Groton: Submarine Capital of the World

If you have ever driven across the Gold Star Memorial Bridge over the Thames River on Interstate Ninety-Five, you have passed over the threshold of what the Navy calls the submarine capital of the world. Groton, Connecticut, on the east bank, has shaped American undersea warfare for more than a century.

The roots run to eighteen ninety-nine, when an inventor and entrepreneur named Isaac Rice founded the Electric Boat Company in Groton for the specific purpose of building submarines for the United States Navy. Rice's first boat was the USS Holland, commissioned on April eleventh, nineteen hundred, the first submarine officially accepted into the United States Navy. It changed what naval warfare meant.

By World War One, Electric Boat and its subsidiaries had built eighty-five submarines and more than seven hundred sub-chasers for the Navy. In World War Two, submarines built at Groton sent millions of tons of Japanese shipping to the bottom of the Pacific. Groton-built boats were central to the strangling of Japan's supply lines, one of the decisive campaigns of the war.

Then came the atom. On January twenty-first, nineteen fifty-four, Electric Boat launched the USS Nautilus here at Groton, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine. She was commissioned that September and underway on nuclear power by January of nineteen fifty-five. In nineteen fifty-eight she made history a second time: she passed under the Arctic ice cap and became the first vessel ever to reach the geographic North Pole.

Nautilus is now permanently moored at Groton as the centerpiece of the Submarine Force Museum, open to the public. General Dynamics Electric Boat still builds submarines here. The Naval Submarine Base New London, commissioned during World War One, remains the Navy's primary submarine homeport on the East Coast. This town on the Thames, easy to drive past, has never stopped being one of the most consequential places in American military history.