DDs lost were maneuvering to maintain stations prior to sinking; were unable to extricate themselves from trough of the sea. COs failed to discontinue, sufficiently in advance, attempts to maintain position and emphasize all attention on saving their ships. Knowledge that fueling would be resumed as soon as possible may have caused COs to delay ballasting.
—ONE OF THE FINDINGS IN THE REPORT
OF THE COURT OF INQUIRY INVESTIGATING
“HALSEY’S TYPHOON.”
More than a hundred miles away from Halsey and Kosco on the New Jersey, the destroyer escort Tabberer and her picket group had drifted to the far fringes of the fleet. The little ship’s thin metal hull plates groaned as tons of gray-green water washed over her deck, and she rolled ever more violently. Captain Plage had attempted to keep lookouts posted, but with visibility no more than a few hundred yards, the act was not only life-threatening, but futile.
Unknown to Plage, just before dawn the last lookout he’d pulled in, nineteen-year-old Signalman 3rd Class John Cross, had spotted another vessel atop a swell mere yards from the Tabberer as she struggled to escape a deep trough. Cross, who had wrapped his body around a crossbar attached to the door of the wheelhouse in an effort to keep from being blown overboard, had not recognized the make of the ship. All he saw was the bottom of her hull as she crested the wave almost directly above the Tabby.
Cross, in his first combat posting, had not known what to do. In a panic, he’d slithered across the deck to the DE’s signal shack, found a powerful flashlight, and crawled back to his post. But by the time he returned, the ghost ship had disappeared, and Cross never told anyone about the incident for the remainder of the war.
Now, having ordered Cross belowdecks, Plage was acting as his own lookout. He balanced himself in the Tabby’s wheelhouse, scanning in every direction for what he guessed, what he hoped, was the horizon. Suddenly he glimpsed a dark shadow through the rack of scud off his port side. A moment later the shape took sharper image, and Plage recognized it as the bridge of one of the Tabby’s sister destroyer escorts, the USS Robert F. Keller. She was slicing through the waves less than one hundred yards away, pitching wildly and closing fast on a collision course.
The Keller was skippered by Plage’s friend Lt. Comdr. Raymond J. Toner, a seaman with a poetic bent who, after the war, would go on to become a military writer of some note. Like Plage, Toner had sailed through hurricanes in the Caribbean and helmed his “sea dwarf” through heavy gales in both the Atlantic and Pacific, including two previous combat commands. Without ever forming his thoughts into words, Toner had sensed that this morning’s blow would turn into nothing less than a struggle for his ship’s, and his crew’s, survival. Thus, as the bottom dropped out of his barometer, he decided to point his craft in whichever direction the air pressure appeared to be rising and plowed forward with no more reason than to keep his vessel afloat.
Throughout the gray morning Toner had noticed that “a strange, shrill sound had been impinging upon my consciousness.” As the noise grew louder, he realized it was the shriek of the constant wind whistling through the Keller’s halyards and antennae. He felt as if he were inside a bass fiddle, and because of the difficulty in relaying orders, he had relieved his officer of the deck and taken the conn himself, personally issuing directives to his helmsman and engine room operator.
At nearly the same moment Plage spotted the Keller heading for him bow-on, Toner felt someone pulling ferociously on his arm, “pointing violently toward the murk, the color of burnt umber, on our starboard bow.” It was Toner’s OD, who, the commander learned later, was screaming as loud as he could. Toner could not hear him above the ocean’s roar. With eyes stinging from saltwater, Toner swiveled his body to starboard and spotted the Tabberer bearing down on him.
“All engines ahead flank!” he screamed to his engine gang.
Simultaneously, Plage ordered the Tabby’s black gang to back down full reverse. He had no choice but to plow into the tremendous seas stern-first and accept the risk that the Tabby might break in two. He relayed his movements to Toner via TBS. (Or, as Toner heard it in Plage’s slow, Georgian drawl, “Rogah, aha’m backina full.”)
Both ships lurched madly, and Toner could feel his insides quiver as the two DEs avoided ramming each other by feet.
