There are stories from the Pacific War that settle into the mind with a kind of heavy clarity. They do not shout. They do not demand. They simply sit there and remind us that the ocean has a long memory. Today we are stepping into one of those stories, the night when USS Sea Devil went hunting in the East China Sea and crossed paths with a former passenger liner that had become something far more tragic.

Hawaii Maru began her life carrying travelers who dressed for dinner. By the winter of 1944 she was carrying soldiers, gasoline, ammunition, and the burden of a war that was already slipping away from Japan. What happened when Sea Devil found her was swift, violent, and final. It was also a moment that reveals the strange mix of skill, fear, and consequence that shaped submarine warfare.

This is that story.

The story of USS Bonefish on November 29, 1943, is the kind of moment that captures the strange rhythm of submarine warfare. Long stretches of waiting and watching suddenly turn into a burst of violence that decides everything in a few minutes. Bonefish had been working her way through the Flores Sea when a thin smear of smoke on the horizon pulled the crew straight into the hunt. What followed was a disciplined stalk, a clean attack, and a hard escape under the weight of depth charges.

This introduction sets the stage for the attack itself. It was a morning that began like any other, filled with routine checks and quiet tension, but it quickly became a textbook example of how a trained crew, a steady captain, and a little luck could change the course of a day. It was the silent service at its sharpest.

On this episode of Patrol Reports we return to one of the most remarkable moments in the entire Pacific submarine campaign. The date is November twenty first 1944. The place is the dark and storm driven waters of the Formosa Strait. The submarine USS Sealion is running on the surface through wind, rain, and near zero visibility while trying to track a Japanese formation that includes three battleships. Her skipper, Lieutenant Commander Eli Reich, carries the memory of the first Sealion that was lost in the opening days of the war, and the torpedoes in his forward tubes bear the names of the men who died there.

What follows is the only successful attack by an American submarine that sent an enemy battleship to the bottom. The destroyer Urakaze vanished in an instant. The battleship Kongo died in fire hours later. It is a story of risk, resolve, and a decisive strike that changed naval history.

The Barents Sea was gray and angry on November 15, 1969. Beneath those frigid waves, two nuclear submarines—one American, one Soviet—found themselves in a dance of shadows that neither captain intended to finish with a crash. The USS Gato, an American attack submarine built for silent hunting, and the Soviet K-19, a ballistic missile boat already infamous among sailors as “the Widowmaker,” collided 200 feet below the surface. No lives were lost, no missiles fired, but for a few long seconds, the Cold War trembled on the edge of disaster. What followed was a cover-up so complete that even the men who served aboard Gato rarely spoke of it for decades. The “Barents Bump,” as it’s come to be called, was one of the closest peacetime encounters between nuclear powers that could have turned catastrophic.

In the film The Caine Mutiny, we are told that there has never been a mutiny aboard a United States Navy ship. That is true, at least by the letter of the law. But there have been moments that tested the courage, discipline, and endurance of those who serve beneath the waves.

This is the story of one such moment. In November 1943, deep in the Makassar Strait, the crew of the submarine USS Billfish found themselves fighting not only the enemy above but fear within. Their commanding officer lost his nerve during a relentless sixteen-hour depth charge attack, leaving his men to face the unthinkable.

For sixty years, the truth of what happened aboard Billfish remained buried in silence. Only decades later would the full story come to light, revealing not rebellion, but a different kind of bravery, born in the darkest depths of war.

In the years after World War II, the U.S. Navy faced a new kind of threat. The kamikazes were gone, but the sky itself had become the enemy. Long before satellites and airborne warning planes, the Navy turned to an unlikely solution. It pulled its old fleet submarines out of mothballs and refitted them with radar, turning hunters of the deep into sentinels of the sky.

These were the radar picket submarines, known by the mysterious designation SSR. They formed a short but fascinating chapter in Cold War history, watching for danger from beneath the waves. In this episode, we’ll explore how the program called Project Migraine transformed boats like USS Requin and USS Burrfish into the Navy’s earliest early-warning systems. It’s the story of ingenuity, frustration, and adaptation in an age when America’s eyes had to look not just across the seas, but far above them.

Today on Patrol Reports, we surface the story of the USS Will Rogers, the last of the “41 for Freedom.” She was a silent sentinel of the Cold War, built to carry peace through the threat of unimaginable power. From her first patrol in 1967 to her final days in the early 1990s, the Will Rogers stood watch in the deep, unseen but never idle.

Her namesake, the American humorist and philosopher Will Rogers, once said he never met a man he didn’t like. It was a fitting name for a boat that carried the burden of deterrence, trusting that her very presence would prevent the unthinkable.

Join us as we look back on her construction, her patrols, and the men who lived and served aboard her. This is the story of the last of her kind, and the quiet peace she helped preserve beneath the waves.

The USS Daniel Boone took her name from one of America’s most enduring legends, the frontiersman Daniel Boone. Born on November 2, 1734, in Pennsylvania, Boone became a symbol of courage, exploration, and rugged independence. He blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap, opening the way for settlers into Kentucky, and his adventures in the American frontier made him a folk hero even in his own lifetime. Boone fought in the French and Indian War and later in the Revolutionary War, defending frontier settlements against British-allied forces. Though often romanticized in later tales, the real Boone was a man of endurance and adaptability, traits that mirrored the submarine that bore his name. Just as the frontiersman explored uncharted lands to secure a future for his people, the submarine Daniel Boone explored the depths of the sea to safeguard a nation standing watch in an uncertain age.