That principle weight should have been given to the reports of the Chandeleur search plane received at 14:24 Dec. 17th, since no definite reports of the storm location had been received since the 16th.
That the aerological talent assisting Commander THIRD Fleet was inadequate in practical experience and service background in view of the importance of the services to be expected and required.
—GENERAL OPINIONS #4 AND #6 OF THE COURT OF INQUIRY’S REPORT INVESTIGATING “HALSEY’S TYPHOON.”
At 5:00 A.M. on December 17, the crew of a seaplane flying out of Ulithi spotted what appeared to be the telltale “zero-zero visibility” of what its radio operator referred to as a “tropical disturbance” some 225 miles southeast of Third Fleet’s rendezvous position. This was nearly 300 miles closer than fleet aerologist Comdr. George Kosco had forecast.
The scout plane returned to its tender, the USS Chandeleur, and its pilot encrypted the storm’s last known coordinates by means of the deliberate, handwritten cipher required for weather reports—as opposed to the faster, electronic ciphering machine used to relay intelligence and orders. This message, the dog that didn’t bark, failed to reach Halsey’s flagship until nine hours later, where it was inadvertently buried under a stack of communiqués. Kosco was not to read it for another day and a half.
Meanwhile, farther north, Guam was being rocked by a series of torrential rainstorms, and Army Air Corps meteorologists stationed on Saipan launched their own weather reconnaissance flight. This aircraft’s pilot filed an uncoded radio message saying that he had located what he believed to be the eye of a nascent typhoon. An army meteorologist on Saipan, Lt. Reid A. Bryson, teletyped an emergency transmission to Fleet Weather Central at Pearl conveying the storm’s coordinates. He added that the disturbance was most definitely a typhoon, and it appeared to be curving north.
No one on Saipan, including Bryson, was privy to the exact movements of the Third Fleet. But across the Pacific, scuttlebutt was rampant regarding the Mindoro operation. It did not take much calculation for the meteorologist to determine that the cyclone appeared to be on a collision course with the island, and thus with Halsey’s vessels. It wasn’t often that the weathermen under Bryson’s command got to feel they were a real part of the war. This was such a moment.
They were thus stunned at the four-word response Bryson received from an unknown navy aerologist at Pearl Harbor. “We don’t believe you,” it read.
Agitated, Bryson again sat down at the teletype machine. He assured Pearl that his report was not an educated guess. He had personally spoken to the recon flight’s radio operator as his plane flew through the typhoon’s eye!
“We still don’t believe you, but we’ll watch,” came the reply. Bryson and his small team slumped in their chairs and waited for what they feared would be horrible news.
As Task Force 38 steamed east, away from Mindoro and Luzon, it remained well out of reach of Typhoon Cobra’s most powerful gusts, although remote picket ships radioed reports to flag plot describing the sea making up fast. The eastern sky was swirling with fantastic, multicolored clouds, a Turner watercolor come to life, and the olive green ocean’s surface was beginning to agitate and flow, like water coming to a boil.
Outlying destroyer and destroyer escort crews sensed that some unseen, if powerful, force was driving the mounting swells, and aboard the DD USS Hunt, Gunner’s Mate 2nd Class Dominick Legato noticed that the incessant whitecaps were beginning to release sheets of atomized vapor. His chief warned him to batten down for “a big blow.”
There was something vexing about the whirl of the sea’s currents. They were, as one ship’s officer noted, “not tentative, exactly, but encouraging of ambiguities and multiple meanings.”
In fact, although Typhoon Cobra’s core winds had reached 70 to 80 knots, with gusts topping 120 knots, the storm was still so compact that her “wind spread” extended no farther than one hundred miles from her eye—not yet close enough to be felt by the main body of the task force. Halsey certainly betrayed no apprehension, referring in his log on the morning of December 17 to the mariner’s Beaufort wind scale: “Force 5—fresh breeze—25 to 31 mile wind.”
