The Galloping Ghost Read online

  As June arrived the McCormick dropped anchor in San Diego to an emotional reunion between Fluckey and his bride. For the first time, he got to hold his six-week-old daughter. On 6 June, the third anniversary of Fluckey’s graduation from the academy and the first anniversary of his wedding, the couple christened Barbara Ann. That same day, all three left California for Connecticut, where the young ensign would find a home in the Silent Service.

  Submersibles

  Along with his orders to sub school, Eugene Fluckey had been promoted to lieutenant (j.g.) with a much needed pay raise. As he moved up the chain of command, he also had been moving down—figuratively. In three years he had transferred from a 27,500-ton battleship with a crew of more than 1,000 to a 1,550-ton destroyer with a crew of 270 to imminent duty in a 903-ton submarine with a crew of 38. Rather than wait forever to become captain of the battleship, he now envisioned himself as lieutenant commander of an undersea warship in just a few years.

  The incredibly complex and expensive vessels were, in their time, akin to today’s orbiting spacecraft. Diving and surfacing—like liftoffs and landings—required precision teamwork that was unforgiving if not carried out in split-second unison. The service was perceived as so dangerous it was an all-volunteer arm of the Navy that operated in complete secrecy, giving rise to its reputation as the “Silent Service.” It was also an elite corps; not just anyone could join. Those who served had to meet exceedingly tough criteria for mechanical aptitude and psychological well-being. The wrong kind of man aboard a sub, on a long cruise and under attack, could be devastating for the rest of the crew. Adm. Charles A. Lockwood, a World War I submarine pioneer who would go on to command the Pacific submarine fleet in World War II, summed up the type of individual the Navy was looking for: “In no other branch of military service are men required to remain away from normal human contacts as long as submariners at depths far below the least glimmer of sunlight and far away from the feel and smell of natural air. Moreover, these conditions must be endured with good cheer in overcrowded, sometimes ill-smelling, dew-dripping, steel compartments. Those whose tempers or temperaments cannot stand the strain are soon eliminated.”

  On arrival in Connecticut, the Fluckeys rented a cottage in New London, a historic seaport on the south bank of the Thames River and five miles inland from Long Island Sound. In its colonial heyday, the city was an international port-of-call for tall-masted merchant ships that once lined its waterfront. As Marjorie and daughter Barbara settled in to their new quarters, Gene took a Navy launch to the opposite side of the half-mile-wide river to the village of Groton, where the submarine school sat overlooking the Thames. The base, originally a ship coaling station, was converted into a submarine operating and training facility in 1917, the year the Navy launched its first government-built submarine, the L-8. By the time of Fluckey’s arrival, the school appeared much like a quintessential New England college campus, with tidy lawns and stately red-brick classrooms and dormitories. But it differed in a couple of aspects. For one, a 150-foot-high cylindrical tank loomed over it. The tower, appearing much like a midwestern grain silo, was filled with 240,000 gallons of purified, steam-heated water in which students practiced escape techniques from a mock submarine compartment at the bottom of the tank. Another distinguishing feature was a small fleet of stubby World War I–era O- and R-class submarines used for training and docked at slips along the river below the school.

  Lieutenant Fluckey and 29 other junior officers drawn from the Fleet joined about 170 enlisted men at the school in a program that turned over every six months. A series of physical tests weaned the enlistees. First was night-vision certification. Since submarines primarily patrolled on the surface at night to increase speed while avoiding detection, the men had to be able to see the silhouettes of enemy surface vessels in a darkened room built to resemble the bridge of a submarine. The men also gathered in a twenty-foot-long steel chamber, where they were subjected to high atmospheric pressure and hundred-degree temperatures, the type of conditions they might face in a submarine. Anyone who could not endure the tests faced elimination and return to the surface fleet.

