The Battlefield Below --- The German U-boat force maintained a fearsome reputation. American submariners fought more effectively.

“Wolfpack

 

By Roger Moorhouse

 

Basic, 480 pages, $35

 

Running Deep

 

By Tom Clavin

 

St. Martin's, 352 pages, $30

 

Winston Churchill once said that nothing frightened him more during World War II than the German submarines stalking the North Atlantic, menacing Allied convoys and sinking capital ships. According to Roger Moorhouse, the author of "Wolfpack: Inside Hitler's U-Boat War," however, these vessels don't deserve the ferocious reputation afforded them by history and cinema.

 

"The reality was much less threatening," Mr. Moorhouse writes. "When there was a genuine opportunity to disrupt Atlantic supply lines, prior to the U.S. entry into the war, in 1941, Germany's U-boat force lacked the numbers to successfully press its advantage. And by the time that it had the numbers, the industrial and military might of the United States meant that the U-boat's moment had already passed."

 

Indeed, in early September 1939, shortly after Hitler invaded Poland, the mood among U-boaters was not that of wolves but of sheep being led to the slaughter. "We have the feeling of being poorly off," Herbert Schultze, the commander of U-48, wrote in his war diary. "The phrase 'Atlantic forces' once sounded powerful, but what we have is not enough to pluck more than ten to twenty hairs from the fur of the British lion."

 

Mr. Moorhouse, whose books include "Berlin at War" (2010) and "Poland 1939" (2020), details the early successes of the U-boat force, which, during the first four months of the war, sank "more than 550,000 tons of shipping -- 155 vessels in total, the vast majority of them merchantmen." For the most part, however, "Wolfpack" chronicles the misery, failure and deaths of U-boat crews.

 

On Oct. 8, 1939, U-12 became the first U-boat to be sunk with no survivors, striking one of the 3,000 mines, laid by the British and French, that made the English Channel "impassable to enemy shipping." U-boats, Mr. Moorhouse tells us, were also plagued by malfunctioning torpedoes, mechanical failures and, eventually, the incessant -- and often successful -- depth-charge attacks of Allied warships.

 

Life aboard a German submarine was as miserable as we've ever imagined. "In the 'morning' the air is thick; it hangs in a clammy, damp mass that you can all but grasp with your hands. It flows like melted gelatine over everybody and everything. The walls sweat and run with water. Everything is clammy and damp. Silver pearls glisten on the men's foreheads and their eyes are sunken deep in their pale faces, framed in a stubble of beard. Everyone is so exhausted."

 

The narrow Straits of Gibraltar was particularly harrowing for U-boat captains and crews. "U-95 was sunk by a Dutch submarine off the Spanish coast after failing to identify the threat, her crew fretting among themselves -- 'What sort of a boat was she? Italian? German?' -- before finally being torpedoed. U-557 was rammed in error by the Italian torpedo boat Orione, west of Crete, and was sunk with all hands." Seven U-boats, about 25% of the Mediterranean force, we are told, were sunk in the winter of 1941-42.

 

If the story of Germany's U-boats was one mostly of failure, the U.S. Navy's submarine force, the Silent Service, was much more. In "Running Deep: Bravery, Survival and the True Story of the Deadliest Submarine in World War II," Tom Clavin argues that shortly after Pearl Harbor the U.S. submarine fleet was often the only offensive weapon available to strike Japanese shipping and other war assets. "Overall, the Pacific Submarine Force had launched 1,682 patrols," Mr. Clavin writes, "and in less than four years of attacks five million tons of Japanese shipping had been sunk and six hundred thousand tons of warships had been sent to the bottom, including eight aircraft carriers."

 

It came at a high price. "Fifty-two submarines had gone on eternal patrol and with them went 3,505 men, a loss six times higher than for surface ships."

 

In telling this tale of overwhelming success, Mr. Clavin follows the exploits of Dick O'Kane, a graduate of Annapolis who would go on to become "arguably the most highly decorated U.S. Navy officer of World War II, an undersea version of the Army's Audie Murphy."

 

O'Kane's underwater adventures began as the executive officer aboard USS Wahoo, alongside its commanding officer, Dudley Morton, an aggressive wartime submarine commander. "Here, we were to realize before the Wahoo's third patrol ended, was a man whose supreme joy was to literally seek out and destroy the enemy," George Grider, Wahoo's engineering officer, wrote of Morton in his wartime diary.

 

In 1943, the Wahoo was sent to the Yellow Sea. "Not only had this patrol set a new record for ships sunk, but it had paralyzed Japanese shipping" in the area, Mr. Clavin writes. The patrol was so successful that the Japanese thought the U.S. Navy had adopted the German wolfpack strategy of hunting surface ships in groups. In reality, it was only the Wahoo.

 

These wartime patrols were not without challenges similar to those of the Germans in the Atlantic. "Morton launched his last two torpedoes," Mr. Clavin writes of a 1943 encounter off the Kuril Islands, somewhere between Russia and Japan. "Nothing happened with the first one. With the second, it struck under the bridge of the second enemy ship, but instead of an explosion the sound man picked up only a dull thud -- another dud."

 

In January 1944, O'Kane was awarded his first command, USS Tang. Five months later, during a patrol off Sasebo, Japan, the Tang came upon a convoy of as many as 18 ships. In one attack, the Tang fired six torpedoes and sank four Japanese ships, totaling more than 16,000 tons.

 

O'Kane's leadership became even more important when the Tang was sunk and he and his men were sent to Ofuna, one of the most brutal Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. There, the American officers and crew were regularly beaten, tortured and denied any visits by the Red Cross. After a particularly vicious beating, "the officers were held upright so they could be beaten some more."

 

In combat, O'Kane was all business. But, as Mr. Clavin tells us, quoting William Tuohy (the author of "The Bravest Man"), once in captivity, O'Kane "developed more compassion for his crew and his fellow prisoners. He behaved like a benign father figure to them all."

 

After he was freed, Dick O'Kane became one of the seven World War II submariners awarded the Medal of Honor.

 

---

 

Mr. Yost writes about military history for the Journal.” [1]

 

1. REVIEW --- Books: The Battlefield Below --- The German U-boat force maintained a fearsome reputation. American submariners fought more effectively. Yost, Mark.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 08 Nov 2025: C7.