In late February 1944, the USS Grayback was at the height of her power and the edge of her fate. Fresh off a string of devastating attacks in the East China Sea, she had already sunk tens of thousands of tons of Japanese shipping and earned her place among the most successful submarines of the war. But success has a way of narrowing your options. By February 25, she had only two torpedoes left. Ordered home to Midway, she would have to pass near Okinawa, through waters thick with patrol aircraft and escort vessels. Instead of slipping quietly away, her captain chose to strike one last time. It would be her final act.

In this episode of Patrol Reports, we walk through the Grayback’s last week at sea, from triumph to disappearance, and the decades-long mystery that followed. This is not just the story of a submarine lost, but of eighty men who never came home, and the long silence that finally ended.

The USSVI Bremerton Base remembers the US Submarines lost in the month of February

On a January morning in nineteen forty four, a small town in Ohio learned how the war really worked. Not through headlines about victory, but through a quiet notice. A sailor was missing. No details. No explanation. Just absence.

That sailor had been aboard USS Corvina.

Corvina was new, capable, and sent on her first war patrol into some of the most dangerous water on earth. She never came back. Eighty two men went down with her in a single night south of Truk Lagoon. In the vast arithmetic of the Pacific War, Corvina occupies a narrow line. She was the only American submarine lost to an enemy submarine in World War Two.

That fact matters, but it is not the heart of the story.

This is not about rarity. It is about people, machinery, chance, and silence. About what the ocean takes, and what history remembers.

This is the story of USS Corvina, and the crew that remains on Eternal Patrol.