The heavy steel component displayed here is a torpedo tube door from the USS Pompon (SS-267), a United States Navy submarine that served in the Pacific during the Second World War. Though less visually dramatic than a gun or aircraft, artifacts like this represent one of the most important realities of submarine warfare: every attack depended on machinery functioning flawlessly beneath immense pressure and under constant danger.
Commissioned in 1943, USS Pompon was a Gato-class submarine, part of the fleet submarine force that carried the war deep into Japanese-controlled waters. American submarines became one of the most effective strategic weapons of the Pacific War, targeting merchant shipping, troop transports, tankers, and warships in an effort to isolate Japan from the resources needed to continue the conflict.
At the center of that campaign was the torpedo.
This hatch once sealed part of a submarine torpedo tube system—a mechanism designed to launch self-propelled torpedoes while the vessel remained submerged. The engineering behind these systems was extraordinarily complex. Tube doors, seals, valves, pressure controls, and firing mechanisms all had to operate precisely in an environment where a single failure could place the submarine and its crew in mortal danger.
Submarine warfare was unlike combat in almost any other branch of service.
The crews who operated vessels like USS Pompon fought in confined steel compartments surrounded by fuel, batteries, machinery, and torpedoes while submerged beneath hundreds of feet of ocean. During combat patrols they faced depth charges, mechanical failures, flooding, and the constant psychological pressure of operating unseen beneath enemy waters.
The torpedo tube itself was the submarine’s primary offensive weapon.
When attacking enemy shipping, submarine crews carefully calculated speed, distance, bearing, and target movement before firing spreads of torpedoes through these tubes. Early in the war, American submariners struggled with unreliable torpedoes plagued by depth-control and detonation problems. As these issues were corrected, submarines became increasingly devastating against Japanese maritime logistics.
USS Pompon participated in that broader undersea campaign that helped cripple Japan’s wartime supply network. By the final years of the war, American submarines had destroyed vast amounts of enemy shipping, contributing directly to shortages of fuel, food, ammunition, and industrial resources throughout the Japanese Empire.
Yet this artifact also reminds us how much of submarine warfare depended on unseen systems.
The public often remembers submarines for torpedoes and attacks, but survival relied equally on valves, hatches, pressure seals, electrical systems, and mechanical reliability. A component like this—heavy, industrial, and built to withstand tremendous stress—was part of the invisible infrastructure that allowed submarines to fight beneath the sea.
Look closely at the steel itself.
Its weight and construction reflect the unforgiving environment in which it once operated. Every hatch aboard a submarine existed between safety and catastrophe. Every seal mattered.
Preserved within the collection of Ghosts of the Battlefield, this torpedo tube hatch from USS Pompon stands as a tangible connection to the silent service and to the submariners who carried the war into the depths of the Pacific Ocean.