Submarine History

In the midst of her tenth war patrol, on the night of 9-10 November 1944, USS BARB (SS-220) latched onto a target, the Japanese light cruiser Gokoku, near the naval base at Sasebo. BARB put two torpedoes into the enemy [...]

Commissioned on 29 March 1945, USS STICKLEBACK (SS-415) managed to squeeze in a two-day war patrol before the cease-fire was declared in mid-August. Less than a year later, she was decommissioned. But the Korean War brought the boat back into [...]

On 1 March 1939, USS SQUALUS (SS-192) was commissioned at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine. By May, the boat was ready to stretch her legs in the waters off the coast of New Hampshire. Her first eighteen dives, which [...]

“Dennis Landrum was one of the many prisoners of war (POW) held at the Aomori prison camp in Japan during World War II. The POWs wanted a flag to greet their rescuers when they were liberated at the end of [...]

On 20 May 1982, Historic Ship NAUTILUS (SSN-571) was designated a National Historic Landmark by the Secretary of the Interior. Although there are 85,000 sites on the National Register of Historic Places, only 2,500 or so are National Historic Landmarks. [...]

Ensign John England was four days shy of his twenty-first birthday when the sun rose over his ship, USS OKLAHOMA (BB-37), and the rest of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on 7 December 1941. The idea of an attack was probably the [...]

USS GUITARRO (SSN-665) was launched on 27 July 1968. Less than a year later, on 15 May 1969, the boat would have a much less positive experience with the water surrounding her: she sank at the pier. “The Guitarro should [...]

On 15 February 1944, USS ANGLER (SS-240) left Midway Island to begin her second war patrol. Several weeks later, Major General Douglas MacArthur received word that that the Japanese were massacring the civilian population on the Philippine island of Panay; [...]