All commanding officers and most of the officers and men of the squadron who have been in the ships any length of time were very much aware of the lack of stability of the ships.
—TESTIMONY OF CAPT. PRESTON V. MERCER, U.S. NAVY, COMMANDING DESTROYER SQUADRON 1, FLAGSHIP USS DEWEY, TO THE COURT OF INQUIRY INVESTIGATING “HALSEY’S TYPHOON.”
Ulithi had been captured by American forces less than two months earlier and proved an ideal staging area for the navy’s push west and north. The tiny atoll, sitting forlorn at the rump end of the Caroline Islands about midway between the Philippines and the great Mariana Trench, is shaped like an inverted horseshoe broken by a string of channels, its axis extending twenty miles from north to south. The central lagoon, sheltered by coral reefs and sandy beaches, formed a natural harbor deep and expansive enough to moor the entire Third Fleet, and the largest cay, measuring almost a mile across, accommodated an air base with a twelve-hundred-yard landing strip. Although the island of Yap, less than 150 miles to the southwest, was still under Japanese control, its decimated air squadrons had been virtually abandoned by the Imperial War Department and were not considered a major threat.
It was on Ulithi that Halsey and his inner core of confidants, which he famously dubbed his “Dirty Tricks Department,” would hatch their Boy’s Own schemes to bedevil the enemy during the upcoming Mindoro landings, in particular their successful nullification of the kamikaze threat. But they also had fresh “toys” to learn how to deploy in the form of brand-new navy ships called destroyer escorts.
These trim, sturdy vessels were another innovation in America’s burgeoning military-industrial complex. The prewar Lend-Lease Act passed by Congress had enabled the British Royal Navy to procure merchant vessels and munitions designed and built in the United States. The act also stipulated the manufacture of an escort vessel specifically intended for deepwater, anti–U-boat screening patrols, or ASW duty—antisubmarine warfare. Drawing upon the blueprints and schematics of the smaller British and Canadian destroyers called corvettes, the navy’s Bureau of Ships ordered development of the destroyer escort, or DE.
Traditional American destroyers had been built to accentuate speed and firepower, but they could not match the agility of the German U-boat. The DE’s maneuverability, in contrast, was more than up to the task. Her narrow turning circle of 440 yards nearly halved the turning radius of the conventional destroyer, and with her rounded “bubble” hull and wider stern and bow, she was perfectly suited for the stormy North Atlantic. Destroyer escorts were rough-riding ships, and it took time for sailors posted to them to accustom themselves to the constant plunging, lurching, and rolling, even in placid seas. Lt. Comdr. Henry Lee Plage, skipper of the DE USS Tabberer, jokingly complained to friends that in every photo of him taken aboard his ship, it appeared as if he were about to topple over. But the little destroyer escorts were harder to sink than cork.
Although the average DE was nearly ten knots slower and, at 306 feet long and 36 feet abeam, slightly smaller than a destroyer, she sailed with nearly the same payload, albeit with a smaller crew and a lesser caliber of long- and short-range deck cannon. Naval engineers had compensated for this shortfall with an impressive battery of underwater weaponry that included three torpedo tubes, two depth charge racks, eight depth charge projectors (called K-guns), and the menacing hedgehog, a cluster of twenty-four mortars that could fire forward at an undersea target.
The first destroyer escort made its deepwater debut for the British Royal Navy in 1941. Equipped with the latest radar and sonar technology, these tidy “Sea Dwarfs” soon became the bane of German submarine commanders. Monitoring the progress of these little subchasers, the Navy Department became so enamored with their efficiency that it determined to incorporate them into its own Atlantic and Pacific fleets. DEs proved not only invaluable for screening convoys and coast-watching, but, as the navy discovered, they were also particularly adept as long-range, “first alert” radar picket ships for island-hopping in the Pacific. Although the first U.S. Navy destroyer escort was not commissioned until January 1943, nearly one hundred more followed shortly.
Halsey was delighted to incorporate them into his task forces, and on Ulithi he tasked his Dirty Tricksters with deciding how best to use them. He had it in his mind that using the DEs as outlying submarine screeners would free up his destroyers for shore bombardment duty, but wanted to see what other strategy his staff could cook up for them.
Meanwhile, the fleet’s exhausted sailors and airmen looked forward to two weeks of deserved R&R. They had steamed over thirty-six thousand miles since departing Pearl Harbor in August, fighting up and down the Philippine coasts in “unprecedented intensity and scope.” Resting heavy on their minds and nerves, heavier perhaps than the combat itself, was the tension inherent in the constant expectation of combat, and Halsey knew that tension bred fatigue. Indicative of this notion was a report sent from the flight surgeon on the carrier USS Wasp. He informed Halsey that only 30 of his 131 pilots were fit for immediate duty. Everyone needed to blow off some steam.
