The Iron Heart of the Silent Service
They Doubted His Engine — Until It Powered Every U.S. Submarine in the Pacific ! - YouTube
How a condemned German aero-diesel, resurrected by a Wisconsin scale-maker, powered the campaign that strangled Imperial Japan—and why the Navy still buys the same engine today.
—— BLUF ——
Between 1938 and 1945 the U.S. Navy acquired a two-stroke, twin-crankshaft, cylinder-headless diesel of German pedigree—the Fairbanks-Morse Model 38D8⅛—and installed it as main propulsion in roughly half of the Gato-, Balao-, and Tench-class fleet submarines that conducted the Pacific guerre de course. Those submarines sank an estimated 54.7 percent of all Japanese merchant tonnage and roughly 30 percent of Imperial Japanese Navy tonnage lost in the war, a campaign the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey judged “perhaps the most decisive single factor in the collapse of the Japanese economy.”
The same opposed-piston architecture, continuously produced in Beloit, Wisconsin, remains the OEM emergency diesel generator aboard Ohio-class SSBN/SSGNs today; in June 2025 the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Philadelphia Division, initiated a five-year IDIQ sustainment contract for Submarine EDG Global Repair Services specifically scoped to the Fairbanks-Morse Opposed Piston (FMOP) platform. The engine is, by any reasonable measure, the longest-serving major marine prime mover in U.S. naval history.
The decisive weapon of the Pacific War was not the Essex, the B-29, or the atomic bomb. It was a 312-foot steel tube running on four diesel engines that almost no American civilian had ever heard of, designed by a German engineer the Nazis drove into house arrest, and welded together by women working second shift in a factory that once made platform scales for grain merchants. This is the story of that engine.
I · OriginsFrom Dessau to Beloit
Professor Hugo Junkers began experimenting with two-stroke, opposed-piston gas engines in 1892, and by 1910 had married the architecture to the Diesel combustion cycle.1 The concept was austere: eliminate the cylinder head entirely; stand two pistons facing each other in a common bore; let combustion occur in the center of the cylinder between their crowns; handle gas exchange through ports cut into the liner walls and uncovered by the pistons themselves at the bottom of their strokes. Two crankshafts—one at each end of the cylinder block—were geared together to produce a single output.
The payoff was significant. With no cylinder head there was no head gasket, no valve train, and no combustion-chamber geometry dominated by a flat, punishing surface that must survive thousands of thermal cycles. Because each combustion event drove two pistons outward simultaneously, twin crankshafts meant inherent mechanical balance. Because exhaust ports could be uncovered slightly before intake ports—achieved by running the lower crankshaft approximately eleven degrees behind the upper—scavenging approached the cleanliness of a four-stroke poppet-valve engine without the weight and complexity of valves.2
Junkers formalized the design in the Jumo 4, re-designated Jumo 204 in 1932 and refined as the Jumo 205 in 1934.2 Roughly 900 engines of the Jumo 205 family were produced before the war, powering early variants of the Junkers Ju 86 bomber, the Blohm & Voss BV 138 and BV 222 flying boats, and a handful of Dornier maritime patrol types.3 In Britain, D. Napier & Son licensed the Jumo 204 and 205 as the Culverin and Cutlass, a program that would eventually yield the triangular Napier Deltic used in Royal Navy fast attack craft and British Rail locomotives.4
Hugo Junkers himself saw none of this succeed in wartime. When he refused in 1933 to assist the National Socialist regime in rearming Germany, the state seized his patents and his factories and placed him under house arrest; he died in 1935.5 The intellectual property passed, under duress, into the combined Junkers Flugzeug- und Motorenwerke AG.
Among the firms that had taken an early commercial interest in the Junkers patents was Fairbanks, Morse & Company of Beloit, Wisconsin—a diversified American industrial house whose catalog, by the 1930s, ranged from the Eclipse Windmill and the platform scales patented by Thaddeus Fairbanks in 1832 to pumps, stationary engines, and self-propelled railcars.6 Fairbanks-Morse engineers acquired access to the Junkers architecture through a licensing arrangement and reworked it for the environment in which it actually made sense: not an aircraft nacelle, where a tall, two-crankshaft engine was a problem, but a submarine engine room, where tall and narrow was exactly what the naval architects needed.
