SS-394 USS Razorback Patch - Hog Mascot Small

USS Razorback SS-394 was one of twelve submarines that steamed into Tokyo Bay on 31 August 1945 for the Japanese surrender, and she is still afloat today. She is the only ship the Navy ever named Razorback. A Balao-class fleet boat out of Portsmouth, she fought the last year of the Pacific war, served through the Cold War and Vietnam, then spent three more decades under another flag. Now she sits on the Arkansas River in North Little Rock, about as far from salt water as a submarine gets. For a boat with that many lives, the cartoon hog on this patch is about right.

Razorback was laid down at Portsmouth Navy Yard in Kittery, Maine on 9 September 1943, launched on 27 January 1944, and commissioned on 3 April 1944 under Lt. Cmdr. A. M. Bontier. She made five war patrols, sinking the destroyer Kuretake and a string of wooden cargo craft and sea trucks, several of them in the Sea of Okhotsk, and earned five battle stars. She went into the yard in 1952 for her GUPPY IIA conversion and came back to the fleet in January 1954. Through the 1960s she made Western Pacific deployments into the South China Sea and earned four Vietnam campaign stars. She decommissioned on 30 November 1970 and the same day went to the Turkish Navy as TCG Muratreis (S-336), which kept her in service until 2001.

The patch is a 3 inch circle with a twisted rope border in yellow and black around a pale sea green field. USS RAZORBACK arches across the top in red and SS-394 sits across the bottom. In the middle is a gray razorback hog in a white Dixie cup, red-eyed and showing a mouthful of teeth, its body drawn long and tapered like a hull. One fist grips a white bar and the other arm hauls a torpedo with a red warhead and a green body. It measures 3 inches wide by 3 inches tall, with a cut edge and iron-on backing.

Razorback served the U.S. Navy for twenty six years and Turkey for thirty one, which is a long run for any hull. North Little Rock bought her on 25 March 2004 for $37,500, and she was towed out of Turkey, across the Atlantic to Key West, and up the Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers to her berth. She opened to the public at the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum on 15 May 2005 and went on the National Register of Historic Places that September. A boat named for the razorback ending up in Arkansas suits everyone who ever rode her. The men who stood watches in her get to walk her decks again.

It belongs in a shadow box beside a dolphins pin and a WestPac cruise book, or on a jacket at a submarine veterans reunion. It is also a good gift for a family that is about to visit the boat in North Little Rock. One patch, one hog and one torpedo, and every Razorback sailor will know it.