On his watch, no man aboard the Barb earned a Purple Heart (awarded for having been wounded)-a stunning accomplishment at a time when half of the silent service's craft failed to make round trips. While willing, even eager, to go in harm's way-e.g., by searching for prey on the surface rather than submerged-Fluckey was not reckless. A 1935 graduate of Annapolis, Fluckey offers a grippingly detailed account of his command's hell-and-high-water feats, which won him the Congressional Medal of Honor, as well as four Navy Crosses. They also laid waste to a host of coastal installations, destroying Japan's largest paper mill as well as a sizable shipyard and, on one occasion, slipping ashore to blow up a 16-car military train (thereby becoming the only Americans to land on Japanese soil before the guns fell silent). All told, he and his well-trained crew sent over 85 Japanese vessels (including a carrier, a cruiser, and a frigate) to the bottom. Among the scores of US submarine skippers in WW II's Pacific theater, Fluckey, captain of the Barb on five war patrols, was credited with sinking the greatest tonnage of enemy shipping.
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