Bubbles in the Blood-Red Light: The Untold Story of Bobby Decker and the USS Barb

Prologue: Red Light, Deep Water

March 17, 1945. Forty miles off Sakhalin Island, the Pacific presses in on the steel hull of USS Barb, 220 feet below the surface. Inside, the world is painted in the blood-red glow of emergency lamps. The lights flicker, die, and the hull groans as another explosion hammers through the water. Seventy-eight men hold their breath, waiting for the next depth charge. Commander Eugene “Lucky” Fluckey grips the periscope housing, counting the seconds between detonations. Paint chips rain from the overhead. Somewhere in the shadows, a young sailor vomits into a bucket. Nobody moves to help him. Nobody moves at all.

Above, the Japanese destroyer Ukuru circles like a patient shark, sonar pinging through the water. Each metallic “ping” is a countdown to death. The destroyer’s captain knows the American submarine is here, knows it’s wounded—one propeller damaged, battery cells cracked and leaking chlorine gas. The Barb can’t run, can’t fight, can barely breathe. In twelve hours, when the batteries die completely, the submarine will either surface into enemy guns or sink to crush depth. Either way, seventy-eight men die.

The statistics are brutal. In 1945, the US Navy has lost fifty-two submarines to enemy action—355 men, twenty-two percent of the entire submarine force. Depth charges account for nineteen of those kills. Once a destroyer establishes sonar contact, the survival rate drops to thirty-four percent. Fluckey has done the math. He’s run every evasion tactic in the manual. Silent running, emergency deep, course changes, temperature layer diving. Nothing works. The enemy sonar operator is too good, tracking their every move.

What Commander Fluckey doesn’t know is that the solution to his problem is sitting in the forward torpedo room. He doesn’t know about the unauthorized crew member who shouldn’t be aboard. He doesn’t know about the teenager who lied about his age, forged his brother’s papers, and snuck onto this submarine in Pearl Harbor three months ago. And he definitely doesn’t know that this sixteen-year-old kid, who can barely grow facial hair, has been watching the veteran torpedomen work, thinking about pressure and water and bubbles, and has just figured out something every submarine expert in the Navy has missed.

The boy’s name is James Robert “Bobby” Decker—and his childish idea is about to rewrite the rules of submarine warfare.

Act I: The Mathematics of Death

To understand why the Barb is dying, you need to understand how depth charges kill. A depth charge is a steel barrel filled with three to six hundred pounds of TNT, designed to detonate at a preset depth. It doesn’t need a direct hit. Water is incompressible; the shock wave travels unimpeded in every direction. If a depth charge explodes within twenty-eight feet of a submarine’s hull, the pressure hull cracks open. Within fifty feet, it causes lethal damage to equipment, ruptures pipes, shorts electrical systems. Within one hundred fifty feet, it rattles the crew so badly they can’t function.

But the real killer isn’t the explosive. It’s the sonar. Active sonar sends sound waves through the water. When those waves hit something solid, like a steel submarine, they bounce back. The sonar operator hears the return echo, calculates distance and bearing, and directs his ship to drop depth charges in a pattern that brackets the submarine’s position.

Since 1943, submarine commanders have tried everything to defeat sonar. They dive deep, hoping to hide beneath temperature layers that refract sound waves. They shut down all equipment, running silent to avoid giving the enemy acoustic targets. They release oil and debris to make the enemy think they’re sinking. None of it works reliably. The US Navy’s submarine operations research group has analyzed over a thousand depth charge attacks in the Pacific theater. Their conclusion is stark: once sonar contact is established and maintained, submarine survival depends primarily on luck.

The experts have proposed solutions—better hull coatings that absorb sonar, faster, deeper-diving submarines, electronic jammers that confuse enemy sonar. All of these require years of research, millions of dollars, complete submarine refits. The boats dying right now can’t wait.

