Some years back I saw, read and might even still have and article from the Hartford Current (CT) newspaper about this sub. a diver said he found Surcouf in Long Island Sound. This was an article from the 1960's (1967 I think). I was told, tho I have never seen or read, that it was retracted 3 weeks later, tho only after some guys in suits and dark sedans, "talked" to the person who found it. His name slips me right now, but I remember he was a founding member of a large CT dive club along the coast. Now you have to understand, the diver, a hard hat diver from the picture of him in the paper, was black (African American) and dies back in the mid/late 1990's and was married to a white woman. A truly hard thing at the time. I'll be going thru my boxes of sub stuff to find the names and the day/date and post what I can. I found the article, already cut out and folded up, in a 1941 Janes, at the Springfield Mass Library when I was a teen, researching subs for a war games club I belonged to.

In the 1990's I pulled it out and started looking more into it. That's when I heard about the retraction from a member of the dive club and the stuff about his wife and threats that where made to them. In 1994ish I made contact with a few interesting people, one said he was a member of the crew of the US Sub Marlin off Long Island. From another I heard about a US Navy Seal operation off New London CT to demo the hulk of a WW2 sub. This was to have happened in the 1970 or early 1980's.

Other interesting info I picked up, before shelving this little pet project for a while, (I pull it out every now and then) include she was not the only free french sub to go missing around this time. another was lost right after a refit in Philly Navy Yard. Surcouf stopped in Bermuda after her refit in Portsmouth Navy Yard, and the trouble she had there included a mine that went off and while in Bermudas another was found on her.

The ideas that she was trading torps and supplies to the Germans make no sense at all, as French, British or US (tho we where "neutral" would not work in a German tube. Add to that the record keeping of the Germans say nothing of it ever happening, so even if we thought it might be going on at the time, we know now it was not, tho most Vichy records are still sealed. Jacques Cousteau was going to look for it and was talked out of it by US and French authorities, I had never heard he found it. Tho Surcouf, being the pride of the French Navy in WW2, you'd think the world renown diver would have looked for it and it would have been fairly easy if the story about being rammed and sunk by the Thompson Lykes as the official story goes, and even easier with today's equipment, she is the size of a WW2 era Destroyer and they can find the Liberty Bell space capsule at the bottom of the Pacific. Tho if she sank someplace else... Well and on that topic, The crew of the Lykes thought they ran over a small costal tanker, and there was oil in the water, tho no cork, which a sub a that time had alot of for insolation and they crys for help they heard, where in English, not French or Spanish. Now If you where a French Submariner, and was just rammed and sinking, would you cry for help in English for French?
Lastly, the Naval Inquire on her loss, was just Brits and US, not any French where allows to be present, with is rather odd. I can find no record of any bodies, tho have heard of one rumor of bodies in French naval uniforms washing ashore in Florida, I can't find any proff that happened, any first or second hand accounts of it, or where the bodies might have gone.