Then, Key West was the hub of ASW to a greater extent than it is today. Looking back to the decade of ASW research and development that spanned the last half of the 1940s to the mid-1950s, those years have the nostalgic aura of a simpler age. And ever since, for two decades, it has had a priority, which, though occasionally dethroned, in theory has never strayed very far from pre-eminence. Accordingly, soon after the war ended, ASW was designated the number one item of urgency in the U. The success of this campaign, incidentally, provides a useful corrective to the notion that the submarine always loses.ĭespite victory in the Atlantic, the advent of the snorkel and the medium-speed, deep-diving submarine-typified by the German Type-XXI boat, which came too late on the scene to affect the course of the war-raised serious new ASW problems for which no solutions were imminent. In the Pacific, on the other hand, where the conditions responsible for the submarine’s defeat did not prevail, the American submarine campaign achieved a strangulating blockade. Increasingly it was forced to hide, relying more and more heavily upon the resource of submergence, and in the crucial North Atlantic areas its offensive capability was reduced to the vanishing point. A vast search and surveillance effort relentlessly stripped away the freedom and mobility of surface operations essential to its success. It follows, as a corollary-and a paradoxical one-that the story of the U-boat’s defeat was the creation by the Allies of an ocean environment where the submarine could not operate sufficiently exposed above the surface. Yet, limited as this capability was, with submerged speeds slow and their duration rigidly bound by curves of battery exhaustion, the German U-boat, exploiting the precious advantage conferred, was almost able to cut the Allied sea lanes. Its submerged capability was a hoarded asset, reserved for vital encounters, to achieve success in attack or to make escape possible. It spent the majority of its time on the surface, transited on the surface and, whenever it could, attacked on the surface. The submarine of that war was in reality a surface ship. To appreciate the value of this single fact, consider the submarine’s modus operandi in World War II. The unique attribute of the submarine, from which all its other virtues flow, is simply its ability to hide in the sea. The submarine is a heavyweight, but it has a glass jaw. The submarine possesses none that cannot be carried in other hulls. What is it, then, that defines the submarine? It is not speed. Elementary as it is, it must be isolated in order to provide a basis by which the import of the nuclear submarine can be grasped. It is necessary, at the outset, to establish the fundamental characteristic of the submarine. From examination of the essential nature of submarine warfare, the elements of this challenge and their meaning to the United States will be deduced. It is the intent of this essay to develop the thesis that the nuclear submarine is a challenge far more profound than was hurled at the navies of the world that September day in 1914. Then, on 22 September 1914, a U-boat sank three British cruisers in a single hour, and a new dimension was added to naval warfare. The modern submarine had to await the age of steel and the engine of Otto Diesel before it could be born. But, until the present century, the history of submarine warfare is only a succession of fascinating episodes, wrought by a handful of daring men venturing forth in strange contraptions more dangerous to themselves than to their adversaries. The idea of the submarine perhaps entered the mind of man not long after he first looked at the sea.
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