Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan

In preparing to write this book, Clay Blair, Jr. combed hundreds of thousands of pages of recently declassified documents and personal letters. In individual interviews he listened to scores of skippers, staff officers, and codebreakers speaking freely. He researched in depth the development of submarine and torpedo from prewar days down to the present time. The result is a revealing and immensely exciting book that sets the submarine war within the framework of history and the overall war in the Pacific.

Silent Victorytakes you into the submarine war at all levels—the highest strategy sessions in Washington, the terrifying moments in a submarine trapped on the bottom for hours as depth charges explode around it, the zany efforts of a torpedo crew coaxing an emaciated chicken to lay an egg. It tells of the jealous infighting of admirals vying for power . . . of "overcautious" skippers, trained in peacetime and ill suited for war, and the mutinies they provoked . . . of the shocking torpedo scandal and the toll it took . . . of the later breed of younger skippers whose daring was so effective against Japanese shipping that the war, as Blair argues, could have ended months earlier, saving thousands of lives.

The complete saga that led to victory is here supplemented by * 37 specially drawn maps showing submarine activity in the context of every important naval engagement in the Pacific * 32 pages of photographs * 12 appendixes, including a calendar of all submarine war patrols * an index of over 2,000 entries. A work of great scholarship and scope, Silent Victoryis a timeless contribution to the history of World War II.