USS Pampanito Submarine
In July 2002 I was visiting California on business trip and popped up to San Francisco for a visit before flying home. While I was there I went on a tour of the WWII submarine the USS Pampanito. It was bloody excellent, inexpensive and informative.
See also: Yosemite photos
The USS Pampanito was built in 1943 at the Navy Yard Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in just 9 months, and at a cost of 6 million dollars. She was one of the most advanced fighting systems of her day. Designed to operate at a maximum depth of 450ft apparenly crew unofficially took her to 600ft on occasion to avoid detection.
On her first patrol she was damaged by depth charges, however the crew was able to repair most of the damage at sea. All U.S. submariners were volunteers which was amazing considering 3,500 crew died while onboard submarines that were lost at sea.
Note: Click on any image to see a larger one. They're all fairly small file-size wise (about 100k)
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The old girl is in remarkably good nick really and the maintenence that goes on makes it look like they could almost send it out on active duty again. Submarines like this sank over half the Japanese shipping destroyed in WWII and about 50 of these subs were lost along with the 3,500 crew. |
| Here's a view of the gun-tower and lookout platforms. The gun shown here is a 20mm anti-aircraft gun and the one at the rear of the boat is 40mm calibre (apparenlty they would normally dive when aircraft were spotted) |  |
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The bunkroom contained 36 beds, stacked three high with bugger-all room to move, sometimes the crew had to share bunks when there were more men than beds. On one patrol the sub picked up 73 British and Australian former prisoners of war who then had to share the accomodation with the 70 crew. |
| This room was actually flooded with red safe-light (the camera flash has killed that) and with all the dials and lights going I was hoping I might be able to start the old girl up. |  |
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This is a rather crappy photo of the Torpedo room, there were also 14 crew who slept in the room to keep the 16 Torpedo's company that the boat carried. The tubes were always loaded and ready to fire. |
See also: Yosemite photos
Once you've had enough of my exciting photos, check out the official website where they have a wiced virtual tour.