The Galloping Ghost (20 page)

“The sun rose at 7:00 a.m. It was dismal. One group of about nine hundred men had drifted far from the ship. I was one of these,” Thams told his
Barb
rescuers.

The gunner, while sharing a floating hatch cover with four other survivors, watched as Japanese frigates came toward them, pulling men from the sea. “With the transport reasonably close our hopes of rescue soared. Unfortunately, it did not happen. When the English prisoners of war realized this, some started singing ‘Rule Brittania.' Others joined in. Also the Australians. It rose to a great crescendo. Words cannot describe this act of defiance. Why they did not fire on us at close range I will never understand. The three ships turned away. We watched the freighter as long as it was visible, then we were all alone. All hope of rescue disappeared. Men began to die at once.”

On the second day of their ordeal, 14 September, the men were in need of a miracle. “Oil covered us from head to feet, clogging our eyes and ears,” continued Thams. “It coated the surfaces of the rafts and wreckage, making
them very slippery and difficult to hang on to. We had no food or water and while we survived long periods of hunger on the railway, thirst was another matter. Many gave up. Scores succumbed and gulped seawater. Men who had already endured unspeakable hardship and grief now had to endure the unnerving sight of their own mates going crazy. There was nothing we could do for them.”

On the third day the
Pampanito
passed through the wreckage and began taking as many aboard as it could. The
Sealion II
also arrived and helped. But there were far too many who had to be left behind.

On the fourth day only four men were left in Thams's group on two rafts. They found a fifth, a sailor who had survived the sinking of the Australian cruiser
Perth
in the Battle of the Java Sea, the building of the railroad, and the sinking of the
Rakuyo
. But overnight, the sailor disappeared, as did two others.

By the morning of the fifth day all that remained were Thams and an Englishman, sitting on a half-sunken hatch cover. They were semi-delirious and dozing a lot. “Almost alone in the sea, my English mate and I hang on we did, though chances of rescue were nil,” Thams continued. “The sea was starting to toss our hatch cover about. Neither of us had much strength left and it was extremely difficult to climb back on the slippery raft. My eyes were covered in oil and I used a small piece of wood to scrape the oil from my eyelids. A shark circled us for about fifteen minutes, then it was gone. We were not unduly concerned. We were past the stage of worrying about death by shark attack or drowning.”

The sea turned angry by the sixth day. Both men caught a few raindrops but not enough to quench their thirst. In the late afternoon the Englishman was the first to see a submarine heading toward them.

It was the
Barb
.

“I waved my shorts,” said Thams. “I had removed them about the fourth day. They were chafing me. And they became our flag if ever we had the opportunity to wave at something. I can still see the submarine, like some gray ghost, as it came our way, blowing out spray as it plowed through the waves. There was a sailor in blue with a white cap. When a rope was thrown, I placed it under my armpits. Another two hours and I would have drowned.”

Thams was the last man pulled aboard.

The weather worsened as the
Barb
and the
Queenfish
searched through the late afternoon of 17 September for more survivors. As darkness fell wind
velocity exceeded sixty knots, tossing up waves more than thirty-five feet high. Lookouts and officers of the deck used lanyards to tie themselves to the bridge to keep from being washed overboard. In the chance that survivors were still alive, Fluckey was determined to try and find them. “It was a dangerous thing on a submarine,” explained McNitt. “You can be pooped easily. We had to put the seas on the quarter, these huge seas running. We had to close the hatch almost every time when the sea flooded the conning tower, with the watch officer standing there with his foot on the hatch to close it. When the water subsided he'd let it open again, close it again. We were all drowned, soaked. We kept the searchlight on in the rain and the wind and the gale searching all night.”

They saw nothing. A search all the next day yielded no other survivors. By nightfall the
Barb
gave up and submerged so those below could recover from the battering they had taken for more than twenty-four hours.

