The Galloping Ghost Page 4

  For Fluckey, the voyage would be remembered in quite a different way.

  Unbeknownst to him, when his parents headed back to Annapolis after seeing their son a few months before the cruise, they were in an automobile crash caused by a drunken driver. Both suffered serious internal injuries. Newt recovered, leaving him with a permanent limp. Mrs. Fluckey also recovered but remained frail from the ordeal. The details of the crash and the full extent of the injuries were withheld by the family so Gene would not worry.

  During the Wyoming’s fifteen-day transit to Plymouth, England, a Navy dispatch arrived with news from Fluckey’s father: “DOCTOR ADVISES THAT MOTHER IS CRITICALLY ILL PNEUMONIA AND HEART TROUBLE COME HOME IF POSSIBLE I N FLUCKEY.”

  As much as he wanted to return, Gene thought that terminating the cruise would end his Navy career. Hope arrived the next day in another message, this time from his sister: “MOTHER STILL IN GRAVE CONDITION BUT HOLDING OWN WILL ADVISE DEVELOPMENTS LUCIELLE”

  Two days later—on June 9—all hope was lost : “MIDSHIPMAN EUGENE FLUCKEY MOTHER PASSES AWAY SUDDENLY AT EIGHT FORTY FIVE THIS MORNING PERIOD EVERYTHING WAS DONE FIRST AND SHE FOUGHT COURAGEOUSLY THROUGHOUT BUT CONTINUOUS PNEUMONIA STRAIN WAS TOO MUCH FOR HEART PERIOD HOLD UP SON DAD.”

  Gene was heartsick.

  From Washington, his sister wrote a long letter, explaining all that had happened, a letter that would eventually catch up to him on the French Riviera. She enclosed a lock of his mother’s chestnut hair, snipped as a keepsake for each of the children. “I know it will be such a long, long time before you get this, but it’s been so terribly hard up to now to sit down and let you know everything,” wrote Lucy.

  Gene read the letter despairingly. Too soon after the accident, he reasoned, his parents had taken a trip to visit his brother, Jim, who had taken a job in Ohio after graduation from Princeton. Along the way, Mrs. Fluckey contracted a bad sore throat and bronchitis. In her weakened condition from the accident, she returned to Washington, where the illness worsened. Pneumonia had set in, eventually taking her life at age sixty-one.

  In her letter Lucy described how peaceful Mrs. Fluckey looked in repose in a flower-bedecked living room during the viewing. She was clothed in a pink dress with a locket and chain around her neck that Gene had given her. “She loved it so, and always wore it and told everyone about it,” wrote Lucy. She recounted heroic efforts by two doctors to save Mrs. Fluckey from what was thought to be a heart attack. She had rebounded, even getting up out of bed a number of times. But the illness wouldn’t loosen its grip. She took a turn for the worse because of pneumonia and died a week later. “I’ve felt so sorry for you having to hear about it way out there all alone, no one to comfort you,” Lucy concluded. “Just be a good sailor and remember how mother worked and wanted you to stay at Annapolis. We’re all glad you couldn’t come home and spoil what mother’d worked so hard for. And take care of yourself dear; so that you can finish at the Academy.”

  By August, with his son still at sea, Newt Fluckey wrote for the first time since the funeral. He apologized to his son, noting that illness, the auto injuries, the stress of the funeral, and later trials had left him in weakened condition. “It is needless to say how greatly all miss Mom, and there is left only the holding of best memories. She loved her children more than they knew, but also had the satisfaction of knowing they genuinely appreciated the many, many things she had done in their behalf. She preferred to overlook errors in others—much more so than any general inclination.”

  It wasn’t until 23 August that the midshipmen returned to the Severn on the battleship, and Fluckey finally returned home. The obituary in the Washington Post made no mention of the automobile crash. But the family henceforth would say Mrs. Fluckey had been killed in an auto accident. In fact, Gene bore deep bitterness toward the drunken driver who had caused the wreck. Mostly he internalized his grief. Lucy worried about that and later wrote to him, urging him to persevere at the academy. “Mother would be so pleased to know that you graduated from Annapolis.”

