Increasingly, I've found in my old age, that memories from my past, good and bad, just pop into my mind of their own accord. Some are just a brief flash, a moment in time, others tend to hang on for days, playing themselves over and over. Lately, one such memory that has been persistent has to do with the submarine, USS Redfish (SS395), what we in the Navy called a pigboat.
To explain this, let me go back some. I enlisted in the Navy in 1964. Not so long after WWII and Korea that many of the drill instructors at boot camp were combat veterans of those wars. I attended boot training at San Diego Recruit Training Command. We had many hours of classroom instruction on the Naval battles of WWII. Many lectures were given by instructors who had personally participated in the battles. Really a first rate experience for a young boot.
During the course of bootcamp, on two occasions, the top man or two of each boot company were chosen to go on a off base liberty trip to a museum or a ship for the day. You can imagine what a big deal that was for a young trooper who had been confined inside the gates of the camp for weeks.
I was lucky to be chosen to make two such trips, the first was to a WWII private museum and viewarama of the war in the Pacific with the ocean the size of a large dinning room, with all the model ships and lighting effects to show gun flashes. The owner was a retired Navy Chief who narrated the entire war in the Pacific from memory. Impressive as hell.
The next liberty trip is the one that keeps popping up in my memory, it was to the USS Redfish. The Redfish was a Balao class submarine commissioned on 12 April 1944 and decommissioned on 27 June 1968. She arrived at Pearl Harbor on 27 June 1944. Prior to Dec 1944, she was credited with sinking 18 thousand tons of Japanese shipping. Together with the USS Sea Devil (SS400), she sank the Japanese Air Craft Carrier Junyo on 9 Dec 1944. On 19 Dec 1944, she sank the new Jap carrier Unryu.
I never became a submariner but that visit still sticks in my mind.