The USS George C. Marshall was built for a kind of war that everyone hoped would never happen. No battles, no victories, no headlines, just long months of silence beneath the sea, carrying consequences too large to ever be used lightly. In this episode of Dave Does History, we step inside the steel hull of one of the Navy’s most important Cold War submarines and tell the story the way the sailors lived it, patiently, professionally, and without mythmaking.

Marshall was part of the “41 for Freedom,” the quiet backbone of America’s nuclear deterrent. She patrolled the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Arctic ice, survived a dangerous submerged collision with an unidentified but suspected Soviet submarine, and returned to sea through sheer ingenuity and discipline. This is not a story about explosions or triumph. It is a story about restraint, endurance, and the men who carried the weight of the unthinkable so the rest of the world could sleep.

The USS Woodrow Wilson was built to disappear. Not in disgrace, not in secrecy, but in purpose. She was one of the original Forty One for Freedom, a ballistic missile submarine whose job was to slip beneath the ocean and make sure the unthinkable never happened. For more than thirty years, she did that work quietly, patiently, and without applause.

What makes her story worth telling is not just where she began, but where she ended up. Few submarines lived three distinct lives. Fewer still succeeded in all of them. From Polaris patrols in the heart of the Cold War, to the Poseidon MIRV era, and finally to an unexpected second career as a special operations attack submarine, the Woodrow Wilson adapted as the world around her changed.

There are stories from the Pacific War that settle into the mind with a kind of heavy clarity. They do not shout. They do not demand. They simply sit there and remind us that the ocean has a long memory. Today we are stepping into one of those stories, the night when USS Sea Devil went hunting in the East China Sea and crossed paths with a former passenger liner that had become something far more tragic.

Hawaii Maru began her life carrying travelers who dressed for dinner. By the winter of 1944 she was carrying soldiers, gasoline, ammunition, and the burden of a war that was already slipping away from Japan. What happened when Sea Devil found her was swift, violent, and final. It was also a moment that reveals the strange mix of skill, fear, and consequence that shaped submarine warfare.

This is that story.

The story of USS Bonefish on November 29, 1943, is the kind of moment that captures the strange rhythm of submarine warfare. Long stretches of waiting and watching suddenly turn into a burst of violence that decides everything in a few minutes. Bonefish had been working her way through the Flores Sea when a thin smear of smoke on the horizon pulled the crew straight into the hunt. What followed was a disciplined stalk, a clean attack, and a hard escape under the weight of depth charges.

This introduction sets the stage for the attack itself. It was a morning that began like any other, filled with routine checks and quiet tension, but it quickly became a textbook example of how a trained crew, a steady captain, and a little luck could change the course of a day. It was the silent service at its sharpest.

On this episode of Patrol Reports we return to one of the most remarkable moments in the entire Pacific submarine campaign. The date is November twenty first 1944. The place is the dark and storm driven waters of the Formosa Strait. The submarine USS Sealion is running on the surface through wind, rain, and near zero visibility while trying to track a Japanese formation that includes three battleships. Her skipper, Lieutenant Commander Eli Reich, carries the memory of the first Sealion that was lost in the opening days of the war, and the torpedoes in his forward tubes bear the names of the men who died there.

What follows is the only successful attack by an American submarine that sent an enemy battleship to the bottom. The destroyer Urakaze vanished in an instant. The battleship Kongo died in fire hours later. It is a story of risk, resolve, and a decisive strike that changed naval history.

The Barents Sea was gray and angry on November 15, 1969. Beneath those frigid waves, two nuclear submarines—one American, one Soviet—found themselves in a dance of shadows that neither captain intended to finish with a crash. The USS Gato, an American attack submarine built for silent hunting, and the Soviet K-19, a ballistic missile boat already infamous among sailors as “the Widowmaker,” collided 200 feet below the surface. No lives were lost, no missiles fired, but for a few long seconds, the Cold War trembled on the edge of disaster. What followed was a cover-up so complete that even the men who served aboard Gato rarely spoke of it for decades. The “Barents Bump,” as it’s come to be called, was one of the closest peacetime encounters between nuclear powers that could have turned catastrophic.

In the film The Caine Mutiny, we are told that there has never been a mutiny aboard a United States Navy ship. That is true, at least by the letter of the law. But there have been moments that tested the courage, discipline, and endurance of those who serve beneath the waves.

This is the story of one such moment. In November 1943, deep in the Makassar Strait, the crew of the submarine USS Billfish found themselves fighting not only the enemy above but fear within. Their commanding officer lost his nerve during a relentless sixteen-hour depth charge attack, leaving his men to face the unthinkable.

For sixty years, the truth of what happened aboard Billfish remained buried in silence. Only decades later would the full story come to light, revealing not rebellion, but a different kind of bravery, born in the darkest depths of war.

In the years after World War II, the U.S. Navy faced a new kind of threat. The kamikazes were gone, but the sky itself had become the enemy. Long before satellites and airborne warning planes, the Navy turned to an unlikely solution. It pulled its old fleet submarines out of mothballs and refitted them with radar, turning hunters of the deep into sentinels of the sky.

These were the radar picket submarines, known by the mysterious designation SSR. They formed a short but fascinating chapter in Cold War history, watching for danger from beneath the waves. In this episode, we’ll explore how the program called Project Migraine transformed boats like USS Requin and USS Burrfish into the Navy’s earliest early-warning systems. It’s the story of ingenuity, frustration, and adaptation in an age when America’s eyes had to look not just across the seas, but far above them.