The Galloping Ghost (25 page)

Commander Fluckey, knowing his officers and men were to receive a Presidential Unit Citation for the boat's eighth, ninth, and tenth war patrols, thought the boat's eleventh might earn a second such citation—unprecedented for a boat under a single skipper. Another sub captain had interceded, however, to keep that from happening. Robert “Dusty” Dornin, a former All-American football player at the academy, was the personal aide to Fleet Adm. Ernest King. When he heard of the
Barb
's tremendous achievement, he retrieved the citation before it could be signed by Roosevelt and added the eleventh to the commendation. Earlier in the war, Dornin had earned a Presidential Unit Citation as commander of the USS
Trigger
(SS-237) after it sank ten ships in two patrols. In Fluckey's mind, Dornin, who was very familiar with the awards system, had “robbed” the
Barb
of any chance of getting a second citation. Dornin, feigning ignorance, radioed Fluckey the news, saying he had “no problem in convincing the board to
include the
Barb
's eleventh patrol with the others so all your patrols in command will have such citation. Gene you owe me one for this. Dusty.”

Fluckey was flabbergasted. “I just couldn't believe what I had read,” he said. Yet there was nothing that could be done. He decided to give Dornin “a good kick in the backside” when he saw him and then “we'd still be good friends.”

By the time of his arrival at Mare Island, Commander Fluckey wrote Marjorie that the red beard he had grown on patrol had been reduced to a “rakish” mustache as a defensive measure. “I intend to keep it for the moment as a measure of self-defense . . . the boys haven't seen a female for two hundred days and they are wild. Wolf wouldn't even begin to describe any one of us. So I wear my moustache.”

The men divided into two groups for thirty days' leave each. The captain, heading the first group of married men, caught the first plane out for Annapolis and a joyful reunion. He hadn't seen his wife and daughter Barbara in more than a year. Back home, the nation had rebounded from the Great Depression. “The great Arsenal of Democracy,” as Roosevelt had put it, was churning out munitions at a phenomenal rate. Factories were in full production. Seemingly endless streams of tanks, artillery, and troop carriers moved by train to ports on both coasts for shipment to the front. The economy was booming. Yet personal reminders of the cost of war were ever-present—long lines for rationed food and fuel, blackouts at night, and the continuing drumroll of battlefield wounded and dead. In towns and cities spanning the nation, news of casualties arrived in telegrams, in telephone calls, in conversations overheard. Those who would not be coming home left a pall over the living.

Nowhere was that more evident than in the Submarine Wives' Club in Annapolis. Marjorie Fluckey was one of thirteen in the support group, five of whom had been informed their husbands were “overdue and presumed lost.” One evening Marjorie and Gene invited the group to join them at the North Severn Officers' Club for a bit of socializing and dancing. For Gene, the gathering was heartbreaking. “As each snuggled close, dancing with me, my heart did flip-flops. I knew four others were widows but they had not yet been notified. Damn the war! Already over half my submarine school classmates were buried in steel coffins at the bottom of the ocean. The horror those women had yet to face brought tears to my eyes as they danced with their eyes closed, dreaming of dancing with their husbands.”

Toward the end of the furlough, the Navy's Bureau of Personnel notified Fluckey that he was to receive the nation's highest distinction, the Medal of Honor, for his heroics in Nam Kwan Harbor. President Roosevelt
wanted to present it personally at a ceremony in mid-April. The skipper was flattered but informed the bureau that the Medal of Honor was for “dead men,” that he was turning it down. Besides, he said, the
Barb
's attack wasn't as hazardous as the Navy was making it out to be. He also noted that if he flew back from California to accept the award, it would interrupt his exec's furlough. He didn't want to do that.

Two days later he was summoned to appear in Washington before Admiral “Shorty” Edwards, vice chief of naval operations, who quickly came to the point. The nation was in need of “live, smart heroes” to inspire others in the Navy. The Medal of Honor had been awarded to five submarine commanders since the war began, two of whom—Richard O'Kane of the
Tang
(SS-306) and Lawson Ramage of the
Parche
(SS-384)—were very much alive. Fluckey should drop his objections. He was getting the medal whether he wanted it or not. He should accept it in the spirit with which it was to be given in the name of Congress. The admiral noted the ceremony would be moved up so the skipper wouldn't have to fly back from Mare Island. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal and Admiral King would stand in for the president. The next day Fluckey posed for Navy publicity photos for use when the
Barb
's story had been declassified. On 23 March, at a midday ceremony with no reporters in attendance, Forrestal presented the award, just twenty-one days before the president's death from cerebral hemorrhage. A beaming Marjorie Fluckey draped the star-studded blue ribbon and gold medallion around her husband's neck.

