Launching of the R-10 Submarine

In several posts I have noted that my dad had a long career as a submarine officer (the most recent was titled Submarine First Day Covers). So when my Texas brother sent me a link earlier this week to a short video showing the launching of the R-10 submarine, I watched it with interest. Dad was assigned to the R-10 right after graduating from submarine school in 1942.

My brother should get the credit for this post. When I began researching the R-10, I started down the wrong path as it turns out that Great Britain also built R-class submarines, including the HMS R10. To add to the confusion, the video I linked to in the first paragraph, which shows an American submarine, is posted on a British web site.

My brother set me straight:

We didn’t get the R-10 from the Brits. We built it, incidentally, at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts—the same shipyard that built the Long Beach. Dad was on it just after he graduated from sub school. The story he tells is that the Navy promised the top graduates of their sub school classes that they would be assigned to the boats of their choice. He chose the R-10, which at that time was a training sub out of Key West, because he wanted to be “home” in the U.S. with Mom for a while—they were newlyweds then—rather than shipping out immediately on a boat already deployed to the Atlantic or Pacific theater. His classmates were surprised at his choice, saying that by going to the R-10 rather than a newer boat he would miss out on the war completely. Well, the Navy handled that. He reported for duty on the R-10 in April 1942 (the Navy kept its promise there) but was almost immediately reassigned to the commissioning crew of the Blackfish (SS-221) in May of the same year. I think he was on the R-10 for six weeks. Then it was off to the Blackfish and, in October, the Atlantic theater.

The R-10 was launched in 1919, too late to see service during World War I. However, in addition to serving as a training vessel, the by-then aging submarine did make patrols during World War II. For details on the R-10’s assignments during its 26-year service to the fleet, see USS R-10, a web page put together by Mary Floy Katzman, whose father served on the R-10 in 1922. The R-10 was decommissioned in 1945.