Although Wisconsin is remote from any ocean, the state played a role in the victory at sea during World War II. The Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company constructed 28 submarines during the war, and observed their sea trials in Lake Michigan, before Navy crews piloted them across inland waterways to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. One of Manitowoc’s submarines, the USS Lagarto, proceeded through the Panama Canal to Pearl Harbor and from their to the Gulf of Siam, where it was lost during the closing summer of the war.
Lost and Found: The Legacy of the USS Lagarto” is a documentary on the Badger State sub by the Emmy-winning team of Harvey Moshman and Chuck Coppola. It airs 8 p.m. Sunday, May 24, and noon on Sunday, May 31 on MPTV-36.
Spurred by Badger naval veterans and the Wisconsin Maritime Museum, an expedition located the Lagarto nearly 60 years after its last crash dive. By then the hulk was a coral encrusted shell, dented but not blown apart by Japanese depth charges. Film of the shipwreck’s discovery is interspersed with interviews with war veterans, families of the Lagarto crew and workers who built her. Archival footage of wartime Manitowoc reveal a bustling little factory town, working day and night to win a war everyone believed in. Seldom seen training movies show the lives of the era’s submarine crews, who were often on deep-ocean patrol for weeks on end.
