Qualla: USS R-12: Fifteen Seconds

USS R-12: Fifteen Seconds: Introduction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At 12:23 on the afternoon of June 12, 1943, the navigator of USS R-12 reported from the control room two words that sealed the fate of 42 men: "Forward battery flooding." The collision alarm sounded. The commanding officer, standing on the bridge, immediately ordered the main ballast tanks blown. It did not matter. R-12 tipped forward at a steep angle and plunged beneath the surface southeast of Key West. Fifteen seconds -- that was all the time between the alarm and the bridge going under. The commanding officer, one other officer, and three enlisted men were swept from the bridge as the boat went down. They treaded water for nearly six hours before a submarine chaser picked them up. Everyone else -- 42 officers, enlisted men, trainees, and two Brazilian Navy observers -- went down with the boat.

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USS R-12: Fifteen Seconds: Built for One War, Called Back for Another

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

R-12 was an R-1-class coastal defense submarine, built at the Fore River Shipbuilding Company in Quincy, Massachusetts. Her keel was laid down on March 28, 1918, designed for a war that ended before she could fight it. She launched on August 15, 1919, and was commissioned at the ...

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USS R-12: Fifteen Seconds: The Training Grounds

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

R-12 spent the early war years shuttling between training stations across the Caribbean and the East Coast. She operated out of Coco Solo in the Panama Canal Zone, ran exercises in the waters around the Perlas Islands, trained crews at Guantanamo Bay, and worked out of Key West. ...

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USS R-12: Fifteen Seconds: Six Hundred Feet Down

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After conducting sound exercises with the coastal yacht Coral, R-12 surfaced and began preparing for a torpedo firing run. She shifted from electric motors to diesel engines and proceeded on course 275 degrees, rigged for dive. Then the flooding started. The forward battery compa...

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USS R-12: Fifteen Seconds: Found After Seven Decades

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

R-12 sat on the bottom, largely forgotten, for nearly seventy years. Sometime before May 2011, an exploration team led by Tim Taylor aboard the research vessel Tiburon located and documented the wreck using an autonomous underwater robot. The imagery they captured was the first e...

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USS R-12: Fifteen Seconds: On Eternal Patrol

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The submarine community remembers its lost boats with a phrase: "on eternal patrol." R-12 is honored with granite markers at the National Submarine Memorial in Groton, Connecticut, and at the Pacific Fleet Submarine Memorial Museum in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. A small monument stands...

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