USS Snook, a 1525-ton Gato class submarine, was built at the Portsmouth Navy Yard, Kittery, Maine. She was commissioned in October 1942 and went to the Pacific in March 1943. Her first war patrol began in April, taking her to the East China Sea where she laid mines and, on 5 and 7 May, sank three Japanese cargo ships. The submarine's second and third patrols, in the same area during June-July and August-October, cost the enemy three more freighters and a good-sized transport. Her fourth patrol, in the Marianas area between late October and early December 1943, produced two more sinkings. In early January 1944 she left Pearl Harbor for a return to the Western Pacific area. Snook's sinkings in this, her most successful war patrol, included a converted gunboat, three cargo carriers and a passenger-cargo ship.

Following an overhaul on the West Coast, Snook conducted an unproductive war patrol into Japanese waters during June-August 1944, but this was followed in September-November by a seventh patrol that sank three ships. Snook next assignment was in the northern Pacific, off the Kurile Islands in December-February, but she found the area to be unfruitful. She returned to the region between the Philippines and the Asian mainland for her ninth patrol. After checking in by radio on 8 April 1945 she was not heard from again. Snook's loss, with her entire crew of more than eighty officers and men, remains unexplained. Her combat record, however, was clear, and remarkable: 17 enemy ships sunk, totalling more than 75,000 tons, the tenth highest tonnage count among the U.S. submarines that ravaged Japan's shipping during the Pacific War.