The next day, the two submarines began tracking a six-ship convoy and continued the chase for some five hours before Bowfin finally attained a suitable attack position.

Gunfire at her periscope forced Bowfin to go deep, so prevented her crew from observing the progress of her last salvo, but they heard its torpedoes explode.

When the submarine rose to periscope depth about an hour later, the 8,120 GRT passenger-cargo ship Kirishima Maru was slowly sinking, the tanker was on fire, and the transport seemed to be settling by the stern.

Although the submarines continued to pursue the remaining enemy vessels as they fled during the night, the battered group of Japanese ships finally managed to slip away in the darkness.

On 30 September, as she left the Mindanao Sea, Bowfin chanced upon a diesel-propelled barge carrying over 100 Japanese soldiers, and opened fire on it with her four-inch gun.

When she pulled within range of them, she opened fire with her four-inch gun and sank three before bombs from a Japanese plane forced the submarine to dive, allowing the two surviving vessels to slip away.

Before long, she discovered and opened fire upon a large sailing ship, which went down after suffering hits by two four-inch shells.

A few hours later, her torpedoes sank Van Vollenhoven, a 691 GRT coaster that the Japanese had taken from her French owners when they overran Indochina almost two years before.

Meanwhile, one of the Japanese ships fired on Bowfin and scored hits, which opened leaks in her starboard induction line; while serious, they did not prevent the submarine from getting off her last two torpedoes.

Repair efforts at daylight slowed, but did not completely stop the flooding, and Bowfin began her voyage back to Australia.

The submarine's deck gun promptly destroyed this stranger; thereafter, Bowfin enjoyed an uneventful passage that brought her to Fremantle a week later.

She proceeded through the Java, Banda, and Flores Seas to Makassar Strait, where – on 16 January – she encountered a small schooner, surfaced, and sank the sailing vessel with her deck gun.

After reloading her tubes, she returned to the convoy the following day and finished off the crippled cargo ship with four torpedoes, which sank the 4,408 GRT Shoyu Maru.

Griffith claimed the target sank and his distinguished passenger confirmed the kill, but the sinking was not borne out by postwar examination of Japanese records – possibly because Bowfin's alleged victim was too small to be listed.

About daybreak on 28 January, Bowfin began trailing a large tanker, and she continued the chase until reaching striking range that evening.

After a rapid reload, she sent six more toward the tanker, and this time, two exploded against the side of the Japanese ship, sending towers of fire and smoke skyward.

As Bowfin closed to administer the coup de grace, the enemy ship began fighting back with her main battery and machine-gun fire.

During the ensuing action, in which the escorts searched for the submarine, and she, in turn, strove to hide at some 350 ft below the surface, a chain dragged by one of the Japanese hunters scraped across Bowfin's hull.

Despite the efforts of the enemy escorts and of five circling Japanese aircraft, Bowfin attacked the convoy, but could not follow the progress of her torpedoes because one of them had boomeranged and threatened her by running in a circular pattern.

Three days later, she emptied her bow tubes while attacking a small convoy, but all six either ran under their targets or missed wide of their marks.

Although this sixth patrol proved to be her longest in both time and distance, she only managed to put two torpedoes into a cargo ship on 14 May, and it refused to sink.

However, since she had futilely fired her last four torpedoes at this target before surfacing, the submarine headed via Midway and Pearl Harbor for the US West Coast.

Following training in Hawaiian waters, she headed for a station near the Japanese home islands south of Honshū, where she performed lifeguard services for American planes – both naval and Army – raiding strategic enemy targets in Japan.

The captain ordered the life raft sunk and the dye marker destroyed with small arms fire and then resumed patrol on the lifeguard station.

While training for her ninth and final patrol of the war, Bowfin rescued a Marine Corps pilot whose fighter had crashed.

One of nine submarines protected by newly developed mine-detecting sonar and sent into the Sea of Japan, she threaded her way through the minefields of Tsushima Strait, which guarded this previously sacrosanct maritime heart of the Japanese Empire, but found little enemy shipping.

Reactivated because of the Navy's need to expand the fleet to support United Nations-led forces during the Korean War, the submarine was recommissioned on 27 July 1951, and following shakedown training, sailed for the Pacific.

After arriving at San Diego, California, on 6 October, she worked from that port for the next two years, devoting her time to training operations and local exercises.

The nominal ending of hostilities in Korea in the summer of 1953 reduced the Navy's need for active submarines and prompted Bowfin's second inactivation.

The warship remained there until moving to Seattle, Washington, on 1 May 1960 to replace Puffer as the Naval Reserve training submarine there, and to begin a little over a decade's service.