The Galloping Ghost

by Carl P. LaVO

  So far Swinburne hadn’t discovered the beer in the officers’ shower. The boat was crammed with food and provisions. It wasn’t unusual for the shower to be stowing provisions early in the patrol. Normally no one took showers until four weeks or more had passed and the smell of diesel fuel and body odor became pronounced. Even when the men did shower, it was quick—about a minute—due to limited fresh water aboard.

  During an overnight layover in Midway, Captain Swinburne called a meeting of the sub captains to go over details of the upcoming mission. The plan was to stearn due west 3,600 miles to the Luzon Strait. There Ed’s Eradicators would be joined by the Growler (SS-215), the Pampanito (SS-383), and the Sealion II (SS-315)—“Ben’s Busters.” Senior skipper Ben Oakley in the Growler was wolf pack commander. The objective was to harass and sink Japanese convoys plowing the ninety-mile-wide passage between the Philippine island of Luzon and Formosa (Taiwan) on the eastern edge of the South China Sea. The strait was known in the Navy as Convoy College for the great numbers of ships passing through and the difficult test posed to sub captains in sinking them.

  Prior to departure for Midway Commo. “Shorty” Edwards hosted a luncheon for the wolf pack officers. Fluckey still was seeking some way of legitimizing his cargo of beer. He casually brought up the fact that younger crewmen in Barb did not like whiskey. Edmonds remarked that new regulations allowed ships to carry a half-case of beer per man. Fluckey quickly went to a phone within earshot of Swinburne and made an exaggerated request to officers in the Barb to order some beer and take it aboard. They could store it in the officers’ shower.

  The submarines embarked on the morning of 10 August. Fluckey was confident since the Barb was armed with twenty-four electric torpedoes. The new Mark 18s were powerful and left no wake. No longer would the boat’s position be revealed by the bubbly trail of a steam-driven Mark 14.

  The boats formed a scouting line at twenty-mile intervals and proceeded at twelve knots for two weeks in an uneventful Pacific crossing. Arriving in the area of the Philippines, the two wolf packs spread out across the strait to engage a very wary, sophisticated enemy. Convoys were well guarded by destroyers, torpedo boats, and mine-layers. Numerous midget submarines and radar-equipped bombers operated from many islands near the strait.

  For seven days no targets were encountered. Finally on 30 August an ULTRA reported that a convoy of nine ships escorted by five destroyers had embarked from Formosa en route to Manila. All six subs rushed to intercept in the Bashi Channel fifty miles south of Formosa. In the predawn of 31 August the Queenfish was the first to make contact and torpedoed a 4,700-ton tanker that exploded in a fireball, illuminating the night sky. The Barb, diving to avoid aircraft, came to periscope depth. Fluckey couldn’t believe his eyes. Three columns approached: a freighter and tanker in the starboard column; a large freighter, a tanker, and a smaller tanker in the center; and, on the port side, a much larger tanker, a smaller oiler, and another tanker or a freighter. Enemy destroyers prowled the peripheries while planes crisscrossed overhead. The captain called down on the intercom so all could hear. “Jackson, put four cases of beer in the cooler.” It would become the skipper’s signature affirmation in expressing confidence and easing tension.

  Fluckey thought a single salvo might wipe out the entire center column and the lead tanker in the port column. The Growler, however, had taken aim at one of the destroyers and fired two torpedoes, one of which passed above the Barb. The convoy zigged radically to the east, foiling the Barb’s opportunity. Still, the captain’s primary target—the largest of the freighters in the center column—lumbered into range, overlapped by a medium-sized tanker. Fluckey prepared to attack, his mind racing and changing tactics in a flash amid a cacophony of telemetry and verbal feedback from the fire control party. He fired three stern torpedoes from a thousand yards. Two ripped apart the freighter. The third struck the tanker.

  The Barb went deep to escape a flurry of depth charges and aerial bombs. Back at periscope depth, both Fluckey and Commander Swinburne took turns viewing the sinking freighter. Meanwhile the Sealion inflicted damage on a freighter and a tanker, forcing the convoy back to Formosa.