At dawn the
Barb,
with its fourteen survivors, and the
Queenfish
, with its eighteen, laid a course for recently captured Saipan. En route Donnelly, the pharmacist mate, hardly slept in order to attend to the survivors. They continually expressed their gratitude while recovering a sense of humor. “I take back all I said about you Yanks,” laughed one. Another joked, “As soon as I can I'm going to write my wife [in Australia] to kick the Yankee out—I'm coming home.”

The real hero of the patrol was McNitt. “The challenge [of locating the survivors] was like finding a needle in a haystack,” Tuck Weaver recalled years later. “Bob's knowledge and skill not only saved thirty-one lives but also placed
Queenfish
and
Barb
in position to intercept the convoy.”

On 24 September 1944 the two submarines arrived at Saipan. The
Barb
moored against the
Queenfish
, which had tied up alongside the sub tender USS
Fulton
(AS-11).

As the survivors prepared to disembark for treatment at a hospital,
Barb
crewmen and officers collected three hundred dollars—every cent that was aboard—to give them. Don Miller, second-class
Barb
torpedoman, saw the survivors off as hundreds of Navy men and Marines stood by and cheered. The men, wobbly and thin, were dressed in white navy hats and clean khaki dungarees. A dozen, including Thams, were able to walk. Two others were brought up on stretchers. Each insisted on clasping the hand of Captain Fluckey as they passed, tears of gratitude rolling down their cheeks. He choked up as well.

Said Miller, “A lot of tears were in the crews' and ex-POWs' eyes, very emotional for all of us.”

Saipan didn't mark the end of the war patrol. Rather, rest and relaxation would have to wait until both the
Barb
and the
Queenfish
made the week-long voyage southeast to the burgeoning Navy base on Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands in the Southwest Pacific. The
Barb
took on an extra torpedo for one of its forward tubes since wolf pack Commander Swinburne planned a little gun action against Japanese-controlled Wake Island en route. Three days into the mission, however, ComSubPac negated the bombardment, ordering the boats to Majuro without delay. There, the scene was far removed from the luxury the submariners had enjoyed at their preferred “barn”—Pearl Harbor and the hotel on Waikiki Beach. Majuro was quite the antithesis.

The atoll is just north of the equator, hot and humid, “a place much easier to forget than remember,” explained Tuck Weaver. Conditions were miserable, agreed Fluckey in a letter to Marjorie. “Reserved this morning to answer a few of your letters, if the ants and gnats don't carry me off. Coco Solo and its sand flies were insignificant compared to these gnats. They're everywhere, unbearable at night. Crawling all over you, getting in every bit of hair on your body. Even when we mix a drink, the bugs have to be picked out before a sip.”

To give the submariners a place to swim, explosives were used to blast out a section of reef. The coral was so sharp the men had to wear shoes to get to the water. “Majuro was a very austere place,” recalled Max Duncan. “The quarters for officers and crew were Quonset huts. The skippers had a larger one. One thing I remember is that the thing to do at night, after the movies, was to throw beer cans on the metal hut roofs and yell ‘depth charge!' Not funny very long.”

The foremost thing on everyone's mind on arrival was the “the mail buoy,” a metaphor for mail collected and waiting for the men at scattered island bases about the Pacific. Letters and packages—lots of them—were dispensed immediately. For Gene Fluckey, it was a chance to relax and finally catch up with his family in Annapolis—and get news of his safety back to them. “Between us'uns,” he wrote, “let me know if you read anything published in the newspapers about Australian and British survivors being rescued by submarines. If so, I'll have some interesting dope for you. If not, don't mention it.”

One of the letters to Gene was distressing. Marjorie had suffered three diabetic blackouts in the span of a few days. One had occurred when no one was home but seven-year-old Barbara, who saved her mother's life. Marjorie
assured her husband the problem was under control and not to worry. Fluckey wrote back, unable as he was to phone home. “Hon, you can give me more scares than I'd have attacking Tokyo single-handed with a brick bat. Please be careful and take your tests as you promised me.” The skipper was impressed by his daughter's ability to adapt in a moment of crisis. “She's got so much more on the ball than I had at her age,” he wrote.

