A GOOD SEA STORY RUINED BY A BAD TELLING. In keeping with a down year ending a down decade, a down Book Review N^o. 50. Submarine operations in the Pacific Theater provide material for more than a few good stories. All it takes is a straightforward telling and a sense of organization. Jonathan J. McCullough's telling, in A Tale of Two Subs: An Untold Story of World War II, Two Sister Ships, and Extraordinary Heroism, offers neither.

The untold stories are told better elsewhere. They go better if told in order.

Start with the sister ships, U.S. Navy submarines Squalus and Sculpin. On a test in 1939, Squalus sank when he submerged with an air induction vent still open. Some of the crew were rescued, and the submarine was subsequently raised, rebuilt, and renamed Sailfish.

The retired submariner at the Wisconsin Maritime Museum is standing near an emergency lever that was subsequently fitted to U.S. submarines, to give the crew a fighting chance at being able to close the induction vent without standing directly under it.

USS Cobia, 20 May 1999.

Sculpin and Sailfish put to sea after Pearl Harbor, aided by the successful code-breaking of Naval Intelligence, hampered by unreliable torpedoes, and mindful of the risks of a relatively quick death by drowning or a somewhat slower death in a Japanese prison camp. Some of Sculpin's crew, bound for just such a camp after the Japanese forced him to surrender, were lost when Sailfish sank their transportation, carrier Chuyo. The reader will pick up a few nuggets of useful information on each of these things, that is, if he hasn't abandoned his reading after one too many jumps from the conn to the codebreakers to the homefront, without continuity. There are better tellings of each of the sub-plots elsewhere.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.)