Sublime

In February 1943, Admiral Kent Hewitt—fresh from amphibious invasions in North Africa and equipped with the sailor’s gift to see a red sky at morning and predict the storm to follow—sent a message to the US Army’s commander of ground forces requesting a curriculum addition to the Scout and Raider program to begin training men on the destruction of

“In recognition of your creative and original work on sophisticated rocket systems, for your contributions to the advancement of technology and ability to transform ideas into reality, and especially for your demonstrated courage and integrity for always standing on principles you know to be right and just.”

But Rickover was also just a regular human being, someone with a temper, someone with colleagues and subordinates, a spouse, a son, parents, neighbors, bills to pay, traffic to navigate. What guided him, what he spoke about repeatedly in speeches and briefings, was the importance of this idea of a sense of right and wrong, a sense of duty and honor

George Melville would serve as the Jeannette’s engineer. Said to be distantly related to the great author, Melville was an improvisational genius with machines—a greasy-fingered savant who seemed most at home among thumping boilers and sharp blasts of steam. The engineer, thirty-eight years old, had a booming voice, a stout physique, and an enormou

Admiral King “listened with utmost enthusiasm,” wrote Captain James Doyle, Turner’s operations officer, when describing the UDT efforts at Flintlock. “Excellent,” King interrupted in the middle of Doyle’s briefing, “that business of the hydrographic survey at the first possible moment is a pet hobby of mine.” For Turner, however, a unit capable of