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In 1973, the Italian submarine Enrico Tazzoli was sold for scrap for the bargain basement
price of $100,000. And that just seems an injustice, because that submarine,
a Gato class submarine that had been given to the Italian Navy by the United States in 1953,
was an extraordinary submarine who had seen some of the most extraordinary
service of the Second World War. And so the amazing record of the Enrico Tazzoli,
otherwise known as the USS Barb, the only US warship to invade the Japanese home islands,
and the only known submarine and US service to sink a… freight train, deserves to be remembered.
The USS Barb, named after a species of fish called the Barbos, was a Gato class diesel-electric
submarine, built by the General Dynamics Electric Boat Company of Groton Connecticut. It was laid
down in June of 1941 and commissioned July of 1942. It was 311 feet nine inches long. Displaced
1525 long tons, when surfaced. It had a maximum speed of 21 knots, a range of 11,000 miles. A crew
of six officers and 54 enlisted, and was armed with ten torpedo tubes, six forward and four aft.
The record of the USS Barb cannot be separated from the extraordinary man who commanded the
submarine's last five war patrols of the war. Eugene B. Fluckey, better known as Lucky Fluckey,
was one of the most gifted submarine skippers of the Second World War. He was a meticulous
planner and a daring officer who had a bold and innovative vision for how a combat submarine
should be used. A 1935 graduate of the United States Naval Academy, Fluckey had served aboard
a Battleship and a Destroyer before completing the Commanding Officer School at Submarine Base
New London in Connecticut. In January of 1944 he was given command of the USS Barb.
The Barbs record was nothing short of amazing, among its kills were a Japanese aircraft carrier,
a cruiser and a frigate. The Barb sank 29 enemy vessels just in the period from May of
1944 to August of 1945. According to Japanese records, the USS Barb sank more tonnage of
Japanese ships than any other US submarine of the war. On January 8th 1945, the Barb
set a record for the US submarine service, sinking six enemy vessels in a single day.
One of the most extraordinary submarine raids of the war occurred on January 28th of 1945.
Fluckey used a moonless night to sneak the USS Barb into a shallow minefield protected harbor
on the China coast that the Japanese had been using to shield their merchant vessels from US
submarines. He found thirty enemy vessels anchored there. He fired eight torpedoes and sunk more
tonnage of enemy ships in a single attack than any other single US submarine attack of the war,
and then he out dashed the pursuit through the minefields and made it back to open sea.
The daring attack earned Lucky Fluckey his second nickname, The Galloping Ghost of the China Coast.
The Navy commands faith in Fluckey showed in that they allowed him a rare fifth war
patrol commanding the USS Barb. For the most part, in the United States Navy,
a submarine commander was only allowed four war patrols, after which the Navy decided
that they would become either too cautious or too reckless. For this fifth mission,
Barb requested that the Navy install five 130 millimeter rocket tubes on the deck of the
USS Barb, giving the Barb unprecedented shore bombardment capability for a submarine. While
rockets and missiles are commonly fired from submarines today, the USS Barb was the first
US Navy submarine to successfully employ rockets, destroying several factories and towns along the
coast of Japan. One of the bombard mission's was so effective, that the Japanese reported
that they thought that they had been bombarded by at least six warships, and a submarine.
It was on this fifth patrol that Fluckey and the USS Barb went on perhaps their
most famous raid. Anchored off the coast of Japan, Fluckey watched through his periscope
as Japanese troop and supply trains moved along a railway along their coast. And so,
on a moonlit night, the USS Barb sent eight sailors, in a rubber raft,
to go on shore and plant 55 pounds of explosives under the tracks hooked to a detonator that would
explode when the weight of the locomotive pushed down on the rail. When the explosives went off,
the locomotive flew two hundred feet in the air and the entire train crashed down the hill into
the ocean. The USS Barb is the only known US submarine of the war, to sink a freight train.
And the action was the only US land operation on the Japanese home islands in the Second World War.
The record the Fluckey and the Barb show on the submarine's final battle flag of the war. Fluckey
himself won the Medal of Honor and an astonishing four Navy Crosses. In addition, the crew won two
more Navy Crosses, twenty-three Silver Stars, 23 Bronze Stars, four Presidential Unit Citations,
a Navy Unit Commendation, four Navy and Marine Corps medals, 82 Letters of Commendation Ribbons
and symbols representing 38 enemy vessels, and one locomotive...shown here at the bottom, destroyed.
The adventures of the USS Barb were so epic, that the President himself, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
asked to be copied on all of Fluckeys Patrol reports. Once while they were in Hawaii, FDR asked
Fluckey to drive the Barb at dangerous speeds, just so that the president could take a film of
the Barb going with all of its banners flapping in the breeze. But in the end, the success of
Fluckey and USS Barb was not just the luck of Lucky Fluckey, he was a meticulous planner he
made very good use of the available intelligence and his own skills of observation. He had a clear
and compelling vision of using a submarine as a fast torpedo boat that could submerge to escape,
rather than the general doctrine of just lying in wait to attack. To give you an idea of how
carefully he planned and managed his crew, when US torpedoes were having troubles with
their detonators, he and his crew dismantled the detonators on all of their torpedoes and
rebuilt them using stronger springs. so that they would be more likely to detonate. In the end,
Commander Fluckey was successful because he was good at what he did. And perhaps no statistics
shows that more clearly than the fact that in five war patrols in the US submarine service, one of
the most dangerous surfaces of the war, not one of Fluckey sailors was killed or seriously injured.
Eugene B. Fluckey eventually rose to the rank of Rear Admiral and served in among
other roles, the role as the Chief of Naval Intelligence. He retired from the Navy in 1972,
and he passed away in 2007, at the age of 93. Lucky Fluckey,
The Galloping Ghost of the China Coast. Gone, but not forgotten.
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