The Galloping Ghost

by Carl P. LaVO

  At dawn on the 28th the boat returned to its earlier position and submerged. A frigate appeared at one point, then departed. Also a plane flew over. But no convoy was sighted. With oxygen running low, Fluckey brought the sub back to the surface at dusk to recharge batteries and air out the compartments. Again the captain sought the anchorage without success before returning to the boat’s submerged guard post at dawn.

  At noon on the 29th a float plane flew past the sub’s raised periscope. Startled, Fluckey had a good view of the pilot, staring straight ahead fifty feet off the glassy surface. Thirty minutes later, the skipper took another look. “Man battle stations torpedoes! Here they come!” he shouted. The sound of gongs mixed with cheers from below. The long wait was over.

  The Terutsuki, with its scout plane, led the way. The Barb positioned itself for a stern shot. Fluckey took a look. “Angle on the bow still zero with plane weaving across his bow. This boy looks menacing. Coming left to give him a down the throat with stern tubes.”

  Up above, the plane did figure-eights ahead of the hunter-killer. Pinging from the destroyer combed the ocean for the submarine. The destroyer maintained a steady course at 10 knots. Range closed to 1,700 yards . . . 1,000 yards . . . 960. . . . Then, without warning, five bombs exploded over the boat, so powerful the periscope acted like a whip antenna. Flecks of insulating cork broke loose, creating a dust storm in the compartments. Light bulbs shattered. Crewmen clung to any fixed object to stay upright. Fluckey, maintaining periscope depth, took aim with a Mark 28 homing torpedo.

  “Fire 10!”

  The torpedo bolted away. But the motor again failed. Another dud. “Damn it!” cursed the skipper. “Open the outer doors on tubes 7, 8, and 9! Max! New setup!”

  A depth charge exploded, then another well below the boat—perhaps the torpedo exploding on impact with the ocean floor.

  Fluckey raised the periscope and fed coordinates to Duncan at the TDC. The destroyer continued lobbing depth charges.

  “Fire 7! Fire 8! Fire 9! All ahead full!”

  Three conventional electric torpedoes sped away. The Barb accelerated for twenty seconds, ending with a large knuckling of seawater as the boat turned sharply, giving enemy sonar the impression the cavitation was the submarine. All stop. The boat coasted silently away from the water disturbance.

  Sixty seconds passed.

  The three torpedoes converged on the warship—and passed under it without exploding. “It can’t be!” Fluckey anguished, issuing the command to close watertight doors between the compartments. “Hang on, everyone!”

  The Terutsuki sped up, coming in fast to finish off the Barb. The shriek of the destroyer’s twin propellers rose audibly, as if they would cleave their way through the boat’s hull. Crewmen braced, ears tuned to the overhead. They could hear the heavy splash of countless depth charge canisters, followed by the sharp clicks of detonators. The depth charge direction indicator in the conning tower lit up like a runaway computer. Explosions ahead. Above. Below. Port. Starboard. Somehow the submarine remained watertight.

  It was Fluckey’s turn.

  This time he would narrow the distance. Another Mark 28 couldn’t miss. The skipper raised the scope. “Thrilling. The ship’s doing a St. Vitas dance!” he shouted, describing the rocking motion of the destroyer, slinging depth charges side to side. “Geysers are flying up from a stream of charges shot from her side throwers.”

  Someone in the crowded conning tower yelled back, “Captain, for God’s sake, get that periscope down!”

  “Fire 4!”

  With a jolt, the torpedo left the bow. Moments later its motor also failed, and it fell harmlessly into the depths.

  The destroyer paused out of range, listening and pinging. It turned and throttled up, bearing straight for the boat. Fluckey knew the Barb was in big trouble. “Open the outer doors on tubes 1, 2, and 3! Max! New setup!”

  Screws of the speeding Terutsuki rose to fever pitch. Crewmen held their breath, pulses pounding. The sound man counted off the approach. “He’s at 1,000 . . . 600 . . . 400 . . . 100.” The swish of the warship passed overhead. Then the splashdown of canisters, lots of them. Sledgehammers waffled the boat. Explosions too numerous to count.

  Fluckey’s evasive tactics again saved the boat.

