College understand change in organizations, particularly with respect to military change. They’ve got good work out there.