The book is dedicated to the history of the creation of assault weapons intended to equip combat swimmers. This narrative, of course, does not pretend to fully cover this large and interesting topic, since different authors include many different devices in the category of human torpedoes, but, by and large, only the Japanese “Kaiten” fully correspond to this name. The German "Negger" and "Marder" are more likely to belong to super-midget submarines, and the Italian "Maiale" and the British "Blacks" are clearly classified as combat swimmer vehicles, despite their torpedo-shaped appearance. But all of them are united by the fact that an ordinary torpedo was used as an engine. All these somewhat exotic systems seemed to the admirals an interesting novelty that would allow them to achieve great results at a low cost. However, very often the price for success was the lives of the crew members.