On 12 August 1943, on Midway Island, Lt. Cdr. I. J. Galantin took command of the fleet submarine USS Halibut. For the next fourteen months, Galantin and his officers and crew would play their part in the unrelenting attack on Japan's navy and merchant marine. But it was in Luzon Strait in November 1944 that the submarine and its crew underwent their greatest ordeal. Detected and driven down while attacking a decoy, Halibut was subjected to an assault of appalling ferocity. Badly damaged, the crippled sub and crew endured hours of desperate maneuvering and helpless waiting before the...

In a collision with a steamship, City of Rome, on the night of September 25, 1925, the U.S. Navy Submarine S-51 sank in 132 feet of water, taking 33 sailors to the ocean floor. This is the story of the men charged with doing the impossible--raising the thousand ton sub from the bottom of the sea. Added to this modern classic of true adventure are a foreword and afterword giving specifics of the accident and the aftermath, additional photographs, a publisher's preface, and appendices.

Author Mochitsura Hashimoto was one of the few Japanese submarine captains to survive. Shortly before the end of WW2 he inflicted the greatest single loss on the U.S. Navy in its history, when he torpedoed and sank the USS Indianapolis -- soon after it had delivered parts for the first A-bomb on Hiroshima to the US base on Tinian, ironically enough. The title, however, refers to the fate of the Japanese submarine fleet. It's a tale of the bravery of doomed men in a lost cause, against impossible odds. The kaitens or human torpedoes were not the only submarine kamikazes: the whole war in the...