Recordings Made on USS Sealion During WW II:
On 21 Nov 1944, Imperial Japanese Navy Battleship
Kongo was sunk by USS
Sealion. The crew of
Sealion made sound recordings in the conning tower of the submarine during the attack. They also recorded another attack during their 5th war patrol in March of 1945. Very, very few sound recordings of any kind where made aboard submarines during the war. These truly remarkable recordings may be the only audio or video from within a submarine during an attack that has survived. The sound you hear on the links below has been copied many times and is at times hard to understand. The
Kongo attack was first recorded on a portable film optical recording machine. It was later transferred with a narrators voice at the beginning and end to 78 RPM records by Columbia University Division of War Research at the U.S. Navy Underwater Sound Laboratory Fort Trumbull, New London, Connecticut. Later, one of Sealion's crew, Fred Schuler, acquired a copy of the training records and added his own music and narration and transferred the sounds to cassette tape. A copy of this was discovered in the collection at the
Mariners' Museum in 2004. In May of 2005 the original of this tape was found by Mr. Schuler's son and was digitized for long term preservation. Then in July we found copies of these records in the collection of the
Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport, WA.
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