Shanghaiceltic:

Once again thanks for the informative and explanatary post which I really enjoyed reading. I read "Blind Man's Bluff" last summer, it turned out one of my neighbors had friends or relatives in the service and he leant it to me. I also really enjoyed reading and watching "Das Boot" and when I was last in Anchorage I came upon the memoirs of a U-Boat Captain who wrote a very interesting book about his service there, almost entirely against the Brits, which he was lucky to survive. I'm afraid I can't recall the title right now.

Thank you for tolerating my golly gee whiz initial post to this thread, and I will look for "We Come Unseen".

I've not seen actual sub batteries, but I've done some work with industrial UPS systems and I have an idea of what they're about if I scale up the size of the cells. The American WWII sub I was reading about had 2 banks of 126 cells at 1500 lbs a cell. That's about 200 tons of batteries and likely several tons of copper for the cables. Electric drives of proportionate size would be something to see as well. The on-line history mentioned something I believe to be true, that while the Germans tried and failed to starve England, the Americans tried and succeeded in starving the Japanese military via submarine warfare, and in comparison to the aircraft carrier wars, gets almost no mention in the public history of the Pacific Theater. Supposedly the Japanese had some sizable submarines of their own and achieved some successes, notably the Indianapolis on her return after delivering Atomic weapons to the American assembly point.

And of course you are familiar with the submariners who define ships into two groups: Submarines and Targets.