  That he did on 6 June 1935, with a commission as an ensign in the United States Navy. He finished 107th in a class of 464 graduates. Upon graduation, he received orders to join the battleship Nevada on the far side of the country, where worries about war with Japan were mounting.

  Over and Under

  Ensign Fluckey’s great adventure as an officer in the U.S. Navy began in a sedan headed for the West Coast to the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet in Long Beach, California. He could have gone by train or bus. But, since he and three buddies—fellow ensigns at the academy—had the same orders, they decided to pool their cash and buy a car for a transcontinental drive. At the invitation of his older brother, Fluckey and his pals stayed overnight with Jim at his home in Ohio while heading west. Ensigns Fluckey, Frank Gambacorta, William Germershausen, and Robert Prickett made quite an impression on Jim, who greeted his brother with, “Congratulations, Commodore!” He was impressed with the uniforms, noting in the vernacular of the times, “naval officers look simply ducky when wearing their gigs.”

  By the time of Gene’s visit, Jim had changed his last name. All the Fluckey children had endured some degree of hazing growing up. “Fluckey is a difficult name to live with. I know from personal experience,” said one female relative, who explained that at a family reunion several teenagers and young adults agreed that their last name was a “trial.” Gene had contemplated a name change, wondering about the consequences in the Navy for an officer called “Fluckey.” But he decided he’d rather defend it, given the long and proud history of the family’s service to the country. But Jim and Ken, his Ivy League brothers, made the change just as soon as they were able. Ken assumed the original Alsatian spelling to become Kenneth Newton Flocke. Jim simply switched around his birth name to become James Fluckey Snowden, after his mother.

  Leaving Ohio, the four ensigns roared away in mid-June, taking Route 40 to Route 66 that led them through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and finally California. The journey was a panoply of extremes for the young officers. The contrast between abject poverty and wealth was undeniable. The Great Depression had coincided with years of drought through the midsection of the country, causing prodigious dust storms and suffocating black blizzards, one of which chased the ensigns through Oklahoma before a rainstorm settled it. What came to be known as the “Dust Bowl” had wiped out whole farming communities. Refugees with all their belongings took flight, many en route to a West Coast that by most standards seemed quite the paradise—especially California, where a burgeoning oil industry, thriving Hollywood film studios, agricultural abundance, and trade opportunities with Pacific Rim countries ensured a relatively stable economy. A buildup of Navy bases at San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles further bolstered the economy. Among them, the anchorage serving the Fleet at Los Angeles—Long Beach—was one of the Pacific Coast’s most unlikely ports.

  In its brief history, the city had virtually willed itself into prominence at the mouth of the Los Angeles River. In 1911 investors had conceived draining eight hundred acres of mud flats between the river and the ocean, dredging them, building a stone breakwater at sea, and thereby creating a seaport that eventually would become the largest man-made harbor in the world. Discovery of oil fields offshore in 1921 drew new investors, who plowed an estimated $1 million per month into creating a downtown. Even when a major earthquake devastated the city in 1933, it was quickly rebuilt in an Art Deco style. By the time of Fluckey’s arrival in the summer of 1935, another offshore oil gusher continued the fuel expansion of the port, which had become home base for the Pacific Fleet because of its temperate weather most of the year. With more than a dozen battleships, several carriers, and numerous cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and auxiliary vessels berthed there plus a naval shipbuilding yard in nearby San Pedro, the Navy projected awesome military clout across the Pacific to support bases in Hawaii and the Philippines and the atolls of Midway, Wake, and Guam between
them.

  As the four ensigns arrived in Long Beach, a letter from “Snowden” awaited Gene. “Can’t Navy discipline teach you to take your junk with you?” Jim joked, noting Gene had left behind a pair of dress white pants. “You’re one of the world’s worst travelers in leaving everything behind, so naturally you’ll spend your whole life traveling. Fancy losing half of your cruiser division during a war, Admiral, damned embarrassing, don’t you think?” He closed by wishing his brother good luck.