  Throughout the day Japanese bombers sought the submarines, dropping numerous explosives. Several detonations were close but astern as the submerged Barb tried to keep pace with the retreating convoy. Losing position, the sub turned west to investigate a smoke plume seen from the periscope as the sun set. A small armed transport led by two patrol boats soon sailed into view. Fluckey closed, not realizing the ship was a decoy in a submarine-killer group. The danger to the Barb was pronounced because its day-long submergence had drained most of the power from its batteries. Still, the boat was in position to sink the ship. Fluckey wanted to try. As the Barb maneuvered astern of the target, a bird landed on the periscope, plopping its tail feathers over the view port. “This proved extremely confusing for the approach officer in the final stages,” Fluckey noted in the ship’s log. “He banged on the scope, shook it, hooted and hollered at the blasted bird, swung the scope around quickly and raised and lowered it desperately. The bird clung on tenaciously, hovering over the scope while it was ducked, then hopping back on when it was raised. As a last resort both scopes were raised for observations, one a few seconds ahead of the other as a feint, while the approach officer followed the other scope up. This completely baffled the bird and he was noted peering venomously down the other periscope.”

  Fluckey, laughing, had a camera brought up and took a photo of the “feathered fiend.” Then, in a flash, the Barb launched four torpedoes from its bow tubes, breaking the decoy ship in half as the bird flew off. The two escorts turned and charged, dropping fifty-eight depth changes as the submarine descended to three hundred feet with a left full rudder and escaped.

  The boat surfaced five miles away under an inky, moonless sky. The boat’s diesels roared to life, powering a getaway at seventeen knots. Barb crewmen were glad to be out in the open seas. By Fluckey’s count, the sub had endured two hundred bombs and depth charges over a twenty-four-hour period.

  Around midnight Fluckey reestablished contact with the Tunny and the Queenfish. The subs assumed a new patrol area off the northwest coast of Luzon. Through the night and into the next day the Barb dived and popped back up as antisubmarine aircraft hounded it with surface radar. As dusk fell on 1 September Fluckey and Lt. Max Duncan, one of two new officers assigned to the Barb, were on the bridge studying the sea for any sign of periscopes or mines while lookouts higher up in the periscope shears watched for approaching planes and ships. Duncan was the first to notice a silver bomber roaring in low toward the sub. “Plane astern!” he shouted. “Clear the bridge! Dive! Dive!”

  The plane roared past without dropping any bombs. Through the periscope, Fluckey saw it head straight for the Tunny. At the last minute the sub dove. But it was too late. A bomb exploded near the tail, lifting the stern as the Tunny was going under. The plane circled, dropping more explosives plus flares to illuminate the area. Swinburne directed Fluckey to send a sonar message to the Tunny telling Skipper Pierce to stay deep. There was no reply. Two hours later the Barb surfaced on a dark sea. Again Fluckey tried to contact the Tunny. No answer.

  At midnight radar picked up another fast-approaching aircraft. Again the lookouts and officers dropped into the conning tower, riding the ladder rails down in a single motion. McNitt, who had been taking star sightings to establish the Barb’s location, had a jacket on and zipped it up as he went through the hatch. “My beard was caught in the zipper and it held my head forward so that it banged every rung on the way down,” he explained later. “It went clunk clunk clunk. Played that thing like a xylophone all the way down.”

  The sound of the plane passing over was so loud it brought a sleep-deprived Fluckey running from his cabin in his underwear. “Three hundred feet! Left full rudder!” he shouted. The bomber circled back and dropped four bombs. One of them exploded above the forward deck, shaking the boat violently. Fuses jum
ped from their lodgings. Lightbulbs exploded. Emergency lights snapped on. Glass gauges shattered, sending shards tinkling down through deck plates into the keel. Flakes of insulating cork and paint fluttered down from the overhead. Crewmen were visibly shaken.

  As quickly as the attack began, it was over. To break the tension, Fluckey directed that the four cases of beer being refrigerated in the below-decks meat locker be brought to the control room to celebrate the sinking of the sub-killer. McNitt, nursing a nasty welt on his forehead, further enlivened things by reciting an old prayer from his Scottish ancestry: “Good Lord, do deliver us—from all the ghosties and ghoulies, and long-leggity beasties, and things that go boomp in the night.”

  An examination of the deck on surfacing revealed just how close the Barb had come to destruction. “I went out on the foredeck and I found the tail fins of a bomb stuck in the deck and wrapped around the bitts,” said McNitt. “And there were bits of shattered casing stuck in the wood all over. I think it hit the forward part of the submarine where the deck was level but the pressure hull sloped down to more of a point. And the pressure hull was farther from the deck that detonated the bomb. If it had been farther aft, where the pressure hull was right underneath the deck, it might have finished us. That close.”

