I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.
— Stephen Covey
I was watching this Youtube video about two famous WW2 submarine skippers, Morton and O'Kane, and I started to wonder just how old these skippers were during WW2.
Hollywood movies usually show WW2 sub skippers as men in their late 40s or 50s (e.g. Operation Pacific or Run Silent Run Deep). I found a list of the top scoring US submarine skippers of WW2 and was able to figure out their birthdays. Given their birthdays, I determined that they had an average age of 32 years on December 7th, 1941. The following table summarizes their ages and their post-war "ships sunk" scoring. When you think about the responsibility they had, these men were very young.
I based my original post on a web version of the JANAC naval records. I have now regenerated the data from the raw JANAC records. I did not see any significant changes. Yes, some of the numbers were rounded in the old data, but the rounding was accurate. I specifically checked Dornin's data using multiple sources – the table is accurate. I should mention that two sets of "books" were kept: (1) wartime records, and (2) JANAC, which used records from the Japanese. In most cases, the JANAC records show less tonnage than the wartime records. The one major exception is the record of Archerfish.
While I was doing post maintenance, I made a few other changes:
Used the skipper's full legal name (middle name abbreviated). This eliminated things like "Mush" in Morton's name.
Fixed a spelling error in Bruton's name that exists all over the web – it is usually misspelled as Brunton.
Used a lighter color format that I have been experimenting with.
Clay Blair's "Silent Victory" discusses this in some depth. According to him, the Navy quickly learned that "older" -- think mid-to-late 30s -- COs were much more tentative in their attacks.
This was attributed to two factors; one that their training had been during peace time when the Navy's concept of operations for submarines was more of a scouting mission for the surface fleet. Submarines would locate the enemy and the big battleships would come in for the kill
The second factor was age itself. Older officers tended to be more safety oriented whereas young COs still retained much of the "invulnerability" that teenage males tend to exhibit. Not that the older officers were cowards, but they recognized that they, and the submarine, could be destroyed and therefore weighed the risks differently.
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I think the tonnage is off. Dornin had a lot more.
Hi William,
I based my original post on a web version of the JANAC naval records. I have now regenerated the data from the raw JANAC records. I did not see any significant changes. Yes, some of the numbers were rounded in the old data, but the rounding was accurate. I specifically checked Dornin's data using multiple sources – the table is accurate. I should mention that two sets of "books" were kept: (1) wartime records, and (2) JANAC, which used records from the Japanese. In most cases, the JANAC records show less tonnage than the wartime records. The one major exception is the record of Archerfish.
While I was doing post maintenance, I made a few other changes:
Thanks for the careful reading.
mark
Clay Blair's "Silent Victory" discusses this in some depth. According to him, the Navy quickly learned that "older" -- think mid-to-late 30s -- COs were much more tentative in their attacks.
This was attributed to two factors; one that their training had been during peace time when the Navy's concept of operations for submarines was more of a scouting mission for the surface fleet. Submarines would locate the enemy and the big battleships would come in for the kill
The second factor was age itself. Older officers tended to be more safety oriented whereas young COs still retained much of the "invulnerability" that teenage males tend to exhibit. Not that the older officers were cowards, but they recognized that they, and the submarine, could be destroyed and therefore weighed the risks differently.