АҚШ-тың «Батфиш» теңіз асты кемесінің тарихы

Submarine of the United States

{|

submerged USS Batfish is the first vessel of the United States Navy to be named for the batfish, a type of anglerfish that crawls about on the sea floor. Batfish served during World War II. Her war operations spanned a period from 11 December 1943 to 26 August 1945, during which she completed seven war patrols. She is credited with having sunk nine Japanese ships totaling 10,658 tons while operating east of Japan and in the Philippine Sea, Luzon Strait, and South China Sea. Batfish received the Presidential Unit Citation for her sixth war patrol during which she sank three Japanese submarines in the South China Sea in four days.

Originally to be named Acoupa, hull SS 310 was renamed Batfish on 24 September 1942 prior to its keel laying on 27 December 1942 at the Portsmouth Navy Yard in Kittery, Maine. She was launched on 5 May 1943, sponsored by Mrs. Nellie W. Fortier, and commissioned on 21 August 1943 with Lieutenant Commander Wayne R. Merrill in command.

Following her commissioning, Batfish underwent an extensive shakedown and training period to instruct the crew in combat procedures for diving, attacking, evading, and damage control. She left the Portsmouth Navy Yard in mid September 1943, paused briefly at Newport, Rhode Island, to practice on the torpedo range, and then continued on to New London, Connecticut. She arrived there on 26 September 1943 and, after voyage repairs, underwent additional training in submarine combat routine. Batfish left New London on 15 October to join the war in the Pacific. While still northeast of the Panama Canal, Batfish sighted another submarine and, believing it to be a German U boat, fired a torpedo at it. The torpedo missed, and the other submarine disappeared. Just as Batfish approached the Panama Canal, a U. S. Navy patrol bomber mistook her for a U boat and almost dropped its bombload on her. On 1 November 1943, Batfish tied up at Coco Solo in the Panama Canal Zone for an overnight stop, then transited the canal and spent a week in Balboa on the Pacific end of the canal for minor repairs and rest. On 8 November 1943, Batfish resumed her journey, making an independent voyage during which her crew conducted daily drills. She arrived in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on 19 November 1943. After reporting for duty to the Commander, Submarine Force, U. S. Pacific Fleet, Batfish spent five days alongside the submarine tender Griffin at Pearl Harbor for repairs. She then carried out intensive training in United States Pacific Fleet procedures.

Batfish left Pearl Harbor on 11 December 1943 and began her first war patrol, an open sea patrol south of Honshu, Japan. She fought typhoons most of the way but finally reached her patrol area on 28 December 1943. However, bad weather continued to dog her operations and made it impossible for her to attack the few Japanese convoys she sighted. On 14 January 1944, her radar picked up a large contact. Signals intelligence identified it as the Imperial Japanese Navy battleship Japanese battleship Yamato, one of the two largest warships in the world. Merrill chose to dive rather than use the cover of the heavy seas to close the battleship on the surface, and Batfish′s slower submerged speed caused her to fall rapidly out of range of Yamato and her escorts. Shortly after 12:00 on 19 January 1944, a convoy of four Japanese ships appeared on the horizon and, with nightfall, Batfish made a high speed surface run to close for an attack. She fired three torpedoes at each of two cargo ships, sinking one and crippling the other. The other two ships escaped, but Batfish remained on the scene to sink the crippled cargo ship, the 5,486 gross register ton Hidaka Maru, early the following morning. Postwar assessment of Japanese shipping losses only credited Batfish with this last sinking. Batfish departed her patrol area on 24 January 1944 and headed back through typhoons to Midway Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, where she arrived on 30 January 1944. At Midway, she underwent a two week refit, followed by a week of training.

Batfish departed Midway Atoll on 22 February 1944 bound for another patrol area south of Honshu. This patrol was unsuccessful because of continual high winds and heavy seas that seemed to have kept the Japanese in port. Batfish departed her patrol area on 3 April 1944 without making contact with any ship larger than a sampan. She proceeded to Pearl Harbor for refit, which began upon her arrival there on 15 April 1944. A relief crew from the submarine tender Proteus took over to allow Batfish′s crew two weeks of rest. The refit was extended, but finally, on 10 May 1944, Batfish departed Pearl Harbor for Midway Atoll and additional training. While she was at Midway, Lieutenant Commander John K. “Jake” Fyfe relieved Merrill of command.

