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Hostile Waters
Peter Huchthausen, Igor Kurdin, and R. Alan White. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. 303 pp. Bib. Photos. $23.95 ($21.55).
Retired Captain Peter Huchthausen, former U.S. Naval Attache in Moscow, has coauthored a "factual" account of the sinking of the Soviet Yankee-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) K-219 off Bermuda in October 1986. Collaborating with Huchthausen were retired Soviet Navy Captain First Rank Igor Kurdin, a former executive officer of K-219, and novelist R. Alan White. The heart of the book is based on extensive interviews with the crew of the K-219.
The dust jacket of Hostile Waters states that the book "reads like a pageturning thriller, a Tom Clancy novel of underwater intrigue, but this story really happened."
Well, parts of it did; but parts clearly did not, and appear to have been made up out of the whole cloth. The account of what happened on board the K-219 and how Captain Igor Britanov and his crew valiantly fought to save their ship almost surely is true-and it is a spellbinding story. Unfortunately, however, the authors juxtapose this fascinating account of fighting for survival on board a doomed submarine with a wholly fictitious narrative of what was supposedly happening on board the USS Augusta (SSN-710), which they allege had been trailing the Yankee throughout the entire sequence of events. Worse yet, the book implies that the Augusta may have collided with the Yankee and somehow caused or exacerbated the missile detonation which crippled the ship-at least some members of the K-219 crew appear to believe this. To put icing on the cake, the authors go on to describe the Augusta doing such mind-boggling things as cutting the cable from the Soviet merchant ship that was attempting to tow K-219 (while cleverly remaining submerged) and then making a shallow-depth high-speed...