Why Commander Eugene Fluckey sent eight submariners ashore to blow up a Japanese train during WW2 — and they became the only US troops to conduct ground combat on Japanese home islands. This World War 2 story reveals how a submarine commander rewrote the rules of submarine warfare.
July twenty-second, nineteen forty-five. Commander Eugene Fluckey, captain of USS Barb, watched Japanese supply trains running along the Karafuto coastline from his periscope. Every submarine doctrine said submarines attacked ships, not trains. High Command would call this an unauthorized risk.
They were all wrong.
What Fluckey discovered that night wasn't about following doctrine. It was about adapting submarine capabilities in ways that contradicted everything the Navy taught. By the end of July twenty-third — the night eight sailors paddled ashore with fifty-five pounds of explosives — the US had conducted its only ground combat operation on Japanese sovereign territory during the entire Pacific War.
This mission proved submarines could project power beyond anti-shipping warfare. Fluckey also pioneered submarine-launched rockets, firing seventy-two at Japanese coastal targets. The principles disco
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