(gentle music) - Welcome to the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum.

Razorback here behind me was built at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine beginning in September of 1943.

By April of 1944, it was fully assembled and ready to go to work.

This hatch here is aft torpedo room hatch.

It's 21 inches in diameter, and the ladder's about 12 feet long.

And this is how we get into the submarine.

We are now in the aft torpedo room, but loading hatch I showed you is right above this fella's bed in the middle of the room here, and you can see two torpedoes in here.

I've got one on this side, and I've got one on this side.

Now I can get eight torpedoes in here like the two you see in here.

Four of them go in the torpedo tubes.

If you turn around and look behind you, you'll find four round gold doors.

Each one of those is a torpedo tube, so I could put one torpedo in each tube.

And I have four reloads out here.

(gentle music) Okay, we are now in the after engine room.

In this room, I have engine number three.

We have engine number four.

We have a simulator of what one engine sounds like in this room.

This may be a little bit loud.

(engine rumbling) That was one engine.

So you double that for two engines and then you have to add the heat because now you're standing under the hood of your car.

So yeah, not only was it very noisy back here, but this was a very hot space.

We're talking 110, 120 degrees in the shade.

This plaque here, is a replica of Razorbacks battle flag from World War II.

Every ship had a battle flag.

These are bragging rights for what we did on a war patrol.

So each one of the little flags represents Japanese ships sunk.

The two down here at the bottom look like red starburst were Japanese destroyers, warships.

We carried a crew compliment of 70 to 90, so you have to imagine this with 80 of your closest friends on here with you.

Now you had to have fresh water for about 1000 gallons of fresh water per day using sea water.

Now, that may seem like a lot of water, but it isn't.

So you have to ration the water.

So once you get to the bathing part, you're rationing the water again.

So if you're a cook or a food handler, you're in luck.

You got to take a shower every single day.

If you're not a cook, that included the captain you're out of luck.

Your showered average may be every 15 days.

Yes, it got pretty ripe down here pretty fast.

This is after battery birthing.

There are 35 bunks in this room.

As you can see, you're basically sleeping in a box.

The box is a little more than six feet long, three feet tall and three feet wide with a six inch foam mattress on it.

Now, if you counted all the bunks on board you came up with a magic number of 75.

So if you had more people than you had beds, somebody's doubling up.

Shift change comes around and one guy has to get up to do his job.

The guy coming off shift will get the bed.

It's called hot bunking because the bunk never got cold.

There's always somebody in it.

So hopefully you shared it with someone just as clean or as dirty as you.

Alright, this is control room.

The room right over here is the radio room.

This is how you kept in contact with the outside world when the submarine was at sea.

This is where all of the action happens.

Everything on the submarine will happen in here first.

So on this bulkhead here, I have two hand wheels.

One of them is for the bow planes the other one is for the stern planes.

Bow planes are on the front, and as you work your way down the submarine, you'll find a matching pair on the back.

These are the stern blades.

With the submarine underwater, you can use these two pairs of wings to control the depth and the angle of the submarine.

So the first thing that you're going to hear is an announcement that says, "Dive, dive."

Then you're going to hear this (machine honking) and then you'll hear the words, "Dive, dive," again.

(gentle music) That concludes the interior portion of the tour.

We have a ladder here that will take us out, this one slightly longer than the one you came in.

And also as you go out the sub, you'll be going through what we call a escape truck.

(gentle music) Thank you folks for coming out to see us today at the Arkansas Maritime Museum.

I hope you had a good time on your tour, and I hope you learned something.

Thanks again for coming.