II · The Model 38Americanization of the Opposed Piston
The first American production version was the Model 38A8, an eight-cylinder engine with an 8-inch bore and a 10-inch (x2) stroke displacing 8,042 cubic inches and rated at 1,200 horsepower at 720 rpm.7 In December 1934 the U.S. Navy ordered eight 38A8s—four each for USS Plunger (SS-179) and USS Pollack (SS-180) of the Porpoise class.7 Teething problems were substantial; the chain drive between the two crankshafts was replaced with a vertical shaft and bevel gears, bore was fractionally widened to 8⅛ inches, and the resulting engine was re-designated the Model 38D8⅛.7 A smaller auxiliary variant, the 38E5¼, entered production in 1939; roughly 630 were built during the war as auxiliary gensets aboard fleet boats.7
The adaptation required for submarine service is worth a sentence, because it has survived unchanged for ninety years. The Junkers architecture was designed so that upper and lower pistons could each be withdrawn through their respective ends of the engine for maintenance. When measured against the interior frame dimensions of a Gato-class pressure hull, the engine was approximately four inches too tall to permit upper-piston service in situ. Fairbanks-Morse shortened the upper connecting rods by four inches and removed a matching section of block height above the intake manifolds.8 Fleet Defense engineer Brian King, confirming the design history in a 2023 correspondence, noted that “the upper connecting rod on the 38D8-1/8 has remained 4 inches shorter to this day.”8 The compromise made upper-piston removal more laborious; the alternative was no engine at all.
FM Model 38D8⅛ — Main Propulsion Variant
III · The Dual-Source StrategyHow the Engines Were Allocated
The Navy never intended Fairbanks-Morse to be a sole source for fleet submarine propulsion, and it is important to be precise about this. Gato- and Balao-class submarines received main engines from one of two manufacturers: General Motors Cleveland Diesel (whose Model 16-248 and later 16-278A V-16 engines were the other standard) or Fairbanks-Morse (whose 38D8⅛ in nine- and, from USS Sand Lance (SS-381) onward, ten-cylinder form served as the OP alternative).9 Cleveland Diesel, descended from the Winton Engine Corporation and absorbed into General Motors in 1938, produced the majority of submarine engines during the war—an estimated 70 percent of U.S. submarine diesels by wartime volume—operating on a four-stroke uniflow-scavenged design with poppet exhaust valves.10
A third supplier, Hooven-Owens-Rentschler (HOR), attempted to deliver a double-acting diesel that promised nearly twice the horsepower per unit volume. Twelve Gato-class boats built by Electric Boat (SS-253 through SS-264) received HOR engines. They proved so catastrophically unreliable that every HOR installation was ripped out and replaced with Cleveland 16-278As at the first available yard period, and the Navy cancelled the two Balao-class boats (Unicorn and Vendace) intended to receive them.9
The Fairbanks-Morse engines earned something the HOR never did: the trust of the crews who depended on them. Naval historian and preservation documentation at USS Pampanito (SS-383) records the wartime crew's assessment without ornament: in the Balao hull, with four 38D8⅛s driving generators in a fully diesel-electric arrangement, the boat could make roughly 17 knots surfaced, charge batteries on remaining engines while another was down for maintenance, and absorb the concussive shock of near-miss depth charges without the cylinder-head cracking that plagued four-stroke designs.11 There were no cylinder heads to crack.
IV · The Combat EnvironmentWhy Opposed Pistons Fit the Fight
Four design characteristics mattered under the specific stresses of Pacific patrol.
First, thermal path. With no cylinder head, combustion heat transferred only into the piston crowns (cooled through hollow piston cores and oil spray) and into the cylinder liner walls (cooled by seawater-fed jackets). There was no head gasket to blow, no valve seat to recede, no exhaust valve to stick. Reliability over 60- to 75-day patrols, with intermittent access to parts and dockyard support, is a function of removing failure modes, not adding features.
