Stories From the US Submarine Force
Submariners live for the sea stories, and some are colder than others. On this episode of Patrol Reports, Dave Bowman sat down with Captain Jim Harvey, former commanding officer of USS Queenfish (SSN-651), to revisit a patrol that pushed the limits of technology, seamanship, and nerves: surfacing at the North Pole in August of 1985.
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.
Continue reading “USS Guitarro’s Moonlit Victory: The Surface Gun Attack and Sinking of Nanshin Maru No. 27 off Cape Calavite, August 27, 1944”
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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