USS Tautog, a 1475-ton Tambor class submarine built at Groton, Connecticut, was commissioned in early July 1940. She served for the next ten months in the western Atlantic and Caribbean areas. In May 1941 Tautog was sent to the Pacific for basing at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was present there on 7 December 1941, when the devastating Japanese surprise attack opened the Pacific War. During the next three years, in the course of making thirteen war patrols, she retaliated by sinking a total of 26 enemy ships, the most accounted for by any U.S. Navy submarine, and damaged several others.

Tautog's first patrol, into the Marshall Islands in late 1941 and early 1942, produced reconnaissance information but no sinkings. However, on her second visit to that area, in the spring of 1942, she torpedoed the Japanese submarines RO-30 and I-28, plus a freighter. Operating out of Australia between July 1942 and May 1943, Tautog went into the waters of the East Indies and Indochina on five patrols that cost the enemy the destroyer Isonami and seven merchantmen. She also laid mines off Haiphong and suffered through a depth charge attack in November 1942.

Following an overhaul at San Francisco, California, Tautog resumed operations from Pearl Harbor in October 1943, sinking Submarine Chaser # 30 and damaging a tanker and three freighters during this cruise, her eighth of the war. Her next four patrols, in December 1943 - August 1944, took her to the Japanese home islands, including the chilly northern Pacific. This period was a very productive one, with the destroyer Shirakumo and eleven Marus falling victim to Tautog's torpedoes. A stateside overhaul followed, with the submarine's thirteenth war patrol, into the East China Sea, beginning in December 1944. The next month she sank a landing ship and a motor torpedo boat tender to conclude an extraordinary combat career.

Assigned to training duty in February 1945, Tautog spent the rest of World War II in that role and supporting developmental work off Hawaii and the West Coast. She transferred to the Atlantic in November 1945, a few months after Japan's surrender, and was decommissioned in December. In 1947 Tautog went to the Great Lakes, where she was employed as a stationary Naval Reserve training submarine at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for nearly twelve years. USS Tautog was removed from service in September 1959. Sold some months later, she was scrapped at Manistee, Michigan, during the early 1960s.