German U-boats face the same problem in the Atlantic. British and American destroyers are sinking them at catastrophic rates—237 U-boats lost in 1944 alone. The Kriegsmarine solution, deployed in 1942, is a device called Bold, or “Pillenwerfer” by German crews. It’s a metal canister packed with calcium hydride and zinc dust. When ejected from the submarine and exposed to seawater, it produces a massive chemical reaction, creating millions of bubbles that reflect sonar pulses.

Allied intelligence knows about Bold. They’ve recovered canisters from sunken U-boats, analyzed the chemical composition. US Naval Intelligence Report 47A45 from October 1944 concludes: “While theoretically effective, the Bold device requires specialized launch tubes and volatile chemicals unsuitable for US submarine operations. Not recommended for adoption.” Translation: it’s German technology, it requires German equipment, and American submarines aren’t built for it. Retrofitting the fleet would take years.

So, American submarine captains keep dying the same way—trapped underwater while enemy destroyers methodically drop charge after charge, walking the pattern closer until something vital breaks.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. American submarines are the most successful weapons in the Pacific. They’ve sunk three hundred Japanese merchant ships, five million tons of enemy cargo. They’ve strangled Japan’s supply lines, cutting off oil from the Dutch East Indies, rubber from Indochina, rice from Korea. They’re starving the enemy into submission. But the cost is measured in lost boats and lost men. USS Wahoo—gone. USS Harder—gone. USS Tang—sunk by its own torpedo. Only nine survivors. USS Growler—rammed by a Japanese gunboat, sunk with all hands. Fifty-two submarines. Three hundred fifty-five men and counting.

The US Navy needs a miracle. They need a way for submarines to defeat enemy sonar, without months of refit, without specialized equipment, without chemicals that might blow up in their own faces. They need something simple, something immediate, something that works right now.

They’re about to get it—from a kid who shouldn’t even be on the boat.

Act II: The Boy Who Wasn’t Supposed to Be There

James Robert Decker—Bobby to his shipmates—was born April 3, 1929, in Corpus Christi, Texas. His father was a merchant marine who drowned when Bobby was eight. His mother remarried a man who saw Bobby as a mouth to feed he didn’t ask for. By fifteen, Bobby was working the docks, loading cargo ships, saving every dollar. By sixteen, he made his decision: join the Navy, see the world, escape the stepfather’s fists.

The Navy wanted seventeen-year-olds with parental consent or eighteen-year-olds with high school diplomas. Bobby had neither, but he had his older brother’s birth certificate, a steady hand for forgery, and a fake mustache drawn with his mother’s eyebrow pencil that fooled exactly nobody—except the recruiter in Galveston, who had a quota to meet.

On December 3, 1944, James Robert Decker, aged sixteen years, eight months, raised his right hand and swore to defend the Constitution. The Navy assigned him to submarine duty, not because he requested it, but because the submarine service needed bodies and Bobby was there. He had no technical training, no engineering background, no college education. The Navy gave him eight weeks of basic submarine school at New London, Connecticut—just enough to learn which valve does what and how not to kill everybody by flooding the boat.

Then they put him on USS Barb as a torpedo room striker, the lowest job in the submarine hierarchy. His duties: load torpedoes, clean the torpedo tubes, polish brass fittings, make coffee, and keep his mouth shut while the real sailors did the important work.

Bobby was good at keeping his mouth shut. He was not good at following orders. The veteran torpedomen noticed the skinny kid watching them work, watching too intently, asking questions. Why does the torpedo air flask pressurize to 2,700 psi? Why does the impulse charge only use 400 psi? Where does the rest go? Chief Torpedoman Raymond Parker told him to shut up and swab the deck. But Parker also noticed something—the kid understood pressure differentials, understood how compressed air behaved underwater, understood it instinctively, the way some people understand music or mathematics.

On the Barb’s first two war patrols, Bobby kept his head down. He loaded torpedoes. He fired the tubes when ordered. He watched Commander Fluckey hunt Japanese ships with a calculated aggression that terrified and thrilled the crew.

