The Galloping Ghost

by Carl P. LaVO

  Back on the Barb, Fluckey resumed the hunt for targets and soon spotted the fleeing Koto Maru. It took three hours for the sub to get ahead of the transport and settle into a submerged position. Under a clear sky with no sign of overhead aircraft, the Barb let loose with three torpedoes from its stern tubes. A minute ticked by. Raising the periscope, Fluckey watched as all three hit the ship, breaking its bow and turning it on its end. Lifeboats, dangling from their lines, began spilling survivors into the frigid sea. Within three minutes the ship disappeared.

  The skipper, making a periscope sweep before surfacing, was taken by surprise when a plane came roaring in undetected and dropped two bombs. Concussions slammed against the hull, shaking the boat wildly and causing seawater to rush past as if it had been holed. “Down scope! Rig ship for depth charge!” Fluckey shouted. “Take her deep—three hundred feet! Left full rudder!” Two more explosions were more distant as the Barb made its narrow escape with only minor damage.

  The boat stayed submerged for an hour, then surfaced to return to the wreckage in hopes of taking a prisoner who might provide valuable intelligence. The resulting spectacle was gruesome and eerie in daylight on a flat sea with ice shards everywhere. “This was the first time that I’d ever returned to the scene of a sinking and it was a rather unholy sight,” the skipper later noted. “The atmosphere was much like one you’d expect from Frankenstein. The people were screaming and groaning in the water. There were several survivors on rafts. The water at that time was very cold, about twenty-seven degrees. These people were gradually freezing and dying.”

  When one of the gunners aboard the Barb took a shot at one of the survivors, Fluckey angrily rebuked him, demanding why he had done so. The enlisted man stammered, then replied, “He pulled a knife on me.”

  McNitt, the exec, was alongside Fluckey on the bridge as the submarine trolled through the flotsam and doomed soldiers. “We could only take one prisoner. I remember coming up close to this man who was sitting on a hatch cover or a piece of wood. There was ice in the water. He was wearing nothing but a singlet and a pair of pants. We invited him aboard, came up to him, and he turned his back to us. One of the crew pointed a submachine gun at him, at which point he seemed happy to come aboard. I’ve often thought this was a matter of saving face for a moment. His alternative was not good.”

  Three seamen hauled the prisoner on deck, where a pharmacist’s mate bundled him in a blanket after unwinding a twenty-foot-long spool of wool that he had wrapped around his abdomen, which had saved his life. The rescuers passed him through an access door to the bridge and lowered him through a hatchway, where others took him under guard, removing him to the after torpedo room where he could be watched. Fluckey ordered everyone aboard to treat him kindly and asked to be informed when he was sufficiently revived to begin interrogation.

  Two hours later, guards led the prisoner into the officers’ quarters, where McNitt had laid out a chart of the Okhotsk on the wardroom table. No one knew any Japanese. Luckily the skipper had pirated a single page of Japanese phonetic vocabulary from a Navy bulletin two years earlier and had kept it with him. He greeted the prisoner with “Konban wa” (Welcome). The sailor, short with a slender build, bowed and returned the greeting. The skipper had him sit next to him on a bench and proceeded with a line of questioning. Asked his name, he declined, putting his finger to his lips and moving it back and forth as if to say he could not divulge anything. Fluckey produced a .45 revolver and placed it on the table out of reach of the prisoner. Again he asked for the seaman’s name.

  “Kitojima Sanji!”

  Fluckey indicated that he and the crew would call him “Kito.” The prisoner nodded. With a combination of broken Japanese, sign language, and facial expressions, the officers were able to extract some information: Kito was a second-class gunner’s mate. He once went AWOL after being ordered to execute a Chinese captive. He became a schoolteacher. Then he got drafted. He had been a lookout on the Koto Maru and had seen the torpedoes coming. The convoy had embarked from Matsuwa. There were four ships. He named them all. He confirmed that the Herring sank the escort.

  The skipper reasoned that the Herring was chasing the Hakuyo Maru, the convoy’s sole survivor, back toward Matsuwa. He ordered McNitt, the boat’s gifted navigator, to set a course for La Perouse Strait in case the ship had evaded the Herring and was making a desperate run for the Sea of Japan.

