Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)When I picked up We Were Pirates I expected a firsthand account of the Pacific War with a ghost writer and what I found was that two men have edited and woven Chief Robert Hunt's diary into We Were Pirates. While well written I found myself wishing I was reading Chief Hunt's diary with commentary by Chief Hunt. At one point Hunt by mistake fires a torpedo then the authors kept on talking about a leak in the torpedo room. It seems likely that the torpedo went through the outer torpedo tube door and damaged the tube causing the leak but the authors lack of knowledge of submarines is shown here. The authors spend too much time on Hunt's time ashore and not enough exploring the war patrols or bringing in other material supplementing Hunt's diary. the pressures of the war patrols would be far more helpful than the exploits of Chief Hunt's letting off steam. The purpose of a good History is to explore causes in order to understand the consequences, I found myself skipping over the beach portions of the book.
The end of the book became difficult to read because the main author Robert Schultz goes into first person account of hero worship for Chief Hunt and while interesting the purpose of reading this book is to know about Chief Hunt experiences not Dr. Schultz's. It is a very irritating trend in recent histories to have the author imbed themselves into the narrative. In the end it was an easy read but a book that I can't say added much to the submarine history library. It is a shame we couldn't have Chief Hunt's words and experience firsthand.
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A sailor's extraordinary experiences on an American submarine in the Pacific are candidly reported in this eyewitness account of war from a torpedoman's perspective. Robert Hunt managed to survive twelve consecutive war patrols on the submarine USS Tambor. During the course of the war, Hunt was everywhere that mattered in the Pacific. He stood on the bow of the Tambor as it cruised into Pearl Harbor just days after the devastation of the Japanese air raid, peered through binoculars as his boat shadowed Japanese cruisers at the Battle of Midway, ferried guns and supplies to American guerilla fighters in the Philippines, fired torpedoes that sank vital Japanese shipping, and survived a near-fatal, seventeen-hour depth-charge attack. For exceptional skill and proficiency at his battle station Hunt received a commendation from Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. This WWII torpedoman's account of the war offers the rare perspective of an enlisted seaman that is not available in the more common officer accounts. To capture and recount the progress of the Pacific War through Hunt's eyes coauthors Robert Schultz and James Shell examined the young submariner's war diary, as well as crew letters, photographs, and captains' reports, and they also conducted hours of interviews. Their vivid descriptions of the ways in which sailors dealt with the stress of war while at sea or on liberty show a side of the war that is rarely reported. The fact that Hunt's submarine was the first of a new fleet of World War II boats and the namesake of a significant class adds further value to his remarkable story.
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