On 26 May 1944, Batfish departed Midway Atoll to patrol an area covering the southern coasts of Kyushu, Shikoku, and Honshu. The weather was excellent. On 10 June 1944, she attacked and thought she had sunk a Japanese cargo ship in use as a training ship, but the kill was not confirmed. Retaliatory depth charge attacks by Japanese planes and patrol boats failed to damage Batfish, and she continued her patrol. On 18 June 1944 she sighted two Japanese ships, a coastal cargo ship and a small, but heavily laden, tanker. Although within sight of the coast of Honshu, Batfish closed in for the kill and claimed to have sunk the cargo ship. On 22 June 1944, Batfish sighted a large Japanese cargo ship steaming independently down the Japanese coast. She fired three of her bow torpedo tubes at the ship, but all three passed astern of her. As the first target rounded Andakino Point and headed away, a larger Japanese cargo ship, Nagaragawa Maru, passed her on an opposite course. Batfish fired four torpedoes from her stern tubes at Nagaragawa Maru, allowing her to make a quick escape out to sea. Nagaragawa Maru sank by the stern. However, a Japanese patrol boat immediately gave chase to Batfish, forcing her to dive to avoid depth charges. Unfortunately, Batfish′s nautical charts were not accurate: They showed depths of 400 feet (122 m) in the area, but Batfish grounded on an underwater volcanic peak at a depth of 240 feet (73 m). Batfish rapidly eased backwards and upwards, but endured a tense eight hours punctuated by more than 50 depth charges before she could surface and survey her damage. The depth charges had caused none, but the grounding had jammed the starboard sound head, reducing her underwater listening capabilities, and had bent the starboard propeller shaft and propeller. Nevertheless, Batfish continued her patrol. She sighted a Japanese convoy on 28 June 1944, but before she could reach a suitable attack position, the Japanese attacked her with torpedoes and aerial bombs, forcing her to let the convoy escape. However, she picked up another contact on 29 June 1944, a Japanese convoy with a cargo ship as a prime target. Batfish fired three torpedoes from her bow tubes that missed their mark when the Japanese maneuvered to avoid them. This convoy also made good its escape. On 2 July 1944, as Batfish departed her patrol area bound for Midway Atoll, a lookout sighted two Japanese ships, a small trawler traveling with a converted yacht serving as an escort. Batfish closed in for a surface attack, and her guns filled the trawler with holes but failed to trigger an explosion. The escort moved at high speed to ram Batfish, which backed at emergency speed and narrowly avoided a collision. Full of holes from Batfish′s raking gunfire, the converted yacht was engulfed in flames and quickly sank. Batfish suffered one casualty, the pharmacist's mate, who was hit by a bullet in the knee while at his post on deck in the surface gun action that ended in the destruction of what proved to be the guard boats Kamoi Maru and No. 5 Isuzugawa Maru. Batfish returned to Midway Atoll, where she underwent a 16 day refit alongside Proteus. Her crew then trained in firing the new electric Mark 18 torpedo.