  Warming up to the interrogation, the prisoner used a pencil to draw a line on the map where mines were located in or near the strait. Fluckey wanted to know if there were more, motioning that the sub would be headed through the passage and could strike a mine, killing everyone—including Kito. He understood. He drew more lines and revealed that each of the explosives was about fifty feet below the surface. The captain was satisfied.

  Guards led Kito back to the torpedo room while Fluckey convened a strategy session. The captain appointed torpedo and gunnery officer Lt. Jay Alan Easton to teach the prisoner English, have the enlisted men watch over him at all times, assign him various tasks, get to know him, and treat him gently. Based on the interrogation, Fluckey decided the boat would not venture through La Perouse Strait—too risky. He ordered everyone to rest overnight while posting a minimal watch. The next day he would have the ship’s cook bake a cake to celebrate the dual sinking and pass around rations from the sub’s whiskey allotment, known as “Black Death” because it was so poorly manufactured.

  On the evening of 2 June, as the sub continued its westward trek across the Okhotsk, there was still no word from the Herring. Later reports would confirm what Fluckey suspected: Skipper Zabriski had set a course for Matsuwa in hopes of intercepting the fleeing Hakuyo Maru. There was no sign of the transport when the submarine arrived off the port. However, Zabriski noticed two other ships docked at the island and moved into the harbor at night to attack them. The boat fired several torpedoes that destroyed the Hiburi Maru and Iwaki Maru. Soldiers manning a shore battery, however, saw the tracks of the torpedoes and counterattacked. Two direct hits shattered the Herring’s conning tower and the boat plunged to the bottom with the loss of its entire eighty-three-man crew.

  Just past midnight on 2 June, the day after Herring’s loss, the Barb made radar contact with a fast-moving Japanese Chidori-class frigate paralleling the submarine as both neared La Perouse Strait. Sounding the battle stations alarm, Fluckey prepared to attack. The destroyer continued its course without deviating, oblivious to the submarine. Fluckey hoped to get in closer but minefields loomed just ahead. He had no choice but to launch three torpedoes from long range. Lookouts on the warship saw them coming by their luminous tracks. The warship dodged the torpedoes, dropped a dozen depth charges, and fled through the strait.

  Two hours later the diving alarm sounded again as the Barb made radar contact with a plane at dawn. The sub made an emergency dive to 260 feet as a bomb exploded overhead but not close. Resurfacing, the sub headed up the east coast of Sakhalin Island north of La Perouse. In the journey northbound, crewmen were mesmerized by a fantasy of floating ice. Windchiseled icebergs rose over the sea. Men crowded the bridge for a glimpse. Most had never seen such a proliferation of fifty-foot columns and pinnacles sculpted by the wind into exotic shapes. Around them, white seals basked in the sun on ice floes—“a lost world smothered in diamonds,” as the captain later put it. The boat steered around the bergs and approached a thirty-foot ice cliff reflecting a dazzling kaleidoscope of color. The sub paralleled the ice pack for twenty minutes until lookouts reported masts and funnels of four trawlers, apparently ice bound. The battle stations alarm sent sailors scrambling to man the 4-inch gun on the afterdeck plus the boat’s 40mm cannon and twin 20mm guns on the bridge. The gun captain reported the ships were in sight. Fluckey was just about ready to order a bombardment when the ice shelf began moving. And it picked up speed. With a shocked expression, Tuck Weaver asked Fluckey if the Barb should speed up too. “All ahead standard!” the skipper replied. Yet as the sub accelerated, so d
id the ice shelf—and it disappeared!

  “All stop!” the captain ordered.

  Those on deck were dumbfounded. Before them appeared an open, flat sea with nothing in sight. The whole engagement had been a mirage.

  Weaver announced that maybe he’d been on patrol too long and needed some rest, that all the men were apparently “a bit touched.” Moments later, he sighted another ice floe. Reporting it to the captain, Fluckey took a look and concluded it, too, was a mirage. Weaver said it was the real thing. Fluckey bet him a quart of whiskey that it wasn’t. It was.

  The captain went below to the wardroom to take stock of himself. There he mulled over childhood memories, recalling the literary adventures of Gen. Adolphus W. Greely, whose arctic explorations in the 1880s were once compared to those of Lewis and Clark in opening up the Old West to the United States. Fluckey recalled Greely’s descriptions of phenomenal mirages produced by ice and sun in the arctic. As the skipper was lost in thought, a message arrived from Weaver: “It’s twelve o’clock and all chronometers are round.” Weaver had replaced the w in wound with an r to humor the skipper.

