Quote:
Originally Posted by NEON DEON
Notice the two Hatches to the port and starboard of the gun. Also take a look at the rail and deck expanding the width of the deck just forward of the gun to accomadate the hatches and not the gun.
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Neon,
The hatches and deck cutouts you are seeing in these photos are actually for two small boats that were used for running sailors ashore for liberty. They were stored under the deck forward and these deck hatches covered them up. In the pre-war years, submarines would frequently anchor out when in port and sometimes liberty launches were not available. One of them would have been for the crew and one for the officers and the captain. The hatches would be removed and the boats lifted out and put over the side using the torpedo recovery davit. Most of the fleet boats up through the early Gatos had these launches.
As I stated in a previous post, once the war started the sub crews realized that they had a lot of frills and extra stuff on their boats that really did not contribute to the completion of the mission of sinking ships. Very quickly a list of desired equipment deletions was drawn up and submitted to the General Board. The request to remove the liberty launches was approved on 10 May 1942, but many of the boats had already removed them.
The 1943 photos of Seal above show the forward deck as it was originally built, with the hatches and cutouts to accommodate the launches. They had probably been already removed at this point. The last photo, taken after the war, show the forward deck modified and the hatches removed. This was done because the larger 4"/50 cal gun required more deck space in order to be safely trained. This necessitated altering the deck and thus the unused boat hatches were removed and the space decked over.
This brings us back to the original point. Where in the heck were these torpedo stowage tubes located? You must remember that these torpedoes were 21 feet long! In order to pull them completely out of the tube and get them on deck so they could be struck below, you would need an additional 21 feet in front of the tubes (probably 25 feet would be more like it)!
Look at the photos of the Seal's forward deck. With the deck gun (it had a substantial foundation hidden under the deck) and the boats, were would they fit? Remember you need 50 feet of unobstructed space. The only thing I can think of is that they were arranged two to a side on either side of the conning tower. The fish were then extracted and hoisted up on deck through the deck hatches for the boats. The problem here is that you would have to remove both boats, put them in the water alongside the sub, extract the torpedoes, then replace the boats! Sounds like a real Rube Goldberg setup to me.
I have done a little more reading and I trust that the tubes actually existed on the Salmon/Sargo boats, but I am having the devil of a time figuring out how they were used.
I have handled torpedoes as part of a loading party several times on the Darter and I can tell you the process is little tolerant of haste, poor planning, or mistakes. I'm stumped on this one. What do you guys think?