But during depth charge attacks—and there were seven—Bobby noticed something the veterans missed. When they fired a torpedo, air bubbled out of the tube during the water slug ejection. Those bubbles rose to the surface, giving away their position. But before the bubbles reached the surface, they reflected the enemy’s sonar pulses. For thirty seconds, the Japanese destroyers locked onto the bubble column instead of the submarine.

Bobby watched this happen. Watched the sonar pings shift targets, watched the depth charges explode harmlessly away from the Barb. And he thought, “What if we could make bubbles on purpose?”

Act III: The Forbidden Workshop

Bobby doesn’t call it a workshop. It’s a storage locker in the forward torpedo room, three feet wide, barely tall enough to crouch in. It smells like oil and metal and the mildew that grows on everything in a submarine. He works during off-hours, during the night watches when most of the crew sleeps and the skeleton watch focuses on keeping the boat alive. He uses tools he’s not authorized to touch. He borrows parts from the pneumatic systems without asking permission.

Chief Parker catches him on February 28, 1945. Bobby’s hunched over a contraption that looks like a pressure gauge mated with a fire extinguisher—copper tubing, brass fittings, a makeshift valve assembly.

Parker demands to know what the hell the kid is doing. Bobby explains, fast, nervous. “When we fire a torpedo, we use compressed air to blow water out of the tube. That air makes bubbles. Big bubbles. They draw sonar away from the boat. I saw it happen off Formosa. The destroyer locked onto our bubble wake for like thirty seconds before the charges went off.”

Parker’s expression doesn’t change. “Yeah, that’s a known effect. So what?”

“So what if we could make bubbles without firing a torpedo? Just blow air into the water deliberately, create a false target. The Japs would ping the bubbles instead of us. We could slip away while they’re depth charging nothing.”

Parker stares at the kid, then at the contraption. “You built this?”

“It’s just a pressure regulator connected to our HP air system. We crack open this valve, blow air into the sea at controlled rates. It bubbles out through a diffuser I made from screen mesh. Creates a column of bubbles twenty feet wide. Rises to the surface slow enough to hold sonar reflection for three, maybe four minutes.”

Parker picks up the device. Hefty, crude, but the engineering is sound. The kid’s used proper thread sealant, installed check valves to prevent backflow, even rigged a depth gauge so you’d know when pressure equalization was correct.

“This is unauthorized modification of ship’s equipment,” Parker says. “That’s illegal. You could be court-martialed.”

Bobby knows. He doesn’t care.

“Does it work, though?”

“I don’t know. I need to test it, but I can’t do that without permission. And nobody’s going to give permission to test something this stupid.”

Parker should report this. Should confiscate the device. Report Bobby to the executive officer. Let Navy discipline handle a kid who’s playing inventor with safety-critical submarine systems.

Instead, Parker says, “Show me the math.”

Bobby shows him pressure calculations, bubble rise rates, sonar reflection coefficients. It’s crude math, full of estimates and guesses, but the principles are correct. Air bubbles do reflect sonar. A large enough bubble column would create a false target.

Parker makes his decision. “When the shooting starts next patrol, we test it. Unofficial. If it fails, I take responsibility. If it works, you still take the fall because you’re too young to know better. Deal?”

Bobby grins. “Deal.”

Act IV: The Moment of Truth

March 17, 1945. The depth charges start falling at 0620 hours. Commander Fluckey has just sunk two Japanese cargo ships off Sakhalin Island—the Barb’s ninth and tenth kills of the patrol. But the escorting destroyer Ukuru has them bracketed. Perfect sonar contact. Textbook depth charge pattern.

At 0647, the Barb sustains damage to the starboard propeller shaft. They’re running on one screw. Battery acid is leaking into the bilge. They have maybe ten hours of air left.

Fluckey calls a meeting in the control room. All officers, senior chiefs. They run through options.

“We can try going deep. Settle on the bottom until nightfall,” suggests Lieutenant Commander Paul Summers, the executive officer.

“We’re at 210 feet in 320 feet of water,” Fluckey replies. “If we settle on mud, we might not have power to break suction. We’d be stuck. Surface and fight against a destroyer. We’d be dead in two minutes.”

