A boat blessed with a skilled, aggressive commander like Mush Morton or Eugene Fluckey is an effective boat. A sub not so blessed is apt to run afoul of hard luck or worse.
What a drag.
Top Gun was about the best of the best flitting around the skies, kept aloft by a lonely impulse of delight. This list of History s Worst 5 Submarines catalogues the worst of the worst lumbering around in the briny deep. Such a vessel is a millstone dragging down the fortunes of its navy, its parent military, or the society that puts it to sea.
Call it
Bottom Gun.
Now, it s possible to rank hardware, including submersibles and their armament, purely by technical characteristics. The crummiest piece of kit condemned by shoddy design, faulty construction work, or premature obsolescence is the bottom-feeder on such a list. In the case of submarines, then, tallying up speed, submerged endurance, acoustic properties, and kindred statistics offers a reputable way to proceed. But it tells only part of the story.
Rembrandt: Healing of Peter’s Mother in Law. (Wiki)
A Reflection for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings:
As skipper of the Wahoo, a submarine newly commissioned in 1941, Lieutenant Commander Dudley W. Morton rewrote expectations for submersibles in the Second World War. The U.S. Navy had previously valued them as scouting craft, but that changed in February 1943, when the Wahoo returned to Pearl Harbor, sporting eight Rising Sun flags on one of her signal halyards. Five of those ships, totaling 32,000 tons, had been sunk on that cruise alone.
The Wahoo’s captain and crew were focused warriors, but, as Ian W. Toll records in