Patrol Reports

Before I discovered Cary Grant and Tony Curtis in Operation Petticoat , I knew John Astin and the pink submarine from ABC’s 1977 television remake. The original movie was better, but the sitcom had something worth remembering: a real fleet submarine beneath that improbable paint job. In this episode of Patrol Reports , revisit the short-lived series, Jamie Lee Curtis’s connection to her father’s f...

On October 24, 1944, USS Snook (SS-279) pressed repeated torpedo attacks against Japanese shipping in the South China Sea, then went deep as escorts answered with depth charges. Her crew survived the engagement, but identifying the ships they struck would leave questions that persisted long after the war. In this episode of Patrol Reports, Dave Bowman follows Snook’s seventh war patrol into a conv...

While the Philippines endured Japanese occupation, American submarines carried weapons, medicine, radios, and intelligence teams to guerrillas still fighting behind enemy lines. On October 25, 1944, General Douglas MacArthur publicly revealed the undersea supply campaign that had helped sustain their resistance. In this episode of Patrol Reports , USSVI National Historian Dave Bowman explores SPYR...

USS Croaker (SS-246) stalks a coastal freighter by radar, launches four torpedoes, and closes to within 400 yards of a three-masted schooner. It is October 23, 1944, off Korea’s west coast, and a recurring gun malfunction is about to complicate the night’s fighting. In this episode of Patrol Reports, USSVI National Historian Dave Bowman follows Croaker’s second war patrol through the submarine’s o...

October, 1945. Portland, Oregon. Just weeks after Japan's surrender, USS Hawkbill (SS-366) prepared to do something extraordinary. Before a crowd gathered along the Willamette River, the World War II submarine submerged beneath the muddy waters, leaving behind a blanket of flowers honoring the American submariners who never came home. For the spectators, it was a remarkable sight. For the sail...

How did two American submarines help open the Battle of Leyte Gulf and strike a devastating blow against the Imperial Japanese Navy? On October 21, 1944, as American forces fought to liberate the Philippines, USS Darter (SS-227) was patrolling the dangerous waters near Palawan Passage. Commander David H. McClintock knew that Japan's powerful surface fleet would soon respond to the invasion of...

On October 20, 1943, deep in enemy waters off Japan, USS Tarpon (SS-175) was closing in on one of the Imperial Japanese Navy's most valuable assets: an aircraft carrier. But this was no chance encounter. American naval intelligence had intercepted Japanese communications, providing Commander Thomas Lincoln Wogan with information that could place his submarine directly in the carrier's path...

USS Narwhal (SS-167): The Secret Mission to Negros | October 19, 1944 On October 19, 1944, just one day before General Douglas MacArthur's forces landed on Leyte, an American submarine surfaced off the coast of Japanese-occupied Negros Island. Her mission wasn't to sink enemy ships. It was to deliver the weapons, ammunition, and supplies that could help turn a guerrilla resistance into a f...

Nine enemy ships. Scattered escorts. One American submarine. And a commander willing to take an extraordinary risk. On the night of October 18, 1944, USS Raton (SS-270) found herself with an opportunity few submarine commanders would dare attempt. Somewhere off the coast of Luzon, a Japanese convoy was struggling to recover from a disastrous day. Lieutenant Commander Maurice W. “Mike” Shea had a c...

October 17, 1943. At the Electric Boat shipyard in Groton, Connecticut, the United States Navy launched USS Shark (SS-314), a new Balao-class submarine destined for combat in the Pacific. Just one year and one week later, Shark and all 87 men aboard would be lost. In this episode of Patrol Reports , we follow USS Shark from her launching and commissioning under Commander Edward N. Blakely through...

USS Pickerel USS Grenadier USS Gudgeon USS Snook USS Thresher

Remembering the US Submarines and men lost in the month of March: USS F-4 USS H-1 USS Perch USS Grampus USS Triton USS Tullibee USS Kete USS Trigger

In late February 1944, the USS Grayback was at the height of her power and the edge of her fate. Fresh off a string of devastating attacks in the East China Sea, she had already sunk tens of thousands of tons of Japanese shipping and earned her place among the most successful submarines of the war. But success has a way of narrowing your options. By February 25, she had only two torpedoes left. Or...

The USSVI Bremerton Base remembers the US Submarines lost in the month of February

On a January morning in nineteen forty four, a small town in Ohio learned how the war really worked. Not through headlines about victory, but through a quiet notice. A sailor was missing. No details. No explanation. Just absence. That sailor had been aboard USS Corvina. Corvina was new, capable, and sent on her first war patrol into some of the most dangerous water on earth. She never came back. E...

She was built to disappear, and that may be the most important thing about her. In the long shadow of the Cold War, USS Benjamin Franklin did not chase enemies or make headlines. She waited. Silent, hidden, and relentlessly prepared, she carried a responsibility that most Americans never saw and rarely thought about. As one of the last of the “41 for Freedom,” she formed the quiet backbone of a st...

The USS Alexander Hamilton was built to operate in silence, and for three decades that silence carried enormous weight. Commissioned in 1963 at the height of the Cold War, she was part of the Forty One for Freedom, a fleet designed to make nuclear war unthinkable by making retaliation unavoidable. From patrols out of Rota and Holy Loch to Arctic operations beneath the ice, the Hamilton spent her l...

In the early months of the Pacific War, American submarines were sent to sea with imperfect weapons, incomplete intelligence, and almost no margin for error. There was no polished doctrine yet, no comforting sense that victory was inevitable. What there was, instead, were crews learning in real time what survival would require. On this episode of Patrol Reports, we return to the night of February...

The USSVI Bremerton Base remembering the US Navy Submarines lost in the month of January

We remember the : USS S-26 USS S-36 USS Argonaut USS Scorpion USS Swordfish

The USS Sam Rayburn was built for a job no one ever wanted her to do, and that is precisely why she mattered. In the tense years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, American strategy shifted away from spectacle and toward survival. Submarines like Rayburn were designed to vanish beneath the ocean and remain there, unseen and patient, carrying consequences no adversary could ignore. She spent her early...

The USS George C. Marshall was built for a kind of war that everyone hoped would never happen. No battles, no victories, no headlines, just long months of silence beneath the sea, carrying consequences too large to ever be used lightly. In this episode of Dave Does History , we step inside the steel hull of one of the Navy’s most important Cold War submarines and tell the story the way the sailors...

The USS Woodrow Wilson was built to disappear. Not in disgrace, not in secrecy, but in purpose. She was one of the original Forty One for Freedom, a ballistic missile submarine whose job was to slip beneath the ocean and make sure the unthinkable never happened. For more than thirty years, she did that work quietly, patiently, and without applause. What makes her story worth telling is not just wh...

There are stories from the Pacific War that settle into the mind with a kind of heavy clarity. They do not shout. They do not demand. They simply sit there and remind us that the ocean has a long memory. Today we are stepping into one of those stories, the night when USS Sea Devil went hunting in the East China Sea and crossed paths with a former passenger liner that had become something far more...

The story of USS Bonefish on November 29, 1943, is the kind of moment that captures the strange rhythm of submarine warfare. Long stretches of waiting and watching suddenly turn into a burst of violence that decides everything in a few minutes. Bonefish had been working her way through the Flores Sea when a thin smear of smoke on the horizon pulled the crew straight into the hunt. What followed wa...