New online: Submarine War Patrol Reports

Sent to me via email:

From: richard pekelney
Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 19:05
To: {excised by CRH}
Cc: {excised by CRH}

Subject: WW II Submarine War Patrol Reports Online

Folks,

The entire collection of Submarine War Patrol Reports are now available online via the HNSA web site:

Historic Naval Ships Association - 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).

HNSA thanks 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, higher resolutions versions on DVD that may print or OCR better may be purchased from USS Sealion Silent Service Tapes

(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.