Book Review: The Navy Times Book of Submarines

[Subnuts]

I wrote this review for Epinions.com last night. Epinions is a "pay-per-hit" website, so I'll be nice and post the review here verbatim. Or if you feel like it, you can read it "in the raw" here: http://www.epinions.com/content_215069986436

Pros
One great book on submarine developments up to 1939...

Cons
...And one relentlessly mediocre book on the proceeding years.

The Bottom Line
The first two-thirds of this book is excellent. The rest is wasted potential. Buy it if you have to own every submarine book ever written.

Full Review

Let me begin this review with a simple question: "Is it really possible to condense the 450-year history of a revolutionary naval vessel into a layman-accessible "popular" history?" In his classic Silent Victory Clay Blair spends the better part of 1,000 pages analyzing the American pacific submarine campaign of World War II. Obviously, if one was to write a book of that scope covering the entire history of the submarine, it could stretch on for 50,000 pages.

Can Brayton Harris do this story justice in 400 pages? Well… yes and no. Up to 1939, smooth sailing. With World War II and the Nuclear Age, this book stumbles and eventually falls on it’s face.

Format
The 2001 Berkeley Press edition of The Navy Times Book of Submarines is a 415 page paperback book with 32 pages of black and white photographs. It is divided into 32 chapters, and has a bibliography plus a list of illustrations.

What I Liked
While many books place the "birth" of the submarine in 1863 with the Confederate Hunley, or in 1898 with the Holland VI, Harris sets his sights much earlier. The narrative opens in 1580, when William Bourne proposed a "boate that may goe under the water unto the bottome, and so to come up again at your pleasure." It continues on to describe some of the earlier "submersible" boats and their eccentric designers, such as Cornelius Drebbel, Robert Fulton, and David Bushnell.

The Hunley is first referenced on Page 83. Before that are a substantial number of interesting and little-known tidbits on early submarine development. One can’t help but shake their head at the deathtraps presented within. Most illuminating of all are a number of pages describing "forgotten" French and Russian submersibles, plus a fairly in-depth look at Samuel Colt’s position in the development of underwater mines.

The central figure throughout much of the early chapters in Irish-revolutionary-come-engineer John Philip Holland. Harris traces Holland’s 25-year struggle to design a workable submarine for the United States Navy. Laughable as it seems today, Holland VI sparked a naval revolution, and by 1914 16 navies operated submarines.

The submarine was (and to a lesser extant, still is) regarded as a sneaky, treacherous weapon by many. In an oft-quoted speech, British Admiral AK Wilson regarded them as "underhand, unfair, and damned UnEnglish." Harris overviews some of the political and philosophical issues of submarine warfare, blockade, and unrestricted attacks against merchant ships, without taking a stance himself.

While most submarine histories focus of World War II, the chapters regarding World War I are extremely well done, and provide an excellent capsule history of the submarine war. A miniature epic in 70 pages, this section covers everything from British operations in the Mediterranean to the political repercussions of unrestricted warfare.

What I Didn’t Like
Maybe I should restrain from expanding on my thoughts and simply say "everything after World War I." It’s almost as if a second book was tacked on at the end.

Maybe I’ve become jaded, or maybe I’ve become overexposed. But I’ve become so tired of World War II, that unless the historian brings some new information, or a groundbreaking hypothesis of some sort to the table, it isn’t worth my time. And frankly, Mr. Harris has little or nothing particularly startling to say about the submarine campaigns of 1939-1945.

I’m not completely brushing aside WWII’s legitimacy as a topic for historical discussion. As you know from my previous reviews, I have an immense fascination in that conflict. However, there’s only so many times I can read about U-47’s attack on Scapa Flow before I become apathetic.

Harris writes the first 2/3rds of this book in a leisurely, but engaging manner, populating the narrative with eccentric heroes. His description of the complex technological thrust-counterthrust between Axis and Allies comes across as stilted and workmanlike. Surprisingly, he provides a good overview of Japanese submarine operations (usually overlooked) while marginalizing the impact of American submarines in the Pacific.

Worst of all is the extremely scattershot coverage (only 43 pages) the post-war period receives. Harris devotes an unusually large portion of 43 pages describing a number of unbuilt or experimental boats using closed-cycle, or air-independent propulsion systems. Another 10 pages are spent discussing Hyman Rickover’s career and struggles with the Navy and Atomic Energy Commission. Subtract those two elements, and only 20 pages are devoted to the entire post-war history of submarine development. A major disappointment in that regard.

In Conclusion
It’s hard to say whether this book was a true disappointment for me. I enjoyed it quite immensely up to page 272 - the outbreak of World War II. After that, it became a bit of a slog to finish; by the end, deja vu was setting in.

If you have an interest in naval history or submarines, I give this one a cautious recommendation. As a popular history of the submarine up to 1918, it is a fine work. Those looking for a more in-depth study are advised to look elsewhere, and trust me, there are hundreds of books on the subject.

[Kapitan]

does it have anything on the british K class WW1 submarines ?

more specificaly anything on HMS K13 of the fore mentioned class