Williams, whose 30-year navy career began in 1927 and included submarine service, opens a modest but valuable history of early U.S. polar submarine operations with the trouble-plagued, pioneering 1931 voyage of Sir Hubert Wilkins' U.
This book proved entirely opaque to me: there were so many technical matters presented with no clarification for the non-specialist, and these often matters of life and death for the subs discussed, that I set aside the book in bafflement.