voyage during which her crew conducted daily drills. She arrived in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on 19 November 1943. After reporting for duty to the Commander, Submarine Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet, Batfish spent five days alongside the submarine tender at Pearl Harbor for repairs. She then carried out intensive training in United States Pacific Fleet procedures. First war patrol Batfish left Pearl Harbor on 11 December 1943 and began her first war patrol, an open-sea patrol south of Honshu, Japan. She fought typhoons most of the way but finally reached her patrol area on 28 December 1943. However, bad weather continued to dog her operations and made it impossible for her to attack the few Japanese convoys she sighted. On 14 January 1944, her radar picked up a large contact. Signals intelligence identified it as the Imperial Japanese Navy battleship , one of the two largest warships in the world. Merrill chose to dive rather than use the cover of the heavy seas to close the battleship on the surface, and Batfish′s slower submerged speed caused her to fall rapidly out of range of Yamato and her escorts. Shortly after 12:00 on 19 January 1944, a convoy of four Japanese ships appeared on the horizon and, with nightfall, Batfish made a high-speed surface run to close for an attack. She fired three torpedoes at each of two cargo ships, sinking one and crippling the other. The other two ships escaped, but Batfish remained on the scene to sink the crippled cargo ship, the 5,486-gross register ton Hidaka Maru, early the following morning. Postwar assessment of Japanese shipping losses only credited Batfish with this last sinking. Batfish departed her patrol area on 24 January 1944 and headed back through typhoons to Midway Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, where she arrived on 30 January 1944. At Midway, she underwent a two-week refit, followed by a week of training. Second war patrol Batfish departed Midway Atoll on 22 February 1944 bound for another patrol area south of Honshu. This patrol was unsuccessful because of continual high winds and heavy seas that seemed to have kept the Japanese in port. Batfish departed her patrol area on 3 April 1944 without making contact with any ship larger than a sampan. She proceeded to Pearl Harbor for refit, which began upon her arrival there on 15 April 1944. A relief crew from the submarine tender took