USS Drum: The Oldest Surviving American Submarine
Near Mobile, Alabama
At the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park in Mobile, tied to the wharf beside a battleship, sits a submarine that carries one of the most remarkable combat records of the Second World War. The USS Drum, hull number S-S two hundred twenty-eight, is the oldest surviving American submarine in existence, and the first of the Gato class, the workhorse design that gave the United States Navy its underwater offensive in the Pacific.
Drum was laid down in September of nineteen forty at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, launched in May of nineteen forty-one, and commissioned on November first of that year, just weeks before Pearl Harbor. She entered combat and served fourteen war patrols across the Pacific, ranging from the waters around Japan to the shipping lanes of the South China Sea.
Her record was devastating. Drum is officially credited with sinking fifteen Japanese vessels totaling more than eighty thousand tons of shipping, earning twelve battle stars in the process. The ships she sent to the bottom included freighters, tankers, and warships. In the brutal mathematics of submarine warfare, where a crew of sixty-odd men could eliminate months of enemy industrial production in a single torpedo run, Drum was one of the most cost-effective weapons the United States Navy deployed in any theater of the war.
After the war Drum served as a training vessel in Washington, D.C., for more than two decades before being retired. She was towed to Mobile in May of nineteen sixty-nine and has been a museum ship ever since. Walking her decks today, visitors move through the same cramped passageways where officers plotted attacks and crews endured weeks submerged, breathing recycled air, in waters held by a determined enemy.
She is the oldest of the roughly dozen Second World War American submarines preserved as museums, a floating record of what American submarine crews endured and accomplished in the Pacific.