Second, volumetric fit. The Balao-class pressure hull was 27 feet in beam and 16–17 feet in effective interior height. The 38D8⅛ was tall and narrow; the Cleveland V-16 was short and wide. Both engines fit, but the opposed-piston configuration left proportionally more deck area in the engine rooms for maintenance access and auxiliary equipment.
Third, scavenging. A Roots-type supercharger blower, mounted at the drive end and powered by the upper crankshaft, forced air through intake ports located at the top of each cylinder liner; combustion products exited through exhaust ports near the bottom, collected into a manifold taken off the front of the engine.12 The arrangement meant the engine could not run at all without the blower, but it also meant scavenging was positive and predictable across the full rpm range—important for a diesel-electric powertrain in which the engine rarely ran at fixed cruise settings.
Fourth, diesel-electric decoupling. No Balao-class engine drove a propeller shaft directly. The four mains drove generators; four 1,350-hp electric motors (Elliott Company motors with Fairbanks-Morse boats; General Electric with Cleveland Diesel boats, though the pairings were not absolute) drove the two shafts through reduction gearing.9 This allowed any engine to be isolated, shut down, and serviced while the boat remained underway on the other three—a tactical flexibility that German Type VII boats, with their direct-drive arrangement, never enjoyed.
V · The Campaign in NumbersWhat the Engines Accomplished
Within six hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold R. Stark transmitted to Pacific Fleet units an eight-word directive that ended the doctrinal debate over commerce warfare: “Execute against Japan unrestricted air and submarine war.”13 The campaign that followed, commanded from Pearl Harbor and Fremantle by Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood after early 1943, would run for 44 months and would produce the most lopsided guerre de course in modern history.
The U.S. submarine force reached a peak of 314 commissioned boats during the war, with 52 lost in action.14 Casualty rates among submarine crews reached one in seven—higher than any other U.S. service arm in the Pacific, roughly 3,500 killed.14 The boats they manned destroyed 1,314 Japanese vessels totaling approximately 5.3 million tons, including more than one quarter of all Imperial Japanese Navy combatants lost in the war.14
The authoritative postwar accounting—conducted by the Joint Army-Navy Assessment Committee (JANAC) and published in 1947 as Japanese Naval and Merchant Shipping Losses During World War II by All Causes—credited U.S. submarines with 540,192 tons of Japanese naval ships (201 vessels) and 4,779,902 tons of merchant shipping (1,113 vessels), totaling 54.6 percent of all Japanese tonnage lost.15 The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, working from captured Japanese records, refined the merchant figures: of 8,900,000 tons of Japanese merchant shipping sunk or crippled, 54.7 percent was attributable to submarines, 16.3 percent to carrier-based aircraft, 10.2 percent to Army land-based planes, 9.3 percent to mines (largely Operation Starvation B-29 aerial mining), and 4.3 percent to Navy and Marine land-based planes.16
Among individual boats, USS Tang (SS-306) was credited in the 1980 JANAC revision with 33 ships totaling 116,454 tons—more than any other American submarine—before she was lost on 24 October 1944 to one of her own circular-running Mark 18 electric torpedoes. Tang is a Balao-class boat; her main engines were General Motors 16-278As, a reminder that the statistical weight of the campaign rested on both engine families and on the industrial organization that kept them running. Flasher (SS-249), Rasher (SS-269), Barb (SS-220), and Silversides (SS-236) all exceeded 59,000 tons sunk.17
Of the fourteen most successful Balao-class boats in the postwar tonnage rankings, a majority were built at Electric Boat and Manitowoc Shipbuilding, yards that drew from both engine suppliers depending on the production lot. The Fairbanks-Morse-powered boats—including Pampanito, Barb, and a number of the Manitowoc hulls—carried the specific reputation among crews for running quietly and starting reliably after emergency dives.11 Barb alone, under Commander Eugene B. Fluckey, fired the only submarine-launched rocket attack of the war and sent a landing party ashore on Karafuto (Sakhalin) to demolish a Japanese railway train—operations that presupposed engines that would run when ordered.
