Category: Early Submarine History

December 10 in US Submarine History

December 10 tends to sit quietly on the calendar, a date that rarely makes headlines and never asks for much. Yet, across the long and strange saga of the United States Navy Submarine Force, this ordinary wintery day has carried more weight than it lets on. It has seen explosions in cramped early hulls, the smoke of war hanging over Cavite, the long shadow of strategic deterrence, and the uneasy reality that even the most powerful navy in the world still depends on shipyards that run behind schedule and politicians who promise to fix them.

1910: A lesson written in gasoline fumes

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From Harbor Tragedy to a Resilient Legacy: The USS R-6 (SS-83)

San Pedro Harbor, late September 1921. The Pacific Fleet’s new base was a place alive with the restless energy of a Navy in transition. Battleships and destroyers filled the anchorage, while a cluster of small, dark-hulled submarines rocked gently in their moorings beside the big tender USS Camden. The sun had set, but the harbor was far from quiet. Ashore, the city of Los Angeles was swelling into one of the nation’s fastest growing metropolises, and the Navy’s presence was both a symbol of American reach and a reminder of unfinished business after the First World War. For the sailors aboard USS R-6, the night of September 26 began as another routine round of preparations for training exercises. Within hours, however, it would end with their boat lying on the harbor bottom and two of their shipmates dead.

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USS Plunger (SS-2): How America’s First Submarine Class Launched the Silent Service

In the fall of 1903, when most of the world still thought of submarines as either science fiction or sideshow curiosities, the United States Navy quietly brought one into active service. The boat was called USS Plunger, officially Submarine Torpedo Boat Number Two. She was a stubby little creature, barely sixty-four feet long, powered by a gasoline engine that filled her insides with the stench of fumes, and armed with a single torpedo tube that, on paper at least, made her a weapon of war. On September 19, 1903, she was commissioned at New Suffolk, New York. That date puts her right at the beginning of America’s real experiment with undersea craft, and though Plunger would never fire a shot in anger, she would change the trajectory of naval warfare.

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