All Hands Down: The True Story of the Soviet Attack on the USS Scorpion

I lived just outside Norfolk in 1968 when Scorpion was lost. I got married a couple of years later and left the area, but will NEVER forget how it affected our community. This book describes things exactly as they happened. It was like going back in a time machine. Finally the Scorpion story has been told. I only wish I could change the outcome.

Having read all the books in Jerome Preisler's Tom Clancy's Power Plays series, I knew he could tell a fast-paced story based on real-world politics and interesting characters, and was intrigued when I found out he'd collaborated with a submariner named Ken Sewall on a nonfiction work about the USS Scorpion, as I also enjoy books on maritime history. I wasn't disappointed. ALL HANDS DOWN reads like a novel. I was surprised to learn early in the book that Robert Ballard, the undersea scientist who found Titanic, was actually on a secret mission to examine the Scorpion wreck when he did so. Incredibly (to me) the entire Titanic expedition was an excuse, or "cover story", as Ballard was working for the CIA. The mystery of what happened to this submarine is tied together with heartbreaking stories of the crewmen and their families, and also the story of John Walker Jr., the spy who almost lost the Cold War for the United States. It is told in short scenes that leave you on the edge of your seat. All in all, a great book that I read in a single sitting. I'd recommend it to anyone.

Having served on the comissioning Crew of the USS Scamp SSN588 I have always been interested in the accounts of the Scorpion Disaster.This account has been a very telling one of our loss of the SSN589.The account of just what John Walker has been amplified in this book.I think it is a "Must Read"for all Submariners. William Roberts,FTCM(SS)USN,Ret