How America’s First Submarines Launched the Silent Service: USS Plunger SS-2
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How America’s First Submarines Launched the Silent Service: USS Plunger SS-2
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About this listen
On September 19, 1903, the United States Navy brought a strange little boat into service. She was called USS Plunger, Submarine Torpedo Boat Number Two. At just over sixty feet long, with a gasoline engine that filled her hull with fumes and a single torpedo tube that may or may not have worked as advertised, she hardly looked like the future of naval power. But that is exactly what she became.
Plunger never sank an enemy ship, never fought in a war, and yet she changed everything. She carried a President beneath the waves, trained the first generation of submariners, and even gave Chester Nimitz his first taste of command. The Silent Service traces its roots to her cramped, smelly interior. Today we look back at the short life of Plunger, the boat that helped turn the dream of undersea warfare into a permanent part of American naval history.