Qualla: SS Coast Trader

SS Coast Trader: Introduction

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At 2:10 in the afternoon on June 7, 1942, a torpedo punched a six-foot hole in the starboard side of the SS Coast Trader. Two thousand pounds of newsprint rolls launched skyward from the hold. The engine room flooded, the engines died, and the 324-foot cargo ship began settling into the cold Pacific, 35 nautical miles southwest of Cape Flattery. What the U.S. Navy did not want anyone to know was that a Japanese submarine had just drawn blood off the coast of Washington State.

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SS Coast Trader: Three Names, Three Lives

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The ship that died as Coast Trader had already lived under two other names. Built as the SS Holyoke Bridge in 1920 by the Submarine Boat Company in Newark, New Jersey, she was one of 118 identical Design 1023 ships rushed into production by the Emergency Fleet Corporation for Wor...

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SS Coast Trader: The Hunter from Yokosuka

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Navy dispatched five submarines to prowl the West Coast of the United States. Among them was I-26, commanded by Minoru Yokota. By June 1942, I-26 had participated in the opening stages of the Aleutian Islands campaign before...

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SS Coast Trader: Forty Minutes and Forty Hours

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The torpedo struck below cargo hatch number four in the stern. Captain Lyle G. Havens ordered the crew to abandon ship, and all 56 aboard -- nine officers, 28 seamen, and 19 Army armed guards manning the deck guns -- scrambled into a lifeboat and two life rafts. The radio was dam...

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SS Coast Trader: The Secret and the Wreck

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The U.S. Navy initially refused to acknowledge that Japanese submarines were operating off the West Coast. With German U-boats already ravaging Atlantic shipping during what submariners called the Second Happy Time, admitting a Pacific threat as well was too much. Officials attri...

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