  The exec’s bumpy ride down the conning tower ladder got him to considering what could be done to give the crew a few more seconds to dive to avoid aircraft. Radar warnings had been useful but precious time was lost getting the warning to the captain or officer of the deck. McNitt came up with a novel idea. The scope for the air search radar located below decks in the radio shack in the bowels of the boat showed an electronic spike that rose as a plane was coming in. The exec put a piece of tape on the scope at the point it was necessary to dive. “When this spike got up to the level of that tape, the radioman would dive the boat from his radio shack—not the officer of the deck, not the captain,” explained McNitt. The radioman would buzz the bridge electronically, alerting the officer of the deck to commence the dive. It saved a few seconds, critical time that could mean the difference between life and death. The Barb employed the method from then on.

  For the next two days the sub continued to dodge night fliers. Miraculously the Tunny reported in with no casualties. However, its stern was severely caved in, disabling four torpedo tubes and damaging the rudder. Swinburne ordered the boat back to Midway. The Barb and Queenfish continued on. Days went by as both dodged aircraft and midget submarines. Fluckey was able to shell and sink a four-masted armed sampan. A few days later the Queenfish came upon a convoy at midnight and alerted the Barb. Loughlin made an end-around and submerged ahead of the ships, which passed over the submarine. The Barb was angling up the far side of the convoy on the surface when the Queenfish fired ten torpedoes at four separate targets, sinking two large freighters. In the resulting commotion, Fluckey spotted a destroyer lagging behind the convoy. He ordered three torpedoes calibrated to run at a shallow four feet. “Dislike shooting at this target, really against my better judgment—if we hit they’ll keep us down and the convoy will get away, if we miss the same results,” the captain noted in the patrol log. “However once in every submariner’s life there comes the urge to let three fish go particularly after a convoy skids across his nose while his hands are tied. I dood it.”

  Two torpedoes missed the target and the third made a circular run over the Barb, which went deep to avoid it, losing the convoy.

  The Barb continued to be harassed by Japanese bombers, day and night. “These boys are varsity,” Fluckey said of the enemy pilots. So often did the boat dive and resurface that the quartermaster, closing the hatch, remarked, “Is there any use in closing it?” The Barb also was pinned down by a destroyer that dropped twenty well-placed depth charges, “enough to jar your fillings,” noted Fluckey.

  On 15 September 1944 the wolf pack received orders to rescue Australian and British prisoners of war from Japanese transports sunk by the Growler and Pompanito in the middle of the South China Sea. The Pompanito had returned to the area and found more than a thousand prisoners floating on improvised rafts among miles of debris and dead bodies. The Pompanito picked up seventy-three survivors, the Sealion II another fifty-four. They could take no more. The remaining castaways’ only hope—the Queenfish and Barb—was still more than 450 miles away. The problem was where to find those adrift.

  That responsibility fell to McNitt, the boat’s brilliant navigator. In the previous patrol in the Okhotsk Sea, it was his ingenuity using radar mapping that enabled the Barb to dash through fog-shrouded inlets in the Kurile chain without fear of grounding. He prided himself in delivering the boat to precisely the destination the captain had in mind. Now, as the Barb and the Queenfish awaited coordinates for the rescue mission, McNitt drew on all available data. Tidal information. Estimated wind direction. Strength of current. “Fortunately, I had in my navigator’s notebook a clipping I’d taken from the Naval Institute Proceedings written by a Coast Guardsman,” he explained. “Never knowing when this would be handy, I’d cut it out and stuck it in my book. It gave a very good description in a few paragraphs of how to combine wave, current, coriolis effects [the effect of the earth’s rotation on sea currents], and wind and calculate what the drift would be. We laid these vectors down on a chart, ran it out to where we thought they’d likely be, set a course for it, and took off on the surface at maximum four-engine speed.”

