USS FLASHER (SS-249): The Deadliest Submarine in American History

In January 1944, USS Flasher departed Pearl Harbor on her first war patrol. Fifteen months later, she returned from her sixth - having sent more Japanese shipping to the bottom than any other American submarine in history. Twenty-one ships. 100,231 tons. Six consecutive successful patrols. A record the Pacific War never surpassed.But the tonnage figure is where the story begins, not where it ends.USS Flasher: The Deadliest Submarine in American History is the first full narrative account of Flasher's six-patrol operational career - from her keel-laying at Electric Boat's Groton shipyard in September 1942, through the two commanding officers whose contrasting approaches both proved equal to the South China Sea's demands, to the conning tower that still stands at a Groton street corner as the only physical remnant of a boat the scrapyard took in 1963. It is the story of Reuben Whitaker, who built the record patrol by patient patrol with the positioning discipline of a man who understood that aggression and recklessness were not the same thing. And it is the story of George Grider - who inherited the most successful submarine in the Pacific Fleet with fourteen days to learn it, then conducted the greatest single patrol in American submarine history.The December 1944 engagements alone tell a story that no popular account has examined at full depth: two destroyers and a tanker sunk in a single day through a firing geometry that required torpedoes to pass beneath one warship to reach the vessel behind her, followed seventeen days later by a triple tanker strike so rapid and so complete that the escorting vessels concluded they had sailed into a minefield. Together, those engagements pushed Flasher's record past every competitor and helped sever the oil lifeline on which Japan's entire war machine depended.This book examines that record with the seriousness it has always deserved - operationally, strategically, and humanly, including the men on both sides of the torpedoes.