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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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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41 Cold War Sentinels: USS Von Steuben SSBN-632

The story of the USS Von Steuben begins, fittingly, with a name from the Revolutionary War. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben (born September 17, 1730), was the Prussian officer who made Washington’s ragged army into something resembling a fighting force. It was his drill manual, delivered in blunt and precise language, that gave Americans discipline when they needed it most. Two centuries later, another Von Steuben was commissioned into service, this one made of steel and reactor power, carrying sixteen ballistic missiles rather than a musket and bayonet. Her purpose was no less vital. She was built to keep the peace by being invisible, silent, and ready to deliver destruction if the order ever came.

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