I've had this book sitting on my "to be read" pile for awhile and to a certain degree I wish that I had left it there, as though the story is inherently gripping at a certain point I just don't trust this book. I was on edge from the start due to a rather bombastic forward by Len Deighton and there are just little things that put me off, like referring to the destroyer HMS "Brazen" as being coal-fired. The main thing is that there is a legend that the crew of HMS "Thetis" were sacrificed so that the vessel could be saved, as cutting into her pressure hull would destroy her structural integrity as a warship. The author appears to have bought into this myth and there are hints of evidence that this sort of intervention was a step that the Admiralty was prepared to take only as the last course of action, and too much time was allowed to pass while it was still a viable option.

So why was "Thetis" lost on her first submergence test and why was it so hard to assign responsibility? Much of it comes down to many hands make light work and if no one agent can be blamed than no one is responsible. The shipyard Cammell Laird deserves blame for slipshod manufacturing practices and the RN really doesn't seem like it was trying very hard to hold the firm accountable. The RN and the yard probably also share blame for bad design elements. The RN had bad doctrine in regards to a situation like this and didn't even practice what doctrine they did have particularly well. Finally, there is an overarching sense of slack attitudes and arrogance that wouldn't have been tolerated by an Ernest King or a Hyman Rickover. Never mind the small matter that in the Summer of '39 war was in the air and the push was on to get ships into commission and one suspects that corners were being cut due to the sense of emergency; just think of the recent American incidents at sea driven by pushing too few ships and personnel too hard. This also begs the question that if submarine rescue in the RN was largely a matter of self-help why didn't the responsible officers start getting people off "Thetis" in a more reasonable time frame rather than waiting until it was almost too late? Again, slack attitudes all around.

That still leaves the probably unanswerable question of why the external torpedo door that flooded the vessel was left open in the first place. Booth does note that the civilian contractors aboard and the RN had different doctrine on how torpedo tubes were supposed to be used as part of ballast system and in a situation of ambiguous authority it appears that one hand did not know what the other was doing. But that would mean blaming the trials crew for their own demise and no one wanted to go there, at least in public. Also, if the hydraulic systems for the sub's control surfaces were not properly set up why should the hydraulics for the torpedo tubes not also be suspect. Booth ends on a then-confidential quote from the eminent government official John Colville that implies there are documents that HM's government has not yet released that would more firmly place responsibility on the Admiralty, so that the author is not quite willing to say that there was nothing to the mythology. ( )