Cod was launched
on March 21st, 1943. She was the last of the Gato-
class boats built on that slip. The minute
she hit the water, a Balao-class boat was
laid down for construction. So, she incorporated
all the latest battle lessons. Cod arrived at the Pacific theater
of war in the autumn of 1943, when the battles for Bougainville Island
and New Guinea were in full swing. The Allies were pushing
the Japanese forces back, seeking to approach
the Philippines. In turn, the Japanese were trying to provide their
garrisons with necessary supplies and sent transport convoys
to the besieged islands. This is the Mark 40, 5"/25 deck gun,
common to US submarines in World War II. These were very desired by
the captains by the end of the war. Early on, they
had a 4-inch gun, which was not as effective,
very difficult to work with. These were a great upgrade,
because towards the end of the war, we had smaller ships, and these
subs actually became gunboats. Which meant they
came to the surface, used their deck guns
rather than torpedoes. The nice thing
about the 5-inch gun was you didn't have to wait for
everything to get drained out, you just load the
shells and start to shoot. Artillery armament:
Mark 40 gun mount. Caliber: 127 mm. Range: 13,000 m.
Rate of fire: up to 15 shots per minute. Two 40-mm Bofors
anti-aircraft guns. Browning M2 machine
gun, caliber 12.7 mm. The American
fleet submarine carries at least 200 rounds of main caliber
ammunition and 400 rounds of 40-mm, and thousands of rounds of
50-caliber machine gun ammunition. So they're
floating arsenals. No matter how strong
a submarine's armament, this alone isn’t enough to
result in a successful operation. It's important to have all the necessary
means to detect your enemy on board, and these should be as
diverse as the sub’s armament. We're here in the
conning tower of the Cod, it's a pressure vessel
above the main pressure hull, it's 8 feet in diameter,
17 feet long. This is where the officers and the
approach party would conduct attacks. Up to 11 men would be crammed in this
small space during a submerged attack. It holds for us the radars, the
sonar, the torpedo data computer, as well as their main
steering and the two periscopes. The American TDC,
or torpedo data computer, in World War II was
a marvel of engineering. It used spherical cams to solve spherical
trigonometry equations in real time, no microchips
or microprocessors involved. Firing torpedoes while submerged
presents quite a complex problem involving multiple variables. Imagine that you need to hit
a swinging log with a billiard cue, while standing on roller skates
at a distance of 30 meters. You're allowed to look at your target
only two or three times with one eye. To solve this issue and
make firing torpedoes easier, different countries
developed computing instruments. In World War II, the United States achieved the
most significant progress in this area. The American machine here, the
TDC takes time out of the equation. So the minute you have
the correct solution light, if your data is good, the torpedoes
will meet the target in time and space. So, the Germans,
the Japanese, and the British— their machines are
saying "Shoot now". If you shoot too soon or wait too
long your torpedo was going to miss. In terms of its construction, the
Mark 4 TDC consisted of three blocks that were connected
electromechanically. Data was input both
in manual and automatic modes. The receiver would automatically read
data about the submarine's course and speed from the gyrocompass
and dynamic-pressure log. Crew members
would input information about the target's
course, speed, and range, obtained with the help of the
periscope, sonar, and radar. It was adjusted
every 15–20 minutes. The TDC would
calculate the target's position and automatically send all
the data necessary for firing to a gyroscope installed
inside the torpedo launcher. This way the torpedo
was able to hit its target regardless of the
submarine's position. The computer made it possible to
continuously predict a target's position, even when the submarine was
maneuvering and fire at night, or under conditions
of limited visibility. We're going to turn this on
and start integrating some data. And what you're hearing
is a 1944 computer turning on and accepting the data
we've preset in the machine. If we estimate the target’s course
and speed, we can wait five minutes. We're going to bring the scope up,
if we see the target in our crosshairs, we know our
data is correct. If the target hasn't arrived yet or
has passed the periscope of you, we know our data
is in need of refinement, either he's going
faster or slower. And now let's start firing fish
that we have a correct solution. We have our two
firing boxes right here with the actual firing buttons for the
forward tubes and the after tubes. The captain will say “Standby 2”,
so we'll turn tube 2 to standby. The spindles
engage light comes on— this tells us that the
mechanical programmer is now communicating with the
torpedo, while it's in the tube. When the proper
gyro-angle is set, the spindles will come out,
and this light will go off, and this light will come on telling
us that tube 2 is ready to fire. So, I will wait for the
captain to say “Fire 2”— when we hear that command “Fire 2”,
I'll push that button and we’ll wait. The TDC has told us what the
runtime is, so we're going to wait. We might have our stopwatch
to track the time, and hopefully, we're going to hear big explosions,
and we're going to bring the scope up and see, hopefully,
the ship going down. More sophisticated means of
detection and torpedo fire control, combined with their enemies’ weak
anti-submarine defenses, paid off. During the Pacific War, American submarines sank about
75% of the Japanese merchant fleet. The price they paid for it was
a mere 17% of their submarines lost. This means that every
