O-class

Design, Construction, and Naming Notes

The Fiscal Year 1916 coastal submarine construction program was expanded with 16 submarines authorized. The Navy took the L-class specifications and scaled up the requirements a bit. The result was the O-class. As usual, the Navy chose to have the submarines built to two different designs submitted by Electric Boat and the Lake Torpedo Boat Company. In an unusual move, the Navy obtained a legal license to build two subs of the EB design at government Navy yards. O-1 was built at the Portsmouth Navy Yard in Maine, and O-2 at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton, WA. O-3 through O-10 were also EB designs, but they were built at the EB contractor Fore River Shipbuilding in Quincy, MA. O-11 to O-13 were built at the Lake yard in Bridgeport, CT., and O-14 to O-16 at a Lake contractor, California Shipbuilding Company in Long Beach, CA. CALSHIP ran into severe difficulties in construction, and all three boats had to be towed up the coast, incomplete, to Mare Island Navy Yard in Vallejo, CA. for completion.

USS O-5 (SS-66) was sunk in a collision with a steamer near the entrance to the Panama Canal. Three men died, 16 successfully escaped before the boat went down, and two, Henry Breault and Lawrence Brown were trapped alive in the torpedo room. The bow was lifted from the mud and the two men were rescued. O-5 was a total loss and even though she was salvaged the boat was not returned to service. She was sold as scrap in Balboa, C.Z.,Panama.

These were the first U.S. submarines with really satisfactory diesel engines from the start. In addition, they were the last USN submarines built with 18-inch torpedo tubes. All subsequent USN designs used 21-inch diameter tubes. In general they were well liked and quite useful, although once again the Lake variant was rated inferior to the EB boats. They spent a lot of time in Panama guarding the approaches to the canal. The Lake boats were discarded in the mid 1920's, and the EB boats were laid up in mothballs In Philadelphia between 1931 and 1941. They were hurriedly returned to service as war clouds loomed in 1941 and served in a useful capacity as training boats in New London. Unfortunately, USS O-9 (SS-70) was lost with all hands in a tragic accident in June 1941. Her crew is "On Eternal Patrol".

The decommissioned O-12 was pulled out of mothballs and sold back to Lake. He had the boat heavily modified for Sir Hubert Wilkins' polar expedition of 1930 and renamed it Nautilus. It was intended to run the boat under the ice all the way to the Pole. It was not successful in this role and it sank in a deep Norwegian fjord in 1931.

O-1 (SS-62)

O-1 underway off the Brooklyn Navy Yard, New York City, November 1922. There is one sailor half way out of the torpedo room hatch.

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O-2 (SS-63)

O-2 running on the surface during WWII, November 26, 1943. The location is in the western Atlantic off the coast of Long Island, NY. By this time the original 3"/23 caliber Mk 9 gun had been removed. These boats were used to train basic course students at the Submarine School in Groton, CT. so it was felt that the gun was not needed. O-2 has received the mandated safety modifications, with McCann Chamber compatible hatches forward and aft, rescue/marker buoys, and a motor room escape hatch. The unusual structure on her forward deck that looks like a stick figure is actually the transducers for the JK/SC sonar array.

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