USS Tautog (SS-199)

USS Tautog (SS-199), the second Tambor-class submarine, was the first ship of the United States Navy to be named for the tautog, a small edible sport fish, which is also called a blackfish. She was one of the most successful submarines of World War II. Tautog was credited with sinking 26 Japanese ships, for a total of 72,606 tons, scoring second by number of ships and eleventh by tonnage earning her the nickname "The Terrible T." Of the twelve Tambor-class submarines, she was one of only five to survive the war.

Tautog's first patrol, into the Marshall Islands in late 1941 and early 1942, produced reconnaissance information but no enemy vessels sunk. However, on her second visit to that area, in the spring of 1942, she torpedoed the Japanese submarines Ro-30 and I-28, plus a freighter. Operating out of Australia between July 1942 and May 1943, Tautog went into the waters of the East Indies and Indochina on five patrols during which Tautog sank the Japanese destroyer Isonami and seven merchant ships. She also laid mines off Haiphong and endured a depth charge attack in November 1942.

Following an overhaul at San Francisco, California, Tautog resumed operations from Pearl Harbor in October 1943, sinking the Japanese submarine chaser No. 30 and damaging a tanker and three freighters during this cruise, her eighth of the war. Her next four patrols, from December 1943 to August 1944, took her to the Japanese home islands, including the frigid northern Pacific. This period was a very productive one, with the destroyer Shirakumo and eleven Japanese merchant ships falling victim to Tautog. A stateside overhaul followed, with the submarine's thirteenth war patrol, into the East China Sea, beginning in December 1944. The next month she sank a landing ship and a motor torpedo boat tender to conclude the submarine's combat career.

Assigned to training duty in February 1945, Tautog spent the rest of World War II in that role and supporting developmental work off Hawaii and the West Coast. She transferred to the Atlantic in November 1945, a few months after Japan's surrender, and was decommissioned in December. In 1947 Tautog went to the Great Lakes, where she was employed as a stationary Naval Reserve training submarine at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for nearly twelve years. Tautog was removed from service in September 1959. Sold some months later, she was scrapped at Manistee, Michigan, during the early 1960s.