“In periods of such intense concentration,” Toner would note after the typhoon with a typical lyricism, “the body and its demands recede and fuse into a mental-spiritual sensing. It extends one’s reactions to the utmost limits of the ship so that her next movement becomes as responsive and anticipated as the movements of one’s own limbs.”
In the Tabberer’s wheelhouse, Lt. Bob Surdam’s thoughts were somewhat more prosaic. After witnessing the Robert F. Keller lurch out of the Tabby’s path, Surdam felt as if his thumping heart were near to breaking through his chest wall. He turned to the Tabby’s captain.
“How the hell did we get into this mess, Skipper?”
“I don’t know,” Plage said to his XO. “What bothers me is how the hell we’re going to get out of it. I believe we’re right in the middle of a typhoon, and no one has yet acknowledged it.”
The Tabberer’s full reverse had forced her into another trough, from which she could not now escape. On the bridge, Plage and his officers prayed silently as waves formed a canyon on either side of them. Plage glanced at the inclinometer as the Tabby heeled into another 50-degree roll. Murmuring more to himself than to his officers, his voice barely audible, he added, “No warning at all.” His men were not sure if he was talking about the near miss with the Keller, or the storm.
There was now no question that what the Robert F. Keller’s Captain Toner described as “this inhuman force” was engulfing Halsey’s fleet. After one destroyer skipper estimated he heard the chilling distress call “Man Overboard!” over his TBS radio at least twenty times in an hour, oiler task group commander Capt. Jasper Acuff radioed McCain that fueling under these conditions was impossible. His tankers were lolling like water buffalo, their deck crews fighting for their lives. Moreover, the aircraft in his escort carriers’ hangar decks were breaking loose and being pounded to scrap.
At this, McCain finally directed Acuff’s carriers to run to the lee of the storm, wherever they could find it—“to select a course and speed at their own discretion.” He ordered Butterfield on the Nehenta Bay to try and keep them together as a unit. Straightaway the small flattops turned back due south, their speed barely topping 10 knots.
Halsey’s entire fleet was dysfunctional and scattered, as if a ball of quicksilver had been smashed with a hammer. At 8:18 A.M. he radioed MacArthur to inform the general that his planned return the next morning, December 19, was out of the question. The storm had reduced the business of war to an insignificant consideration. He set a new, tentative date with MacArthur for December 21 and ordered the entire fleet to follow Butterfield’s carrier flotilla south.
The admiral was clearly confused—or, to some fleet officers, mule-headed. In his zeal to remain within striking distance of Luzon, he had waited too long to batten down his task force for heavy weather. Even his friend Kosco, keeping a journal, seemed to have changed his opinion about “the incidental dangers of ugly weather.”
He now noted that Halsey’s “primary mission should have been to get his fleet away from there fast. The enemy could wait. The storm did not.”
Telling evidence of Halsey’s obduracy was the communiqué he sent to CINCPAC Nimitz at 9:15 A.M. December 18. In it he relayed the New Jersey’s position and blithely referred to the storm as a “tropical disturbance.” A mild description, considering. He had either still failed to diagnose that his fleet had met a powerful typhoon—or he simply refused to admit it. In any event, the result was as inevitable as a simple axiom of Euclidean geometry: Two forces cannot occupy the same space at the same time.
U.S. Navy rules and regulations can often be chloroform in print, but Adm. William F. Halsey Jr. was nothing if not versed in maritime canon. As Typhoon Cobra encircled his Third Fleet, he was surely familiar with Bowditch’s entry on tropical cyclones as well as the relevant passages of his navy-issue Heavy Weather Guide. It is doubtful, however, that more than a handful of the thirty-six thousand sailors he commanded had any concept of the raw power of the typhoon that was about to embrace them.
“A perfectly ordinary afternoon thunderstorm has the energy equivalent of about thirteen 20-kiloton atomic bombs,” Capt. William J. Kotsch writes in the U.S. Navy’s Heavy Weather Guide. Further, he continues, “in a 24-hour period, even a small-scale typhoon will release about 20 billion tons of water. This is an energy equivalent of close to 500,000 atomic bombs, or almost six bombs per second.”
