Many naval buffs know the outlines of this story. The submarine
Squalus sank off the New England coast in 1939 but was found by her sister ship
Sculpin. More than half the crew was rescued, and the ship herself salvaged and renamed
Sailfish. In World War II,
Sculpin was sunk by the Japanese, and her survivors sent as POWs to Japan aboard an escort carrier that was sunk en route by
Sailfish. Half the American survivors were killed. Culling from an abundance of primary source materials, Lavo fleshes out this unusual story to produce a well-written narrative educing many new details; for example, the
Sculpin survivors' captivity in the Ashio copper mines is here told for the first time. This is one of those World War II naval volumes that perhaps did not cry to be written yet is worthwhile and certainly profited from being written while living survivors remained to tell the tale.
Roland Green
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