In May 1944, Lt. Comdr. Eugene Fluckey, seeking his own submarine command, promised the Pacific Fleet sub commander at Midway Island that he would sink five Japanese ships on his first patrol. It was a bold gamble; the ship Fluckey had been eyeing, the USS Barb, had sunk only a single ship in six patrols under its previous commander. But with Fluckey placed in temporary command, the Barb got five freighters and two trawlers with the Barb’s guns its next time out—and Fluckey got the Barb.

Indeed, his report on the patrol was so full of new ideas, so gung ho, positive, and entertaining, that the commander, Adm. Charles Lockwood, gave it to President Roosevelt, who happened to be at Pearl Harbor on the Barb’s return. FDR enjoyed it so much he asked that all of Fluckey’s future patrol reports be sent along to him—and then demanded a bit more.

“He wanted the Barb to reenact her return to Pearl with battle flags flying as he filmed some home movies,” wrote Fluckey in his action-packed memoir, Thunder Below!

The first pass wasn’t fast enough for FDR. They tried again at two-thirds speed: still too slow for the president, who wanted the Barb’s battle flag and five pennants streaming. So Fluckey brought it in a third time at high speed, skidding sideways to a stop—“All back emergency! Left full rudder!”—not ten yards from an ammunition ship he had been warned about. It was a total hot-dog maneuver, causing Lockwood to blanch, but the president loved every churning, foaming, spectacular second of it. Fluckey leaped out like a daredevil stunt driver at the state fair, strode over, and shook the hand of a hugely grinning FDR.

It was classic Fluckey, mixing a perverse sense of fun with a healthy tolerance for danger, a calculating mind, and a drive to get the best possible outcome. Throw in his gift for inventing tactics to match every situation he faced, and an icy killing instinct, and you had one of the deadliest submariners of World War II.

In five war patrols between May 1944 and August 1945, the 1,500-ton Barb sank twenty-nine ships and destroyed numerous factories using shore bombardment and rockets launched from the foredeck, a tactic invented by Fluckey. The sub’s crew even—improbably—blew up a train on a stealth mission by sending saboteurs to shore in a rubber raft.

Fluckey not only made his mark on the record books, he rewrote the American submarine warfare manual. While traditional tactics counseled subs to lie submerged in wait, Fluckey believed—taking a page from Germany’s most successful U-boat skipper, Otto Kretschmer—that a sub should be used like a motor torpedo boat that pursues the enemy on the surface. On his first patrol, which went fifty-two days, Fluckey only submerged the Barb for one day. He would prove his point, time and again.

His exploits earned Fluckey an astonishing four Navy Crosses and a Medal of Honor. The Barb’s final battle flag shows twenty-three Silver Stars, twenty-three Bronze Stars, two more Navy Crosses, a Presidential Unit Citation for four of his patrols, a Navy Unit Commendation for the fifth, four navy and Marine Corps medals, and eighty-two Letter-of-Commendation Ribbons.

As important, in those five daring patrols there was no loss of life or significant injury to any of his crewmembers. Fluckey often said he was most proud of that, bringing his men home without a scratch, and they in turn dubbed him “Lucky Fluckey” for his ability to do so.

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