The room goes quiet. The options are exhausted. This is how submarines die—trapped underwater, batteries dying, air failing, waiting for the depth charge that cracks the hull like an egg.

At 0712, Chief Parker enters the control room. Unauthorized. You don’t interrupt a captain’s strategy meeting unless the boat’s on fire.

“Captain, permission to speak.”

Fluckey glances up, annoyed. “Chief, now is not—”

“Sir, we have a potential countermeasure. Unorthodox. Needs your approval to deploy.”

Every officer turns. Countermeasure. There’s no countermeasure for active sonar except prayer.

“Explain,” Fluckey says.

Parker explains the air bubble decoy, the false sonar target, the device Bobby built.

The room erupts. “That’s insane,” Lieutenant Jack Walker snaps. “We start blowing air, we announce our exact position.”

“They already know our position,” Parker interrupts. “They’ve got solid sonar contact. This gives them a second target. They’ll depth charge the bubbles while we maneuver clear.”

“How do you know it’ll work?”

“I don’t. But the Germans use something similar. The Brits call it SBT—submarine bubble target. Intelligence reports say it’s effective.”

Lieutenant Commander Summers shakes his head. “The Germans use specialized launch tubes and chemical canisters. We’re talking about jury-rigging compressed air systems during combat. If something ruptures, we could lose HP air pressure, lose ballast blowing capability, lose our ability to surface, or—”

“Or,” Parker says quietly, “we could live.”

Fluckey holds up a hand. Silence. “Who designed this device?”

Parker hesitates. This is the moment Bobby Decker’s entire future Navy career—potential court-martial, maybe even his life—hangs on the next sentence.

“Torpedoman striker Decker, sir.”

“Decker. The kid from Texas.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How old is Decker?”

Another hesitation. Longer. “Eighteen, sir. According to his service record.”

Fluckey’s not stupid. He’s heard the scuttlebutt, the baby-faced kid who looks fifteen. But Fluckey has commanded submarines through seventeen war patrols. He’s sunk thirty-one enemy ships. He’s seen good men die because they played by rules written for peacetime.

“Bring me Decker.”

Bobby arrives two minutes later. Terrified. Certain he’s about to be thrown in the brig.

“Striker Decker. Chief Parker tells me you’ve designed a sonar decoy using our HP air system. That correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Unauthorized modification of ship’s equipment. You understand that’s a violation of Navy regulations?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You understand if this device fails, if it ruptures a pressure hull penetration or deploys incorrectly, you could kill everyone on this boat?”

Bobby swallows. “Yes, sir.”

Fluckey stares at him hard, measuring. “Then, will it work?”

“I think so, sir. The physics is sound. Bubbles reflect sonar. We create bubbles, they chase them instead of us.”

“You think so? You’re betting seventy-eight lives on ‘I think so,’ sir?”

“We’re going to die anyway if we don’t do something.”

Another explosion. Closer. The lights flicker. Somebody curses in the darkness.

Fluckey makes his decision. “Rig it. Deploy on my command. If it works, you get a commendation. If it fails, you get a court-martial. Either way, you won’t be bored. Move.”

Bobby runs.

Act V: Bubbles and Blood

At 0729, Bobby Decker and Chief Parker rig the bubble generator to the forward torpedo room’s HP air manifold. It’s a crude installation—copper tubing clamped to existing pipes, a ball valve for flow control, the diffuser plate bolted to a through-hull fitting normally used for emergency ballast blow.

“Depth?” Bobby asks.

“Two hundred fifteen feet,” comes the reply from the control room.

Bobby does the math. At 215 feet, water pressure is approximately 95 psi. The HP air system runs at 3,000 psi. He’ll need to reduce pressure through the regulator to about 120 psi—just enough differential to force air out, creating bubbles that rise slowly.

“Ready?” Parker asks.

Bobby nods. His hands are shaking. Not from fear, from adrenaline. This is the moment. Either it works or they’re all dead.