  After seventeen hours the subs were within 150 miles. Traveling on the surface at night the Queenfish reported contact with a large enemy convoy traveling north at twelve knots. Commander Swinburne decided it was too important to let pass. Radar imaging revealed four large ships in two columns, a destroyer leading, escorts on the flanks and quarter, and one large vessel in the middle between the two columns. The Queenfish initiated the attack on the far side of the convoy. Loughlin fired his last four torpedoes, two of which damaged a tanker. The Barb, with all ten of its torpedo tubes armed and ready, prepared to attack three heavily laden tankers led by a destroyer. When they suddenly veered away, Fluckey had no choice but to target the last tanker in the column. The destroyer saw the boat coming, turned, and charged.

  On the bridge, Fluckey had his eyes glued to the closing escort when Tuck Weaver shouted, “Captain, there’s a flattop in the middle overlapping the bow of the tanker. We’ll have to change our firing setup.” The quartermaster nudged the captain. “Destroyer, six hundred yards coming in to ram!”

  “Tuck!” shouted Fluckey. “Shift your point of aim to the tanker’s bow! Fire six torpedo spread! Dive! Rig ship for depth charge! All watertight doors locked!”

  In a fifteen-second span the submarine fired all of its bow tubes as the boat was going down. Fluckey hoped to hit both targets. One was them was the twenty-thousand-ton aircraft carrier Unyo, which had long been hunted by American submarines.

  In December 1943 the Sailfish (SS-192) had attacked the Unyo’s sister ship, the Chuyo, during a typhoon off Japan. Imprisoned on the Chuyo was half the surviving crew of the submarine Sculpin (SS-191), scuttled a few weeks earlier near the Japanese naval fortress of Truk in the Central Pacific. Sailing in tandem with the Chuyo was the Unyo, in which twenty other Sculpin prisoners were under guard. In a tenacious ten-hour attack, the Sailfish sank the Chuyo as the Unyo escaped in the storm. Only one Sculpin prisoner survived the sinking. He was picked up by a Japanese warship and later reunited with his shipmates off the Unyo in Japan. Now, nearly a year later, Fluckey had his chance to sink the carrier.

  In less than two minutes three of the Barb’s six torpedoes struck the tanker. Its volatile cargo of aviation gasoline erupted in a five hundred-foot fireball, consuming the vessel. Two other torpedoes smashed into the carrier, rupturing it. Surfacing an hour after the attack, the Barb remained a safe distance away as enemy destroyers picked up survivors. The rest of the convoy had disappeared to the north. The Unyo limped along with them as crewmen attempted damage control. But seven hours after the attack, the carrier sank
.

  Fluckey had contemplated going after the Unyo with his three remaining torpedoes. But time was of the essence if the boat hoped to reach the Allied prisoners they had been dispatched to rescue. “The seas have been rising and if we don’t reach the survivors today, their fifth day in the water, there will be none left alive,” noted Fluckey in the boat’s log. The Barb and the Queenfish raced ahead through the night against winds gusting above twenty knots with rough seas. Aboard the Barb, all torpedo skids were converted into three bunks each as Fluckey organized the ship to take up to a hundred survivors.

  At dawn on 17 September the boats arrived at the position calculated by McNitt. The bridge watch was horrified. “There were bodies all over the place, grossly inflated,” recalled the captain. “The crew came up on the bridge but it was such an awful sight that nobody wanted to stay there and watch. So we went through this mass of wreckage and bodies until we found three men on a raft that seemed to be alive.”

  The Barb pulled alongside.

  “We tried to pass them a rope with a bowline in the end of it right close aboard and handed, almost threw it across the raft, and these men would just sit there and look at it,” said McNitt, who was in charge of the rescue party.

  They were beyond comprehending what was happening to them. They were so far gone. You’d tell them to put it over their shoulders and they’d pick it up and look at it. They were just too weak and too uncomprehending then. So the only thing to do was to just get them. So three or four of us just took these lines, put them around our shoulders, took another line, swam out, and got them. Brought them back with the cross-chest carry and helped drag them up over the side of the submarine. In an open sea, with big swells and a rounded shape of a submarine, it was not easy to get them aboard. All of them fainted when they got on board. None of them could even stand up.

  The men were stripped of their clothing, wiped down, bundled up, hoisted up onto the gun platform at the bridge level, then passed down the hatch by a chain gang to the crew’s mess, where a table served as a receiving station. Chief Pharmacist Mate William Donnelly, aided by crewmen, wiped away the oil; treated enormous skin ulcers caused by sun, salt, and oil; and cleaned the survivors’ eyes, which were in bad shape. Their tongues were seriously swollen as well, very red, dry, and sore.