The Galloping Ghost (19 page)

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 jumped 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.

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.

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.