Having spent a great many years in destroyers and having been in some very severe weather in ships ranging from 160 tons to 1,200 tons, I knew there had been grave doubts as to their stability from time to time, particularly when in a light condition.
—TESTIMONY OF ADM. WILLIAM F. HALSEY JR.,
COMMANDING OFFICER, THIRD FLEET, TO THE COURT OF
INQUIRY INVESTIGATING “HALSEY’S TYPHOON.”
The United States Navy had always been, and remains, the most tight-knit of all the military services. Far-flung news—as well as mad rumors—of triumphs and disasters flow fast and free through its ranks. Thus sailors throughout Halsey’s fleet in December 1944 were aware of the fate of the destroyer USS Warrington, which three months earlier had sunk in a great Atlantic hurricane off Florida, with 248 men drowned. One officer who took a particular interest in the loss of the Warrington was Bob Surdam, the destroyer escort Tabberer’s XO, who had been detached from the Warrington in order to take over as Capt. Henry Plage’s number two.
The fate of the Warrington was also fresh in the mind of Seaman Bob Ayers aboard the destroyer Spence. After the breakup of Arleigh “31-Knot” Burke’s DesRon 23 “Little Beavers” squadron, the Spence had been dispatched to San Francisco for refitting and remanning, and had returned to join Third Fleet at Ulithi two months earlier. Upon arriving at her anchorage, one of her first orders had been to dog down for weather, as at the time all ships berthed in Ulithi lagoon were on Typhoon Condition Standby. The alert lasted three days before the storm veered away and typhoon conditions were canceled. But though the blow had bypassed the atoll, the alert had left a daunting impression on the Spence’s raw crew, many of whom were teenage enlistees sailing into their first combat assignments. Among this gang was brand-new nineteen-year-old Gunner’s Mate Striker Harley “Bob” Ayers.
Ayers had shipped out from Great Lakes Naval Station to his new berth as a “deck ape” on the Spence only eleven days earlier. Growing up on the fringes of Lake Michigan, Ayers was an avid swimmer and water skier who had never been afraid of the water. When he was fourteen years old, a family friend in Michigan City had invited him to crew on an old, gaff-rigged sixty-foot schooner, and the jangly, gawky teenager had taken to sailing like a seal to the sea. It was natural that when it came time to choose a service, he had enlisted in the navy.
On the first day Ayers reported to the Spence on Ulithi, the ship’s bosun’s mate had ordered him and another young crewman to wash down the skipper’s gig, the captain’s small launch, which was still swung outboard over the rail. A few moments later the bosun’s mate found another task for Ayers and hollered for him to come back in. As he made his way from the gig to the destroyer’s deck, instinct took over, and instead of edging across the launch and leaping down onto the deck, he grabbed a secure line and slid over. For an instant his momentum carried him out of sight of the bosun’s mate, who thought he’d fallen into the lagoon. When Ayers popped back up into view, the shocked and angry bosun’s mate cursed him long and loud.
Young Ayers’s fearlessness, however, was to inadvertently help save his life. For, following this inauspicious debut, he had spent the next four days on punishment duty fashioning the Spence’s ratlines—thin, meshlike ropes running horizontally from the ship’s shroud, the iron rod extending from the mast to the futtock plate, used to brace the base of the topmast. These ratlines were to prevent men from falling overboard. Ayers had but recently written to his parents about how proud he was to be a part of “Bull” Halsey’s Big Blue Fleet, sailing with the Tin Can Navy to boot. Respect and affection for the “fighting admiral” were such that whenever a Third Fleet sailor ran into another seaman, the response to the immemorial navy greeting—“What ship you on now, sailor?”—was a proud, “I’m with Halsey.” Yet less than a week into his service, Ayers now found himself muttering to any crewmate who would listen, “I’m so sick and tired of making them damn ratlines. Damn, dirty, creosote-coated hemp.”
Yet, on the morning of December 17, as the gathering storm tossed the Spence like driftwood, Ayers decided that those damn ratlines might just come in handy after all. At a few moments past noon, Halsey himself signaled the Spence’s captain, Lt. Comdr. James Andrea, to steam along the starboard beam of his flagship and begin taking fuel from the New Jersey’s forward and aft bunkers. The Spence, down to between 10 and 15 percent of her fuel capacity, was sailing close enough to the New Jersey that the admiral could see that she was riding high and struggling mightily in the brutal wash.