VI · Strategic EffectThe Strangulation of an Island Empire
Japan entered the war with approximately 6,000,000 gross tons of merchant shipping over 500 tons displacement—already insufficient, by Imperial General Staff calculation, for sustained wartime logistics. During 1942-1945 Japan constructed, captured, or requisitioned another 4,100,000 tons. The Allied submarine force, principally American, removed 8,900,000 tons of that inventory from service.16 By the autumn of 1944, remaining Japanese merchant tonnage had fallen close to the two-million-ton floor estimated as the minimum necessary to supply the home islands with food; by mid-1945, oil imports had effectively ceased.
The industrial feedback was direct and catastrophic. Aluminum smelting collapsed as bauxite convoys from the Indies were lost. Steel output declined as iron ore from Malaya failed to arrive. Aircraft production followed both downward. The Combined Fleet was compelled to base major surface units near the Borneo oilfields because oil tankers could no longer be counted on to reach Yokohama. By early 1945, postwar Japanese records indicate, surviving heavy warships were being decommissioned, camouflaged as floating antiaircraft batteries, or stripped of fuel for Kamikaze operations.18
Estimates of Japanese troop losses to submarine action alone—soldiers drowned in transit aboard torpedoed transports—begin at 97,342 (the floor figure derived by Alden and McDonald in their 2009 revision of JANAC data) and run considerably higher when all troop-ship sinkings are included.19 In January 1945, Imperial Army General Headquarters issued an internal circular, “How to Deal with Maritime Emergencies,” in response to the density of losses; the document described the practice of packing soldiers into cargo holds on what the Army called “silkworm shelves” (kaiko-dana) with grim matter-of-factness.19
VII · Cold War AfterlifeWhy the Same Engine Is Still Being Built
The Navy's diesel-electric submarine program continued into the mid-1950s with the Tang class (SS-563 through SS-568), which attempted to adopt the radially flat EMD 16-338 “pancake” diesel. The pancake proved unreliable in service and was removed. The replacement was not a new engine but the wartime Fairbanks-Morse 38D8⅛, which remained standard in U.S. diesel-electric submarines through the early 1960s.20
When Admiral Hyman G. Rickover's nuclear propulsion program produced USS Nautilus (SSN-571) in 1955, diesel propulsion became operationally obsolete for frontline combatants. But every nuclear submarine ever commissioned by the United States Navy has required an emergency diesel generator—power that must come on line within seconds of a reactor scram to maintain primary coolant circulation, fire control, and life support. For that application, Rickover's successors specified a derivative of the Model 38, designated in service as the 38ND8⅛. It remains the OEM EDG aboard Los Angeles-, Seawolf-, and Ohio-class submarines.21
Production at Beloit never stopped. Fairbanks Morse Defense (now a portfolio company of Arcline Investment Management) continues to manufacture the Opposed Piston line, and the company reports that its flagship OP family has accumulated “over 100 million operating hours—many units with over 40 years of service.”22 In February 2019 the company received a contract to build EDG sets for CVN-80 (USS Enterprise) and CVN-81 (USS Doris Miller), the third and fourth Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers.23
Most recently, the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Philadelphia Division (NSWCPD Code 422, Submarine Diesel Readiness & Sustainment Program) issued a sources-sought notice for Solicitation N64498-25-R-0504, “US Navy Submarine Emergency Diesel Generator (EDG) Fairbanks Morse Opposed Piston (FMOP) Global Repair Services,” anticipating a hybrid Cost-Plus-Fixed-Fee / Firm-Fixed-Price Indefinite-Delivery Indefinite-Quantity contract with a five-year performance period beginning approximately 17 June 2025.24 The scope specifies support for SSBN/SSGN 726-class EDGs rated at 720 rpm and 1,200–1,300 electrical kilowatts—the same rotational speed the Porpoise-class boats used in 1936.24
On 8 July 2025, Fairbanks Morse Defense announced a separate contract to provide an FM 175D high-speed four-stroke diesel generator engine for integration into the DDG(X) land-based propulsion system test site supporting the Navy's next-generation surface combatant program; construction of DDG(X) is planned for 2032.25 The company also holds license-build rights for Pielstick (Whidbey Island-class LSDs and San Antonio-class LPDs), ALCO, and M.A.N. designs, making it one of the few remaining American manufacturers of large medium-speed marine diesels of any architecture.22
