21. Submarines offered few creature comforts to their crews.
The close quarters in American submarines created the need for innovative storage of supplies. Consequently, the crew slept in bunks in tiers of three, eighteen inches apart. Both forward and aft torpedo rooms carried additional bunks, where sailors slept alongside or suspended above the weapons. The submarines used any available space for stowing food. Beneath the deck, in the cool spaces of the bilges, root vegetables and cabbages kept longer, and added their aromas to the overall smell of the vessel’s interior. Space between machinery and the hull carried canned goods with wooden planks laid above them, allowing technicians access to equipment if necessary.
Showers were rationed, and when a shower was allowed it was strictly regulated for time. Like much of military life, long periods of boredom interlaced with relatively quick intervals of terror. As the war drew on in 1945, targets became scarce. Japan’s merchant fleet had been all but destroyed, and what remained lacked sufficient fuel oil to move. Island garrisons bypassed by the American campaign across the Pacific withered from failure of the Japanese military to resupply them. There remained enough Japanese resistance to create a sense of danger on patrol, but boredom and its effect on morale became a problem for submarine crews by the summer of 1945.