Review by Booklist Review
On February15, 1968, nuclear attack submarine USS Scorpion left Norfolk,\b Virginia.\b On May 22, 1968, the Scorpion, with 99 men aboard, was lost in the Atlantic. After 37 years, a court of inquiry, and three undersea investigations--the latter two headed by Dr. Robert Ballard, best known for his discovery of the Titanic--why the sub sank has not been determined. Johnson offers a very readable account of the very tragic mystery, complete with sketches of crew members and a well--delineated picture of the naval and submarine culture of that time. While he describes the evidence generated by all three investigations, the question of what caused the Scorpion to implode and smash with such force on the floor of the Atlantic is still a controversy. --Frieda Murray Copyright 2006 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Johnson painstakingly details the last 18 months of the Cold War-era fast-attack nuclear submarine U.S.S. Scorpion, which disappeared with all hands on May 22, 1968, in the mid-Atlantic. Commissioned in 1960, the Scorpion tested nuclear sub warfare tactics in exercises around the world until its final voyage following four months of duty with the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. When the ship didn't emerge at its homeport of Norfolk, Va., on its scheduled arrival date of May 27, 1968, the navy launched its largest search in U.S. naval history and reported the ship and its 99 crewmen officially dead on June 5. Four months later, the navy located pieces of the ship's hull in more than 10,000 feet of water. Further investigations came to no definitive conclusion about what caused the demise of the Scorpion. Was it a Soviet attack? Did one of the Scorpion's torpedoes accidentally detonate? Did its hull crack due to poor maintenance? Did its main storage battery explode? Mining navy documents and first-person testimony, Johnson's deeply researched effort explores these and other possible explanations, but concludes that the ship's end will remain an enigma. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book 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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
