Without meaning any particular criticism of our present-day aerologists, I’m inclined to think that they have been brought up to depend on a lot of readings they get from other stations. I think they are much weaker than the older officers in judging the weather. … I think they should be taught to judge the weather by what they actually see.
—TESTIMONY OF REAR ADM. FREDERICK C. SHERMAN,
COMMANDING OFFICER, TASK GROUP 38.3,
TO THE COURT OF INQUIRY INVESTIGATING
“HALSEY’S TYPHOON.”
Back on the New Jersey, Halsey and Kosco continued to compare forecasts from Pearl and outlying Allied weather stations. There was by now a frantic undercurrent to their deliberations. Even the immense battleship was taking disturbing rolls, and Halsey’s apprehensive glances at the ship’s barometer could not prevent its needle’s plummet, down now to 29.67.
Outside flag plot, the wind was howling, the ceiling was resting practically on the deck, and saltwater was blowing in horizontal sheets at bridge level. The admiral had a decision to make. He knew that fueling would be difficult, but his destroyers were staggering. The USS Stockham and USS Welles reported 22 percent fuel capacity; the USS Moore 21 percent; the USS Yarnell 20 percent; the USS Taussig 18 percent. Some were even worse off. The USS Colahan, USS Brush, USS Franks, and USS Cushing radioed that they were at 15 percent of capacity. The Maddox, Hickox, and Spence were at 10 percent or below.
One of the enduring questions surrounding the events of December 18 is why, at 6:16 A.M., Vice Admiral McCain ordered a fleetwide 120-degree course change, from due south to northeast. Halsey was aware of his task force commander’s directive, yet he said nothing as Third Fleet steamed directly toward the eye of Typhoon Cobra.
McCain later testified that “he did not appreciate the speed with which the storm was overtaking” the fleet. Uppermost in his mind, he added, was the commitment to strike Luzon, and for that his small boys needed fuel. Halsey, for his part, was never asked by the court of inquiry to explain why he permitted the course change, and never spoke nor wrote of this decision thereafter.
One theory posits that Halsey was merely acting in character, the personification of the heedless servant in the Robert Frost poem who understood that “the best way out is always through.” As a sailor once remarked, “Bull Halsey. My God, even the name swaggers.” More skeptical minds speculated that in some recess of the admiral’s psyche, he was still being guided by the powerful memory of leaving MacArthur’s flank unguarded during the Battle for Leyte Gulf.
Thus, despite the fact that by 8:00 A.M. on December 18 virtually every ship’s commander in the Third Fleet, one by one, on a direct axis running southeast to northwest, had concluded that they were steaming into a massive typhoon, Halsey insisted on attempting to refuel his destroyers. He had vowed to provide MacArthur’s beachhead on Mindoro with every gun and plane he could muster. That this was wishful thinking, if not a hallucination, seemed lost on the admiral.
Soon more vessels joined the Aylwin in distress. The attack carrier USS Wasp reported a life raft to her port that appeared to carry three men. The fleet tug USS Jicarilla requested assistance due to engine trouble. The carrier Independence reported two men overboard, swept into the sea by a geyser of green water. And the destroyer Hickox lost steering control after her aft steering compartment was flooded, nearly drowning the sailors stationed inside; only a makeshift bucket brigade had saved their lives.
Across the Philippine Sea, Halsey’s “small boys” were careering blindly, their lookouts pulled in and their surface radar too cluttered with heaving black contours to differentiate between looming waves and out-of-control vessels on collision headings. And aboard one ship, panic was prompting thoughts of mutiny.
Moments before dawn on December 18, Archie DeRyckere bolted from his bunk in the chief’s quarters in the bow of the destroyer Hull to the sound of a refrigerator bouncing from bulkhead to bulkhead. After helping to lash it down, he was making his way through the wardroom in officers’ country when he felt the ship lie over on her side.
Men tumbled from their beds, and DeRyckere was staggered. He regained his balance only by standing on the starboard bulkhead. As the vessel slowly righted herself, he ran through the chart house and onto the second deck. The ceiling was below him and the spume stung his face like a sandblaster. The starboard side of the Hull was submerged.
Making his way from the chart house to the captain’s bridge, DeRyckere could not differentiate ocean from air, and visibility was so low that he could not make out the ship’s bow, no more than 120 feet away. He began climbing the starboard skipper’s ladder when, midway to the bridge, another wall of water slammed into the Hull’s port beam. He hung on as she lay so far over that the back of his head grazed the ocean’s surface.
