"Recently, the nation celebrated the dedication of the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. to honor the 18.2 million men and women who served in uniform during that conflict. Members of the Guard and Reserve represented 80 percent of this total, or 14.5 million personnel. In the Navy, the citizen-sailor accounted for 90 percent of the crews who sailed in the greatest armada of recent times.
In some submarines, the crew and wardroom were composed entirely of reservists, with the exception of the commanding officer who was most often a Naval Academy graduate."
Transforming the Force During the Cold War
From 1946 to 1972, Navy Reservists drilled in 26 cities on 44 diesel boats. Submarines like the USS Silversides (SS-236) in Chicago; the USS Tambor (SS-198) in Detroit; and the USS Carp (SS-338) in Boston served as training platforms on which Sailors prepared themselves for active service in the event that a global war heated up. For the most part, their training utilized surplus equipment and platforms from the active-duty fleet. With the shift to nuclear-powered submarines and a transition away from reserve units focused on platforms and hardware, the program gradually morphed into the submarine reserve we know today. Although this transition did not take place overnight, the submarine reserve became increasingly focused on its own reserve obligations and infrastructure, and by late in the Cold War, it had become fairly independent of the active-duty component and not truly aligned with the mission or structure of the latter.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, the senior leadership of the submarine reserve realized that while a structure based on mass mobilization may have been appropriate for a traditional wartime scenario, it was inadequate for the fluid nature of the coming era and its potential short-term demands. As RDML Jay DeLoach remarked, “We could no longer afford to think that mustering at the local reserve center to conduct General Military Training (GMT) was enough. Likewise, having two separate entities that didn’t speak the same language wouldn’t work. We began to realize that the submarine reserve needed to be relevant to current operations in the fleet on a day-to-day basis.”
Yep, the old diesel boat reserve fleet was there, but it was mostly on paper due to the danger I illustrated. There were some instances of wet weekends but the boats rarely put to sea. Even the active duty types in the 1970s were hard put to go to sea. I remember an old diddy about a SUBRON in New London (composed of USS Harder, USS Darter, USS Trigger, and USS Trout). It went thusly:
Harder, Darter, Trigger, Trout
Always homebound, never out!