VIII · The Second RenaissanceA Junkers Revival
The renewed commercial interest in opposed-piston diesels has an American origin and, by an appropriate historical coincidence, a San Diego address. In 2004 the physicist Dr. James Lemke founded Achates Power, Inc., explicitly citing the Jumo 205 as the engineering precedent.26 The company's modernization program, aided by computer-aided engineering tools unavailable to Junkers or to the original Fairbanks-Morse engineers, has demonstrated brake thermal efficiencies of 47.8 percent on more than 4,500 hours of dynamometer testing.26
In October 2013 Fairbanks Morse Engine and Achates Power signed a joint development and licensing agreement to apply Achates' combustion and fuel-injection research to the Fairbanks-Morse proprietary opposed-piston family, including dual-fuel (diesel / natural gas) variants covered under FM's Enviro-Design technology.27 The partnership produced the Trident OP, a 12-cylinder, 3.3–3.7 MWe distributed-generation engine launched in 2015 that Fairbanks-Morse rates at 48-50 percent mechanical efficiency—figures that would have been unrecognizable to the engineers of 1938, but which rest on exactly the same architectural premise.28 Achates separately holds U.S. Army TARDEC research contracts for a next-generation combat engine in which the opposed-piston layout is again being evaluated for the virtues that commended it to Hugo Junkers: compactness, balance, and the absence of cylinder heads.26
IX · Proceedings AssessmentWhat the Record Shows
Four observations deserve to be stated plainly at the end of this account.
The first is that the Pacific submarine campaign was a joint triumph of two engine families—the Fairbanks-Morse opposed-piston and the General Motors Cleveland Diesel V-16—not a single-vendor achievement. Any honest Proceedings reader should resist the temptation to reduce the campaign to a celebration of one architecture over the other. Both designs worked. The HOR did not. The dual-source strategy the Bureau of Ships adopted in 1940 deserves recognition as a model of prudent wartime procurement: parallel production, comparable performance, different failure modes.
The second is that the Fairbanks-Morse engine's distinctive contribution—resistance to depth-charge shock, reduced failure surface, exceptional longevity—translated most directly into the quality the Navy came to require after the war: emergency power aboard nuclear platforms, where an engine must start and reach full load in under ten seconds after dormant periods of months. The same attributes that kept a Balao-class boat alive in the Luzon Strait in 1944 keep an Ohio-class boomer alive in the event of a primary-plant casualty in 2026.
The third is that the technology transfer from Dessau to Beloit occurred under circumstances that no modern export-control regime would countenance. A German patent, licensed to an American firm in the early 1930s, was re-engineered, re-toleranced, re-dimensioned, and placed into sustained production at a scale the original inventor never achieved. The intellectual-property history is murky; the engineering outcome was decisive. Historians of American industrial mobilization in World War II routinely underweight these licensing transactions, which took place before the war and which positioned American manufacturers to do things, when the war came, that Washington could not have commanded from scratch.
The fourth, and most uncomfortable, is that the dominant weapons system of the twentieth century's largest maritime campaign was built around a diesel engine. Not around radar, though radar mattered; not around the torpedo, which famously did not work for the first eighteen months of the war; not around code-breaking, though OP-20-G's mastery of the maru code in 1943 was transformative. The weapons system was the boat, and the boat was the engine. When the engines failed—as the HORs did—the boats did not sail. When the engines ran, the campaign proceeded. The Submarine Force, the Naval Submarine League, and the Naval Institute would all do well to notice that the single longest-running piece of hardware in U.S. naval history is not a gun, a radar, or a missile. It is a two-stroke opposed-piston diesel whose basic architecture was fixed in Germany in 1932 and whose American production began in 1938 and has not stopped.
The author thanks the engineering staff at USS Pampanito (San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park) and the maintainers of the NSWCPD Submarine Diesel Readiness & Sustainment Program, whose public documentation made this account possible.
