Tag: World War II submarine

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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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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