Frogman! Suicide Mission

[Bryan]

Not for the weak of heart!

[21]

Scares me and I ain't a scared of nutting!

What a find!

note the price!

21

[crimediver]

I picked up that book for a quarter at a yard sale. Nice cover, lousy writing.

[capn_tucker]

I always pack a bundle or two of dynamite in my gear bag. Never know when it might come in handy..

[capn_tucker]

I picked up that book for a quarter at a yard sale. Nice cover, lousy writing.

Very cool cover indeed! Just found a copy of it on Amazon. Gotta love Amazon..

[Bryan]

Book is written by and about Australian Frogmen...Since my Mom and her side of the clan are from Melborne I understand a lot of the slang in the book....But I agree the covers are the best part of it.

[capn_tucker]

Got my copy of Frogman! from Amazon yesterday. What a great cover..
Hmm, methinks a new forum avatar is order..

[YankDownUnder]

The illustrations are aburd, but fun! Surface fuse on dynamite? Double hoses the float downwards? Dry suits without squeeze lines? The mask outside the hood...... and here is the Slayden suit?

The Australian combat divers never used double hosed SCUBA. Australia was the first country to adopt the single hose SCUBA for military use. Their first open circuit SCUBA was the Porpoise CA series single hose. Today they use Sea Hornet. The Australian government also buys from AirDive for some applications.

The Navy and Army had some Siebe Gorman Salvus units during the war. They used the pendulum style Avon UBA rebreather after the war. I was contacted last week, by members of a Commando reserve unit to restore an old Avon UBA. They sent me a picture of the unit that they have in their Williamstown depot. In the picture was a Porpoise CA2 reduction valve that they thought was a part of the UBA. I sold my CDBA oxygen/EAN60 variation last year, but have donated some early fins, a mask and a divers knife used by them in the early 50s. I also have to get them a petcock (DSV) and replacement breathing hose, but I have those in storage.

Hopefully, we will be able to come up with an acceptable display for them.

[capn_tucker]

The whole picture on Frogman! is pure fantasy anyway. The artist was probably some staff artist for Penguin Books who knew very little about diving. The fact that the book takes place in WW2 shows that.
No frogmen used aqualungs at that time; the only ones in existence were in Nazi occupied France.
The actual book has the frogmen using rebreathers, which is correct. The artist I'm sure didn't read it, and since this paperback was for the US market, he put an American frogman on the cover. The dynamite is pretty hysterical though; how was he going to light it? Obviously a waterproof fuse, and he was going to use an underwater flare to ignite it..
And his Aqualung hoses were obviously weighted to keep them from rising up.. Which would be needed, as the frogman has no weight belt that I can see.. It's still a great picture, and a good example of the love affair the public had with scuba diving during the Sea Hunt era...