Parker calls the control room. “Forward torpedo room ready to deploy countermeasure.”

Fluckey’s voice crackles over the intercom. “Standby.”

Above them, Ukuru completes another sonar sweep. Ping, ping, ping. The Japanese destroyer’s captain, Lieutenant Commander Teeshi Nakamura, is confident—he’s trapped American submarines before. Patient, methodical depth charge attacks. The Americans always panic, make mistakes, give themselves away. This one has damaged propulsion. His sonar operator can hear the shaft wobble. It’s just a matter of time.

Nakamura orders another pattern. Five depth charges set for 200 feet, spaced sixty feet apart in a line perpendicular to the submarine’s heading.

In the Barb, they hear the charges splash into the water. Five distinct splashes.

Fluckey counts them down. “Five, four, three—deploy countermeasure now.”

Bobby cracks the valve. Air hisses through the regulator. He eyes the pressure gauge, watching the needle settle at 120.

Perfect.

The air flows through copper tubing, through the diffuser plate, out into the ocean. Nothing happens.

No, wait.

On the sonar console in the Barb’s control room, sonar technician Frank Morrison is wearing headphones, listening to the enemy destroyer. He hears the destroyer’s active sonar pinging, hears it reflect off the Barb’s hull—and then the contact shifts. Morrison shouts, “The enemy sonar is tracking—bearing zero-niner-zero, range decreasing. They’re locked onto something forward of us!”

The depth charges detonate—all five—but they explode four hundred yards ahead of the Barb, depth-charging empty ocean where the bubble column rises toward the surface.

In the Barb’s forward torpedo room, the crew hears the explosions. Distant, muffled, harmless. Someone laughs, nervous, disbelieving laughter.

“It worked,” Parker whispers. “Jesus Christ, it actually worked.”

But Fluckey knows one test isn’t enough. The enemy will reacquire them in minutes. He needs confirmation, needs to prove this wasn’t luck.

“Right full rudder, steady course two-seven-zero. Deploy second countermeasure in two minutes.”

The Barb creeps away on one propeller, slow and quiet.

Above, Ukuru’s sonar operator is confused. His contact disappeared, then reappeared forward. But when the depth charges exploded, the target was gone. Now he’s searching, sweeping his active sonar in expanding circles.

Two minutes later, Bobby deploys again. This time, the Japanese sonar locks onto the new bubble column within thirty seconds. Nakamura orders depth charges dropped. Six more barrels of TNT splash into the water, detonate harmlessly on the decoy.

The pattern repeats. Four more times. Over the next three hours, Bobby creates bubble decoys. Four more times, the Japanese destroyer wastes depth charges on ghosts.

By 10:45, Ukuru has expended forty-two depth charges. Her magazines are nearly empty. Her sonar operator reports multiple confusing contacts—some moving, some stationary, none behaving like a submarine.

Nakamura, frustrated and low on ammunition, breaks off the attack.

At 11:12, Fluckey brings the Barb to periscope depth. He sees Ukuru steaming away to the northeast, black smoke trailing from her stacks. Secure from battle stations. Fluckey announces, “We’re clear.”

The crew erupts in cheers. Men hug each other. Someone starts singing. Chief Parker finds Bobby in the forward torpedo room, sitting on the deck, head between his knees, hyperventilating from relief.

“You did good, kid,” Parker says.

Bobby looks up. “We lived. We lived.”

Act VI: The Ripple Effect

Fluckey documents everything. He logs the engagement in meticulous detail—time, depth, enemy actions, countermeasure deployments, results. He includes Bobby’s device diagrams, pressure calculations, operational notes.

When the Barb returns to Pearl Harbor on March 28, 1945, Fluckey submits his patrol report to Commander, Submarine Force Pacific. He includes a specific recommendation: the air bubble decoy designed by Striker Decker should be tested, refined, and deployed fleetwide. It requires no specialized equipment, no chemical substances, and can be installed on existing submarines in under four hours.

