By James Heinz
When I was a young man, my friends would often refer to taking their girlfriends to the lakeshore on summer evenings to “watch the submarine races.” I found out that this was a double entendre meaning to spend some intimate moments alone with your girlfriend at the lakefront. After all, the whole idea of watching submarines race is ridiculous; you can’t watch a race between two objects submerged in the dark waters of Lake Michigan. I thought it was just a comical saying.
Until recently, when I found out that Milwaukee really did have a submarine race.
One of the most effective weapons the US wielded in the war against Japan in World War II was the US Navy’s submarine fleet. The two percent of sailors assigned to submarines sank 56 percent of the Japanese merchant marine fleet and many Japanese warships, including the largest ship ever sunk by a submarine. Japan had gone to war to gain access to the raw materials of southeast Asia, and the US submarine fleet made their conquests irrelevant since most of those resources ended up on the bottom of the sea.
One of the chief contributors to the success of the US submarine campaign was USS TAUTOG SS-199. Unlike the submarines built at Manitowoc, Wis. mentioned in previous blog postings, TAUTOG was commissioned in 1940 at the Electric Boat Company of Groton, Conn.
TAUTOG was the second Tambor class diesel electric submarine. She was 1,475 tons surfaced, 307 feet long and 27 feet wide. Her General Electric V-16 diesel engines could drive her at 20 knots on the surface, and her four General Electric electric motors could drive her at 9 knots submerged. She had a range of 11,000 nautical miles and a maximum diving depth of 300 feet. Her 60 man crew had 10 torpedo tubes and 76 mm, 40 mm, and 20 mm guns with which to inflict damage on the enemy.
TAUTOG was involved in World War II from the very beginning. She was moored at Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, where she helped shoot down a Japanese plane. Her first of thirteen patrols produced no results. Her second patrol sank a Japanese submarine and a freighter. Her next five patrols launched from Australia, sank a Japanese destroyer and seven merchant ships. Reassigned to Pearl Harbor, her next six patrols sank three Japanese warships and eleven merchant vessels.
Wikipedia describes her war record: “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 five to survive the war.”
TAUTOG was decommissioned in 1947 and assigned as an immobile training ship for the Milwaukee Naval Reserve Station. She was towed to Milwaukee and arrived at 3 am on December 20, 1947.
According to the Spring 2020 issue of Bay View Historian, the newsletter of the Bay View Historical Society, she was first moored on the north side of the Milwaukee River between the Water Street and Broadway Street bridges. In the mid-1950s, she was moved to a dock on the Lake Michigan shore at the foot of Russell Avenue, directly across from the 1953 Naval Reserve Center and just south of the current Coast Guard station.
In 1959 the Navy decided to scrap TAUTOG and replace her with USS COBIA SS-245. COBIA was a Gato class submarine also built at the Electric Boat Company and commissioned in March 1944. She displaced 1,526 tons and was 312 feet long and 27 feet wide. Her speed, range, armament, and diving depth were essentially the same as TAUTOG. Her first wartime captain was Lt. Cmdr. Albert Becker.
COBIA‘s first patrol from Pearl Harbor in June 1944 was her most successful. She sank two freighters and a transport carrying all 28 tanks of a Japanese tank regiment bound for Iwo Jima. According to COBIA re-enactor Daniel Palama, COBIA received a letter of commendation from a US Marine Corps grateful for not having to fight those tanks. Albert Becker was awarded the Navy Cross for this patrol.
Her second patrol produced no results and she finished it in Australia. On her third patrol she sank a Japanese warship. On her fourth patrol she suffered her only casualty, who was buried at sea. Her fourth patrol resulted in the rescue of seven Army aviators who had been shot down. Her fifth patrol resulted in the sinking of a tanker and a landing craft. Her sixth patrol saw her land intelligence teams along the coast of Java and then assume lifeguard duties for downed aviators. COBIA was credited with sinking 16,835 tons of shipping according to Wikipedia, but the COBIA experts at the Wisconsin Maritime Museum who have studied COBIA’s career claim the true total is 20,821 tons.
