← back
Silent Victory Submarine Warfare in WWII poster

Silent Victory Submarine Warfare in WWII

2010 ·

This World War II documentary rests on an unusual thesis: it argues that, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the actions precipitated by the U.S.A.F. that truly helped turn the tide were perpetrated not by the widely-ballyhooed U.S.N. aviators or aircraft carriers, but by the American submarines - silent warriors beneath the deceptively placid ocean surface. The subs, after all, were responsible for gravely wounding Japan's industry, all but destroying the Japanese merchant fleet, and therefore preventing reinforcement of Japanese military garrisons. In relaying this story, the program draws on a series of interviews with military veterans, and endless archival footage of naval battles that chronologically tells the gripping story of the Pacific Front of the war.

2010

A television-style archival documentary built on a genuinely revisionist thesis: that the Pacific War was strangled not by the celebrated carrier task forces but by the American submarine service, the 'silent service' that operated beneath both the ocean and the headlines. The historical record backs the provocation. Submariners made up less than two percent of U.S. Navy personnel yet accounted for the majority of Japanese merchant tonnage sent to the bottom, severing the shipping lanes that fed an island empire its oil, rice, and steel — a blockade in all but name. The story has its scandal, too: for nearly two years American boats went to war with the defective Mark 14 torpedo, whose failures the Navy's bureaucracy blamed on its own crews before conceding the weapon was broken. The title nods to Clay Blair Jr.'s landmark 1975 history of the campaign, the standard account of a victory purchased at terrible cost — the submarine force suffered the highest casualty rate of any branch of the American armed services. The film assembles its case plainly, from period footage; the argument supplies the drama.

Lines of influence