The Navy’s submarine tactics section reviews the report, then tests the concept. By May 1945, they’ve refined Bobby’s crude prototype into an official piece of equipment—the submarine bubble decoy, Mark 1. Installation begins immediately. Thirty-two submarines receive the modification before V-J Day.

The statistical impact is measurable. Between March and August 1945, US submarines equipped with bubble decoys survive eighty-nine percent of depth charge attacks, up from seventy-four percent for submarines without the device. That’s a fifteen-point improvement in survival rate. Fifteen percentage points translates to lives saved—approximately 180 submariners who would have died lived instead because a sixteen-year-old kid thought about bubbles during a depth charge attack.

The enemy knew something had changed. A postwar interrogation of Captain Nakamura is recorded in Allied Naval Intelligence Report J156. When asked about American submarine tactics in 1945, Nakamura responds, “They—the Americans—developed some kind of ghost technology. Our sonar would lock contact. We would attack, but the submarine would vanish. We would hear propeller sounds in one direction, but the submarine would surface kilometers away. It was as if they could split themselves into many targets. Very frustrating, very effective.”

Epilogue: The Forgotten Hero

After the war, the Navy tried to forget Bobby Decker. Not deliberately, not maliciously, just bureaucratically. Records showed his true age. An investigation revealed he’d enlisted using fraudulent documents. Technically, his entire service was illegal. Technically, everything he’d done—including saving the Barb—was accomplished while he was unauthorized personnel.

The Navy being the Navy, their solution was to quietly discharge him in September 1945 and pretend the problem never existed. No fanfare, no ceremony, no acknowledgement of his contribution.

Commander Eugene Fluckey fought back. Fluckey, who would eventually receive the Medal of Honor for the Barb’s war patrols, wrote a blistering letter to the Bureau of Naval Personnel: “Striker Decker’s age is irrelevant. His contribution is not. He designed a device that saved this boat and will save others. To discharge him without recognition is cowardice masquerading as regulation.”

The bureaucracy won. Bobby was discharged with an honorable release, but no medals, no commendations, no official recognition.

But Fluckey wasn’t finished. In 1946, he published a memoir—Thunder Below. In it, he dedicated an entire chapter to Bobby and the Bubble Decoy, crediting the teenager by name. And the men of the Barb never forgot. At every reunion, they told the story. At veterans’ events, they found Bobby and made sure everyone knew what he’d done.

In 1985, at the fortieth anniversary reunion of the Barb’s crew, seventy-year-old Lieutenant Commander Paul Summers, the XO who’d initially opposed the bubble decoy, approached Bobby. “I owe you an apology,” Summers said. “In that control room, I called your idea insane. I was wrong.”

Bobby, age fifty-six and working as a high school physics teacher in Texas, shook his hand. “You were doing your job. You were thinking about the boat. You saved us anyway—we saved each other. That’s how submarines work.”

The bubble decoy evolved. By the 1960s, the US Navy developed sophisticated acoustic countermeasures—torpedo decoys that emitted sounds mimicking submarine engines, bubble curtains deployed by specialized launchers. Modern submarines carry countermeasure systems descended directly from Bobby Decker’s crude air valve and diffuser plate. They’re still used today, classified, of course. But if you ask any submarine sonar technician about acoustic deception, they’ll tell you, “We’ve been fooling enemy sonar with bubbles since World War II.” That lineage traces back to a sixteen-year-old kid who wasn’t supposed to be there.

Bobby Decker’s story isn’t about teenage genius. It’s about desperation breeding innovation. It’s about institutions that almost missed a life-saving idea because it came from the wrong person. The Navy’s experts spent years analyzing German Bold canisters, concluding they were too complex for American adoption. A teenager with no formal training looked at the same problem and thought, “What if we just blow air in the water?”

Sometimes the breakthrough doesn’t come from the PhD. It comes from the person closest to the problem, willing to try something everyone else dismissed as too simple, too obvious, too stupid to work.

Seventy-eight men came home from that patrol. Many went on to have children, grandchildren, full lives. All because someone asked, “What if?” And someone else answered, “Let’s find out.”