Fueling a destroyer from a battleship, as opposed to from an oiler, is often less treacherous in confused seas, as the battlewagon’s higher freeboard, greater mass, and maneuverability create, in theory, a natural lee to protect the smaller vessel from wind and horizontal rains. Like her Farragut-class counterparts, the Fletcher-class Spence was top-heavy. Additional radar scanners and antiaircraft guns had been installed on her deck in San Francisco, and this supplementary weight combined with her empty fuel bunkers to make her that much more “tender” as she approached the New Jersey in the escalating winds.
Nowhere was this more apparent than on the Spence’s pitching topside, where fueling gangs assigned to secure marker lines and hoses from the battleship were tossed about like straw men. One member of this gang was Gunner’s Mate Striker Bob Ayers. Ayers’s job was to tie in the destroyer’s bow marker line. But as Halsey’s big battleship towered above him, he found that in the deteriorating weather he was having all he could do just to remain on his feet. Once he managed to shoot the line up to the New Jersey’s deck crew and secure the hawsers, he crouched near the prow of the ship, paying the rope in and out as the two vessels rose and fell together atop the heavy swells.
At one point, with green water crashing over him, Ayers sensed that he was about to be washed over the side. Still gripping the bowline, he backed off and burrowed into what he thought was a sheltered cranny beneath the ship’s number 1 gun mount. Just as he wedged himself in, a huge comber rocked the Spence, sending her rolling profoundly to port. Ayers lost his footing and began sliding across the deck.
“Then I find out what the ratlines were for,” he later told a messmate. “One foot was through one hole and one through another, and my ass is hanging overboard. Without the ratlines, I wouldn’t be here.”
Ayers untangled himself and was still hunkered down on the deck, this time gripping the bowline much tighter, when an even more colossal wave pitched the Spence again to port. So powerful was this wave that it parted the thick hawsers’ hemp fibers as if they were threads and sent the 2,150-ton destroyer’s mast and rigging swinging bow-on toward the New Jersey’s bridge. The Spence’s mast came so close that Halsey, by now taking lunch near the open door of the flag mess in the island superstructure, instinctively ducked. Paint chips flew as the two ships sideswiped.
Near simultaneously, the destroyer USS Collett radioed flag plot that both her hoses had been ripped asunder and carried away as she attempted to take fuel from the battleship USS Wisconsin. The destroyer USS Maddox reported narrowly avoiding a collision with the oiler USS Manatee as she tried to refuel, and in rapid succession the destroyers Hunt, USS Stephen Potter, USS Mansfield, USS Lyman K. Swenson, USS Preston, and USS Thatcher filed similar messages. The skipper of the heavy cruiser USS San Francisco threatened to hack through the refueling lines of the bucking destroyer USS Brown if she didn’t break off. It was clear that something big was barreling down on the fleet.
Ten minutes later Halsey directed all refueling operations to be “suspended at the earliest time possible.”
“So Halsey doesn’t want to scratch his boat,” Bob Ayers thought when he received the orders. Within moments the Spence, her foredeck and hull blackened by spilled fuel oil, broke off from the New Jersey. She had managed to pump some six thousand gallons into her bunkers. Ayers had no way of knowing that this would not be nearly enough.
In flag plot, Halsey and Kosco returned to their weather charts and forecasts. By 2:00 P.M. the barometer read 29.70. It had dropped .13 inches in three hours. In his chapter on tropical cyclones, Bowditch writes, “If the wind remains steady in direction and increases in force in heavy squalls while the barometer falls rapidly, say, at a greater rate than .03 of an inch per hour, the vessel is probably on or near the track of the storm and in advance of the center.” Aboard the destroyer Dewey, Lt. Watson T. “Watso” Singer, a veteran China station hand in his mid-fifties, had reduced Bowditch’s cyclonic counsel to its salty essence, which he dubbed “Singer’s Law”:
“When the barometer drops .10 of an inch or more in three hours or less, you’re in the path of a typhoon, and you’d better haul ass.”
But Kosco’s calculations still placed the center of the “tropical disturbance” a good 400 miles southeast of the fleet. It was, in reality, a mere 120 miles distant. Nonetheless, on his aerographer’s advice, Halsey plotted a new rendezvous with the oiler group some 160 miles to the northwest. The linkup was scheduled for daybreak the next morning, December 18, at latitude 17 degrees north, longitude 128 east.
With his options restricted by the necessity of remaining close enough to Luzon to fulfill his commitment to MacArthur, Halsey thought he was angling away from the storm. In fact, he was running parallel to and ahead of it. As the fleet fanned out in a great semicircle and steamed west-northwest, the faster carriers, cruisers, and battleships of Task Force 38 began outpacing by three to six knots the slower-moving typhoon. The sea thus moderated slightly, the New Jersey’s barometer inched higher, and Halsey was furnished with the illusion of security.
