By the summer of 1945, the Pacific had shrunk.

On maps in Washington and Pearl Harbor, the ocean no longer looked like a vast, indifferent blue. It looked like lanes. Allied shipping lanes. Submarine patrol lanes. Bomber flight lines arcing out from island airfields toward the home islands of Japan.

Japan, once an empire that had stretched from Manchuria to the Solomons, was now a fortress of four main islands and a handful of blood-soaked rocks. Its carrier fleet lay on the bottom of the sea. Its cities were being burned out one by one by B-29 Superfortresses flying from Tinian and Saipan. Oil was gone. Food was running out. And yet, the war did not end.

In Tokyo, the militarists promised one more battle. One final decisive clash. One hundred million loyal hearts beating as one. Better to die than surrender.

Out on patrol in the northern Pacific, Commander Eugene Bennett Fluckey, U.S. Navy, looked through a periscope and saw something else entirely:

Empty sea lanes, shattered ports—and little coastal freighters hugging the shoreline, carrying the last threads that held Japan together.

He didn’t see honor. He saw targets.

The USS Barb had already lived a war’s worth of stories.

By 1945 it was on its 12th war patrol. Under Fluckey’s command, it had sunk more enemy ships than most submarine skippers dared dream of: tankers, troopships, escorts. Its battle flag was crowded with little white silhouettes, each a kill.

But the big game was gone now. The heavy cruisers and aircraft carriers and fat troop transports that had once plowed confidently across the Pacific were either sunk or hiding.

What was left were the coasters.

Small freighters, tramps and colliers and little tankers that crept along the ragged rim of Japan itself. They hugged the coast so closely that their wakes sometimes broke on the rocks. Above them, patrol planes circled. In front of them, minefields waited. Shore batteries watched.

If you wanted to starve Japan, this was the meat you had to cut. And to get at it, you had to go where no submarine skipper in his right mind wanted to be: shallow water, within sight of land, where the bottom was never more than a few dozen feet below your keel and the sky was never clear of enemies.

The charts the Barb carried for the waters around northern Honshu and Hokkaido were as much warning as guide. “Unsurveyed.” “Poorly charted.” “Reports of mines.” Fluckey’s smile just got tighter.

He was not built for sitting out the last act of a war.

At 35, Eugene “Lucky” Fluckey had the face of a schoolteacher and the brain of an engineer wrapped around the instincts of a cheetah. He hated waste—of fuel, of torpedoes, of chances.

Submarines were supposed to be hunter–killers. Their job, according to the manual, was to find enemy ships, fire their torpedoes, and disappear. They were not supposed to stick around under coastal batteries or fire guns at shore targets. They were definitely not supposed to think like raiders, creeping ashore.

Fluckey’s private opinion of the manual was that it made decent kindling.

Before the Barb left on what would be her final patrol, Fluckey sent a message to headquarters that made the staff in Pearl Harbor blink and then read it again to make sure they weren’t misinterpreting the Navy’s encryption:

REQUEST FIVE-INCH ROCKET LAUNCHERS FOR DECK MOUNT OPERATIONS STOP INTENT TO ATTACK COASTAL INSTALLATIONS STOP.

Submarines didn’t carry rockets. That was the sort of thing you bolted to landing craft and fired at beaches in the first waves of an assault. The Pacific Fleet staff could have said no.

Instead, they looked at the tonnage column next to Barb’s name and decided this was not a man whose ideas you dismissed lightly.

Somewhere in a depot, a few Army-pattern rocket launchers and crates of 5-inch spin-stabilized projectiles were “misdirected” to a submarine tender.

In a shipyard bay, welders shook their heads and shrugged and burned new metal onto Barb’s sleek deck. A crude launcher took shape—rails and brackets and wiring spliced into firing circuits never meant for such work.

When they were done, Barb’s bow looked like something out of a science fiction pulp. A steel shark that had sprouted claws.

The crew loved it.

“Sea-to-shore artillery,” the torpedomen joked.

“Hope they don’t blow our own conning tower off,” the chief muttered, inspecting the wiring.

Fluckey just ran his hand along the rails and imagined what a salvo of rockets would look like rising toward a Japanese village that thought itself safe.

In June 1945, Barb poked her periscope up a mile off the coast of Hokkaido.

The shoreline lay in a gray dawn band—a few low buildings, a factory chimney, a thin thread of rail. The charts listed a name: Shari. A small town. A nothing place.

