The Galloping Ghost

by Carl P. LaVO

  Following a tradition of promoting those who had worked with him in the past, the admiral chose Capt. Max Duncan to run the submarine base at Pearl Harbor. The former torpedo and gunnery officer in the original Barb was younger than others standing in line for promotion. But Fluckey was unfazed. “Gene was unusual in that he stayed in touch with officers and some of the crew members of the first Barb,” explained Everett “Tuck” Weaver, former officer on the old diesel boat. “He later told me that in a session on management techniques he was criticized by his peers for giving preferential treatment in the selection of persons for jobs to individuals who had worked for or with him in the past. Gene’s position was that they were proven commodities, and there would be no unpleasant surprises.”

  Fluckey had long assumed that Vice Admiral Clarey, former skipper of the USS Pintado (SS-387) during World War II, was a friend and mentor who would help him become vice admiral when the time came. However, Clarey was a complex individual who tended to denigrate accomplishments of others. Rear Adm. Corwin Mendenhall, the former ensign in the USS Sculpin (SS-191), which had been in the thick of combat in the Southwest Pacific in the first year of World War II, was on the receiving end of Clarey’s biting sarcasm when he met Clarey at the Navy’s shipbuilding yard in Kittery, Maine, in 1943. Clarey had graduated from executive officer of the USS Amberjack (SS-219) to skipper of the newly launched Pintado. Mendenhall was his exec. “He somehow learned that I had been regimental commander at the Naval Academy and proceeded to make some cutting remarks to me about my position at the school,” recalled Mendenhall in a memoir published in 1991. “He had his ego, could be temperamental, secretive, and hard for me to understand; and he had a sharp tongue, lashing out at inconsequential things. . . . As time went on, when a Pintado problem came up like one we had solved in Sculpin, I would offer the Sculpin solution. Chick would summarily dismiss the suggestions with disparaging remarks about Sculpin and her captain and exec. This was very unkind treatment, particularly in the presence of others, so thereafter I tried to keep Sculpin out of my vocabulary.”

  Similarly, Fluckey’s pride in the original Barb drew Clarey’s scorn whenever the rear admiral was not around. One day in Pearl Harbor the vice admiral was walking down a dock with an associate, not realizing Gene was trailing behind. He overhead Clarey say that he was sick and tired of hearing about the Barb, that he hoped never to hear about that boat again. “This totally surprised Gene,” recalled “Tuck” Weaver. Fluckey hoped the remark would not have repercussions for his career. But there were hints. Said Duncan of those years in Pearl Harbor, “Anything Gene wanted to change was something Chick had put in place. Gene couldn’t win.”

  In taking charge of the nuclear attack boats, the SSNs, Fluckey was unlike many predecessors in the way he met his responsibilities, even at great personal risk. Such was the case when he flew from Pearl Harbor to a Pacific Missile Range ship that was working with the Plunger to test the performance of the Navy’s experimental SubRoc missile, a nuclear-tipped missile designed to be launched from a torpedo tube of a nuclear submarine.

  From the test range ship, Fluckey and his entourage were lowered in a long boat for the crossing in heavy seas to the Plunger. Twenty-foot rollers prevented them from coming alongside, however. “I called over a megaphone to the submarine: ‘If we swim over, can you pick us up?’” the rear admiral later recounted. “They manned the sail bridge with lines and one at a time we swam over and they picked us up.”

  Two days later, after the tests had been completed, Fluckey and his staff needed to get back to the mother ship. However, seas were still rough and again the long boat couldn’t get near enough to the submarine to take on its passengers. Not to be dissuaded, the admiral got on the phone to the pilot of a helicopter hovering overhead. The group would dive into the ocean, where the aircraft would dangle a line to pick them up one at a time.

  “I was the first one and I swam out about a hundred yards,” recalled the fifty-one-year-old commander.

  I am a good swimmer so I was sure I could either survive or get back on board the submarine. I did have a life jacket on, but what I hadn’t appreciated was that when the helicopter came to pick me up, and he dropped this horse collar down in the water, the high waves were beating it up and down and I couldn’t find it with all the spray around. So the pilot could see my dilemma and he dragged it back and forth until it finally got near me. I put myself in the horse collar and got my arms around it. I gave him the “up” signal.

