USS Pampanito (San Francisco, California)

 Second World War 1939-1945, submarine, NRHP - National Register of Historic Places, movie / film / TV location, submarine museum, U.S. National Historic Landmark

USS Pampanito (SS-383/AGSS-383), a Balao-class submarine, was a United States Navy ship, the only one named for a variety of the pompano fish. She completed six war patrols from 1944 to 1945 and served as a Naval Reserve Training ship from 1960 to 1971.

Pampanito was turned into a memorial and museum at San Francisco on 21 November 1975, transferred to the Maritime Park Association (formerly the National Maritime Museum Association) on May 20, 1976, and opened to the public on March 15, 1982.

In 1986, Pampanito was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and declared to be a National Historic Landmark.

She is now owned and operated by the San Francisco Maritime National Park Association and is moored at Pier 45 in San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf area, where she is open for visiting.

She flies a broom from her mast, indicating a "clean sweep": a successful patrol that "swept the enemy from the seas." In total, she sank four Japanese ships and damaged six others, with a total of more than 27,000 tons of enemy shipping sunken.

Pampanito has completed four maintenance drydockings since becoming a memorial and museum. The Pampanito still has several working parts, including one torpedo tube, the periscope, engines, galley and ice-cream maker. The museum runs educational programs including one that allows organized groups of children and adults to sleep overnight in the submarine's 48 bunk beds.

In 1995, she played the fictional rust-bucket USS Stingray (SS-161) in the movie Down Periscope. The movie, with Kelsey Grammer as the ship's captain, is set in Charleston and Norfolk harbors, on the U.S. east coast, but San Francisco's Fort Mason is prominent behind the submarine in the closing shot of the movie. Filming is actually of the Pampanito sailing under tow in San Francisco Bay and venturing past the Golden Gate Bridge. It had been fifty years since she sailed under the bridge.

www.maritime.org/