But smoke curled from that chimney. There was coal piled at a dock. Barges moved. A freighter sat in the shallow harbor, tucked in as if hiding behind the land.

Too shallow for torpedoes. Too close for comfort.

A normal submarine skipper would have logged the contact and crept away.

Fluckey took a bearing, ran a rough mental plot, and ordered:

“Surface. All ahead one-third.”

It was like pulling a haunted house up from the sea. One minute the water was flat. The next, green-painted steel broke through, shedding sheets of seawater. Men poured out of hatches, soaked, scrambling to stations.

The night was thick enough that Barb’s silhouette was just a darker shape against the shore. No searchlights. No sirens. The Japanese didn’t expect trouble from the sea at this hour.

“Range?” Fluckey called.

“Five thousand yards, Captain.”

“Open rocket shutters.”

Voices relayed. Switches clacked. The launchers on the deck came alive with a faint hum.

“Five salvos, rapid fire. Load ‘em all.”

Rockets slid into place. They were fat, heavy things compared to torpedoes, but there was something almost joyful in the way they sat there, like punches cocked.

“Fire.”

The first salvo of rockets in submarine history leapt from Barb’s deck in a shrieking blur.

They rode invisible rails of force up and away, leaving white streaks in the dark as their motors burned. Halfway to the shore, their sustainer motors cut, and they arced silently downward.

When they hit the little town, the night opened.

Flames spurted from factory roofs. A storage shed blew apart, its walls pinwheeling. One rocket hit the freight pier, showering splinters and crates into the water. Another slammed into the rail yard, detonating among parked cars.

Onshore, men stumbled from barracks in confusion, looking seaward in time to see nothing but shadows and the red pulses of fire where buildings had been.

By the time the first shore gun crew reached its post, cranking elevation and traverse, Barb had already flashed her remaining rockets and was sliding back under the waves.

From the Japanese point of view, it made no sense.

Submarines did not come in this close. Submarines did not fire rockets into towns and then disappear before anyone could even swing a gun around.

In three weeks, Barb hit four coastal towns with surprise rocket barrages. Fishing ports. Little industrial sites. A station with a fuel dump. The rockets weren’t terribly accurate, but accuracy wasn’t the point. The psychological shock was.

Coast-watch reports began to mention “phantom shelling.” The Imperial Navy reported, baffled, that no American destroyers were in the area.

A ghost was stalking the shoreline.

For most men, that would have been enough mischief for one patrol.

Not for Eugene Fluckey.

One night, periscope up off the island of Karafuto (Sakhalin), Fluckey saw something that offended him personally:

A train.

It was a fat one—locomotive and fifteen, sixteen cars—its plume of smoke trailing across the night like a comet’s tail. It rattled along a coastal track just inland, cars square in his lens.

He watched it for a long moment in the green glow of the scope optics, tracking its movement.

Railway lines along the Japanese coast were vital. They carried coal, troops, food, and the last dribble of goods between northern and southern commands.

He could not reach it.

His torpedoes were for water. His gun could maybe lob a few shells inland, but the chances of hitting a fast-moving train on an embankment were slim at best, suicidal at worst. Rockets were too short-ranged and unguided.

The train had all the superiority of someone standing on a second-floor balcony while you stood in the street below with a knife.

Back in the control room, he stood for a while, hands clasped behind him, listening to the boat breathe. The soft murmur of air through the ducts. The low whine of a motor.

“We’re going to attack that train,” he said quietly.

Executive Officer Garth asked, “With what, sir?”

“Us,” Fluckey said.

The boat went very, very still.

He put out a call for volunteers.

He didn’t really need to. When the word went around that the captain wanted to send a landing party ashore on the Japanese home islands, eighty hands went up and eighty men crowded into the wardroom, eager and pale.

Fluckey measured them with a glance. He wasn’t looking for the bravest or the deadliest. He was looking for something else.

“Any of you ever been Boy Scouts?” he asked.

There was a ripple of laughter, then a forest of hands again.

“Good,” he said. “I want men who can read a compass and find their way in the dark.”

He took an electrician’s mate, because he understood wiring. A torpedoman, because he knew explosives and was built like a mule. A quartermaster, because he could read terrain and charts. A gunner’s mate, because he was steady under pressure. A cook, because he was wiry and quiet and needed looking after.

Eight men total.

