As chronicled in Silent Victory, Clay Blair's monumental history of United States submarine operations in World War II, the submarine war against Japan was a relatively little known war-within-a-war. It was waged by an initially small but expanding force of boats that eventually made more than 1,400 war patrols and sank almost 1,400 Japanese merchant ships and naval vessels. Many American submarines carved out enviable records, including USS Guardfish, the subject of Claude Conner's remarkable memoir of service aboard a US fleet boat as an enlisted man.Conner, who served as a Radar Technician,