In World War 2, how did American submarines perform so well despite their often problematic equipment?

Posted 23Sep2017.

There are a lot of good answers to this question below. I actually chose this topic for my thesis, and poured through a lot of primary and secondary sources, but the short answer is doctrine and leadership.

Doctrine was an aspect of success due to the shift from the pre-war ideas that American submarines were to be used as scouting elements to commerce raiders. In going through the documents associated with the Fleet Problems of the 1930s, the theoretical employment of submarines as vanguards of the surface fleets and the utter nonsense of their incorporation in War Plan Orange (managing sorties of naval assets to reinforce the Philippines from the U.S. just seems incomprehensibly silly). Our doctrine was shaped by the lessons learned from the study of German submarines and tactics from the First World War, and the resistance to completely abandon submarine warfare as what was considered at the time to be a “dishonorable” means to wage war eventually was shelved for more effective attitudes and actions.

Leadership paired nicely with the doctrinal shift and overcame the “problematic equipment” that comprised the plethora of issues surrounding the Mark 14 torpedoes and political infighting within the Navy – specifically, the operational submarine fleet and the Bureau of Ordnance. Relatively decentralized control of the deployed submarines prevented a repeat of the contemporary mistakes which proved to be the downfall of the German U-Boat fleet in the Atlantic, and while many skippers were relieved of command due to lack of aggressiveness or poor performance (later attributed to the dismal defects of the Mark 14’s in some cases), the skippers who rose through the ranks in the years before the war proved to be quite capable in managing the challenges, limitations, and changes the submarine fleet was experiencing during the first half of the war.

Our industrial capacity produced effective tools in terms of the Gato, Balao, and later Tench-class subs on both coasts (Cramp Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia being the exception) as well as the unlikely yard in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. With the exception of the Mark 14 fiasco, American submarines in the Pacific were successfully employed because of the crews and the determination to use those tools as effectively as possible.