Patrol Reports

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...

On this episode of Patrol Reports we return to one of the most remarkable moments in the entire Pacific submarine campaign. The date is November twenty first 1944. The place is the dark and storm driven waters of the Formosa Strait. The submarine USS Sealion is running on the surface through wind, rain, and near zero visibility while trying to track a Japanese formation that includes three battles...

The Barents Sea was gray and angry on November 15, 1969 . Beneath those frigid waves, two nuclear submarines—one American, one Soviet—found themselves in a dance of shadows that neither captain intended to finish with a crash. The USS Gato, an American attack submarine built for silent hunting, and the Soviet K-19, a ballistic missile boat already infamous among sailors as “the Widowmaker,” collid...

In the film The Caine Mutiny , we are told that there has never been a mutiny aboard a United States Navy ship. That is true, at least by the letter of the law. But there have been moments that tested the courage, discipline, and endurance of those who serve beneath the waves. This is the story of one such moment. In November 1943, deep in the Makassar Strait, the crew of the submarine USS Billfis...

In the years after World War II, the U.S. Navy faced a new kind of threat. The kamikazes were gone, but the sky itself had become the enemy. Long before satellites and airborne warning planes, the Navy turned to an unlikely solution. It pulled its old fleet submarines out of mothballs and refitted them with radar, turning hunters of the deep into sentinels of the sky. These were the radar picket s...

Today on Patrol Reports , we surface the story of the USS Will Rogers, the last of the “41 for Freedom.” She was a silent sentinel of the Cold War, built to carry peace through the threat of unimaginable power. From her first patrol in 1967 to her final days in the early 1990s, the Will Rogers stood watch in the deep, unseen but never idle. Her namesake, the American humorist and philosopher Will...

In this episode of Patrol Reports , we surface the story of the USS James K. Polk —a submarine that lived two very different lives beneath the waves. Commissioned in 1966 at the height of the Cold War, Polk carried the nation’s most powerful weapons on sixty-six deterrent patrols, vanishing for months at a time to keep the peace through silent vigilance. When the Cold War ended, she was reborn, tr...

The USS Daniel Boone took her name from one of America’s most enduring legends, the frontiersman Daniel Boone. Born on November 2, 1734, in Pennsylvania, Boone became a symbol of courage, exploration, and rugged independence. He blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap, opening the way for settlers into Kentucky, and his adventures in the American frontier made him a folk hero even in...

In the dark depths of the Cold War, one submarine carried the name of a Founding Father who believed peace could be preserved only through strength. USS John Adams, SSBN-620, was a Lafayette-class ballistic missile submarine built to ensure that no enemy would dare start a war it could not finish. From her launch in 1963 to her recycling in 1996, she patrolled the oceans unseen, part of the silent...

Welcome to Dave Does History , where we surface the forgotten stories beneath the waves. Today, we turn our periscope toward the USS Theodore Roosevelt , SSBN-600, a submarine that carried the name of a president who believed in speaking softly and carrying a big stick. Launched in 1959 at Mare Island, she embodied the dawn of a new kind of strength, one that stayed hidden under the sea but kept t...

George Bancroft was one of the great figures of nineteenth-century America, a historian, diplomat, and the founder of the United States Naval Academy. More than a century later, the Navy honored him by giving his name to a vessel that represented the cutting edge of Cold War deterrence. USS George Bancroft (SSBN-643) was a Benjamin Franklin-class ballistic missile submarine, part of the legendary...