  He prepared to counterattack. “This time we’ll let him come close so we can’t miss,” he said to Duncan. Max calculated six hundred yards—it would give the boat’s conventional torpedoes a twenty-second run, just enough time to arm them.

  The captain quickly raised and lowered the periscope. The destroyer turned, straightened out, and came charging. A plane circled over its bridge.

  One last check.

  “Up scope. Angle on the bow five starboard. Range—mark. Final bearing—mark. Down scope.”

  The telemetry checked. Six hundred twenty yards and closing.

  “Fire 1! Fire 2! Fire 3!”

  All three bore a hot, straight course. A minute later sonar reported them again passing under the destroyer. No explosion.

  “Damn the torpedoes!” roared the captain.

  Fluckey, his mind racing, put another knuckle in the sea, stopped, started, backed down, came up to eighty feet. The Terutsuki laced another carpet of explosives. Concussions whipped the boat. The pressure hull groaned.

  With no means of reloading, the only remaining option was to find an escape route. Not easy. The sub was trapped between the destroyer and the beach and more escorts were joining the fray. Fluckey was desperate. He ordered Duncan to jettison the boat’s mechanical decoys—bubblers, gassers, and swim-out beacons. Duncan counted seventy-six. “Fire them all!” When Duncan questioned the directive, the captain replied cryptically, “I said all. I need them now before he attacks again.” Max carried out the instructions as the sub made a few more high-speed knuckles, twists, and turns. Fluckey kept a wary eye on the distance to the beach. Only 5,500 yards. The Barb maneuvered wildly in a series of stops and starts and radical turns, all the while ejecting decoys that filled the depths with loud noises. The sonar operator announced there would be no way to pinpoint the sub’s position in such commotion. “Great!” said Fluckey as the boat wiggled its way to the open seas undetected. There, the skipper breathed a sigh of relief, happy to have come away with a draw.

  The skirmish was hardly the end of the patrol. The sub moved up the coast of Karafuto, where the skipper had his men test the sub’s inflatable rubber boats to see if they could steer a straight course. Satisfied, he planned to invade a large processing plant on Kaihyo, a tiny island at the eastern end of Patience Bay. The factory converted seal carcasses into oil and jackets for aviators. Every enlisted man volunteered to be in the landing party. Only eight could go, however, four to a boat. Fluckey selected them, depending on their skills.

  The sub approached from the north on 1 July. Persistent fog, however, shrouded the island; the skipper wanted a full view. The Barb waited until dawn of the next day when the weather cleared. As the sub circled the island, lookouts were surprised at the large number of barracks, warehouses, and buildings on the western side—a much larger concentration than expected. As the captain sounded the battle stations alarm, the Barb’s gunnery crew poured on deck to man 20mm, 40mm, and 5-inch guns. Ashore, the Japanese saw the boat approaching and began running. The first rounds destroyed a 75mm gun emplacement on a cliff overlooking the plant. Return machine gunfire fell well short. Within minutes all opposition ceased. The sub closed to within eight hundred yards, where it came to a complete halt and opened fire. The captain couldn’t be more pleased. “The ideal submarine bombardment—huge fires burning, sections of buildings flying up in the air, sampans destroyed, oil drums tumbled and split, a field piece overturned, and a machine gun hanging loose, unattended.”

  The Barb backed well offshore for three hours in anticipation of enemy aircraft. When none appeared, it moved back in to launch the invasion force. Lookouts noticed a pillbox on the hillside on the way in. Fluckey and Duncan made a quick
sweep with binoculars and noticed three more fortified sites. The Barb’s 40mm gun destroyed the largest. Given the possibility of resistance and having reduced the plant to flaming wreckage, the skipper chose to withdraw, terming the skirmish “Little Iwo Jima.” Indeed, the Japanese army would later report that three American ships had dropped six hundred bombs on the plant, destroying it.

  The Barb sped to the northwestern side of Patience Bay, with plans to bombard the large city of Shikuka and its factories and big aircraft base. The boat would have to venture fifteen miles inside the ten-fathom curve however—a much greater distance in shallow seas than the Nam Kwan transit. The captain was confident. No search was under way for the submarine. Total surprise was on his side.

