USS Snapper (SS-185)
1937 Salmon-class submarine
USS Snapper (SS-185), a Salmon-class submarine, was the third ship of the United States Navy of the name and the second to be named for the snapper.
Construction and commissioning
Snapper′s keel was laid down by the Portsmouth Navy Yard at Kittery, Maine, on 23 July 1936. She was launched on 24 August 1937, sponsored by Mrs. Katharine R. Stark, wife of Rear Admiral Harold R. Stark, Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, and commissioned on 16 December 1937.
Pre-World War II service
On 10 May 1938, Snapper departed Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for her shakedown cruise, visited Cuba, the Panama Canal Zone, Peru, and Chile, and returned to Portsmouth on 16 July. There, she conducted final acceptance trials and underwent post-shakedown overhaul.
On 3 October, Snapper was assigned to Submarine Squadron (SubRon) 3 based at Balboa, Canal Zone, where she participated in training and fleet exercises until 15 March 1939, when she set sail for repairs at the Portsmouth Navy Yard. Departing Portsmouth on 9 May, she stopped at New London, Connecticut, and then got underway for the West Coast, arriving at San Diego, California, on 2 June. On 1 July, the submarine set sail for Pearl Harbor and maneuvers in the Hawaiian area, followed by overhaul at the Mare Island Navy Yard in Vallejo, California, from 1 December 1939 to 1 March 1940.
Following her return to San Diego, Snapper was assigned to SubRon 6 and got underway for Hawaii on 1 April, arriving at Pearl Harbor on 9 April.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7874219. Authority coordinates are 28.333, 139.417. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1936, 1937, 1938 and 1939.
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This entry incorporates text from “USS Snapper (SS-185)” 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.