The Lake Torpedo Boat Company laid S-17's keel in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on March 19, 1918, while the Great War still raged in Europe. By the time she launched on May 22, 1920, that war was over. At 231 feet long and displacing 875 tons on the surface, she was compact even by submarine standards. Her crew of four officers and thirty-four enlisted men shared quarters designed more for utility than comfort, powered by two Busch-Sulzer diesel engines for surface running and a pair of Westinghouse electric motors for diving. Four torpedo tubes in the bow held the boat's primary punch, with eight reloads giving her twelve torpedoes total. A single deck gun rounded out her armament. Commissioned on March 1, 1921, S-17 was already an aging design when she first tasted salt water -- the S-class submarines were the Navy's workhorses, built for reliability rather than innovation.

S-17 wasted no time. In May 1921, she departed New London, Connecticut, threading through the Panama Canal and crossing the Pacific via California, Hawaii, and Guam to reach the Philippines by December. For the next three years, she operated from Cavite on Luzon, visiting ports that read like a tour of the prewar Western Pacific: Manila Bay, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Qingdao, Yantai, and Qinhuangdao. These were not combat patrols but the steady, unglamorous work of showing the flag and training crews in tropical waters. By late 1924, S-17 crossed the Pacific again to Mare Island Navy Yard in California, where she spent two quiet years before operating along the California coast out of San Diego and San Pedro. From 1928 to 1934, she settled into the Panama Canal zone, patrolling the approaches to one of the world's most strategically vital waterways. On March 29, 1935, she was decommissioned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, her first career apparently over.

Pearl Harbor changed everything. Recommissioned on December 16, 1940, as war loomed, S-17 returned to Caribbean patrol. The February 1942 bombing by Marine Corps aircraft was alarming enough, but worse followed. On August 4, 1942, while operating on the surface in the Caribbean, a U.S. plane attacked S-17 with four 500-pound depth charges at 2:20 in the afternoon. This time, the damage was real -- the charges prevented S-17 from diving, the one capability a submarine cannot afford to lose. The crew identified the attacker as a B-25 Mitchell bomber, though one account suggested a Navy PV-1 Ventura. An official report later identified the aircraft as a B-18 Bolo, a twin-engine bomber with a single tail fin -- a distinction that mattered because the crew had reported a twin-tailed plane. Whatever the aircraft, S-17 limped to Coco Solo in the Canal Zone for repairs, arriving four days later. The friendly fire incidents underscored a grim reality of the early war: with German U-boats prowling the Caribbean, American forces were sometimes shooting first and identifying later.

After her repairs, S-17 spent her final active years operating out of New London from September 1942 to July 1944, running training exercises that frequently took her into Casco Bay, Maine. For a boat that had crossed the Pacific and survived bombs from her own side, this was quiet, essential work -- preparing new submariners for the war that her aging hull could no longer fight. She was decommissioned on October 4, 1944, struck from the Naval Vessel Register the following month, and intentionally sunk as a target on April 5, 1945. But S-17's story did not end at the bottom of the ocean. In 1955, Edward L. Beach published Run Silent, Run Deep, one of the most celebrated submarine novels ever written, and placed a fictional USS S-17 at the heart of the story. The real S-17 earned three service medals -- the American Defense Service Medal, the American Campaign Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal -- modest honors for a boat whose most harrowing moments came not from enemy action but from the fog of war among allies.