USS Menhaden (SS-377) - Vietnam Service and Fate

Vietnam Service and Fate

Early in 1968 Menhaden returned to the western Pacific. During a 6-month deployment she concentrated her operations in the troubled waters of Southeast Asia as the United States increased the effort to protect and defend the independence and integrity of South Vietnam from aggression of the North Vietnamese Communists. Later in the year she returned to the west coast where she continued to prepare for future “keeping-the-peace” missions.

Menhaden was decommissioned, 13 August 1971, and struck from the Naval Register, 15 August 1973. In 1976, ex-Menhaden was towed from California to Washington to begin a new career as the "Yellow Submarine." The boat, stripped of her engines and painted yellow, was operated by the Naval Undersea Warfare Engineering Station in Keyport, Wash. Affectionately referred to as "The Hulk", she served as a remotely controlled, unmanned acoustic test vehicle capable of submerging to moderate depths in support of undersea weapons testing, and as a target ship to train Trident missile submarine crews off the coast of Washington.

In 1988 she sank, due to a leaking main-ballast-tank vent-valve when she was being cut up for scrap. As the tide came in, she was not able to float fast enough to avoid being flooded through all of the holes cut through her pressure hull. The city of Everett eventually finished scrapping the abandoned hulk.