Following is a slightly edited transcript of an interview with CAPT
Max Duncan, USN, (Ret) The interview was conducted in Savannah,
GA in May of 2014 as an oral history for the Naval Submarine League.
Some explanatory notes have been provided by the editor in brackets.
Interviewers – RADM Tom Robertson, USN, (Ret) and CAPT Jack
Mead, USN, (Ret)
Max Duncan was a member of the crew of the USS Barb for four war patrols, under Commander Gene Fluckey who received of the Medal of Honor and four Navy Crosses. Max served 23 years in the Navy, had three major commands, and received a Silver Star. In 2015, Max attend- ed the Naval Submarine League’s Annual Symposium and participated as a Living History Exhibit, regaling attendees with his sea stories. In January 2017, Max passed away. He was a member of the Naval Sub- marine League Legacy Society (people who have made a bequest to the NSL in their estates), so the NSL has planted a tree in his honor at the US Naval Academy.
The USS Barb (SS-220) was a Gato class submarine. Keel laid 6/7/41 in Groton, CT; commissioned 7/8/42 with LCDR John R. Wa- terman in command. She had 12 war patrols, with Rear Admiral Gene Fluckey, then a Commander, in command for her last five. On the last patrol, the crew blew up a train, which was the only combat action con- ducted by Americans on Japanese soil during World War II.
Interviewer: So, Max, for starters, could you please talk about the circumstances of your interest in the Navy and in becoming a submari- ner?
Duncan: Yes. I was born and raised in Western North Carolina, a small town, Forest City. And I wanted to go to the Naval Academy when I got out of high school. I wasn’t old enough. I had to wait a year. So I went to The Citadel for a year and I ended up with two plebe years,
going to the Naval Academy in the summer of 1938, Class of ’42. And my interest in submarines really started at the end of my first year at the Academy, plebe year. During June week (with my future wife and my fiancé since we were in kindergarten together), they had an O-boat [a class of submarine] at the Naval Academy. And we went down on board, and they were cooking navy bean soup, and that navy bean soup and submarines sold me. I wanted to go into submarines. When I graduated, at that stage of the game, the rules were that you could not go into the submarines or go flying until you had two years at sea on a ship and qual- ified officer-of-the-deck, and the engineering, and all the requirements of ensign in the 1930s. And therefore, I had to go to a surface ship. Also, in those days, the assignments you got from the Naval Academy when you graduated were determined by lot. And you drew a number. In my case, 1 to 564, and I was fortunate enough to draw number 20, which meant I could’ve had any duty station that had an ensign requirement in the Navy. At that stage of the game, the war was going to be in Europe in the Atlantic, and therefore I wanted a new light cruiser, east coast. And they gave me such a new light cruiser, it hadn’t even been built yet!
So they sent me to an old cruiser, and I went to the Milwaukee. We patrolled in the South Atlantic in the 4th fleet. I kept trying to get off and go to submarine school, because all the rules were lifted on April 1, 1942, including the requirement that you couldn’t get married. So I have a lot of classmates that were married shortly after 1 April of 1942. Finally, we got an exec on board this cruiser, that had been a submarine skipper in Manila during the beginning of the war, but he was one of the submarine skippers that didn’t quite cut it during the earlier part of the war, so they sent him back to surface craft, and he was the exec of the cruiser. But he was very understanding when Gene Barnhardt, my classmate, and I wanted to go to submarines. He got me to go into submarines in late ‘43. Of course, when I went to sub school, I was a full lieutenant and there- fore had time at sea. Most of the class were very junior officers that had just come into the Navy. Upon graduation from sub school, I went out to Midway to get in a relief crew, because I was a so-called senior officer at that time and entering the submarine force, and most of them were billets for ensigns. But I was fortunate because Gene Fluckey came in and a classmate of mine was going back to new construction. Captain Fluckey agreed to take me, and that’s when I fell in the briar patch.
Interviewer: So, Max, please describe your path to qualifications in
submarines.
Duncan: Well, as I said, I had been qualified as officer-of-the-deck on the cruiser and had all the sea-going stuff. One of the things that I always appreciated very much is both Captain Fluckey and the exec Bob McKnitt were very generous to me, in the sense that I was standing top watch officer-of-the-deck before we got to the South China Sea on my first patrol. [Later in this interview, Max will refer to his first underway, which preceded his first patrol.] I had only been aboard probably about a month, because it’s a long way from Pearl to the South China Sea. In those days, we had to do it at slow speed. So the first patrol, I was quali- fying in the various places on the boat and all the systems in those days. Why? The boats were such that you had to be able to operate everything on board and know everything. And today, why that’s very difficult in some of the large, particularly the Trident, boats. And even in the SSNs, why if you’re not qualified nuclear, you have a handicap and not being able to cut it in the Engineering Department. But in those days, why you had to be able to do everything. And of course, one of the fancy questions in those days is how to blow fuel oil out the whistle. And if you knew all of the piping line-up, you could do that. But it in any case, my first patrol was an unusual occurrence because we had an officer that was out of the class of ’39 that had been a PT boat skipper in Manila and was a double Silver Star winner when he came aboard. He didn’t quite fit into the submarine. He was supposed to be Exec, the next one, but he didn’t quite make it. And Gene didn’t qualify him. Therefore I didn’t get qualified until my next patrol, when I got qualified in like what, No- vember ’44 or September or October – somewhere along in there. I got qualified because I had gotten examined by two division commanders in Midway. That included, of course, in those days, going out and doing a practice approach of firing a torpedo, which I always enjoyed. I was fortunate enough after the war to be exec of a boat where the skipper had been a wartime skipper, and he didn’t want to shoot torpedoes. I got to fire all the practice torpedoes.
