SUBMARINE WAR PATROL REPORTS

At the end of each war patrol of WW II, submarine commanders created a report on the patrol. These reports were used as the raw material to inform intelligence, improve tactics, evaluate commanders, etc. During WW II, over 1,550 patrol reports containing approximately 63,000 pages were generated. During the 1970s these were photographed and reproduced on microfilm to make them more easly accessible and easily reproduced (approx. 250 rolls). During 2008 a copy of this microfilm was scanned into digital format (110 GB), and in 2009 it was made available online here (14 GB).

These war patrol reports were written during a deadly, bitterly fought war. Please note that there may be some references to enemy forces that may be offensive in today's context.

At the end of the war patrol reports there are appendicies that provide tabulations of information accross multiple war patrols. In addition, there is an Excel formatted spreadsheet with the Special Operation Research Group Summary of US Submarine Attacks in WW II.

Appendicies

We thank John Clear EMC (SS) USN Ret. and Dan Martini EMCM(SS) USN Ret. for their generous donation of the digital copies of these war patrol reports used to create this online version. We also wish to thank the Naval Undersea Museum for loaning their microfilm copies of the war patrol reports for the project. The online versions have been compressed and optimized for online reading by webmaster Rich Pekelney, higher resolutions versions on DVD that may print or OCR better may be purchased from http://www.usssealion.com/ (Unrelated to HNSA). Many of the original documents without any reproduction artifacts many be found at the US National Archives and Record Administration in College Park, Maryland.

We are using the commercial service issuu.com to provide fast access over the web to this large collection. Problems viewing the reports will most likely be fixed by using a recent version of the free Adobe Flash Player. You will also need a recent version of one of the popular web browsers (i.e. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox or Apple Safari) with javascript and cookies turned on.

If you are using a slow internet connection you will see a fuzzy version of each page while the page is downloaded for display.

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