Tag: World War II submarine

The Water Wolf – USS Muskallunge at Camranh Bay

The USS Muskallunge (SS-262) was one of the U.S. Navy’s steel hunters, a Gato-class submarine that prowled the Pacific during the Second World War. Her name, chosen in honor of the fierce fish that lurks in the lakes and rivers of North America, could not have been more fitting. Fishermen know the muskie as the “fish of ten thousand casts,” a prize hard to land and nearly impossible to forget. For the crew of Muskallunge, the boat became their own elusive prize, tested in battle, hounded by escorts, and remembered today as one of the submarines that carried the Silent Service into the heart of the Pacific war.

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SS Bluegill’s 2nd War Patrol: The August 13, 1944 Battle and the Mark 18 Torpedo’s Trial

USS Bluegill began her life on the ways at Groton, Connecticut, in December of 1942. She was a Gato-class boat, built for the long patrols and hard work the war in the Pacific demanded. When Mrs. W. Sterling Cole christened her on August 8, 1943, she slid into the Thames River looking every bit the part of a warship that would soon prowl far from home. Commissioned that November under Lt. Comdr. Eric L. Barr, Jr., she went through the usual shakedown, torpedo shoots, and workups before making the long transit to the war zone.

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USS Croaker’s First War Patrol: Deadly Strikes in the East China Sea, August 1944

In the summer of 1944, USS CROAKER SS-246, embarked on her first war patrol, leaving Pearl Harbor in July and pushing deep into the East China and Yellow Seas. The early days were a mix of training sharpened by caution, with sporadic contacts and long stretches of empty water. By mid-August, she had skirted mines, traded information with other submarines, and patrolled close enough to hostile shores to feel the reach of Japanese air and sea patrols. It was in this tense environment, between the fourteenth and seventeenth, that CROAKER struck two decisive blows, demonstrating both the skill of her crew and the deadly precision of a well-handled submarine.

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