Submarine Service World War 2 - My Dad

USS Kingfish SS 234 - Torpedo’s Mate Second Class James A. Hooper, Jr.

My dad served on Kingfish during the early part of WW 2. He enlisted, as did hundreds of thousands of young Americans, in January 1942. He volunteered for the submarine force, they only took volunteers, and finished basic submarine school and training as a Torpedo’s Mate in New London, Connecticut and was assigned to USS Kingfish SS 234 homeported in Pearl Harbor. He completed two wartime patrols before being selected for the V-12 Officer Training Program and returned to the US to go through training and commissioning in Plattsburg, New York. He was commissioned in 1943 and went to Antisubmarine Warfare Officer training in Miami, Florida, before joining his ship USS Brown, a destroyer escort stationed in Boston, Massachusetts. He finished the war operating out of Boston escorting convoys to England and hunting German U-boats. After the defeat and surrender of Nazi Germany in April 1945, the German U-boats on patrol in the Atlantic surrendered to the U.S. Navy forces and my mother remembers waiting for the USS brown to return to port in Boston Navy Yard and seeing the USS Brown escorting a surrendered German U-boat into port. The war in the Atlantic was over.

This is the patrol highlights of USS Kingfish while my dad was aboard. He never talked about any of this and I did not know or appreciate enough what that must have been like in those desperate early years of the war far out in the Western Pacific hunting Japanese shipping targets making attacks and enduring depth charge attacks from Japanese Imperial Navy destroyers. *

  

 9 Sep 1942
USS Kingfish (Lt.Cdr. V.L. Lawrence) departed from Pearl Harbor for her 1st war patrol. She was ordered to patrol in Japanese home waters.

1 Oct 1942
USS Kingfish (Lt.Cdr. V.L. Lawrence) torpedoed and sank the Japanese merchant cargo ship Yomei Maru (2860 GRT) off Ichiezaki, Japan in position 33°31'N, 135°26'E.

23 Oct 1942
USS Kingfish (Lt.Cdr. V.L. Lawrence) torpedoed and sank the Japanese auxiliary gunboat Seikyo Maru (2608 GRT) at the entrance to Kii Suido, Honshu, Japan in position 33°20'N, 135°27'E.

3 Nov 1942
USS Kingfish (Lt.Cdr. V.L. Lawrence) ended her 1st war patrol at Midway.

25 Nov 1942
USS Kingfish (Lt.Cdr. V.L. Lawrence) departed from Midway for her 2nd war patrol. She was ordered to patrol off Formosa.

7 Dec 1942
USS Kingfish (Lt.Cdr. V.L. Lawrence) torpedoed and sank the Japanese army cargo ship Hino Maru No.3 (4389 GRT) west of the Bonin Islands in position 23°59'N, 138°43'E.

28 Dec 1942
USS Kingfish (Lt.Cdr. V.L. Lawrence) torpedoed and sank the Japanese merchant cargo ship Choyo Maru (5388 BRT) off the northwest coast of Formosa in position 24°46'N, 120°40'E.

7 Jan 1943
USS Kingfish (Lt.Cdr. V.L. Lawrence) sank two Japanese sailing vessels with gunfire west of the Bonin Islands in the following positions 25°46'N, 138°09'E and 25°31'N, 136°28'E.

23 Jan 1943
USS Kingfish (Lt.Cdr. V.L. Lawrence) ended her 2nd war patrol at Pearl Harbor.

*During World War II, the U.S. Navy's submarine service suffered the highest casualty percentage of all the American armed forces, losing one in five submariners.^[3] Some 16,000 submariners served during the war, of whom 375 officers and 3131 enlisted men were killed.^[4]

Fifty-two submarines of the United States Navy were lost during World War II.^[5] Two -- Dorado (SS-248) and Seawolf (SS-197)—were lost to friendly fire (with S-26 (SS-131) probably additional friendly fire, as the collision with USS Sturdy (PC-460) appears due to being mistaken for a U-boat), at least two more --Tulibee and Tang—to defective torpedoes, and six to accident or grounding.^[6]

Another eight submarines went missing while on patrol and are presumed to have been sunk by Japanese mines, as there were no recorded Japanese anti-submarine attacks in their patrol areas. The other thirty-three lost submarines are known to have been sunk by the Japanese.