  Fluckey’s orders were to join the battleship Nevada, one of about a dozen dreadnaughts forming the core of the Pacific Fleet. The 27,500-ton warship was home to more than a thousand officers, sailors, and Marines. It was one of two sister ships built in Massachusetts and commissioned in 1916 in time for World War I. The ship had seen duty with the Atlantic Fleet in the British Isles during the war but saw little action.

  In 1922 the Atlantic Fleet was disassembled and sent to the newly formed Pacific Fleet command in California. The decision was the outgrowth of a burglary of the Japanese consulate in New York City that same year by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). The prize was the theft of Japan’s naval code that allowed American code-breakers to decipher Japanese diplomatic and naval dispatches. They revealed that Japan had a larger peacetime fleet than the United States, that it was fully activated, and that Japan had well-fortified island bases stretching south into the Central Pacific. The Navy worried about its bases in the Pacific should war break out and redeployed its warships from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coast as a warning to Japan. Under the Navy’s worstcase scenario envisioned by its so-called Orange War Plan, the United States would temporarily concede the Philippines to Japan, would rush the Pacific Fleet from California to Hawaii, then island-hop south to the Philippines to retake them.

  With this in mind, the Navy began modernizing its coal-burning battleships like the Nevada. By 1930 the battlewagon had completed a three-year modernization that gave it a new superstructure and significant improvement to its armament and firepower, plus conversion from coal to oil power. Still, the battleship was one of the older behemoths in the Fleet. Newer dreadnaughts such as the 33,400-ton Idaho, New Mexico, and Mississippi were bigger, faster, stronger, and more heavily armed.

  An invasion of China by Japan in 1931 exacerbated tensions in the Pacific. Japan’s ever-more powerful navy and army needed resources, especially oil, to sustain its war and fuel the heavily industrialized Japanese homeland. The fear in Washington was that Japan would move south against European colonies in Indochina. Mineral- and oil-rich Malaysia made a tempting target, and the Pacific Fleet was the only real hurdle standing in the way.

  Indeed, Fluckey and his fellow ensigns had arrived in Long Beach at a precipitous time. The year 1935 foreshadowed in many ways what was to come. Fascist troops from Italy had invaded and occupied Ethiopia. The Japanese army had marched into Beijing in China. Nazi Germany had created a new Luftwaffe (air force), instituted a compulsory draft, and began rebuilding its navy. Japan began accelerating shipbuilding, having abrogated the London Naval Treaty of 1930 that had fixed the size and type of warships that the major navies of the world could build with an aim to preventing the kind of arms race that led to World War I. Meanwhile, Tokyo fiercely objected to a plan by the U.S. Navy to conduct its annual Fleet exercise in the area of Wake Island, the American possession nearest to Japan. Adm. Joseph M. Reeves, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, wanted to test his theory that it was possible for Japan to spring a surprise attack on the big Navy base at Pearl Harbor by using aircraft flying off carriers. Reeves wanted to see if his carriers could take Wake Island by surprise in a mock attack. Tokyo demanded that unless the war games were called off, it would cancel a trade agreement with the United States that had made Japan its second largest market. President Franklin Roosevelt, unwilling to risk a disruption in trade, ordered Reeves not to venture close to Wake.

  The ensigns aboard the battleships at Long Beach were not privy to any of this. Rather, their purpose was to learn how to be officers. The tradition was to rotate duty stations every few months so that over a two-year probationary period they would have a good understanding of all the various commands and responsibilities aboard. Engineering, communications, and deck management were primary objectives, as well as completion of the so-called ensigns notebook. “The notebook had a separate chapter for each department of the ship,” explained Capt. Max Duncan, who was to serve under Fluckey in World War II.

  You were required to become familiar with each system (piping, circuits, pumps, motors, etc.) within the department and make drawings of many of the systems from inspections. You were required to qualify to stand the watch or duty in the department if one was established. The division officers signed off that you had satisfactorily completed his division’s requirements and the department head had to sign off for his department. There was a schedule established and if you fell behind, you were not granted shore leave until you were back on schedule. The major check off was “officer of the deck-underway” so one could go flying or to sub school [with their inducement of extra pay]. To qualify, one had to successfully anchor the ship, conduct a successful man overboard, change station in a formation underway, and so forth. The notebook work was in addition to your assigned billet work. Overall, duty on a major ship was a busy time for ensigns.