  Classroom instruction included diesel mechanics, electrical systems, submarine tactics, torpedo weaponry, and communications. Exhausting hours were spent understanding the complex web of internal mechanisms of a submarine, one of the most complicated military weapons ever devised. Diesel engines used to propel the vessels on the surface were dismantled and rebuilt. Motors and generators for undersea propulsion were rewound. The men diagrammed all the electrical, pneumatic, and hydraulic systems and practiced using all the controls. They witnessed what would happen if lead-acid batteries in the keel of a submarine were doused in seawater. Deadly chlorine gas roiled up, a vivid reminder of a perennial danger of submarine operations. The men also learned how to use Momsen lungs, self-contained breathing devices that would allow them to escape from a stranded sub. Each lung consisted of a spring-loaded nose clip, mouthpiece, and air-inflated bag from which to breathe. To qualify for submarine duty, each officer and enlisted man had to swim to the surface from the bottom of the escape training tank while breathing through his Momsen lung. They made ascents of a hundred feet straight up the middle of the tank, guided by a line knotted every fifteen to twenty feet. To simulate actual conditions, the bottom end of the line was attached to a platform modeled to resemble a sub’s deck and the top end was attached to a buoy deployed at the surface. The men methodically ascended, one knot at a time, pausing at each to blow and decompress the air in their lungs. As they ascended from the hundred-foot depth the air in their lungs expanded under the reduced pressure and would have ruptured a lung if not exhaled. As a safety measure, experienced divers worked in pairs from air-filled vestibules at various depths in the tank to assist anyone who had problems.

  Twice a week the students boarded the school’s submarines in small groups for hands-on lessons in diving, surfacing, and maneuvering the vessels in the river and Long Island Sound. Under the careful scrutiny of a veteran crew, they experienced for the first time the complexity of submergence, beginning with the explosive “ah-oo-gah” of the Klaxon diving alarm. In unison, crewmen cranked open huge Kingston valves to flood ballast tanks to begin a typical ten-minute dive. Simultaneously the deafening clatter of diesel engines shut down as electrical motors took over, drawing power from the batteries, each the size of a human and lining the keel, making up nearly a third of the submarine’s weight. Simultaneously crewmen sealed all hatches and valves throughout the vessel to keep interior compartments from flooding. Planesmen manned two large, hydraulically powered hand wheels at amidships that controlled stern and bow diving planes, mechanical wings deployed from the craft to maneuver it up and down in the sea. Everything was timed; everyone aboard had to carry out his duty unerringly to perfect the dive. Practice emphasized the critical nature of teamwork: one mistake could cost the lives of every man aboard. Slade Cutter, who graduated from sub school just ahead of Fluckey, described the unity of purpose that was needed in a Fleet boat:

  The engineman has to shut off the engines at the diving alarm. The man on the hydraulic manifold in the control room closes the outboard induction valve by hydraulic power. When the engine room personnel hear the outboard valve close, they close the inboard inductions. The guys in the maneuvering room have to shift to the batteries for propulsion. The fellow in the control room opens the vents, and then he closes the vents after the submarine is submerged. All these things have to happen independently. Nobody is supervising them; nobody can be there. The officers have their own responsibilities. All these things have to be done and you have to count on the people doing them in the proper sequence.

  Rigorous oral and written exams each week continued to narrow down the number of enlisted men who could qualify for submarine duty. As for the officers, Fluckey seemed a perfect fit. Throughout his life, he had been fascinated with how things worked and nothing was more complex than a submarine. He also was a people person,
and no crew worked more closely together in tight quarters than submariners. Officers and men viewed themselves much like a family.

  The submarine classes of 1938 were important to the Navy because they would form the command nucleus for the service’s new Fleet submarines, the long-sought answer to how to deal with the growing might of the Japanese military. Admiral Hart, superintendent of the Naval Academy during Fluckey’s years there, proved in 1921 that the Navy’s existing subs were incapable of doing that. He took a flotilla of the latest S-class boats accompanied by a tender, a floating hotel/machine shop that serviced the undersea fleet, on a voyage from New London to Hawaii, then southwest to Manila in the Philippines. The entire journey was beset by breakdowns, forcing overhauls in Hawaii and overtaxing the tender. The flotilla’s ineffectiveness convinced the Navy of the need for a long-range, much larger submarine that would not be tied to a tender and would be capable of patrols that might last three months at a time and span the Pacific.

