Stories From the US Submarine Force
The USS Batfish (SS-310) earned her place in history as “The Champion Submarine-Killing Submarine of World War Two.” But before she ever sent three enemy subs to the bottom in early 1945, she fought her way through tense patrols in the Central Pacific. One of her most daring actions came on August 23, 1944, during her Fourth War Patrol near Palau. It was a day when Batfish stumbled onto a Japanese flotilla trapped by reefs and shoals, and came out swinging.
The year 1928 was not kind to submariners. It began with the aftermath of the USS S-4 tragedy, a disaster that left all forty men aboard entombed just a few hundred yards from Provincetown, Massachusetts. The submarine had been rammed by the Coast Guard destroyer Paulding and went down in less than a minute, settling at about a hundred feet. Six men trapped in the torpedo room signaled by tapping out messages on the hull, asking the haunting question: “Is there any hope?” Weather and sea combined to make the answer no. Despite the efforts of Rear Admiral Brumby, Captain Ernest J. King, Lieutenant Henry Hartley, and Commander Edward Ellsberg, the men suffocated before help could reach them. The tragedy became a defining moment for the submarine force, not just for the lives lost, but for the realization that rescue methods were woefully inadequate.
The USS Muskallunge (SS-262) was one of the U.S. Navy’s steel hunters, a Gato-class submarine that prowled the Pacific during the Second World War. Her name, chosen in honor of the fierce fish that lurks in the lakes and rivers of North America, could not have been more fitting. Fishermen know the muskie as the “fish of ten thousand casts,” a prize hard to land and nearly impossible to forget. For the crew of Muskallunge, the boat became their own elusive prize, tested in battle, hounded by escorts, and remembered today as one of the submarines that carried the Silent Service into the heart of the Pacific war.
Patrol Reports 