  After a fruitless search for targets, including a near attack on a poorly marked Russian freighter, the skipper turned south toward the northern coast of Hokkaido, where he contemplated an attack on the port of Abashiri. Kito warned him that the city was home to seven major air bases that could easily swarm the sub. Fluckey changed his mind.

  The prisoner, who was learning English rapidly, had proven to be extremely likeable. “He was as accommodating as could be,” said McNitt. “When we’d tell him where we wanted to go, he would show us that there are minefields here, or there were airplanes located here, or guns emplaced here. The places he showed us that we knew about were accurate, and he showed us a lot that we didn’t know about.”

  On 9 June the Barb headed for the lower Kuriles, hoping to destroy a cable relay station on Etorofu Island. To get within range of the station, the sub would have to navigate its way into a U-shaped cove. Low-hanging, patchy fog kept frustrating the captain as he edged in and out of the cove. The lookouts were surprised to hear him utter an expletive for the first time—“Damn charts!”—when the depth measured under the sub was much shallower than shown, putting the boat at risk of grounding. Fluckey made several more approaches from different angles. Each time fog or the shallows stymied the boat. Occasionally, the gritty fog lifted to reveal the cable station and an exotic landscape of smoking volcanoes. Still, the sub could not get close enough.

  The skipper finally gave up and resumed a northward patrol of the Kuriles, where the boat encountered tremendous currents and eddies caused by tidal differences at the boundary between the Pacific and Okhotsk. The sub skirted numerous whirlpools, some several hundred feet wide. The ever-curious Fluckey directed the Barb through one of them “to see what happened.” The boat heeled over ten degrees but righted itself as it passed through.

  The boat made radar contact on 10 June with another swift-moving Chidori and gave chase for five hours before the destroyer outran the sub. The following day, as the sub navigated past icebergs, the port lookout spotted a fishing trawler hiding behind one of them. The Barb’s orders, like those issued to all other American submarines, were to clear the sea of enemy vessels until Japan surrendered. Fluckey wasn’t crazy about sinking fishing trawlers, many of which were unarmed. But he and his men rationalized that most had radios and could be sentries on the lookout for submarines. Also, starving the enemy by denying its food supply seemed a good way to speed up an end to the war.

  Fluckey ordered the gunnery crew to man the 4-inch gun, sufficient to sink the trawler. But the fishing boat kept out of sight behind the ice. McNitt suggested lobbing a shell over the iceberg into the ocean behind the ship. That could alarm the captain, causing him to speed forward into view. As predicted, the trawler took off at full speed, the submarine in pursuit. The two vessels zipped in and out among the icebergs, the sub firing thirty rounds that made Swiss cheese of passing ice columns. The thirty-first shell tore through a larger iceberg, toppling ice boulders that fell onto the deck of the ship, sinking it.

  The sub encountered a second trawler, this one armed. An exchange of gunfire ensued but the fishing boat was no match for the sub’s 4-inch gun.

  Three hours later lookouts reported columns of smoke over the horizon. Radar plots showed two ships following a zigzag route. The sub caught up, submerged, and prepared to attack. Fluckey raised the periscope and noticed the ships’ silhouettes jump into the clouds. Another mirage. He called off the attack. “I don’t want to waste torpedoes on phantom ships,” he told the crew. Rather than chase the mirage from submergence, Fluckey decided to wait for dark, surface, and then use a burst of speed to go after the ships, which were actually ten miles distant.

  The Barb overtook the convoy off the coast of Sakhalin Island. The ships had embarked three days earlier from a naval base on the opposite side of the Okhotsk at Paramushiru, the northernmost island in the Kuriles. The 2,738-ton Chihaya Maru was carrying 260 tons of military cargo and 173 soldiers. It was accompanied by the Toten Maru, a 3,823-ton crab factory ship carrying another 200 troops. Both were armed with deck canons and steaming west toward La Perouse Strait.

  Fluckey, on the bridge with Weaver, issued a whirlwind of directives. “All engines ahead one-third. Make ready all tubes fore and aft. Phosphorescence is very heavy, but I believe we can mosey in another 1,000 yards without being seen. Use tubes 1, 2, and 3 on the lead ship and 4, 5, and 6 on the trailer. Tuck will mark amidships bearings. Spread the torpedoes from aft forward with 50 yards between torpedoes. All hands on your toes. We’re heading in!”

