Hell and High Water

By Sam Moses | World War II  | 2 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

But luck, he always insisted, had very little to do with it: he prepared obsessively for his missions and applied logic and experience to the calculation of risk. “I’ve always believed luck is where you find it, but by God, you’ve got to go out there and find it.”

The son of a government lawyer, Fluckey was raised in Washington, D.C., and was set to attend Princeton at age sixteen when, inspired by a war hero neighbor, he changed his plans and enrolled in the U.S. Naval Academy instead. Fluckey, a former Boy Scout, was all-American down to his lanky frame, red hair, and freckles, and his persistence and ingenuity were apparent at every turn. He proposed the concept of an electric torpedo (which, rather than steam, became the norm) in a class at the Naval Academy, but the teacher threw his illustration in the wastebasket. At twenty, he figured out how to cure himself of nearsightedness by working his eye muscles, an unheard-of medical feat that enabled him to stay in Annapolis.

Fluckey signed up for submarines partly to get out of the sun, but also for the hazardous-duty pay. A lieutenant’s pay in 1937 didn’t go far, and he had a wife and baby to support. Even after he made commander, his family still lived in half a Quonset hut, which measured 15 x 30 feet and cost $30 per month.

When war broke out in 1941 Lieutenant Fluckey was an engineering and diving officer on the V-class submarine USS Bonita, after having served on the battleship Nevada, the destroyer McCormick, and another sub, the S-42.

The Bonita was a 2,000-ton relic that could only dive at two degrees and took five minutes and forty-five seconds to do so, according to its own manual. With the inventiveness that would become his signature, Fluckey examined the boat and figured out how to make it dive at twenty degrees and get down in less than a minute.

The Bonita saw no action, however, and it was aboard the Barb that he would make his lasting mark. In May 1944, on that first patrol as co-commander, Fluckey, then thirty, took his boat into the treacherous Sea of Okhotsk, off the Russian coast. The Barb left Midway with two wolf-pack mates, the Herring and the Golet. On May 30, 1944—Memorial Day evening—they found a convoy of four freighters with one destroyer escort; the Herring sank the destroyer with one torpedo, scattering the convoy. The next day the Barb picked off two freighters (one carrying troops) at 1:20 p.m. and 5:45 p.m. Six torpedoes fired, six hits—Fluckey’s first shots as captain. The detonator firing pins on the torpedoes had been failing, so before the patrol Fluckey and his men had fixed them all with stronger springs. He had put his motto to work: not problems, solutions.

The Herring sank another freighter, and then stole into the harbor of Matsuwa Island, where it sank two more freighters at anchor. Shore batteries retaliated, and the Herring went down with eighty-three men lost. The Golet, which had never fired a torpedo, was never heard from and was later presumed sunk, based on Japanese records. Eighty-two men were lost. The Herring appeared to have been too daring—the Golet possibly not daring enough.

For a sub captain operating in the Sea of Okhotsk, it was a question of finding a happy medium. For the next five weeks, the Barb would be alone, and Fluckey would zero in on that state of balance.

For starters, after the first kills, Fluckey trolled the flotsam of the sunken freighter Koto Maru looking for a prisoner: the sea charts supplied by the navy were fifty years old, and he needed more information. The carnage gave him pause. “This was the first time I’d ever returned to the scene of a sinking and it was a rather unholy sight,” he later recalled. Nonetheless, he only needed one sailor to interrogate, so he picked up one survivor clinging to a wooden hatch cover in the freezing water. The other unlucky survivors were left to drown or die of exposure. Armed with a one-page phonetic dictionary of Japanese words, his fabulous smile, and a .45-caliber pistol, Fluckey charmed his way into the brain of Kitojima Sanji, who would become “Kito” to the crew. Fluckey treated him kindly, made him understand that saving the Barb was saving himself, and the crew virtually adopted him as their mascot. Meanwhile, Fluckey obtained from him the location of Japanese minefields and air bases.

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Tags: Historical Figures, Naval Battles, World War II

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