The Galloping Ghost (14 page)

Passing into the Okhotsk, the
Barb
encountered an ice floe five miles wide with peaks a hundred feet high. Soon the sub made contact with a freighter but let it pass. It was Russian, an ally, though Fluckey didn't trust the Soviets. The next day, just past midnight, radar contact was made with another large vessel in dense fog. Fluckey closed to within two thousand yards on a perfect setup. One more attempt to see the target through the fog and then fire. At the last minute, a tanker loomed into view. It was Russian. The
Barb
sat there, unseen, as the ship lumbered by. “Frankly I was tempted to order the lookouts to do an about face and let go anyhow. However, we sat and watched her quickly pass into the fog,” Captain Fluckey noted in the ship's log.

Overnight, the
Barb
received an ULTRA revealing that a four-ship Japanese troop convoy was about to leave the northern Kurile island of Matsuwa on a route that would take it into the vicinity of Fluckey's wolf pack. The skipper issued a call for the
Herring
and
Golet
to rendezvous as planned. Only the
Herring
responded. The two boats danced around each other like scorpions ready to strike until prearranged radar signatures confirmed their identities. The two then planed up alongside each other just before midnight on 31 May.

From their respective bridges, the two captains communicated with megaphones. Fluckey reasoned that the convoy would make for La Perouse Strait and pass into the Sea of Japan on the opposite side of the Okhotsk. A plan of attack was agreed to. The
Herring
would patrol a ten-mile square north and east of an imaginary line drawn between Matsuwa and the strait, while the
Barb
would search south and west of the line. The first boat to make radar contact would alert the other before attacking. The subs quickly separated.

Fluckey went below to gauge the readiness of his crew. In the stern torpedo room they had a favor to ask. Could the captain attack with the stern torpedoes? Through its many war patrols, the
Barb
had yet to fire a stern shot. Fluckey promised not to forget this time. In the engine rooms, with the clatter of diesels drowning out conversation as the sub streamed along, the so-called “black gang” gave a thumbs up and a “V” for victory as the captain passed forward into the crew's mess, where the men burst into applause as the skipper entered. “Sink 'em all, Captain! Give them back more than they gave us at Pearl Harbor!” In the control room, men were so busy exchanging information that Fluckey simply gave a clenched fist in
acknowledgment. In the wardroom, as meals were being served, Executive Officer McNitt reported that all was in readiness.

The
Barb
was the first to make contact. Fluckey ordered the bridge watch to head for the target while sounding the battle stations alarm and getting off a contact report to the
Herring
. Gongs blared as men scrambled to their stations. The captain, slipping into a rubberized parka and grabbing a pair of gloves and binoculars, climbed the control room ladder through the conning tower and onto the bridge, a pedestal forty feet above the surf. Though it was early afternoon, Fluckey couldn't see a thing because of low-hanging fog. However, trailing clouds of smoke from coal-burning engines could be seen through thinning upper layers of the fog. As the captain directed the boat at high speed to get around and ahead of the vessels, the fog disappeared, leaving the sub exposed. The captain and the lookouts dropped down into the conning tower, Weaver following close behind and dogging the water-tight hatch amid the loud “A-ooga!” of the Klaxon diving alarm.

A bomb blast could be heard, then the sound of depth charges. They were a long ways off. The
Herring
obviously had engaged the enemy. In fact, Skipper Zabriskie had attacked the convoy's lone destroyer escort. A single torpedo put the
Ishigaki
under, scattering the convoy's three transports. The
Madras Maru
headed south, the
Koto Maru
west, and the
Hokuyo Maru
turned east back toward Matsuwa.

Fluckey, from the periscope in the conning tower, made a 360-degree circle. No airplanes were in sight. One ship with large guns forward and aft was heading directly at the
Barb
. The sub would attack with three of its six bow torpedo tubes, then prepare for a stern shot if the ship eluded the first shots. In quick succession, he ordered the periscope up and down, exposed for no more than four seconds at a time to avoid detection. Each time trajectories to the target were checked and rechecked. When the ship was within 1,400 yards, the captain gave the order.

“Fire 4!”

The boat shuddered as a blast of compressed air launched a twenty-foot-long torpedo.

“Fire 5!”

