In August 1945, eight members of the crew of the USS Barb posed for a photo at Pearl Harbor holding up the submarine’s battle flag. The different patches on the flag represented the boat’s myriad accomplishments over 12 patrols in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters. Seventeen ships sunk, a Presidential Unit Citation awarded following its 11th patrol, and the Medal of Honor was awarded to the ship’s captain, Cmdr. Eugene Fluckey. But, most unusual, the flag also featured a kill marking for a train. Yes, a train.
On the USS Barb’s final patrol of the war, the eight men in the photo had destroyed a Japanese locomotive, a most unusual kill for a Navy submarine.
A few weeks earlier, the Gato-class submarine was patrolling the Sea of Okhotsk, off the shore of what is now Sakhalin Island but was then part of Japan’s Karafuto Prefecture. Within a month, the war would be over, but the USS Barb had already racked up an impressive combat record. Commissioned in 1942, the USS Barb was initially one of the few U.S. Navy submarines sent to the Atlantic theater. Over the course of five patrols, it recorded just one possible sinking of a German freighter before being sent to the Pacific in the fall of 1943, where the Barb would make its name as one of the most lethal submarines in the fleet.
Fluckey, the submarine’s commander, had joined the ship for its seventh patrol, and took command of the boat on April 28, 1944, ahead of its eighth mission. As Fluckey wrote in his 1992 account of his wartime service, Thunder Below!, he guaranteed Vice Adm. Charles Lockwood, commander of all submarines in the Pacific, at least five kills before departing; a promise which he fulfilled. In the first four patrols with Fluckey in command, the USS Barb sank more than a dozen Japanese Navy ships, including an aircraft carrier, as well as numerous other small vessels.
