The Galloping Ghost Read online

  Marjorie mailed her letter in care of the Nevada, then had second thoughts and wrote a second letter. “Last night I stayed awake from eleven when I went to bed till 3:45 am thinking of you and wondering what you were going to think of me when you get the letter I wrote on Saturday. I nearly sent a telegram asking you not to open it. I practically bared my soul to you and hon, it’s almost like standing naked before someone. You don’t think me awful, truthfully, do you?”

  Quite the contrary—the revelations only deepened Ensign Fluckey’s feelings for her. He wrote of his undying devotion, that having children didn’t matter to him, that it was his love of her that mattered. On leave a few weeks later, Fluckey went to Marjorie’s house and the couple announced their engagement.

  Marriage under normal circumstances would have been possible within a short time. But in the mid-1930s the Navy frowned mightily on any of its ensigns getting married. War was coming and the Navy was determined to hang onto them for as long as possible. Rules were adopted to prohibit them from marrying until a full two years after graduation from the academy. Anyone who violated the directive was subject to immediate dismissal from the service.

  Gene and Marjorie contemplated getting hitched secretly, perhaps in Mexico. But in the end they decided not to flaunt the regulation, though it meant no marriage until at least June 1937—a year-and-a-half away. They both were young and willing to wait. They could still see each other whenever the Fleet was in port, and when away steady correspondence—each letter numbered in a countdown to 6 June 1937—kept the flame burning. So absorbed was Ensign Fluckey in writing letters to Marjorie in his off-duty hours one day that while giving his messboy orders, he called him “honey.” “That damn message has been laughing about that ever since,” he wrote Marjorie.

  Every week at sea Fluckey arranged for forget-me-not flowers to be delivered to his fiancée. Through daily correspondence, the couple exchanged poetry, thoughts about popular tunes, sometimes lapsed into French, and professed deep love for one another that at times was tested. In March 1936, for instance, the Nevada embarked for the Bremerton, Washington, Navy Yard for a month-long refit. On leave at the time, Fluckey took the train from Long Beach to rejoin the battleship at the shipyard. There he received a letter from Marjorie describing an encounter with a married aide to Fleet Admiral Reeves at a dinner party she was requested to attend as the aide’s escort. “He was old enough to be my father,” she wrote. “Franny [the hostess] warned me not to get cornered alone anywhere with him as he’s very amorous. He has a ’36 Buick sedan that’s a honey but even that couldn’t intrigue me. We all went to the Biltmore after dinner and had a very enjoyable time but when we arrived home he wouldn’t let me out of the car. Gave me quite a fight until I told him I’m very much in love with someone and that I detested people who had no regard for other’s feelings. After that speech he let me go. He said he’d like to call again but I told mother that I’m out if he does.”

  Fluckey started counting down the hours in his letters until the Nevada was back in Long Beach. There Marjorie noticed in a city newspaper that Gene was being transferred to the destroyer USS McCormick (DD-223), based in San Diego. “Your letter gave me the worst fright of my life,” he replied. “I spent the whole afternoon running around the communication offices of the Nevada, Maryland and New York reading over all orders sent out in the last two weeks—my name didn’t appear. I even went to the newspaper offices in town, checking the back file of orders sent to the news—still no orders for me. Darling, I’m so in love with you that the thought alone of being in San Diego this next year with only weekends to be with you, is enough to drive me nuts. Surely fate couldn’t be that mean.”

  But mean it was. Six days later he sent another letter to Marjorie on USS Nevada stationery with the Nevada crossed out and replaced with a handwritten McCormick.

  “Marjorie, darling,” he began, “I’m aboard.”

  The change from the spacious battleship to the McCormick was incredible. “Hon, this is the first time I’ve ever written a letter to you on the overhead—one leg is out the port, the other over the side of the bunk to keep the steady rolling from affecting my writing. Gosh, I’m glad I’m a fairly good sailor, otherwise I’d have to install a one-way valve in my throat. It’s such a change from a battlewagon. As a Junior Officer, one is wet-nursed perpetually [on a battleship]. The moment I stepped aboard the McCormick the executive officer informed me that I was Gunnery Officer, Assistant Engineer, Commissary Officer, Assistant Communications Officer, Ships Service Officer and Wardroom Mess Treasurer. I was flabbergasted.”

