The Galloping Ghost (10 page)

The big sub cast off at 1345 on 10 December, bound for Balboa at the Pacific egress from the Panama Canal. A three-week patrol of shipping lanes leading to the canal was planned. Lt. Cdr. Stanley G. Nichols orders were to interdict Japanese submarines and warships and report any enemy aircraft. Arriving on station on 13 December, the sub assumed a routine of sailing to the west from daybreak until noon, then east from noon to darkness. The boat lay to at night to save fuel. There were no sightings of any ships or submarines. Aircraft contacts all turned out to be Navy.

On 31 December the
Bonita
headed in through the canal en route to Coco Solo to end the patrol. The pilot of a patrol boat who came aboard announced that all transportation from the States had been canceled and that dependents in Coco Solo were being evacuated. Fluckey could only wonder
if his family had arrived, only to be shipped back home. Letters from Marjorie awaiting him, however, disclosed the shock of the Japanese attack back home, the fact that her departure had been canceled, and how worried she was about her husband. “Most of the boys from the old Coco Solo S-boats have written the girls telling them to go home,” she noted. “Sweet, I don't know how I'm going to stand this being away from you and specially not knowing how long it is going to be. Why, oh why did we have to get Coco Solo at this time? . . . Are you alright and is there any great danger in your vicinity? I'm so terrified at the merest chance of anything happening to you.”

Fluckey was crestfallen. “I tried to sit down and write you a letter calmly accepting the situation, yet my eyes would fill and a lump rose up in my throat at every thought of you,” he wrote back. “Sweetheart, our present situation is one which we can't avoid and lack the power to do anything about it. As much as I passionately desire you, as much as I long for the sight of you, I feel that your being in New London is for the best—it's so much safer there and you're free from the cause of jitters the families down here seem to have had lately since being sandbagged and blacked out.”

Fluckey urged his wife to approach the future as a series of stepping stones. “You know, as well as I, that [the war] will be over on Barbara's birthday [March 19]—that's our first date to look forward to—let's keep that date in mind.” But that date came and passed with no end in sight to World War II. After three consecutive war patrols in the Pacific zone, Fluckey was discouraged, assigned as he was to one of the worst boats in the fleet and stuck in Panama, where there was no action, no sign of the enemy. The only thing to preoccupy him were the perennial breakdowns. On the second patrol, the bow planes became unreliable, followed by the stern planes jamming when the boat dove at a seventeen-and-a-half-degree down angle. That was solved only by going to hand operation. The upside for Fluckey was his promotion to full lieutenant just before the
Bonita
cast off on 9 January. April and May passed with two more war patrols—the boat's fourth and fifth. Still no sightings of any enemy aircraft, warships, or submarines. On the fifth patrol, more mechanical problems afflicted the boat, this time a failure of the starboard generator engine.

Fluckey was frustrated as others got promoted to new boats back in the States despite his ability to keep the
Bonita
functioning. With no promotion in sight, he applied for postgraduate studies in design engineering, a three-year regimen beginning with one year at the academy and the final two at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I've stayed awake so many nights lately arguing the pros and cons over and over again and wondering what was the right thing to do,” the lieutenant wrote his wife. “I must be hypersensitive
about any thing that would even look like I was trying to avoid the war. I looked up all the submarine people who had taken [the course] and almost all of them now command submarines. All that and the thought of being with you for three years finally brought about my decision.”

Still, Fluckey clung to the hope of commanding one of the new fleet submarines. “I'm going to do my damnedest to get in a new boat,” he vowed to his wife at the end of his fifth patrol. “At least then I'll get a chance to be with you for awhile and afterward I'll be heading someplace with a purpose and an opportunity to polish or rather help polish off this whole mess [the war].”

In June good news arrived. The Navy granted Fluckey's wish for graduate school. On 21 June 1942 he left Coco Solo for New London for a well-deserved thirty-day leave, after which he and his family would move to Annapolis, where he would begin his studies. But he would return to the war sooner than he envisioned on a boat that seemed to be jinxed.

Gene Fluckey's arrival in Annapolis in midsummer of 1942 coincided with a low point in the submarine war against Japan. After the debacle at Pearl Harbor, the Navy had hoped to strike back convincingly with its growing and vastly improved undersea fleet. Many naval experts considered the faster, more durable, deep-running fleet-style boats the best in the world. Intended for operations in the tropics, they were air-conditioned to cut down on electrical short circuits caused by humidity. They could dive quickly to three hundred feet or more, safely below typical blasts from enemy depth charges. They were equipped with targeting computers, the first use of such devices that made attacks more effective. They had ten torpedo firing tubes, six forward and four aft, and could carry as many as twenty-four advanced Mark 14 torpedoes. Most persuasive of all, the weapons were tipped with Mark 6 magnetic exploders. The existence of the exploders was a highly classified secret that very few in the Navy knew about. No longer did a torpedo have to depend on impact with a ship's hull before detonating. Naval engineers had come up with a triggering mechanism that detonated the explosive when the torpedo entered the target's magnetic field. Since all iron ships generate such a field, the new weapon seemed foolproof in laboratory tests, though they had not been tested at sea for cost-cutting reasons. Nevertheless, the Navy was convinced the exploders would be decisive
in combat. In fact, Capt. John Wilkes, commander of U.S. submarines in Manila on the eve of war, had predicted “amazing results.” Then just about everything that could go wrong did.

