The Galloping Ghost

by Carl P. LaVO

  The rescue operation was repeated throughout the afternoon. When one swimmer tired, another would take his place. In two and a half hours, the Barb found seven more improvised rafts, some with two, others with a sole survivor sitting on them. They were in pitiful condition, covered with sores, soaked in oil, emaciated, barely alive. They were all Australian or British. Once aboard, the survivors slowly came around. The stories they told were incredible, as was the account of Aussie army gunner Neville B. Thams of the 2nd/10th Field Regiment.

  He and others had been in captivity for nearly three years after the fall of British-controlled Singapore in 1942. They were among 61,000 Australian, British, Dutch, and American prisoners put to work building a 265-mile railroad through the nearly impenetrable jungles of Malaysia. The men endured ghastly confinement in rat- and bug-infested “hell trains” after long work hours. They suffered terribly from dysentery, malaria, pellagra, beriberi, cholera, tropical ulcers, malnutrition, starvation, and beatings. More than a third succumbed. After the railroad was completed, the hardiest of the prisoners were transported back to Singapore for shipment to Japan in the holds of two unmarked transports. The intention was to put them to work in Japan’s factories and mines.

  The Rakuyo Maru took 1,350 prisoners aboard, most of them stacked on wooden platforms in the forward hull while others were confined to the forward deck. The Kachidoko Maru took an additional 900. Accompanied by five escorts, the ships cast off on 6 September. American code breakers intercepted news of the departure but were unaware of the prisoners aboard. Japan had not asked for safe passage, which would have been granted. At dawn on 12 September Ben’s Busters—the Growler, Pompanito, and Sealion II—attacked. Both the Rakuyo and Kachidoko were torpedoed. Most prisoners were able to get off the ships before they went under.

  “The sun rose at 7:00 a.m. It was dismal. One group of about nine hundred men had drifted far from the ship. I was one of these,” Thams told his Barb rescuers.

  The gunner, while sharing a floating hatch cover with four other survivors, watched as Japanese frigates came toward them, pulling men from the sea. “With the transport reasonably close our hopes of rescue soared. Unfortunately, it did not happen. When the English prisoners of war realized this, some started singing ‘Rule Brittania.’ Others joined in. Also the Australians. It rose to a great crescendo. Words cannot describe this act of defiance. Why they did not fire on us at close range I will never understand. The three ships turned away. We watched the freighter as long as it was visible, then we were all alone. All hope of rescue disappeared. Men began to die at once.”

  On the second day of their ordeal, 14 September, the men were in need of a miracle. “Oil covered us from head to feet, clogging our eyes and ears,” continued Thams. “It coated the surfaces of the rafts and wreckage, making them very slippery and difficult to hang on to. We had no food or water and while we survived long periods of hunger on the railway, thirst was another matter. Many gave up. Scores succumbed and gulped seawater. Men who had already endured unspeakable hardship and grief now had to endure the unnerving sight of their own mates going crazy. There was nothing we could do for them.”

  On the third day the Pampanito passed through the wreckage and began taking as many aboard as it could. The Sealion II also arrived and helped. But there were far too many who had to be left behind.

  On the fourth day only four men were left in Thams’s group on two rafts. They found a fifth, a sailor who had survived the sinking of the Australian cruiser Perth in the Battle of the Java Sea, the building of the railroad, and the sinking of the Rakuyo. But overnight, the sailor disappeared, as did two others.

  By the morning of the fifth day all that remained were Thams and an Englishman, sitting on a half-sunken hatch cover. They were semi-delirious and dozing a lot. “Almost alone in the sea, my English mate and I hang on we did, though chances of rescue were nil,” Thams continued. “The sea was starting to toss our hatch cover about. Neither of us had much strength left and it was extremely difficult to climb back on the slippery raft. My eyes were covered in oil and I used a small piece of wood to scrape the oil from my eyelids. A shark circled us for about fifteen minutes, then it was gone. We were not unduly concerned. We were past the stage of worrying about death by shark attack or drowning.”

  The sea turned angry by the sixth day. Both men caught a few raindrops but not enough to quench their thirst. In the late afternoon the Englishman was the first to see a submarine heading toward them.

