Stories From the US Submarine Force
She slipped away from Midway on May 28, 1944, her steel hull slicing through the Pacific with quiet determination. Her crew, 82 strong, knew their mission and accepted the risks. They had trained, bonded, and believed in the purpose that had brought them to this point. The boat was USS Golet, SS-361, a Gato-class submarine barely six months into her career. No one who waved her off that day could know they were saying goodbye forever.
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With the war over and things finally settled down, US Submarine Veterans began to return to their homes and family. They were still keenly aware of the deep sacrifice the Sub Force had made, and the reasons why so many had died there was still a reluctance to talk about how they had carried out the destruction of the Japanese Empire.
But in newspapers around the country, stories began to appear that gave the public a taste of what the Sub force had been through and what it had accomplished. In Bogalusa, LA, a multi-part series was run, telling the stories of submarine veterans from the area who had served on the USS Ray SS-271.
On June 6, 1946, almost a year after the war had ended, one of these articles appeared. In it were the lyrics to “The Submarine Song,” without attribution or any author listed.
When we talk about the legacy of the U.S. Submarine Force during the Second World War, we often gravitate toward the celebrated names—Tang, Wahoo, Barb. But woven just as tightly into the silent steel of America’s wartime submarine story is the USS Snook (SS-279), a Gato-class boat launched in 1942 that would go on to serve valiantly and vanish mysteriously in the closing months of the war. Her story begins with the hard-earned lessons of a young submarine fleet still feeling its way through the murky depths of undersea warfare.
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Patrol Reports 