# USS Perch (SS-176)

USS Perch (SS-176), a Porpoise-class submarine, was the first ship of the United States Navy to be named for the perch.

## Construction and commissioning

Perch′s keel was laid down on 25 February 1935 by the Electric Boat Company, in Groton, Connecticut. She was launched on 9 May 1936, sponsored by Mrs. Helen Lorena Withers (née LaBar), wife of Captain (later Admiral) Thomas Withers, Jr., then assigned to Naval Submarine Base New London at Groton, She was commissioned on 19 November 1936.

## Service history
### Inter-war period

After shakedown in the North Atlantic Ocean, Perch became a unit of the United States Pacific Fleet when she joined Submarine Squadron 6 (SubRon 6) in November 1937. The following spring she was engaged in the annual fleet problem and did some work on a survey of the Aleutian Islands, entering the Bering Sea on 28 February. In the spring of 1939, Perch operated with the fleet on its cruise to the United States East Coast.
In October 1939, Perch departed San Diego, California, for Manila where she became a division flagship and made a summer cruise in 1940 to Tsingtao and Shanghai. She spent the year preceding World War II in operations around the Philippines. A week before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Perch rendezvoused with two transports off Shanghai and escorted the 4th Marine Regiment from China to the Philippines.

### World War II

At the outbreak of hostilities on 8 December 1941 (7 December in Hawaii on the other side of the International Date Line), Perch, commanded by David A. Hurt, was in Cavite Navy Yard. She took part in the rush to clear the navy yard on 10 December and watched, at close range, the destruction of Cavite by Japanese bombers. That night, Perch slipped through the Corregidor minefields and scouted between Luzon and Formosa (now Taiwan) in search of targets. Failing to detect any, she shifted to an area off Hong Kong, and on the evening of 25 December 1941 launched four torpedoes at a large merchant ship, all missing. A few days later, she torpedoed a merchant ship, probably Nojima Maru. Japanese escorts prevented Perch from observing the kill.
Perch proceeded south to Darwin, Australia, to repair damage, making several unsuccessful attacks en route. She next made a patrol to Kendari, Celebes (now Sulawesi), where she scouted the harbor and made several attempts to get through the narrow entrance to an attack position.
After a week of close contact with the Japanese while obtaining information, Perch headed south, searching for targets. In a night attack on a large merchant ship off the eastern coast of Celebes, Perch was hit in the superstructure, forward of the pressure hull of the conning tower, by a high-explosive round which blew away the bridge deck, punctured the antenna trunk and temporarily put her radio out of commission. Her crew made repairs on deck at night in waters heavily patrolled by the Japanese, and Perch headed for the Java Sea.

