"I suggested we use a strong cloth tape to close seams, and make tab of same. It worked fine, I showed it to different government inspectors they said it was all right, but I could never get them to change tape." Vesta Stoudt to President Roosevelt, February 10, 1943 [1]. History is full of "never get them to change" stories, probably one of the more famous is Napoleon's dismissal of the steam engine, although the story is a bit more complicated, "Fulton (and his design) failed at the worst possible time" [2]. As we found out recently, submarines are hard.

And on a completely unrelated note, one of the greater stories of quasi-forgotten sacrifice of a mother for her son is the story of a woman in 1850s travelling around 2,000 kilometres by foot, by horse, by any means to get her son enrolled into university, dying shortly after: her name was Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, her son's name was Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev [3], that Mendeleev.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesta_Stoudt

[2] https://hsm.stackexchange.com/a/13154

[3] https://chemaust.raci.org.au/article/julyaugust-2019/mother%...