Interviewer: Well, talk about your shipboard assignments.
Duncan: When I first went aboard, I was a first lieutenant and assis- tant torpedo gunnery officer. My job in battle stations was to operate the right hand edge of the TDC [Torpedo Data Computer] doing the firing and setting of the spreads and so forth. And from there and for the next three patrols, I was a TDC operator, and my battle station was TDC op- erator. And of course, one of the big things in my case, torpedo and gun- nery, when we came into the Navy yard after the 11th patrol, we swapped our 4-inch gun that was mounted forward for a 5-inch gun, a wet gun, in the aft part. And of course, we also installed our missile firing.
Interviewer: What is the most memorable thing that you remember about your initial reporting to the Barb?
Duncan: Probably the degree to which I was welcomed into the Barb by all the shipmates, officer and enlisted. When we came aboard, you were immediately assumed to be part of the family, so to speak, and they wanted to help you in any way they could for you to learn in a hurry, so you could hold up your end of the bargain, I guess you’d call it that. And what it was, it kind of validated what I saw in that old O-boat back at the Naval Academy, in that this was a tough, small, family group that were very serious about their jobs, but were also very helpful as shipmates.
Interviewer: Well, let’s pin down the time accurately here for when you reported to the ship and Barb is preparing to go on, I believe, patrol number nine.
Duncan: That’s correct, I came aboard in Midway when the boat was scheduled to go back to Pearl Harbor for upkeep. So my first underway, was from Midway back to Pearl, and then I had that very tough assign- ment of an upkeep at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. And never having made a patrol, I got in on the good part of it to begin with. From there, we left on the 9th patrol, stopped in Midway for fuel, and then proceeded to the South China Sea.
Interviewer: Now Max, most authors that we have read have de- scribed the atmosphere onboard, particularly onboard successful subma- rines in World War II, as sort of free of discipline problems. Was that really your experience?
Duncan: Oh, very much so. As a matter of fact, there are stories of Gene Fluckey having one of his men brought back to the ship by shore patrol in Pearl for wearing his hat on the back of his head, and his re- sponding to the people when they asked him with, “Oh, I’ll get him a summary court martial.” This was passed up to Admiral Lockwood in SubPac. He called Gene up and said, “Gene, you’re getting too tough. We’ve got to relieve you.” Gene laughed and told him the story that he didn’t do that. He says, “As a matter of fact, we don’t have a mast book anymore on the Barb.” If you really think about it, everyone was so interested in continuing the success of the Barb that any problems we had in the men, why our Chief of the Boat probably handled those. I had never really ever heard of any significant disciplinary problems.
Interviewer: Well, your first patrol on Barb would be patrol number 9, and that must’ve really had an impact on you. Could you walk us through that?
Duncan: One of the things that I have used to describe Admiral Fluckey is decisive, and I’ll talk about those [things] later. But right now, we went to the South China Sea as part of a Wolf Pack. As an officer-of- the-deck, one of the things that I saw was, the Tunny get bombed, and her forward torpedo tubes all screwed up, and she was sent back. I think they decommissioned her. That made an impression upon me and all the lookouts there, that you better stay awake or you may not be able to be here. But we got a message to proceed at best speed to the western part of the South China Sea to pick up POWs that had been sunk on a ship. We’re not supposed to have POWs aboard and try to pick up them up at sea. We started across there and one night we ran into a [Japanese] Navy task force. As we, on our way, approached her, why it soon became obvious that the center was a large ship and two other large ships. And so we went in on a night surface approach. Just before we were ready to fire, we saw that it was a carrier and overlapping oiler with, at that stage of the game, a destroyer bearing down on us. And when it got to about 900 yards, we fired six torpedo tubes forward and ended up hitting the Unyo with two or three, and the overlapping carrier with one or two. And therefore, we sunk both of them with one six torpedo salvo, probably one of the heavier salvos of the war for six. And by then we pulled the plug, and the destroyer went overhead and didn’t even drop [depth charges]. And why I say that, is because the skipper made decisions on a very short leash and convinced me he was one very decisive guy.
Then we got up and went over [to rescue the POWs]. Because our navigator, the exec, Bob McKnitt had seen an article in the Naval In- stitute about how to [measure the effect of] the currents, and because these guys had been on the water for some five days, he had to predict where they would be after five days with the wind and the currents. We went up there, and by golly we found them! And we rescued 14 of them and brought them back. That was towards the end of the patrol, and we brought them back and offloaded them at Guam. The night before [we arrived], they stayed up all night eating because they didn’t know whether the next people would feed them or not. It tells you something. This was a group that had been doing the bridge on the river Kwai. Ten of them were Australian, and four British, I think. And a couple of those guys came back to a reunion of the Barb some 30 years later. Those were the two instances of the night patrol that really bear on me.
Interviewer: Now at some stage of the game, you became the officer
responsible for ultimately making the torpedoes ready.
Duncan: That’s correct. Yeah, I did that – yeah, even though I was only the assistant, even during the 9th patrol.
One of the things that is really important is the recognition of suc- cess. If you were a successful skipper in World War II, you could get anything you wanted. If you weren’t a successful skipper in World War II, you got what was left over in the way of areas and everything. As a result, on the Barb, I never fired a Mark 14 in anger; we got all Mark 18 torpedoes. We even had that happen on one load. Why, they only had about 35 of them on Midway and we took 24 of them. What I’m demon-strating is that the successful skippers were recognized as such and given opportunities to do even better.
Interviewer: The performance of the Mark 18 was much improved.
