Under Pressure: The Final Voyage Of Submarine S-Five

"The sea is notoriously unforgiving, but it reserves its harshest penalties for those who venture beneath its surface," writes U.S. Navy veteran A.J. Hill in Under Pressure. The captain and crew of the S-Five submarine learned this gloomy fact the hard way in 1920, when they tested their new boat's ability to "crash dive"--submerse as quickly as possible--and sank straight to the bottom of the ocean. A faulty induction valve had flooded, leaving 40 men stranded at a depth of 180 feet, about 50 miles off the coast of Cape May, New Jersey. Everything seemed to go wrong: the drive motors failed, the main lighting circuits went dead, and their oxygen began to run thin. Nobody knew their location and they had no means of calling for help. All they had was their own ingenuity and the remarkable leader Lt. Commander Savvy Cooke. The story of how they managed--just barely--to escape an underwater tomb will appeal to fans of Peter Maas's The Terrible Hours (though it's worth noting that the technology behind the 1939 Squalus rescue wasn't available to the men trapped in the S-Five) and Blind Man's Bluff by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew. --John J. Miller