July 19th, 1945.
0700 hours.
Off the Karafuto coast.
Commander Eugene Fluckey pressed his eye to the periscope of USS Barb and watched a Japanese supply train snake along the coastline like a living artery. A dark engine. A line of cars. Men and materiel moving north—forty to sixty soldiers per train, plus ammunition and supplies bound for a garrison that would happily feed those supplies into American bodies if the war dragged on long enough.
Fluckey was thirty-one. Five war patrols as Barb’s commander. Seventeen enemy ships already on the bottom. A Medal of Honor already pinned to his name from an earlier patrol when he drove Barb into water so shallow she couldn’t dive—minefields, destroyers, and a harbor full of ships the Japanese thought were untouchable.
He’d touched them anyway.
Now, in mid-1945, Japanese merchant shipping was thinning out. Submarines were running out of fat targets. For a captain like Fluckey—restless, inventive, allergic to “nothing to do”—that wasn’t an end.
It was a problem.
And Fluckey solved problems the way he fought wars: by turning them inside out until the enemy didn’t recognize what was happening.
For three days he watched the coastal rail line.
Counted schedules. Studied the beach approaches. Measured distance and darkness and patrol patterns. He could have surfaced and shelled the tracks with Barb’s deck gun—but the Japanese would repair rails by afternoon. He could have fired rockets—the Mark 51 launcher he’d convinced the Navy to bolt onto his deck—but rockets weren’t precise enough to guarantee a moving hit.
He didn’t want to damage the line.
He wanted to destroy a train.
Maximum disruption. Maximum shock. The kind of blow that made a whole coastline feel unsafe.
Submarines weren’t built for that.
So he built his own way.
On the evening of July 22nd, in Barb’s cramped forward torpedo room, Chief Gunner’s Mate Paul Saunders and Electrician’s Mate Third Class Billy Hatfield sat with a problem that felt insane until it didn’t.
“How do you blow up a moving train,” Hatfield said, “without being anywhere near it when it goes?”
Hatfield stared at a 55-pound scuttling charge—the kind of explosive meant to destroy the submarine if capture was imminent. He thought of a childhood trick—walnuts on railroad tracks, cracked open by a locomotive’s weight.
Then he said it.
“What if the train does the work?”
A pressure switch. Buried under the rail. The locomotive’s weight closing the circuit. The charge detonating directly under the boiler.
Fluckey examined what Hatfield and Saunders cobbled together: a salvaged microswitch, three dry cells wired in series, detonator leads—everything sealed inside an empty pickle jar to keep seawater out. When a train depressed the rail even a quarter inch, the circuit would close.
The locomotive would trigger its own death.
The engineering was elegant.
The mission was not.
To plant it, Barb would have to surface within a thousand yards of the Japanese coastline. A shore party would paddle rubber rafts in darkness, cross the beach, cross a road, climb the rail embankment, dig, wire, bury, and get back to the submarine before dawn.
If they were discovered, they’d be trapped on enemy soil with no support and no escape. If Barb was spotted in shallow water, she might not dive fast enough to survive.
Fluckey asked for volunteers.
Eighty hands went up.
He set rules that sounded cold but weren’t: unmarried men only. He refused to create widows for a stunt, no matter how useful the target looked on a chart. Strong swimmers. Calm heads. And—preferably—former Boy Scouts. Fluckey had been one himself and trusted that kind of training when plans went sideways.
He picked eight.
Saunders would lead. Hatfield would handle the device. The others brought a mix of skills: signaling, engines, muscle, nerve. They improvised digging tools from steel plates. Packed survival gear in case they had to flee inland. Even carried raw steaks—intelligence hinted at guard dogs along the rail line, and a steak might buy precious seconds.
Then they waited on weather.
Cloud cover was everything. Clear skies meant moonlight, and moonlight meant silhouettes—of rafts, of men, of a submarine too close to shore.
Four days of clear nights.
Then, on July 22nd, clouds began to cap the mountains.
Fluckey made the call.
Tonight.
At 2300, Barb crept toward the coastline on electric motors to reduce noise. By midnight she was within 950 yards of shore. Water depth: 36 feet—so shallow a crash dive could slam her into the bottom.
On deck, eight men in dark clothing stood over two rubber rafts.
Fluckey’s voice was low, steady.
“Go.”
The rafts hit the water at 0005 on July 23rd.
Paddles dipped silently. The shore was invisible, a darker shade of black. Twenty-five minutes to the beach. The surf was light. The cloud cover held.
At 0030, sand met rubber. The men dragged the rafts above the tide line, hid them behind driftwood and rock. Two stayed with the boats. Six moved inland.
They crossed high grass and uneven ground, careful with every step. A drainage ditch. A packed road. Then the rail embankment—gravel and crushed rock, rails running north-south like a blade.
