“Fish don’t vote.”

That was Admiral Hyman Rickover’s explanation for why the Navy began naming attack submarines for cities. By 1987, the Navy was naming its Trident missile boats for states, and Congressman Sam Gejdenson wanted to know why Connecticut was missing from the list. After all, the boats were being built at Electric Boat in Groton.

On Patrol Reports, Dave Bowman follows Gejdenson’s appeal from a newspaper clipping to the christening of USS Connecticut and a naming decision decades later that brought the story back to the shipyard’s hometown.

On November 6, 1943, USS Haddock closed on a Japanese convoy near Truk with just four torpedoes remaining. After an initial attack slowed two tankers, Lieutenant Commander Roy Davenport brought his boat around for another surface approach. His crew reported hits, fire, and the disappearance of both targets, but postwar analysis would reach a different conclusion.

In this episode of Patrol Reports, Dave Bowman follows Haddock’s night attack through the boat’s own patrol report, examining the crew’s persistence and the difficulty of determining a ship’s fate in darkness. It is an account of submarine combat that preserves what the sailors witnessed while distinguishing their wartime claims from confirmed losses.

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On November 5, 1944, a hometown newspaper reported that Electrician’s Mate First Class Ansel Sampson was leaving his parents’ home to report for another assignment. Behind that brief announcement lay five war patrols aboard USS Rasher (SS-269), one of America’s most successful World War II submarines.

This episode of Patrol Reports follows Rasher’s opening campaigns, from the waters of present-day Indonesia to the devastating attacks on convoy HI-71 off the Philippines. Through Sampson’s service, we remember the electricians and other technical specialists whose work kept the boat fighting, and the millions of Americans who came home on leave, then returned to duty while the war continued.

Sampson went on Eternal Patrol in 1975. His story preserves one life behind the Silent Service’s wartime record.

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