The Silent Service

Thank goodness for YouTube. I am watching episode after episode on my 82" Smart TV. Great anthology of the Silent Service.

The thing that everyone remembers about the show was the opening credits with a film of the USS Pickerel, a late WWII diesel-electric boat, doing an emergency surface from 250 feet. How many of us young boys used to mimic that action at the City Park swimming pool! I wonder how many future submariners were inspired by this TV show, which was partially funded by the taxpayers (by virtue of the loaner submarine and crew provided by the Navy for some filming). I've spoken with a few veterans of the U.S. submarine service in WWII about sub movies and TV. Of all, they pick this TV series as head and shoulders above all others.

This series, plus Whirlybirds, Sea Hunt, Science Fiction Theater, and Range Rider were the prime time TV shows I couldn't miss. Add Saturday morning Mr. Wizard, Fury, and Sky King, and that is my entire recollection of TV from the 50's.

Clear the bridge. Dive, dive!

In response to the poster who asked what major studio owned the show, I am guessing it would be NBC, as California National Productions was run out of the West Coast division of NBC. That said, many California National shows are starting to fall into public domain use; such as many episodes of the William Bendix version of "Life of Riley", "Adventures of Hiram Holliday", and others. I would suspect, based on that, that the "major studio" who is trying to get their hands on the films would be a DVD distributor who wants to release the show. I say more power to them. "The Silent Service" was a great show, I used to stay up very late during the summertime when I was in grade school in the 60s to watch reruns of the show on a local independent station.

This was a fantastic series about U.S. Navy Submarines in WWII. It starred the regular TV actors of the the day and each episode was based on fact. Also the host often had the real people of the story on at the end of an episode to get their comments. It was great history and weekly entertainment. It really should be brought out on DVD both for those of us that remember it and to preserve television history itself. The combination of real footage and actors on the submarine set seemed pretty seamless to me but then I couldn't have been more than 6 or 7 years old when it was on TV. I just know that it is one of the shows I remember quite well from that period. It was entertaining but was obviously done more for telling the history than 'entertaining' people. For me that was more than enough.

Each episode of the series is about the heroism of the USN, USA (Army), Australians, British, Filipinos, Indonesians, and other Allies.

When I lookup (DDG/Google/Bing) information about the submarines mentioned/detailed in the episodes, I get the same basic information that is in each pertinent episode... I consider this to be a high compliment to the facts presented in each episode. Of course, there are probably some inaccuracies.

This series doesn't attempt to instill more drama than actually existed ... which must have been significant ... it decreased the drama and let us, the viewers, decide for ourselves.

Anyone that has actually been within a WWII submarine nowadays (such as the USS Torsk, SSN-423, now in Baltimore, MD, near the National Aquarium, USS Constellation, and USCG Cutter 37) would have additional awareness of what the USN submarine crews had to deal even when not in action. The subs are quite small, not much space, except for the racks of torpedos which took a lot of room.

The series even touched on the sensitive subject of the significant issues with the Mark 14 torpedo, which had major multiple problems, all covered-up by one person in the USN.

The number of future stars in the series is phenomenal: Carl Betz, Deforest Kelley, Russell Johnson, Joe Flynn, Leonard Nimoy, Kurt Kreuger, Simon Oakland, Dennis Weaver, Richard Crenna, Chuck Connors, Mike Connors ... too many to mention. Amazing cast.

Great series.