Verified Sources & Citations
Primary and secondary references, federal contract records, and technical documentation supporting the foregoing account.
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“Junkers Jumo 207 D-V2 In-line 6 Diesel Engine,” Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, collection object NASM_A19660013000.
airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/junkers-jumo-207-d-v2-line-6-diesel-engine/nasm_A19660013000 -
“Junkers Jumo 204,” Wikipedia, citing Reinhard Müller, Junkers Flugtriebwerke (2006) and Kyrill von Gersdorff et al., Flugmotoren und Strahltriebwerke (2007).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Jumo_204 -
“Junkers Jumo 205,” Wikipedia.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Jumo_205 -
Bill Pearce, “Junkers Jumo 223 Aircraft Engine,” Old Machine Press, 26 September 2015. Citations include Jean-Pierre Pirault and Martin Flint, Opposed Piston Engines: Evolution, Use, and Future Applications (SAE International, 2010).
oldmachinepress.com/2015/09/26/junkers-jumo-223-aircraft-engine/ -
“Junkers Engines Index,” Aircraft Engine Historical Society, citing the historical record of the 1933 Nazi seizure of Junkers patents.
enginehistory.org/Piston/Before1925/EarlyEngines/J/J.shtml -
“Fairbanks-Morse,” Wikipedia.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairbanks-Morse -
Bill Pearce, “Fairbanks Morse Diamond Opposed-Piston Marine Engine,” Old Machine Press, 20 August 2019. Principal sources: R. H. Beadle, “Development of Diamond Opposed-Piston Diesel Engine,” SAE Transactions vol. 64 (1956); Lyle Cummins, Diesels for the First Stealth Weapon: Submarine Power 1902-1945 (2007); Submarine Main Propulsion Diesels, NavPers 16161 (June 1946).
oldmachinepress.com/2019/08/20/fairbanks-morse-diamond-opposed-piston-marine-engine/ -
Martin Leduc, “Martin's Fairbanks Morse Page,”
DieselDuck.info, including January 2023 correspondence with Brian King,
Fairbanks Morse Defense, confirming the four-inch shortened upper
connecting rod as original to the submarine adaptation and unchanged
since.
dieselduck.info/machine/01 prime movers/fairbanks_morse/fairbanks_morse.htm -
“Balao-class submarine,” Wikipedia. Principal technical source: Norman Friedman, U.S. Submarines Through 1945: An Illustrated Design History (Naval Institute Press, 1995).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balao-class_submarine -
“Cleveland Diesel Engine Division,” Wikipedia.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Diesel_Engine_Division -
Phil Dayton, “An Exclusive Look Inside a WW II Balao Class Submarine,” Diesel World, August 2015 (USS Pampanito 70th VJ Day feature).
dieselworldmag.com/features/an-exclusive-look-inside-an-ww-ii-balao-class-submarine/ -
Submarine Main Propulsion Diesels, NavPers 16161, Chapter 3, Bureau of Naval Personnel, June 1946.
maritime.org/doc/fleetsub/diesel/chap3.php -
James Scott, “America's Undersea War on Shipping,” Naval History 28:6 (U.S. Naval Institute, December 2014).
usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2014/december/americas-undersea-war-shipping -
John T. Harrison Jr., “The Silent Service's Success in the Pacific,” Proceedings 139:6/1,324 (U.S. Naval Institute, June 2013).
usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2013/june/silent-services-success-pacific -
Joint Army-Navy Assessment Committee, Japanese Naval and Merchant Shipping Losses During World War II by All Causes (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, February 1947), NAVEXOS P-468.
ibiblio.org/hyperwar/Japan/IJN/JANAC-Losses/JANAC-Losses-6.html -
United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report (Pacific War), 1 July 1946.
anesi.com/ussbs01.htm -
“List of Most Successful American Submarines in World War II,” Wikipedia, reflecting the 1980 JANAC revision of USS Tang's credit.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_successful_American_submarines_in_World_War_II -
Andrew Norris, “World War II: Japan's Disinterest in Merchant Ship Convoying,” Naval Submarine League archive, citing Mark P. Parillo, The Japanese Merchant Marine in World War II (Naval Institute Press, 1993).
