Tag: US Navy submarine history

Motors and Petals

He did not set out to be a hero. Most submariners did not. They signed on for steady work, for a trade, for the promise of learning a machine well enough that it would not kill them. Frank Nelson Horton belonged to that quiet fraternity of men who understood engines the way farmers understand soil. He knew how things were supposed to sound, how they smelled when they were healthy, and how to tell when trouble was coming before it arrived at full speed.

The irony is that history remembers men like Horton precisely because they never sought remembrance.

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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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