  On the way down to Panama, the destroyer was involved in wartime maneuvers with the battleships. “Yesterday was one I’ll never forget,” Fluckey wrote. “From two in the morning till a forlorn supper at ten last night, we ran around like a dog with a tin can tied to its tail. Making smoke to protect our dear, dear battleships till we all looked like coal miners.”

  So often did Fluckey begin his letters with “Marjorie, darling” that he mused he would name his flagship “Marjorie, darling” when he became admiral. “Then I’ll never get mixed up. Anyhow it sounds good to me and the British call theirs ‘invincible,’ ‘indefatigable,’ and ‘impregnable.’ Naturally in time the U.S. will probably have a ‘delightful,’ ‘delicious,’ and ‘delovely.’”

  Ensign Fluckey adjusted well to life aboard the destroyer. Both he and his fiancée eventually viewed his reassignment as fortuitous. As she put it, “It could be lots worse, for it might have been one of the new destroyers on the East Coast.” He agreed. “The final ensign to get orders from the Nevada is being sent to an oiler which travels any place and every place. Perhaps I could have done worse.”

  The McCormick was in and out of San Diego, often at sea with the Fleet off the West Coast, visiting Central and South America and Hawaii. When the ship was in San Diego and the officers got shore leave, Fluckey took the bus to Long Beach. He made the trip so often that he later joked he had put enough mileage in to circumnavigate the world.

  On a return cruise to the Canal Zone, the McCormick docked in Panama City, where everyone got to go ashore. Fluckey was appalled by the city’s squalor just beyond the shopping district. “Later I dropped into a small restaurant and received a shock. The most peculiar individual I have ever seen in my life dropped himself at a nearby table. One might call him a male—I wouldn’t. He was blonde with a weak attempt to make his hair quite pink. His face was powdered, lipsticked, eyebrow penciled, with mascara. The climax was silver nail polish. Passing sailors laughed when he beckoned to them. I waited for someone to pop him, but he went unmolested. Pitiful sight.”

  At sea in the tropics, Fluckey suffered badly from sunburn due to his light complexion. As officer of the deck, he complained that his face was “one big blister . . . I’m so red I’m purple.” During the cruise, the McCormick passed below the equator, bringing on an ancient naval tradition whereby crewmen who have sailed the Southern Hemisphere “baptize” those who haven’t. In this case it was Ensign Fluckey and a few other “pollywogs” brought before a mock King Neptune’s court convened on the destroyer. “Last night Davy Jones [a designated crewman] crawled aboard in proper fashion with his subpoenas for the ‘pollywogs’ to the court of Father Neptune,” as Fluckey described it in a letter to his fiancée. Fluckey’s three “offenses” were “overexposing his face to the sun,” “flouting his blistered hide before his betters,” and “being lubberly enough to attempt to bring a trunk aboard a destroyer.” The next morning a sailor dressed up as Rex Neptune in a homemade crown and scepter presided with a school of “mermaid” sailors. The ensign was found guilty on all counts followed by an appropriate sentence, met with laughter all around: “First they stuffed me full of quinine, then, alas, clipped my golden locks (by far the worst of the ignominies). Off to a good start they proceeded to beat me to a frazzle, souse me from head to foot with fuel oil, and then dumped me into the tank. Naturally I’m a full-fledged shellback [satisfact
ory initiation into the Southern Hemisphere club], though slightly peculiar looking, being bald in spots with dark rimmed eyes where the fuel oil refused to come off. We passed the remainder of the day massaging ourselves with kerosene, hot water and rags alternately,” he said of himself and fellow pollywogs. “Hon, when, oh, when will I ever be presentable again.”

  For the next year, as the destroyer tagged along with the Fleet up and down the Pacific Coast, Fluckey earned a reputation as being affable, well liked, capable of lightning-like calculations, and unflappable in emergencies. “I don’t know anyone he doesn’t like, nor do I know of anyone who doesn’t like him,” Marjorie would tell a reporter a few years later. “He fits into all crowds and doesn’t know what it is to have a temper. In fact, he flatly tells me, ‘There’s no use trying to get into a fight with me—I just won’t fight.’”

