Dr. Don Walsh of Trieste and Marianas Trench fame opens his Foreword to Will Forman’s book stating… “I cannot think of a more qualified person to write this book.” This reviewer certainly concurs in Don’s endorsement. I had the privilege of a casual but enlightening association with Will when I too worked at the U.S. Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS). I was at the Pasadena Annex and on San Clemente Island while Will was toiling to build the “Deep Jeep” in the middle of the Mojave desert! One of his colleagues, a renowned marine geologist then at NOTS, constantly referred to submersibles as “those backyard death-traps” although he did bump me from a dive in the Cousteau “Soucoupe” when Westinghouse and the Navy contracted it for dives off San Clemente in the early 60s.

Palmer, H. 2000. Review of The History of American Deep Submersible Operations, by W. Forman. Oceanography 13(3):122, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2000.25.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.