One hour later, at 3:00 P.M., Kosco received an updated weather report from Pearl indicating that the storm had also changed direction. A quick glance at his charts persuaded him that Halsey’s current rendezvous coordinates could place the fleet directly in its new path. He informed the admiral, who, at 3:30 P.M., again changed the refueling site, ordering a course change to nearly 185 miles due south. This would take his vessels precariously close to the Japanese-held Legaspi Peninsula in the far southeastern corner of Luzon. But Halsey’s staff argued that even the most desperate, Bushido-infused squadron commander would not put planes in the sky in this scud and wind.
They were correct about the Japanese dogging down, albeit for the wrong reasons. What was left of Japan’s scattered navy, as well as its Philippine-based air squadrons, was very nearly spent. In fact, by the time of MacArthur’s Mindoro invasion, the Imperial War Department had already written off the Philippines, save for last-gasp “prolonged holding operations” on Luzon. Japan’s only effective remaining weapons were the kamikazes, who could no more aim their suicide flights at specific U.S. Navy ships in this weather than those same ships could refuel.
Thus, as the Third Fleet steamed south, it had only a nonhuman enemy to fear—a foe just 135 miles distant and roaring toward it on a collision course.
Far astern of the bulk of Task Force 38, Capt. Jasper Acuff’s wallowing oilers struggled to keep pace with Halsey’s faster “heavies.” The tankers’ low horsepower and high freeboard left them especially susceptible to the strong winds, and their task was further hindered by continued attempts to refuel the fleet’s thirstiest ships—the destroyers Spence, USS Hickox, and USS Maddox. In spite of the dire conditions, the three vessels had been exempted from the fuel-cancellation orders, detached from Task Force 38, and left behind with Acuff’s replenishment group with orders to seize the first opportunity to fill their bunkers. The effort proved disastrous.
After the Spence, now running on less than 10 percent fuel capacity, collided with an oiler—her second crash of the day, this one causing several injuries to her crew—all attempts at parallel refueling were abandoned. The Spence, Maddox, and Hickox would have to take oil stern-to-bow. The oilers dropped inflated canvas balls attached to ropes for the destroyer deck crews to gaff so they could attach fuel lines. But the swells had grown so large, blotting out the seascape, that the gaffing gangs could not even spot the balls. Next, an oiler tried floating an empty forty-two-gallon drum with a line attached to the Spence, but a tanker deckhand became fouled in the line and it had to be cut loose.
Finally, in desperation, one oiler ran a surfboard attached to a hawser off her stern, hoping that the Spence’s deck gang could scoop it up and reel it in. Though Spence sailors did manage to retrieve the board and run it through the ship’s bull nose ring, when they attempted to bring fueling hoses on line, they snapped in the gale like rubber bands.
With his ship running on fumes, the Spence’s chief watertender, George Johnson, turned to a shipmate and ventured a prediction. “I believe we are doomed,” he said.
By this time all of Acuff’s narrow-hulled destroyers, even those with adequate fuel, were taking the brunt of the increasingly confused seas. A struggling DD would bury her nose in the base of an undulating cliff of water and begin the climb of fifty feet or more to the crest. Once atop the wave, her keel would be exposed nearly back to the bridge, and her screws and half her bottom would clear the surface as she plunged into the next trough.
In the pilothouse of the Dewey, sailing with 78 percent fuel capacity and thus fairly well ballasted, Captain Calhoun nonetheless noted that the heavy swell was causing his ship to yaw about 20 degrees with each wave. At one point the Dewey, locked in irons and out of control, hove to within five yards of an unknown cargo ship, nearly ramming her bow.
Among the most precious commodities that Acuff’s replenishment group carried was mail. The navy realized the morale value of letters from home and tried to deliver them, even in combat zones, at least twice a month. Back on Ulithi a barge had split open on a reef and sank with twenty-five bags of mail, and the pall cast over enlisted men and officers alike was worse than if the atoll had run out of Iron City beer.
The destroyer Hull, screening the northernmost of the oiler group’s three units, carried in its hold 120 sacks of letters to Third Fleet sailors from wives, sweethearts, and parents. The Hull had managed to refuel to 75 percent of her capacity, and late in the afternoon of December 17 she attempted the transfer of 40 bags of mail to the battleship USS South Dakota. Twenty-two-year-old Petty Officer 2nd Class Pat Douhan, nominally the Hull’s sonarman, had also signed up as the Hull’s mail clerk, primarily because it meant an extra $25 added to his monthly $75 paycheck. Back in California, Douhan’s wife was three months pregnant, and he needed every dollar he could earn. (Thirteen Hull sailors had left pregnant wives behind following the ship’s last Stateside overhaul; crewmen joked that theirs was the most prolific ship in the U.S. Navy.)