  It was the Barb.

  “I waved my shorts,” said Thams. “I had removed them about the fourth day. They were chafing me. And they became our flag if ever we had the opportunity to wave at something. I can still see the submarine, like some gray ghost, as it came our way, blowing out spray as it plowed through the waves. There was a sailor in blue with a white cap. When a rope was thrown, I placed it under my armpits. Another two hours and I would have drowned.”

  Thams was the last man pulled aboard.

  The weather worsened as the Barb and the Queenfish searched through the late afternoon of 17 September for more survivors. As darkness fell wind velocity exceeded sixty knots, tossing up waves more than thirty-five feet high. Lookouts and officers of the deck used lanyards to tie themselves to the bridge to keep from being washed overboard. In the chance that survivors were still alive, Fluckey was determined to try and find them. “It was a dangerous thing on a submarine,” explained McNitt. “You can be pooped easily. We had to put the seas on the quarter, these huge seas running. We had to close the hatch almost every time when the sea flooded the conning tower, with the watch officer standing there with his foot on the hatch to close it. When the water subsided he’d let it open again, close it again. We were all drowned, soaked. We kept the searchlight on in the rain and the wind and the gale searching all night.”

  They saw nothing. A search all the next day yielded no other survivors. By nightfall the Barb gave up and submerged so those below could recover from the battering they had taken for more than twenty-four hours.

  At dawn the Barb, with its fourteen survivors, and the Queenfish, with its eighteen, laid a course for recently captured Saipan. En route Donnelly, the pharmacist mate, hardly slept in order to attend to the survivors. They continually expressed their gratitude while recovering a sense of humor. “I take back all I said about you Yanks,” laughed one. Another joked, “As soon as I can I’m going to write my wife [in Australia] to kick the Yankee out—I’m coming home.”

  The real hero of the patrol was McNitt. “The challenge [of locating the survivors] was like finding a needle in a haystack,” Tuck Weaver recalled years later. “Bob’s knowledge and skill not only saved thirty-one lives but also placed Queenfish and Barb in position to intercept the convoy.”

  On 24 September 1944 the two submarines arrived at Saipan. The Barb moored against the Queenfish, which had tied up alongside the sub tender USS Fulton (AS-11).

  As the survivors prepared to disembark for treatment at a hospital, Barb crewmen and officers collected three hundred dollars—every cent that was aboard—to give them. Don Miller, second-class Barb torpedoman, saw the survivors off as hundreds of Navy men and Marines stood by and cheered. The men, wobbly and thin, were dressed in white navy hats and clean khaki dungarees. A dozen, including Thams, were able to walk. Two others were brought up on stretchers. Each insisted on clasping the hand of Captain Fluckey as they passed, tears of gratitude rolling down their cheeks. He choked up as well.

  Said Miller, “A lot of tears were in the crews’ and ex-POWs’ eyes, very emotional for all of us.”

  Chaos (Tenth Patrol)

  Saipan didn’t mark the end of the war patrol. Rather, rest and relaxation would have to wait until both the Barb and the Queenfish made the week-long voyage southeast to the burgeoning Navy base on Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands in the Southwest Pacific. The Barb took on an extra torpedo for one of its forward tubes since wolf pack Commander Swinburne planned a little gun a
ction against Japanese-controlled Wake Island en route. Three days into the mission, however, ComSubPac negated the bombardment, ordering the boats to Majuro without delay. There, the scene was far removed from the luxury the submariners had enjoyed at their preferred “barn”—Pearl Harbor and the hotel on Waikiki Beach. Majuro was quite the antithesis.

  The atoll is just north of the equator, hot and humid, “a place much easier to forget than remember,” explained Tuck Weaver. Conditions were miserable, agreed Fluckey in a letter to Marjorie. “Reserved this morning to answer a few of your letters, if the ants and gnats don’t carry me off. Coco Solo and its sand flies were insignificant compared to these gnats. They’re everywhere, unbearable at night. Crawling all over you, getting in every bit of hair on your body. Even when we mix a drink, the bugs have to be picked out before a sip.”