Halsey had once leafed through an aerologist’s copy of the Heavy Weather Guide and noticed the single word “Odysseus” scribbled in the margins next to that particular passage. Poetic, perhaps, but his Third Fleet was a state-of-the-art deepwater navy, not some mis-begotten bark on a wine-dark sea. Nevertheless, as the morning wore on, disturbing reports continued to flow into flag plot from foundering ships, the smaller, more southeasterly vessels at first. Men swept overboard. Loss of steering control. The bow of the destroyer USS Grayson was buckled by one wave, and her aft gun mount was stove in by another.
Then, more ominously, Halsey began hearing from his larger vessels, particularly his escort carriers. Fighter planes were being swept off decks and into the sea. Aircraft stowed in hangar decks were breaking loose from their moorings, bouncing off bulkheads, and exploding. Aboard the USS Monterey, the admiral learned, one such conflagration was close to sinking the venerable aircraft carrier.
To Lt. (j.g.) Jerry Ford, officer of the deck on the USS Monterey, each descent down the face of a wave was like the downbeat of an ax. From his station on the bridge, Ford contemplated the implausible scene unfolding before him. Lashing rains and 60-knot winds had whipped the sea into a liquid palisade, and few, if any, of Third Fleet’s vessels were visible through Ford’s binoculars. As the presiding officer on the midnight-to-4:00 A.M. midwatch, it was Ford’s responsibility to ensure that the little jeep carrier maintained station. In particular, he was tasked with securing her heading and avoiding collisions at all cost. Yet now, as he scanned the shifting, undulating horizon, not a single ship hove into view.
It suddenly struck the lieutenant that in his eighteen months at sea he had never seen waves so large. They reeled in from starboard in constant sets, an unbroken chaos of gray-black water that appeared to defy gravity. They battered the Monterey’s hull and washed over her flight deck, fifty-seven feet above the waterline. To Ford, their vibrations resonated like a basso organ chord in some vast European cathedral.
Since he’d drawn a billet on the Monterey in the spring of 1943, the thirty-one-year-old Ford—blond and broad-shouldered, with the square-jawed countenance of a young Johnny Weissmuller— wrote that he’d seen “as much action as I’d ever hoped to see.” As a gunnery division officer, Ford had directed fire during the great Marianas Turkey Shoot only six months earlier, where Japanese Zeros had fallen like autumn leaves. Four months after that, during the Leyte campaign, waves of enemy aircraft out of Formosa had hit the Monterey’s task group with everything they’d had for two solid days. It had rained iron, and Ford, commanding a 40mm antiaircraft gun crew from the fantail deck, had watched as a torpedo narrowly missed his carrier and tore out the bow of the nearby Australian cruiser HMS Canberra.
Ford thought he’d seen the worst of it … until this morning, watching the Philippine Sea churn. Now, as another breaker crashed over the carrier’s housing, Jerry Ford wondered if nature was about to accomplish what the Japanese could not. Sometimes, in those rare, eerie hollows when the wind abated for an instant, he could just make out the distress whistles sounding about him, the deep beeps of the battlewagons, the shrill whoops of the destroyers. By the end of his watch there was already scuttlebutt on the bridge about 2,000-ton destroyers rolling abeam and taking water down their stacks.
When his midwatch ended, Ford crawled into his bunk belowdecks, his nerves on edge, functioning in that liminal state between sleep and wakefulness. It seemed to him that his head had barely hit the pillow before the Monterey’s skipper, Capt. Stuart H. “Slim” Ingersoll, sounded general quarters. Ford bolted upright in his dark sea cabin. He thought he smelled smoke from somewhere amidships.
Racing through a rolling companionway dimly lit by red battle lights, he reached the catwalk encircling the flight deck. His foot hit the first rung of the iron skipper’s ladder leading to the bridge at the precise moment a gigantic white comber broke over the wheelhouse like an avalanche lit by glints of moonlight. The sound reminded Ford of branches being ripped from giant trees.
The carrier pitched 25 degrees to port, and Ford lost his footing and was knocked flat on his back. He began skimming across the flight deck “as if I were on a toboggan.” By this time the waves were up over the ship’s island superstructure, and Ford was taking a twenty-second slide down the flight deck. “It scared the hell out of me,” he later admitted. “I was going overboard.”