  Ensigns found a very formal setup on battleships and carriers. There was a junior officers mess with a separate wardroom, and the mess president was the senior lieutenant j.g. The junior officer mess was informal and was frequently the scene of dinners with dates on weekends. Many times the dinners were quite formal—and cheap. Cost was important. “Ensigns pay was $125 a month plus $18 a month subsistence,” explained Duncan. “Only if you lived on the ship did you have enough money to go ashore and have a good time.”

  Maneuvers off Long Beach and spring voyages to Panama and Hawaii kept the Fleet battle ready.

  Fluckey, at age twenty-two, preferred life aboard the battleship, focusing on all his tasks. He was not much for dating, a pattern he established during his academy years. But in December 1935, fellow Ensign Germershausen met a young woman in Long Beach by the name of Marjorie Gould. She was pretty with long blonde hair, high cheekbones, aquiline features, and a light build on a tallish frame. Her girlish mannerisms were irresistible. Socially she was outgoing and was a chanteuse for a local band and had joined a group of young ladies, including the wives of senior officers, who provided companionship to naval officers at formal teas and dinner dances. Ensign Germershausen thought Marjorie would be an ideal match for his good friend Fluckey and arranged a blind date between them. Afterward Gene was so smitten that he rushed back to the Nevada to report, “I’ve met the girl I’m going to marry.” He wrote a letter to his father announcing the same news. The next day he proposed. But Marjorie demurred. It took her more than a month to reveal what wasn’t outwardly apparent. In late January, she got up the courage to write a letter to Gene at sea, unveiling a story of tragedy, hardship, and perseverance.

  Marjorie was the older of two daughters born to an affluent English immigrant couple. She grew up in privileged circumstances in Flatbush, then an upscale section of New York City in the 1920s. Her father was a department store buyer. Marjorie, well educated early in life at private schools, seemed destined for a comfortable life. But at age eleven she was on vacation with her family and was playing with other children on a second-story balcony at their hotel when she slipped and plunged to the ground. She wasn’t seriously injured. However, perhaps by coincidence, her pancreas stopped functioning, bringing on profound and irreversible diabetes at a time when treatment was very limited.

  The Goulds took her to the Joslin Diabetes Clinic in Boston, where doctors decided to start their youngest patient on insulin, an experimental drug first manufactured by the Eli Lily Company in 1922. Traditionally, diabetes patients practiced what was known as a “starvation diet”—fasting and consu
ming large quantities of fat and very few carbohydrates. Insulin made it possible to eat normal foods. But it could also be unpredictable; too much insulin could bring on serious reactions. The clinic’s renowned “wandering nurses” visited the Goulds at home, sometimes staying with them, to teach Mrs. Gould how to inject the medicine and how to calculate the calories needed to balance her daughter’s diet with her insulin. Large needles were needed, needles that had to be sharpened on a pumice stone. The syringes were made of glass and had to be boiled so they could be reused. If the calculations were inaccurate, if too much insulin was injected, sudden dips in blood sugar could bring on frightening mood swings and, in the extreme, diabetic coma. Marjorie had enrolled at public school in Flatbush after being diagnosed with diabetes, but the school couldn’t handle her diabetic reactions. A Catholic school accepted her, but after two years it too let her go.

  The Goulds separated when Marjorie was fourteen. She, her mother, and a younger sister moved to California at the invitation of an uncle in Long Beach. Again she was unable to enroll in any school. Meanwhile, her father fell upon hard times and sent less and less money to support his family, causing great distress. Out of economic necessity, Marjorie learned to sew, becoming an excellent seamstress who made all of her own clothes. She also became a voracious reader, becoming self-educated. As a diabetic, it was clear she could never have children. The doctors had told her as much. The risk to fetus and mother was too great. And it was because of this that she wrote to Gene that marriage to the ensign wouldn’t be a good thing.