  To give the submariners a place to swim, explosives were used to blast out a section of reef. The coral was so sharp the men had to wear shoes to get to the water. “Majuro was a very austere place,” recalled Max Duncan. “The quarters for officers and crew were Quonset huts. The skippers had a larger one. One thing I remember is that the thing to do at night, after the movies, was to throw beer cans on the metal hut roofs and yell ‘depth charge!’ Not funny very long.”

  The foremost thing on everyone’s mind on arrival was the “the mail buoy,” a metaphor for mail collected and waiting for the men at scattered island bases about the Pacific. Letters and packages—lots of them—were dispensed immediately. For Gene Fluckey, it was a chance to relax and finally catch up with his family in Annapolis—and get news of his safety back to them. “Between us’uns,” he wrote, “let me know if you read anything published in the newspapers about Australian and British survivors being rescued by submarines. If so, I’ll have some interesting dope for you. If not, don’t mention it.”

  One of the letters to Gene was distressing. Marjorie had suffered three diabetic blackouts in the span of a few days. One had occurred when no one was home but seven-year-old Barbara, who saved her mother’s life. Marjorie assured her husband the problem was under control and not to worry. Fluckey wrote back, unable as he was to phone home. “Hon, you can give me more scares than I’d have attacking Tokyo single-handed with a brick bat. Please be careful and take your tests as you promised me.” The skipper was impressed by his daughter’s ability to adapt in a moment of crisis. “She’s got so much more on the ball than I had at her age,” he wrote.

  One of the facts of wartime was tight censorship to prevent operational details from getting back to the enemy. Fluckey, among the censors in his boat, described the process in a letter to Marjorie on the way to Majuro. “The wardroom is jammed with everyone including Commander Swinburne, dashing off a letter to respective wives. Most of the time they’re jibber jabbering about what’s confidential and what’s not. Whether they can write this or that—and I bat them down. It’s a shame, ’cause so many interesting things happen.”

  Captain Fluckey had a nickname for his daughter after his favorite bird, the bobolink. “Barbolink” had gotten into the custom of sending her father treasured Crayola drawings and the Sunday comics, which he took along on patrol. In a letter thanking her, he added, “Say, wasn’t it nice of Uncle Sam to name our submarine after you?”

  During the layover on Majuro, the skipper asked Max Duncan to take an early morning ride with him on a Catalina flying boat to watch a practice bombing by a carrier group on an island about an hour’s flight away. “The strike force was from a carrier group that used the small Japanese-occupied island, not heavily defended, as a warm-up for major assaults,” explained Duncan. “The strike was not on time so the Dumbo pilot flew in closer to get a good view of the island. The shore batteries opened up, the carrier plane strike was cancelled and the Dumbo beat a hasty retreat back to Majuro.” On the way the “zoomies”—the pilots—offered Fluckey a chance to fly the plane in exchange for a sub ride. He compared the experience to “driving a truck.”

  Back on Majuro a ship’s picnic was well under way when the captain and his officers arrived on the back of a loaded beer truck. With a band playing, crewmen lustily sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” The skipper had just been promoted to full commander and the crew decided to christen him properly by bearing him off to the ocean. “I dunked six of them before they finally threw me in—shows you what jujitsu can accomplish,” he smirked in a letter home. “Then with so many soaked down, they decided the other officers shouldn’t be dry if the skipper was wet and all the officers were tossed in. And so the picnic went on, playing football with coconuts, drinking beer, grilling steaks, a few innings of softball.”

  Fluckey, whom Admiral Lockwood had recommended for a Navy Cross, the Navy’s highest honor, for his first war patrol, thought it possible that his just completed second patrol would earn him a second Navy Cross. Sinking five ships was the standard for earning one. Another sterling run could put the crew in line for a Presidential Unit Citation, a much-coveted award extended by President Roosevelt. But this time, the Barb would have to do without its remarkable navigator. Bob McNitt had received orders to naval postgraduate school in Annapolis. For the exec, who was in Barb for five war patrols, the timing was perfect since the fall semester was about to begin.