  The new fleet-type subs were critical to the success of another revision of the Orange War Plan. Instead of the Fleet steaming directly to Manila from its base in Hawaii at the outbreak of war, it would move in stages, first to bases in the Marshall Islands, then to the more westerly Caroline Islands, before moving into Philippine seas. The new tactic required American and Philippine troops to stand their ground longer, to retreat if necessary to the rocky fortress of Corregidor at the mouth of Manila Bay until the Fleet arrived. In tandem with this strategy Fleet submarines would interdict troops and supplies sent south from Japan.

  Plans for these amazing submarines had been finalized and the first generation was launched from shipyards in New England and California in the mid-1930s. The contrast to the S-boats was astonishing. The older vessels were 211 feet long; the fleets, 310. The S-boats contained 4 torpedo firing tubes; the fleets, 10. The S-boats could dive to a test depth of 200 feet; the fleets, at least 300. The S-boats had a maximum surface speed of 14 knots; the fleets, 21. The S-boats carried a maximum crew of 42; the fleets, 80. The S-boats had a range without refueling of 5,000 miles; the fleets, 12,000. And enough food and water could be stored aboard a fleet-type sub to facilitate patrols lasting more than two months without resupply or refueling.

  Technically both the S-class and fleet subs weren’t true submarines but rather submersibles capable of diving and staying submerged for periods of time measured in hours. In wartime, survivability was questionable. The discovery and development of sonar as a means of locating and destroying submarines posed a significant threat. During the latter stages of World War I, an Allied group known as the Anti-Submarine Detection Investigation Committee discovered an electronic method of locating German submarines. The resulting echo-ranging system, known as ASDIC (from the committee’s initials), or sonar, came into being. With it, a sound pulse, or “ping,” was transmitted from a surface vessel. When the pulse hit a submerged metallic object, it bounced back as an echo. At the sub school instructors believed that a properly equipped destroyer operating in tandem with other equally equipped vessels could determine the precise location of a sub with sonar and deliver a coup de grace. Still, the young sub officers-in-training shrugged off potential hazards. “That’s the beauty of being young,” said Cutter.

  As graduation neared in the late fall, competition for class rank was intense because of the consequence of finishing last: assignment to the S-boat squadron patrolling the Chinese coast. It was the one place where you couldn’t take your family and most in Fluckey’s class were married. By sheer determination Fluckey avoided China duty. As a member of the 57th Submarine Basic Officer’s Class, he graduated seventh out of thirty officers and received orders to report for duty to the S-42 based in Panama.

  For the United States Navy in the 1920s, the S-class subs represented the highest evolution of a stealthy coastal defense weapon. After Admiral Hart’s ill-fated voyage to Manila proved that the boats were ill equipped to travel with the Fleet, the Navy relegated them to guarding bases on the West and East Coasts of the United States, the U.S.-owned Canal Zone in Panama, Hawaii, and the Philippines. The S-42, built in 1923 in the Bethlehem shipbuilding yard in Quincy, Massachusetts, was one of six S-boats stationed at the big Navy base in Coco Solo, Panama. The former company town constructed to house workers who built the American-owned canal was now a bustling naval bastion guarding the Caribbean entrance to the waterway.

  It was because of the ambition of the United States to build the canal that Panama earned independence after a long struggle. The tiny country was among the first Spanish-owned colonies in the Americas to assert independence from Spain in 1821 by aligning itself with breakaway Colombia, which decided to absorb Panama rather than let it go. For eighty-two years Panamanians tried to reassert independence through forty administrations, fifty riots, and five attempted secessions. They were finally successful after the United States approached Colombia for permission to build the canal linking the Atlantic with the Pacific over the narrow isthmus of Panama. When Colombia rejected the overture in 1902, Panama again proclaimed independence, this time succeeding with American backing. In exchange for the ten-mile-wide, coast-to-coast canal zone in perpetuity, the United States agreed to pay Panama $10 million immediately and a $250,000 annuity, nearly doubling that amount by 1933.

