The Galloping Ghost

by Carl P. LaVO

  Three years into the war Lockwood was directing an undersea offensive honed to deadly perfection. Despite the loss in the previous two months of the Darter (SS-227), Shark II (SS-314), Seawolf (SS-197), Tang (SS-306), Escolar (SS-294), Albacore (SS-218), Growler (SS-215), and Scamp (SS-277), there were still 140 boats on patrol—from north of Australia to the coast of Japan. The submarines were drawing an ever-tighter noose, denying Tokyo critically needed fuel and materiel to keep the war going. Furthermore, Japan was unable to build ships fast enough to replace those lost. It seemed Tokyo could not continue too much longer. Yet the Nippon government—especially the army—would not surrender. The war went on.

  After his conference with the admiral, Fluckey flew back to Midway, where the relief crew worked to prepare the Barb for its eleventh war patrol. “A strange place,” Fluckey noted of the two-and-a-half-square-mile Midway atoll in a letter home after he returned from Pearl Harbor. “Not a female in sight. White coral sand everyplace that forces you to wear sunglasses if you’re outdoors long, ironwood trees and the birds. Thousands of them and darn near one for every square yard.”

  A presentation of medals to Fluckey and his crew on the deck of the Barb on 6 December broke the relative monotony. Admiral Lockwood flew in for the occasion and personally pinned the Navy Cross on the captain’s shirt for the sub’s extraordinary eighth patrol in the Okhotsk Sea. The admiral also parceled out additional awards to the officers and men. He confided to the skipper that more honors were in the pipeline for the eighth, ninth, and tenth patrols—Silver and Bronze Stars, dozens of letters of commendation, and a prestigious Presidential Unit Citation.

  On the midafternoon of 19 December 1944 the Barb began its eleventh war patrol, bearing west toward China. Nearing Guam, the boat’s seventy-seven enlisted men and nine officers celebrated what they hoped would be their last wartime Christmas. The skipper whipped up a sampler of eggnog from an improvised recipe of powdered milk, eggs, medicinal rye whiskey, and nutmeg. The cook prepared seven gallons for the holiday. “In our own small way we’re trying to make Christmas seem like something, even way out here in nowhere,” Fluckey wrote in a letter home to be mailed from Guam. “At times we all look awfully sad and moody and everyone seems to take turns snapping the others out of it. Really, Christmas Eve is the hardest to take. One of the men’s mothers had sent me a phonograph record of his little sister singing a few songs for him and the rest of us. What a pleasant surprise it was for him when I put the record on. She had such a sweet voice. It was quite touching.”

  The boat arrived at Guam on 27 December to top off fuel and make minor voyage repairs. There, the Barb rejoined Loughlin’s Loopers and continued west, the Queenfish and Picuda leading. Engine repairs while under way forced the Barb to lag behind.

  Four days out from Guam the two forward submarines shelled a Japanese naval weather picket, leaving it holed and on fire. Commander Loughlin radioed the Barb to sink the vessel at Fluckey’s discretion. Closing, the skipper noticed that two fires had been extinguished forward and aft and that no flooding was apparent. He assumed the ship’s crew was hiding. With grapnels, the sub pulled alongside the hundred-ton ship and a well-armed boarding gang jumped aboard. For fifteen minutes they scoured the vessel, scooping up a sextant, charts, rifles, books, a compass, a barometer, and a radio transmitter. The submariners avoided searching the crew’s quarters, where a gunfight might break out. The sub cast off and commenced shelling the ship. Nine sailors who scrambled on deck were killed by gunfire. Assuring the ship sank, the Barb resumed its run to the west.

  Arriving at the northern reach of the Formosa Strait in the predawn of 7 January, the Picuda and Barb made contact with a convoy of seven ships sprinting east from Shanghai to the port city of Keelong on the northern tip of Formosa. Though rough seas, rain squalls, and haze foiled the Barb’s attempt to attack, the Picuda heavily damaged a 10,500-ton tanker and sank a cargo ship. Afterward the wolf pack headed for the Chinese coast.

