USS Quillback
1944 Tench-class submarine
USS Quillback (SS-424), a Tench-class submarine, was the only ship of the United States Navy to be named for the quillback, a fish of the sucker family, widespread in the freshwaters of North America and Northern Asia.
Commissioned in December 1944, USS Quillback went on one war patrol in May-July 1945, and was refitting for a second patrol when Japan surrendered on 14 August 1945. She served two periods in commission: 1944-1952 and 1953-1973, for a total of 28 years of active service. USS Quillback was sold for scrap in 1974.
Construction
When her construction by the Portsmouth Navy Yard in Kittery, Maine, was authorized, her name was to be Trembler, which would have made her the first ship named for the trembler, a torpedinoid fish of the West Indies and Brazil, but she was given a less embarrassing name on 7 December 1943.
Her keel was laid down on 27 June 1944. She was launched on 1 October 1944 sponsored by Mrs. J. A. Tyree Jr., and commissioned on 29 December 1944.
Wartime activities
After training at New London, Connecticut, and work on an experimental ordnance project at Key West, Florida, Quillback departed for Pearl Harbor and her maiden war patrol, off the coast of Kyūshū. During this patrol, from 30 May to 24 July 1945, she destroyed a Japanese suicide motorboat and rescued one aviator from the water only a half-mile from the heavily armed shore.
The public source identifies “USS Quillback” as 1944 Tench-class submarine. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Quillback, Tench-class and submarine.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7873196. Authority coordinates are 32.217, 133.200. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1944, 1945, 1952 and 1953.
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This entry incorporates text from “USS Quillback” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.