  Realizing the strategic importance of the waterway to commerce and military security after World War I, the Navy stationed a significant number of submarines and destroyers in Panama to guard the canal. The relatively new S-boats, including S-42 of Submarine Division 11, had been based in Coco Solo since May 1936.

  Fluckey was the junior officer and would remain with the boat for two and a half years. He gained invaluable undersea experience as the boat patrolled the Caribbean as far north as Cuba and Haiti and as far east as the Virgin Islands. The sub played tag with destroyers (which Fluckey termed “greyhounds of the sea”) and often dived and surfaced to avoid detection by planes. The S-boats were prone to breakdowns on extended duty, requiring the USS Holland (AS-1) sub tender to accompany them.

  Lieutenant Fluckey quickly learned that sub duty had built-in hazards not found on surface ships. They were noisy, crowded, hot while submerged, and a plumber’s delight of hand wheels, flapper valves, pressure gauges, pumps, levers, and switches. Occasionally, men were injured unwittingly, including Fluckey. “We had been down for an hour or more, so had started to pump the control room bilges, unbeknownst to me,” he wrote Marjorie. “In doing this, they have to take up the central section of the deck—about two feet behind the place I was standing. With the noise in the boat, I didn’t hear them lift up the deck, and being warm, I took off my shirt, then stepped back to hang it up on a valve wheel—but there just wasn’t any deck to step back on and I went tumbling down into the bilges. Nevertheless, I didn’t even break a leg, nor nary a bone. I luckily got off with a hunk out of my skin and a sliced thigh.”

  Among the reasons the lieutenant chose undersea duty was to escape the sun, which had left him terribly burned on the destroyer. Alas, even sub duty had its moments. In a letter to his family, now relocated to Coco Solo, he sighed, “So far this cruise, sunburn just comes and goes—first I get burnt, then we dive and I sweat it out. . . . I’m as red as a spanked fanny. A few more freckles will probably be the ultimate outcome. How I wish I’d tan for once.”

  Fluckey was away from his family far more than he had anticipated. His first mission lasted more than three months. At times, he wrote of Division 11 being forgotten by the Navy. “All the other ships are making some of the big ports around here ’cept good old subdiv eleven. We’re just like a bunch of old drag horses plodding around working for everybody and nobody realizes we’re here when it comes to a decent liberty port or going home.” There were times far out at sea when Fluckey was mesmerized by submarine duty, however, like when the S-42 arrived on station 1,100 miles east of Coco Solo. “It was so darn calm we passed our day of leisure swimming over the side, a real treat to splash around in water cryst
al clean and so deep it would take a person over an hour to reach the bottom at a fast trot.”

  The sub docked periodically at the U.S. naval base of Guantanamo, Cuba, and in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Haiti, where Fluckey couldn’t believe conditions. “I thought I had seen the low in poverty but this takes the cake,” he wrote Marjorie. “The people have nothing, have never had anything and the land seems to produce only dried up peanuts with an orange or so now and then.” In the Virgin Islands, officers and sailors of the Fleet went ashore in St. Thomas. It was there that Fluckey became an accidental ambassador for the Navy at the governor’s house.

  He had been relaxing on the veranda of the city hotel when a fellow officer arrived, dressed in white service and under the impression that the officers had to attend a reception at the governor’s mansion. “I told him I would gladly hop up to the governor’s with him save for the sad fact that the two suits of white I had were dirty,” Fluckey wrote to his wife. “The situation was cleared up by my returning to the ship, squeezing into one of the [officer’s] suits and returning ashore to kill the fatted calf.” Arriving outside the mansion, he noticed officers milling about in the road and in the gardens, not wanting to be first to enter the home. When Cdr. W. T. Waldschmidt entered the home, Fluckey strolled inside, signed the guest registry, and started up the stairway, expecting others to follow. He hadn’t realized that the officers were to first go to a room on the first floor. The governor and his wife were on the second floor and dashed forward to greet the young lieutenant, who looked around with a jolt.