V-boat

V-boats (left to right): Cachalot, Dolphin, Barracuda, Bass, Bonita, Nautilus, Narwhal, with submarine tender Holland.
Class overview
Builders:	Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Electric Boat Company
Operators:	United States Navy
Preceded by:	S class and T class
Succeeded by:	Porpoise class
Built:	1921–1934
In commission:	1924–1945
Completed:	9
Lost:	1
Retired:	8

The V-boats were a group of nine United States Navy submarines built between World War I and World War II from 1921 to 1934. These were not a ship class in the usual sense of a series of nearly identical ships built from the same design, but shared authorization under the "fleet boat" program. The term "V-boats" is used to includes five separate classes of submarines. They broke down into three large, fast fleet submarines (V-1 through V-3), three large long-range submarines (V-4 through V-6), and three medium-sized submarines (V-7 through V-9). The successful fleet submarines of World War II (Tambor class through Tench class) were descended from the last three, especially V-7, though somewhat larger with pure diesel-electric propulsion systems.

Originally called USS V-1 through V-9 (SS-163 through SS-171), in 1931 the nine submarines were renamed Barracuda, Bass, Bonita, Argonaut, Narwhal, Nautilus, Dolphin, Cachalot, and Cuttlefish, respectively. All served in World War II, six of them on war patrols in the central Pacific. Argonaut was lost to enemy action.

In the early 1910s, only 12 years after Holland inaugurated the Navy's undersea force, naval strategists had already begun to wish for submarines that could operate in closer collaboration with the surface fleet than the Navy's existing classes, which had been designed primarily for coastal defense. These notional "fleet" submarines would necessarily be larger and better armed, but primarily, they would need a surface speed of some 21 kn (24 mph; 39 km/h) to be able to maneuver with the 21-knot battleships the battle fleet was built around. This was the designed speed of the Delaware class and later battleships, including the standard-type battleships that were under construction and proposed in 1913.