Class: Balao Submarine
Launched: May 5, 1943
At: Portsmouth Navy Yard, Portsmouth, New Hampshire
Commissioned: August 21, 1943
Length: 311 feet, 8 inches
Beam: 27 feet, 3 inches
Draft: 15 feet, 3 inches
Displacement: 1,525 tons (surfaced)
Armament: Ten 21-inch torpedo tubes; one 40 mm gun; one 5 inch/25 caliber gun
Address:
USS Batfish (SS-310)
Muskogee War Memorial Park
3500 Batfish Road
P.O. Box 253
Muskogee, OK 74402
(918) 682-6294
E-mail: ussbatfish@sbcglobal.net
http://www.warmemorialpark.org
Latitude: 35.7944510192, Longitude: -95.310973995
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USS Batfish earned nine battle stars for her World War II service in the Pacific. She sank 14 ships and damaged three others during her seven war patrols. Over a period of four days in February 1945, she sank three Japanese submarines. For this feat, the “sub killer” was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation. Her other WW II exploits included blasting a grounded destroyer, bombarding a Japanese village, and rescuing downed aviators.
Decommissioned shortly after WW II, Batfish was recommissioned at Mare Island Navy Yard on March 7, 1952, as the Korean War intensified. At her new home port of Key West, her primary duties involved training operations in the Caribbean and along the Atlantic seaboard. She was decommissioned August 4, 1958. A year later she was towed to New Orleans for use as a moored naval reserve training vessel until stricken from the Navy list in 1969.
In February 1972, Batfish was transferred to the Oklahoma Maritime Advisory Board and towed up the Arkansas river to Muskogee. There, she was placed in a dry berth and opened to the public as a memorial to Oklahoma combat submariners.
The park is open from March through October.
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