Submarines at War: The History of the American Silent Service

by Edwin P. Hoyt

Traces the development of the submarine forces of the United States Navy from their beginnings in the early 1900s to the present

329 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Edwin P. Hoyt was a prolific American writer who specialized in military history. He was born in Portland, Oregon to the publisher Edwin Palmer Hoyt (1897–1979) and his wife, the former Cecile DeVore (1901–1970). A younger brother, Charles Richard, was born in 1928. Hoyt attended the University of Oregon from 1940 to 1943.

In 1943, Hoyt's father, then the editor and publisher of The Oregonian, was appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt as the director of the Domestic Branch, Office of War Information. The younger Hoyt served with the Office of War Information during World War II, from 1943 to 1945. In 1945 and 1946, he served as a foreign correspondent for The Denver Post (of which his father became editor and publisher in 1946) and the United Press, reporting from locations in China, Thailand, Burma, India, the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and Korea.

Edwin Hoyt subsequently worked as an ABC broadcaster, covering the 1948 revolution in Czechoslovakia and the Arab-Israeli conflict. From 1949 to 1951, he was the editor of the editorial page at The Denver Post. He was the editor and publisher of the Colorado Springs Free Press from 1951 to 1955, and an associate editor of Collier's Weekly in New York from 1955 to 1956. In 1957 he was a television producer and writer-director at CBS, and in 1958 he was an assistant publisher of American Heritage magazine in New York.

Starting in 1958, Hoyt became a writer full-time, and for a few years (1976 to 1980) served as a part-time lecturer at the University of Hawaii. In the 40 years since his first publication in 1960, he produced nearly 200 published works.

While Hoyt wrote about 20 novels (many published under pseudonyms Christopher Martin and Cabot L. Forbes) the vast majority of his works are biographies and other forms of non-fiction, with a heavy emphasis on World War II military history.

Hoyt died in Tokyo, Japan on July 29, 2005, after a prolonged illness. He was survived by his wife Hiroko, of Tokyo, and three children, Diana, Helga, and Christopher, all residing in the U.S.

Reviews

[Rachel Parham]

Although the official title of this book is "Submarines at War: The History of the American Silent Service" a more apt title would be: "Submarines at War: The History of American Submarines in the Pacific during WWII, And Some Other History Thrown in There."

While a fairly cohesive read - and far more accurate than the last book I read titled "Submarines at War" - it became obvious at the three-quarters mark that Edwin Hoyt loves him some Pacific Theater action. A solid one half of this book is dedicated to the submarine war against the Japanese with lots of detail around the ships deployed in that Theater, the captains that commanded them, their varied missions and engagements, and all the detritus in between (including a solid cover of the faulty torpedo issue submarines faced in the first few years of the War).

And don't get me wrong, it was all great stuff, but Hoyt did not give the same attention to the other eras of submarine history (for example, he covered the Cold War and the rise of nuclear submarines in a page and a half), so this was definitely a case of expectations not being met. Having said that, however, it is a solid history, and I enjoyed it for what it was.

At least, as far as I could tell, Hoyt got his facts right.