Warship Wednesday, the plucky Perch, hardy frogman steed
By Christopher Eger at laststandonzombieisland

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.

Here we see the Balao-class submarine USS Perch (SS-313) as she appeared in the late 1960s off Pearl Harbor with her crew in summer whites. This hardy vessel made seven war patrols during WWII then remained one of the last operational smoke boats in the U.S. Navy, seeing hot service in both Korea and Vietnam.

The 128-ship Balao class were classic 311-foot, 2500-ton ‘fleet boats’ designed to roam the Pacific on patrols that could last some 75-days due to their 11,000-nm range. Capable of making over 20-knots in a surface attack, they carried a staggering 10 torpedo tubes for which they stocked two dozen steel fish, as well as a reasonably well-armed battery of deck and AAA guns to sink smaller vessels like sampans and defend themselves against aircraft. We have covered ships of this class in the past here at LSOZI but don’t complain, they have lots of great stories.

Laid down 5 January 1943 at Electric Boat in Groton, she was commissioned 367 days later and departed for Key West for training. Needed for service in the Pacific, she arrived in Pearl Harbor at the beginning of April 1944. Just three weeks later she left on her first war patrol. For the next year she conducted a total of 7 patrols in enemy waters, often working as part of a small U.S. submarine wolf-pack, chasing down the few Japanese merchant and warships that remained afloat. She lurked in the South China sea, trading an attack on an oilier for a counter attack by a Japanese sub buster. Perch managed to send a few small trawlers and coasters to the bottom in surface gunfire actions while plucking Navy Corsair pilots and USAAF B-29 crews from the Pacific.

In a sign of things to come, she was used to land an 12-man Australian commando force of the famous Z Special Unit on a reconnaissance mission to Balikpapan Bay, Borneo, Indonesia (then in the Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies). The ill-fated force under the renowned Aussie commando leader Major John Stott was lost through no fault of the Perch.

Ending the war off the coast of Imperial Japan, Perch was decommed and placed in reserve in 1947. However, unlike many of her class she was soon dusted off and in May 1948 she was converted to a Submarine, Transport (SSP-313, later ASSP-313, then APSS-313, then LPSS–313, all with basically the same meaning) then recommissioned.

That's as much as I can steel from another site. Great info on the US Perch, a sub used extensively by the US Navy's Underwater Demolition teams (UDT) and SEALs, and on occasion by British 'Independent commandos' (today considered part of SBS lineage) during the Korean War. READ FULL ARTICLE at laststandonzombieisland