USS William H. Bates (SSN-680), a Sturgeon-class attack submarine, was planned to be the second U.S. Navy ship to be named USS Redfish — for the redfish, a variety of salmon also called blueback, sawqui, red salmon, and nerka — when the contract to build her was awarded to Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, on 25 June 1968. However, upon the 22 June 1969 death of William H. Bates (1917–1969), the U.S. Representative from Massachusetts’s 6th Congressional District (1950–1969) known for his staunch support of nuclear propulsion in the U.S. Navy, she was renamed William H. Bates and was laid down on 4 August 1969 as the only ship of the U.S. Navy to have borne the name. The reason for her naming by then-Secretary of the Navy John Chafee, breaking with a long-standing Navy tradition of naming U.S. Navy attack submarines for sea creatures, was best summed up by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the then-director of the Navy’s nuclear reactors program, with the pithy comment that, “Fish don’t vote!”[1]
Bates was a great Boat BTW, plank owner and loved my time onboard.