Batfish departed Midway Atoll on 1 August 1944 for her fourth war patrol, which took her to waters surrounding the Palau Islands. Her assigned area offered up no worthy targets, but a report of a Japanese destroyer grounded to the north of the Palaus sent her to Velasco Reef to investigate. There, she found two Japanese ships – minelayer and a transport – aground on the reef and the Japanese destroyer Japanese destroyer Samidare on the beach across the atoll where had run aground on 18 August 1944. A Japanese floatplane, two tugs, two patrol boats, and a minesweeper that Batfish identified as a second destroyer were in attendance. Batfish selected the transport as her first target, but poor visibility, rain, and rough seas intervened. On 23 August 1944, while making an approach to locate the transport again in a rain squall, Batfish found the minesweeper, which her crew still believed to be a destroyer, in her sights instead. She fired three torpedoes from her bow tubes that hit the warship and blew her apart at on 30 December 1944 for her sixth war patrol, bound for the Mariana Islands as part of an attack group which also included the submarines Blackfish and Archerfish. The submarines arrived at Apra Harbor on Guam on 9 January 1945, but returned to sea on 10 January to take up patrol in the South China Sea to the northeast of Hainan Island. Early on 23 January 1945, the attack group made radar contact with a small fleet of junks. Batfish surfaced and fired at one of the larger junks, then dispatched boarding parties which searched four of the junks and found nothing but harmless Chinese fishermen aboard them. After giving the junks some supplies, Batfish resumed her patrol to the south to avoid further contact with the junks. Since Japanese convoys dwindled constantly both in size and number by this point in the war due to American advances and faltering Japanese defenses, Batfish encountered only small and isolated transports, and her attacks on them were cut short either by foul weather or by torpedoes that consistently passed under their targets. On 2 February 1945, Batfish's patrol area changed to Babuyan and the Calayan north of Luzon. After arriving on station, she sighted a small Japanese landing barge on a northerly course heading toward Formosa and made a surface attack. She was unable to sink the barge, but started a fire on board and thoroughly raked it with gunfire before leaving it behind. On 3 February 1945, Batfish was alerted to watch for Japanese vessels engaged in an evacuation to Formosa of Japanese personnel from the Aparri area of northern Luzon. On 4 February, Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Miwa, the commander of Japanese 6th Fleet, ordered the submarines Japanese submarine Ro 46, Japanese submarine Ro 112, Japanese submarine Ro 113, and Japanese submarine Ro 115 to suspend their patrols, proceed to Takao on Formosa to offload torpedoes and ammunition, and then proceed to the Aparri area to embark evacuees. After her engagement with the landing barge, Batfish made no contacts until 9 February 1945, when at 22:50 her SJ radar began tracking a blip moving at on a course of 310 degrees – i. e., away from Aparri and toward Formosa – at a range of Ro 115 never acknowledged Miwa's order and never arrived at Takao, and there is no evidence that she took part in the evacuation; the destroyer escort Ulvert M. Moore probably sank her southwest of Manila on 31 January 1945. Ro 46 completed her evacuation mission successfully, and survived until at least April 1945. The Japanese submarine Japanese submarine Ro 55, not a participant in the evacuation but at Aparri at the time to offload ammunition, is a possible candidate,

During the patrol, Fyfe noted that Batfish sighted a significant number of Japanese aircraft, but that they passed her without attempting an attack, a behavior he attributed to what he presumed was the Japanese pilots being more concerned about the large number of American planes also in the area than with Batfish. Fyfe assessed it as a probable friendly fire incident, in which the aircraft had mistaken her for a Japanese submarine, one of the fighters had spotted for the PBY by following Batfish down her track, and the PBY had dropped the torpedo. according to different sources, on 13 February 1945, Batfish gained SJ radar contact at a range of There were no survivors from any of the three Japanese submarines. berthed at Mare Island.

Batfish received her reactivation overhaul in January 1952 and was recommissioned on 7 March 1952 with Lieutenant Commander Robert J. Jackson in command. After six weeks of training, she set course via the Panama Canal for Key West, Florida. She was assigned to Submarine Division 122 in the United States Atlantic Fleet on 21 April 1952. She served the remainder of her commissioned career in training operations in the Caribbean and along the United States East Coast.

Impressed by the Drum museum in Mobile, Alabama, which drew over 300,000 paying visitors its first year, the Oklahoma chapter of the United States Submarine Veterans of World War II sent a delegation from its Oklahoma City and Tulsa chapters in 1969 to ask the U. S. Navy if they could adopt a retired submarine. On hand at the time at Naval Support Activity New Orleans was Piranha, which the Navy agreed to turn over to them if they could fulfill the donation requirements. Wanting Piranha for his hometown, then Oklahoma State Senator James Inhofe agreed to sponsor a bill accepting the submarine for Oklahoma. Batfish officially was opened on the Memorial Day weekend in late May 1973. By the end of August 1973, she was attracting a thousand visitors a week, with income from paid attendance doubling over her first seven weeks on display. She had been restored well with the exception of her conning tower. Until May 2019, she was open to the public year round. While the park and grounds remain open for visitors, Batfish remains closed to the public due to flood damage while funds are raised for repairs. In November 2021, a plan was announced to relocate Batfish to Three Forks Harbor in Muskogee along with artifacts in the museum and pieces on the museum grounds. The time frame for the relocation operation was announced as three to five years.