“Fire 6!” yelled the captain.

Seconds passed. Then a tremendous explosion amid cheers throughout the boat.

Fluckey ordered the periscope raised and held there. He watched as a waterspout from the first explosion fell on the target. Then another fireball. “Directly under the stacks!” he shouted, followed by the sound of another
direct hit. A secondary explosion from munitions aboard the ship shattered the vessel.

Fluckey gave those in the conning tower a quick look at the sinking
Madras Maru
. Landing barges loaded with soldiers floated off the deck. Motorized lifeboats and row boats pulled away. One got caught in the whirlpool of the ship going under and disappeared.

After ten minutes, with the forward torpedo tubes reloaded, the submarine surfaced among the lifeboats and landing barges, one only fifty yards off the port beam. Weaver and Fluckey were the first to emerge on the bridge, the captain intent on offering medical assistance to survivors. He heard a Japanese officer's scream, then the sound of a machine gun sending a spray of bullets whizzing overhead. Fluckey and Weaver hit the deck, crawling back to the conning tower hatch and diving below while ordering the sub to roar ahead, leaving the survivors behind.

“One ship down, four to go!” shouted the captain.

For Tuck Weaver the near brush with disaster on the bridge reminded him of his days aboard the S-30 (SS-135) when it was stationed in the Aleutian Islands in 1943.

The boat was on patrol on the Pacific side of the Kuriles when Skipper Bill Stevenson attempted a daring down-the-throat attack on a charging Japanese patrol boat that was firing 5-inch shells at the sub. The captain was preparing to fire four bow torpedoes when his periscope dipped below the waves, foiling the setup. Yelling to bring the boat up, the planesmen overcompensated and broached the sub right under the nose of the
Chidori
. Stevenson ordered a crash dive with no time to close the outer doors of the torpedo tubes where the weapons were exposed. The S-30 was only a hundred feet deep when the patrol boat crossed over and dropped depth charges.

Weaver described the scene for Fluckey. “Standing in the control room, I saw the hands fly off both depth gauges before the lights and everything electrical went dead. Having no propulsion and being nearly twenty tons heavy we just sank until with a thud we hit the bottom.”

Fortunately the boat landed on an ocean shelf three hundred feet down, sparing it from crush depth. But the first round of depth charges smashed all four torpedoes, one so badly it couldn't be removed. As electrician mates toiled to repair damage throughout the boat, patrol craft overhead used grappling hooks in attempts to hook the submarine. It was nerve-wracking to hear them rattling across the hull. But none took hold. After dark the boat surfaced and escaped using radar to thread its way through the circling patrol boats.

Back on the
Barb,
Fluckey resumed the hunt for targets and soon spotted the fleeing
Koto Maru
. It took three hours for the sub to get ahead of the transport and settle into a submerged position. Under a clear sky with no sign of overhead aircraft, the
Barb
let loose with three torpedoes from its stern tubes. A minute ticked by. Raising the periscope, Fluckey watched as all three hit the ship, breaking its bow and turning it on its end. Lifeboats, dangling from their lines, began spilling survivors into the frigid sea. Within three minutes the ship disappeared.

The skipper, making a periscope sweep before surfacing, was taken by surprise when a plane came roaring in undetected and dropped two bombs. Concussions slammed against the hull, shaking the boat wildly and causing seawater to rush past as if it had been holed. “Down scope! Rig ship for depth charge!” Fluckey shouted. “Take her deep—three hundred feet! Left full rudder!” Two more explosions were more distant as the
Barb
made its narrow escape with only minor damage.

The boat stayed submerged for an hour, then surfaced to return to the wreckage in hopes of taking a prisoner who might provide valuable intelligence. The resulting spectacle was gruesome and eerie in daylight on a flat sea with ice shards everywhere. “This was the first time that I'd ever returned to the scene of a sinking and it was a rather unholy sight,” the skipper later noted. “The atmosphere was much like one you'd expect from
Frankenstein
. The people were screaming and groaning in the water. There were several survivors on rafts. The water at that time was very cold, about twenty-seven degrees. These people were gradually freezing and dying.”

When one of the gunners aboard the
Barb
took a shot at one of the survivors, Fluckey angrily rebuked him, demanding why he had done so. The enlisted man stammered, then replied, “He pulled a knife on me.”

