Have any figures?
17 US submarines lost to direct ASW action during the entire war. The rest to collisions, friendly fire, training accidents, mines, and grounding.
Or so they claimed.
That's a bizarre comment. The subs ran aground. It's a documented fact with photographs, survivors accounts etc. Most of the crews were picked up by friendly escorts. As of a couple years ago, at least one of them (S-39) was still visible on the shoals where it grounded off New Guinea. If you are suggesting that there is some sort of conspiracy to cover up the existence of the secret Japanese Seawolf II class SSN attack submarines or whatever then there's no further point in responding to you.
After all, Hoyt's not perfect. He made substantial errors in The B and the J about the relative merits of the A6M and F4F.
That was my error. Had Hoyt confused with H.P. Willmott. Good read on the general strategies of the combatants but some AF myth perpetuations that, these days, don't belong in a good general history.
And where do you find that information? I somehow find it hard to believe these things seeing as how you think the Allies were so prepared pre-war for anti-submarine warfare.
So basically you find it hard to believe me because you don't want to believe me. Neatly circular logic there. Hard to reason you out of your pov since reason didn't get you there in the first place. I repeat, since you seem not to have been listening: contentless panglossian tropes like "American ASW sucked" or "The USN was lax" or "The US was unprepared" have absolutely no meaning or value unless you are willing to be specific as regards what you think was "not up to standard" (of, say, the RN). The biggest problem the USN faced in 1942 in re ASW was the lack of a sufficient number of escort vessels. Crew training was, in my opinion, as good as anyone's and better than that of any Axis power
at ASW. There were a number of improvements made both in the RN and the USN in 1942 that began to rip the advantage away from submarines. Some were technological (mousetrap then hedgehog, improved sonar, centimetric radar, better RDF, better TBS, better radio and flare discipline among merchant ships, and so forth) and some organizational (such as putting the escort group cmdr on board an escort rather than a merchant, and adding a central HFDF officer and plot board to the escort group commander's ship).
To me "lax" means that you think that crews did not know how to operate their ASW equipment properly or very well (which is false) or that crews did not train realistically for ASW -- live shots and all that (which is false) or did not enagage in ASW exercises with real USN submarines playing the role of the aggressor (which is also false.. even in 1939). The lack of specifity or clarity in your general character assassination of things related to American ASW makes me suspect that you are talking about 1917 or 1864 some other wtf time period with no particular relevance to WW2.
Oh, so you have some source somewhere that accounts for a per-shot ratio?
I haven't done the calculations. But the fact remains that in 1942 the US sank more Japanese submarines than the US lost American subs to enemy ASW in the entire war. I posted these results in a thread several months ago. I recommend you read
The Last Patrol 2d edition by Harry Holmes, 2001, Naval Institute Press. Since you've already stated that you don't want to believe me and therefore will not, there's no point in running you through the tallies again. Go look them up yourself (and afterward I'll take your apology if you're the sort of guy who apologises after calling someone a liar). For the Japanese losses you can see them all in the TROMs of Japanese submarines at combinedfleet.com.
BTW, part of the whole point of this ASW debate is to state that the USN ASW was not giant killers in '42, yet that is precisely one of the things stirring this.
No there are several points to thid debate. There's a latter day German AF with a long standing and fairly transparent personal agenda of rewriting history to re-enoble the Nazis, whose intellectual depth runs no deeper than "American(s) suck(ed)." There's people like you who seem willing to disparage things with some fairly broad and non-specific negative comments because someone in a book once also made broad, vague, disparaging remarks. And there's people talking about the game. If you want to talk about how the game compares with history you have to be a little more specific than "the USN was (or were not) 'giant killers' in 1941-1942." I'll agree that they werent' (because I think they were after May 1943), but that doesn't say much about how people are using subs and how people are deploying ASW assets to deal with them.
Don't you think that having the USN attack my JA subs in deep water, BEFORE the sub fires a single shot, with my subs NEVER diving deep, subject to attack from every single escort (or ASW fleet ships possibly), while in the reverse my JA ASW combat fleets not only can't find the sub in 6/7 instances despite it being spotted by aerial recon one hex away, with the USN sub diving deep and of course the one ASW JA attack missing, a stark contrast to the ridiculous?
I agree that if your description really describes your results then you are getting something that seems like a mockery of the real danger of subs. But in detail I have no particular problem with Japanese subs being detected (often but certainly not always) before they fire a shot. If they're being detected by escorts and they have enough time to dive deep they OUGHT to. IMO any ASW attack delivered by a/c on a submarine that lacks radar should be presumed to occur (most of the time) at shallow depth.
Having the USN subs escape most of the time despite being detected by a/c seems right to me. In the time between aerial detection and the arrival of surface assets a submarine can go a long ways, as the USN and RN knew from the Atlantic. The most that aerial ASW assets could do until the arrival of CVE-based hunter killer groups was to: 1. hope that they could ambush the sub and launch an effective attack before it dived, and 2. failing at that, be content in the knowledge that a submerged boat isn't keeping station with or overtaking a convoy, so the threat level from that boat is temporarily reduced.
Show me a fellow who rejects statistical analysis a priori and I'll show you a fellow who has no knowledge of statistics.
Didn't we have this conversation already?