Duncan: Well, the Mark 18 is, as you know, an electric fish and it’s only a 30-knot [34.5 miles per hour] fish. But the depth control and the other problems did not exist. However, as we found out in the last patrol, the 12th patrol, they were affected by the sea temperature, and we did not have as good a success with the firings on the 12th patrol as we did the other patrols.
Interviewer: Because of cold water?
Duncan: Because of cold water, apparently. That’s kind of the end of the war. And we also fired some acoustic torpedoes on the 12th boat, but we’ll get to that later.
Interviewer: Max, I’d like to ask you now, to what do you attribute
the remarkable success of Barb in avoiding trouble?
Duncan: I can attribute that to, primarily, the decisions and the lead- ership of the skipper. But I also must attribute that to the far-sightedness of everybody on board, the crew. By that I mean that we had very few significant maintenance failures on patrol. Even though the equipment in those days was not the reliable thing that it is today or the amount of it [that there is today], our people were extremely good in making sure that the equipment didn’t fail at the wrong time. I guess, you get into a comparison between the General Motors and the Fairbanks engines. The General Motors engines would have more failures, but were easier to fix. The Fairbanks engines had far fewer failures, but were much harder to fix. In the future, of course, I had command of both types. But specifi- cally, the Barb was able to avoid – well, we didn’t avoid trouble, because we got a damn near record of depth charges dropped on us – but how we were able to get around it, I take most of that credit. The actual combat goes to the capability of our skipper.
Interviewer: But I don’t recall the Barb having suffered any signifi- cant damage from those depth charges, which meant that somehow you played defense well.
Duncan: That is correct. But of course, what’s interesting is that after they left the patrol, we were in the yard. They installed a new machine in the conning tower called the Depth Charge Direction Indicator. It will tell you whether the depth charge, with microphones around, will tell you whether it’s up above or down below or right or left. The only thing I can remember is when we got in that fight with the damn destroyer on the 25th of June 1945. And that number is buried in my head because I thought we bought the farm that day. Well, the depth charges go off and every light in the damn machine would go off. But we had antennas blown off and stuff like that. I mean, the ceramic parts of the holders. But basically, the choice of depth and course and speed to avoid attacks, those, in all cases of course, were decisions of the commanding officer.
Interviewer: Well, maybe you can lead us then into the following patrols.
Duncan: Patrol number 10 was in the East China Sea, that is the northern part, up from the southern part of the entrance of the Sea of Japan and around the peninsulas and so forth. And on that patrol, one of the big things is that there was a rough weather patrol. We had pret- ty rough weather practically the whole time on the patrol. That’s when Gene started approaching convoys differently. Rather than trying to go in on the bow and go through the escorts and get a shot and go out, why he wanted to come in on the quarter, and then go out on the beam, and then circle around and come in on a quarter. And that way, you’d have a much faster turnaround to shoot again.
The other thing was, then we were in rough weather, making a sub- merged approach at radar depth, to be able to get an accurate picture of the range for the ships. The only other thing is that on that same patrol, we also found another Navy task force. And this carrier, we picked up at a very long range for our radar. Our radar was superb because of our radar officer and our radar techs. We got a lot of long ranges with our radar. Again, that’s because of the expertise of the people on board that make the equipment the best they could. We picked [the carrier] up, and we had this thing tracking it like 28 or 29 knots. Of course, we couldn’t do that if we couldn’t close. We finally fired at about 3,000 yards, and we maybe got a hit because he slowed down for about 20 or 30 minutes after the torpedo should’ve gotten there. Then he was back up to speed and he was gone. We were waving goodbye.
The other thing was is in the port of Sasebo. There is a lighthouse out of the entrance to the channel, and we observed that that lighthouse’s light was turned on when they expected ships to come in. So we saw the light on, and we went up there. Sure enough, here comes a ship that was called an auxiliary cruiser because it was a merchant ship that was con- verted with more guns and one thing or another. We made an approach on that ship in the early morning hours and got a hit, but only one hit out of three. That slowed him down. Then we went back in on another approach and went in rather close and fired a couple of more and did him in. That was an auxiliary cruiser that we got; that was the best bag on that particular cruise. That was the 10th patrol. We did end up firing all of our torpedoes and sinking three or four other ships, but the things that I remember are: the bad weather the whole cruise, the chase for the carrier, and the sinking of an auxiliary cruiser going into Sasebo.
Interviewer: Well Max, you’ve talked several times about the quality of people you had, the radar techs being able to keep your radar peaked and that. In World War II, was it possible for qualified submariners to try and sort of angle for transfers to the more successful ships like Barb?
Duncan: The kind of reverse. It was hard as hell to get everybody to leave the Barb. You have to understand that we were having new con- struction, and therefore, they needed at least some crew to go back to man it for the new construction. And therefore the normal rule was that you went back to new construction after four patrols, which meant that we would have to turn over maybe 20 to 25% of our people. We had an awful hard time getting any volunteers to do that. The Chief of the Boat at the end of the war made all 12 patrols on the Barb. There was a torpe- doman onboard that made all 12 patrols on the Barb. There were quite
a few people that made patrols 7 through 12. By the same token, it was certainly true that we had people when we were in Midway or in upkeep that came over and wanted to join the Barb. But I’m sure that happened to a lot of successful boats. People like to go with a winner.
Interviewer: Well, this may be too hard a question to deal with, but aside from Captain Fluckey and obviously yourself, is it possible for you to sort of name some of the people you think were the real key leaders in making Barb so successful over a long period of time?