fifth sub didn't return to port. Compare this to the losses
suffered by German U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic:
75% of them were destroyed, while managing to sink only
1% of the Allied merchant fleet. The Gato-class subs were
in the thick of the fight early on. Again, being the largest and
most capable boats at the time, were given the
most difficult missions. On May 10th, 1944, the Cod
is involved in her largest combat. She is the last submarine that's
able to attack a 35-ship convoy coming to reinforce the
Japanese garrison in Manila. Throughout the night,
the sub pursued the convoy, trying to pass its anti-submarine
defense ships undetected. At dawn, she finally managed
to break through the outer ring and into the core of convoy, where she launched all six torpedoes
from her bow tubes at the cargo vessels. The sonar man hears some
high-speed screws behind us, the captain turns this periscope aft and
sees the Japanese destroyer Karukaya just 300 yards behind us,
cutting across our stern. And he flips the periscope
into high magnification and realizes there are crewmen on
the bridge pointing at his periscope. And so, he quickly fires three
torpedoes from the stern tubes, two of them catch the Karukaya
in amidships and break it in half. But it was too early
to celebrate victory. A Japanese hydroplane dropped a smoke
buoy right next to their periscope and the sub
had to submerge. The boat headed away from
the attack area at maximum speed. We clear the area very quickly,
but the firing point is saturated with a hundred depth
charges within a few minutes. They're going off
like strings of firecrackers. The ships are
so close to the harbor that they're able to
proceed into the harbor safely, and all of the escort destroyers
come out to kill the Cod. Cod's captain reduced
speed to a noiseless level— two to three knots—and
managed to evade sonar detection. All day the boat maneuvered, turning its
bow or aft towards enemy sonar signals, so as to present as small
a target as possible for them. Toward evening, with the
batteries running very low, the sonar man hears water hitting the
surface of the ocean a few miles away. And the captain says, “Maybe that's
a rain squall, so head toward that sound.” And he puts the periscope up
and realizes it's a heavy rainstorm. So, Cod surfaces in the rainstorm
and gets out of the area very quickly. So that's a typical attack
for an American submarine. The glorious Gato-class
submarines, including U.S.S. Cod, arguably became the most famous American
submarines of the World War II era. U.S.S. Flasher was one of the
most successful U.S. submarines, with more than 100,000
sunk tonnage credited to her. U.S.S. Cavalla sank Japanese
aircraft carrier Shokaku, which had participated
in the attack on Pearl Harbor. U.S.S. Wahoo
single-handedly destroyed an entire convoy of four ships
off the coast of New Guinea. In 1943, she became one
of the first U.S. submarines to break through
to the Sea of Japan. U.S.S. Finback recovered
a downed pilot, George H.W. Bush, future President
of the United States. U.S.S. Barb landed
a team from her crew on the Japanese-held
southern shore of Sakhalin Island. They placed charges under a railroad
track and blew up a passing train. Later in the war,
we were sent on a junk mission, because the Japanese targets
were getting fewer and far between. And Cod was based
in the southwest Pacific, so we were based out of
Australia and our mission was to interdict the Japanese shipping
coming out of the South China Sea. The rubber, tin and
oil coming from Malaysia, and some of the
areas around the Philippines. We participated in a campaign to prevent
the Philippines from being reinforced before our reinvasion
or liberation of the Philippines. So, late in the war, the last
patrol, we sank about 26 junks. We're also very proud of the fact
that on our final last war patrol, while we're
sinking the junks, we were sent to rescue the crew
of the Dutch submarine O 19. The Dutch had a very small but very effective force of
submarines fighting with the Allies. Sadly, the Dutch sub O 19 ran up on
a coral reef in the middle of the night, and the Cod, unable to free her,
had to take the 55 Dutch crewmen aboard for three days,
destroy the Dutch submarine, and put them ashore in the Philippines,
which had just been liberated. The Cod returned to her home
base at the end of the month, the Dutch were waiting for
the Cod crew, and they said, “Tomorrow night we have
a thank-you party for saving our lives”. Well, the next night at the thank-you
party they find out the war is over, so it became
one heck of a party. Which is why
today Cod's battle flag carries a martini glass over
the name O 19, to commemorate history's only international sub-to-sub
rescue and that infamous party. On the last day of summer in 1945,
Cod set a course for home. After an overhaul, the submarine
was sent to the reserve, but in 1951,
she was recommissioned. Cod served in the Caribbean and around
South America for the next three years. Then she was finally
decommissioned once and for all, and in 1971, was stricken
from the Naval Register. Five years later,
residents of Cleveland, not indifferent to the
submarine's faithful service, took care of her and
turned her into a museum. In 1986, U.S.S. Cod became
a National Historic Landmark. We're very proud of the Cod,
because it is very representative of the American fleet
submarine in World War II. She's the only World War II submarine
to retain both its hull integrity and its
World War II configuration. She remained pretty much intact,
we were able to add the deck guns that were missing, and a lot
of the crew habitation aspects. So, when people visit the Cod,
they're going to take a trip back in time to see what we believe is perhaps
the best restored fleet submarine.