  By May 1937—with just a month left until Fluckey was to get twenty-five days’ leave to marry his fiancée—the ensign witnessed a tragedy involving a Navy pilot and radioman. “Our ship was port plane guard for the Saratoga and I was officer-of-the-deck when a plane whizzed past us attempting to take a short cut to make the landing on the Saratoga,” he wrote Marjorie.

  He crashed about 500 yards astern of us and we went emergency full ahead, trying to reach him as fast as possible. The plane sank immediately for when we reached the spot in less than six minutes it had disappeared leaving no trace. As I am in charge of the crash boat, I hopped in and searched back and forth in a very heavy sea for a half-hour in vain. The only articles I found were a cigarette butt, a couple of pencils and a radio notebook. Gasoline bubbles kept breaking on the surface, but as the water was miles deep, there will never be a chance of finding them. They were snuffed out like a pair of candles.

  You know, hon, it gives you an awful funny feeling to see a couple of men die that quickly and know you can’t do a damn thing to save them. Tomorrow I have to appear at the inquest aboard the Saratoga to give all the gory details and my part in it. It’s so sad to think that they might be alive now if they had just taken their time instead of trying to save a couple of minutes.

  As the McCormick headed back to San Diego, Fluckey scribbled “658 dragging hours” at the beginning of a new letter, noting the time remaining until the couple would be reunited and could wed. “Did you know I’ve grown a moustache? I was going to surprise you with it, but the captain thinks I’d better get rid of it before I see the high and mighty tomorrow. Truly I’m quite distinguished looking if one is not over five feet away. Still, as you can realize, at ten feet it fades out entirely just like my eyebrows. And I did so want to be married with a moustache.”

  With “2,030,400 seconds” left before leave, Fluckey wrote again of preparing for marriage and how the division doctor summoned the three husbands-to-be aboard the McCormick to a private conference to “top off” their knowledge of marital relations.

  Gene Fluckey and Marjorie Gould were married right on schedule, 6 June 1937, in Long Beach in a simple ceremony that fulfilled the Navy’s marital waiting period. The couple was desperately poor on an ensign’s salary. Given the cost of insulin and other medicines, they eked by, barely. When the commanding officer of the McCormick came to call, the couple drew the blinds and didn’t answer the door as they didn’t have a single soft drink or anything to offer.

  With trepidation Marjorie’s mother turned over the duty of monitoring her daughter’s insulin treatments to her son-in-law. Not only did he do so very successfully, but he had studied up on every available source of information on diabetes. “He frankly knew more than the doctors did,” said a relative. Fluckey decided, based on his readings, that megadoses of vitamin B would help keep his wife healthy, contrary to medical advice of the time. But the vitamins were expensive and the Navy was unwilling to pay for them. Fortunately, a new, longer-lasting insulin was on the market, which helped medically. But as Fluckey put it in a letter after the McCormick cast off, “I am scared stiff and heart broken at the thought of leaving you in anyone’s hands but my own. I’ve never detested going away so much in my life as I did that last night. I tried to feel perky. Still the minute the car drove off gloom and despair settled all over me.”

  The couple had no intention of having children; the risk to both child and mother from diabetes was just too great. Yet it wasn’t long before Marjorie learned she was pregnant and due in March 1938—a scary situation. Mothers with diabetes at that time often died during childbirth.

  In his desire to be home more during this time, Fluckey considered transferring to submarine duty; submariners seemed to have much more free time. “I have figured out that in destroyers, normally operating, I can be with you less than one-third of each year. Loving you as I do, there is no job at any salary worth that sacrifice. Submarines should do better,” Fluckey noted in a letter home. But even with submersibles, as he put it, “If they don’t bring the average free time up to 50 percent, the Navy and I will part.”

  Over the next nine months, the McCormick was in and out of San Diego and for a time was transferred to the Navy base in Vallejo on San Francisco Bay, where Marjorie relocated briefly. Most of the time, Ensign Fluckey was at sea, rekindling a romance of letters in which he regretted deeply the long absences.