  For several days all three subs patrolled the coast without success. It soon was clear the enemy had adopted new tactics. Enemy convoys—“mud-crawlers” to the submariners—now traveled only during daylight hours, when planes could protect them as they hugged the Chinese coast in shallow seas where they believed submarines wouldn’t operate. At night they holed up in shallow bays or river mouths behind mine fields and roving patrol boats. These anchorages were established all along a six hundred-mile stretch of coastline—from northernmost Shanghai to Fuzhou in the south, where convoys had to run the submarine gauntlet across the Formosa Strait to reach bases on the island and points south in the Philippines. The coastal route was characterized by inland waterways, rocky outcrops, and islands too numerous to count. The East China Sea was so shallow along the coast that the twenty-fathom curve—that point where the ocean was deep enough for subs to dive to avoid detection—was at least twenty miles offshore. Each of the China anchorages was within a day’s run of each other. Americans became aware of what the Japanese were up to thanks to intelligence supplied by the little-known U.S. Naval Group China. The outfit operated a secret network of coast watchers based at an abandoned Buddhist temple, a vacated oil company dock, and other sites along the Chinese coast. Reports of convoy activity were relayed to China Air, a central command, which then relayed them to Navy forces and Army air bases in liberated areas deep inside China.

  Of the three Loopers, the Barb patrolled closest to the shoreline, following the twenty-fathom curve. Loughlin gave Fluckey the inward position because of the distinctive silhouette of the older Barb’s conning tower. From the distance, it easily could be mistaken for a Chinese fishing junk, which were numerous along the coast. Perhaps the sub could blend in.

  Shortly after noon on 8 January the Barb was the first to report smoke from a southbound convoy of large ships beginning the daylight run across the 111-mile-wide Formosa Strait to the safety of the Japanese naval base of Takao on the southern tip of the island. The largest of the ships, the 9,256-ton Anyo Maru, was loaded with troops, kamikaze pilots, and military supplies destined for the Philippines. Aft of the Anyo were smaller freighters and tankers containing horses, vehicles, weapons, ammunition, aviation fuel, and more than a thousand combat soldiers.

  With the Loopers in pursuit, Fluckey made an end-around while plotting the convoy’s zig pattern and speed from radar bearings and observations from the bridge. Once ahead of the approaching ships, Fluckey waited for either of the other two subs to make contact. Confirmation came within half an hour from Picuda. The Barb dived and moved in on the starboard flank. Echo ranging and periscope sightings detected at least eight heavily laden freighters and tankers escorted by at least eight destroyers. Fluckey decided to attack the largest of the vessels, the Anyo Maru, with three bow torpedoes at 2,700 yards, then target a smaller cargo carrier before swinging around to launch stern torpedoes at another freighter. The attack, the skipper reasoned, would create enough havoc on the inboard edge of the convoy to turn the ships seaward into the path of the wolf pack.

  Within the span of sixty-five seconds six torpedoes streaked away from the bow of the Barb. The boat turned to the third target just as two of the torpedoes exploded. Then a third, so violent it staggered the submarine, shattering light bulbs and loosening insulation on the compartment overheads. Fluckey was so intent on witnessing the destruction of the 6,892-ton munitions ship Shinyo Maru through the periscope that he hardly noticed. “The expressions on the faces of the fire control party snapped me out of my fixation and the full force of the explosion dawned upon me,” Fluckey noted in his patrol log. “The boat had been forced sideways and down, personnel had grabbed the nearest support to keep from being thrown off their feet, cases of canned goods had burst open in the forward torpedo room.”

  “Now that’s what I call a solid hit!” chortled the captain to no one in particular. He heard a muttered reply, “Golly, I’d hate to be around when he hears a loud explosion.”

  Amid breaking-up noises and t
he sound of high-speed screws, the Barb went deep, then made its way back to periscope depth. Fluckey took a peek. He could see the bow of a large freighter jutting up out of the ocean at a thirty-degree angle, its stern mired in the mud at thirty fathoms. Another ship was on fire. Smoke hung over the convoy. Amazingly the escorts had gone to the far side of the convoy without dropping depth charges. There, the Queenfish and Picuda initiated their attacks, sinking a few more ships over the next two hours as the sun set.

  A moonless night prevailed as the Barb, its torpedo tubes fully reloaded, surfaced behind the remaining convoy. Fluckey decided on a radical new method of attack, one he termed “continuous attack”—come up from aft of the convoy on the surface at flank speed to overrun the ships and torpedo them, hoping to be mistaken for one of the enemy’s escorts. “We did not have enough time going wide around the convoy to attack from in front before they reached the safety of their minefield pass [off Formosa],” the skipper later noted.

