When the Germans unleashed submarines in the Atlantic, they always managed to sink a bunch of highly publicized, clearly civilian ships, like the Lusitania or the Athenia, and generally piss people off and provoke neutral nations into a more bellicose stance.
Then the US unleashed its submarines in the Pacific and… well, I don’t know what happened.
Were there a lot of neutral casualties from US submarines? Any major incidents?
If so, is it something better known outside the United States than within it? (I sure hadn’t heard of it, but most of my media sources are American)
I’ve done some reading on the subject over the years, and I can’t recall any civilian ships being sunk by US subs. By civilian I mean ocean liners and the like. But remember, by the time we entered the war, the Pacific was already at war. There really weren’t any liners plying the sealanes by that time, and most certainly not sailing to Japan. Most neutrals were in other theaters of war.
Arguably the submarine was THE decisive weapon in the US arsenal against Japan. Japan lost some 9 million gross tons of shipping during the war and over half of it was losses to US submarines. The result was that the most dangerous branch of service for Japan was the merchant marine, over 30 percent of Japanese merchant marines were lost as casualties… compared to 16 percent for the Imperial Japanese Army. There were fewer Lusitania type incidents because of the nature of the Japanese merchant fleet, the ships were by and large smaller than American or European counterparts, there were several notable sinkings of troop transport ships that were in use ferrying allied POW in horrid conditions and unmarked, as required by international law. Look up the Lisbon Maru and the Montevideo Maru.
Although the Lusitania was a civilian ship, it seems that the whole world and their cousin knew that it was carrying some sort of armaments for belligerents in WWI. The Germans had even placed an ad in the NY Times warning passengers that according to international law, it would be be subject to attack. It was to the advantage of the Allied propaganda machine that a few years had passed when they started their push, that everybody had forgotten about these ads.
For all practical purposes, the United States was the only country in both world wars which: 1) had a significant merchant shipping capacity; 2) did not enter the war in its early years, and; 3) was a strong enough power for other countries to be concerned about its opinions. So American ships were the only ones likely to be neutral ships in a war zone.
The Soviets & Imperial Japan were on th outs, albeit not at war until the very end of the fighting. Not many would have gone to sea. After all, where could they go without violating neutrality?
Peru? Mexico? Chile? Mozambique? - I don’t know. I guess in theory neutral ships are still supposed to be able to travel the seas in wartime, but it’s just not safe in the war zone. So would US subs sink Soviet ships on route from Vladivostok to Santiago, Chile in 1943? Or would the Japanese have sunk such ships? Or did the Soviet merchant fleet just not venture into the Pacific during the war?
There was very little neutral traffic in the Pacific during the war. Neither Japan nor the US targeted Russian ships. There might have been some accidents, but it wasn’t policy. IIRC, the Russian Merchant Marine in the Pacific was pretty much non-existant prior to WW2. Otherwise, Little Nemo nailed it.
One major incident was the Awa Maru, sunk after being granted safe passage by the US State Department. It might not fit your question since it was a neutral but it does fall into the major incident category.
There wasn’t much Soviet merchant marine presence in the Pacific, and what there was of it wasn’t ferrying supplies to either the Allies or Japan (and thus didn’t attract either side’s attention).
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So would US subs sink Soviet ships on route from Vladivostok to Santiago, Chile in 1943?
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So just why would the US sink ships that belonged to one of our allies? In 1943 Russia and the US were on the same side.
During the war we were running convoys on a consistant basis to Murmansk from East coast ports.
[QUOTE=wevets]
So would US subs sink Soviet ships on route from Vladivostok to Santiago, Chile in 1943?
The idea behind unrestricted submarine warfare is that you don’t stop even unarmed merchantmen or ocean liners before sinking them. In that kind of an atmosphere it’s easy to misidentify the nationality of a ship or to disregard the flag if you think the enemy uses neutral flags as a cover.
Yes, this is true, but Russia was not neutral as far as the US was concerned. We were allies, although in another theatre, but we were allies.
You do not win wars by sinking your allies’ ships. Sinking your allies’ ships would have a tendency to piss said allies off.
Yeah, but what are you going to do at the sub/ship level? It’s not the intent of the policy makers - Nimitz or King or Roosevelt didn’t say “go sink a bunch of Russki ships,” but if a submarine captain decides to shoot rather than hold fire in case of a ship with an uncertain identity, it’s at his discretion. It was a big war, and many subs and ships were involved, leading to the chance of an incident.
Judging from the posts above, there were so few Russian ships in the area that it just didn’t matter, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.
Wasn’t there a recent case of friendly fire in Afghanistan where a US fighter pilot dropped bombs on Canadian troops? Ah. Here it is. Friendly fire happens in wars.
In that case, you had a guy nicknamed “Psycho” who was hopped up on drugs disobeying a direct order not to fire.
A submarine captain’s situation is somewhat different; subs generally did not shoot on the spur of the moment. Sub captains had recognition charts handy, time to survey their targets, and hunted their prey through various means of narrowing the odds - hunting known sea lanes, HF/DF, and other forms of intelligence that were regularly transmitted to them via encrypted radio messages. It’s theoretically possible that a U.S. sub could have accidentally torpedoed a Russian ship, but it would have required a monumental avalanche of errors and stupidity.
Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was convicted after WWII of ‘crimes against the laws of war’. In 1942 RMS Laconia was torpedoed by a German U-boat. The U-boat, along with other U-boats, surfaced to rescue the survivors. Unfortunately they were attacked by a B-24 Liberator bomber. Dönitz ordered that U-boats will no longer surface to lend aid to survivors of the ships they sunk.
He was convicted and served ten years in Spandau prison even after Admiral Chester Nimitz testified (or wrote an affadavit) that the U.S. also did not lend aid to survivors if there was danger of being attacked.
