The Galloping Ghost (5 page)

Fluckey excitedly leaped to his feet. They shook hands. The admiral smiled. “My hearty congratulations on your accomplishment. Well done!”

Fluckey returned to the academy a new man, accomplishing what others thought was impossible. His family couldn't believe it either and were ecstatic. Now nothing seemed impossible or improbable in the budding career of Eugene Bennett Fluckey. His parents drove over to Annapolis, where he posed for a photo with his mom, who was beaming with pride in what her son had accomplished.

As a second classman, Fluckey approached his final year with renewed vigor, eager for his last summer training cruise to Europe at the end of May.

The middies would look back on the spring and summer of 1934 aboard the battleships
Wyoming
and
Arkansas
as the best ever. Happy omens seemed to follow the midshipmen everywhere. Fluckey was aboard the
Wyoming
, which also quartered the Navy's football team, considered a national powerhouse. The voyage was memorable for a number of reasons, as noted in the
Lucky Bag
, the academy's yearbook. First stop was England, where the midshipmen toured the sights, gawked at “long-haired haranguers” on soapboxes in Hyde Park, and attended a luncheon with Hollywood movie star Douglas Fairbanks and “a bevy of English beauties.” The middies also shared tea with Lady Astor before the battleships set sail for the Mediterranean. The first stop was in Villefranche, where the middies enjoyed the glitz and glamour of Monte Carlo and Cannes. Next stop was Naples, where the ominous summit of Mount Vesuvius belched smoke. Then on to Rome, where the men from Annapolis gave a startled dictator Benito Mussolini a spirited “4N” cheer—“NnnnAaaaVvvvYyyy!”—vocalized in a quick stutter that echoed loudly through the Venetian Palace. They also visited Vatican City, where they had an audience with Pope Pious XI, who smiled benignly as the
sailors greeted him with another 4N, after which he blessed them. On the return voyage, the battleships stopped in Gibraltar, allowing the middies to visit nearby Tangiers, which they described as “a Ripley-ish sort of place” for its camels and crosscurrent of Arab, Spanish, and British influences. A school of porpoises—a lucky omen—greeted the
Wyoming
off the Virginia capes as it re-crossed the Atlantic and followed them to Norfolk (“a whirl of dances, dinners, girls, touched with real Southern hospitality”). The ships continued north to the mouth of the Potomac River, where they anchored for three days, long enough for President Franklin D. Roosevelt to come aboard (“we greeted him with a 4N”).

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.

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.