Fortunately, on the small sandbank of Mog Mog in the middle of Ulithi’s lagoon, the Seabees had constructed a thatched-hut recreation area and bar. Although trapped under a baking sun where, at dusk, the temperature dropped from the infernal to the merely intolerable, to Halsey’s thousands of battle-weary sailors, Mog Mog may as well have been The Ritz. Officers chowed down on barbecued steaks and scotch whiskey at picnic tables, tossed horseshoes, and swam. Enlisted men played volleyball, baseball, and football. Each swabbie was also issued chits to exchange for two bottles of Iron City beer per day. Word quickly spread that the suds, shipped all the way from Pittsburgh, were laced with the preservative formaldehyde. The rumor discouraged few men.
“Hot sun, beer, formaldehyde, not a good mix,” the destroyer Hull’s chief quartermaster Archie DeRyckere warned new arrivals. “I mean, it really gets to you after you drink a couple dozen. Beyond that, well, at least you go to your grave with a smile on your face.”
Moreover, if one were clever enough, shore leave presented manifold opportunities to “impound” certain provisions difficult to obtain at sea. Ship’s Cook 1st Class Paul “Cookie” Phillips, of the USS Tabberer, was one such enterprising sailor.
Phillips, a butcher from Texarkana, Texas, had honed his scrounging skills while serving for nearly a year on Atlantic convoy duty. His talents blossomed upon his transfer to the destroyer escort Tabberer. Phillips readily volunteered to his skipper, Lieutenant Commander Plage, that he wasn’t much of a chef. “I guess I’m pretty much best at S.O.S.,” he admitted, referring to the chipped beef on toast dish universally reviled among sailors as “shit on a shingle.” But what Phillips lacked in culinary talent he made up for in creativity.
Phillips was an expert at “relieving” fellow Allied vessels of precious stores, and the fruits of his labor ranged from sacks of potatoes to cases of toilet tissue. “You just got to have a good nose, a feel for when another ship’s stuff will be left just laying there on the dock, and not be afraid to sneak around in the middle of the night,” he instructed his Tabberer messmates.
But his pièce de résistance occurred one afternoon when he noticed a crew of dockworkers delivering an ice cream freezer and crates of ice cream mix to a “heavy” vessel berthed at Ulithi beside the Tabberer. The galley of an undersized, no-nonsense destroyer escort was considered too cramped to sail with such extraneous bulk. Moreover, she was not authorized to possess one. To Cookie Phillips, however, the U.S. Navy’s rules were made to be broken.
Eyeing his prize, he gathered about him a dozen deckhands, including several from his kitchen staff, and laid out his plan. Phillips and his crewmates would stage a fistfight among themselves on the wharf, not a terribly difficult bit of playacting for men who had just spent forty-nine straight days in close quarters at sea. When the brawl escalated into a donnybrook, the Shore Patrol would arrive, rendering the scene even more confusing.
As all hell broke loose among the Tabberer’s crew, the dockworkers, and the Shore Patrol, the Tabberer’s assistant cook would spring into action. “You get two men and grab that ice cream freezer and the ice cream mix and carry it back aboard ship,” Phillips instructed. “Don’t look back, don’t stop for no one, and look official.”
To the Tabberer’s skipper, his ship’s cook’s accomplishments were all in a sailor’s day’s work, for by all accounts the charismatic Lieutenant Commander Plage was a special commander, and a special man. Tall, slender, and athletic, he was not only one of the most beloved skippers in the Pacific Theater, but circumstances were to prove him one of the bravest. He and his ship were, in fact, destined to employ what one senior officer called Plage’s “peculiar magic” and play an outsized role in an impending drama that was to change the nature of seafaring navies forever.
The Plage family had emigrated to the United States from the bitterly contested Alsace-Lorraine area of Europe in the nineteenth century, and Plage often joked that his forebears “could be French or German, depending on the historical era.” Both his grandfather and father were engineers, and one of the family’s prized possessions was a White House ashtray personally inscribed by President Theodore Roosevelt and sent to the elder Plage as a token of appreciation for helping to design and construct the living quarters of American workers building the Panama Canal. Plage’s father had moved his family from Oklahoma City, where Henry was born in 1915, to Atlanta when Plage was a toddler, and young Henry was reared in an upper-middle-class environment redolent of Southern gentility.
