My Favorite 282 story – TUNNY’s Mascot
How 11 men from the Tunny sealed the entire crew of the USS Ronquil (SS 396) in their submarine crew and stole their mascot.
YN1 (SS) Ray Olszewski
YN1 (SS) Ray Olszewski was a 282 TUNNY Yeoman. Ray is the admin for the 282 website.
He wrote the definitive 282 book, which you may buy from him or on Amazon.
I bought a hard copy of this book from Ray and it is 682 pages of 282 biography. It is the most complete story of the 282 that you will ever see.
If you can afford to, I want to you to buy Ray’s book. There are a limited number of these available and it is an amazing book.
A few years ago, I heard a story about 282 TUNNY’s mascot, a panther. The story went that the panther was stolen from another submarine on a dare. It is one of the finest submarine stories I have ever heard, and Ray was part of the team that made it happen. He also wrote the story in his book, in remarkable detail.
I humbly asked Ray if I could share the story on our web site. I felt bad in my heart even asking, because I am going to excerpt 26 pages from his book and let you read the entire tale as he wrote it. It’s Ray’s story, not mine. 26 pages is a big section for me to just share for free. Hopefully, you will buy the whole book because it is packed with greatness.
The excerpt that I will share is all of Chapter 10 from his book. The page numbers are screwed up because I didn’t edit the page formatting, so ignore the page numbers. I basically deleted everything BEFORE and AFTER this Chapter of his book. Whenever I tried to adjust page numbers it started shifting the content around, so I left it.
In my opinion, this is an incredible read. It made a real impression on me. When I met JJ Jenkins in person (in Charleston) a few years ago, I shook his hand and enthusiastically told him how honored I was to meet a key player on the panther theft team. These guys are just legends.
