Tag: US Navy submarine history

The Sorcerer Strikes – Aspro’s 5th War Patrol

When USS Aspro (SS-309) pushed away from USS Euryale at Fremantle on September 10, 1944, she was no stranger to the deadly chess game of the Pacific submarine campaign. She had already carried out four successful patrols, sending enemy ships to the bottom, and she bore the scars and the confidence of a seasoned hunter. Her crew, lean from the tropical heat and the endless diet of Navy rations, carried the rhythm of submarine life in their bones. They had endured the long refit—tuning machinery, testing torpedoes, restowing provisions, and saying goodbye to the brief comforts of liberty. Now they were heading back into the South China Sea, where enemy shipping still plied the waters in defiance of the American blockade.

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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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Growlers Legendary Down-the-Throat Torpedo Attack of September 12, 1944

The night sea was calm, almost deceptively so. A thin scatter of clouds drifted across the stars, and the horizon was a dark, featureless smear. Below the surface lay silence, but on the bridge of Growler, men kept their eyes sweeping and their nerves sharp. This was wolf pack country now, waters between Luzon and Formosa, where Japanese convoys crept through the straits and where three American submarines waited to pounce.

In the conning tower, red lamps threw their dull glow over the dials and the men hunched around them. Commander Thomas B. “Ben” Oakley Jr. stood steady, his voice measured, his presence calm. He had a knack for that, keeping himself even while every other heart on the boat ran a little faster.

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