Hell and High Water

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

Still, patrol records and his own commentary suggest Fluckey was as determined a killer as any in the sub fleet.

Back in the East China Sea on January 1, 1945, on what would become his storied fourth patrol, the Barb came across a smoking naval weather ship that two other subs had shot up before a plane chased them away. The crew had put out fires and hid as a boarding party from the Barb looted it, looking mostly for charts. Because the ship was armed with machine guns, and was presumed to have radioed for help on seeing the Barb, Fluckey took no prisoners. Thirteen shots from the four-inch gun turned the weather ship with its hiding crew into a blazing inferno.

“We took Kodachrome movies of the event,” said Fluckey.

No regrets, no mercy. The war, he wrote home to his wife, had changed him: “What a pleasure it is to eliminate Japs. Funny thing, I seem to be the most bloodthirsty of the bunch, and I could never steel my heart enough to kill a rabbit.”

January 8, 1945, was another record-breaking day, as the Barb sank six ships. First the ship raced a convoy of eight freighters and transports and eight escorts all afternoon, running at flank speed in order to get into firing position. Then it fired six torpedoes in a fan pattern. The patrol report from that day reads:

Up scope. Stern of the transport is sticking up at a 30 [degree] angle with two escorts alongside taking off survivors. The bow is in the bottom mud. The brand-new engines-aft freighter exploded. There is nothing left but an enormous smoke cloud and flat flotsam; no lifeboats, nothing alive, nothing. The large freighter leading the port column is on fire amidships just above the waterline.

The Barb’s wolf-pack sisters, Queenfish and Picuda, attacked from the front, which allowed the Barb to come from the starboard flank and get into the middle of the convoy, where it fired three torpedoes and watched another ship nosedive. Fluckey retreated until things cooled down; when he came back an hour later, he sank a tanker at 1,500 yards.

But January 8 was just a warm-up for January 23, the night Fluckey earned the nickname “the Galloping Ghost of the China Coast,” as well as the Medal of Honor.

He put all his ideas together that night: good intelligence, knowledge of his enemies’ mindset, the element of surprise, a dash of courage, and skillful use of his weaponry and ship. At the time, targets had vanished, and he was frustrated by reports that all traffic had holed up. He didn’t believe it. He suspected the ships were somehow getting past the wolf pack. He studied every chart and war report he could. “I was brought to a shuddering halt,” he wrote in Thunder Below! “I realized that the mile-wide channel between Hai-tan Island and the mainland is 10 miles long and only six feet deep. Could they possibly have dredged it? If such a dredging had been done, it would have enabled convoys to escape submarine surveillance.”

Fluckey finally tracked a convoy until it anchored in the dredged Namkwan Harbor. He invited the Picuda to join the Barb in sneaking into the harbor and blowing up ships. “Drop dead!” the Picuda’s skipper was said to have replied.

It’s easy to imagine Fluckey rubbing his hands together in glee at that response: all the more for the Barb.

At 3:20 a.m., the Barb’s radar picked up thirty ships in the harbor. “Fantastic! All ahead standard.” At 3:52 a.m., Fluckey saw the ships through binoculars from three thousand yards. The ships were in three lines, “a complete overlap from end to end. Even an erratic torpedo couldn’t miss. No one had ever had such a perfect target.”

The Barb crept into the harbor, only five fathoms deep. Four torpedoes were fired at 4:03 a.m., and four more at 4:05.

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Tags: Historical Figures, Naval Battles, World War II

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