Later the couple went to see Gene's ailing father to show him the medal; he had never seen one before. Afterward the Fluckeys took Barbara out of school, obtained enough gas coupons from the Annapolis ration board to get across country, packed some belongings and their cocker spaniel Miss Nibs, and headed west in the family's five-year-old Plymouth sedan, which they planned to sell after arrival. The family would return by train. They passed through Yellowstone National Park on the way to Mare Island, arriving at the end of March. Max Duncan and his wife, Trilby, arrived by car from their home in North Carolina as did Phyllis and Dave Teeters from Oregon. The couples and their families settled into Quonset huts at the base while the overhaul continued. Weekends were spent enjoying San Francisco, particularly Fisherman's Wharf and the Top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel. The Fluckeys received an invitation to a Sunday night dinner party hosted by a fifty-six-year-old San Francisco physician.

Dr. Margaret Chung, born in the United States of Chinese ancestry, had established the first medical clinics in the city, where she was known as “the angel of Chinatown” in the 1920s. After Japan's invasion of China in
the 1930s and the attack on Pearl Harbor, “Mom” Chung became famous by drawing national attention to the exploits of the Flying Tigers, three hundred American volunteers who flew for the Dutch from bases in Southeast Asia. Piloting P-40 fighter planes with sharks' teeth painted on their fuselages, the squadron took on the vaunted Japanese air force in the skies over Burma and China in the summer of 1942. As the war progressed, the flamboyant physician created a circle of “adopted” war heroes. They included “fair haired Bastards” (her moniker for aviators, soldiers, and sailors; she said she couldn't call them sons because she was not married), “Golden Dolphins” (for submariners), and “Kiwis” (her name for those in the performing arts, politicians, and business leaders who supported the war effort). The club included Pacific Fleet Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, Adm. William F. Halsey Jr., commander of the Third Fleet, and actor and future president Ronald Reagan.

The physician's large townhouse on Masonic Street became a gathering place for as many as a hundred guests at a time. Attendance was by invitation only, with the rule being that senior military and famous people wash the dishes. One submarine officer recalled his visit early in the war: “Lily Pons was singing, Admiral Nimitz was dishing out the chow, and Harold Stassen [former Minnesota governor and future presidential candidate] was among his assistants.”

Word had gotten back to the doctor that Fluckey had earned the Medal of Honor and was at Mare Island. So she issued an invitation for him to join the Golden Dolphins. Fluckey insisted that Max Duncan go with him. “The parties were always on Sunday night and Mom Chung's walk-in refrigerator and liquor cabinet were well stocked by merchants, celebrities, and wealthy friends,” recalled Duncan. “I was privileged to be made a Golden Dolphin. My wife, Trilby, and I went to Mom's with Marjorie and Gene at least twice, maybe three times. Mom made me Golden Dolphin 106 and gave me a ring with the number on it.”

At that first gathering the Fluckeys and the Duncans enjoyed kibitzing with Lily Pons, Hollywood maestro Andre Kostalanetz, and Broadway and film star Helen Hayes. During the evening the conductor taught Fluckey how to drink a Nickolayev cocktail. The irrepressible skipper engaged Pons in a discussion of the finer points of her stagecraft.

Across the bay the
Barb
had entered the final stages of its overhaul. Among the refinements were installation of radar in one of the boat's two periscopes for more precise range finding during submerged attacks and anchoring a
more powerful 5-inch gun aft of the conning tower. The 4-inch forward gun was removed. An after gun was more practical, as Fluckey learned while being chased from Nam Kwan Harbor. Officers and crew spent the last few days of the overhaul outside the Golden Gate practicing with the deck gun and making test dives. The boat also tied up to a pier in San Francisco for a day of degaussing—removing magnetic properties to make the sub less vulnerable to floating mines.