  He took off because he was endangered by the heavy waves. He was about 150 feet in the air and I was swinging like a pendulum. I was winding and unwinding and watching this cord above me . . . and wondering, “If this ever lets go while I’m up here, this is going to be the highest dive I ever made in my life.”

  The admiral made it safely to the ship, as did his staff.

  To young submarine officers, the Plunger story contributed to the legend of Gene Fluckey, the “Galloping Ghost of the China Coast.” His reputation for valor and ingenuity preceded him wherever he went. Many young officers looked on him with great reverence, having studied his war patrols in classes at the academy. R. Michael Henzi, class of 1966, was one of them.

  “I was attached to SubPac during my first class cruise in the summer of 1965,” he recalled.

  The middies were invited to a cocktail party a couple days after arrival in Pearl Harbor. Our uniform was tropical whites, which consisted of white shoes, white trousers, and a short-sleeved white shirt adorned with shoulder boards. Admiral Fluckey arrived a bit late from some other event at which the uniform was dress whites. His uniform was white shoes, white trousers, and the high-necked white tunic. The tunic was adorned with gold uniform buttons and gold admiral’s shoulder boards. He wore only two decorations: gold submariner’s dolphins and a pale blue ribbon around his neck, from which was suspended the Medal of Honor. When he walked into the room, every one of us gasped. This sight was nicely set off by his flaming red hair. We all knew about the admiral and his World War II exploits beforehand, but nothing could prepare us for the actual sight of this legitimate hero all decked out in gleaming white, shining gold, pale blue, and that one incredible medal.

  Two weeks later Henzi was at the Pearl Harbor officers’ club when he noticed Fluckey in the pool with his granddaughter Gail, who had flown in from Maryland for a visit. “The admiral was trying to teach his small granddaughter how to swim. I overheard him say to the little girl, ‘No, no. You have to make yourself positively buoyant.’ The instruction was spoken like a true submariner.”

  The rear admiral’s motto in his two-year command was “Think Deep.” He broadcast it everywhere he went. At the launch of the Polaris submarine Mariano G. Vallejo (USBN-658) on 23 October 1965 at the Mare Island naval shipyard in California, the commander referred to it in a welcoming address to the boat’s officers and crew. “The noblest thing that you and your life-giving crew can do is to serve the cause of freedom well. You will come to understand our submarine force motto: ‘Think Deep.’ Your deployment arena will be some 80 million square miles of ocean. Your survivability is assured, for no enemy can afford the size force, or even man such a force, to find you, as you intelligently rove the lonely dark abyss of the ocean in deepest secrecy.”

  It was this certainty of invulnerability that convinced Fluckey nuclear war between the superpowers was improbable. In an address in San Diego to three hundred Navy League guests at a submarine anniversary celebration in June 1966, he minced no words. “I have no fear of a direct confrontation with the Russians. We will have no full-blown nuclear war because there will always be the avenging angel, Polaris.”

  The growing war in Vietnam, however, was another matter. He warned that communism was on the move in Southeast Asia. Referring to demonstrations against President Lyndon Johnson because of a peacetime draft and continuing buildup of U.S. military forces in South Vietnam, he listed the consequences of a pullout. Thousands of South Vietnamese would be massacred. Commu
nist aggression would spread throughout the world, weakening smaller nations no longer trusting American promises. A “pincer” move would be made against India and Pakistan. Finally, “China would become the colossus of the East. The few remaining democracies would soon have their backs to the wall against this preponderance of the earth’s population and raw material. We would be fighting for our very survival.” He added, “I would like to know where the people who want us to withdraw would like us to dig in our new position—the Tijuana border? Vancouver? Niagara Falls?”

  Fluckey drew a standing ovation.

