USS Stingray, a 1449-ton Salmon class submarine, was built at the Portsmouth Navy Yard, Kittery, Maine. Commissioned in March 1938, she spent her first year of service in U.S. East Coast and Caribbean waters, transferring to the Pacific in May 1939. After more than two years in the West Coast and Hawaiian areas, Stingray went to the Far East in October 1941, a month and a half before the Japanese began the Pacific War with attacks on U.S. bases in the Philippines and Hawaii. From December 1941 to March 1942 the submarine conducted two war patrols from Manila, attempting to hamper Japan's offensive operations. One enemy ship was sunk during her second patrol.

Shifting her base to Fremantle, Australia, Stingray made two more patrols in March-July 1942 that cost the Japanese another ship. Following overhaul on the West Coast, she reentered combat in October 1942 with the first of five patrols into the central and western Pacific, during which one more ship was sunk and Stingray suffered slight damage when attacked by "friendly" aircraft. Overhauled at San Francisco, California, in October 1943-January 1944, she began further operations out of Pearl Harbor in March with a patrol, her tenth, into the Marianas. One ship was sunk and Stingray experienced a close call when attacked by a hostile submarine.

During Stingray's next patrol, off Guam during the June assault on the Marianas, she rescued several downed Navy fliers, one very close to shore while under enemy artillery fire. Her last five war patrols were made from Australian bases, conducting reconnaissance of enemy-held islands and putting ashore landing parties in the Philippines and East Indies. After completing her sixteenth patrol in February 1945, Stingray was withdrawn from combat and sent back to the United States for training service. She was decommissioned in October 1945, stricken from the Navy list in July 1946 and sold for scrapping in January 1947.