Final Harbor

Epilogue

The story of the life and death of the U.S.S. Mako, Fleet Submarine, is fiction.

Here is fact: A very small group of submarines waged a bitter war against Japan, sinking more than 1,000 Japanese merchant vessels and a considerable portion of the Imperial Japanese Navy, including one battleship, eight aircraft carriers, three heavy and eight light cruisers, many destroyers and a large number of Naval auxiliary ships.

The stunning impact of this war within a war led a great many experts to express the postwar view that the U.S. Submarine blockade against Japan had been so effective that the invasions of the Philippine Islands, Iwo Jima, Palau, and Okinawa, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, were unnecessary. The submarine war had already drawn the noose so tightly around Japan’s neck that it could not survive as a nation.

The price the American submarine force paid for waging this war was expensive. Twenty-two percent of the 16,000 men who went to war in U.S. submarines died in action. In terms of the percentages engaged that was the highest death toll of any branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. Some of those deaths, perhaps many of them, could be laid at the door of the U.S. Navy itself. The Navy’s prewar training for submarine captains was poorly conceived and ineffective. It sent submarines to sea with defective torpedoes, defective torpedo exploders and diesel engines that would not run properly.

For all those who went to sea in submarines and never came back:

Requiescant in pace.