Duncan: Yes. One of the guys is a guy by the name of Tuck Weaver. Tuck – this was his third submarine he was on – was a reserve officer. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1940. Came into the naval base, a couple of patrols on S-boats and another patrol, and came to the Barb. And Tuck was the officer-of-the-deck for battle stations on the surface attacks at night. Tuck is another cool customer. And while the skipper always stayed on the bridge and had the exec in the conning tow- er for surface patrols, surface attacks, why, Tuck Weaver is the one that kept the bearings coming and kept the information coming. Tuck made patrols through 11, I believe.
Another guy that we mentioned earlier is Dave Teeters. Dave came aboard and he made all five patrols with Gene Fluckey, he’s the only officer to do that. He was a communication and radar officer. Dave was an extremely intelligent guy that knew how in the hell that radar worked. He was working with the ETs [Electronic Technicians], or we called them RTs, radar technicians, in those days. He would work with them and keep our radars peaked up. And that’s extremely important because at night to be able to get long ranges allows you to make good approach- es. After the war, Dave went to UC Berkeley, got a PhD in physics and worked for Bell Labs in Red Bank, New Jersey for many years. Dave was an extremely intelligent guy. Sometimes I think Dave would have trouble with bus schedules, but he is another sharp dude.
The other guy, several patrols before, of course, was our Exec, Bob McKnitt, on the 9th and 10th patrols. And above all else, Bob was a nav- igator. I think I’ve told you how he predicted where the people are going to be after five days on rafts and turned out to be correct. Bob was an extreme guy. He’s the only guy I know that’s smart enough to turn down a wartime command to go to post-graduate school and still make flag.
There’s another guy that was with me and was chief engineer, a guy by the name of Paul Monroe. Paul and I turned out to be very close on board. And Paul was the engineer. And Paul was from California, went to, I think UC Berkeley. And Paul got out of the Navy after the war and died at a very young age. Those are the three.
And of course, we had, one of the guys I have to mention is our Chief of the Boat, Switch Saunders. He’s the guy that made all 12 pa- trols of the thing. Gene Fluckey wanted him to be Chief of the Boat and he says, he didn’t want to be Chief of the Boat. And the Captain says, “You’ll make a good Chief of the Boat.” And he was a superb Chief of the Boat. He’s probably one of the more decorated, enlisted submariners of World War II, having two Silver Stars, a Bronze Star and a Navy Commendation medal, as well as a medal for helping pull people out of the water for POWs. Those are some of the individuals that I know of.
I will say, coupled with Dave Teeters was a guy by the name of John Lehman who was an RT, radar technician. He also is a guy that kept the log of the radar contacts that showed our attack in the 11th patrol. And that radar log is in the Navy Museum in Annapolis today.
Interviewer: Well, I know that the 11th patrol is the one that most people know most about.
Duncan: Yes, 11th patrol. But I will say that in my view, the 12th patrol is more historic, but we’ll get to that when we get to it. The 11th patrol, we were again part of a Wolf Pack. And we were in the East China Sea, but down near the entrance to the Formosa Straits between Formo- sa and the northern part of the East China Sea. And that time we had a Wolf Pack of Picuda, Barb, and Queenfish, with Elliot Loughlin under Queenfish, being the senior skipper and the Wolf Pack Commander. And those days, that’s when we started getting ultras [messages from having broken the Japanese code], which told us when the ship convoys were coming through and what their routes were and so forth. And we got an ultra which said that they’re coming by. And by the way, that was also the time that we were there to bottleneck the ships going down to the Philippines, because the Philippines campaign was going on. And the Japanese were trying to replenish their troops there, of course. We were there and each of us was assigned a position. And our position was to the west on a three boat limit. And the time came and we went to look for the convoy. And nothing; we didn’t find them. And we knew that that in- formation had been good. Therefore, they had to do something different. And the skipper went to the ward room and broke out the charts and kept looking. And he says, “You know, the only thing that they could’ve done was to come up the inland coast of China. But in order to do that, Hainan Straits had to be dredged.” So he sent a message to the coast watchers in China and asked them, “Has Hainan Channel been dredged?” Two days later, they came back and said, “Yes.” Therefore, it’s possible for this to happen. He says, “That’s where they got to be going.” So we went up and got about 20 miles off the beach and head north, and sometime in the afternoon, sure enough, saw smoke close to the beach. So he says, “Okay, we’ll go down there and there’s a hole in the island chain and we’ll wait for them and get them down there.” We waited for them down there and they didn’t come. Therefore they had to have stopped some place. So we moved in closer to the beach and started up. And when we rounded Incog Island, the radar operator says, “I’ve got 30 ships in the harbor in three lanes.” And now they’re in there. Well, now that poses a problem because there’s only 30 feet of water in there or about five or six fathoms of water. And you got minefields some place and you add an island in there. And so what do we do? Well, he looks over there and there’s a bunch of Chinese fishing boats. One of the nice things, where the fishing boats are, the mines aren’t. So we go into Namkwan Harbor and sure enough, there is that golden target in front of us, and we only had four torpedoes forward. So we fired the four forward, turned around and fired the four aft.
And then we pulled that well-known maneuver of getting the hell
out of there. And in order to do that, by that stage of the game, why, we had been suspected, and there was a couple of destroyers firing all over the place. And we thought one of them had found us and was heading for us. And we went out through there. And Gene sent everybody down below, and he took the conn up on the bridge. And we went out through a rather junk fleet, kind of like broken field running right and left. And we got out of there and that’s how the story goes. And it’s true that he told the engine room to give us all they got. And he sent a man down on the lower flats [lower levels] of the maneuvering room and put his hand on the bearing and it was too hot to hold. Well, back off two turns. And the story is, and I’ve told this many times, we recorded 23.5 knots in a Ga- to-class boat. Now in the meantime, of course, we had the low pressure blower all the time to keep the water out of tanks to get us the speed. But we went out 20 fathoms and dove and had a nice rest.
