The Galloping Ghost Read online

  “Uncle Charlie,” as he was known in the undersea Navy, was a submariner’s submariner, a sparkplug of a man who was a legend in the force going all the way back to the early days of the Silent Service. After the outset of World War II, he had taken command of U.S. submarines in the southwest Pacific and vigorously defended his boat captains who insisted the Mark 14s were defective. The Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance bristled at criticism of the secret weapon, blamed submariners for fouling up, and wouldn’t field-test the weapons. Lockwood, refusing to buckle under, took a submarine into the harbor off Albany, Australia, and fired Mark 14s into a net, proving they ran too deep, deep enough to miss a ship’s hull. Henceforth sub captains adjusted depth controls accordingly, ignoring bureau directives. Still, magnetic triggers tended to explode prematurely during attacks. No one could figure out why. Lockwood, by then promoted to commander of all Pacific Fleet submarines, and Adm. Chester Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, ordered the exploders deactivated permanently.

  Sub captains continued to experience many duds. In July 1943 the Tinosa (SS-283) fired fifteen Mark 14s with conventional contact exploders at a Japanese whaling ship; eleven were direct hits but failed to explode. In August the Sculpin (SS-191) attacked targets on three occasions off the coast of Formosa (Taiwan). The torpedoes hit with a metallic “clunk” but didn’t explode.

  Lockwood was fed up with the Bureau of Ordnance’s inability to explain what was happening. He ordered tests in which live Mark 14s were fired at various angles into a submerged Hawaiian cliff. Navy divers recovered one dud with its warhead split open. Big chunks of TNT littered the seabed. Upon examination of the firing mechanism, it was determined that the steel firing pin never reached the detonation cap. The motion of the pin was guided by a sleeve and the fit was so close that the shock of hitting the target crimped the sleeve enough to prevent the movement of the pin. Those torpedoes that hit the target at an oblique angle were not so affected. It was decided that a lighter material be used for the firing pin and a stronger spring be used to propel it. Lockwood had a lighter, tougher prototype tooled at Pearl Harbor from the propeller of a wrecked Japanese Zero fighter plane. It solved the problem. New firing pins and stronger springs were thereafter installed in all torpedoes. In what seemed an odd directive, captains at sea with unmodified torpedoes were ordered to fire obliquely at targets to give them a better chance of sinking ships. After twenty months of war, the Mark 14 was at last combat worthy and boat captains soon reported success.

  As 1943 slipped into 1944 the undersea war finally was showing major results. American subs had sunk more than three hundred enemy ships in 1943, twice the success rate of 1942. Imports of raw materials to sustain Japan’s factories dropped sharply, and Japanese shipyards for the first time were unable to keep up with losses. But just as the offensive began to bite hard, so did Japanese antisubmarine warfare. The Navy lost fifteen submarines in 1943—more than twice the 1942 rate. In the first two months of 1944, three more subs joined them—Scorpion (SS-278), Grayback (SS-208), and Trout (SS-202).

  On the afternoon of 2 March 1944 Lieutenant Commander Fluckey sidled up alongside Lieutenant Commander Waterman on the bridge of the Barb with every expectation of a superior war patrol as the submarine’s four powerful diesel engines roared to life. In a major surprise, another officer jumped aboard at the last minute. It was Admiral Lockwood, hitching a ride to the Navy base at Midway, the first leg of the Barb’s seventh war patrol.

  Lockwood was a chatty people-person, much like Fluckey, who wasted no time engaging him in conversation. Waterman and others, though, were a bit taken aback by the admiral’s presence. “Everybody was polite, subdued, and listened more than they talked with Lockwood. However, Gene was quite chatty, and two or three times he told the admiral he hoped he would get a chance to get a command,” recalled Lt. Everett “Tuck” Weaver, one of four junior officers aboard.

