Praise for Silent Steel "The magnitude of the tragedy of the USS Scorpion is matched only by the depth of the mystery surrounding her loss. Stephen Johnson has done a remarkable job of shining new light on this dark moment in U.S. submarine history." --Sherry Sontag, coauthor of Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage "What happened to the USS Scorpion? The question has vexed submariners for almost four decades. Now, with meticulous research and incredible attention to detail, Stephen ...
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Praise for Silent Steel "The magnitude of the tragedy of the USS Scorpion is matched only by the depth of the mystery surrounding her loss. Stephen Johnson has done a remarkable job of shining new light on this dark moment in U.S. submarine history." --Sherry Sontag, coauthor of Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage "What happened to the USS Scorpion? The question has vexed submariners for almost four decades. Now, with meticulous research and incredible attention to detail, Stephen Johnson examines and dissects one of the most tragic and mysterious submarine accidents in U.S. Navy history." --Douglas Waller, author of Big Red: Inside the Secret World of a Trident Nuclear Submarine "Stephen Johnson has crafted a forensic masterpiece that leads the reader back through time to unravel the gnawing enigma of the tragic 1968 loss of the nuclear attack submarine USS Scorpion. Sifting through a maze of conflicting theories, he meticulously lays out a tale of undersea detectives searching for conclusive evidence to one of the most baffling mysteries of the cruel sea." --Rear Admiral Thomas Evans, author, analyst specializing in submarine history and operations, and former officer on the Scorpion "The manuscript arrived with yesterday's afternoon mail. I finished reading it by nightfall. It's that good! Thoroughly researched, impeccably documented, with an appealing and literate style, Silent Steel should become essential reading for submarine enthusiasts and for anyone else who enjoys an engaging and informative yarn." --A. J. Hill, author of Under Pressure: The Final Voyage of Submarine S-Five
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Seller's Description:
Good. Minimal signs of wear. Corners and cover may show wear. May contain highlighting and or writing. May be missing dust jacket. May not include supplemental materials. May be a former library book.
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Seller's Description:
Good. Hardcover This item shows wear from consistent use but remains in good readable condition. It may have marks on or in it, and may show other signs of previous use or shelf wear. May have minor creases or signs of wear on dust jacket. Packed with care, shipped promptly.
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Seller's Description:
Very good in very good dust jacket. DJ clean / slight edgewear. boards clean / lightly bumped spine ends. text clean / tight. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 292 p. Contains: Unspecified. Audience: General/trade.
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Good in Good jacket. xi, [1], 292 pages. Contains vivid photos of the scorpion and her crew. Lists the Officers and Crew of the USS Scorpion. Bibliography. Index. DJ is taped to the boards. This book combines a thrilling adventure story and an intriguing mystery with a cautionary tale about the limits of technology and the high price of failure at sea. Journalist Stephen Johnson (a former Houston Chronicle reporter) has written a compelling and meticulously detailed examination of the Scorpion disaster. Using Navy Court of Inquiry records and interviews with former Scorpion sailors, naval scientists, submarine warfare experts and family members of those who died, he provides possible answers about the sinking and in the process paints a vivid picture of the U.S. -Soviet struggle at sea. We get a guided tour of the numerous technical malfunctions aboard the 1960-commissioned Scorpion. Johnson looks at a 1967 mishap involving a torpedo that somehow activated inside the submarine during a training exercise. Although the torpedo didn't explode, the cause of this potentially disastrous problem, he writes, was never determined. Johnson also examines a number of characters in this drama. He writes that "the crew quickly warmed" to Cmdr. Francis Atwood Slattery and Lt. Cmdr. David Lloyd after they took command in late 1967. "Scorpion sailors who served under the two later spoke well of the submarine's two top officers." We also meet the fantastically lucky Sonarman Bob Davis, who had been sentenced to 30 days' confinement in Norfolk's Camp Allen brig because he missed the Scorpion's departure by 15 minutes. In this book, the author has tried to clear away much of the confusion surrounding the Scorpion disaster by providing the fullest possible story about the Scorpion's final eighteen months. He has also attempted to place a human face on the Scorpion disaster, which has been consistently characterized as the loss of nothing more than a complex machine, rather than a catastrophe that ended the lives of ninety-nine dedicated men. With the passage of years, officers, sailors, and scientists who had long ago retired decided that enough time had passed for them to speak openly about their roles as onetime crew members on the Scorpion or their involvement in the investigations the Navy conducted into the disaster. Derived from a Kirkus review: Dissecting one of the U.S. Navy's most tragic and perplexing losses and the nearly four decades of investigation that have followed. Journalist Johnson, who first wrote about the Scorpion for the Houston Chronicle, deals with this unsolved mystery by exhaustively exploring everything known about the vessel's final year-and-a-half of operation, culminating in its fatal dive in May 1968, about 450 miles southwest of the Azores Islands. The resultant aggregation of events specific to the Scorpion and its crew, coupled with known parallels in the annals of nuclear submarine technology, is a collection of hair-raising possibilities. So shrouded and silent was the Scorpion's disappearance-at the height of Cold War tensions, when the U.S. jockeyed with the U.S.S.R. for superiority at sea-that families and friends of the crew were awaiting its return dockside in Norfolk, Va., some five days, it turned out, after the vessel had been lost. The author spares no detail in linking some of the snafus occurring during various exercises aboard the Scorpion to distinctly fatal possibilities. Prime among them: weapons glitches, including a "hot run" malfunction in which a torpedo's engine started while it was still lodged in its firing tube and the inadvertent release of a dummy homing torpedo that, had it been live, could have returned to kill the sub (still favored by some speculators as the likely cause of Scorpion's loss). Other potential disasters, such as the flooding of a main storage battery with poisonous chlorine gas, can't be totally ruled out. Engrossing documentation of haunting, grisly what-ifs.
Stephen Johnson has written the definitive documented story of the loss of the USS Scorpion SSN-579 in the Atlantic in 1968. Others have tried to write conspiracy theories and have failed miserably. This is the book to read.