And that particular patrol is not important for the number of ships sunk, because, as a matter of fact, JANAC [Joint Army Navy Assessment Committee] only gave us credit for one ship sunk there. And the reason for it, of course, is that the system was such that once the ship’s convoys went into harbor, why they took them off the listing. But the real import- ant thing was, we interrupted the whole chain that they had for replenish- ing the Philippines. And we suspected, they were really scratching their heads and went back out to sea. And probably the other boats were able to pick them off when they got out there. And from there, of course, we went to the Navy yard for a two month overhaul, I guess.
But that was the 11th patrol. And for that patrol, why the skipper was the recipient of the Medal of Honor. The Barb had been already recom- mended for the Presidential Unit Citation [PUC] for patrols 8, 9 and 10. But a classmate and friend of Gene Fluckey’s, Dusty Dornan, was Admi- ral King’s EA. And Dusty told Gene he did him a favor and included the 11th in there. Even though, the 11th, of course, would’ve been a PUC all by itself. So that’s one of the short changes. The other short change, of course, is that Gene Fluckey went back to Namkwan Harbor in the early ‘90s and talked to old men that were young boys when that attack took place. They said there were six masts out there in the harbor. So suppos- edly we sank more than the one ship we got credit for. But okay, he still ended up as the top tonnage sinker in World War II.
Interviewer: Max, you’ve talked a lot about how much you relied on your radar, and we’ve, of course, read that from other sources. How undetectable did you feel or think that your radar was in use against the Japanese?
Duncan: Not too much because they really weren’t very good at their business. We did have some trouble being able to, well, first of all, we later had an air search radar, you know. And I’m talking about an SD we had, which is a single-prong lobe. I don’t remember the technical details, but that was one that just told you there’s an aircraft at an approximate range, and you didn’t know the direction or anything. As far as I guess normal surface ships and convoys, we never felt that they contacted us because of our radar usage. I do think that we did see some indication of the homing in on our radars by some of the aircraft; but not much. Gene Fluckey’s idea was, if you see an aircraft and you dive for it, don’t stay down more than 20 minutes because if he didn’t detect you, he’s gone in 20 minutes. And therefore that’s why the Barb spent most of their time on the surface. And of course, as you also appreciate, when you’re on the surface your visibility to detect targets is increased by many-fold, because of the difference in the height.
Interviewer: So, you go back to Pearl for re-fit and R&R?
Duncan: We went all the way to Mare Island. We were there for two months, and half the crew got 30 days and the other half got 30 days. I was in the first half with the skipper, and the exec and the 4th officer were in the second half. I had gotten married. In December ’43 we went back to Florida and got my wife’s father and family, mother and father, and drove back up to North Carolina, our home. And then, Trilby and I bought our first car, drove cross-country in 1945, stopped and went down into the Grand Canyon on mules and so forth.
When we arrived in Mare Island, they had taken off the 4-inch gun and put the 5-inch gun aft, and installed a radar periscope and put in larger stills so we can make more fresh water. Those are the three things I remember. Also, I think they replaced our air compressors that were a major piece of problem equipment up until then. Then we came back to Pearl.
When we got back to Pearl is when Gene had been talking with the first gunnery officer and wanted to get some missiles. He saw the mis- siles that were used for the pre-strikes for amphibious landings where the LCMRs [medium range rocket ships] gave these big things. And he says,
“That’s what I want.” So we finally got a launcher that we mounted on the platform of the old 4-inch gun forward, and floated down and bolted it in place so that it goes right over and across the bow. We also put tele- scopic sights on our 40-millimeter up forward, so we could use that as a gun against small trawlers. We didn’t get all our missiles. We asked for 144 missiles, but we only got 72. There’s a 5-inch spin stabilized rocket that comes in two parts, the missile and the rotor. The reason that that’s true is that we didn’t have enough space in our magazine to put the whole thing in there, so we had to put the aft end down on the magazine, then we put the forward end in skids in the forward torpedo room.
Interviewer: So as weapons officer, I guess you were in charge of all of this stuff.
Duncan: You got it. And of course, I have to tell you about the fa- mous story on the firing. This is the way that the 5-inch spin stabilized rockets are fired in a bank of 12: six on the side with an open gate. That is, when this side goes, the gate opens and the other side goes. They fall down and hit a bronze firing key pin that goes into a firing band on the stern, on the rear end of the rocket. That’s an electrical firing pin, and therefore you have to have electricity for that. Well, on the Barb, where do we find electricity? So I asked the guys, I said, “Okay, we can use the water-tight and sound-powered telephone jack top side for the firing-pin lead in. When it gets into the conning tower, what do we plug it into?” He says, “Well, it uses 12 volts.” I said, “Well, we don’t have 12 volts. We got 24. Can we use 24 volts?” “Yeah, I guess you can.” I says, “Well, we have 110 up there. Can we use 110?” And he thought and he said, “Yes, I guess you could.” So rather than 12 volts, we fired our rockets with 110 volts, which if you appreciate, gives it a better goose, if you will. So then, we put in that circuit. The gyro-setter firing pin that goes into the forward torpedo room has a trigger on it. We had a spare one of those, and we put that in the firing circuit from the conning tower to the missile launcher. My job was on the periscope, holding the firing pin. When the skipper hollered “rockets away,” I’d pull the trigger. About five seconds later, 12 rockets would be on their way. Now, how do you aim the rock- ets? Well, you aim the rockets with the boat, because of course, they’re spin stabilized, and therefore, they process 3 degrees to the right. So you aim the boat 3 degrees from where you want the missiles to go. If you set them at maximum range, they go 5,250 yards. They have a CEP [Cir- cular Error Probability] of about 100-150 yards for 12 missiles.
