The Balao-class submarine USS Menhaden (SS 377) was not always yellow.

Commissioned June 22, 1945, USS Menhaden did not see combat during World War II.  However, the submarine achieved historical fame when Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz chose it as his flagship for the Nov. 24, 1945, change of command ceremony in Pearl Harbor during which Nimitz became Chief of Naval Operations and Adm. Raymond A. Spruance took command of the Pacific Fleet.

Mendaden would serve through the Korean and Vietnam wars, finally being decommissioned Aug. 13, 1971.  The boat ended its commissioned service having been awarded numerous citations including the China Service Medal, Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal, and the Vietnam Service Medal with two stars.

Following its decommissioning, the ex-Menhaden’s life got very interesting.

The decommissioned boat was pulled out of mothballs in 1976, painted yellow, and used as a tethered Trident training target in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Washington State.  Submerged and suspended from spar buoys, the ex-Menhaden provided a realistic platform for the Trident program.

The Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Division, Keyport, known at the time as Naval Undersea Warfare Engineering Station (NUWES) in Keyport, Washington, recognized great value in the yellow submarine and obtained it for use in NUWES’ operational ranges in Washington State and Canada following its use by the Trident program.

Rod Mash was associate director for weapons system testing at NUWES during the late 1970s and early 1980s.  He said it is common for decommissioned ships to be requested by a testing and evaluation center such as NUWES (and the modern-day NUWC Division, Keyport).

“The ex-Menhaden and the ex-Blueback and the other ships we’ve used, they’re normally requested by the [torpedo] program office,” Mash said.  “The major contribution of the ex-Menhaden was the ability to test without fear of damaging an operational sub or taking up too much time off their tight operational schedules.”

During its phase as a Trident test target in the open ocean, the ex-Menhaden was suspended from a spar buoy system.  Once the yellow submarine was by NUWES, the need for a different buoy system in the quieter waters of the NUWES test ranges was recognized.

Rick Schulze was a mechanical engineer at NUWES from 1979 until his retirement in 2002.  He was the lead designer for a new buoy system that would suspend the submarine at its test depth.  His design included two clusters of five buoys bound together incorporating a hydraulic winch, with one cluster at the bow and the other at the boat’s stern.

“It was towed up to the test site,” Schulze said.  The submarine’s ballast tanks were then flooded to begin submerging the boat.  At its predetermined test depth, the cables from the buoys would hold the boat suspended in place.  This method ensured the yellow submarine would hang at a precise test depth, but the first attempt at submerging the boat gave everyone a good scare.  They simply opened up the ballast tanks and let the boat drop like a rock.

“Back in the early days we didn’t know how to gently lower it.  We just opened the vents, the ballast went in there, and the boat just started dropping.  You get that much momentum going down, of course it’s going to pull the buoy clusters under,” Schulze said.  Some members of the team “nearly had a heart attack” when the buoys were yanked beneath the surface and didn’t immediately reappear.

Ten agonizing minutes passed during which Rick and the team thought they had sunk the ex-Menhaden.    However, the cluster buoys finally resurfaced, indicating the yellow submarine was safely at its test depth.  The NUWES team quickly re-engineered the system to allow them to submerge the boat in a controlled manner, thereby avoiding potential heart attacks.

Andrea G. Reister was an electronics engineer at NUWES in the 1980s.  She has the distinction of designing and installing the sensor system that measured the boat’s trim (or horizontal angle) and also alert the crew on the surface if the boat began flooding.  The sensors sent their information through a able to a radio buoy which then communicated with Reister and the other engineers.

“We could monitor what the depth was, what the pitch, roll and yaw was.  If something changed, if we didn’t like something we could send a command and it would blow to the surface,” Reister said.

Affectionately called the “unofficial last commanding officer of the ex-Menhaden” by her teammates due to her work on the sensor system and her system to remotely surface the boat, Reister wound up in the awkward position of having to brief the NUWES commanding officer after an one emergency blow in the early 1980s.

“One time we did have a problem,” Reister said.  “I’m sure everybody wants to forget it, but the punch line is that everything worked like it was supposed to work.  We were doing the operational test, and I’m there looking at the display.  I’m noticing the bow—the angle is continuing to grow.”