As a teenager, Plage honed his knack for leadership as a summer counselor at the exclusive Camp Tate for Boys in the Stone Mountain area of northern Georgia. The camp, a sort of finishing school for young men, offered among its sundry programs daily exercise regimens, nature studies, swimming and sailing lessons, rifle practice, and war games. At Camp Tate, Plage proved a natural sailor, and in a group photo of counselors in its 1934 brochure an athletic and arrestingly handsome nineteen-year-old “Hank” stares back at the camera wearing an unruly shock of black hair and a look of confident determination. In fact, with his square jaw, high cheekbones, and thick dark hair, Henry Plage was as striking as a Roman bust. Not a few seamen destined to sail under his command remarked upon his resemblance to the actor Cary Grant.
In 1933, Plage enrolled at Georgia Tech, where he majored in engineering and indulged his love of the sea in the school’s naval ROTC program. It was also at Georgia Tech where he met his future wife, Marjorie Armstrong, daughter of the university’s faculty director of athletics. Plage excelled at school as an honor roll student and as a member of the Honor Society, the president of his fraternity (Chi Phi), the captain of the swimming team, and a member of the golf team. When he graduated in 1937, he carried not only an ensign’s commission in the Naval Reserve, but the responsibility of a new bride, which meant placing his engineering career on hold. A job as an insurance claims investigator opened up in Pensacola, Florida, and Henry and Marjorie moved south, where he remained on inactive Naval Reserve duty for three years.
In late 1940, sensing war’s approach, Plage wrote the navy asking to be transferred to active duty. He had conferred with Marjorie and was considering making the service his calling. He also concluded that the request, at this point in time, would give him a career jump on the generation of men who he was certain would shortly be called up or drafted. The navy acquiesced and, still in the Reserves, he graduated from officer candidate school in 1941 as a lieutenant commander.
In May 1942 he was posted to the Charleston, South Carolina, navy yard, where his first sea duty was as skipper of a 173-foot subchaser. Plage made several patrols through the Caribbean, sometimes skirting hurricanes, aboard the frigate, and ten months later he was bumped up the command chain to destroyer escorts.
One of the earliest of these agile new ships was the Pacific-based USS LeHardy, and it was to this unhappy vessel Lieutenant Commander Plage was assigned as executive officer in late 1943. The regular navy crew took immediately to this stately Reserve XO with the ramrod posture and slight Southern drawl; word quickly spread belowdecks, “Them crumbum Japs have had it now. Cary Grant’s come aboard.”
“Cary Grant” did not disappoint. Her crew, predominantly young Southern boys, considered the LeHardy’s skipper a pompous and aloof “by-the-book” martinet who seemed more intent on enforcing petty regulations than in fighting a war. “Just a foul pole,” one seaman called him. Most nettling, he issued strict orders forbidding any social contact, including conversation, between his officers and the ship’s enlisted men.
Yet from the day of his arrival Plage blithely ignored this directive. He announced that his door “is open to any sailor,” and once, when a ship’s electrician took him up on the offer and barged into his cabin while he was showering, Plage turned to the sailor, smiled, and said, “Come on in, the water’s fine.”
On deck rounds he would stop and speak to any enlisted man he met, and during shore leave he made it a point to join the crew’s dockside sandlot baseball games, albeit as the umpire. His seamanship was obvious, and enlisted men and officers alike commented upon the “mother’s love” with which the young Plage would sail the little DE into her mooring. He formed lifelong friendships with several of his crew, and sailors lined the ship’s rail to bid him a fond, if bittersweet, farewell when he was transferred to command of his own vessel, the DE USS Donaldson.
In June 1944, Plage was skippering the Donaldson through the Marianas campaign when he received a radio message ordering his immediate return to Pacific Fleet headquarters at Pearl. From there he was flown to Houston, Texas, where, on May 23, 1944, the destroyer escort Tabberer, having just rolled off the line at the Brown Shipbuilding Yard, was commissioned. The vessel—named for Charles Arthur Tabberer, an American fighter pilot awarded a posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross after being killed in action two years earlier—carried 12 officers and 124 enlisted men. Plage’s orders were to steam the “Tabby” back to the Pacific via the Panama Canal and join a hunter-killer DE squadron anchored by the escort carrier USS Anzio. Plage was thankful for the long shakedown cruise.
Of the Tabby’s officers, only four had ever been to sea, and close to 90 percent of her enlisted crew were teenagers with an average service record barely exceeding three months.
“They were boys when they came into the navy,” Plage told his new executive officer, twenty-seven-year-old Lt. Bob Surdam, himself a navy reservist who until recently had been an industrial analyst for a commercial bank in upstate New York. “A few months active duty on this ship and they’ll become men in a hurry.”
Before weighing anchor for Pearl, Plage ran the Tabby through dock trials and underway maneuvers in the Gulf of Mexico, steamed her through shakedown training exercises to Bermuda, and put into the Boston navy yards for her final overhaul. Along the way Plage and Surdam instituted a backbreaking regimen of seamanship drills designed to shape the crew into fighting trim. The skipper exuded a quiet authority that did not go unnoticed by his men. They not only admired his obviously exceptional seamanship, but sensed that he was as much concerned for their safety and well-being as he was for his own. “A fine gentleman, a man among men,” one subordinate described him, not, it turned out, without good reason.
To nineteen-year-old Mailman 3rd Class William McClain, Plage was the antithesis of everything he had expected from a navy commander. Before joining the service, McClain had been out of his home state of Tennessee precisely once, and when he joined the Tabby’s crew in Houston for her maiden voyage, he was unsure what to expect from the ship’s officers. Plage quickly set him straight. He played no favorites and pulled no rank.
“The one thing that stands out about the Cap’n is his evenhandedness,” McClain told new arrivals to the Tabberer. “We’re a small ship, and when we load stores, everybody loads stores, the Cap’n makes sure of that.” In fact, Plage would drag a chair to the fantail of the Tabberer when it came time to take on provisions, and sit there throughout the entire process making sure none of his enlisted men worked any harder than his officers. McClain was not the only sailor who noticed that Plage, though but twenty-nine himself, was wont to take an inordinate paternal interest in every member of his crew.
Two months out of port, a twenty-five-year-old shipfitter named Leonard Glaser caught Plage’s eye. Glaser was pale and drawn, bordering on emaciated. He looked, a crewmate observed, “like he was walking around just to save funeral expenses.” In fact, he had lost a pound a day in the sixty days the Tabby had been at sea. Plage found Glaser alone one day and pulled him aside. “What’s wrong with you?” he said. “You look like you’re wasting away.”
Glaser explained that he had been raised in a kosher household and could not eat much of the galley’s mess, including the copious servings of bacon and ham.
“This is war, son,” Plage told him. “I know your religious decrees, but I also know your rabbi says you can eat anything and everything.”
Faith had nothing to do with it, Glaser said. His stomach just couldn’t hold down the food to which his system was so unaccustomed. Plage placed his hand on Glaser’s shoulder and marched him straightaway to the galley. There he instructed “Cookie” Phillips that Shipfitter 3rd Class Leonard Glaser hereby had the run of the galley. He turned back to Glaser. “Anytime there’s food served you don’t think you can eat, you come up here and find yourself something you can,” he said.
Shortly thereafter, as the Tabby steamed for the Panama Canal, she made another brief port of call in the Caribbean. The crew was given one-day shore leave. When Glaser returned to the ship, he found a carton of sardines, peanuts, and other kosher foods on his bunk, compliments of the captain.
It was true, the skipper could be a stern disciplinarian when necessary, but just as the crew felt they had reached their breaking point during, say, one of his relentless crash-course drills, he would relent. He had an innate feel for just how much stress the men could take, and he even looked the other way when several sailors, against regulations, adopted and smuggled aboard a mascot, a scruffy abandoned terrier they christened, naturally enough, Tabby. Plage could often be spotted on the fantail donning gloves and competing in the ship’s intramural boxing matches, or eschewing meals in officers’ country in order to dine in the enlisted men’s mess. By late 1944 the Tabberer boasted one of the most efficient crews in the U.S. Navy to complement her beloved skipper.
After Cookie Phillips installed his new ice cream freezer on the DE, it was Plage’s habit to ensure that all hands had been served dessert before he appeared at the galley door, late at night, eager to see if any might be left. Of course Phillips always put some aside, and “the Cap’n,” Cookie, and the galley staff, sometimes joined by an officer or two, would often talk well into the night over bowls of ice cream, their topics ranging from Hollywood movies to their postwar plans.
It was on one such visit belowdecks, on December 8, 1944, that Lt. Comdr. Henry Lee Plage notified several of his crew that the Tabby would be sailing with her hunter-killer Task Group 30.7 squadron early the next morning. Her mission: to conduct long-range submarine sweeps in preparation for the invasion of Mindoro.