There were, however, ominous auguries. Captain Kernodle of the “jeep carrier” San Jacinto instituted a two-man deck order: No seaman was allowed topside unless roped to a shipmate. Chief Petty Officer William Christensen on the carrier USS Essex raised Kernodle’s ante. As the officer in charge of the flight deck, Christensen worried that his flight crews would be blown overboard by winds approaching gale force and ordered his sailors tied together into six-man teams as they shepherded home returning combat air patrols, or CAPs, charged with detecting enemy bogeys. And in the ready room of the jeep carrier USS Savo Island, Avenger tail gunner Bob Winn was warned by a veteran squadron commander that any man taking to the sky in this weather was a sure bet to end up in the drink.
Winn’s squad leader proved prescient. By daybreak on December 17, commanders of Halsey’s attack carriers had already begun receiving distress messages from the smaller and lighter escort carriers, which requested permission to land their CAPs on the larger, more stable decks of the CVs. And when it became too difficult to put down at all on any of the heaving, dancing flattops, Halsey directed the pilots of, first, one, and then a second returning scout plane to bail out and ditch their aircraft into the sea. At this Halsey ordered all planes temporarily grounded and instructed his carrier deck crews to let the air out of all aircraft tires and relash the planes with triple steel cables. The fleet had withstood big storms before, and it would damn well ride this one out, too.
Aerologist Kosco caught the essence of the admiral’s martial mood. “Weather information at hand from the three reporting fleet weather stations did not disclose that a typhoon was on the rampage, or even existing,” he wrote. “As a matter of fact, the possibility that [a typhoon] might be snaking toward the Fleet was not given serious thought. In time of war, when combat objectives rise above all other priorities, it is not the rule to bestow grave concern on incidental dangers. Planes do not stay grounded and fleets do not run scared because of ugly weather if in doing so they jeopardize military or naval missions.”
It need be pointed out that Kosco was facing these “incidental dangers” aboard a 45,000-ton battlewagon and not a floundering destroyer. When a DD low on fuel rolls, the oil in its bunkers sloshes from its center of gravity to leeward, thereby increasing the roll. Third Fleet destroyer commanders had been issued a standing order to ballast their fuel tanks with “sufficient” seawater whenever their fuel capacity fell below 70 percent, particularly when encountering heavy weather. The DDs were indeed encountering mounting seas this morning, but the combined operation of spilling ballast and refueling could take upward of ten hours. His Tin Can skippers were loath to keep an anxious Halsey waiting that long, well aware of the admiral’s desire to return to Luzon as soon as possible.
Anticipating his wrath should anything delay that goal, many of his destroyer commanders thus opted to remain running their ships perilously high above the waterline as the sea continued to roil. By the time Acuff’s oil tankers approached Halsey’s task force, a bracing cross-swell and 30-knot winds would make refueling nearly impossible.
At 1:00 A.M. on December 17, the deck log of Admiral Halsey’s flagship New Jersey recorded a barometer reading of 29.88, with winds at 23 knots out of the northeast. This aroused no suspicion, as normal barometric pressure at sea level is 29.92. Yet Third Fleet was dispersed across such a wide swath of the Pacific that, at the same time, more than two hundred miles east-southeast of the New Jersey, the entry for the log of the destroyer USS Dewey noted a barometer reading of 29.72.
While destroyer skippers depended upon the barometer and thermometer as their primary weather forecasting instruments, aboard the New Jersey, Kosco was monitoring multiple weather transmissions coming into flag plot. These included reports compiled in Kwajalein from weather stations in the Western Pacific and broadcast at six-hour intervals; transmissions every three hours from Manus in the Admiralties; twice-daily search plane reports from Saipan, Guam, Kossol Roads, Peleliu, and Ulithi; reports four times a day from Oahu that covered the Central and North Pacific, and, of course, the overall weather map analyses sent every six hours from Fleet Weather Central at Pearl. In addition, each U.S. Navy vessel operating in the Western Pacific was issued a monthly pilot chart from the navy’s Hydrographic Office that plotted the course of past typhoons in the area going back several years.
Although their accuracy and timeliness was ever in doubt, Kosco pored through these forecasts and charts as Halsey’s task force approached Acuff’s oiler group. In recognition of the worsening weather, the scheduled refueling had been advanced one hour, to 7:00 A.M., but even by then the wind had intensified to just shy of gale force, the cross-swell resembled rolling pewter hills, and the sky was completely overcast.