Daniel Palama relates that COBIA rescued Japanese shipwreck survivors. One of them developed an obsession that the crew tolerated: he insisted on painting all pieces of equipment on the COBIA with what he thought was its corresponding name in Japanese Kanji characters. The grateful survivor misidentified the control room gyrocompass and painted the Japanese characters for “radio set” on it.
COBIA was decommissioned in 1946, then recommissioned in 1951 and assigned to training duties at the Navy submarine school at New London, Conn. She was decommissioned in 1954 and remained in the Reserve Fleet until 1959 when she was chosen to replace TAUTOG at the Milwaukee Naval Reserve Station by none other than her first captain, Albert Becker, who as a staff officer was in charge of the Reserve Fleet, according to Daniel Palama.
In accordance with a treaty with Canada that prohibits armed warships being permanently stationed on the Great Lakes, both submarines had their propellers, anchors, and other gear removed. COBIA and TAUTOG were both towed to Milwaukee because they could not propel themselves. When COBIA arrived in Milwaukee, she was moored next to TAUTOG at the Russell Avenue pier. COBIA was moored alongside the pier and TAUTOG was moored outboard of COBIA. Both were moored facing east into the lake. There was a brief ceremony on September 11, 1959, in which the flag was lowered on TAUTOG and then raised on COBIA.
Some equipment was transferred from TAUTOG to COBIA, which assumed naval reserve duties as TAUTOG was essentially stripped and abandoned prior to her planned scrapping in 1960. There was an effort to preserve TAUTOG as a war memorial in Milwaukee but the city council refused to allocate funds. TAUTOG was removed from the Naval Register on September 11, 1959, and sold to the Bultema Dock and Dredge Company of Manistee, Mich.
And now the Great Milwaukee Submarine Race was about to begin.
According to the July 2011 issue of the Bay View Compass newsletter, in February 1960 a violent blizzard with 60 mile an hour winds struck Milwaukee. The winds were so bad that eight of the pier pilings on the Russell Avenue pier were torn loose and the cables holding the subs to the pier snapped.
Three naval personnel were trapped aboard COBIA without heat or light, which was lost when the cables snapped. They did have telephone contact with shore for a while, until that cable snapped as well. “We do not believe we are in any danger,” said Quartermaster William Floyd in a Wisconsin State Journal article. “If we did, we’d jump off when the wind rolls the ship against the finger pier.” A Coast Guard vessel stood by to rescue the three men of the COBIA.
There was no one aboard TAUTOG. Both ships were unpowered and indeed had no propellers even if they had been. The subs began shifting back and forth with the wind and waves, apparently jostling each other in such a manner that it reminded onshore onlookers, one of whom was Daniel Palama’s grandmother, of two submarines attempting to race with each other.
Eventually the three men on the COBIA were able to start its generator, which restored heat and light to the cold, pitch dark steel tube. Ten reservists boarded the COBIA using a ladder and were able to secure both submarines with cables.
According to Milwaukee Journal articles supplied by Bay View historian Anna Passante, the date of the big storm was the night of Wednesday, February 10, 1960. The police were dispatched to round up naval reservists and rush them to the pier. The subs were described as “writhing” and “tortured,” and were still racing each other the following Friday with only thin cables to hold them to the pier. The naval reserve officer in charge expected the subs to be brought under control by the following Tuesday, February 16, which means the subs may have raced each other for almost a week.
TAUTOG was reported to be scraping the bottom of the 24 foot deep pier area but was still dry inside. Both subs were described as being “scratched, dented, and bumped.” Part of the problem in securing the subs is that there was nothing to secure them to. The storm had destroyed the eight mooring “dolphins”, or cluster of pilings, that they had been tied to. The finger pier mentioned above had been damaged by one of the subs getting its bow under the pier and bobbing up and down. Contractors were reported to be ready to install new dolphins and heavy cables had been requested from Chicago.
And so it appears to me that a maritime disaster in the middle of a howling blizzard may have been transformed into a Milwaukee colloquialism for a warm, intimate moment with someone you care about. Probably the most unlikely evolution of a metaphor in history with most of those who have used it unaware of its possible origin.
