USS Pampanito

The steel deck feels slightly hollow underfoot. Salt air drifts in off the bay, mixed with a faint smell of diesel and old paint. Gulls call from the pilings of Pier 45, and somewhere behind you a sea lion barks. In front of you lies a long, low, grey hull, sitting almost flush with the water. It does not look like much from the pier. But this is a submarine that went to war, and came home.

This is the USS Pampanito, a Balao-class submarine of the Second World War. The Balao class was the workhorse of the American submarine fleet in the Pacific. These boats were built to dive deeper than earlier designs, thanks to thicker, stronger hulls. Pampanito was built at the Portsmouth Navy Yard, in Kittery, Maine, and launched in 1943. Within months she was crossing the Pacific toward enemy waters.

The name itself is a small surprise. American submarines of this era were named after fish and other sea creatures. A pampanito is a kind of pompano, a silvery fish of warm coastal waters. So this hunter of ships carries the name of a modest, quick little fish. Many of her sister boats had names that sound just as gentle. The contrast between those names and the work these submarines did is part of their story.

Pampanito made six war patrols in the Pacific. Submarine work was slow, tense, and often lonely. Boats spent weeks searching empty ocean, hunting for convoys carrying fuel, food, and troops to Japanese forces. Then, suddenly, there would be hours of danger. A submarine had to attack, and then survive the depth charges that followed. Pampanito was damaged by depth charges on her first patrol. She survived, and she kept going back out.

Her most famous patrol came in September 1944, in the South China Sea. Pampanito joined other American submarines in an attack on a Japanese convoy. She torpedoed and sank ships, including the transport Kachidoki Maru. What no one on board knew was terrible. Some ships in that convoy carried British and Australian prisoners of war, being moved from Southeast Asia to Japan. The prisoners had spent years doing forced labour, including work on the infamous Burma Railway.

Several days later, Pampanito returned to the area. Her crew spotted men in the water, clinging to wreckage and rafts, covered in oil. At first they did not know who these survivors were. Then they heard English voices. The crew pulled seventy-three prisoners of war out of the sea. These men were starving, sick, and exhausted after days adrift. Sailors who had been trained to sink ships now worked for hours to save lives.

That rescue changed history in another way too. The survivors brought the first detailed reports to the Allies about conditions on the Burma Railway. Their accounts described brutal treatment and terrible death rates among prisoners. For the men of Pampanito, the rescue became the moment they remembered most. Out of a war spent hunting ships, their proudest day was pulling strangers from the sea. Keep that in mind as you go below.

Now, step down the hatch. The first thing you notice is how close everything is. Pipes, valves, gauges, and wheels cover every surface. The passage is narrow, and the ceilings are low. About eighty men lived and worked here for patrols that lasted many weeks. There was no private space. Sailors sometimes shared bunks, one man sleeping while another stood watch. This practice was called hot bunking, because the bed was still warm.

In the forward torpedo room, look at the heavy bronze doors of the torpedo tubes. Pampanito had ten tubes — six at the bow and four at the stern. The torpedoes were enormous, and the crew loaded them by hand, with chains and rails. Notice the bunks fixed right beside the torpedo racks. Some men slept next to the weapons themselves. It is a striking image: a sailor dreaming of home, inches from a warhead.

Further aft, you reach the control room and the galley. The control room is the brain of the boat, full of dials for depth, speed, and ballast. The galley is tiny, yet cooks here fed the whole crew around the clock. Submarine food had a reputation as the best in the navy. It was one small reward for life in a cramped steel tube. Imagine the smell of coffee and frying bacon filling this narrow space.

In the engine rooms, the scale changes. Large diesel engines fill the compartments, painted and polished. On the surface, these engines drove the boat and charged huge banks of batteries. Under water, the submarine ran silently on battery power alone. That meant every dive was a race against time and stored electricity. The heat and noise in here during a patrol must have been intense. Today, the rooms are still, and much quieter.

After the war, Pampanito spent years as a training vessel for naval reservists. Later she was saved from the scrapyard. Since the early 1980s she has been a museum ship here in San Francisco. Volunteers and staff of the San Francisco Maritime National Park Association care for her. She is a National Historic Landmark. Film fans might also know her from the comedy Down Periscope, where she stood in for another submarine on screen.

When you climb back up into the daylight, pause on the deck for a moment. Look out across the bay toward Alcatraz and the hills of Marin. Listen to the water slapping against the hull. Nearby is the Liberty ship Jeremiah O'Brien, another survivor of the same war. Two working vessels, now resting side by side. As you walk back along the pier, remember those seventy-three men, lifted out of the sea onto this same grey deck.