Theodore Roscoe (1906–1992)

This is a complete history and record of the American submarine service in World War II. Roscoe starts with Pearl Harbor and follows all the developments in the boats, strategy and equipment. Initially the US Navy had problems with their Mark 14 torpedoes and the Submarine captains could not get the navy to study and rectify the issue. Using a faulty torpedo meant that many Japanese vessels escaped damage and put US subs in danger unnecessarily from enemy escorts.

He covers the various uses of the submarine such as rescue of shot down airman, pre invasion surveys of island coasts, supplying arms and supplies to guerillas, rescuing people from Japanese held islands, surveying mine fields and much more.

While telling the overall history of the sub war in the Pacific, Roscoe fills the book with anecdotes from patrols using the captains' official reports as his source. He also documents every American submarine loss with details if known. He also includes charts to illustrate the loss of Japanese cargo shipping and Naval losses. His conclusion is that japan was starving because by July 1945 the country had few cargo ships left and and the few tankers that were still afloat could not be protected if they attempted to bring oil to Japan. There was little fuel left for aircraft or ships.

He makes a good argument that Japan would have had to surrender soon and in fact the Emperor and the civilian members of the government were in favour of surrender but the militarists in the government refused to give in. They could have prevented the suffering released by the Atomic bomb on their people.… (more)

5565. Only in New England The Story of a Gaslight Crime, by Theodore Roscoe (read 25 Jun 2018) This book, supposedly based on an actual happening in New England, was published in 1959. The names have been changed so that one does not know where it happened but the author pretends to have found information in newspapers and old papers found in a New England mansion acquired by a friend. The death of an old woman is said to have occurred April 12, 1911. If it is an actual case I wish the author had used real names and places. There is some discussion of events around 1910 and references to olden poems and novel which are of some interest, including a quote of a few lines rom Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight, a poem I much appreciated in mty youth and memorized, especially liking these memorable lines:

Lo,, the ponderous .tongue is swinging, 'tis the hour of curfew now
And the sight has chilled her bosom, stopped her breath, and paled her brow;
Shall she let it ring? No, never! Flash her eyes with sudden light
And she springs , and grasps it firmly, Curfew shall not ring tongiht!

But as a whole the book is of little interest and deserves to be forgotten.… (more)

If you're interested in this book, I have good news and bad news.

The good news is, if you want to know something about what an American destroyer did in World War II, it's bound to be in here. The book is more than 400 pages long, and every destroyer action I know anything about is in here. Since it was written soon after the war, there are some secret details that aren't known, but on the whole, I was very impressed with what the author dug up.

The bad news? Well, for starters, there is no index. There is a table of contents, of sorts, but with only eight sections listed, and no dates associated with them, it's no real help. If you want to find something, you have to know the date of the event, and then you have to skim through perhaps dozens or hundreds of pages to find it.

Which of course won't matter if you are reading the book from cover to cover. But there was another thing that really got to me, and that was the way the author treated the enemy. That's all they were -- the enemy. Not quite human. This was most obvious in dealing with the Japanese, where the author clearly is guilty of racism as well as of tribalism; the Japanese are never known by that name; they are "the Japs." Consistently. It really grated. The other statements about non-Americans aren't as blatant, but the feeling of "not-one-of-us-ness" is still there.

This perhaps isn't surprising in a book from 1951, but it made me very uncomfortable.

That's the bottom line, I think: Almost anything you want to know about destroyers is in here, but you may not enjoy the process of finding it out.… (more)