### Final battle

On the evening of 1 March 1942, Perch surfaced 30 nautical miles (56 km; 35 mi) northwest of Surabaya, Java, and started in for an attack on a Japanese convoy landing troops to the west of Surabaya. However, before this could be done, Perch just so happened to run into a pair of Japanese destroyers, the Minegumo and Natsugumo. Since she was still running on the surface, Perch crashed dived to avoid detection, and seemed to do so successfully, swerving into firing range for a potential kill, observing the enemy destroyers waiting for the right time to unleash the torpedoes, but upon a final inspection through the periscope, the destroyers were well aware of Perch's presence and were preparing a depth charge attack. Hoping to score a kill before the reverse happened, Perch climbed to around 90 feet deep, but it was too late, Minegumo and Natsugumo were right on top of her and furiously unleashed their depth charges. The first patterned missed their mark, but a second pattern of four depth charges gouged Perch and inflicted considerable damage. The pressure hull and a section of the conning tower were dented inwards, several ventilation valves were jammed shut, major leaking occurred through the ship's doors and gaskets, and around 90% of the ship's instruments and gouges were broken or destroyed. Minegumo and Natsugumo assumed their target had perished and continued on, but Perch had enough integrity to remain under water, surfacing after 2 hours in the early morning of the 2nd and began sailing for repairs. Upon surfacing, the crew discovered practically every window was shattered, both pericope tubes were flooded, and only half the main engines were operable. Perch has survived her encounter, but still suffered major damage, yet still continued in hopes of attacking Japanese ships.
Because of this, two hours later just before sunrise, Perch was spotted yet again by the Japanese destroyers Ushio and Sazanami, prompting the submarine to immediately dive to 200 feet, but it was too late. Ushio and Sazanami dropped a depth charge attack, and the damage inflicted to Perch went from bad to worse. Perch attempted to maneuver away, but her crew discovered the propulsion system to be completely inoperable as Ushio and Sazanami further depth charged their enemy. Perch lied motionless underwater, and when sunrise broke, Ushio and Sazanami launched a final depth charge attack which caused the most critical damage of all before leaving the area, concluding they had sunk their target.
Perch was forced to surface, and through she had already been badly damaged by Minegumo's and Natsugumo's attack, Ushio and Sazanami further crippled her. Upon resurfacing, seawater flooded the pressure hull, leaked in heat and humidity made the ship's interior unbearable, and the ship was completely dead in the water. Damage control efforts eventually got just one of her four engines up and running, limiting Perch to just 5 knots. An attempt to dive was made, but it almost sank the ship then and there, and meaning the crew found out the hard way Perch was completely incapable of underwater travel and resurfaced for the last time.
By the evening of the 3rd, the idea to simply scuttle Perch was brought up, but her crew disputed the order as the crippled submarine desperately limped to repairs. While the crew was attempting to repair the watertight hatches on the deck, one sailor decided to light a cigar for a smoke. The blinkering light emitted by the cigar was spotted by Captain Tameichi Hara aboard the Japanese destroyer Amatsukaze, which quickly trained her guns on the submarine and fired away. 5-inch (127 mm) shells rained on Perch as Amatsukaze sped at 30 knots to decrease the range, and at least three shells made their mark, setting Perch on fire as in turn she trained her deck gun on what she reported as "two light cruisers and three destroyers" (actually the light cruiser Jintsū leading the destroyers Amatsukaze, Hatsukaze, Yukikaze, and Tokitsukaze)
Destroyer Yukikaze shortly joined Amatsukaze in the attack on Perch. Rather than pointlessly die on the defenseless vessel, Perch's crew decided to abandon ship, and as Amatsukaze's and Yukikaze's shells continued to damage her, several hull valves were opened in an attempt to scuttle the boat followed by her crew members jumping into the water one by one. Perch made her last dive as she slipped beneath the waves, followed by the destroyers ceasing fire. The next morning, Captain Hara called Amatsukaze's crew to the deck to graduate them on their kill, and decided to ban smoking on the ship due to the experience. Simultaneously, Perch's entire crew of nearly 60 men escaped the ship and were struggling in the water when a Japanese destroyer located them. It was the familiar Ushio, which was still on patrol duty and located the crew of the very submarine she helped to sink. All of the men were rescued by Ushio, which transported them to prison camps in the freshly captured Dutch East Indies. Besides 5 that died from malnutrition, all of them returned to their families on V-J Day.

### Wreck

On 23 November 2006, Thanksgiving Day in the United States, the wreck of Perch was unexpectedly located by an international team of divers aboard MV Empress while searching for the wreck of the British heavy cruiser HMS Exeter northwest of Bawean Island in the Java Sea. The expedition had hoped to locate and photograph the wreck of Exeter, sunk in the same area on 1 March 1942. The wreck of Perch was illegally salvaged sometime between 2006 and 2016 and no longer exists. Unlike the Dutch and British ships near her, which also were scavenged illegally, Perch was not a war grave, as she had been abandoned by her crew without fatalities.

## Awards

* Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with one battle star for World War II service
Lieutenant Kenneth G. Schacht was awarded a Navy Cross for assisting in the scuttling of Perch and therefore preventing the Japanese from capturing classified code books, materials, and equipment.

## In media

Perch is the subject of an episode of the syndicated television anthology series The Silent Service, which aired in the United States during the 1957–1958 television season.