His weapons officer produced the device that would be their main weapon: a 55-pound scuttling charge—a concentrated explosive designed to sink Barb herself if she ever had to be abandoned.

They could use it instead to blow a section of track and whatever rolled over it into scrap. If they lived long enough.

They rehearsed on paper, on the wardroom table. A rough sketch of a coast, a line for the tracks, circles for sentries that might or might not be there.

“Time from surfacing to being on the beach?” Fluckey asked.

“Ten minutes if the sea’s calm,” one of the oarsmen said.

“Time from setting the charge to first possible train?”

“We don’t know their schedule exactly, sir,” the exec said. “But last night’s train was at 0100. Could be earlier tonight.”

“You’ll dig the hole under the rails, wire the detonator to a pressure switch,” Fluckey said, tapping with a pencil. “Set the switch under the outside rail. Train comes. Wheels go down. Weight closes the circuit. Boom.”

He looked up at his men.

“This is voluntary,” he said quietly. “We’re going into enemy territory, gentlemen. If you get caught, we cannot come and get you. You will be alone, and you will likely die. Anyone who wants to back out, this is the time.”

No one moved.

“All right,” he said. “Saddle up.”

July 23, 1945.

The waters off Karafuto were black glass under a starless sky when Barb rose from beneath.

The hatch whispered open. The night smelled of kelp and cold and the faint, sour tang of a tidal flat. The shoreline was so close they could hear waves slapping stones.

Eight men emerged, faces blackened with soot, gear slung. They moved in a kind of queasy coordinated dance across the slick deck, bundling inflatable rafts over the side.

“Good hunting,” Fluckey said. His voice was low. His hands, gripping the bridge railing, were white at the knuckles.

The rafts whispered away toward the darker line of the beach.

On shore, the eight-man team dragged their rubber boats above the tideline, then paused, crouched, listening.

There were no shouts. No dogs. No lights except one weak bulb far inland, marking some kind of outbuilding.

“Let’s move,” whispered Chief Paul Saunders, the senior man. His voice was barely more than breath. “We’ve got maybe an hour.”

They pushed inland through scrub and low trees, hearts thudding. The night pressed on them like a weight. Every snapped twig sounded like a rifle shot in their own ears.

Ten minutes of cautious scrambling brought them to the embankment.

The rails rose above them, dark steel against a slightly less dark sky.

Three men clambered up to stand watch on either side, eyes straining. The others slid down under the track, shovels and bare hands working fast to claw a shallow trench in the ballast between the ties.

The scuttling charge was heavy. It took two of them to manhandle it into position, wedged under the outside rail at the base of the embankment. The electrician opened his kit, pulling out wire, pliers, a jury-rigged pressure switch about the size of a cigarette pack.

“Come on, come on,” muttered Billy Hatfield, the youngest of the team, fingers numb as he stripped insulation with his teeth.

A sound shivered through the rails.

A faint vibration, then a distant, rhythmic rumble.

“Train,” hissed a lookout. “From the south.”

It was early.

Panic threatened to unravel them. The explosive was in place but the circuit wasn’t finished. The pressure switch lay in Hatfield’s hands, wires flaring like nerves.

“You got thirty seconds, kid,” Saunders hissed. “After that, we’re hauling you out of there charge or no charge.”

Hatfield swallowed. His mouth was dry. He jammed the little switch under the rail, fingers fumbling. The idea was simple enough—force from the train wheels would press the rail down onto the switch, completing the circuit and firing the detonator. Simple on paper. Monstrously demanding when your hands were slick with sweat and your ears were filled with the growing thunder of approaching steel.

“Got it!” he whispered at last.

“Let’s go!”

They scrambled back into the scrub, boots slipping on loose gravel. They ran, bent double, away from the tracks, toward the dark ribbon of beach where the sea hissed and the invisible shape of Barb waited.

Behind them, the sound of the train grew, a living thing of iron and steam. The clack-clack of wheels over rail joined the chuff of the engine. A whistle blew—two short blasts.

“Faster,” Saunders gasped.

The rafts loomed out of the dark just as the locomotive entered the section of track above the charge.

From Barb’s bridge, Fluckey watched through binoculars, his breath fogging the lenses, his imagination filling in the things the night hid. He could see the pale line of the embankment, the faint silver of rails. He heard the train before he saw it, the low thunder rolling across the water.

The locomotive appeared, a darker bulk against the rising land, smoke trailing.