  Lockwood was unlike other admirals. His tradition, established in Australia, was to personally greet every sub coming in off war patrol by jumping aboard as the boat tied up and climbing to the bridge or going to the wardroom to congratulate and interview the captain. Fluckey, like many in the undersea fleet, knew of Lockwood’s disdain for skippers who did not press their attacks. The admiral had relieved a number of them, replacing them with younger, more daring captains. Fluckey—quick-thinking, imaginative, and bursting with ambition—was the kind of individual Lockwood could keen to in his search for top guns. Gene used every occasion to discuss tactics and experiences with Lockwood. His knowledge of submarines soon showed itself.

  On the fourth day out from Pearl Harbor, the Barb encountered heavy seas. While the sub was submerged, a fire erupted on an auxiliary generator terminal board in the engine room and was quickly put out. The cause was traced to an electrical short circuit caused by seawater leaking into the sub from the main induction pipe, the largest external opening of the boat situated high up on the conning tower. A mushroom-shaped, hydraulically controlled valve normally sealed the external opening of the induction pipe, which snaked down aft of the conning tower and into the boat’s engine rooms, where it stretched along the overhead above the vessel’s four diesel engines. The tube, twenty-two inches in diameter, provided the tremendous air flow to the engines needed during surface propulsion. It was imperative to find the cause of the leak because the valve might fail during night surface patrol, making it virtually impossible to dive. To find out what was wrong required someone to enter the ribbed pipe in the engine room and wiggle up through the wet, tortuously narrow opening, follow the conduit to the topside valve, and tighten a nut on the valve stem seal as the boat remained submerged. It was too risky to sit like a cork on the surface with the engines shut down, unable to dive because of a man in the induction pipe.

  “I didn’t like having somebody go up in there submerged under the conditions, so I did that myself,” recalled Executive Officer Robert McNitt. The fact that he was tall and slender helped. “I took a wrench and crawled in. You have to crawl like a snake through it. It was too small to get on your knees. I got all the way up there and found that I had an oversized wrench. Crawled back out again. If I’d had any sense, I’d have taken a rope with me.”

  McNitt slithered up the pipe a second time, tightened the lock nut, then backed out again. Still there was water leakage. The exec was stumped.

  Fluckey, studying the situation, posed a solution. “Have we looked at the zerk fitting?” he asked McNitt. The zerk, external to the main induction valve, was a small plug to which a grease gun could be attached in order to force grease into the valve. Replacing the zerk fitting stopped the leak.

  At Midway Lockwood disembarked and the Barb resumed its patrol. Now alone and unmarked, the boat headed west on the surface at seventeen knots toward enemy shipping lanes off the east coast of Formosa, a round-trip voyage of more than six thousand miles. The bridge atop the conning tower bristled with lookouts, each intently scanning the horizon for ships, submarines, or approaching aircraft, friend or foe. Down below radar operators searched for contacts beyond visual range.

  Less than a day into the voyage, mountainous seas and high winds slowed the sub’s progress, making for a roller coaster ride for the nine officers and seventy-one enlisted men aboard. For three days seventy-foot breakers and seventy-knot winds made it impossible to gain forward momentum. The wild surf crested and broke above the sub, crashing down in a gray blur on the conning tower where the lookouts and the captain—Waterman and Fluckey alternating duty—were lashed into the bridge superstructure. Repeatedly so much seawater was taken down the conning tower hatch that it grounded out a periscope-hoisting control panel, temporarily disabling the scope.

  Finally, on 12 March, the storm abated enough for the Barb to attain thirteen knots. But one of the boat’s propeller shafts began emitting a loud squeal, easily heard through the hull and a threat to future silent running when under enemy attack—a sobering thought to Waterman. For a week the submarine pushed wes
t into the Philippine Sea but made no contact with the enemy.

  Opportunity finally arrived on 24 March.

  ComSubPac had radioed an ULTRA directive for the Barb to intercept an enemy convoy at a specific location. ULTRAs were command dispatches to submarines on patrol, giving precise details of Japanese ship movements. Very few in the Navy knew where the information came from but it was very accurate. In fact, U.S. cryptanalysts had cracked the Japanese naval code. As the “ultra secret,” it gave the American Navy an unparalleled advantage in the Pacific that would remain throughout the war. The intelligence was so precise that the Navy knew the names of vessels leaving port, when they were embarking, what course they were taking, their final destinations, and their arrival times. Unfortunately the Navy had been unable early in the war to capitalize on the information due to torpedo problems and old-school tactics by senior captains.

