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Forum URL: http://www.eyrie-productions.com/Forum/dcboard.cgi
Forum Name: Undocumented Features General
Topic ID: 2370
Message ID: 3
#3, RE: Well, That's Awkward dep't
Posted by Gryphon on Aug-27-18 at 01:42 AM
In response to message #0
LAST EDITED ON Aug-27-18 AT 01:44 AM (EDT)
 
>Morton and
>Wahoo (the sub) are also mentioned in Edward L. Beach, Jr.'s
>book Submarine!, in similarly admiring terms.

I don't have a copy of O'Kane's book, but I dug out my copy of Submarine! and refreshed my memory. There is an entire chapter in this book about Wahoo, and it contains a long and detailed account of the entire action of January 26 (or 27—Beach says the 27th, I presume it's an International Date Line thing). There's no mention of the attack on Buyo Maru's survivors, but with a little close reading you can see the spot it's missing from—where the sub has just sunk the largest of the several non-warships she sank that day, and Beach laconically notes, "Two down out of three, and time out is taken to get a few pictures."

Yeah.

It shouldn't surprise me that these things were redacted from contemporary accounts written by serving USN officers for popular consumption. And it doesn't, really, surprise is the wrong word. I mean, this was a era when a television documentary series broadcast on national network TV (CBS-TV's Victory at Sea, which aired at around the same time Submarine! was published) contained footage of an American submarine sinking a Japanese freighter, with a completely unironic voiceover narration to the effect of, "Attaboy, fellas! That's ten more dead Nips for Uncle Sam." It was a less... considered age than the one in which my sensibilities were formed.

Still, it makes me a bit sad. Submarine! was one of my favorite books in that middle school/early high school period when I did my first really serious reading on the war. I knew from its tone and publication date that it was neither a scholarly work nor one that did otherwise than wear its bias on its sleeve, but all the same...

--G.
Note that I didn't say "than the one we're in now." :/
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