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.