USS Tarpon, second of the two 1316-ton Shark class submarines, was built at Groton, Connecticut. Commissioned in March 1936, she operated along the West Coast and in Hawaiian waters until October 1939, then was sent to the Philippines. Soon after the Pacific War began in December 1941 Tarpon conducted her first combat cruise amid bad weather east of Luzon. She had an eventful second war patrol near Timor in January-March 1942, damaging one Japanese ship, experiencing a depth charge attack and running aground before returning to her Australian base. Her third patrol ended at Pearl Harbor in May and was followed by a short cruise north of the Hawaiian Islands during the June Battle of Midway. After that, Tarpon went to California for a badly needed overhaul.

The submarine returned to the war zone in October, making her fifth war patrol in the central Pacific, where she fruitlessly tangled with a Japanese convoy headed for the embattled Solomon islands. On her next mission, however, Tarpon sank two enemy ships off Japan, one of them a large troop transport. The following two missions, one into the central Pacific and one in Japanese home waters, caused the enemy no shipping losses. However, her ninth patrol, also off Japan, produced a third sinking, which years later was determined to be the raider Michel, one of the few German warships to fall victim to U.S. Navy submarines.

Tarpon made three more war cruises, all involving special missions and aircraft lifeguard duties in the central Pacific. At the conclusion of her twelfth patrol, in October 1944, the now relatively elderly submarine was retired from combat. She went to the East Coast early in 1945 to spend the rest of the Second World War on training service. Decommissioned in November 1945, Tarpon was laid up in reserve until 1947, when she became a stationary Naval Reserve training submarine at New Orleans. That assignment ended in September 1956, when Tarpon was stricken from the Navy list. She sank while under tow off Cape Hatteras in August 1957.