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SKU: 9781591144182
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David W Jourdan
After the submarine Dakar went down somewhere in the Mediterranean, Israel spent 31 years searching for the ship’s 69 officers and crew. Newly purchased from the Royal Navy—along with two of her T-class sisters—she was commissioned into the Israeli Navy on November 10, 1967, as Dakar (“Swordfish” in Hebrew). After sea trials in England, she set course for Haifa.
On January 25, 1968, just two minutes after midnight, the Dakar transmitted its last message. Driven by one of Israel’s strongest military traditions—bringing home all killed and missing so they can receive a proper Jewish burial—Israel launched more than 25 expeditions to search different parts of the Mediterranean.
The frustration was immense: a massive 287-foot submarine had been lost for over three decades, and the fate of the men aboard Dakar remained unknown. In 1996, that uncertainty led the Israeli Navy to invite David Jourdan and his company, Nauticos, to conduct a search. Their work ultimately led to discovery in May 1999.
Never Forgotten: The Search and Discovery of Israel’s Lost Submarine Dakar tells the gripping story of the determination, endurance, and technical skill of the people who made a lifelong impact on a nation and on 69 grieving families.
Never Forgotten is a first-person account that grew out of Jourdan’s successful career in deep-sea search. It follows the technical effort to locate the ship—about 10,000 feet below the surface—then to determine what caused the disaster. The book also traces the Dakar’s own history, from her origins as the WWII British HMS Totem, through her sale to Israel, and finally to her last, fateful voyage.
Throughout the story, we follow the families of the lost crew—from their pride in the Dakar, to their horror at her disappearance, and ultimately to the closure that comes with discovering the gravesite. A dramatic final chapter imagines what the crew might have been doing in the seconds before a catastrophic implosion ended their lives.
The exact cause of the loss is still unknown, but it likely involved a catastrophic hull rupture during a dive. The evidence suggests that no emergency measures were taken before Dakar dropped rapidly beyond her maximum depth.
On October 11, 2000, the Dakar’s bridge and the forward edge of her sail were raised and are now displayed as a memorial at the Naval Museum in Haifa. Attempts to recover the crew remains and return them for Jewish burial in Israel were eventually abandoned due to the enormous cost and respect for a longstanding maritime tradition: letting the seabed serve as the final resting place for drowned sailors. Instead, the families held a ceremony on a ship over the wreckage.
During the 30 years between the submarine’s loss and the discovery of its remains, rumors, speculation, and Cold War conspiracy theories circulated widely. Many Israeli cities and towns have a “Dakar” street, and several schools and other public institutions are named after the lost submarine. A television documentary about the search, Full Circle, first aired on the National Geographic Channel in November 2003, bringing even more public attention to the story.
May 1, 2009 by Naval Institute Press
Tags:
2009,
All Products,
Contemporary,
David W Jourdan,
History