Thus began a synchronized rolling that would last for six hours. The vessel’s towering masts and stacks served like the bantam tail of a weathervane, and the relentless winds would seize them and spin the ship into the tossing broadsides of enormous waves. DeRyckere knew that none of Halsey’s ships would be refueled that day. It was a constant fight for crewmen just to remain on their feet.
The Hull was a tough old tin can that had survived rough seas before. Three years earlier, in 1941, she had been escorting the carrier Lexington from Pearl Harbor to San Diego when an unexpected low front had fallen on her like a lid. She’d plowed through waves so steep, the vessel’s metal housing had shrieked and the crew felt the shuddering vibrations in their kidneys. The beating she’d taken had warped her main frame, but she’d docked safely, all hands accounted for.
That experience now seemed like a shakedown cruise, and DeRyckere was frustrated. His responsibilities as chief quartermaster also included winding, reading, and comparing the Hull’s three chronometers and reporting his findings to the ship’s captain. But besides qualifying the instruments in this blow, DeRyckere felt like a “big zero.” Taking his station on the bridge, he yearned for Captain Marks to give him something, anything, to do. He offered to take reports from the engine room, where the scowling throttleman “Buddha” Wiemers, the water rising almost to his great, heaving belly, had only moments before cursed the captain to DeRyckere with strings of oaths novel even to the veteran chief—“damn pogey-bait sailor.” But Marks appeared petrified.
Wiemers was an old China hand, a veteran of the USS Panay, the small, shoal-drift river gunboat that Japanese dive bombers had sent to the bottom of the Yangtze River in 1937 during the Rape of Nanking. Wiemers manned the whaleboat that ferried the Panay’s survivors to the river’s reedy banks until rescuers arrived. With his barrel-shaped physique, Buddha Wiemers may have appeared as if he needed a tugboat escort, but the man had a lot of hard bark on him. If his tone of voice was tinged with a tremolo of fear, DeRyckere was a sailor to take notice. Now DeRyckere paced behind Marks, not ten feet away, practically willing the man to give him something to do. Marks never said a word.
Irritated, DeRyckere stepped out onto the starboard bridge wing. Surging seas the color of pewter crashed about him. Driving rain stung his face. “This is not good,” he thought. He was an understated man. “We’re going down and there’s nobody around to help us.” He couldn’t believe that Admiral Halsey had gotten them into this pickle.
Halsey was an icon to every sailor in the Pacific Command. The word was out among even the most humble jack tar that Halsey was a sailor’s sailor and a leader’s leader, a commander who was motivated by only two ambitions: to kill Japs, and to watch over the safety of his sailors. The tough old admiral was known to weep while greeting returning vessels that had lost men in combat.
But now Ray Schultz, the Hull’s chief bosun’s mate, approached DeRyckere on the bridge wing with incredible news. Schultz had just come up from the communications shack, where Chief Radioman Burt “Sparks” Martin had copied a TBS message between Halsey’s New Jersey and the light carrier USS Monterey. The Monterey was in trouble, dead in the water after having lost steering control. She was also fighting an aviation fuel fire in her hangar deck. The Hull’s radioman had overheard her reporting her damage to flag plot.
During the exchange, someone on the Monterey—Sparks Martin assumed it to be her captain—asked Halsey for permission to break station and plot coordinates to sail around “this typhoon.” It was the first use of this loaded word anyone on the Hull had picked up; all other descriptions of the violent weather had referred only to a tropical storm or a tropical depression. Sparks also overheard the Monterey’s commander express concern for his “small boys,” meaning the task group’s destroyers and destroyer escorts. Halsey’s reply, rather too nonchalant for Ray Schultz’s taste, was that the rough seas would give the destroyer crews an opportunity to practice their seamanship.
“Jesus, you believe that?” Schultz said to Martin. He was angry enough to explode. “Practice our seamanship?”
Unlike most draftees and enlistees in the dark days after Pearl Harbor, John Ray Schultz had not come lately to the colors, having been billeted aboard the Hull since June of ’38. A slender twenty-four-year-old with wavy, pomaded blond hair set atop a boyish oval face, he was fair-skinned and freckled, handsome in a sidekick sort of way. He reminded DeRyckere of the Hollywood actor Ralph Bellamy, the good-looking guy who, in the movies, never got the girl.
