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 easily 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 (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 appendices that provide tabulations of information across multiple war patrols.
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.
