The Silent Service

My father, Capt Harley K. Nauman, was featured on one of the silent service episodes. I was very young and don't remember much more. My father was captain on the Steckleback and the Salmon during WWII. Any information on the episode he was in and where I can get a copy of it would be very helpful. My fathers year of birth was 1910, he graduated from the Naval Academy in 1934 and retired from the Navy in 1964 with the rank of Rear Admiral. I don't have much more information but can contact my sister with questions you may have. Thanks in advance for your assistance.

BILL BUEHLER California

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

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.

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.

I can vividly recall watching this series on Saturday nights during my early teen years. I'd lie on the carpet in our living room and marvel at the opening of each show when you'd see a vintage WWII submarine shooting almost straight up out of the water in what appeared to be an emergency surfacing exercise. The series dramatically chronicled the actions of the United States submarine service during the second World War. The story of a different submarine and it's heroic crew was featured each week and the actors always kept my young mind stimulated with their dramatic portrayals of early submariners. I'm sure the series has been off the air for about 50 years, but I still think about it whenever I reflect on my favorite viewing in the early years of B&W T.V.