We fired the first missiles against a little town on the northern coast of Hokkaido called Shari. That was a waterfront with a lot of warehouses and stuff. We did that at about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. After we fired them, we turned around and got the hell out of there. Turns out that they thought it was an air raid, and they moved a whole anti-aircraft bat- talion up there to protect against those air raids that had come up. But the main story of that is how do you take something that isn’t part of your basic structure and fit it in so that you’re able to use it effectively. Now, that’s what we did. I’m telling you what we ended up with, and I’m not sure that I thought of all those things myself. Don’t get that impression at all. But at any rate, that was how we fired the first ones. As I mentioned earlier, we do have a tape of that, and the Naval Submarine League has a video of it.
Then we got on up there. This is toward the end of the war. And most of the Japanese were moving their stuff by small boats, not big ships. So the big thing is to stop their traffic, you had to really knock off all these spitkits [little boats]. So that’s what we used the 5-inch gun for and the 40 millimeter, and we sank about 40 of them. But in the process of do- ing this, we also found a place where they were building these trawlers, a shipyard. So, I can’t recall where in the patrol we did that, but we fired the remaining 5-inch shells we had into that shipyard, and some 40 millimeter. We started a fire and burned the whole damn shipyard down. When we left the shipyard after the firing, we fired three more attacks of rockets on various other buildings in two other places. One of the places was obviously a large factory because of the size of the smoke stack and everything. For that one, we sat there and unloaded three loads of rock- ets, all we had. Well, we had to cut short because we used four of them to test the firing on the way to Midway. So where we really only had 68 rockets to fire at the enemy. And we fired three there, and that darned place burned for two days. Because these would start fires; that’s what they do. They weren’t that big of a thing.
In the process, we were watching Patience Bay and its mountains in the back. Along the coast there was a railroad track. We’d see that and we were in there trying to intercept the ships that would come around the coast and so forth, submerged. And we’d see the trains, and the skipper got a thing with trains. You know we’ve got to figure out, how are we going to get that train. Part of Gene Fluckey’s thing is what I call inclu- siveness. He was inclusive. He wanted everybody’s ideas. So he put out the word, how do we sink a train? Well, Billy Hatfield was an electrician, and had worked on railroads. He was one of the Hatfields of the Hatfield and McCoy clans. He said he used to crack walnuts on the railroads. He does it because when the train goes over the tracks, the cross ties sink into the ground. Therefore, if you want to do a train, rather than to put a walnut under there, you put a switch under there and let the train blow itself up. That’s exactly what they did. We took one of the 55 pound demolition charges that we carried to blow up the boat in case we lose it. We had a party of eight guys and Gene picked them out. Only single guys were allowed, and therefore, I was ineligible because I was married. I felt bad; I would’ve loved this job. But anyway, Bill Walker, our chief engineer, led the party ashore. He had the Chief of the Boat, and then we had a torpedoman. We had a motor machinist, we had a cook, and we had Neil Sever, the youngest aboard. He was a signalman. I aided them going to shore. They had lookouts up and down the track and lookouts up and down the beach. They had Neil Sever to stay there, and three people to dig the hole and put it in there. On their way back, the lookout said, “There’s another train coming up the track.” The train arrived at the spot when the party was maybe 200-300 yards from us. I was standing up topside and I said, “Oh, hell, it didn’t work.” Well, I was about five seconds too slow, because about five seconds later that damn thing blew up, and it was one hell of a blast. That probably disrupted the stuff up there for quite a while until they got that fixed. What was important, of course, is that by moving things out from the main islands of Japan, they were trying to disperse their manufacturing and everything to other plac- es. That’s why that damn train track was so busy all the time.
Interviewer: So Max, this is patrol number 5 for Commander Fluck- ey. How much aware were the troops that their skipper had been in sort of a wrestling match with Admiral Lockwood to get special permission [to go on a fifth patrol]?
Duncan: We didn’t know that. You know, and I’ve thought about that myself, if we did know that before? And I think we had a hint of it, but it wasn’t known. We knew the skippers normally were four-patrol skippers. And we also knew that, well, I didn’t really think of it, that Medal of Honor recipients, they don’t send them in harm’s way again. That’s kind of the normal rule all over. It’s like they don’t send brothers together on certain ships and everything. But in any case, I don’t think we were aware of it. We wanted him to make the 5th patrol too. But all of us enjoyed that part, because Fluckey took us to sea. We had a great time. We had good success. And he brought us home.
Interviewer: You have talked several times about the inclusiveness of discussions in the crew, and that there would’ve been such a thing at this point. What sort of thoughts were there, say in your mind, about risks versus rewards in this particular evolution, that is the risks to not getting the people back, to the tactical rewards?
Duncan: Gene Fluckey, one of the things he says, “Do the unusual, but never do the unusual twice.” He says, “The second time, they’ll be ready for you.” So an awful lot of the things that we did were unusual. Why, they were things that were just so far out that they didn’t suspect that anyone would be thinking about. Well, just like when they fired that [missile], why they brought in the anti-aircraft crews. Nobody thought that the submarines would do that. It did turn out by the way, that the Barb was credited in the San Francisco paper with a chart that showed the U.S. Pacific Northern Fleet coming down and bombarding the peo- ple in northern Hokkaido and the Karafuto, when it was of course, the Barb’s missile fires that did that. Sending a party ashore and the planning involved and the thing, no one ever really thought we were taking as much risk as we probably were. For the attack in Namkwan Harbor, no one thought about the fact that, hey, there’s just a lot of things that could go wrong when you go into 30 feet of water and start firing torpedoes and have to come out through a minefield. I would agree there. But, I don’t know; everyone had the confidence that either they or the skipper had figured out this was a reasonable risk. Of course, you know, since
it was successful, it was a reasonable risk. Whether or not that would be considered in another context, I don’t know. Yeah, I understand your point, and it’s well taken, and I’m sure that no skipper would be censured for not doing it, because there was a risk involved in these things.