McNitt, the exec, was alongside Fluckey on the bridge as the submarine trolled through the flotsam and doomed soldiers. “We could only take one prisoner. I remember coming up close to this man who was sitting on a hatch cover or a piece of wood. There was ice in the water. He was wearing nothing but a singlet and a pair of pants. We invited him aboard, came up to him, and he turned his back to us. One of the crew pointed a submachine gun at him, at which point he seemed happy to come aboard. I've often thought this was a matter of saving face for a moment. His alternative was not good.”

Three seamen hauled the prisoner on deck, where a pharmacist's mate bundled him in a blanket after unwinding a twenty-foot-long spool of wool that he had wrapped around his abdomen, which had saved his life. The
rescuers passed him through an access door to the bridge and lowered him through a hatchway, where others took him under guard, removing him to the after torpedo room where he could be watched. Fluckey ordered everyone aboard to treat him kindly and asked to be informed when he was sufficiently revived to begin interrogation.

Two hours later, guards led the prisoner into the officers' quarters, where McNitt had laid out a chart of the Okhotsk on the wardroom table. No one knew any Japanese. Luckily the skipper had pirated a single page of Japanese phonetic vocabulary from a Navy bulletin two years earlier and had kept it with him. He greeted the prisoner with “Konban wa” (Welcome). The sailor, short with a slender build, bowed and returned the greeting. The skipper had him sit next to him on a bench and proceeded with a line of questioning. Asked his name, he declined, putting his finger to his lips and moving it back and forth as if to say he could not divulge anything. Fluckey produced a .45 revolver and placed it on the table out of reach of the prisoner. Again he asked for the seaman's name.

“Kitojima Sanji!”

Fluckey indicated that he and the crew would call him “Kito.” The prisoner nodded. With a combination of broken Japanese, sign language, and facial expressions, the officers were able to extract some information: Kito was a second-class gunner's mate. He once went AWOL after being ordered to execute a Chinese captive. He became a schoolteacher. Then he got drafted. He had been a lookout on the
Koto Maru
and had seen the torpedoes coming. The convoy had embarked from Matsuwa. There were four ships. He named them all. He confirmed that the
Herring
sank the escort.

The skipper reasoned that the
Herring
was chasing the
Hakuyo Maru,
the convoy's sole survivor, back toward Matsuwa. He ordered McNitt, the boat's gifted navigator, to set a course for La Perouse Strait in case the ship had evaded the
Herring
and was making a desperate run for the Sea of Japan.

Warming up to the interrogation, the prisoner used a pencil to draw a line on the map where mines were located in or near the strait. Fluckey wanted to know if there were more, motioning that the sub would be headed through the passage and could strike a mine, killing everyone—including Kito. He understood. He drew more lines and revealed that each of the explosives was about fifty feet below the surface. The captain was satisfied.

Guards led Kito back to the torpedo room while Fluckey convened a strategy session. The captain appointed torpedo and gunnery officer Lt. Jay Alan Easton to teach the prisoner English, have the enlisted men watch over him at all times, assign him various tasks, get to know him, and treat him gently. Based on the interrogation, Fluckey decided the boat would
not venture through La Perouse Strait—too risky. He ordered everyone to rest overnight while posting a minimal watch. The next day he would have the ship's cook bake a cake to celebrate the dual sinking and pass around rations from the sub's whiskey allotment, known as “Black Death” because it was so poorly manufactured.

On the evening of 2 June, as the sub continued its westward trek across the Okhotsk, there was still no word from the
Herring
. Later reports would confirm what Fluckey suspected: Skipper Zabriski had set a course for Matsuwa in hopes of intercepting the fleeing
Hakuyo Maru
. There was no sign of the transport when the submarine arrived off the port. However, Zabriski noticed two other ships docked at the island and moved into the harbor at night to attack them. The boat fired several torpedoes that destroyed the
Hiburi Maru
and
Iwaki Maru
. Soldiers manning a shore battery, however, saw the tracks of the torpedoes and counterattacked. Two direct hits shattered the
Herring
's conning tower and the boat plunged to the bottom with the loss of its entire eighty-three-man crew.