The war below : the story of three submarines that battled Japan /

Chronicles of WWII's submarine war remain popular, because while most combatants are cogs in gigantic military machines, a submarine lends itself to individuation. It often operated alone, and its combat success depended crucially on its commander's risk-taking aggressiveness. Relying on the centrality of the commander, Scott recounts the Pacific war patrols of three U.S. submarines, of which two today are on display, the Drum in Mobile, Alabama, and the Silversides in Muskegon, Michigan. The third, the Tang, sank in battle. Providing character sketches of the boats' commanders that note leadership style and pugnacity, Scott puts each on the periscope and describes the ensuing patrol. About 25 such episodes make up the narrative, which Scott expresses in dialogue akin to Edward Beach's Run Silent, Run Deep (1955; movie, 1958) and fills with the navigational detail of hunting Japanese ships, firing torpedoes, and enduring depth-charge attacks. Though focusing on commanders, Scott expands to describe crew members' roles, which further evokes the claustrophobic, dangerous world of the WWII sub. Scott (The Attack on the Liberty, 2009) satisfies the naval-history readership.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist

After the attacks on Pearl Harbor, US Admiral Charles Lockwood (commander of the Pacific submarine fleet during WWII) declared that since all Japanese merchantmen in the Pacific were indirectly aiding their native country in its war effort, they were henceforth to be considered legitimate enemy targets. What followed was unrestricted submarine warfare on boats flying the circle of the sun. Scott (The Attack on the Liberty), a journalist turned naval historian, combines patrol reports and extensive interviews with former submariners to reconstruct the achievements of three of the most successful U.S. submarines: Silversides, Drum, and Tang. Submarines were primarily manned by young and hastily trained crews, and missions were fraught with challenges, from handling defective torpedoes to ad hoc appendectomies, not to mention the sheer danger of underwater battle-over the course of the war, nearly 3,500 American submariners were killed. But their efforts were not for naught: as the U.S. Strategic Bomb Survey had it, "the war against shipping... was perhaps the most decisive single factor in the collapse of the Japanese economy." Scott presents the submariners aboard his chosen trio of ships as a team, brought together to do a high-risk job that "pushed boat[s] and men to the limit," and their story is an exciting one. 8-page b&w insert. Agent: Wendy Strothman, the Strothman Agency LLC. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Using voluminous official records plus interviews and an amazing number of unpublished diaries and letters, former Charleston Post and Courier investigative reporter Scott (The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel's Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship, 2009) delivers a gripping, almost day-by-day account of the actions of three submarines, Silversides, Tang and Drum, from Pearl Harbor to VE Day. Nazi U-boats get the publicity, but America's submarines were more effective, sinking so many Japanese vessels that by the end of World War II, civilians were starving and factories barely functioning. The author mixes biographies of the men who fought in the subs, technical details of sub warfare and the patrols themselves. Moving back and forth among the three boats, he describes weeks of boredom and searching, days of maneuvering for attacks, the devastation when they were successful, the frustration when they weren't and the anxiety of enduring depth-charge attacks while trapped deep beneath the sea. All this havoc on Japanese shipping came at a price; American submarines suffered 20 percent losses, the highest of any Navy service. That included the Tang, sunk, ironically, by its own malfunctioning torpedo, killing most of its crew. The nine survivors emerged as malnourished skeletons after a year of unspeakable conditions in Japanese prisons. Scott pauses regularly to explain the progress of the Pacific war but makes no attempt to write a general history of the submarine campaign; for that, read Clay Blair's Silent Victory (1975). Inevitably, details of several dozen submarine patrols become increasingly familiar. Military buffs will lap it up, but general readers may find it difficult to resist the tension, drama and fireworks of this underappreciated but dazzlingly destructive American weapon of WWII.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.