USS Sand Lance (SS-381), a Balao-class submarine, was the first ship of the United States Navy to be named for the sand lance, a member of the family Ammodytidae. Construction and commissioning Sand Lance′s keel was laid down on 12 March 1943 by the Portsmouth Navy Yard in Kittery, Maine. She was launched on 25 June 1943, sponsored by Mrs. Edith Burrows, and commissioned on 9 October 1943 at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Service history U.S. Navy World War II Sand Lance conducted training exercises from New London, Connecticut, until 18 December 1943 when she sailed for the Panama Canal. She transited the canal on 30 December and reached her base of operations, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on 17 January 1944. First war patrol On 8 February, Sand Lance got underway for the first of her five war patrols. She stopped at Midway Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands for fuel, then headed for the Kuril Islands. Before entering her patrol area off Paramushiro on 24 February, she passed through two typhoons and encountered fields of slush ice and patches of drift ice. Sand Lance encountered her first victim, the Japanese cargo ship Kaika Maru, taking shelter from a blizzard in the lee of Paramushiro's southeast point and torpedoed and sank her. Though her Number One periscope had been heavily damaged by drift ice, she pressed home attacks on a convoy on the night of 2 March and 3 March, sinking the 4521-ton cargo ship Akashisan Maru, and damaging other ships. On 3 March 1944, Sand Lance mistakenly sank the Soviet merchant ship Byelorussia in the Sea of Okhotsk. On the night of 12–13 March, Sand Lance was running on the surface toward Honshū when a marauding airplane forced her to submerge. At about 0200, she came up to periscope depth and found herself in the midst of a Japanese convoy, consisting of five merchantmen and three heavily armed warships. Sand Lance had only six torpedoes remaining, but she made them count. She loosed four from the stern tubes and two from the bow tubes. All six hit the mark. Two of the four stern torpedoes hit a merchantman and the other two ripped into a light cruiser, while the two from the bow tubes smashed into another freighter. At least two of the ships went to the bottom, light cruiser Tatsuta and cargoman Kokuyo Maru, carrying over 1,000 enemy troops. For