  At midnight on 3 July 1945 the submarine approached under a heavy, overcast sky and a steady drizzle—“perfect for rocketeering,” as the skipper put it. Radar revealed high smokestacks, the point of aim for the missile strike. “Swish” Saunders led his team onto the forward deck, unstrapped the launcher, adjusted the angle, and loaded a dozen rockets, set for a range of 4,550 yards. After an initial short circuit, the missiles rose in a flash of light and disappeared as the submarine roared away. Behind, the thunder of impact could be heard, ravishing the air base. The Japanese would later report the attack as the work of five U.S. warships.

  The boat continued down the coast and seven hours later encountered a thousand-ton Japanese freighter bound for Skikuka. From deep submergence, Fluckey attacked with one of the boat’s four smaller Mark 27s, nicknamed “cuties,” which could be fired only from very close range. The torpedo silently exited the stern on its own power and made a sweeping upward curve to intersect the target. The torpedo exploded, snapping the ship’s keel and sending the ship quickly to the bottom, where it landed with a thud next to the submarine. The Barb surfaced in flotsam and coal dust. There were no survivors. From the bridge, Fluckey noticed a floating pilothouse and rolls of bobbing charts. With grapnels crewmen snagged the charts. Duncan stepped onto the roof of the pilothouse to retrieve more charts. They were a goldmine, providing the locations of minefields in the Okhotsk and La Perouse Strait.

  The crew celebrated the Barb’s fourth sinking with cake and beer as the sub set a course for the southern end of Karafuto to patrol Aniwan Bay, a small body of water that opens like a crab’s claw on the strait. Large train ferries linking Karafuto with Hokkaido routinely sailed the bay and strait, as well as Japanese frigates. Late on the morning of 5 July Fluckey sank an enemy freighter with conventional torpedoes. A subsequent plan to stage a missile attack on the city of Shimoyubesu on the north coast of Hokkaido was canceled after surveillance revealed it to be a poor target. The sub returned to Patience Bay and on 8 July sank a cargo ship with 40mm gunfire.

  New orders arrived, shifting the Barb five hundred miles south to the east coast of Hokkaido for lifeguard duty during a bombing strike by Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet Carrier Task Force 38. En route the submarine sank a large diesel sampan with gunfire. The air bombardment began on 14 July, setting large fires on the mainland that burned all night. In the morning fifty planes returned and leveled everything ashore. The submariners listened in on the pilots’ frequency as the aviators looked for anything to attack. “There’s a horse. I’m going after him,” radioed one of the pilots. “You leave that poor horse alone,” came the reply from the flight leader.

  All planes returned safely to their carriers, freeing up the Barb, which set a course back to Aniwa Bay, where two days later it torpedoed a frigate whose cargo of depth charges blew up. Out of torpedoes except three Mark 27 “cuties” in the stern tubes, the boat returned to Patience Bay.

  Many times during the patrol the “Galloping Ghost” of the east Karafuto coast had witnessed steam locomotives hauling freight and passengers along the shoreline. Troop trains moved at night. What Fluckey had in mind was smuggling commandos ashore to blow up one of them. Planning for the mission had been in the works for three weeks. Lt. William Walker, the boat’s engineering officer, would lead the invasion in one rubber boat while “Swish” Saunders would command another. Several of the men had been Boy Scouts, experience that Fluckey thought could come in handy if something happened and they had to live off the land. Neal Sever, a second-class signalman, was among the chosen for his scouting and communications skills. Also Larry Newland, a first-class cook, was to go ashore. Saunders and Billy Hatfield, a third-class electrician’s mate, devised a fifty-five-pound bomb from missile warheads. They loaded the explosives into a large pickle can with wires leading to three dry-cell batteries in their own waterproof tin. The men dubbed the demolition a “land torpedo.” Commander Fluckey wondered how it would be triggered since the saboteurs didn’t have the time to wait to detonate the explosives; blowing up the tracks without taking a train didn’t seem worth it.

  To study the issue, the skipper convened a meeting in the wardroom attended by enlisted men. Hatfield, a former railroad worker in his native Kentucky, knew exactly what was needed. A micro-switch. Bolted to a wooden wedge, it could be pushed up under one of the iron rails. The weight of the locomotive would cause the track to sag, pressing down on the switch and detonating the bomb. Fluckey was ecstatic, slapping Hatfield on the back. Max had a question, however: “Do you have a micro-switch?” Hatfield replied no. But Lieutenant Teeters, the radar officer, might. He did. That clinched it. The mission was a go.

