Category: World War II

In the Silent Depths: The Fighting Life of USS Gurnard

The date was September 18, 1942, when the submarine USS Gurnard was commissioned into the United States Navy. She was one of the many Gato-class submarines that slipped into the war effort during the dark mid-years of World War II, at a time when the Atlantic was still contested and the Pacific was a long way from turning in America’s favor. To her crew she was not just another boat with a fish name, she was home, she was a weapon, and she was a place where life and death mixed in with diesel fumes, sweat, and salt water. To the Navy she was a number in a long line of steel tubes being turned out of yards as fast as the nation could make them. To history, she was a fighting submarine that sank nearly sixty thousand tons of Japanese shipping, disrupted convoys, and lived to tell about it.

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USS Paddle and the Tragedy of Shinyo Maru

The first days of September 1944 found the USS Paddle deep in enemy waters, sliding along the edge of the Sulu Sea and the Celebes, that broad, restless stretch of ocean where islands rise like jagged teeth out of the water. She was a Gato-class submarine, crewed by men who had already seen enough of the war to know its rhythms. They knew the false alarms, the sudden bursts of action, and the endless stretches of waiting. For them, the days blended into a pattern of diving before dawn, running silent through the daylight hours, then surfacing at night to breathe, to charge the batteries, and to prowl.

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The Silent Prowler and the Submarine School Graduate: USS Cod’s War Patrols 2 and 3 through the Eyes of Calvin Baker

When the USS Cod (SS-224) first slipped into the Pacific war, she was one of dozens of Gato-class submarines sliding down the ways in 1943. The war was still young for the Silent Service, but it had already turned into a proving ground for men and machines. By the time Cod was commissioned on June 21, 1943, under Commander James C. Dempsey, the submarine force had become America’s sharpest spear against Japan’s supply lines. Cod herself was a sleek, steel predator, long, lean, and packed with 24 torpedoes, a 5-inch deck gun, and the engines and batteries to make her a silent prowler beneath the seas. She was part of the answer to Japan’s sprawling empire: cut the lifelines, sink the ships, starve the war machine. But ships are only steel and rivets until men step aboard to bring them to life.

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