Finding myself with some extra time in Philadelphia, PA, I walked down to the river to check out the ships I had seen during a ride on one of the local DUKW amphibious tours.

The Becuna is not exactly an intact artifact of WWII. She was refitted several times during her long service life and no telling the vintage of the Chelsea time pieces on board.

I was only able to locate two clocks on board. One located in the bridge/control room - screwed into the port-side, mid-ship.

Close-up

The second Chelsea was located in the aft torpedo room, in the back, screwed to the starboard hull. Here is a close-up with what looks like the correct sweep second hand. I don't know about the red second hand in the control room - while it does not look right for WWII, we must keep in mind that this boat was in use until 1969. Note also, the dials are white and marked U.S. Govt instead of the black U.S. Navy marked dials common during WWII. These time pieces are either of late production or they have new dials added during post WWII repairs/rebuilding to conform with new specs.

One can see a sailors bunk over one of the “fish”. The men slept with the torpedos.

There were no other time pieces visible, not even in the radio room, which would have had a clock with red segments to mark the radio silent intervals in WWII.

Here we have the last image, looking forward through the main passageway.

Crawling around in this cramped vessel I found great respect for the special valor of the submariner.

Best regards,

Greg

Greg, you may know this, but these Chelsea clocks are/were in the control post of your 1960/1970's underground nuclear silos.(minuteman?)
I was watching a program on British TV tonight about the cold war and the presenter did a piece from an underground silo, there it was on the panel!

Peter