USS Marlin: The Last Cold War Training Submarine
Near Omaha, Iowa
Moored at Freedom Park on the Missouri River sits the USS Marlin, one of the last target and training submarines of her kind. Commissioned in nineteen fifty-three, the Marlin was a small, compact submarine designed not for long patrols but for teaching the Navy how to hunt submarines during the Cold War. Surface ships and aircraft would practice anti-submarine warfare against her; sonar operators trained on her acoustic signature.
She deployed to Guantanamo Bay in nineteen fifty-six for fleet training duty, participated in Navy demonstrations, and spent her later years at the Fleet Sonar School in Key West running target exercises. She was decommissioned on January thirty-first, nineteen seventy-three, after twenty years of service, and was assigned to Omaha in August of nineteen seventy-four as a memorial. Freedom Park also holds a World War Two minesweeper, the USS Hazard, making this one of the more unusual naval museums in the landlocked interior of the continent.
