| All Hands Down: The True Story of the Soviet Attack on USS Scorpion |  | Authors: Sewell, Ken
Creator: Reader: To Be Announced
Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 1979891
Media: Audio CD
Edition: Unabridged
Number Of Items: 6
Pages: 7
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 5.7 x 5.2 x 0.7
ISBN: 1433246198
Dewey Decimal Number: 947
EAN: 9781433246197
ASIN: 1433246198
Publication Date: June 1, 2008
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Product Description
Sewell, a submarine veteran, and Preisler, a writer of techno-thrillers, add little new evidence in their version of the story; their new data is unfailingly familiar and they never succeed in making a persuasive case for the conspiracy and cover-up they claim occurred. Instead, Sewell and Preisler devote more time to anecdotes about the Scorpion's crew and their families and little vignettes of the routines on board a nuclear sub. What is undeniably useful is the book's demonstration of the high numbers of accidents between ships and aircrafts that were accepted as routine during much of the Cold War. All Hands Down highlights a truth no less relevant today: international incidents are in good part constructions mutually agreed upon after the event.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Gripping Read May 6, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Having read and tremendously enjoyed the book (see my review) I purchased the ALL HANDS DOWN audio as a birthday gift for my oldest son, who enjoys general history and true stories about the sea. He found it as gripping as I did. From the prologue, in which you are placed aboard a deepwater submersible descending to the ocean floor to investigate Scorpion's wreckage, to the story of Scorpion and her crew, ALL HANDS DOWN pulls you into the story and keeps you there from beginning to end. My son felt the audio reading was clear and dramatic and captured the flow of the book.
 Deeply Flawed Technically, Not Credible May 4, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
A FINAL SUMMARY POSTED 2 Sep 2008
In ALL HANDS DOWN (AHD), the author, Kenneth Sewell, conjectures the US nuclear submarine SCORPION was sunk on 22 May 1968 in the East Central Atlantic by a Soviet Ka-25 helicopter that dropped one of two AT-2 torpedoes it was carrying on SCORPION. Sewell further conjectures the 40 knot torpedo exploded at 1859 Greenwich Mean Tme (GMT) when SCORPION was located near 35 degrees north latitude, 35 degrees west longitude.
The following problems exist with this scenario:
- The first deployment of the Ka-25 - for test and evaluation purposes - did not occur until 18 Sep 1968, four months after SCORPION was lost, and it occurred not in the Atlantic but in the Mediterranean from the Soviet ASW Cruiser MOSKVA.
- The Ka-25 was not designed to lift even one torpedo the size and weight of the AT-2. A Soviet helicopter with this capability, the Ka-27, was not available to Soviet Naval Forces until more than 10 years after SCORPION was lost.
- The SCORPION wreckage was located near 33 degrees north latitude, 33 degrees west longitude or about 160 nautical miles from the position in AHD.
- Acoustic data recorded by the Columbia University Hydroacoustic Station (CUHS) in the Canary Islands indicated the initial event that resulted in the loss of SCORPION occurred at 1821 GMT on 22 May 1968, 38 minutes before the time noted in AHD. This event was one, more probably two low-order internal explosions that did not breach the pressure hull but caused loss of depth control.
- Photography of the SCORPION wreckage, and the CUHS acoustic data, indicated the submarine collapsed at great depth (below 1500 feet) from hydrostatic pressure. The wreckage shows no sign of damage from a torepdo explosion nor is there any wreckage of a Sovet torpedo.
- The photography and the CUHS acoustic data indicate SCORPION collapsed nearly simultaneously at two points separated by nearly 100 feet which is impossible to explain with a single torpedo hit.
- The CUHS acoustic data showed detection of more than 15 acoustic events associated with the loss of SCORPION but NO detection of a 40 knot Soviet torpedo.
Bottom line: Kenneth Sewel did not know when, where or why SCORPION was lost but he expects the reader to believe the Soviets sank it.
This is the same approach Sewell took with his previous conspiracy novel, RED STAR ROGUE, only in that book his position where the GOLF Class submarine (K-129) sank was more than 1000 nautical miles (nm) in error which made the books contention that the submarine sank while attemptinmg a missile launch against Pearl Harbor impossible because the maximum range of the GOLF missile was 750 nm.
Basic Review:
For an author who has chosen not to interview credible living witnesses including the three surviving TRIESTE II submersible pilots who observed the SCORPION wreckage -- Robert Nevin, Ross Saxon and David Byrnes, or the commander of the 1969 Phase II Investigation, CAPT. Robert Gautier, all of whom could have provided an accurate description of the damage to SCORPION, Jerome Preisler asks us to accept his version of underwater acoustics, physics and fracture analysis.
It is all very well for Jerome Preisler to write techno-thriller potboilers; it is quite another to write one and claim it is fact. Is it reasonable to expect readers to believe that the Soviet Union committed an act of war by sinking the SCORPION when there were was no tactical or strategic reason to do so? The Soviets were not preparing to launch a nuclear attack nor were they preparing for such an event by an advance deployment of their Northern Fleet submarines and surface ships to escape the bottleneck of the Barents Sea and thus increase the odds their Fleet would survive.