Like William Dampier’s terrified sailors two and a half centuries earlier, crewmen from Third Fleet watched as a dark, heavy cloud blackened the southeastern horizon, its upper reaches tinged with a dull, reddish cast. This mass approached slowly, its facade as thin as an ax blade, which then fanned out behind like the furrow of a plow. It was like nothing they had ever seen.
Atop the center mast of the carrier Cape Esperance, sixty feet above the deck, eighteen-year-old seaman Paul Schlener was pulling lookout duty as these “waves of dark clouds were coming down on us like I could reach up and touch them.” As a child, Schlener had witnessed violent thunderstorms rolling down from the mountains near his parents’ ranch in Idaho. Yet as the Cape Esperance began to sway in the heaving ocean, it seemed to the young seaman as if the lightning bolts emanating from the low-scudding rain clouds bearing down on him were arrows, all aimed at the metal pole to which he clung. He was, he told friends, “as scared as a kid could be.”
Soon other vessels began pitching heavily, “slamming” up and over waves that tested their rivets, which buckled and emitted a sound like popping corn. As ships rose and fell, the clappers on their huge, three-foot-tall bells swung fore and aft constantly, and sailors spoke of becoming almost as sick of hearing those “damn bells” as they did of the bucking seas. Though it is doubtful that either Halsey or Kosco physically experienced the tossing ocean on the bridge of the hulking New Jersey, Capt. C. Raymond Calhoun of the oiler task group escort destroyer Dewey noted sardonically, “On the smaller ships, the weather took on a distinctly more personal dimension than it did on the carriers and battleships.”
The main body of Acuff’s replenishment task group consisted of five escort aircraft carriers, twelve oilers, and three oceangoing tugs. The jeep carriers were scheduled to deliver replacement planes and pilots to Halsey’s attack flattops as well as—theoretically—launch combat air patrols. The oilers, their bunkers bursting, were transporting some 100,000 barrels of fuel oil and 800,000 gallons of aviation gas.
Oilers were the lumbering oxen of the sea. As such, they were easy prey for Japanese pilots and submarine commanders, and five destroyers and ten destroyer escorts screened this movable feast against enemy subs and aircraft. Standard procedure held that these escort vessels would form a wide circle around the oilers and fill the air with ack-ack at the approach of an enemy sortie.
It was rare that a Japanese pilot was hardy or lucky enough to fly through the barrier of air bursts. Moreover, the odds of a Japanese submarine rising even to periscope depth in these high seas were slim; the arrival of an enemy scout plane from far-off Luzon even slimmer. But even one lucky sighting could foul the entire refueling operation, and all vessels posted lookouts, most of whom tied neckerchiefs or kitchen rags around their mouths and noses to protect them from the stinging spume.
Along with the Dewey, sailing in the oiler group’s screening detachment were four more of the old Farragut-class, double-stacked destroyers: the Hull, Monaghan, USS Aylwin, and USS Farragut. Although, as noted, by 1944 the Farraguts could not match the tonnage or firepower brought to bear by the newer Fletcher and Sumner classes of DD, the original eight Farraguts had once been considered pearls, and their crews took pride in their heritage. When one, the USS Worden, a veteran of Pearl Harbor, Midway, and Guadalcanal, split her seams open athwart a rock off Amchitka Island in the Aleutians and went down without a trace in January 1943, her loss was mourned throughout the fleet.
Among the remaining seven—as destroyer squadron commander Capt. Preston Mercer was to testify during the court of inquiry—the five Farraguts steaming with Third Fleet during the Mindoro invasion were led by some of the most junior destroyer skippers in the navy.
Calhoun aboard the Dewey, the Hull’s James Marks, William Rogers of the Aylwin, Conway “Connie” Hartigan on the Farragut, and the Monaghan’s Bruce Garrett had all been classmates at the Naval Academy in the late 1930s, and each was in his first combat command. Lieutenant Commander Garrett had been in the Monaghan’s captain’s chair less than twenty-four hours before departing Ulithi, having replaced her former skipper, Comdr. Wally Wendt, the day before.
