Author: FTB1(SS)

USS Guitarro’s Moonlit Victory: The Surface Gun Attack and Sinking of Nanshin Maru No. 27 off Cape Calavite, August 27, 1944

 

By late August 1944, Japanese supply operations in the Philippines were reduced to a dangerous gamble. With deepwater shipping lanes under constant threat from American submarines, the enemy had turned to small intercoastal tankers to shuttle fuel and oil between island bases. These vessels could slip close to shore where larger warships hesitated to follow, but if they were caught in open water they had little chance of survival.

 

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The Routine of Torpedo Offloads and Berth Shifts in San Diego: USS Queenfish (SS-393)

In August 1958, USS Queenfish (SS-393) was back in San Diego after her WestPac deployment and quickly moved into a maintenance phase. The deck log shows that beginning on August 21 she entered an availability period, and over the following days the crew oversaw the offloading of her torpedoes. This was standard practice before any yard period, both for safety reasons and to allow overhaul work in the torpedo rooms. The log notes entries where torpedoes were struck below, removed, and transferred off the submarine, marking the transition from an operational posture to one focused on repair and upkeep .

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USS Ronquil’s First War Patrol: Convoy Battles off Formosa, August 1944

The USS Ronquil (SS-396) was a Balao-class submarine, one of the many steel predators the U.S. Navy sent into the Pacific during World War II. She carried the name of a humble spiny-finned fish from the waters of the Pacific Northwest, but her business was far from small. Commissioned on April 22, 1944, under the command of Lieutenant Commander H. S. Monroe, Ronquil’s steel frame stretched over 311 feet, her two propellers driven by the throb of Fairbanks-Morse diesels and Elliott electric motors. She carried ten torpedo tubes and a 5-inch deck gun, but what mattered most was the crew of eighty-one who would have to take her into combat and bring her back again.

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