He was also a wildcat. Once, back at Pearl before the war, Schultz had missed curfew and subsequently commandeered a fast crash boat to return to the Hull. But he was spotted and chased by the Shore Patrol. He outran them and, nearing the Hull, dived off the boat, climbed aboard the destroyer over the screw guards, and hared to his bunk in his soaking dress whites. He pulled a blanket up to his chin, and when the officer of the deck “woke” him, he professed outrage at any dirty rat who would dare to steal one of the U.S. Navy’s crash boats.
Weeks later, when the Japanese attacked on the morning of December 7, Schultz was still in the sack at Pearl. He refused to believe the sailor who came running through the bunkroom shouting a warning and beaned him in the back of the head with a shoe for waking him. Then Schultz heard the explosions. He rushed topside, manned a .50-caliber machine gun, and shot down the Japanese plane that crash-landed into the seaplane tender USS Curtiss.
DeRyckere knew Schultz’s moods, and now, in the middle of this blow, he could see that the chief bosun’s mate was seething with anger. A few hours earlier, he told DeRyckere, he had petitioned Captain Marks for permission to order all hands to don life jackets.
“What do you want to do?” Marks replied. “Frighten the crew?”
Incensed, Schultz left the bridge and headed belowdecks. He rousted unnerved men and ordered each to break out his kapok. It was Schultz who had crusaded back in Bremerton to have all the Hull’s worm-eaten, inflatable “Mae West” rubber life tubes replaced with the newer kapok designs constructed from the waxy, fibrous seedpods of tropical silk-cotton trees and sealed in vinyl. This inspiration now looked prescient. Down in the hold, men were praying in corners, dredging the bottom of their faith. Others were puking, or writing letters to their mothers. Desperate men, Schultz knew, never wrote to their fathers. Somewhere aft, Schultz could hear voices singing the navy hymn: Eternal father strong to save, whose arm does rule the restless wave. … Oh hear us when we cry to Thee, for those in peril on the sea.
Since the argument with Captain Marks over the life jackets, Schultz had made periodic trips to the bridge to urge Lt. Griel Gherstly, the Hull’s executive officer and second-in-command, to convince Marks to rig the Hull for heavy seas. Schultz wanted to strike all superfluous topside weight, the ammunition lockers in particular, and move it belowdecks. He argued that the ship’s high port side desperately needed ballast. When Marks dismissed Gherstly’s request to stow the ammo by reminding his subordinate that the Hull was “in a war zone,” Ray Schultz stomped away in frustration.
Sometime around 11:00 A.M. another vertical sheet of ocean slammed into the Hull, accompanied by a sucking, hissing noise that sounded to the crew like a giant vacuum cleaner. The wave rolled the ship 75 degrees to port and sheared off the forward davit securing her motor whaleboat. The dory swung in the wind on its remaining davit like a scythe, banging against the deck housing. Schultz burst into the bridge, demanding that it be jettisoned. Marks would not cut it loose. Instead, he ordered Schultz to form up a deck crew to resecure the boat.
In the midst of the operation the whaleboat broke completely free, crashed into a torpedo tube mounting, slid across the deck, and took several crewmen over the side with it. There was no way the Hull, locked in irons, could reverse course to retrieve them.
Upon news of this tragedy, the men on the Hull’s bridge went silent. DeRyckere was in shock. The chief quartermaster had always felt that the crew makes the ship; it did not matter who was in charge. Now he wasn’t sure. After a moment, Gherstly, stationed behind the helmsman, quietly asked Schultz to find him a life jacket. His was below, Gherstly said, and because he was the officer of the deck, Captain Marks would not allow him to leave the bridge.
Schultz pivoted toward Marks wearing a lion-tamer’s look. When he saw that the captain’s own kapok was buckled across his chest, his emotions slipped their brakes. Without taking his eyes off Marks, he addressed Gherstly, loud enough for Marks to hear.
“Why don’t you ask him for his? He’s supposed to go down with the ship, anyway.”
Marks glared back at Schultz, but said nothing. It was an exchange Chief Quartermaster Archie DeRyckere never expected to witness on a fighting ship of the United States Navy.
A few minutes later, his watch finally over, Gherstly left the bridge to find a life jacket. Schultz trailed after him.
“Mr. Gherstly,” he said, “you know the captain is sinking this ship. You’ve got to relieve him.”
Gherstly paused, the rain streaming from his peaked cap. At first he said nothing. Then he told Schultz he was talking mutiny. If they didn’t drown they’d all be shot. Then he walked away, and the opportunity to save the USS Hull passed.