Month: July 2025

Independence Day in the Kuriles

Aboard the USS Sunfish SS-281, July 3-4, 1944…

Not every Fourth of July comes with flags and fireworks. Sometimes, it comes with fog, fishing boats, and a barometer that just can’t make up its mind.

On July 3, 1944, the submarine USS Sunfish slipped into her patrol zone. She was sixty miles southeast of Kurabu Zaki, off the northern edge of Paramushiru, one of the outermost of Japan’s Kurile Islands. This was not a place for parades or patriotic speeches. It was a place for shadows, silence, and submarine warfare. On this particular patrol, action was measured less in torpedoes and more in fathoms and fogbanks.

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They Saved the World One Life at a Time

The photograph shows young men, weary but smiling, crowding the deck of the USS Tigrone as she lies quietly in Apra Harbor, Guam. Behind them, the harbor waters reflect the early morning light. Beyond that, the haze of a world still at war. The camera captures aviators in patched uniforms and borrowed gear, the crew of Tigrone standing near them with the same sea-worn posture common to submariners. It’s a moment frozen in time, but the story behind the picture runs deeper than the Pacific waters they traversed.

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Bump… Whoops…

 

A “Sub”-Par Afternoon: When the Ferry Klamath Kissed the USS Trepang

The sun was still high over the San Francisco Bay on July 1, 1944, as the ferry Klamath rumbled across familiar waters. She was no stranger to the waves. By then, she had been carrying passengers and vehicles between Richmond and San Quentin for years. On that day, she had 120 souls and 30 cars aboard, lazily making her last run of the afternoon.

But what was normally a routine trip quickly turned into a nautical curiosity, and then a minor catastrophe.

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