The submerged ex-Menhaden had sprung a leak and was slowly flooding, causing its bow to steadily drop.

 “Normally we’d blow the tanks and winch it up very nicely so that it would come up in a controlled way, rather than just coming up to the surface and all that cabling going everywhere,” said Reister.  “We knew it would be a mess, but we built the system. The decision was made to bring the submarine to the surface quickly, so I issued the commands.”

The “unofficial last commanding officer of the ex-Menhaden” hit the switches on her control panel, and the submarine shot back to the surface, its suspension cables and buoys scattering across the water.  It was indeed a mess and an operational test was aborted.   However, Reister had no qualms briefing the commanding officer.  The system had worked as intended, alerting the team to a problem and ensuring the ex-Menhaden was not lost.

Ronald Krell, currently president of the Naval Undersea Museum Foundation at Keyport, was the head of NUWES’ undersea technology branch from 1979 – 1986.  He said the ex-Menhaden was used in a variety of acoustic tests.  One test involved lowering a torpedo’s acoustic sensor into the water and “pinging” the submarine to get a measurement of how different frequency pings reflected off the hull.  Other tests involved actually shooting a test torpedo at the yellow submarine, but these were not meant to impact the hull.  Test torpedoes have a great deal of complex and expensive instrumentation in them, and an accidental impact could damage a testing device worth many thousands of dollars…in addition to potentially sinking the ex-Menhaden by accident.

Krell and the team did worry about whether the ex-Menhaden’s hull could actually withstand an accidental impact by a test torpedo, even with the warhead replaced by test instruments.

“There’s something called nil ductility transition temperature, or NDTT,” Krell said.  NDTT is the low temperature point at which steel loses its flexibility and will shatter like glass when impacted.  Krell said the speed of construction during World War II meant many submarines were built with steel in which the NDTT properties were unknown.

“The Menhaden was built from steel for which they never measured the NDTT,” Krell said.  “The water she operated in outside of Pearl Harbor and the Far East was warm enough that it probably wasn’t a problem.  The water up here in the northwest Pacific might be at a temperature at which it might shatter when hit.”

There is no record of any accidental hits on the yellow submarine.  However, even if there was an accidental strike, the ex-Menhaden obviously didn’t sink.

Charles Gundersen, a mechanical engineer at NUWES from 1980 – 2005, said all of the effort put into the ex-Menhaden, long after her active duty service ended, was well worth the effort because of the opportunities the ex-Menhaden offered.  The yellow submarine was an actual submarine, albeit one without power or a crew.

“From the acoustic signature point of view it was representative of some threat submarines at the time,” said Gundersen.  “Then, from the availability of it as a target, that saved us from going out and borrowing one of the Navy’s operational submarines.  We had our own submarine.”

The ex-Menhaden finally ended its days under the scrapper’s torch in Everett, Washington, in 1988.  It was a quiet end for one of the most unique—and colorful—submarines in the Navy’s history.

The yellow color was not a reference to the famous 1966 Beatles song.  According to Schulze, the color was simply a way to make the boat easily visible and ensure it showed up clearly during underwater photography.  Even so, the yellow submarine was quite a morale booster due to the humor its color generated during its years as a test platform.

Reister, who went onto become the first female chief engineer at NUWES, said working below decks as they installed her sensor system in the ex-Mehaden was a very moving experience.

“It was really interesting to go down below decks,” said Reister.  “A lot of stuff had been removed, but the various compartments were there.  What was intriguing was the idea somebody put forth that this submarine could fit inside the missile compartment of a Trident submarine.  You begin to think about the lives of the men, so to me that was a very unique experience.”

The former USS Menhaden (SS 377), the Navy’s yellow submarine, is now only a memory, and NUWES has evolved into NUWC Division, Keyport.  However, the impact the yellow submarine had on naval technology reverberated around the entire fleet for many years to come.  The yellow submarine may have barely missed World War II, but it left a legacy far greater than merely being Fleet Admiral Nimitz’ flagship for a day.

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