And then the rails vibrated.
A train.
They dropped flat in the grass as a locomotive thundered past in blackout conditions—no headlight, no lantern. Fifteen freight cars. It passed within fifteen feet of them, steam hissing, wheels clacking, the earth shaking under their ribs.
When it faded south, Saunders waited, then signaled: move.
They climbed onto the embankment. Lookouts went north and south. Hatfield chose a straight section of track—no curves, no grade, maximum speed, no warning.
They dug.
Gravel came easy, then compacted earth and rock fought back. Every scrape sounded like a shout in the dark. Hatfield kept checking his watch. The clock was running.
At 0115, another train came—this one northbound. Again blackout. Again it roared past without seeing the tools scattered between rails.
Now there was no cushion of time. Only urgency.
By 0135, the hole was deep enough: twelve inches square, eight inches down. Hatfield lowered the scuttling charge, set batteries, wired the microswitch. He left the final connection undone until the last moment.
Lookouts returned. The team gathered tight.
Hatfield made the final connection.
The device was live.
They buried it, smoothed the ballast, erased their fingerprints from the landscape.
Then they moved—fast, low, silent—back across the road, back through the ditch, back through the grass to the rafts.
Ashore time: one hour forty minutes.
Too long, Fluckey would later admit, but the rails were harder than expected and the night was full of trains.
They pushed off.
Halfway back to Barb, Fluckey’s voice cut through the darkness from the conning tower—shouting through a megaphone.
“Paddle faster!”
Another train was coming.
The shore party could hear it now—the distant growl, building, fast. The timing was going to be catastrophically close.
The rafts churned water. Barb edged closer—now only 600 yards from shore, which shortened the paddle but pushed the submarine deeper into danger.
The train was less than a mile from the device.
Ninety seconds.
Fluckey had a choice he’d never forgive himself for making wrong: dive now and save the submarine, leaving eight men on the surface to die or be captured… or wait, exposed, in shallow water, for his men to reach the hull.
He waited.
The rafts reached Barb at 0146. Men scrambled up the wet steel like ghosts climbing into a coffin. Saunders was last. The rafts were cut loose—no time to recover them.
Hatches sealed.
Engines roared.
Barb turned away, clawing for deeper water.
At 0147, the northbound locomotive reached the switch.
Sixty-eight tons of steel pressed down.
The rail dipped.
The circuit closed.
And the coast erupted.
A fireball bloomed along the embankment so bright it looked like dawn arriving wrong. The locomotive’s boiler ruptured instantly. Metal flew. Cars piled into twisted wreckage. Ammunition cooked off, secondary explosions popping like angry gods.
Even from offshore, Barb’s crew could feel the sound in their bones—a rolling thunder that echoed off the mountains.
On Barb’s deck, sailors crowded to watch the fire burn against Japan’s far northern edge.
A submarine had just sunk a train.
Not shelled tracks. Not harassed a station.
Destroyed a moving military convoy on land by planting a trigger beneath the future.
And for a brief, stunned moment, everyone aboard understood what they’d done wasn’t just audacious.
It was a new kind of warfare.
They didn’t linger.
Searchlights began sweeping the water from shore. Barb was still on the surface, running hard, diesel engines overloaded, leaving a faint phosphorescent wake.
At 0200, the depth gauge finally reached 60 feet.
Fluckey gave the order.
“Dive.”
Barb slipped under. The searchlights continued to rake the surface above them, but the submarine was gone—silent, moving on electric motors, leaving nothing but smoke behind.
By dawn, the coast was still burning. Barb surfaced farther out and resumed patrol as if nothing had happened.
Because Fluckey still had days left.
And he intended to use every hour.
When Barb returned to Midway in early August, the crew assembled on deck in dress uniforms beside the boat’s battle flag—patches for ships sunk, symbols for rockets and gunfire, ribbons for citations.
And at the bottom center, a new emblem:
A Japanese locomotive.
The only submarine in history that could claim it.
Then, six days after Barb’s return, Hiroshima happened. Nine days later, Japan surrendered.
The war ended before Barb could do it again.
But the raid lived—because it proved something that would shape the next seventy years of naval war: submarines weren’t just torpedo hunters. They could strike ashore. They could launch rockets—one day missiles. They could insert teams. They could make nowhere safe.
Fluckey would later value one statistic above every ton of shipping destroyed, every ribbon, every newspaper headline:
Zero.
Zero Purple Hearts among the men who served under his command across those patrols. Zero casualties. He brought his crew home.
And on a night in July 1945, off a dark stretch of Japanese coastline, eight sailors in rubber rafts and one pickle jar full of batteries and explosive proved that innovation in war isn’t always a new weapon.
Sometimes it’s a new idea.
And sometimes the loudest explosion in history starts with something as quiet as a switch buried under a rail.
