Thomas F. (hardtack) - , reviewed on 11/2/2017 + 2794 more book reviews

I want to say this is an excellent book, but then I'm biased, as I love to read stories about the "Silent Service" or the submarines. On the other hand, I would never want to serve on a submarine. For one thing, in WW II, one in five submariners were killed. And, if the 'flack' hits the fan, I like to have my choice of directions in which to run.

The personal stories related by the authors really convey what it meant to be a submariner in WW II, including all the 'warts.'

Unfortunately, the authors seem to have problems with numbers. In numerous cases, their reports of casualties are way off. For example, they report over 9,000 dead Marines in the taking of Peleliu, when there were actually less than 2,300. The rest were mostly wounded Marines.

And they report the British surrendered 60,000 men at Singapore and another 100,000 on Java. Sorry, but Java was Dutch Army territory. The British surrendered about 136,000 men at Singapore. The authors also reported it took the Marines three months to secure Iwo Jima, when it was actually five weeks.

And in one case, the authors reported U.S. submarines in the Pacific were directed by information from ULTRA, the breaking of the German code, but got it right later on when they reported it a MAGIC, the name given to the breaking of the Japanese code.

Since this book was published in 2007, there is no excuse for these errors, as they could have simply looked up the correct data on Wikipedia.

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