Американская подводная лодка USS Ronquil Исаак Пераль

Submarine of the United States

USS Ronquil (SS 396), a , was the only ship of the United States Navy named after the ronquil, a spiny finned fish found along the northwest coast of North America. It has a single dorsal fin and a large mouth and resembles the tropical jawfish.

Ronquil was laid down on 9 September 1943 at the Portsmouth Navy Yard, in Kittery, Maine; launched on 27 January 1944, sponsored by Mrs. C. M. Elder; and commissioned on 22 April 1944.

After shakedown off the New England coast, Ronquil sailed for Hawaii. She arrived at Pearl Harbor on 8 July 1944; and, after preparatory training, sailed on her first war patrol (31 July – 8 September 1944) in the northeastern Formosa Sakishima Gunto area. On 24 August the submarine sank two attack cargo ships: Yoshida Maru No. 3 (4,646 tons) and Fukurei Maru (5,969 tons). Ronquil’s second war patrol, from 30 September to 28 November 1944, was carried out in two phases. She first operated with a coordinated submarine attack group in the Bungo Suido area, and then joined six other submarines to carry out an antipatrol ship sweep off the Bonin Islands. On her third war patrol, from 1 January to 14 February 1945, Ronquil patrolled the Bonins and did lifeguard duty in that area for Army bombers hitting the Japanese home islands. Her fourth war patrol from 11 March to 23 April 1945, brought her no worthwhile enemy targets but resulted in the rescue of 10 Army aviators from a B 29 bomber downed between the Bonins and Japan. The submarine's fifth and last patrol from 19 May to 26 July 1945, took her into the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea. The end of the war in the Pacific in mid August 1945 found Ronquil off Pearl Harbor, training for another war patrol.

Ronquil returned to San Diego in the fall of 1945 and engaged in training exercises off the California coast. In January 1947, she departed San Diego for her first peacetime western Pacific deployment. This patrol lasted 114 days and took the submarine to Tahiti, the Caroline Islands, the Mariana Islands, Japan, and the Yellow Sea. On her return to San Diego, she resumed local operations before beginning a three year period of intensive training in offensive and antisubmarine warfare, embodying lessons learned during World War II as well as new postwar developments.

On the day of her commissioning, Ronquil was transferred to Spain under the Mutual Security Assistance Act. She was commissioned into the Spanish Navy as Isaac Peral (S 32), named after Spanish submarine pioneer Isaac Peral. Under her new commander, Lieutenant Commander Pedro Soler Yolif, she sailed from San Diego to her new home port of Cartagena, Spain, where she arrived on 22 August 1971. Isaac Peral faced retirement in 1982, but her service was extended until the commissioning of the new submarine Spanish submarine Siroco. The Spanish Navy finally decommissioned Isaac Peral on 3 April 1984.