One of the facts of wartime was tight censorship to prevent operational details from getting back to the enemy. Fluckey, among the censors in his boat, described the process in a letter to Marjorie on the way to Majuro. “The wardroom is jammed with everyone including Commander Swinburne, dashing off a letter to respective wives. Most of the time they're jibber jabbering about what's confidential and what's not. Whether they can write this or that—and I bat them down. It's a shame, 'cause so many interesting things happen.”

Captain Fluckey had a nickname for his daughter after his favorite bird, the bobolink. “Barbolink” had gotten into the custom of sending her father treasured Crayola drawings and the Sunday comics, which he took along on patrol. In a letter thanking her, he added, “Say, wasn't it nice of Uncle Sam to name our submarine after you?”

During the layover on Majuro, the skipper asked Max Duncan to take an early morning ride with him on a Catalina flying boat to watch a practice bombing by a carrier group on an island about an hour's flight away. “The strike force was from a carrier group that used the small Japanese-occupied island, not heavily defended, as a warm-up for major assaults,” explained Duncan. “The strike was not on time so the Dumbo pilot flew in closer to get a good view of the island. The shore batteries opened up, the carrier plane strike was cancelled and the Dumbo beat a hasty retreat back to Majuro.” On the way the “zoomies”—the pilots—offered Fluckey a chance to fly the plane in exchange for a sub ride. He compared the experience to “driving a truck.”

Back on Majuro a ship's picnic was well under way when the captain and his officers arrived on the back of a loaded beer truck. With a band playing, crewmen lustily sang “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow.” The skipper had just been promoted to full commander and the crew decided to christen him properly by bearing him off to the ocean. “I dunked six of them before they finally threw me in—shows you what jujitsu can accomplish,” he smirked in a letter home. “Then with so many soaked down, they decided the other officers shouldn't be dry if the skipper was wet and all the officers were tossed in. And so the picnic went on, playing football with coconuts, drinking beer, grilling steaks, a few innings of softball.”

Fluckey, whom Admiral Lockwood had recommended for a Navy Cross, the Navy's highest honor, for his first war patrol, thought it possible that his just completed second patrol would earn him a second Navy Cross. Sinking five ships was the standard for earning one. Another sterling run could put the crew in line for a Presidential Unit Citation, a much-coveted award extended by President Roosevelt. But this time, the
Barb
would have to do without its remarkable navigator. Bob McNitt had received orders to naval postgraduate school in Annapolis. For the exec, who was in
Barb
for five war patrols, the timing was perfect since the fall semester was about to begin.

Fluckey needed another executive so Lt. James G. Lanier, who had made the last two runs, moved up. The captain and the reserve officer “clicked together,” as Gene put it. Lanier was a graduate of the University of Alabama, and his family came from a nautical tradition as owners of a big shipbuilding yard in Pascagoula, Mississippi. He also had been schooled by McNitt in his navigation techniques.

Making the
Barb
's upcoming run was newcomer Lt. Cdr. Tex Lander, a prospective commanding officer assigned to gain experience under Fluckey before getting his own boat. The Navy also intended to infuse the
Barb
with many new enlisted men. “I told the squadron commander no one wanted to go and that I didn't intend to transfer anyone,” Fluckey wrote Marjorie. “At this he gave me a long song and dance about their health being imperiled if they stayed aboard too long and ordered me to transfer a certain number of old hands. These practically cried on my shoulder at having to leave and swore that if they were still around Gooneyville [Midway] when we came through again, they'd be waiting on the dock with the sea bags and would expect to be taken aboard, having fully recovered.”

One of those on the list was Buell Murphy, who had been aboard for nine patrols. “The great big gunners mate came around to me bawling like a baby, saying I could do anything to him, stick him in the bilges, disrate him, God knows what else—but please don't take him off the
Barb
—it would break his heart. That got me—I scratched his name off the list.”