  Back in Hawaii, Admiral and Mrs. Fluckey attended a submarine officers’ ball at the Kahala Hilton. The sub base and much of Hawaii awaited the arrival of the latest boomer, the USS Kamehameha (SSBN-642), named for Hawaii’s most famous native king. Admiral Fluckey was relinquishing command the following morning to return to Washington. He and his wife entertained VIPs at a cocktail party in the presidential suite to say aloha to the many friends they had made. The suite was jammed to capacity with admirals, generals, colonels, captains, and civilians. Said one officer of the crush of well-wishers, “It looks a little like a submarine.” Even the elevator was stuffed to capacity. Rear Adm. E. Alvey Wright, commanding officer of the shipyard, joked on the way up, “There’s some pitch and yaw here!”

  After returning to D.C., Gene Fluckey became director of naval intelligence for two years at a time when the Vietnam War was becoming a political quagmire and civil unrest was spreading at home. The admiral, the Navy’s ultimate Cold Warrior, despised what he called “hippies, kooks, and peaceniks heavily aided, abetted, and tainted by the Communists.” When they demonstrated outside the Pentagon in the fall of 1967, he waded into their midst to argue his point of view to no avail. “I went home and washed my dogs. Incidentally, while I was there, two of the hippies got married in a bathtub—it was a double ring ceremony,” he later quipped in addressing the naval Reserve Intelligence Division in Atlanta, Georgia.

  In that speech, Fluckey discussed the worldwide threat that Soviet naval power represented. “The Soviet naval war game is now a global fact of life. Wherever there is a demonstrably strategic sphere, wherever there is an obvious tactical area and another nation’s reason for being there, there also is the Soviet navy.” Fluckey drew particular attention to Russian operations in the Mediterranean Sea. “In the past four years Soviet operations in the Mediterranean grew from sporadic and seasonal small-scale appearances to the continuous presence of some thirty-five to forty naval ships in recent months. This force now generally comprises four to six submarines, some fourteen surface combatant ships, and a dozen or so auxiliaries and support ships. . . . This naval strength has taken on the appearance of permanence. You no doubt have read of their increasing visits to certain Arab ports as well as their constant attempts to shadow or harass units of the Sixth Fleet.”

  The cutting edge between East and West did appear to be the Mediterranean. For Gene Fluckey, that represented opportunity. He still sought to move up to vice admiral. The way seemed clear to do just that—by returning to Portugal as the first commander of NATO’s expanded Iberian area Atlantic operations. But there was hidden risk for him as a target for assassination.

  Sintra

  Developments in Europe and the Mediterranean were ominous when Admiral and Mrs. Fluckey arrived in Portugal in 1968 after an absence of fourteen years. Mobile atomic missiles had been deployed in East and West Germany in an “I-dare-you” standoff between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. Soviet, Polish, East German, Bulgarian, and Hungarian troops had invaded Czechoslovakia to put down a separatist movement, and the Russian buildup of naval forces in the Mediterranean continued. The threat of a possible nuclear showdown between East and West seemed to be intensifying. NATO, reeling, issued a warning. “Clearly any Soviet intervention directly or indirectly affecting the situation in Europe or in the Mediterranean would create an international crisis with grave consequences,” announced alliance Secretary General Manlio Brosio of Italy.

  Part of NATO’s response to all these events was to initiate a separate, consolidated command called IBERLANT to guard the strategic Strait of Gibraltar and important Atlantic shipping lanes running north and south along the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa. Admiral Fluckey’s objective was to unify British, Portuguese, and American forces in an oblong box extending from Portugal’s northern border five hundred miles west into the Atlantic Ocean, then south to the Tropic of Cancer—410,000 square miles of ocean. Through this sector passed most of Western Europe’s oil supply as well as commodities from South America, Africa, and Mediterranean nations. Washington-based newspaper columnist Holmes Alexander described the importance of the admiral’s mission after a visit to Portugal. “The Soviet and the Warsaw Pact nations have us out-manned along most of the land-borders, have us outgunned in intercontinental missiles and have us checkmated with a politico-military maritime crunch inside the Mediterranean basin. But just west of Gibraltar, where the Atlantic begins, it’s still anybody’s ball game.” In response to questioning by Alexander, Fluckey replied, “There’s been a change in NATO thinking. It was oriented toward the Iron Curtain but now it’s swinging to the South Atlantic.”

