To Kill the Potemkin

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On May 27, 1968, at one o'clock in the afternoon, the USS Scorpion, a nuclear submarine with ninety-nine pen aboard, was due to arrive at her home port of Norfolk, Virginia, after a ninety-day patrol. The families of the crew were waiting on the dock.

At about three o'clock a navy public affairs officer announced that Scorpion was overdue. She had failed to request her berthing assignment and tug services.

Scorpion had last communicated on May 21, when she filed a routine position report from fifty miles south of the Azores in the mid-Atlantic.

After several more hours of continued silence, the navy undertook a massive search of the waters around Norfolk. Over the next few days the search was widened into the deep Atlantic. On June 5, the navy declared Scorpion presumed lost with all hands, and on June 30 her name was struck from the navy list.

The loss of Scorpion was the worst disaster to befall a fully armed United States Navy warship on patrol since the end of World War Two.

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