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A compelling naval memoir of Arctic submarine duty—operations, engineering realities, and split‑second leadership choices in Emergency Deep.

Captain Alfred Scott McLaren served as commander of the USS Queenfish (SSN 651) from September 1969 to May 1973, the very height of the Cold War. As commander, McLaren led at least six major clandestine operations, including the first-ever exploration of the entire Siberian Continental Shelf: a perilous voyage detailed in his previous book Unknown Waters.

Emergency Deep: Cold War Missions of a Submarine Commander conveys the entire spectrum of Captain McLaren’s experiences commanding the USS Queenfish, mainly in the waters of the Russian Far East and also off Vietnam. McLaren offers a riveting and deeply human story that illuminates the intensity and pressures of commanding a nuclear attack submarine in some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable.

Relying on his own notes and records, as well as discussions with former officers and shipmates, McLaren focuses on operational matters both great and small. He recounts his unique perspectives on attack-submarine tactics and exploratory techniques in high-risk or uncharted areas, matters of leadership and team-building and the morale of his crews, and the innumerable and often unforeseen ways his philosophy of command played out on a day-to-day basis, with consequences that ran the gamut from the mundane to the dire and life-threatening.

Readers are also treated to significant new information and insight on submarine strategy, maneuvers, and culture. Such details illuminate and bring to life, with both great humor and gravitas, the intensity and pressures on those engaged in covert missions on nuclear attack submarines.
 

An outdoor adventure memoir by a legendary diver and innovator who never stopped pushing the limit

I Live Underwater is the highly anticipated posthumous memoir of Max Nohl, a larger-than-life thrill seeker and treasure hunter who revolutionized deep-sea diving. Recounting harrowing experiences with tangled air-hoses, hungry sharks, untested scientific theories, and painful cases of the bends, Nohl’s vivid narrative shows how his unquenchable thirst for adventure propelled him to transcend fear and become one of the field’s great innovators—shattering the diving record in 1937 as the first person to dive deeper than 400 feet. 

Beginning with the disquieting childhood experiences that inspired his obsession with the underwater world, Nohl goes on to discuss his innovative work on the first self-contained diving suit as a student at MIT and his risky experiments in breathing helium to achieve deeper dives. In addition to making vital contributions to the commercial diving industry, Nohl was a pioneer in underwater filming, developing equipment and techniques that were employed in many Hollywood film and television productions. 

After Nohl’s sudden death in 1960 in a car accident, his nearly complete memoir sat in the Milwaukee Public Library Archives—unpublished, until now. Accompanying this page-turning text is a dynamic assortment of images, including Nohl’s original pen-and-ink sketches and historic photos of Nohl and his collaborators. A foreword by Wisconsin Historical Society maritime archaeologist Tamara Thomsen provides insights into Nohl’s many important contributions to the diving world and to Wisconsin history and culture.

Includes stories of dives in Lake Michigan (near Milwaukee), the North Atlantic (near Marblehead and Martha’s Vineyard), Walden Pond, the Gulf Coast (near Morgan City, Louisiana, and Panama City, Apalachicola, Wakulla Springs, and Tarpon Springs in Florida), and the Caribbean (near Haiti and the Dominican Republic).
 

“A first-person view of submarine under-ice operations that appears in very few other works.”  —Gary E. Weir, author of Rising Tide: The Untold Story of the Russian Submarines that Fought the Cold War 

Unknown Waters tells the story of the brave officers and men of the nuclear attack submarine USS Queenfish (SSN-651), who made the first survey of an extremely important and remote region of the Arctic Ocean. The unpredictability of deep-draft sea ice, shallow water, and possible Soviet discovery, all played a dramatic part in this engrossing 1970 voyage.

Covering 3,100 miles over a period of some 20 days at a laborious average speed of 6.5 knots or less, the attack submarine carefully threaded its way through innumerable underwater canyons of ice and over irregular seafloors, at one point becoming entrapped in an “ice garage.” Only cool thinking and skillful maneuvering of the nearly 5,000-ton vessel enabled a successful exit.