They built her in Maine. By the time the Balao-class submarine USS Razorback (SS-394) slipped into the Pacific in 1944, the war against Japan was reaching its bloody climax. She quickly proved her mettle. During five intense combat patrols, her crew sank Japanese freighters, rescued downed American aviators from the drink, and dodged depth charges that shook the steel hull until the welds groaned. Then came Tokyo Bay. On September 2, 1945, Razorback sat in the crowded harbor. She was one of just twelve submarines chosen to witness the formal Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri. A front-row seat to the end of World War II.
But the end of WWII didn't mean retirement. In 1952, the Navy chopped off her deck guns and streamlined her sail under the GUPPY IIA program, transforming her from a surface-running boat into a true underwater hunter. This kept her lethal. She spent the next two decades tracking Soviet vessels in the Pacific and even earned battle stars during the Vietnam War before the Navy decommissioned her in 1970. They didn't scrap her, though. Instead, Turkey bought the sub, renamed her the TCG Murat Reis, and ran her for another thirty-one years until her final decommissioning in 2001.
Arkansas bought her back. The city of North Little Rock rescued the boat from a Turkish shipyard in 2004, tugging her all the way up the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers to her final berth at the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum. Why is she on the National Register of Historic Places Because she represents an almost unbroken fifty-seven-year operational history, making her one of the longest-serving combat submarines in the world. Step inside today. You can still smell the diesel fuel, hydraulic oil, and sweat baked into the metal - the exact claustrophobic reality of eighty men crammed into a steel tube for months on end.
