USS SQUALUS (SS-192)

On the morning of May 23, 1939, the submarine USS Squalus sank off the coast of New Hampshire with fifty-nine men aboard. Twenty-six died in the first seconds. The remaining thirty-three waited in the cold and darkness at two hundred and forty feet while a steel bell descended toward them for the first time in the history of submarine navigation. The rescue that followed changed submarine salvage protocols around the world.

But the story did not end there.

The Squalus's hull was returned to the surface, repaired, and renamed USS Sailfish. In December 1943, in the middle of a Pacific typhoon, its torpedoes sank a Japanese carrier. Aboard that carrier, traveling as prisoners of war, were the survivors of the USS Sculpin - the sister ship that had been the first to respond to the Squalus's sinking four years earlier and whose crew had established the contact that made the rescue possible.

One man survived to tell what had happened.

USS Squalus: The Submarine That Rose from the Dead examines with documentary rigor and narrative depth the arc most dense with historical irony that American submarine warfare produced: the ship rescued by its twin that returned to sea under another name and involuntarily destroyed the men who had saved it. It is a book about the identity of the objects that human beings build, sink, recover, and return to war. About the institutional decisions that strategic pressure makes possible and that moral distance makes uncomfortable. About the men who operated at both ends of a chain that nobody designed and that the Pacific closed with the indifference of oceans toward the stories that men build on their waters.

The steel was the same. The name had changed. The consequences were permanent.