And so ended the Great Milwaukee Submarine Race. And only one sub was victorious. On August 3, 1960, the TAUTOG was towed out of her temporary berth in the Milwaukee River by the tug JOHN ROEN IV. She was scrapped in the summer of 1960. Some of her equipment was removed and placed in storage for proposed display in the Milwaukee Public Museum. Her 40mm gun was removed and is on display in Manistee, Mich.
COBIA was redesignated an Auxiliary Submarine AGSS-245 in 1960 and remained in service as a Naval Reserve training ship until July 1, 1970, when she was stricken from the Naval Register. I remember my father taking a friend and me down to the COBIA to take a tour of her when I was in grade school.
Bay View resident Phillip Marks described taking tours of the COBIA by himself as a kid and how the COBIA may have been responsible for him being born: “As a boy growing up in Bay View in the 1960’s, I frequently rode my bike down to Jones Island to see the WWII submarines docked at the Naval Reserve Station.
“As there was virtually no security at the Naval Reserve Station at that time, I would occasionally venture onto the lakeshore part of the property to get a closer look at the subs and once or twice I even boarded the COBIA and explored the interior. The few sailors who were around never bothered me. They probably just assumed that I was someone’s kid brother or something. Pretty exciting stuff for a kid brought up on 1940’s and 50’s WWII movies.
“I learned many years later that the COBIA may have actually saved my father’s life. He was a US Marine in the battle of Iwo Jima and had the COBIA not sunk that Japanese ship carrying tanks destined for Iwo Jima, he might have been one of the additional casualties that were surely saved by that action. That also means that I might not be here today either.”
At that point fate intervened in the form of the Manitowoc Submarine Memorial Association. According to an August 11, 2020, article in USA Today, MSMA wanted to obtain one of the Manitowoc built subs as a war memorial. The Navy offered the Manitowoc built USS REDFIN as a memorial, but the MSMA could not afford the $75,000 towing fee. Fortunately, there was a submarine identical to the Manitowoc boats in every way conveniently located 75 miles away. And so the Navy donated COBIA to MSMA.
On August 17, 1970, at 6 am the Navy transferred ownership of the COBIA and her contents to MSMA. COBIA was towed the 75 miles to Manitowoc by the tugboat LAUREN CASTLE, a trip that took 9 hours. The sub was tied to a dock on the Manitowoc River between the 8th and 10th Street Bridges. After an official welcoming on August 23rd, the sub remained at her berth until her final trip to her current berth in front of the Wisconsin Maritime Museum on May 26, 1986. Retired Captain Albert Becker stood in the conning tower of his old ship for its last ride.
COBIA remains at her berth to this day. She is described as the most historically accurate World War II submarine in America. Wikipedia says that “many systems (are) operational, including two of the main diesel engines, the radio shack, and the SJ-1 radar, which is believed to be the oldest operating radar set in the world.”
But COBIA’s competitor in the Great Milwaukee Submarine Race is not forgotten. One of the items stripped from TAUTOG was her periscope which is on display at the Wisconsin Maritime Museum, as well as that of Manitowoc built USS RASHER whose story I told in a previous blog post. The two participants in the Great Milwaukee Submarine Race are berthed together again.
Much of the information in this story is courtesy of COBIA re-enactor Daniel Palama. Daniel gave a Facebook lecture to the Bay View Historical Society and the Wisconsin Maritime Museum, which I had the honor to participate in. The video of the lecture can be seen on the Facebook pages of the BVHS, the WMM, and the WMHS, and on their You Tube channels.
Photo at top of page: TAUTOG at Milwaukee on December 21, 1947.
Other photos:
PHOTO CREDIT: Great Lakes Marine Collection of the Milwaukee Public Library and Wisconsin Marine Historical Society.
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James Heinz is the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s acquisitions director. He became interested in maritime history as a kid watching Jacques Cousteau’s adventures on TV. He was a Great Lakes wreck diver until three episodes of the bends forced him to retire from diving. He was a University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee police officer for thirty years. He regularly flies either a Cessna 152 or 172.