Fluckey, having made an incredible ten war patrols, graded the overhaul average. The
Barb
had always been exceptionally clean and sound, a tribute to its veteran petty officers who had completed war patrols in
Barb
and other boats. Saunders, the chief gunners mate, had made eleven war patrols. Gordon Wade, the chief electricians mate, had made ten, and the two chief motor mates—Franklin Williams and Thomas Noll—had five and seven respectively. Lieutenant Teeters, having been aboard for four runs, keened to the boat's tidiness. “It's the reason I went into submarines,” he recalled. “I don't like dust.”

On 16 May the wives saw the
Barb
off for its return to Hawaii. Afterward they packed their belongings and began the long journey home. Gene had asked Trilby Duncan to drive his family since the Duncans lived not far from Annapolis and she had planned to make the road trip on her own. She asked Phyllis Teeters to come along to help with the driving. The women drove a southern route, passing through Yosemite, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, the Painted Desert, and New Orleans. Along the way Marjorie suffered a diabetic seizure at a hotel; fortunately Trilby noticed in time. A glass of orange juice reversed the effects.

Arriving at Pearl Harbor on 24 May, Commander Fluckey prepared for a variety of unique sub operations that had been rolling around in his mind since the seventh war patrol. Back then he wanted to use a rubber boat to smuggle saboteurs ashore in Formosa to blow up a railroad bridge, a plan turned down by the skipper. Likewise, he conceived using the sub as “a perfect platform” to launch missiles at land targets. Tuck Weaver thought it was an interesting concept but Captain Waterman rejected it as farfetched; he thought the sub's 4-inch gun was far more accurate than missiles. On the eighth patrol, Fluckey had been bothered by the inability of the
Barb
to destroy the strategic cable station in the Kuriles with the 4-inch gun. A rocket attack might have succeeded. “The torpedo has fulfilled its purpose. Its day, in this war, is passing,” Fluckey wrote at the time. “Those of us, not specially equipped for the last good area [of sub operations], must stagnate and slowly slip into oblivion, or look to a new main battery—rockets. The
rocket is not a toy. Its possibilities are tremendous, strategically and tactically, but not beyond comprehension.”

ComSubPac gunnery officer Cdr. Harry Hull, who shared Fluckey's enthusiasm, pursued the skipper's request for a hundred spin-stabilized rockets tipped with nearly ten pounds of explosives, all of which would be stacked in the forward torpedo room at the expense of a few torpedoes. A mobile pipe rack launcher was bolted to the forward gun mount. The launcher could be raised to a forty-five-degree angle and pointed dead ahead to fire simultaneously a dozen of the four-foot-long MK10 missiles to their maximum range of about five thousand yards. Such a rocket salvo would far surpass the impact of the boat's 5-inch gun in Fluckey's estimation.

The skipper also brought aboard a new class of acoustical homing torpedoes—four Mark 27s and three larger Mark 28s for use on heavy targets. The Mark 27s were light enough to “swim” from a torpedo tube on their own without the normal boost of compressed air.

As June rolled around, news of the attack on Nam Kwan Harbor finally broke. The
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
reported in a screaming two-deck, page 1 headline, “U.S. Sub Barb Sneaks Into Enemy Harbor, Has Field Day.” The
Los Angeles Times
led with “U.S. Sub Blows Up NIP Convoy,” and papers back East declared, “Incredible . . . But True” and “Jap Sea Convoy Destroyed by Lone U.S. Submarine.” The Navy, in disclosing Fluckey's Medal of Honor and the
Barb
's Presidential Unit Citation, termed the attack on Nam Kwan Harbor “virtually a suicide mission—a naval epic.” The United Press International crowed, “It is the sort of thriller with which boys series books about war are filled but which sound too incredible really to have happened,” adding, “From the bridge of the surfaced ship Commander Fluckey could see Japanese ships erupting in the night like a nest of volcanoes.”

There was no time for the skipper or his crew to bask in the limelight. The
Barb
was ready to go. All that was needed were the promised rockets. When they didn't show up as scheduled, Fluckey refused to leave without them. Finally a boat pulled alongside the sub and off-loaded the seventy-five-pound rocket launcher and seventy-two missiles. No others were available.