  Just before midnight Fluckey gave the order to fire. One torpedo wrecked the stern of the Chihaya Maru. Two others holed the factory ship. The mournful sound of its whistle emanated continually from the Toten Maru amid automatic gunfire blinking wildly in the dark from its deck. Those in the Barb watched from afar as the Chihaya turned to flee. Fluckey had no intention of letting it go and proceeded after it. The ship reversed course, as if to ram the sub, its deck gun lobbing shells at the boat’s luminous wake. Fluckey and Weaver instinctively ducked behind thin metal sheathing that wrapped around the bridge as each shell whistled past. Suddenly the captain stood up, laughing. Weaver wondered what was so funny. “Tuck,” he replied, “it’s so idiotic to cower behind this thin sheeting. Any shell would pierce it.” So both men stood, ignoring the shelling as the speeding Barb roared past the crippled ship. One canon blast was so loud at two hundred yards that it left ears ringing on the bridge.

  The Chihaya turned and crossed the sub’s wake. Fluckey was ready. He fired three stern torpedoes. Seconds later the transport disintegrated in one massive explosion.

  Tracking east back across the Okhotsk to the Kuriles, the submarine arrived in the vicinity of the big Paramushiru naval base just as the destroyer Hatsuharu left port, escorting the 5,633-ton army icebreaker Takashima Maru with a cargo of six hundred troops and equipment headed for the Philippines.

  Fluckey worried that the boat’s vertical periscope shears might be seen during the chase. He had four enlisted men climb up and drape white sheets over the shears, then lash them down. With so much ice floating in the sea, the captain reasoned, this would help disguise the boat as it closed on the convoy. It worked. The Barb moved in undetected. Radar imaging on the sub revealed the ships often stopped, sometimes reversed course, than went ahead full, making it very difficult for any submarine to position itself for a methodical submerged attack.

  Fluckey decided to go after the icebreaker in a risky night surface attack using the boat’s speed to mimic every turn of the target. To the captain, it was the only feasible way of sinking the transport. However, the boat’s phosphorescent wake and engine exhaust risked giving away the sub’s position. Fluckey ordered a full stop ahead of the convoy and abruptly changed tactics. He would depend on radar to direct an attack, crossing his fingers that the stationary submarine was in the
right position at the Takashima’s predicted zig away from the sub as it plowed forward toward the Barb. Fluckey positioned the sub with its stern torpedo doors opened, torpedoes armed and pointed at the oncoming ship. The massive bow of the icebreaker approached, looming higher on a collision course. “We are holding our breaths for the expected zig away,” noted Fluckey in the sub’s log. “The bow wave of the target looks tremendous bearing down on us.” The captain, on the bridge, held steady. At the last moment the ship zigged away as anticipated and into the sub’s cross-hairs. Fluckey fired two torpedoes. Forty-five seconds later they exploded, ripping away the ship’s fantail. The target came to a halt and began sinking, its whistle blaring.

  In the confusion, the destroyer Hatsuharu got a visual on the luminous wake of the Barb speeding away. The warship turned and gave chase, lobbing depth charges. The sub pushed nineteen knots. The destroyer was faster and gaining but finally turned back to the Takashima to rescue survivors.

  Fluckey ordered all stop.

  The Barb idled in the distance, looking for an opening to attack the destroyer. The escort, noting the sub’s presence, broke from the sinking ship, spilling soldiers into the sea, and raced anew after the submarine, driving it away while lobbing depth charges, then turned back again. The scene repeated itself through the night, keeping the sub crew on edge. Rumbling explosions from thirty-eight depth charges repeatedly rocked the boat. The sub remained on the surface in Fluckey’s attempt to outwit the destroyer and ensure the sinking of the transport by putting another torpedo into it. There was no need. Just before dawn, the Takashima Maru’s bow rose high and disappeared into the Okhotsk.

  The destroyer, with a cargo of rescued soldiers, began a more intense search for the Barb. Fluckey, still watching from the distance, asked for a five-gallon milk tin filled with oil and the top punctured. The captain directed an enlisted man to climb down to the deck and cast the tin into the sea. Fluckey reasoned an oil slick would spread and in the early light would be mistaken for a sunken submarine, allowing the Americans to escape. It worked.