The Sinking of Gokoku Maru: The "Super Tanker" That Fought a Submarine

#NavalHistory #WWII #MilitaryHistory #Documentary
In the dead of night on November 10, 1944, legendary US submarine commander Eugene Fluckey aboard the USS Barb was closing in for a routine kill in the Luzon Strait. His target: a fat Japanese tanker. But this was no ordinary tanker. When the night exploded with the thunder of cruiser-caliber guns, Fluckey found himself in an impossible duel. The prey had fangs.
This is the incredible story of the IJN Gokoku Maru, a vessel that should not have existed. Officially a fleet oiler, she was engineered as a bizarre hybrid warship—fast enough to keep up with battleships and armed heavily enough to fight off attackers. For a few brief hours, this radical concept worked perfectly, as her elite crew drove one of America's deadliest submarines into a desperate crash dive.
But what happened next reveals a deeper story of strategic failure. This documentary provides a deep technical and tactical analysis of the duel between the USS Barb and the Gokoku Maru. We explore the fatal flaw in Japanese naval strategy known as Kantai Kessen (Decisive Battle), an obsession with offensive glory that left its vital supply lines fatally exposed.
Join us as we dissect the engineering compromises of this unique "super tanker," examine the revolutionary surface-attack tactics of Commander Eugene Fluckey, and recount the minute-by-minute events of a forgotten naval battle that serves as a powerful lesson in military doctrine, specialization, and the unglamorous, brutal reality of logistics in warfare. This is the story of how a tactical victory became a catastrophic strategic failure, written in fire on the dark waters of the Pacific.