  The most overt sign of this was Portugal’s decision to build and pay for a sprawling, two-story NATO headquarters to house Fluckey’s command on the site of abandoned eighteenth-century Fort Gomes Freire, situated on a rocky prominence overlooking the Tagus River southwest of Lisbon near the river’s confluence with the Atlantic. The headquarters was to be Portugal’s contribution to NATO, and would include a cobweb of subterranean intelligence bunkers. In the meantime, a temporary operations center with a skeletal staff of fifteen Portuguese, British, and American officers had been established within a leased walled villa in Sintra, a storied borough twelve miles west of Lisbon on the Atlantic Ocean.

  NATO could not have found a more beautiful setting than Sintra, a mountainous dreamscape of fairytale castles, sky-blue lakes where black swans cavort, spectacular palaces and villas, incredible gardens, precipitous roads and lookouts, swirling mists, thick forests, and foliage, flowers and fauna of infinite variety long celebrated by poets and writers. Over the centuries a parade of conquerors—Romans, Spaniards, Moors, Lusitanians, and even a Norwegian king—had imbued Sintra with exotic architecture and art from Europe, Egypt, North Africa, and the Orient. Five extravagant palaces, a Moorish castle, and a peculiar monastery made entirely from cork and stone dominate the mountaintops. Flourishes of Italian glassware, Chinese screens, Austrian porcelain, marble fountains, blue Moorish tiles, and Gothic archways add to the enchantment.

  The Fluckeys had discovered the beauty and gracious living of Sintra years earlier when Gene was naval attaché in Lisbon. To be back, to be in Sintra and standing in line to become a three-star vice admiral at the commissioning of COMIBERLANT’s new headquarters would be a perfect capstone to his career—or so it seemed to Gene Fluckey at the time.

  In Lisbon the Fluckeys were at the top of the social order and had renewed many friendships. They purchased a quinta (pronounced “queen ta”)—a small farmette—on the drier southwestern face of the Sintra Mountains just below Pena Palace, a lavish medieval castle governing the crest. The quinta with its gardens and woods was owned by a widow who had fallen on tough times and couldn’t keep up with maintenance. The domicile was remote despite its location near the castle, a popular tourist attraction. With help from local craftsmen, Gene envisioned restoring the estate to its former glory.

  “That place was the love of his life, if that’s possible with houses,” said daughter Barbara.

  He loved views, and when there wasn’t a cloud over the mountain, you could see all the way to the Ponte Salazar [the 25th of April suspension bridge] in Lisbon.

  Dad remodeled [the quinta] and tried to do it to American standards. He employed a retired stonemason and he tapped away each day, fitting the broken marble slabs Dad bought from a quarry at the bottom of the mountain, ma
king gorgeous flagstone-type marble terraces and paths into the woods and other areas of the quinta. It was stunning. It was built on a series of marbled terraces where gardens of flowers grew. The house had a grand entrance hall, which led into a huge dining room and on to the living room, which had a rounded terrace overlooking “the view.” Both rooms were on the right, and on the left was a chapel Dad converted to a bathroom for that floor. A huge butler’s pantry and kitchen finished it off. The lower level was a garage, maids quarters, storage, utilities, etc.

  On the left of the entry was an enormous wide stairway with a major landing, where he put a large hi-fi, and then another stairway to a big landing that was his office. From that landing the size of a regular living room, there were the entrances to four bedrooms and marble baths. One room was used as Mom’s sewing and crafts room. As the master bedroom was over the living room, it shared the same view toward Lisbon.

  Mom had the most gorgeous custom Arioles carpets made up for the stairway, the hall, the landings, the living room, and the bedrooms, except she had a large white India tree of life carpet in the master bedroom. The hall and landings and stairs had the same spectacular pattern, navy blue gold, with Crusaders’ crosses as the pattern.

  To reach the house required driving up a steep cobblestone road, where the quinta was entered through two wrought-iron electric gates flanked by tall posts, each supporting a large dolphin, emblematic of the undersea service.

  The setting was ideal for Mrs. Fluckey. Portugal’s gorgeous scenery, mild climate, and sunny days proved to be the perfect tonic for Marjorie’s fragile health. She loved the quinta, and she and her husband were determined to enjoy the good life there as long as possible.