Some Future Titles of Interest for SPF Members

[fishpond]

No mention on Naval Institute Press's website yet, but this forthcoming book about ASW from 1946 through 1990 sounds interesting. Whenever I re-read Norman Friedman's authoritative U.S. Destroyers: An Illustrated Design History, I am struck that the USN's fears in the late 1940's, about a horde of Soviet high-speed submarines based on the advanced Type XXI U-boat rendering the existing fleet of destroyer escorts ineffective, have still not come to pass. As things have turned out, the fastest diesel-electric subs of the 2020's can do only a few knots more that the Type XXI's 17 knots, and that for only an hour or so. If one could catch a "slow steaming" 18-knot Maersk container ship at all, I suspect that an escorting John C. Butler-class DE armed with Hedgehog would be considered a dangerous adversary to this day.

Dr Friedman covers the period well in his fine book The Fifty Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War, which he kindly autographed for me, and he exhaustively covered ASW weapons and fire control (and the general principles of sonar, etc.) in the volumes of his big Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapon Systems, of which I own two.

The fast submarines would, I think, have been Type 26 knock-offs (would you really like to serve on an HTP sub? I wouldn't), and the only extent to which they came to pass was nuclear subs. The Whiskeys were largely interpreted as Type XXI clones, but they were a lot slower (and shorter-legged); I'd guess that Zulus and Foxtrots came closest. What was largely missed in the West was a Soviet switch away from Battle of the Atlantic II to a focus on nuclear weapons (and going after Western SSBNs). It can be argued that had NATO not been crushed early on in a land war, the Soviets might have turned some of their subs loose against reinforcement shipping. We can't know, and knowing their war plans would not help, because this is speculation about what would have happened had their war plans gone sour.