archive.navalsubleague.org/2001/world-war-ii-japans-disinterest-in-merchant-ship-convoying -
Richard B. Frank, “American Subs Were a Far More Lethal Force in the Pacific War Than Previously Known,” HistoryNet, originally published in World War II magazine (2023). Principal data source: John D. Alden and Craig R. McDonald, United States and Allied Submarine Successes in the Pacific and Far East During World War II (McFarland, 2009).
historynet.com/american-subs-were-a-far-more-lethal-force-in-the-pacific-war-than-previously-known/ -
“Fairbanks Morse 38 8-1/8 Diesel Engine,” Wikipedia.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairbanks_Morse_38_8-1/8_diesel_engine -
Fairbanks Morse Defense, “FM Opposed Piston 38D 8-1/8” (product page), specifications and service history for current production.
fairbanksmorsedefense.com/solutions/engines/fm-38d-8-18/ -
Fairbanks Morse Defense corporate backgrounder (2019/2020),
cited 100 million cumulative operating hours of the OP platform; current
ownership by Arcline Investment Management.
fairbanksmorsedefense.com/blog/fm-awarded-cvn80and81-edgsets -
“Fairbanks Morse to Provide Emergency Diesel Generator
(EDG) Sets for US Navy Nuclear-Powered Aircraft Carriers CVN-80 and
CVN-81,” Fairbanks Morse Defense press release, 25 February 2019.
fairbanksmorsedefense.com/blog/fm-awarded-cvn80and81-edgsets -
Naval Surface Warfare Center Philadelphia Division, Solicitation N64498-25-R-0504 / PID N64498-24-RFPREQ-PD-42-0053, “US Navy Submarine Emergency Diesel Generator (EDG) Fairbanks Morse Opposed Piston (FMOP) Global Repair Services,” sources-sought notice, issued 25 August 2025; incumbent Fairbanks Morse LLC (contract N64498-21-D-4005), Beloit, Wisconsin.
govtribe.com/opportunity/federal-contract-opportunity/us-navy-submarine-emergency-diesel-generator-edg-fairbanks-morse-opposed-piston-fmop-global-repair-services-n6449825r0504 -
“Fairbanks Morse Defense Awarded Contract for FM 175D Engine to Support U.S. Navy's DDG(X) Program,” FMD press release via Business Wire, 8 July 2025.
thedefensepost.com/2025/07/09/fairbanks-morse-engine-us-navy/ -
Achates Power, Inc. (San Diego, California), corporate history
and technical backgrounder, including U.S. Army TARDEC Next-Generation
Combat Engine research contracts and joint work with AVL Powertrain
Engineering.
achatespower.com/about-achates-power/ -
“Fairbanks Morse Engine and Achates Power Team Up to Enhance Opposed-Piston Engines,” joint press release via Green Car Congress, 31 October 2013.
greencarcongress.com/2013/10/20131031-fme.html -
“Taking Powerful Steps: Fairbanks Morse's Trident OP,”
Fairbanks Morse Defense technical overview of the 3.335–3.705 MWe
Trident OP platform, efficiency verified by Ricardo Strategic
Consulting.
fairbanksmorsedefense.com/blog/taking-powerful-steps - Supplementary technical references: “Opposed-piston engine,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposed-piston_engine); Osvaldo Tasca, Francisco Laurini, & Javier Barragán, “Numerical Analysis of Several Port Configurations in the Fairbanks-Morse 38D8-1/8 Opposed Piston Marine Engine,” ResearchGate (researchgate.net); Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, USN (Ret.), Sink 'Em All: Submarine Warfare in the Pacific (E.P. Dutton, 1951); Clay Blair, Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan (Lippincott, 1975); Theodore Roscoe, United States Submarine Operations in World War II (Naval Institute Press, 1949).
IPCSG EDITORIAL CONTRIBUTOR · STEPHEN “PSEUDO PUBLIUS” · APRIL 2026
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