  Occasionally something out of the ordinary broke the monotony on the McCormick. On 20 March 1938, while at sea, a sailor fell overboard when a guard rail on the flying bridge gave way. He plunged onto the roof of the bridge, knocked off one of the radio antennas, then fell into the Pacific. He struggled to get his clothes off so they wouldn’t drag him under. Though life preservers were thrown in his direction, he couldn’t reach them. Fluckey ordered a boat lowered, jumped in, and raced toward the sailor. “We got to him in time to save him though he was cut up a bit and utterly exhausted,” he wrote Marjorie. “When we brought him aboard, I mixed a shot of coffee and alcohol to bring him around. As the coffee was hot and the alcohol strong, I had to keep sipping it to be sure it was OK for him. We both recovered.”

  Three days later Marjorie Fluckey gave birth to a nine-pound, seven-and-three-quarters-ounce baby girl at Mercy Hospital in San Diego. Fortunately, there were no complications; both mother and daughter—Barbara Ann—were doing fine. The announcement was radioed to the McCormick. “When the news arrived I was just turning in after the evening 8–12 watch, so I really feel like I stood watch over you,” he wrote back from the destroyer. “After a few joyous jumps I broke out a box of cigars and woke up everybody from the Commodore on down to tell them of the joyous event and to offer them a cigar. . . . Darling, I’m so very, very happy sitting here puffing a cigar and writing dribbles from the whirlpool of thoughts of you that encompass my being. The whole ship is congratulating me and my chest measurement has increased to a 52.”

  March led into April, April into May, with the McCormick still out in the Pacific and Fluckey longing to be home. He decided to put in for submarine duty. The benefits seemed to far outweigh the negatives. If he got a transfer, he and his family would first go to New London, Connecticut, for intensive submarine training over several months—time that he could be with Marjorie and his daughter. Submarine duty also offered hazardous duty pay—an extra 50 percent at sea—and a quicker route to promotions. In addition, active duty and former submarine officers that Fluckey had met seemed a cut above in intellect. And there was another reason—Fluckey’s complexion. He suffered greatly from sunburn; he figured under-sea duty would be more conducive to his physical well-being.

  Of course, there was the risk of a sinking. During his lifetime, more than a few submarine disasters had grabbed the headlines. Between 1927 and 1935 ten submarines had been lost from the United States, Russia, France, Italy, and England, with the deaths of 408 officers and men. Despite the public perception of subs being “iron coffins,” the disasters were few compared to the large number of submersibles in the American fleet. Lately the safety record had improved. New, larger submarines capable of enough speed to accompany the Fle
et also were being built for transpacific operations.

  Fluckey’s orders to sub school arrived while the McCormick was in Pearl Harbor. He shared the good news in an effusive letter written in the wee hours of dawn. He calculated it would be 28,831 minutes until the destroyer finally returned to San Diego.

  Sweetheart, it’s sunrise. Would you like me to describe a sunrise over Hawaii? I’ll have a try at it anyhow. First, close your eyes—imagine a low verdant land rising to the westward forming a long mountain ridge—to the eastward the land becomes hilly, then breaks into a very rickety range of mountains going down towards the sea. At the seaward end there is an old crater, as Diamond Head appears in the greying morn. The sea is a cobalt blue, smoothed and molded into place by a giant hand. The birds have stopped singing—there is a breathless hush—everything but time has stopped and it’s so quiet you can hear a pin drop—even the sugar cane is standing straight and motionless—not a leaf whispers—not a foot walks—the sky has set itself—I am holding my breath in silent expectancy. Such a lovely dawn—it’s hard to believe that I’m alive and seeing all this with my very own eyes.

  In successive days the ensign composed poetry for his wife and wrote dreamily of his daughter. Marjorie wrote back, “You should see our blessed darling. She gets prettier every day and more adorable. Hon, you’re just going to love her to death. . . . Darling, the poems you wrote were really very sweet, though I must admit that the second one rather made me blush, in fact Mrs. Germeinder said I had the rosiest look while reading one of your letters. If she but knew! However hon, I can quite believe and understand what you mean for they tell me that you realize how very much I love you.”