Conclusion
By 21st century standards, the Navy's exploitation of the Congressional "fleet boat" authorization of 1916 to build five vastly different submarine designs in a series that ended only in 1934 may seem surprising or even disingenuous. However, as the only U.S. submarines built during an entire decade of shifting and often-contradictory operational concepts, the nine V-boats could hardly have been expected to be homogeneous. But the relative freedom that the Navy was granted to try so many novel submarine approaches in so few years may only have been matched subsequently in the initial era of the nuclear-propulsion program. Except for Narwhal and Nautilus—and these for unexpected reasons—none of the V-boats achieved significant success either in peacetime or under combat conditions in World War II. But the willingness to experiment—or perhaps it was only shooting in the dark—that produced the V-boats in all their interesting variety paid off handsomely in a host of lessons-learned that were quickly applied to the subsequent succession of true "fleet boat" designs—the Porpoise, Salmon, Sargo, Tambor, and Gato classes.
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