Rising Tide

Very good book giving the side of the Soviet "Silent Service" during the cold war. Obviously edited to some extent, but not so bad that you can't fill in the blanks if you have a cold war submarine background. Very interesting points of view on what the Red Sub's were trying to do to us as we were doing to them.

I was at Barnes & Noble looking for a more political book, but then I saw Rising Tide. I picked up and went straight to the counter. And I was not dissappointed. It gives you the perspective of the Cold War that not many people have seen. The Russians had been trying to develop a submarine fleet that could counter the United States and wanted a global prescense. This book gives you the details from when Stalin was dreaming of this to the sinking of the Kursk in 2000. It gives the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the first testing of a Russian SSBN, the multiple journeys to the North Pole and the espionage conducted by the Soviet Union's submarines. If you have read Blind Man's Bluff, you will definitely like this! I can't put it down!

Readers who demand a complete and meticulous history of Soviet submarine warfare should join the CIA. For the rest of us who cannot or will not join the CIA, Rising Tide comes as close as possible to describing the Soviet sub program -- the maneuvers of her vessels, conflicts with American boats, strategies, technologies, and the political tit-for-tat that accompanied it all. As a bonus, Rising Tide sports an appendix containing an itemization of Soviet boats replete with tonnage, diving depth, length and special features. Particularly heartbreaking was the account of the nuclearization of the Soviet navy, her transition to reactor power. For example, the Soviets inserted two reactors into most boats -- before they were fully developed. The result was repeated volunteer suicide missions by crew members to turn off overheating reactor cores and leaking cooling pipes. Also interesting is the account of Soviet technological progress in shipbuilding. From early diesel-powered jalopies, the Soviets managed to produce, in 1977 (initial design, 1957), a reactor-powered Alfa-class boat, made entirely of Titanium, that could dive to 800m at 40 knots. The boats were all still intolerably hot and sweaty in warmer climates, until Typhoon and Akula class boats appeared with warheads and nuclear-armed torpedoes. Beyond the edifying history, however, Rising Tide breaks down the last Cold War barriers of mistrust and ignorance, finally documenting the heroism and ingenuity of honest sailors who, trapped by a history never in their control, fought steadfastly for a dying and unworthy ideology.

This is the first real sub book I have read. The historical appendix is really good covering The Russian Navy. There are many facts in here that are amazing to someone new to the genre. This may not be the best book, but it is worth a reading. The info on the Kursk and K-19 were informative and cleared out all the nonsense you get from Hollywood movies. Very informative about Soviet Naval Culture.

There have been quite a few books in recent years based upon first-person accounts of submarine operations during the Cold War. These include several books by retired US Navy Captain Peter Huchthausen (Hostile Waters, October Fury, K-19), several books on the Kursk (A Time to Die is excellent), and Dark Waters, on the NR-1 research submarine. Of course the book that kicked it all off is the excellent Blind Man's Bluff. One thing to keep in mind for all of these books is that for the most part they are based upon interviews, not documents, which are still classified. The problem with writing history based upon interviews is that people remember things the way that they want to remember them, not necessarily the way that they really happened. And memories can fail. So these books are not truly history, but memoirs.Rising Tide was written by Gary Weir and Walter J. Boyne. Weir is a professional historian for the US Navy and has written about the SOSUS underwater listening array. Boyne is a professional aviation writer, and I suspect that Weir did most of the research and writing and Boyne may have polished it up. Despite the fact that Weir is a historian, not a journalist or retired naval officer, the book is not as historically grounded or researched as I would have preferred. It is based primarily on interviews and I found the footnotes to be superficial. While this will not bother most readers, I find that it makes it much harder to look for further information on things mentioned in the books, and it makes it harder to totally trust the information that is provided. We have no way to confirm the stories in the book. (More on this in a moment.)Rising Tide starts out a little slower than some of Huchthausen's books, and initially re-covers much of the same territory--the plight of the K-19, Soviet submarine operations during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a succession of submarine accidents. One problem with all of these books is that because they are often filled with "thrilling stories of the sea" rather than recounts of exactly what the submarines accomplished, it starts to seem as if submarine operations were nothing but daring adventures and near-fatal accidents, rather than military missions that served a clear purpose. The US Navy's submarine service likes to brag that it never suffers accidents, but when one picks up these books it looks like submarines were in constant danger of sinking. Clearly this form of storytelling can leave a false impression of what really happened.Because Weir interviewed many of the same people that Huchthausen did, the stories and perspectives are largely the same, and the reader who has already read those other books will not learn anything new in these sections. There are some differences of interpretation in some cases, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I wish that the authors had specifically responded to them. Why not clearly identify where these books disagree on details? In some cases t