The Barb moved on to sink two more ships with six hits. Fluckey needed just one more to satisfy Admiral Lockwood.

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Two days later Fluckey came upon a convoy and the 5,633-ton Takashima Maru, an icebreaker/freighter/troop transport. Fluckey camouflaged the Barb by wrapping white bed sheets around its conning tower, then tracked the ship for five tense hours. Finally, he circled halfway around the convoy and fired two stern torpedoes at the Takashima, blowing off the fantail and sending the ship to its grave. Escorts came after the Barb and fired thirty-eight depth charges, but Fluckey fooled them by filling a five-gallon milk can with oil and releasing it to create an oil slick, suggesting that one of the depth charges had hit home.

On his second patrol, in the South China Sea, Fluckey followed up on the accolades he had earned, proving he was not a one-trick pony. He came upon a nine-ship convoy running in three columns. In a daring and unorthodox move, Fluckey fired three torpedoes from directly ahead of the convoy, nearly getting rammed by the leading minesweeper. The risk paid off: the single salvo sank a freighter and a tanker.

The Barb was vigorously pursued, and dodged at least ninety-six bombs or depth charges from the convoy’s escorts and airplanes. Undaunted, the Barb fired three torpedoes at the minesweeper twelve hours later, at dusk. “I can’t miss this,” said Fluckey, as he ordered the scopes raised with fifteen seconds to impact. He didn’t.

“His guns are manned fore and aft!” he narrated to the men in the conning tower with him. “There are about fifteen lookouts, dressed in white, on a catwalk above the bridge. An officer is looking….”

Wham!

“My God! Right under the bridge; bodies are flying through the air.”

Wham!

“Waterspout at the well deck!”

Wham!

“Under the forecastle. The gun crew’s been blown overboard. The ship’s breaking into a V!”

Another one hundred or so bombs or depth charges were dropped at the Barb as it dove at twenty-five degrees to a depth of 340 feet—the boat’s maximum-rated test depth was 312. Later the Barb dropped to 375, its thin skin nearly buckling. The danger passed, the Barb resurfaced, and the hunt began anew.

Fluckey was promoted to full commander before his third patrol, the Barb’s tenth, into the East China Sea. On November 10, 1944, after stalking a light cruiser, he sank it with three torpedoes, killing 326 men. More than three hundred explosions chased after the submerged Barb, “as annoying as a Tin Pan band in a small room,” said Fluckey.
Two days later, the Barb fired eight torpedoes at two freighters in a convoy and sank them both. Said Admiral Lockwood, “This attack against a large convoy of 11 ships and four escorts demonstrates in a most brilliant manner how night radar and periscope attacks should be made. A determined and beautiful battle.”

For all his lethal intent at sea, it seems Commander Fluckey did have a softer side. Resting on Midway Island between patrols, he opened a letter from his wife, Marjorie, that began,

Dearest Gene,

I feel like a perfect fool. How could you do this to me? I have never been so embarrassed in my life.

Forty-four subs, including half of Fluckey’s submarine school classmates, had been lost in the Pacific so far. Fluckey hadn’t wanted Marjorie to worry, so he had written a stack of letters from Midway—a pack of lies about repairs in port and training missions. He had postdated them, and an accomplice mailed them at the correct time. Marjorie hadn’t even known he was fighting. She only found out when other navy wives told her that her husband was winning Navy Crosses and that the Barb had sunk an aircraft carrier (the Unyo, in September 1944). “Honey, you’ve been had,” her girlfriends said.

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