by Corwin Mendenhall

When news came of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, fleet submarine USS Sculpin, stationed at Manila in the Philippines, quickly put out to sea in search of enemy ships.

Her junior ensign in charge of torpedoes, Corwin Mendenhall, made seven undersea patrols in all aboard Sculpin in the south and western Pacific, and four more aboard Pintado, taking part in the American naval counteroffensive that gradually reversed the tide of Japanese success and won control of the Pacific.

Submarine Diary is the story of those patrols. No other book on the undersea war against Imperial Japan provides as vivid and detailed an account of what serving aboard a wartime submarine required.

Along with the perils of vulnerability to instant attack by air or sea at any time, until well into the war U.S. submariners had to contend with the frustration of using imperfect torpedoes that too often failed to operate properly.

By V-J Day some 2,117 Japanese navy and merchant vessels, totaling more than nine million tons, had been sent to the bottom, with American submarines accounting for more than 55 percent of them - sinking more enemy warships than any other naval arm.

But the costs were cruelly high. Twenty-two percent of all those who left on patrol aboard U.S. submarines failed to return - more than one out of every five sailors, Sculpin herself went down not long after Mendenhall was assigned to a new undersea boat, Pintado.

Published in 1991 by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill