The Galloping Ghost (35 page)

During Solant Amity II's visit to Gambia, the rear admiral described in a letter to Admiral and Mrs. Nimitz a sporting event he had attended.

In both Togo and Dahomey Fluckey's plan to offer visitors helicopter rides created pandemonium. William B. Hussey, Foreign Service officer in Togo, recalled the scene. “In both countries the helicopter rides were a disaster, with the operation getting quite out of hand with crowds surging aboard, the overload finally being dispatched only to have new faces and hands pushing, grasping at any part of the helicopter. In Togo I also remember people crawling from timber to timber underneath the long pier trying to avoid the lone lines waiting their turn to board the running boats for ship visits.”

Despite the logistic problems, Solant Amity II's visit was quite a success, which was noted in a letter to Fluckey from Hussey. “You know how valuable the overall effect of the visit in Togo was for the entertainment provided, the endless number of repairs effected [by Navy mechanics] from locomotives to equipment of every sort. Then there were the athletic contests in many sports. From President [Sylvanus Epiphanio] Olympio down to the fellows in the street, the visit was highly appreciated and thoroughly enjoyed.” Indeed, Fluckey drew great satisfaction from what had been accomplished. Marine helicopters had taken 3,358 visitors aloft. Eleven Navy and Marine musical ensembles had entertained an estimated 230,000 citizens. Helicopter displays, amphibious exhibitions, drill team performances, and soccer, basketball, baseball, volleyball, softball, and tennis matches between Amity crewmen and local citizens drew nearly 300,000 spectators along the way. Another 112,000 guests visited the ships—VIPs in the morning and the general
public in the afternoon. There were also parachute jumps and judo wrestling exhibitions by the Marines.

The rear admiral came away with a sobering view of Africa's new nations.

Solant Amity II left Africa at the end of August, sailing for Brazil and Trinidad before returning to Norfolk on 8 September. There, Admiral Fluckey caught up with events he had missed, especially the marriage of his daughter Barbara to dentist Charles Bove in July. During the long separation, Marjorie kept up a heavy correspondence, often expressing great loneliness that deepened after Barbara's marriage. The forced separation couldn't have come at a worse time. Before Gene departed, she had fought her way back from cancer after an initial misdiagnosis. Chemotherapy treatments had taken her to death's door before she rebounded just in time to say good-bye to her husband. “Right now I have as much use for this man's navy as an old shoe,” she wrote while her husband was away. “Better than five months' separation at this stage is too much for me and frankly I'd be ready to call it quits if this is what the future holds . . . life as an Admiral isn't all it's cracked up to be. Darling, I know this letter seems to be, for the most part, nothing but grumbles. But loving you so much, this being apart seems to be making me a chronic complainer. I'm trying to be happy but without you life holds very little to make me so.”

By the end of July there was speculation on the wives' grapevine in Norfolk that Gene's new orders would be to Washington, a thought that gave Marjorie pause. “I've never seen such a lot of old and tired people as these Pentagon
sailors,” she wrote Gene. “From the lowest to the highest they all looked as if they had aged ten years. It certainly is a rat race of the first water.”

It didn't take long for Eugene Fluckey to make history as an admiral—and it wasn't in a submarine.

Rather than being assigned to the Pentagon as his wife feared, the admiral became president of the Navy Board of Inspection and Survey from November 1961 to March of 1964. As such he was responsible for evaluating each new weapons system and making a recommendation to the secretary of the navy to either accept or reject it. The board put each advance through a thorough and rigorous trial, a practice that dated to 1868, when Congress established the group to ensure Navy ships were properly equipped to defend the nation.

When Fluckey was appointed, the
Polaris
ballistic missile system was coming to fruition. The Navy also was pushing boundaries with a supersonic nuclear attack bomber, the largest combat aircraft ever launched from an aircraft carrier. The A3J Vigilante came off the drawing board in 1955 and entered the service in June 1961, intended to replace Navy's A-3 Skywarrior. The Vigilante was extremely advanced electronically. Its pioneering digital computer could run all its systems, including multimode radar that could map topographical features below and ahead of the plane, inertial navigation, closed-circuit television under its nose, and a computerized attack system that incorporated one of the first heads-up displays for the two-man crew. The plane could fly very high and at great speed. In 1963 it would set a new world altitude record of 91,450 feet. Despite all its advantages, maintenance problems, balky bomb jettison equipment, and high landing speed on aircraft carriers made it a challenge for the most experienced pilots. It also was susceptible to a new breed of Soviet ground-to-air missiles.

In 1962 the challenge for the Board of Inspection was not so much overcoming the technical hurdles as much as finding an adequate role for the plane. It seemed clear that
Polaris
missiles would satisfy strategic bombing requirements for the Navy. Being a hands-on officer who liked to experience weaponry and tactics up close, Fluckey decided to take a ride on one of the new bombers. Arriving at the Naval Weapons Evaluation Facility in Kirtland, New Mexico, he boarded the swept wing jet with Lt. Cmdr. Samuel R. Chessman, the pilot and project officer for the Vigilante test series. The plane lifted off and quickly surpassed Mach 2 as it streaked over the Southwest deserts to Fluckey's great delight. Back on the ground, Capt. David G.
Adams Jr., commander of the Kirtland facility, presented the rear admiral with a “Mach 2” pin for being, as he put it, the first submarine officer to fly at twice the speed of sound.

Ultimately the Board of Inspection and Survey recommended the
Polaris
system replace the Skywarrior, leaving the Vigilante with no mission. The jets eventually would be deployed on reconnaissance missions during the Vietnam War. Eighteen were lost in combat, more than any other Navy aircraft.

Gene Fluckey's exploits in World War II were never very far from his mind as he studied new weapons systems aboard nuclear submarines. He often thought about his old diesel boat. By 1963 new attack nuclear submarines that dwarfed the
Barb
were coming down the ways in American shipyards. The Navy had decided to name them after famous boats that had fought in the Pacific War. One was SSN-596. The Navy arranged a reunion of the old
Barb
crew for the launch of the new
Barb
at the Ingalls Shipbuilding Corporation yard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, on 12 February 1963.

A crowd of more than eight hundred spectators, including thirty-five
Barb
veterans, gathered at the shipyard to witness the launch of the nation's twenty-ninth atomic submarine—its eighteenth nuclear attack sub—on a pleasant sixty-degree afternoon. Mrs. Fluckey, the ship's sponsor, sent a ceremonial bottle of champagne smashing against the hull, where it exploded in a cascade of bubbly froth that flew skyward above her husband and sister, standing behind her. The big vessel lurched backward, gaining speed as it slid down the ways into the Pascagoula River to the strains of “Anchors Aweigh” by a Navy band. Six months later Fluckey returned to Pascagoula for the
Barb
's initial sea trials. The boat, fitted with the most advanced underwater detection equipment in the world and extremely quiet machinery, met every requirement and deployed to the western Pacific.

Following his stint on the Board of Inspection, Gene Fluckey served for three months on special assignment for the secretary of the navy before assuming command of the Navy's Pacific submarine fleet in June 1964, fulfilling a personal dream. After the world war, there were only two flag-rank billets in submarines—commander submarines Atlantic and commander submarines Pacific. Fluckey now had one of them. In a transfer of command aboard the flagship USS
Plunger
(SSN-595) at the submarine base in Pearl Harbor, Fluckey relieved Rear Adm. Bernard A. “Chick” Clarey, who moved up to vice admiral and deputy commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

The Fluckeys relocated to Oahu, where they entered a whirl of social activity. Marjorie, who enjoyed that aspect of the Navy, accented her husband
well, knew where to draw the line in social drinking for both of them, loved to converse with people, had many friends, and expressed a good sense of humor. “She was the perfect Navy wife,” said her daughter years later. “She knew the ins and outs of required protocol. She was a successful hostess, she attended what she had to—and that cheerfully. She could talk with ambassadors knowledgeably although she had to quit school at fourteen. She read the Time-Life history series, always had a novel in hand, and was absolutely up on current events. In fact, my recollection of her would be that of always having a book in hand.”

Gene was in and out of Hawaii overseeing operations of more than ninety submarines, including the new
Barb,
and ten thousand officers and enlisted men in three flotillas based in San Diego, Pearl Harbor, and Yokosuka, Japan. Several of the boats were armed with deck-launched
Regulus
missiles that Fluckey had worked with during testing in the 1950s. They were being phased out during Fluckey's watch because the
Polaris
and Fleet ballistic missile submarines were on the way. The first of these mammoth boats, the USS
Daniel Boone
(SSBN-629), had arrived in Pearl Harbor shortly after Gene took command.

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.”