January does not announce itself gently in naval history. It arrives cold, dark, and already carrying the weight of decisions made months or years earlier. For the United States submarine force, January became a recurring point of reckoning, a month when machinery, weather, navigation, and war itself seemed to conspire against boats already stretched thin. The losses that occurred during January across multiple years of the Second World War were not part of a single battle or campaign. They were scattered in geography and cause, but unified by circumstance. They tell a story not of failure, but of exposure, of a service operating at the edge of what men and steel could endure.