  Fluckey needed another executive so Lt. James G. Lanier, who had made the last two runs, moved up. The captain and the reserve officer “clicked together,” as Gene put it. Lanier was a graduate of the University of Alabama, and his family came from a nautical tradition as owners of a big shipbuilding yard in Pascagoula, Mississippi. He also had been schooled by McNitt in his navigation techniques.

  Making the Barb’s upcoming run was newcomer Lt. Cdr. Tex Lander, a prospective commanding officer assigned to gain experience under Fluckey before getting his own boat. The Navy also intended to infuse the Barb with many new enlisted men. “I told the squadron commander no one wanted to go and that I didn’t intend to transfer anyone,” Fluckey wrote Marjorie. “At this he gave me a long song and dance about their health being imperiled if they stayed aboard too long and ordered me to transfer a certain number of old hands. These practically cried on my shoulder at having to leave and swore that if they were still around Gooneyville [Midway] when we came through again, they’d be waiting on the dock with the sea bags and would expect to be taken aboard, having fully recovered.”

  One of those on the list was Buell Murphy, who had been aboard for nine patrols. “The great big gunners mate came around to me bawling like a baby, saying I could do anything to him, stick him in the bilges, disrate him, God knows what else—but please don’t take him off the Barb—it would break his heart. That got me—I scratched his name off the list.”

  In the end, a bare minimum were transferred.

  By the morning of 27 October 1944 the Barb was ready to go. Minor repairs had been made, twenty-four Mark 18 torpedoes had been hoisted aboard, and a requisite supply of beer was in storage. The sub’s battle flag, with its angry “One-eyed Hoiman” caricature of a mackerel-like fish throwing firecrackers, fluttered from the conning tower as the sub’s powerful diesels came alive in a haze of bluish smoke. Slipping the mooring lines, the boat fell in behind the Queenfish and just ahead of the Picuda (SS-382) in a single-file procession from the harbor. Destination: Japan. Loughlin in the Queenfish commanded the newly formed wolf pack, dubbed “Loughlin’s Loopers” by ComSubPac. The mission was to sail from Majuro to the western coast of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s home islands. The wolf pack was to link up with another three-boat group known as “Underwood’s Urchins”—the Spadefish (SS-411), Sunfish (SS-282), and Peto (SS-266). All six subs were to stifle convoy activity in and out of the industrial cities of Sasebo and Nagasaki on Kyushu. The sister cities were separated from the East China Sea by the Koshiki Strait running north and south between Kyushu and Goto Island to the west.

  On 7 November the Barb arrived off the southern entrance to the strait. The five other boats patrolled farther west
in the sea. The following afternoon, while the Barb trolled south below the strait along the Kyushu coast, Fluckey decided to stay in plain view as a ruse. His hope was that the presence of the sub would be reported and cause the Japanese to shift convoy departures and arrivals to the northern entrance to the strait. After dark the Barb sped up the coast, rounded Goto Island to the west, and took position at the northern end of the channel. The boat arrived undetected. On the night of 10 November a darkened lighthouse suddenly blinked to life. At the same time radar contact was made with a large ship approaching from the north without escorts. The 10,500-ton Gokoku Maru had been rerouted because of the earlier sightings of the Barb in the south. A destroyer sent to protect the ship was overdue. The Gokoku, which had been converted from a freighter into a light cruiser, slowed to twelve knots and began zigzagging as it neared the strait. The Barb, rapidly closing, submerged and fired three forward torpedoes from 2,500 yards. Two hit, ravaging the target’s amidships and bringing it to a complete halt with a thirty-degree list. As the Barb surfaced, the cruiser moved away at two knots in a desperate attempt to run aground. Antiaircraft guns blinked fire in all directions as seamen dived off the side and lifeboats dangled from the sinking ship. The Barb moved in. Fluckey sent the lookouts below, leaving only him and Tuck Weaver on the bridge. The captain realized the cruiser’s big guns couldn’t be lowered enough to bring the submarine within their sites. Just 970 yards from the target, the boat launched another torpedo from a forward tube. It broached, veered off course, and disappeared. Another, fired a minute later, also lurched off course, passing harmlessly down the side. Weaver jokingly suggested Fluckey try another tactic—put the nose of the sub up against the ship and roll it over.