Douhan had wanted to be a sailor since he was a child. His father had been a navy man in World War I, and young Pat had watched his dad don his uniform and march in every Armistice Day parade thereafter. When war with Germany and Japan broke out, Douhan had enlisted at age nineteen, finished boot camp as a “twenty-one-day wonder,” and was shipped off to sonar school. After completing his technical courses, he’d chosen destroyers over submarines, the “workhorse” Tin Can Navy seeming so much more romantic and glamorous. In March 1943 he picked up the Hull in San Francisco while she was refitting.
As the Hull’s “newbie” sonarman, Douhan had taken much ribbing over his several momentary failures to distinguish enemy tin fish from meandering whales. But he soon discovered he was drawn to the ethos of the old destroyer’s rough-riding crew. He enjoyed the fact that their “work hard, play harder” attitude had gotten them banned from more than a few gin mills up and down the West Coast—it was rumored that San Diego posted a “Hull alert” whenever the ship entered the city’s harbor. Moreover, to Douhan, veteran chiefs such as Archie DeRyckere and Chief Bosun’s Mate Ray Schultz seemed as knowing of the sea as Ahab.
Now, however, Douhan wondered exactly what he’d gotten himself into. He’d sailed through some rough weather when the Hull had patrolled the Aleutians, but this storm was much more than he’d bargained for. During the heaviest rolls he imagined himself sitting safely ensconced on the seabed in a cozy sub, no swells or spindrift or combers to fret over.
When the high seas forced several sacks of precious mail to be dumped into the drink during transfer to the South Dakota, Douhan convinced the Hull’s Captain Marks to defer delivery of the remainder until the ship found better weather. But with the sea rising precipitously and the thick, black clouds above him swirling into grotesque shapes, Douhan discovered that mail transfer was the least of his problems.
The Hull’s sonar operators worked together with the ship’s radarmen in a jury-rigged room adjacent to the captain’s sleeping quarters behind the bridge. There was no radar or sonar when the Hull had been commissioned in 1934, and in order to accommodate the new equipment, the sleeping quarters had been subdivided by a canvas curtain. On one side was the captain’s bunk; on the other, sound and radar gear, both surface and air, had been installed. As afternoon turned to evening on December 17, Douhan found Captain Marks unrelenting in his demands.
The thick salt spray of the waves crashing over the Hull’s superstructure combined with the wind-driven rain to “black out” the ship’s radar gear, and in this weather there was no way to fix it.
This did not stop Marks from entering the compartment regularly to loudly berate the radarmen. “He’s gone bonkers,” Douhan told a radar operator after one of Marks’s tirades. As the weather worsened, Douhan sensed that the havoc had spread to the bridge—as did the Hull’s chief bosun’s mate, Ray Schultz.
Schultz grumbled often about the new commander’s lack of seamanship—“All handle and no jug” was one of his phrases—particularly in contrast to Capt. Charles Consalvo, the Hull’s previous skipper. Consalvo, for instance, had been renowned for his docking ability. “He could bring that ship into a buoy and all the bosun’s mate would have to do was drop down and hook that thing in,” Schultz liked to recall. But after Marks took command, the running joke among the Hull’s crew was that no dock was now safe, and the destroyer’s bow had the dents to prove it. The Hull’s chiefs had even come up with a private nickname for Marks, lengthening his initials “J. A.” into “Jackass.”
Douhan and Schultz were not the only Hull crewmen considering precisely this when their ship, now lacking radar, lost visual contact with the rest of its task group shortly after nightfall. Earlier, on the bridge, Archie DeRyckere had stifled a laugh when Marks had poked his head through the port window and nearly had it ripped off by the wind, scud, and rain. Marks had often boasted of the high seas he had steamed through in the North Atlantic, and his swagger seemed to be returning to haunt him.
But now DeRyckere saw nothing funny in the captain’s comportment. Since the moment Marks had peered out the window, he had barely moved a muscle, wedging himself into a corner between the port wing of the bridge and the four-foot-high Polaris stand, the instrument used to mark the ship’s bearing. The skipper, DeRyckere thought, appeared frozen with indecision.