It became apparent early on that too many subs were commanded by older skippers who were less than aggressive. They were steeped in a 1930s naval tradition of very cautious tactics. In those prewar years, the fleet subs were intended as scouts for the battleships, cruisers, and aircraft carriers. The plan was for the boats to speed ahead of the battle line, then submerge when in the area of possible targets and await opportunity. Submerged attacks were time-consuming and often ineffective compared to surfacing and attacking slow-moving transport ships. Many older skippers also were convinced that Japanese sonar was so sophisticated that once it detected a submerged submarine, there would be little chance of escape. Division commanders reinforced that sense of caution after hostilities began, exemplified by Manila Cdr. Stuart “Sunshine” Murray, who, at a muster of skippers after news arrived of the attack on Pearl Harbor, impressed on them the need for caution. “Don't try to go out there and win the Congressional Medal of Honor in one day,” he told them. “The submarines are all we have left. Your crews are more valuable than anything else. Bring them back.”

Even when the boats did attack, they were hampered by torpedo shortages and, worse, scandalously defective weapons. The new torpedoes either ran too deep or the magnetic feature exploded prematurely for mysterious reasons. There were numerous additional reports that conventional contact exploders didn't detonate, but rather hit with a thud and sank. While laughable to the enemy, it was demoralizing for sub skippers who did get in close enough, only to be counterattacked by Japanese warships with devastating, sometimes fatal, consequences. Within the first months of the war, the fleet submarines
Shark
(SS 174),
Perch
(SS 176), and
Grunion
(SS 216) met their demise, with the loss of nearly two hundred highly trained officers and men. Indeed, the vaunted undersea fleet had proven mostly ineffective, save for one lucky hit by the
Grenadier
(SS 210) on 8 May 1942 on the converted passenger liner
Taiyo Maru
off the Japanese home island of Honshu. The 14,500-ton ship went down with nine hundred technicians and skilled workers employed by the Mitsubishi Company. They were en route to Java and Sumatra to restore oil fields captured from the Dutch. The loss was a major setback.

As the Navy wrestled with its torpedo and skipper problems, Fluckey tackled the books in postgraduate studies at the academy. He was very happy to be reunited with his family and anticipated that within a year he would be
in position to get back into the war as commander of a Pacific submarine. Indeed, as many as three new submarines in need of officers and crew were being launched every month at shipyards spanning the nation.

Initially the Fluckeys moved into an apartment on Perry Circle within view of the academy, planted a “victory” vegetable garden, and enrolled Barbara in preschool nearby. Marjorie's mother, who was a registered nurse, remained by her daughter's side for years, ensuring that she followed a strict regimen to keep her diabetes under control whenever her husband was away. Typically, fresh orange juice was squeezed every morning and kept in the refrigerator. Whenever Marjorie showed symptoms of diabetic reaction due to a drop in blood sugar, a glass of juice was at the ready. Barbara grew up understanding how important that was.

The thing that worried Gene most whenever he was away was how the insulin was administered. The medicine was still in its infancy and even doctors had difficulty. “Dad handled Mom's insulin when he was home and she had very few problems. When she did have a problem and had to have medical help, she got totally messed up,” recalled her daughter.

Fluckey's calculation that naval postgraduate school was the route out of Panama and into the Pacific War proved to be correct in the fall of 1943. With his promotion to lieutenant commander, he received orders to Prospective Commanding Officers' (PCO) School at the submarine base in New London in November of that year. He and Marjorie decided it was best for her, her mother, and Barbara to remain in Annapolis to wait out the war.

In the early spring of 1944, with his schooling behind him, he reported to the commander Submarine Force, Pacific Fleet, with expectations of immediately sailing into combat. But Capt. Karl Hensel had no intention
of sending him outbound on the next submarine. Rather, the division commander assigned him to two months' duty repairing new fleet subs coming in off patrol. Hensel's intention was to go easy with Fluckey because his service had been only on an old S-boat and the
Bonita,
neither of which had engaged in battle. The captain wanted him to learn the modern boats and read the war patrol reports before going out as an understudy to an experienced skipper.

The young officer did his best to hide his disappointment. He checked into his cabin aboard a submarine tender in Pearl Harbor with its brood of toothpick-like fleet boats nested tight to the mother ship to await repairs and re-provisioning. Fluckey, now one of the more senior PCOs in the fleet, looked at the boats with longing, itching to make his mark in the war. Then, just two nights into Fluckey's assignment, around 0200, an old acquaintance showed up. It was Lt. Cdr. John R. Waterman, a graduate of the Annapolis class of 1927. The strain of war patrols in the Atlantic and Pacific as the skipper of the fleet sub USS
Barb
(SS-220) was etched into his face. He was exhausted—and worried. The
Barb
had been Waterman's boat from its launch. It had come down the ways at the Electric Boat Company shipyard in Groton, Connecticut, in 1942 with high hopes as the latest
Gato
-class vessel, the final version of the fleet submarine derived from the mistakes of the V-class. The
Barb
and five sister submarines making up Submarine Squadron Fifty initially were deployed to the British sub base at Roseneath, Scotland. In late October 1942 the squadron sailed for Morocco to make a photo reconnaissance of the coast in preparation for Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa. The
Barb
patrolled off Safi, where it radioed in weather reports and enemy fleet activities, then sneaked in under cover of darkness to put two Army scouts ashore, equipped with blinkers and a radio to guide two destroyers in close to the landing zone in advance of the invasion force. On the night of 8 November 1942, amid occasional flashes of lightning that illuminated an armada of 105 approaching transports, the
Barb
and the other boats took position with twinkling infrared aircraft landing lights mounted on their bridges to guide Task Force 34 to the beach heads. Waterman was apprehensive throughout the operation. His boat was unmarked and could easily be mistaken for a German U-boat by Allied warships and aircraft. A constant barrage of radio communications and recognition signals had to be sustained, the difference between life and death during the ten-day operation.