  In the darkness the Barb joined the escort destroyers weaving back and forth aft of the starboard column, then turned in slightly and angled three torpedoes at each of two ships in the near starboard column. Both sank while the convoy maintained its course and speed. Rounding the destroyer ahead, the submarine turned in toward a tanker and fired three more torpedoes. The target blew up with such force that the pressure wave pulled shirttails of those in the conning tower over their heads. On the bridge, Fluckey stood transfixed. “The target resembled a gigantic phosphorus bomb,” he noted. “The volcanic spectacle was awe inspiring. Shrapnel flew all around us, splashing on the water in a splattering pattern as far as 4,000 yards ahead of us. Topside we alternately ducked and gawked. The horizon was lighted as bright as day.”

  Escorts near the target had disappeared, consumed in the explosion. Fluckey could see only one ship left and a few scattered destroyers as the craggy cliffs of Formosa drew near. Chasing the remaining ship could bring the boat within range of shore batteries or mines. Still, at the urging of one of his officers, Fluckey decided to try. But the Queenfish got there first, sinking the target. Simultaneously artillery on Formosa opened up, lobbing shells that exploded on impact seven thousand yards from the Barb, too far away to have any effect. With the entire convoy eliminated, the Loopers turned back toward China.

  The next day all three subs assumed lifeguard duty in the East China Sea as two waves of American bombers attacked northern Formosa. With no reports of downed aircraft, the wolf pack resumed its patrol of the Chinese coast. The Barb moseyed northward on the twenty-fathom curve. Meanwhile, the Queenfish came upon a tanker with two escorts. Loughlin launched eight torpedoes in three onslaughts. But they all missed. Out of torpedoes, the commander headed for Midway. Cdr. Ty Shepard in Picuda assumed tactical command of the remaining wolf pack.

  The Barb continued operating close to the coast, with the Picuda patrolling well offshore. The ever-inquisitive Fluckey, now sporting a red beard, investigated mysterious discolorations of the ocean along the twenty-fathom curve. The boat dived into one, which proved to be a freshwater spring boiling vertically from the mouth of a tremendous underground river. For more than a week, the Barb cruised up and down the coast, looking for targets without success while avoiding “blind zones” established by China Air. American pilots were authorized to bomb any vessel, friend or foe, in these zones off-limits to all Navy submarines. On 18 January the Barb was cruising near one of the zones when a night flier caught it on the surface, strafing it and dropping four bombs over the submerging conning tower. The bombs lifted the stern. It was a close call but no damage was incurred.

  Barb lookouts became familiar with the movements of the vast fleet of Chinese junks using nets to fish coastal waters. Fluckey decided to experiment. If the sub maneuvered in among the fishing boats manned by Chinese who had no love of Japan, would they sound the alarm? Barb eased in. The gamble succeeded. No planes appeared, convincing Fluckey there were no Japanese spies aboard the boats.

  In the late afternoon of 20 January the Barb received multiple reports of a southbound convoy about to pass through Fluckey’s patrol sector. For two hours lookouts maintained a careful surveillance but saw no sign of the enemy. The captain was baffled. The ships had to be using an unknown route. That evening the skipper called a meeting of his officers around the wardroom table, where they laid out topographical maps of the coast. The captain ran his finger along the mile-wide Haitan Straits leading south toward Fuzhou and shrouded from view by numerous rocky islands. Cartographers noted that the strait was too shallow—only six feet—for major ships to navigate. But had the Japanese dredged the passage? The Barb radioed China Air for an answer.

  Throughout the next day, the Barb and Picuda made a fruitless search for ships in the Formosa Straits. At dusk, the Barb returned to the coast, where the captain received a reply from China Air. Yes, large ships, including at least one battleship, had used the Haitan Straits—the passage had been dredged. That clinched it.

  The next day the Barb ventured ten miles inside the twenty-fathom curve, where it mingled with dozens of junks in order to get a clear view of the coast fifteen miles farther. If a convoy steamed through the straits, the Barb would see the smoke. At noon the boat trolled at one-third speed near the coastline. Fluckey joined the lookouts above the bridge against the shears. About two hours later smoke revealed at least six large ships moving in a single column south at ten knots through the straits. Fluckey calculated from the convoy’s speed that the Barb could intercept the ships after dark on the southern egress of the channel at Sandu Inlet opposite Fuzhou. Fluckey set a course for the intercept point by heading out to sea while rounding coastal islands to the south to Sandu Inlet. It would take about five hours. “With a hundred miles to go, let’s start galloping,” ordered the captain.

