Fluckey believed the scouts would have better pathfinding skills. But within a decade of the Barb’s last mission, new rocket-based technologies in the form of guided cruise and ballistic missiles drastically reduced the relevance of big guns on warships or coastal defenses. While three men took up guard positions—they encountered a sleeping Japanese guard in a watchtower, whom they left unharmed—the other five buried the demolition charge and managed not blow themselves up jury-rigging the detonation circuit. In 1942, the German Kriegsmarine actually tested submarine rocket artillery that could be fired underwater, but gave up on the idea due to its impracticality. It then sailed northward to the coast of Southern Sakhalin Island, then known as the Japanese prefecture of Karafuto. He was the only American submarine skipper to fire rockets at Japanese targets on shore, and he oversaw a sabotage raid in which sailors from his submarine blew up a Japanese train. Other tallies are considerably higher. Eugene Fluckey of the Gato-class submarine USS Barb volunteered his boat to try out the experimental rocket launcher in 1945. Its landing party had just performed what would be the only U.S. ground operation on the Japanese home islands during World War II. By the most conservative count, it sank seventeen ships totaling ninety-seven thousand tons of shipping. The Barb's battle flag featured a train in honor of this exploit. These were used to finish off unarmed merchant ships or sink smaller vessels that could evade torpedoes—but also were occasionally directed to bombard coastal targets, such as in early-war Japanese raids on the coasts of California and Australia. The U.S. Navy, meanwhile, considered a much cruder solution: taking one of the Mark 51 rocket launchers it used on some of its LSM landing ships and strapping it to the main deck of a submarine. The Barb, which displaced 2,400 tons submerged, was one of the top-scoring Allied submarines of World War II. Starting in July 1945, Allied battleships embarked on a series of naval bombardments of coastal cities in Japan in an effort to draw these forces out to battle. At midnight on July 23, the Barb slipped up to within a kilometer of the shore, and a landing party commanded by Lt. William Walke, paddled quietly to the beach. (All of Sakhalin is presently administered by Russia.). The Barb’s guns also destroyed more than three dozen civilian sampans, while its homing torpedoes took out local trawlers, tugboats and a few large merchant ships.