Spikefish was laid down on 29 January 1944 by the Portsmouth Navy Yard in Kittery, Maine; launched on 26 April 1944, sponsored by Mrs. Harvey W. Moore, and commissioned on 30 June 1944, Commander Nicholas J. Nicholas in command.
She outfitted there until 31 July when she moved to the Portsmouth-New London area for training. The submarine departed Portsmouth on 16 September and proceeded via the Panama Canal to the Hawaiian Islands. Upon arriving at Pearl Harbor on 23 October, she began preparation for her first war patrol.
Spikefish got underway on 15 November 1944 for the Kuril Islands and the Sea of Okhotsk. She encountered no enemy shipping during the patrol which ended at Midway Island on 1 January 1945. On 26 January, she sailed for the Ryukyus and began patrolling westward of that group.
On 24 February, the submarine made a submerged attack on a convoy of six cargo ships with four escorts. She fired six torpedoes at two of the freighters, three of which were heard to hit, but results were not observed as Spikefish was forced to go deep and weather out a four-hour attack of about 80 depth charges. She sighted another convoy on 5 March and expended six torpedoes in a fruitless attack which led to another pounding by escorts. Spikefish was ordered to terminate her patrol on 6 March, and she returned to Pearl Harbor on 19 March.
One month later, Spikefish, under Cdr. Robert R. Managhan,[5] sailed with Dragonet (SS-293) for Guam, topped off with fuel, and proceeded independently, on 3 May, toward an area off the east coast of Formosa where she assumed lifeguard station duties. She made no rescues during this period and sighted only one enemy ship. That occurred on the night of 14 May, and all four torpedoes that she fired missed the target. On 29 May, Spikefish was ordered to take station off Sakishima Gunto and act as lifeguard for carrier planes in the area. On 5 June, she bombarded Miyara airstrip on Ishigaki Jima with her 5-inch (130 mm) gun. Two days later, the submarine rescued a downed pilot whose plane had crashed after taking off from escort carrier, Sargent Bay (CVE-83). She returned to Guam on 13 June.
Spikefish began her last war patrol on 8 July with an uneventful patrol in the Yellow Sea and lifeguard duty off Shanghai. On 24 July, she bombarded Surveyor Island, off the China coast, in an attempt to destroy an enemy radar station. Shortly after midnight on 11 August, she located a small Japanese cargo ship near her lifeguard station but could not make positive identification at night. The ship was dead in the water, so Spikefish waited until morning, identified it as enemy and sank it with gunfire. Three survivors were brought on board. On the night of 13 August about 190 nmi (350 km) southeast of Shanghai, she made radar contact with a surfaced submarine. After tracking it for about an hour, the submarine submerged and disappeared from Spikefish's scope. At 00:07, contact was regained and the submarine was tracked until morning, when she was sighted on the surface. Her silhouette proved her to be Japanese. Spikefish fired six torpedoes. Two hit the target, which sank in a cloud of smoke at 29°02′N 123°53′E / 29.033°N 123.883°E / 29.033; 123.883 (Japanese submarine I-373).[6] The sole survivor who was taken prisoner identified the submarine as I-373; she was the last Japanese submarine sunk in the war.
Officer Charlie Cooper's own words on the sinking of the Japanese submarine: "After we spotted the Jap sub and it submerged, we guessed that it would try to lose us by turning 180 degrees and head the other direction. That's what it did. We played cat and mouse all night, each sub running as silent as possible and all crew on edge as we listened intensely for any audible tracks of our enemy below the surface. We sunk the Jap sub the next day and recovered a lone survivor. What is significant is that the war ended the very next day. We all felt very sad and guilty about taking the lives of those men. We couldn't help thinking that if they had only waited less than 24 hours to get the news of the war's end, the killing wouldn't have been necessary".
