Today we take a look at the highest scoring surviving submarine, the USS Silversides!
Visit her here: https://silversidesmuseum.org/
Naval History books, use code ‘DRACH’ for 25% off – https://www.usni.org/press/books?f%5B0%5D=subject%3A1966
Free naval photos and channel posters – www.drachinifel.co.uk
Want to support the channel? – https://www.patreon.com/Drachinifel
Want to talk about ships? https://discord.gg/TYu88mt
‘Legionnaire’ by Scott Buckley – released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.au
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Pinned post for Q&A 🙂
Drach, if you haven't done so already, watch the Silent Service TV series episodes that are freely available on YT. The USS Silversides episode deals specifically with the death of Mike Harbin, the sailor mentioned on that deck plaque. The shows are all true stories and several have stars like Leonard Nimoy, Deforest Kelly, and others, when they were in their early careers.
I see some of those bunks and am not entirely sure I could even get into those, or that I could inhale if I did manage to squeeze in
Would love to see you out here in Hawaii Drach! The mighty USS Bowfin beckons (as well as that floating target they call "Mighty 'Mo" or something). As a former submariner, id love to see you come visit the island! Cheers!
ha ive played tag on this sub
22:16 Now that is a great phone interface! Would you say you identify as more of a Data or a Harry Kim type of ops officer?🖖
Unless you skipped it, the captains quarters on USS Pampanito is much nicer than anything here. It's a nice, compact little room with handy repeaters so he can tell what the boat is doing without leaving his room/office.
I imagined Drach with a flaming phone when he said 'phone torch'.
Having a patient wake up and tell you to hurry up because they can feel themselves bleeding is probably not something to put on your resume… Nevertheless, being able to perform a surgery with rudimentary equipment hundreds of feet below the waterline in a glorified Pringles can probably is.
The 4in wasn't that uncommon. Lots of subs swapped guns with older ships by the end of the war. Old four stackers being chief among them. Oddly enough the old mk8 torpedoes they carried were more capable than the mk14 for the longest time.
Always wanted to see inbetween the pressure and outer hull on a submarine. Many thanks from Northern Wisconsin
Thanks for posting your visit! I grew up in Muskegon, and I've had the opportunity to visit USS Silversides several times since she came to Muskegon in the 1980s. As you said, the museum is also wonderful and has more about the local history as well as more about the sub. She is moored in the channel between Muskegon Lake and Lake Michigan, and the adjacent park is also a nice place to visit. 🙂 The breakwater is a nice piece of engineering and walking it out to the lighthouse is a family tradition. Great memories and I hope your visit to my hometown was pleasant! I live in Huntsville, AL now, or I would have been there to meet you! 🙂
You are correct. It's been 25 years since I got my degree in Electrical Engineering and then proceeded to do nothing with it and go work for a bank and the moment I saw "Kiloamp" written on a dial I started wondering whether it might be safer to be stationed on the deck gun when the sub did an emergency dive than in the "big electricity" room.
Firing torpedoes in all directions? So US subs had a death blossom. Yes, I am showing my age with that movie reference. Lets see if anyone gets it. LOL
Great tour !!!
You're telling me WW2 submarine captains went full gunstar?
I’ve stayed the night twice on that ship with my Boy Scout troop. We’d go in the middle of the summer and reserve a weeknight rather than a weekend and had the whole ship to ourselves.
Excellent tour, thank you! I learned things I did not learn by actually touring a US Navy WWII fleet boat in person.
Re: BBC; Thanks, Drach, your tour of the boat is delightful as usual. A little note on the steering elements of the U-Boat you show. The label BBC indicates the makers of the controls, Brown, Boveri & Cie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown,_Boveri_%26_Cie). You may have given this info in the video on the German sub, but I didn't see it, so just in case …
Cheers!
My scout troop has overnighted on silversides in February- very cold in Michigan in mid winter…
When I was a Cub Scout around 10-11 yrs old my troop took a trip to Muskegon and got a tour of Silversides, after which we got to spend the night on board, sleeping where the real crew slept during her service. My friends and I managed to secure an officers bedroom with real cots while the less resourceful scouts had to make do with the regular crew space and the much less comfortable hanging cots. Love to see her once again, great video Drach.
my Dad used to man switches like those at 40:29
I was thinking of a passenger ship tour of the Great Lakes. I think there is a stop at Muskegon. Will visit Olde Silversides, the other museum ships and the museum, for sure!
Kiloamps..YIKES!!
Woah, I never realized there was that much space between the pressure hull and outer casing. :O
Damn wish i new you were in michigan. I dont live to far from Muskegon.
When I was in Boy Scouts, we were able to spend the night aboard the USS Cobia, which was a submarine of the same class and another museum ship across the lake in Wisconsin. It’s also possible to spend the night aboard USS Silversides
I've have just visited the cod yesterday, thanks for the narrative very similar
Yay finally the Silversides, I always loved seeing her while going through the channel as a kid. I love her and the LST, both are amazing ships.
Thanks.
