USS Angler (SS-240), a Gato-class submarine, was the only ship of the United States Navy to be named for the anglerfish. Construction and commissioning Angler′s keel was laid down on 9 November 1942 by the Electric Boat Company in Groton, Connecticut. She was launched on 4 July 1943, sponsored by Mrs. Mary E. Drewry (née Metcalf), the wife of Congressman Patrick H. Drewry of the House Naval Affairs Committee, and commissioned at New London, Connecticut, on 1 October 1943. Service history World War II Following shakedown in the New London and Newport, Rhode Island, area, Angler sailed to Key West, Florida. She arrived on 21 November and after one week of operations with the Fleet Sound School, sailed for Pearl Harbor on 27 November. Selected to be transferred from Pearl Harbor, Angler commenced her first war patrol on 10 January 1944, her patrol to terminate at Fremantle, Australia. Angler encountered a Japanese convoy north of the Mariana Islands on 29 January, and attacked with torpedoes. She claimed to have sunk one ship and damaged two others, but postwar records confirmed only the sinking of Shuko Maru. Having developed "structural noises" which prevented silent running, Angler turned back to Midway Island for repairs, arriving on 4 February. Angler began her second war patrol on 15 February, assigned the waters off the east coast of the Philippines in the Mindanao Sea and Sulu Sea. While she was nearing her patrol area, General Douglas MacArthur had learned that the Japanese were massacring all the civilians they could find on the island of Panay. MacArthur requested that a submarine be assigned to evacuate what was believed to be about twenty civilians from the island. The task fell to Angler, and she found 58 men, women, and children awaiting rescue. Angler took all of them on board and berthed them in the forward and after torpedo rooms. Meals were limited to two per day in an attempt to stretch the submarine's overtaxed food supply. Toward the end of the cruise, many of the passengers and crew became nauseous. The captain suspected the water supply may have been contaminated, and requested that the fresh water tanks be cleaned upon arrival at Fremantle on 9 April. Angler sailed on 3 May for another patrol as one of eight submarines assigned to support the Operation Transom carrier strike scheduled to hit Surabaya, Java. Their job would be to