USS Shark SS-174

The first months of 1942 were a time of chaos and desperation in the Pacific. The United States Navy, still reeling from the shock of Pearl Harbor, scrambled to stem the Japanese advance that seemed to roll forward with unstoppable force. The Asiatic Fleet, a relic of peacetime deployments that had suddenly found itself on the frontlines, was left to face the onslaught of the Japanese offensive, alone.

The USS Shark (SS-174) slipped beneath the waves of the Java Sea at a time when the world was teetering on the edge of catastrophe. It was February 11, 1942, just two months after Pearl Harbor had awakened the United States to a war that had already engulfed the globe. The U.S. Navy, still reeling from the devastation in Hawaii, scrambled to hold the line against an unrelenting Japanese advance. The Asiatic Fleet, based in the Philippines, was tasked with an impossible mission: delay the onslaught of a Japanese war machine that was sweeping through the Pacific with terrifying speed. The Shark was part of that effort—one of the few American submarines operating in a desperate bid to slow the enemy’s march.

The Shark was no stranger to adversity. Commissioned in 1936, she was a Porpoise-class submarine built by the Electric Boat Company. Like many of the pre-war fleet boats, she had been designed in a time when the U.S. Navy saw submarines as little more than coastal defense weapons. But by December 1941, the Shark and her sister submarines had been thrust into a new, unforgiving kind of war. She had been operating in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and had barely escaped as enemy bombers turned Manila into a smoking ruin. Ordered to evacuate on December 9, Shark embarked on a series of missions that would define her short, harrowing wartime service.

Her first combat patrol was marked by close calls and frustration. On January 6, 1942, an enemy submarine fired a torpedo at Shark, missing her by mere yards. She spent the next weeks maneuvering in the waters around the Dutch East Indies, shadowing Japanese convoys, reporting enemy movements, and dodging destroyers. She had a brush with success on February 2 when she attacked a Japanese ship, but her torpedoes either missed or malfunctioned—a recurring problem for American subs in the early days of the war. Five days later, she reported sighting an empty cargo vessel, an action that earned a sharp rebuke from her superiors, who were looking for bigger targets.

Then, silence.

On February 8, Shark received orders to move into the Makassar Strait and report back with intelligence on enemy movements. She never responded. The submarine that had survived depth charges, torpedoes, and the chaos of the retreat from the Philippines was simply gone.

What happened next is buried in the murky waters of history, pieced together only through Japanese records recovered after the war. At 1:37 a.m. on February 11, the Japanese destroyer Yamakaze made contact with a surfaced submarine east of Menado, in northern Celebes. The Yamakaze’s lookouts must have spotted the American boat silhouetted against the night sky—perhaps caught in the act of recharging her batteries. The destroyer’s gunners fired 42 shells from their five-inch guns and raked the conning tower with machine-gun fire. The submarine never had a chance. Within moments, she was gone, swallowed by the sea.

The Yamakaze’s crew reported hearing voices in the water, desperate cries from sailors who had just lost their boat and their world. But there was no mercy that night. The destroyer did not stop. No prisoners were taken. The ocean simply closed over the 59 men of the Shark, erasing them from the war as completely as if they had never existed.

The Shark was the first American submarine confirmed to have been lost to enemy action in World War II. She would not be the last. Over the course of the war, 52 U.S. submarines and more than 3,500 submariners would meet similar fates, disappearing into the vastness of the Pacific, their stories known only to the depths.

For the families back home, the loss was a slow, torturous thing. When a submarine failed to return, there was always hope—hope that she had been damaged but had managed to limp to some uncharted island, her crew eking out survival as castaways, waiting for rescue. Marjorie Shane, the wife of Shark’s commanding officer, Lt. Cdr. Louis Shane Jr., clung to that hope for two decades. She never remarried. For years after the war, she insisted that he might still be alive, somewhere in the Pacific, waiting. But the ocean does not often give up its dead.

By March 7, 1942, the Navy could wait no longer. The Shark was officially declared lost, its fate sealed in the footnotes of war. On June 24, she was stricken from the Navy’s records, a line in a logbook that could not capture the sacrifice of those 59 men.

Today, the Shark rests in an unmarked grave beneath the sea, somewhere east of Menado, in waters few will ever visit. There are no tombstones for those who perished with her, no white crosses in a military cemetery. But their names live on, carved into memorials and whispered in the memories of those who know their story. The men of Shark went to war knowing the odds, knowing that the old fleet boats they sailed were relics in an age of rapid technological advancement. Yet they went anyway. They went because the war had come to their doorstep, and because they believed in something greater than themselves.

The Pacific is vast, and war is cruel. The Shark was just one small part of a much larger fight, one of many sacrifices in a war that would eventually turn in America’s favor. But for the men aboard her that night, none of that mattered. Theirs was a battle fought in the darkness, against an enemy they barely saw, for a cause that would outlive them. They did not return, but they did not go quietly.

And the sea, as it always does, keeps its secrets.