When My Dad was stationed in New Hampshire, I went on one of these when I was about 8 years old. It looked pretty much like this.
It was some kind of a Navy Day or something where they were letting civilians tour the ships. My Mom was not happy about having to climb down the ladder to get in the sub – in a dress. The crew was right there. They were friendly and somewhat amused by us.
They had the sail of one sub as a memorial at one of the local sub bases.
We saw the Thresher Launched and I knew a kid whose father was aboard as a technician when it sank. There were a lot of the people who lived in that area employed by the ship yard and the Navy. That loss hit them hard. I wasn't living there any more but one of my friends sent me a letter.
One thing about that area in the 1950's was that WWII had only been over for about a dozen years and everyone there remembered it very well.
When the movie Sink the Bismarck came out that was something that had been very real at the time too.
It wasn't going to happen – but people who lived there were speculating on the Bismarck taking on our Coastal Artillery Batteries. People who live in areas like that – where they can look out their front door and see the Atlantic Ocean – have imaginations about what actually could happen – even if it wasn't ever going to. I mean – the US wasn't even in the War then but people will imagine all kinds of things. After all – this is something the Germans could have physically done – even if they weren't going to.
There was a "disappearing" Costal Artillery Battery near our house – and this tower from the war of 1812.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Portsmouth_nh_martello.jpg
That was our house in this picture. It was about 200 yards from the river on one side and another couple of hundred yards from the Atlantic on the other. You can imagine what people living there during WWII felt about German Submarines.
It was really something for an 8 year old boy. Ships went up and out the Portsmouth River all the time – and we'd see WWII Attack Transports with all the little LCVP's training off the coast. Big and small Coast Guard Cutters.
There was a light house off the coast that painted our house every night. Fog horns.
The North East United States isn't drenched in History the way certain parts of Europe are – but – compared to most of the rest of the US – there's a lot of it.
Just past our house was a Coast Guard Base that had been a British Base before the Revolutionary War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_William_and_Mary
We used to go into that gun battery position and play. The guns were gone and no one was there – but my Father warned us about going into any rooms where we couldn't see – because there were Ammunition Hoists in the Fortifications from the Magazines down below. My parents were not happy about us playing around old fortifications like that but – kids do all kinds of things they aren't supposed to. I climbed the Water Tower at Camp Pendleton when I was six years old …
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Thanks Drach
It probably kills the mood a bit, but in Oz, silverside is a type of corned beef, usually served with white sauce.
Like I said, the knowledge rsther kills the mood. Imagine being one of the ships sunk by the USS Pastrami on Rye.
Excellent video
22:16 We have proof that Drach is from the future and that his "phone" was actually a tricorder of some sort.
Is he doing a George and Gracie thing with the USS Silversides and planning to bring in into the 24th century ?
most "amps" kilo or otherwise are very bad news . single digit amps will kill you just as dead as kilo amps, so no point in getting more worried about one or the other.
Way to document the numerous spider webs under the deck. Not normally seen.
Reading the comments I can tell many viewers do not know about the USS Cod YouTube channel.
I've always had a soft spot for these fleet boats – especially after watching a couple of the training movies that the Navy put out. The way the designers over came the myriad of engineering challenges needed to make these boats function so effectively and for such a long time on only the fuel and provisions they could carry always seemed elegant to me.
As I bumble through your visits to existing museum ships, I keep saying to myself, “He’s got to know about USS Orleck, DD-886 in Jacksonville” . Always enjoy your accuracy and Humor. Oobleck was my home WESTPAC Summer 1967 handled about 2000 5” 38 during unreps. Lost both DASH outbound turning hangar into casino. As Sonar operator scored ASROC hit(2) during practice with foreign sub. I’m Jay
Brown STG-2. A lot we could talk about . Favorite ship Italian BB Dante. Bottom line is that you know about the Orleck.
Id have loved to have been able to recommend to you to eat at Tiki Boi’s restaurant while you were in Muskegon. Anyway cool video. I always appreciate your work.
You pronounced Muskegon perfectly!
This what i call the Warspite effect. How can one ship get so much battle credit and not sunk? This ship created a culture where the captain, who was a very bright man, just set up a culture where genius was rewarded and idiocy got one transferred. I always think of Warspite and the Enterprise as being that sort of ship. Most carriers sent reports of perhaps two dozen pages. Enterprise sent hundreds. This is a cultural shift, not a fluke.
People understand that genius is always rewarded and imbeciles will be thrown overboard. All life is just like this. We deny it like the German Destroyers denied Warspite. At Narvik. That didn't work out so well.
Whaaaaat? I drive through Muskegon a few times a year. I know what I want to do the next time I'm in that neck of the woods.
Submarines seem so cool. One of my older brothers was an electrical technician on boomers back in the 80s. He loved it. I'd probably go crazy. Lol
I love how the english person, gunshy after a lifetime of counterintuitive pronunciations like Thames and Cholmondeley, cautiously ventures a surprising alternative to the relatively benign "Burlingame"