While replenishing on Ulithi, the Dewey had taken part in antiaircraft gunnery exercises with, among other destroyers, the Hull. Although the Dewey’s thirty-one-year-old Captain Calhoun noted that he was “favorably impressed with the appearance of his sister vessel and the quality of her underway performance,” he also remarked, portentously, that his classmate Lieutenant Commander Marks struck him as “very serious and very regulation.”
In fact, since Marks’s transfer to the Hull three months earlier, the ship’s morale had plummeted. Veteran sailor Archie DeRyckere, the ship’s chief quartermaster, described this feeling best when he told shipmates that, from the outset, he had sensed “something of the night” about the new skipper. The new captain was a short man, and slight, with dark eyes and an olive-toned complexion. He was a smart officer, to be sure, Academy class of 1938, who had given DeRyckere his shipboard examination when he’d fleeted up to chief. But even the Academy made stony ground for a certain kind of grain, and despite having spent twenty-nine months running convoys across the North Atlantic before taking command of the Hull, there lingered about Marks the scent of the pretender who had alienated the crew from the moment he’d toted his seabag up the gangway.
The Hull had been undergoing refitting at Bremerton when Marks came aboard. The new commander had the ill fortune of replacing the able and beloved Capt. Charles Consalvo, with whom the Hull’s marlinspike crew had forged a bond tempered by combat. But Marks’s first official pronouncement—“I’m going to make history with this ship”—had not sat well with veteran Tin Can sailors who had already earned twenty battle stars in the Pacific campaign.
To make matters worse, Marks had forbidden fraternization, even social conversation, between officers and enlisted men. He canceled shore leave for negligible infractions. He dressed down a navigator for fancifully naming a star on the plot chart after his wife. And he enforced petty edicts with such gratuitous discipline that one of the ship’s first class gunners’ mates had to be physically restrained from attacking him with a submachine gun after a particularly roisterous Stateside evening.
In short, the Hull’s crew felt that Lieutenant Commander Marks was not a seaman, the worst insult that could be hurled at a captain in the Tin Can Navy. It was as if he knew the words, but not the music. A member of the Hull’s black gang was said to have named his daughter’s new kitten “Captain M,” as the creature did nothing all day but mewl, preen, and strut. And DeRyckere was not alone at reading it as an omen when, after a visit to a Seattle fortune-teller, more than a dozen crewmen jumped ship the night before the Hull departed Bremerton for Pearl.
“They just stood there on the docks with their seabags, refusing to come aboard,” Pat Douhan, the Hull’s sonar man, told a crewmate. In Hawaii several more sailors, mostly old-timers with a weather nose for such things, managed to finagle themselves off the ship by picking bar fights and getting themselves tossed into the brig. These former shipmates, many of them old friends, crossed DeRyckere’s mind as the Hull encountered heavier and heavier seas.
Just past sunrise on December 17, Acuff’s oiler task group hove into view of Halsey’s Task Force 38 through a dirty, yellowish haze. Its first order of business was to replenish the admiral’s thirsty “small boys.” The operation instantly proved problematic. The wind and waves tossed and rolled the vessels, and fuel transfer hoses and mooring lines lashed and snapped until they parted. Oiler crews risked life and limb as green water sloshed over decks and white lather over housings. Helmsmen grappled with corkscrewing vessels, and collisions were narrowly avoided.
Finally, parallel fueling became so dangerous that attempts were made to transfer fuel over the sterns of the few oilers so equipped. This, too, proved untenable for the majority of ships, as it required the dismantling and rerigging of hoses and other gear, impossible in these seas. The few trailing hoses successfully manhandled across a destroyer’s pitching forecastle deck whipped and broke off well before they could be secured to the forward fuel oil trunk beneath the pilothouse.
Reports of refueling problems began streaming into flag plot from destroyer commanders, and given the speed with which the sea was running there existed the unnerving possibility that some of Halsey’s small boys would run out of fuel before they could take on more. This was unprecedented in modern U.S. naval history. Yet as Halsey lifted binoculars to peer from the New Jersey’s bridge wing through thickening spouts and spiral rain bands, every DD within his field of vision was having difficulty maintaining station alongside the tankers. As the morning wore on, the admiral haunted flag bridge, smoking, pacing, apprehensive.