I agree with Jerome Preisler on one thing: Simon & Schuster has the right to publish what they want; however, they also have a responsibility to do the research required to determine if what they publish is nonfiction, as they claim in this case.
Preisler and Sewell would have us believe that the politically-cautious Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union, Sergey Gorshkov, decided to sink the SCORPION as the result of an irrational impulse. As for the conjecture that this was reciprocity for the loss of the GOLF (K-129) in the Pacific, the Soviets were still looking for that submarine two weeks after the loss of SCORPION. To this day, the Soviets do not know why or even when the GOLF was lost.
Another point: would the Soviets have taken the chance that the US might locate the SCORPION wreckage and determine it was lost because of a torpedo attack? Not likely, especially since the wreckage of the after section of the torpedo might be found and identified as Soviet.. Contrary to what Sewell and Preisler would have us believe, nothing is more obvious than the difference between torpedo attack damage and a collapse event. The first leaves an unmistakable hole through which catastrophic flooding occurs. This flooding collapses the internal bulkheads more than 1,500 feet above the 2000 foot depth at which SCORPION collapsed.. A torpedo attack would leave the exterior of the pressure hull intact which is why torpedoed or depth-charged submarines are often found holed but otherwise intact on the sea floor.,
On the other hand, a collapse event destroys the pressure hull, leaving it in multiple sections in a state completely different from damage cause by a torpedo attack. Scorpion's 1.88-inch-thick hull steel was folded inward where the operations compartment was crushed by the implosion event that separated the intact torpedo room, another form of damage that could not be caused by a torpedo.
John Craven postulated his original theory that SCORPION was sunk by her own torpedo before imagery of the wreck became available. Given the logical progression of events caused by a torpedo strike, Craven predicted SCORPION would be found intact. Nearly three decades after SCORPION was found in multiple sections -- causing irreparable damage to Craven's torpedo blast theory, he then speculated that a torpedo battery fire triggered an explosion inside the torpedo room, a compartment that shows no signs of blast damage. The after bulkhead of that compartment is deformed forward, not backward as would have been the case if an explosion had occurred within the torpedo compartment.. It was eventually evident to Craven that no torpedo struck the SCORPION, yet we still have Sewell and Preisler trying to capitalize on a theory Craven himself discarded long ago.
In addition, Craven himself blasted Ed OIffley's conspiracy book that claims a Soviet attack sank the SCORPION as "wrong" and "irresponsible."
Aside from the condition of the SCORPION wreck, the three most damning technical considerations that confirm ALL HANDS DOWN is pure fiction are:
1. The Ka-25 Soviet ASW helicopter that Sewell and Preisler maintain carried two 1050 kg AT-2 torpedoes and used one to sink the SCORPION did not have the lift (payload) capability to get off the deck with even one of these weapons.
2. The Canary Island acoustic data show no detection of a 40-knot AT-2 torpedo attacking SCORPION when detection of a torpedo at that speed would have been a near certainty.
3. Two ultra-reliable Russian sources (bona fides available upon request) independently state that the first Ka-25 deployment for operational test and evaluation occurred on 19 September 1968 to the Mediterranean aboard the Soviet ASW cruiser, the MOSKVA. The date of this deployment was four months after SCORPION was lost.
As I like to periodically remind all concerned, it was Kenneth Sewell who brought us RED STAR ROGUE which has been completely discredited by the location of the GOLF (K-129) wreck 700 nautical miles beyond the maximum range of the R-21 missile Sewell claims malfunctioned and sank the GOLF while the submarine was attempting a nuclear strike at Pearl Harbor (1600 nautical miles away) to trigger a Sino-American war. Sewell ignored a 2001 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report position for the wreck (40.1N, 179-9E). Sewell placed the wreck 1250 nautical miles closer to Hawaii to support his wild conjecture. Further, the IAEA position is where the Hughes Glomar Explorer, the CIA recovery ship, lifted the bow section of the GOLF from the bottom.
Sewell seems obsessed with writing near-war conspiracies that require fabricated scenarios AND the distortion of known facts which can be easily established to be distortions. With such a track record, why should anyone believe what Sewell has written in ALL HANDS DOWN? Where is common sense in this equation? It is a more recent version of the jingoistic assertion by the US press and Congress that the Spanish sank the US battleship MAINE in Havana harbor on 15 February 1898 which the US used to as a pretext to justify the Spanish-American war. It took a book by Admiral Hyman Rickover in 1975 to finally refute that wild conjecture. Let us hope we do not have to wait a similar period for those who have read ALL HANDS DOWN to realize the book is a gullibility test that, unfortunately, many have failed.
Oh, by the way, who was one of two experts on the effects of underwater explosions whom Admiral Hyman Rickover, the taskmaster of excellence, selected to analyze photography of the MAINE structural damage evident when the ship was raised in 1911? Why, it was Robert Price, co-author of both the SCORPION Structural Analysis Group report and the Naval Ordnance Laboratory report on SCORPION.
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