It passed the bend.

The earth lifted.

The charge detonated with a flash so bright it momentarily turned the night to noon. The blast shoved a fist of sound through the air that you felt in your chest as much as your ears. The locomotive jumped, then came apart, its boiler exploding in a gout of steam and flame. Cars behind it, laden with troops and supplies, lifted off the rails as if a giant hand had flicked them. Metal screamed, bending beyond its design, and railcars tumbled down the embankment in a twisted ballet.

For one unforgettable second, the entire line of railway was a silhouette cut out of fire.

On shore, their faces lit by the inferno, villagers and soldiers turned toward the sea where the rumbling shape of a submarine loomed on the surface like a shadow.

Then Japanese shore guns woke up.

White muzzle flashes stabbed from bunkers. Shells screamed overhead, geysers of water leaping up near Barb.

“Take her down!” Fluckey snapped.

The hatch clanged shut. Valves spun. The boat slid under as the sea above erupted.

Shell bursts hammered the surface where it had been, too high, too late.

In the control room, men listened to the distant boom-boom-boom of shore batteries and the faint, fading metallic screams of a dying train.

On the deck, Barb’s battle flag snapped in the wake. It already bore silhouettes of merchant ships, a cruiser, two warship factories (for rocket attacks). When they returned from this patrol, the ships’ yeoman would sew on a new symbol. A little locomotive.

No other American submarine in history would ever earn that.

After the war, when the records were tallied and the medals given out, the official histories would say that U.S. submarines sank more than 60 percent of Japan’s merchant fleet. They would list the Barb’s tonnage: 17 ships, including an aircraft carrier, a cruiser, tankers, transports.

They would note that Commander Eugene Fluckey received the Medal of Honor for a previous patrol off Namkwan Harbor, when he had taken Barb into an enemy anchorage and wreaked havoc, and the Navy Cross for that last patrol with its rocket attacks and its train.

But those are just numbers and decorations.

What isn’t as easily expressed in statistics is what drove a man like Fluckey to bolt rocket launchers to his deck and send Boy Scout sailors ashore to plant bombs under enemy trains at a point in the war when the great engines of American industry had already guaranteed victory.

Part of it was professional: the knowledge that every bridge cut, every train derailed, every power line brought down saved American lives on some future beach—and saved Japanese civilians from yet more months of starvation and bombing.

Part of it was simple predatory joy: the satisfaction of outthinking and out-daring an enemy who thought all the moves were already written.

And part of it was the restless refusal to accept the idea that any place could be a safe rear area for a regime that had dragged half the world into war.

When Barb’s men gathered for reunions decades later, they told the story of the train raid the same way sailors always tell their best tales—with laughter and profanity and lingering pride.

They remembered paddling like madmen in collapsing rubber rafts, the cold biting their hands as they pulled, the train’s noise behind them swelling like a nightmare. They remembered diving for the deck as the blast went off, feeling the hot breath of the explosion on their backs. They remembered hauling themselves up the rope ladder dripping, flopping onto Barb’s steel deck and hearing Fluckey shout down the hatch:

“We just sunk a train!”

Even fifty years later, the line still got a cheer.

On Barb’s battle flag, now preserved in a museum, the little locomotive silhouette still sits among the ships and factories, a quiet, absurd, perfect symbol of a war where steel sharks fired rockets at villages and sailors blew up trains in the night.

A reminder that sometimes the most effective weapon in a global industrial conflict isn’t a new technology or a bigger bomb, but a commander willing to look at the rulebook, shrug, and say:

“What else can this boat do?”

Eugene “Lucky” Fluckey died in 2007, age 93, having outlived almost everyone who had tried to kill him. In his memoir, Thunder Below!, he summed up his approach simply:

“We were not content to attack only what the enemy gave us. We went looking for what he thought we couldn’t reach.”

On one summer night in 1945 off the coast of Sakhalin, eight sailors with Boy Scout skills and dirty faces proved him right—using a submarine to kill a train, and writing a footnote in history that still makes naval officers smile and shake their heads.

Because after all the statistics and tonnage and strategy, there remains that image: a long Japanese train, punctual, heavy with war, racing down a dark coastal line in its own backyard—completely unaware that beneath the black water a steel predator is waiting, not with torpedoes this time, but with a bomb, a plan, and a captain crazy enough to turn the ocean into a launch point for the most unlikely raid of the Pacific War.