Final Harbor

Prologue

There were no gestures of tenderness, no soft words of love when she was conceived. Those would come later when men lived with her, rode her, cursed her and finally came to love her.

The conceptual couch was built of drawing boards and the fetus was a thick stack of blueprints labeled “Fleet Submarine Work Order SS/58903-6431-171/39-41.”

She was midwived by Navy Yard workmen dressed in grimy work clothes as the world convulsed in agony; as Poland reeled under the invasion of Russian and German troops, and England, fearful but unafraid, lashed out with a declaration of war against the invaders.

As she grew from a long stretch of gaunt circular ribs of steel to the smooth, deadly sleekness of her finished shape, Finland was overrun, Norway fell and the Low Countries drowned in the riptides of war that swept across Europe.

She had no name. That would come later when a bottle of champagne would be broken over her bulbous nose. Until that day she would bear the generic name given to all submarines — “The Boat.”

In time the Navy sent a man to command her. Later he was joined by other officers and a cadre of Chief and First-Class Petty officers.

These men grew with the Boat. They watched the Navy Yard workmen install the intricate systems of oil, water, air and hydraulic lines that were the arteries of the Boat. They traced the myriad webs of electrical circuitry that were the Boat’s nervous system and they watched as the Boat’s propulsion systems were installed, four huge diesel engines for running on the surface, two immense storage batteries for propulsion while submerged. In bow and stern the Boat’s weapons were installed, six bronze torpedo tubes in the bow, four in the stern. With their knowing hands and eyes the men who would be the Boat’s living heart watched her as she was formed and learned all her concealed parts before they were hidden from view.

The work went on under a blizzard of newspaper headlines that told of the war in Europe. As the men learned the Boat they came to respect the long, sweet reach of this underseas warship that was to be their home in time of peace, the weapon they would wield if the war raging in Europe should come to their shores.

This is the story of the Boat and the men who took her to war in the far reaches of the Pacific Ocean against the forces of the Empire of Japan, a war which would claim of those who fought in submarines the heaviest casualty rate of all the branches of the United States Armed Forces.