Some 105 years ago this week: USS H-2 (Submarine No. 29) partially submerged in the Hudson River, while on recruiting duty at New York City, on 6 October 1919, with the Manhattan skyline in the background. At about that time, while commanded by LCDR Clarke Withers, she performed the remarkable feat of sending a wireless message while submerged.
The second of her class of nine Electric Boat 26A/26R design subs, the 150-foot/467-ton H-1s were ordered by the U.S. Navy and the Tsarist fleet (hence the 26A and 26R designations) with the first three originally given then-traditional “fish” names: Seawolf, Nautilus, and Garfish. These were later changed before commissioning to a more homogenous H-1 through H-9 once the Tsar’s boats were acquired after the Russian Revolution and Civil War prevented delivery.
Constructed at Union Iron Works, San Francisco, H-2 would deploy with her H-1 sister to the Atlantic in October 1917, where they would spend the Great War on a series of patrols and tests of new equipment, coupled with training tasks.
Her wireless arrangement was novel for the time.
Postwar, the class was soon withdrawn from service, with H-1 wrecked in 1920 and the remaining eight boats all decommissioned by 1922, later sold for scrap.
The Navy, however, would soon recycle the name “Nautilus” to two follow-on submarines, SS-168 and SSN-571, both of which set milestones of their own.