  The plan was for the Picuda to remain offshore in case the convoy got past the Barb, which arrived right on time and moved in tight to the coast. Fluckey positioned the boat between two deserted islands on the inland side of the shipping channel. The sub sat on the surface in just thirty feet of water at a dead halt in darkness, a heavy overcast hiding the moon. The captain hoped the Barb would be mistaken for a large rock as the convoy passed. The plan was to torpedo the ships as they went by, then dash past them to safety.

  In steely silence the sub sat in the darkness. The captain remained on the bridge with the lookouts, breathless, straining to make out objects that might be ships. Down below radar operator John Lehman maintained a vigil for anything approaching from any direction. Crewmen elsewhere stood ready at battle stations, gripped by a sense of excitement mixed with foreboding, knowing there was no place to hide once the shooting started. Two hours passed. Still no convoy. Either the ships had taken refuge in an unknown harbor or somehow escaped. Fluckey grew impatient. Waste of time sitting still, he thought. “Notify Picuda,” he said to Lt. James Webster, his new executive officer. “No joy at this posit. Let’s gallop!”

  The surge of the diesels powered the boat out of its hiding place the way it came in. Webster wondered what was next. “Captain, when we reach the twenty-fathom curve, where’s the galloping ghost of the China coast going to gallop tonight?”

  Fluckey had decided not to go out as far as the twenty-fathom curve. Rather, he wanted to backtrack to the shipping channel and follow it north. Somewhere close by, there had to be a secret harbor between the Barb’s position and Seven Stars Islands eighty miles to the north, where the convoy had been spotted the previous day.

  The captain went below and convened a meeting of his officers around the wardroom table. Webster spread out the map. Fluckey, using dividers set for ten-mile increments, stepped off a potential course for the Barb along the inland passage. Lt. Max Duncan, the TDC operator, pronounced the route reasonably unobstructed, aside from rocky promontories here and there. The captain reasoned that it was unlikely the Japanese would mine any areas used by the fishing fleet. The Barb could assume their routes would be safe to follow. When asked h
ow the sub would detect a ship anchored off the beach, the skipper had someone retrieve a piece of clear plexiglass the size of the radar scope and trace the known coastline, shoals, and islands onto the plastic. It was then placed over the radar scope. Lehman, the radar operator, was to report any contacts that didn’t correspond to the overlay. At that point the sub would investigate.

  The skipper fully expected to sneak in undetected on the surface to attack a sleeping convoy of six or seven ships. The Barb would launch eight torpedoes—four forward and four aft—in one tremendous salvo, leaving just four torpedoes aboard, all in the after torpedo room. “Believe me,” Fluckey told the officers, “he won’t know what hit him. When he finds out, we’ll be gone.”

  To the captain, the Barb would make an unprecedented attack, matched in its daring only by the Nazi submarine U-47, which in 1939 negotiated a narrow channel that guarded a British harbor in Scapa Flow to surprise and sink the anchored English battleship Royal Oak.

  Fluckey radioed Captain Shepard in Picuda, inviting him to join the action. But he declined, thinking it was foolhardy and telling Fluckey to “drop dead!” The skipper was undeterred. Executive Officer Webster suggested handing out life jackets for the approach—just in case. The skipper thought it might frighten the men. He’d rather have them concentrate on the tasks ahead. He decided to address them over the intercom, to prepare them for what was to come. “Shipmates, we’ve got this convoy bottled up along the coast. We’re going to find them and knock the socks off of them,” he said. “This surprise will be Barb’s greatest night, a night to remember. If you have any questions, I’m coming through the boat now.”

  He started in the forward torpedo room, where he directed crewmen to reposition their torpedoes in the top four tubes so the fish could run at six-foot depths to prevent them from running aground. As the skipper passed aft, crewmen and officers were tense. Conversation was muted. The men simply signaled a “V” for victory with their fingers or thumbs up to the captain as he went by. The control room—the nerve center of the boat—was a morgue. “It was very businesslike—and had to be,” said Dave Teeters, the electronics officer who was running the tracking party.