  Until now.

  The Barb made haste on all four engines on an intercept course that took all morning and afternoon. As the sub neared its target, an enemy patrol plane spotted the Barb and jettisoned two bombs as the boat dove to 175 feet. Explosions rocked the boat but caused no damage. The captain kept the Barb submerged for an hour. When another bomb exploded at great distance, he ordered the sub to remain deep. Fluckey was beside himself. Fifteen minutes of submergence was enough in his book. Precious time was being lost. Matters boiled over in an animated debate in the wardroom. Lieutenant Weaver and others could hear every word. Fluckey was firm. The Barb should surface and head for the convoy. Waterman was just as firm. It was too risky because of aircraft; the Barb would stay down.

  The crew was on Waterman’s side for the most part. “Gene and Captain Waterman were polar opposites on tactics,” explained Weaver. “Though Gene and the captain had radically different ideas of how to operate a boat in wartime, these differences were never discussed between them in our presence. Captain wasn’t there when we heard Gene’s ideas, and vice versa. Gene’s ideas seemed a little radical, and in view of the fact Bonita never had a Japanese contact, we took them with a grain of salt.” Fluckey’s ideas were “far out,” as Weaver put it.

  But the lieutenant commander viewed a submarine as a kind of torpedo boat that ought to operate on the surface, where it could use its fast speed to outmaneuver ships in hit-and-run attacks and could dive quickly when planes approached, only to pop back up minutes later. He had other ideas too. When the Barb approached the east coast of Formosa and lookouts sighted a railroad bridge, Fluckey was inspired. “Gene wanted to take the rubber boat and a scuttling charge ashore to blow it up,” said Weaver. “He talked a lot about using rockets from the deck too.”

  Waterman, on the other hand, couldn’t shake the cautious regimen of his earlier training and politely overruled Fluckey at every turn. Executive Officer McNitt, though viewing the captain as too cautious, did not try to dissuade him. The captain had taught McNitt much about seamanship and was responsible for his rapid ascendancy to exec. Thus the exec was in no position now to question the skipper’s judgment.

  Junior officers like Weaver who hadn’t had much experience in fleet-type boats were confused. “We didn’t know who or what to believe,” he said.

  Despite tactical disagreements, Fluckey and Waterman were respectful of one another. “It would be very difficult to dislike either man and they got along very well on a personal basis, even though their philosophy on wartime operations was 180 degrees apart,” explained Weaver. “Captain told us Gene was a nice young man who would mature if he got a command, or if he didn’t, he should be flying a one-person airplane and not having eighty people depending on his judgment for their survival.”

  Ultimately, the Barb stayed down for nearly three hours following the attack by the plane. By the time the boat surfaced, all hope of overtaking the convoy was lost. Fluckey was supremely disappointed. The degree of his frustration was imparted later to Weaver and Lt. Paul Monroe in a private moment. “If I ever get command and stay down more than fifteen minutes for a Japanese plane, you are to kick me in the rear end and that’s an order!” he told the two officers.

  Discontinuing the search, the Barb turned back toward the Mariannas. Given the importance of a phosphate mining plant on Rasa Island that produced more than a hundred thousand tons of the explosive annually, Captain Waterman decided to reconnoiter the facility. The skipper thought it possible to bombard it with the sub’s 4-inch deck gun. If the gunnery crew were lucky, it might catch an ore ship being loaded and blast it as well.

  In the predawn darkness of 28 March, the sub moved in toward the coast, where it made radar contact with a ship. The Barb dived. At periscope depth, the captain identified it as the freighter Syona Maru and began closing for attack. The ship, however, acted erratically. Rather than preparing to dock, it moved off, circled the tiny island, stopped and started, and continually changed course abruptly. Waterman suspected a Q-ship—a vessel disguised as a transport but actually armed to the teeth, a decoy to lure submarines in close so they could be destroyed. Such ships had a very shallow draft so that torpedoes fired at them usually missed because so little of the hull was below the waterline. Waterman decided not to attack, turning his attention to the phosphate operations instead.