  Fluckey and the officers chose a sandy beach in the lower portion of Karafuto, a stretch dotted by many waterfront homes but with clear access to the railroad. The sub would approach to a thousand yards of the beach and launch its boats. The landing party would be equipped with red lens flashlights, watches, knives, D-rations, inflatable life jackets, cigarette lighters, a signal gun, a Very pistol for firing flares, binoculars, electrical wire, wedges, and the demolition charge. Carbines, tommy guns, and hand grenades would be loaded onto the boats. Teeters came up with another idea—affixing pieces of tin to the boats so radar could track them. Once they reached the beach, Signalman Sever and Newland would remain with the boats while the rest of the squad proceeded across a highway to the railroad. There, two guards would split off fifty yards up and down the rail line. A third would be posted twenty yards inland. The remaining three men, including Lieutenant Walker, would plant the explosives in a hole between the tracks using improvised picks and shovels. The bomb would be wired to the dry-cells, buried in a second hole. Another set of wires would lead to the switch.

  The skipper wanted everyone back aboard within three hours—fifteen minutes before the first glimmer of daylight. Talking would be kept to whispers during the mission. Fluckey had the men practice bird calls. A whistle mimicking a bobwhite would be used when encountering each other in the dark. A sound like a whippoorwill would mean the men should come together. A mechanical whistle would represent an emergency—run for the boats. A blinker gun would signal the Barb that the boats were returning. Two flares would mean the commandos were in trouble; gunfire was needed in the direction indicated. A single flare, on the other hand, would mean the boats couldn’t locate the sub. A single flare fired from the sub would mean it had to leave and would return every night.

  What was needed now was a dark, moonless night. It arrived on the fourth night, 23 July.

  With the sub at a halt on the surface 950 yards from the beach, the invaders climbed into their boats, packed with gear. Fluckey, on deck, had rehearsed a sendoff, something like, “Synchronize watches” and “Slip-Keep”—one slip and it’s for keeps, the Barb’s slogan for stay alert. But he didn’t. Instead, “Boys, if you get stuck, head for Siberia 130 miles north—follow the mountain ranges, good luck.”

  Radar followed the boats all the way in. It took thirty-five minutes.

  Fluckey had anticipated problems. In fact, there were. “I was in the lead boat with my back to shore and the compass between my feet,” explained Sever, the signalman. “I held a light on the compass so Lieutenant Walker could see it. The many metal objects
in the boat compromised the magnetic feature. That, coupled with poor visibility, caused us to land elsewhere than planned. I could see a lighted window, a dwelling about two hundred yards from the beach. I heard a single bark of what sounded like a small dog, then silence. I signaled the Barb and received one flash in acknowledgment. Newland, the cook, brought meat in case dogs bothered us. He stayed with the boats while I scouted the beach for a hundred yards or so to the north of our landing place.”

  The saboteurs skirted the house and sprinted two hundred yards across what they thought would be grass. Instead, it was waist-high bulrushes that crackled with every step. Lieutenant Walker was the first to reach the road, where he tumbled headfirst into a four-foot drainage ditch. Warning the others, he got up and bolted across the highway, only to plummet into another ditch. The men finally reached the tracks, where the three guards fanned out. One of them, First-Class Motor Machinist Mate John Markuson, went to investigate something that looked like a water tower. He soon came racing back, breathless and unable to mimic a bobwhite. “Jeepers, that thing is a lookout tower with a man inside asleep,” he whispered to Walker. The lieutenant told him to stay put. Walker, Saunders, and Hatfield bent to the task of digging two holes between the ties in the rail bed, preferring to do so with their hands to avoid noise.

  Before the job could be completed, a northbound locomotive came barreling out of the dark. The saboteurs dived for cover behind low bushes and gullies as it rumbled by, the engineer leaning far out of his cab and looking down on the Americans, who lay flat and frozen. Hatfield, who had jumped into a depression, thought he had been shot. Fortunately the sharp noise proved to be the discharge of carbon dioxide cartridges attached to his life vest.