USS Sea Tiger was a fictional submarine presumably named for the barracuda. No vessel of the United States Navy has been given that name, but the 1959 movie Operation Petticoat, starring Cary Grant and Tony Curtis, and the short-lived 1977-1978 television series of the same name, were set aboard a fictional Sea Tiger. According to the movie's dialogue, Sea Tiger was commissioned in 1940.
The name may come from the actual WWII-era submarine USS Sealion (SS-195), which like its film counterpart, was sunk at the pier at Cavite Navy Yard, the Philippines, on 10 December 1941 with the loss of 5 crewmembers.
The Sea Tiger in the movie was portrayed by three different American Balao-class submarines:
- Queenfish (SS-393), in the opening and closing scenes (c. 1959), in which the "393" on the conning tower is visible,
- Archerfish (SS-311), for all the WWII scenes where the boat was painted the standard gray and black,
- Balao (SS-285), for all the scenes in which Sea Tiger was painted pink.
Famous quotes containing the words sea and/or tiger:
“A strange and vanity-devoured, detestable woman! I do not believe I could ever learn to like her except on a raft at sea with no other provisions in sight.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of the snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,—these are in the system, and our habits like theirs. You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, expensive races,—race living at the expense of race.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)