Before the war, Ford had been an all-American football player at the University of Michigan and had passed up a professional contract in order to attend Yale Law School. But he remained in good shape, and aside from his duties as a gunnery officer he was also the Monterey’s athletic director. Crewmates groused that Ford was “an exercise nut,” who, if he caught them goldbricking or loafing, even off duty, would order them to break into sets of jumping jacks. To his credit, Ford would jump right alongside them. It was likely that this dexterity is what saved his life as the white-veined water washed him across the flight deck of the carrier.
Around the deck of every aircraft carrier is a tiny steel lip, about two inches high, called the deck combing, designed to keep the flight crews’ tools from slipping overboard. When Ford’s feet collided with the combing, he managed to slow his slide enough to twist like an acrobat, grab the ridge with his fingertips, and fling himself down onto the ship’s catwalk.
He landed flat on his back. As the Monterey reeled through another trough, he got to his knees, made his way back belowdecks, and started back up again. “Well, let me tell you,” he said, “my second trip back from that catwalk to the bridge, I was much more careful. I was scared as hell.”
When Ford reached the bridge, he found Captain Ingersoll struggling to keep the Monterey on her heading. Moments past 9:00 A.M., Ingersoll sent a distress message to Rear Adm. Alfred E. Montgomery, commander of the Monterey’s task group.
“Cannot hold present 180-degree course. Am coming to 140 degrees at 15 knots.”
But it was futile to attempt to sail into the cross-swell. A moment later Montgomery received a more alarming message from Ingersoll: “Present course 220 degrees. All planes on my hangar deck on fire.”
The Monterey carried thirty-four aircraft—fighters and torpedo bombers—divided and stowed between the flight and hangar decks. Before retiring the previous night, Ingersoll had ordered all topside planes as well as any movable gear lashed down with half-inch cable. He’d also had the aviation fuel drained from the aircraft stored below.
Oddly, the exposed aircraft on the Monterey’s flight deck remained knotted tight for the moment. Down in the hangar deck, however, one plane had burst its cables and begun bouncing about “like a pinball.” When it crashed into other aircraft, they too broke loose, and showers of sparks flew like the Fourth of July as warbirds collided with each other and slammed into the ship’s bulkheads. The sparks from the collisions ignited the planes’ gas tanks and turned them into skidding torches. Although the tanks had been drained, it was impossible to deplete them of every last drop of fuel, much less the explosive gasoline vapors.
The hangar deck of the Monterey became a burning cauldron of aircraft fuel, and one flaming plane plunged down into the carrier’s elevator shaft, threatening the magazines stored in the ship’s bowels.
As all hands worked frantically to jettison the ammunition before the heat touched it off, flames from the burning aircraft were sucked down into the air intakes of the lower decks, and fires began breaking out below. Jerry Ford remembered the smoke he smelled when he bolted from his rack. Because of a quirk in her construction, the vents designed to channel fresh air into the Monterey’s engine and boiler rooms were now funneling thick, oily, black smoke. One black gang sailor was already dead, and another thirty-three were down with asphyxiation.
With no one to tend them, three of the ship’s four boilers were out. If she lost her last boiler, the carrier would also lose pressure in the fire hoses now fighting the conflagration in the hangar deck.
The Monterey was ablaze from bow to stern as Ford stood near the helm awaiting orders from Ingersoll. From a distance she must have looked like she’d taken Greek Fire, for over the TBS the officers in her pilothouse overheard a transmission from an unknown vessel. “Well, check off the Monterey,” came the disembodied words.
But Ingersoll would not let go so easily. He directed Ford to lead a team down to the hangar deck, evacuate the wounded, and try to douse the flames. Before Ford could comply, Ingersoll received an order from Halsey relayed via Admiral Montgomery. Halsey, informed of the Monterey’s plight, had decided to abandon her. Ingersoll was told that two cruisers and several destroyers had been directed to steam abreast of his carrier to rescue survivors, more of a pipe dream than a practical reality in these seas.
Ingersoll mulled Halsey’s directive for a moment, then scanned the raging ocean. He turned to look into the faces of the men huddled about him in the pilothouse. Each, including Ford, was a pale silhouette in the dark. “No,” he said. “We can fix this.”