Interviewer: Well, so we’ve talked about Commander Fluckey plen- ty. So is it possible for you to maybe give a summary description of Commander Fluckey as your wartime skipper?
Duncan: Yes, I can do that because I’ve thought about that. Four things stand out. First of all, he was a decisive skipper. He soaked up information. He’s not the most intelligent man that I ever seen, but he’s the smartest man I’ve ever known. He could take up information and soak it all up and come out with an opinion and everything that made a lot of sense.
He was an inclusive skipper. He was interested in everybody doing their share to make the Barb the best that they could be. He demonstrat- ed it with Billy Hatfield’s suggestion on the firing. The minute they said that, bang, that’s the thing that makes sense, and we do it. Billy’s gotten credit for that ever since.
He was a very compassionate guy. Every day, he went through the boat from bow to stern talking to the people, finding out about them, what are they doing, where’s their family or their girlfriends, whatever he wanted to know. He wanted to know his people. He also conducted a significant amount of correspondence with the families. They would write him, and he would write him back. He really was interested in peo- ple. There’s a famous story, of course, one of the families that wanted him to play a happy birthday tune sung by their daughter for their son who was on board, and he played it over the 1MC [the onboard announc- ing system]. He’s just a compatible guy. He really and truly is interested in his people.
Finally, I think he was a guy with a tremendous amount of imagina- tion. He was an inspiring leader. He really inspired the people to do their best. Without saying what the best was, he gave them a lot of rein. I think I told you in my case. I was really very surprised that I’m standing at the top watch, and I hadn’t been aboard that boat more than a month. I mean, you know, that was most unusual. Of course that gave me confidence in him. Whether I related it or not, it’s beside the point. He did it, and he got away with it, because I didn’t sink the boat. But those four things, I think is what I attribute his leadership and his success [to]: decisive, compassionate, inclusive and inspirational.
Interviewer: Well now, let’s talk about you for a second. Can you talk about the sort of satisfaction that you have about being part of a crew that set a professional standard that’s helped sustain the submarine force?
Duncan: It’s kind of my impression people are realizing that World War II was different. There was a bringing together of the country like it had never been done before, and possibly hasn’t been done since, in terms of unity of purpose and everything, which is what allows all the great things that we’ve accomplished. Yes, I’m very proud of the fact that I served. I probably, I don’t know, have told more sea stories in the last 10 years than I did the 30 years before. I know that losing shipmates and so forth, I think, gee, we’re getting smaller. I was very pleased with Gene’s funeral. We were able to put on a real nice send away. I was very proud of myself. That’s not the right word. I felt very good about being able to get so much support for a proper going away for him.
Then of course, I was very fortunate to stay in submarines. I had basically 23 years of submarine and submarine related things, command opportunities, but also shipmate opportunities. I served with Dave Bell in the Dogfish as his exec. I forget the boat he had during World War II. Joe Icenhower was just a very fine guy, very pleasant man, and a good tactician. He taught me a lot about attacks with torpedoes, torpedo at- tacks. I had Bill Post, Wild Bill Post, as my squadron commander when I had the Cavalla, and he rode me. We went up to Greenland in the winter time on an exercise and he rode me. We were up there in that crow’s nest and we put on a party. Bill Post was one more wild man that night. But he always got me; he was the one that got me. I pulled a stupid stunt while he was aboard. Ice would gather on the lip of the main induction. We’d dive, and the ice would gather there. There’d be a little leakage that’d come in. On one dive, the forward engine room said, “Flooding in the forward engine room.” Stupidly, I turned around and said, “Is it flooding badly?” Well, that’s a pretty stupid stunt for a skipper to pull. Bill Post is standing there, and he went away or something like that. Later he says, “You know, you’re a damn cool customer.” So he gave me credit for being a cool customer when it was really a stupid question. But being associated with those people and everything, was a joy in my life, particularly the families and everything. I’m not a beer drinker, but I used to love going to a beer bust with my crew and having my two beers. That was the big thing I guess I get out of my experience with submarines.
Interviewer: Well, Max, you’ve had as varied a career as anybody could’ve had with four major commands and lots of other experiences. But some of the experiences that you took away from your service in Barb must have been important for your success in later assignments.
Duncan: Very much so. One of the examples I give is the boss man of any organization has got to show confidence and decisiveness. Those two, I got there. I know that when I put Cavalla in commission, by that stage of the game there was a big play on saving fuel. They told you never have any SOA [speed of advance] more than 15 knots and so forth. We were doing school drills up in New London, and we’d get way on out to as far as Block Island at the edge of the ocean out there. Then that would be at the end of the day, and I would get up on the bridge, and I’d say, “Maneuvering, answer bells on four engines.” And of course, everybody’s smiling, the old man’s going to take us home in a hurry. Of course, about five minutes later, I’d call down there and I’d tell them to cut 80-90 on two. But that sort of thing is a little grandiose. But that’s important for a boss man to be in the organization, not just a command- ing officer, but a boss man of any organization to show confidence and decisiveness in his work.