  The periscope view of the factory indicated operations had been expanded greatly from what was reported by another submarine the previous November. There were new barracks and homes for workers, a large roasting and processing plant, huge warehouses, conveyor assemblies, and steel hoists lining the dock. As the skipper began filming the target through the periscope, the Barb broached in plain view of the town, necessitating an emergency dive. The film, developed onboard, turned out to be blank; no prints could be made. After sunset the Barb surfaced and angled back toward the port. But the sea was too rough for an accurate bombardment.

  Captain Waterman turned back toward the mystery ship, still circling the island. The Barb got within 4,500 yards while the target continued to stop and start at irregular intervals. The skipper was convinced the ship was a listening post and had in fact picked up the Barb. “We felt he could hear us but not see us, and that he was cunningly drawing us closer to the beach, possibly for searchlights and shore batteries [to light up the sub],” noted the skipper in the ship’s log.

  Waterman began to lose confidence, according to Weaver.

  Captain was on the bridge. I could hear Gene talking to the crew down below in the control room since my station was in the conning tower on the phone. I heard the darndest commotion. It was Gene acting like a high school cheerleader, giving a pep talk to those around him—“The Barb was going to strike tonight. It would no longer be a virgin.” I thought it was a bit strange as it was a time of tension. Gene then came through the conning tower on his way to the bridge, where I could hear the conversation with Captain Waterman. They concluded the target was a Q-ship and Captain didn’t want to mess with him. But Gene said, “Johnny, you were the best torpedo shooter in Panama. Set the fish for three feet depth. We can’t miss. Let’s get him.”

  I felt Gene coerced Captain into firing.

  A few minutes before midnight the target stopped, giving the Barb an opening from 2,200 yards. Waterman fired three torpedoes from the bow tubes with very shallow depth-control settings. Within a minute the first hit aft. The second passed astern. The third hit under the smokestack with a loud explosion, breaking the ship in two. The stern sank in twenty seconds. The bow followed thirty seconds later. There was no doubt it was a Q-ship. Fluckey was ecstatic, as was Waterman and the rest of the crew. After more than two years patrolling both the Pacific and Atlantic, there was now no doubt that the Barb could claim officially it had sunk an enemy ship.

  The sub resumed patrols of shipping lanes linking Manila and the east coast of Formosa. False radar contacts provoked searches for bogus targets for days to come. When a distant plane was sighted on 13 April, the Barb dived. Waterman kept the sub down for more than two hours, to Fluckey’s great irritation. The skipper reasoned
that the plane was an advance scout for an approaching convoy and that staying submerged put the sub in position to sink passing warships. When none appeared, the Barb surfaced just as a dozen planes turned toward the boat. Waterman ordered an emergency dive to 150 feet and stayed down for another hour though the planes did not attack and went on their way. For the next week the submarine encountered no targets, just a single plane, necessitating another lengthy dive. This time the captain stayed down for more than three hours, using the time for torpedo maintenance.

  By 19 April the boat returned to Rasa. After dark the Barb exchanged recognition signals with the USS Steelhead (SS-280), which had just reconnoitered the phosphate operations. Both boats in a column a thousand yards apart simultaneously bombarded the docks and factory the following night. “The night was dark but clear and cloudless. Although the island and installations were clearly visible from the bridge, only a vague outline could be seen through gun telescopes,” Captain Waterman noted in the patrol log. “Closed to 3400 yards and commenced fire with the 4-inch gun. The first shot was a hit in the congested area of the island. Steelhead opened up with her 3-inch gun immediately and did some nice shooting. Continued closing to 2800 yards and opened up with our four 20 MM and two .50 Caliber guns. Steelhead joined with automatic guns and a respectable barrage resulted.”