Amazone's keel was laid on 22 August 1929 by Ateliers et Chantiers de la Seine-Maritime at Le Trait, on the Seine downstream from Rouen. She was launched on 28 December 1931, a Diane-class submarine authorized under the 1927 naval program. The class was a workhorse of the interwar French submarine arm - medium-sized, ocean-going, capable of long patrols. By the time she was commissioned the political situation in Europe was already darkening. She would spend her entire commissioned life either preparing for war, fighting it, training others to fight it, or recovering from it.

On 18 June 1940 the German army was closing on Brest. At six in the evening the order went out: any French ship that could get underway should run; any that could not should scuttle herself. At six-thirty, the submarine tender Jules Verne and thirteen submarines - Amazone among them - cleared the harbour and pointed south. Five days later they reached Casablanca in French Morocco. Two days after that, on 25 June, the armistices with Germany and Italy went into effect. The vessels that had escaped from Brest now belonged to a government in Vichy, technically neutral, practically at the mercy of whichever side moved first.

On 3 July 1940 the Royal Navy made its move. Force H arrived off Mers el-Kebir in Algeria and demanded that the French fleet there either turn itself over to British custody or disable itself. When the French refused, the British opened fire on ships that had been their allies a fortnight earlier. Nearly thirteen hundred French sailors died. The shockwave reached Casablanca. Amazone and the other submarines were ordered to sea immediately to establish a standing patrol around the port - twenty nautical miles, in case the British came for the unfinished battleship Jean Bart in the harbour. They did not come. But the message was clear: the war had become much more complicated than fighting Germans.

Two and a half years later Amazone was patched together at Casablanca again, this time waiting for an Allied invasion she did not yet know was coming. On the night of 7-8 November 1942 the indications became unmistakable. Operation Torch - the Allied landings in French North Africa - began before dawn on 8 November. At 06:13 Amazone sailed out of Casablanca to take a patrol position off the Moroccan coast. Around ten in the morning, with the Naval Battle of Casablanca raging behind her, she fired torpedoes at an American light cruiser. They missed. She returned to harbour unscathed and was refueled at the Delure pier. Fighting in French North Africa ended three days later. Amazone changed flags again, this time for the Free French Naval Forces, and her war re-routed entirely.

The last chapter is the unlikeliest. In January 1944 Amazone reported to the United States Navy sound school at Bermuda. Her job was to play the role of an enemy submarine for American sonar operators learning to find one. She made the runs day after day - exercise dates listed in clinical strings in her log: 15 to 20 November, 24 and 25 November, 28 November to 1 December. She refitted at Philadelphia Navy Yard, transferred to Key West, refitted again, ran aground at Montauk, was towed back to Philadelphia, repaired, returned to Key West. By the time Japan surrendered she was at sea east of the Azores, headed home to Casablanca. She arrived on 19 August 1945 and was stricken on 26 April 1946. The boat that had spent six years swapping flags ended her life on the navy list under the only one she had started with.