I tried to do that all the way through. I went on board the Torsk. She had just come out of the yard and had the snorkel. She was a 1-A or something like that, I forget, a GUPPY. I found that they had been a rather conservative operator. I wasn’t used to being a conservative oper- ator. I remember that I would just go up there and pull the plug and don’t tell them. I’d just say, when I get down the conning tower, “Dive”. And I wasn’t giving anybody anything. They’d dive. People get used to really doing their job in a hurry. Before that, they damn near wanted to close up the boat with a green board before they pulled the plug. Which you must do in a Trident; I realize that. I remember when Ned Beach [was] doing 15 degree dives. You know, that was new. I never got a 15 degree, but I got 10-12 degree dives, and for a fleet boat that’s most unusual. But we never had any trouble doing it. I did it in increments to where I felt comfortable with it. But that’s the sort of thing that I took away from my experience on Barb. For instance, operating on the surface rather than being submerged during the day. That’s a decision that you made based on what you’ve gained versus what you’ve risked. We gained a tremen- dous area of visibility of targets by being on the surface with the high periscope. You can see one hell of a long way out there. But if you’re submerged, you cut that by a factor of 10 probably. You do that in terms of what I call your results rather than risk. I learned to do a lot of that in the Barb.
Interviewer: Well, from what you see of today’s submarine force, do you detect in the heart of our submarine force, the qualities that could lead us to victory again?
Duncan: I do indeed. That reminds me, I have noticed that the cur- rent SUBLANT, sub commander, Connor, said that the skippers have got to practice more independent operations. What he’s saying is that with the cyber warfare today, all of our fancy communication systems can be possibly jeopardized. If that occurs, you’ve got people out there with orders and everything, and they’ve got to figure out what in the hell they’re going to do, without their boss telling them right over their shoul- der. I applaud that because that’s exactly how we operated in World War
- You see you had some communications occasionally, but you didn’t have, so-called, instant communication. Today, for goodness sakes, they can tell them to turn right and left practically with communications. But the current commander of submarines is saying we’ve got to go back and make sure that we learn to do that. I applaud that.
Interviewer: Well, it looks like our submarines are well equipped to provide that sort of a platform to the skippers if they’re given that leash. Duncan: That’s correct. Our submarines today, and particularly things like the Virginia Class have such capabilities that it blows my mind with what they can do. I hadn’t been aboard a boat in quite a few years. We went out to Hawaii, and I went down to sub base and saw some old offices. You know, the office of the commanding officer of the submarine base, is the same office that Admiral Kimmel was in, in Pearl Harbor, looking over the waterfront down there. At any rate, I went aboard the San Francisco, I believe it was, and I’m just always amazed at the capability of the boats. Now with the non-piercing periscopes and all this stuff today. Particularly, I was in the Office of Naval Research, and I remember that we were trying to figure out how to do ranging by, what the hell do they call it, differential frequencies, giving you a range because you could get certain frequencies and not other frequencies. Of course, that was in the very early days of the sonar world. Today, the sonar world is a whole different thing.
I was also involved in Project Caesar, the SOSUS system [SOund SUrveillance System]. My job was to go around when the SOSUS sys- tem went into effect, and brief type commanders on what the hell is this super-secret system we got that’ll track submarines. That was an interesting thing, particularly the reception I got from some of the peo- ple. They didn’t believe a damn word of it. But at any rate, that was an interesting part.
Interviewer: Well now, you mentioned Admiral Kimmel, which leads me to ask you as a wartime lieutenant, what sort of impressions would you have had during those days of major figures like Nimitz and Lockwood and MacArthur and King.
Duncan: I guess the big picture was not available to us then like it
is 40 years later.
Interviewer: Well, I suppose you were pretty busy doing the work you were doing.
Duncan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes we were, yes we were. And as a mat- ter of fact, of course I’m being honest, you see most of the people lost weight on patrol, I gained weight. I love peanut butter sandwiches and coffee. And I drank a lot of coffee and had a lot of peanut butter sand- wiches. But Gene Fluckey used to lose 10-15 pounds on a patrol. And he was not a robust guy.
Interviewer: Well, Max, you obviously lost many friends and com- rades on other ships during war time which certainly must have had some effect. Do you hold any bitterness towards the Japanese at this point in your life?
Duncan: No. From where I sat, why, our opponents were profes- sional military people doing a professional military job. As far as na- tional decisions are concerned, I thought it was completely far out for the attack on Pearl Harbor, you know, without notice and so forth. But I never felt that the people that did the attacking weren’t carrying out national policy. I never felt any animosity toward any of the enemy that I was associated with. Now that is not true of some of the people. I was in New London on the staff when the boss man up there would not greet Japanese submarine people that came to New London. He was one of our real heroes in submarines too. But he would have nothing to do with them. I think he had a brother that was lost or something. But he was a bitter man towards the Japanese. I never felt that way.
Interviewer: Well, the impact of World War II on your professional life is fairly obvious, but could you talk a bit about the impact of World War II of your private life, both during the war and directly thereafter?
Duncan: I was married to my kindergarten fiancée in 1943, and we lost her 68 years later. I was fortunate in that our long times away from home occurred earlier in our marriage. In my latter part of my Navy ca- reer, I had three years and so forth in the same place. Therefore, we did not have the uprooting of the family at a time that a lot of families are uprooted. We have the one daughter, and she spent six years in private schools and six years in public schools. She graduated from Punahou in Hawaii, a very fine school. We had three years in Annapolis and three years in New London. We were fortunate in our family moves, and I was not at sea for long periods of time except the longest, of course, was my one year in Vietnam, and I did have R&R during that period.
