It’s an Inland and appears to have an SG receiver in the 800-900k range. Might seem crazy that I don’t know 100%, but the provided photos show an unmolested carbine with early features and a very intriguing plaque added to the stock. The price was right so I went for it. I know not to buy the story, but after a lengthy discussion with the current owner about its former owner, I was left with no other choice but to buy it. It had to be done, haha.

The plaque says “WILLIAM R. LENNOX, LT. COMDR DE-V(G)”. The owner of the carbine got it from the estate of Mr. Lennox after his death in an airplane crash in the late 1980s. He was a family friend and handled selling off Lennox’s gun collection. After spending the weekend researching on Fold3 and Ancestry I have a pretty good picture of his service. Lennox first served in the Navy from 1930-34 and entered the Naval Reserve as an Ensign. In 1940 he went active again and served until 1946. He was discharged with the rank of Commander and held the rank of Captain while in the Reserves until his ultimate retirement in 1957.

During WWII Lennox served aboard the USS S-38, USS S-31 and finally the USS Croaker. He was acting Captain on the S-38 for a time and then on the S-31 for training duty. His usual role was that of Executive Officer. The S-38 and S-31 are WWI era subs and the Croaker was a modern sub. Reading the war patrol diaries for the S-38 is really something. Sounds like a terrible experience plagued with a sauna like atmosphere 24/7 and constant mechanical failures due to the age of the subs (see the last picture). Still doing research and will be waiting on the National Archives to provide his service records to fill in all the details.

The rank on the plaque aligns with his time as XO on the USS Croaker. It appears he finished his wartime service aboard the Croaker, so that makes sense.

I’ll update this with better pictures once it arrives. 

 Ditto

In the meantime I’m trying to figure out if there is a way to find supply records for the USS Croaker to pin this carbine down to coming off that sub. I imagine it would be a task only achievable by visiting the national archives in person or maybe those would be records still held by the Navy?

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Anyway, two quick pictures of the serial number and barrel date.

Yeah there is something stamped there. The barreled receiver still needs cleaning. Once it’s taken care of I’ll take detailed pictures of everything.

I need to consult the data sheet index about the stock. It’s marked HI with a flaming bomb in the sling well and to my surprise it has an ink stamped date under the buttplate! Looks like “July 1 1943”.

WSI marked rear sight with W.I. marked aperture. The barrel has an “A” stamped on the top flat forward of the receiver. 

Anyway, here it is…

That’s what I’m thinking is most likely. I need to get ancestry for another month and see what I can find on the muster rolls for the Croaker. I also need to get in touch with someone at the USS Croaker museum and see if they still have any wartime records available. I emailed them last week, but no response so far.

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So the suggestion has been made that the tag on the stock of this carbine was repurposed from a pre-existing tag found aboard the sub. Today I toured the USS Silversides which is the same type of sub as the USS Croaker. I kept an eye peeled for any tags that looked like the one on this carbine. There were tags everywhere that could have been used to make the tag for this carbine. See the attached picture. I don’t know if the sub had an engraving outfit aboard, but one of the sub tenders in Australia and the Philippines surely did. Pretty cool to pin down the likely source of the material for the tag. I also noted that the officers quarters did not have any sort of personal identification tags present on bunks or lockers.

Lennox served aboard the USS Sculpin starting in April 1941. The sub was part of the Asiatic Fleet based out of the Philippines at the outbreak of the war. The author provided a nice description of him.

A few other notes were sprinkled in and it seems that Lennox was a very likable guy. 

This is Christmas 1941.

1942 started off with a promotion!

And the end of his time aboard Sculpin came unexpectedly on January 25, 1942 while in docked in Java. The sub S-38 had a reorganization that resulted in the XO being moved up to CO and required another officer to be brought aboard. On the day of his transfer the S-38 departed Java to begin her 2nd war patrol.

Contact the Submariner museum in Groton CT, they may be able to come up with more info for you.  I do recall him talking about steel beach parties and shark patrols where they were armed with M1 carbines and Garands in the conning tower watching for sharks while guys were swimming.  It’s not beyond reason to believe that the carbine was assigned to a sub he was n and was gifted to him upon retirement.  I know when my dad retired he was given a piece of hull plate and a bunch of other stuff since the Skipjack was in dry dock and was being decommissioned.  He also was able to liberate survival dive knives from several decommissioned subs.  Those things were heavy.  Wood handled brass knives.  

The archives they have on Croaker are fairly limited due to her changing hands as a museum ship and only making it to Buffalo in the late 80s. It’s what I expected really, but the only way to know for sure was to look through everything they had.

Touring the Croaker was the real goal. She’s pretty different from WWII configuration these days. Updated during the Korean War she got a new sail and reconfigured bow.