Eight Survived: The Harrowing Story of the USS Flier and the Only Downed World War II Submariners to Survive and Evade Capture Review

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(More customer reviews)Eight survived is another title to make Admiral O'Kane's 'Clear the Bridge' soar. This one is barely readable and is barely a one star book. The author is not familiar with nautical terminology. The skipper of the sub is ordered to "anchor at a dock", is standing on the "floor" of the conning tower, and the crew's compartment has a steel "floor". Campbell opens the book with an involved description of the Flier going aground at Midway. The chapter screams for a chart of the Midway atoll to put some coherence in the chapter and it isn't there. All we know is that the channel is narrow and difficult and the Flier skipper, who supposedly has fourteen years' experience at sea, totally bungled the approach. The sub runs aground and in attempting to set the anchor in a heavy sea, a seaman is lost overboard and drowned and several others come close to drowning.
To pad the word count Campbell digresses with character vignettes that just don't fit into the narrative which is shaky enough. We have no interest in the men mainly because the war patrol events aren't clearly defined and the result is both stories lack involvement and coherence. My thought is that Mr. Campbell doesn't want to clutter the book with a lot of submarine lingo which is a criticism of O'Kane's book. Clear the Bridge has a compelling story that moves and is involving and we are quite willing to work with O'Kane when he discusses, clappers and angles on the bow, etc. This story dumbs down the action to generalities that insult the intelligence of the reader with a minimal knowledge of submarine warfare.
The writing style is plodding and formulaic. Two or three subject-verb-object declarative sentences in a row. Then a compound sentence with a subordinate clause. This would be good high school level non-fiction writing since the author did the research. He doesn't cite O'Kane's Clear the Bridge in his bibliography and he should read it. The gaps in Eight Survived may become more visible to him and his next effort may benefit. This book will remainder very soon and be available at a very low price right after Christmas.

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The incredible wartime saga of the only American submarinersto survive the sinking of their ship and evade enemy capture in WWII On the night of August 13, 1944, the U.S. submarine Flier struck a mine in the Sulu Sea in the southern Philippines as it steamed along the surface. All but fifteen of the more than eighty-strong crew went down with the vessel. Of those left floating in the dark, eight survived by swimming for seventeen hours before washing ashore on an uninhabited island. The story of the Flier and its eight survivors is wholly unique in the annals of U.S. military history. Eight Survived tells the gripping story of the doomed submarine and its crew from its first patrol, during which it sank several enemy ships, to the explosion in the Sulu Sea. Drawing on interviews with the survivors and on a visit to the jungle where they washed ashore-where a cast of fascinating characters helped the U.S. sailors evade the Japanese-Douglas Campbell fully captures the combination of extraordinary courage and luck that marked one of the most heroic episodes of World War II.

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