Even had the oiler Task Group 30.8’s commander Jasper Acuff been aware of the Hull crew’s discontent, he had more pressing matters to worry about than one rogue destroyer commander. Acuff had chosen as his flagship the destroyer Aylwin, and after assessing the brutal conditions from her bridge, he closed down the refueling attempts to the Spence, Hickox, and Maddox shortly after 4:00 P.M.
The rain-washed sky modified from gunmetal to silver to tarnished brass as thick, high-altitude stratus clouds left an eerie red glow on the horizon. Except for the frothing white water capping the waves, the sea was the color of coal. In the gloaming, Acuff radioed Capt. H. P. Butterfield, commander of the escort carrier USS Nehenta Bay sailing with his task group.
“What do you think about running out of it?” he asked.
“My weatherman says that we may possibly run out of it by morning,” Butterfield replied. “But we are going with it.”
Acuff then broached the delicate subject that was by now edging into every seaman’s mind: “Do you think the old man was mistaken on his course?”
“That is the best way for him,” said Butterfield, alluding to the fact that Halsey’s heavies had outdistanced both the weather and the oiler group. “But we’ve come quite a ways with it. Big swells from the east make us move with it.”
Acuff pressed. “I think we will come close to making rendezvous in the center of the storm.”
There was a slight pause on Butterfield’s end. Then, “He probably thought the center was more to the north. But it is actually more to the east, I think. If he took report of the fleet broadcast from Pearl, he made an error.”
No sailor in the Pacific dared question Halsey’s acumen, intuition, or seamanship. He had led them through too much; he must have known what he was doing. Acuff and Butterfield assumed the admiral had better weather intelligence than either of them could hope for.
Still, as driving rain tattooed the pilothouses of Acuff’s beleaguered oiler group, Captain Calhoun on the Dewey was not alone in fretting over Halsey’s latest refueling plan. In fact, he called it “unrealistic,” and even his young and inexperienced staff officers—“And none of us were geniuses,” the captain noted—had reached the conclusion that the fleet was being threatened by a massive typhoon. Didn’t anyone in flag plot understand how close they were running to this blow?
One officer sailing aboard the Dewey who did was Capt. Preston Mercer, Admiral Nimitz’s former assistant chief of staff and commander of Destroyer Squadron 1. The destroyers of DS1 had spent the past eight weeks ferrying between Pearl Harbor and Ulithi in various, disparate stages of shipyard overhauls, tactical exercises, and shakedown cruises for new crewmen. Although this was the first time since October 18 that they had sailed together as a squadron, Mercer was familiar with their shortcomings, specifically with their inherent instability.
Three months earlier he had telephoned the navy’s Bureau of Ships to express his concern over the “gross deficiency” in the weight distribution of the Farragut-class vessels, but he’d never received a reply. This did not surprise him. The Bureau of Ships had come into existence only four years earlier and was still a bureaucratic work in progress.
Prior to 1940, and reaching back to the Civil War, the responsibility for U.S. Navy ship design and construction had been shared by competing offices: the Bureau of Engineering and the Bureau of Construction and Repair. Such was the petty infighting between these two administrations that they were said to have inspired the age-old line about a camel being a horse designed by a committee. Now, as Typhoon Cobra descended upon Destroyer Squadron 1, no one was joking.
It was no secret among seamen of every stripe that certain classes of DDs, in particular the Farraguts and the even older Mahans, were prone to hazardous rolls. Yet no one in Washington seemed to want to address the matter. Although Mercer had never heard back from the Bureau of Ships, he had won a small bureaucratic skirmish when, during the Dewey’s last refitting, he’d vigorously lobbied to have her steel, 20mm gun mounts replaced with lighter aluminum. As a result, the Dewey had shed over three thousand topside pounds. But she was only one ship.
As night fell on December 17, Mercer radioed the struggling Spence, now sailing with DS1, to inquire if she had sufficiently ballasted. In a few moments it would be dark, and Mercer also wanted to relay Halsey’s command to cancel the fleet’s zigzagging course. The Spence’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander Andrea, replied, inexplicably, that no, he had not pumped ballast, “although it would have been helpful.” Andrea reported that, given his fuel gauge readings, the Spence could probably steam for another 24 to 48 hours at 15 knots. Mercer “recommended” that Andrea immediately fill his empty tanks with seawater to 50 percent of total capacity.
Mercer’s strategy for the Spence—as well as for the Hickox and Maddox—was to ballast down half their bunkers to provide at least some stability, while still leaving enough room to take fuel, if possible, first thing the next morning. Both the Hickox and Maddox complied. For reasons never explained, the Spence did not.