He radioed Montgomery to advise Admiral Halsey of his decision. There was precedent to Ingersoll’s resolution. War planners in Washington had long suspected, if not exactly articulated, that in the early stages of World War II too many American vessels had been lost due to hasty orders from panicky captains to abandon ship. The Navy Department was clearly displeased. As a pointed reminder, the cover line on the department’s 1944 Damage Control Manual was a none-too-subtle “Don’t Give Up the Ship.”
Now, with a nod from Ingersoll, Ford donned a gas mask and led a fire brigade below. Aircraft gas tanks exploded as hose handlers slid across the burning hangar deck. Into this furnace Ford took his men, his first order of business to carry out the unconscious survivors. As one firefighter was overcome by smoke, or burned by the shooting flames, another sailor took his place.
At 9:41 A.M. the Monterey’s Captain Ingersoll radioed Admiral Montgomery, “Have fire under control. Prefer to lie to until we can make formation speed.”
In near-miraculous fashion, one by one the carrier’s boilers were brought back on line. Of her 34 aircraft, she’d lost 18 burned in the hangar deck or blown off the flight deck, with the remaining 16 seriously damaged.
Thirty years later, after Lt. (j.g.) Jerry Ford became president of the United States, he wrote of that morning, “I remembered that fire at the height of the typhoon, and I considered it a marvelous metaphor for the ship of state.”
Aboard too many of Halsey’s ships on that December day in 1944, however, reality was outpacing metaphor. About the same time that Halsey received word of Ingersoll’s refusal to abandon the Monterey, the carrier USS Cowpens reported fire raging across her hangar deck and was saved only when the wind and water tore off the deck’s heavy steel roller door as if it were Styrofoam and the sea flooded in knee-deep, dousing the flames. On the USS Altamaha, a bomb truck snapped its fastening cable and collided with a fighter plane. The aircraft’s fuel tank detonated, igniting planes on either side of it. The ship’s fire extinguisher system drowned the fire, but the torrents of water gushing down her fractured ventilator shaft flooded her lower compartments. Thirty-two of her planes would eventually be swept overboard.
And the 11,000-ton USS San Jacinto reported rolling so precipitously that her skipper glimpsed the carrier’s screws in the air above him as she tottered on the edge of a giant comber. She then keeled over to port at a 45-degree angle and planed into a trough. The strain of the water crashing over her palisades was too much for the steel cables lashing down aircraft in her hangar deck. The planes broke free and ran amok, lacerating the ship’s ventilator ducts, steam pipes, and oil lines. The oil ignited, and the deck proved too slippery for firefighting teams.
As the fire spread, the pilots aboard the San Jacinto were instructed to abandon their ready room, and her captain considered the situation hopeless—until one enterprising junior officer ordered that hand lines be strung from overhead beams bracing the hangar deck. “One hand for the ship and one for yourselves, boys!” he shouted, and the fires were brought under control.
Halsey’s drawbridge eyebrows rose when he was told of the young man’s heroism, and he made a mental note to find the officer and personally commend him. In fact, across the entire fleet spontaneous acts of individual valor by boys and men barely out of their teens, and some still in them, became routine. Quick’s the word and sharp’s the action.
When the destroyer USS Taussig lost all its power, the ship’s physician, Dr. John Blankenship, tied himself to a makeshift operating table and performed an emergency appendectomy, his scalpel sparkling in the vessel’s guttering oil lamps. And when a forward fireroom airlock hatch blew on the destroyer Dewey, Chief Water-tender Andrew Tolmie struggled toward the flooded airlock over scorching steam lines and up a swaying ladder. The seas in the lock bruted him violently, yet, stunned and battered, Tolmie reached the flapping outer hatch and managed to reseal it.
Aboard the destroyer Thatcher, two seamen, Jack Maurey and Stan Lubinsky, volunteered as ropechockers to keep taut the hawsers strung fore and aft that men used as handholds while crossing the deck. When they saw a depth charge break from its rack, roll loose, and bounce into the sea, Maurey held fast to Lubinsky’s legs as he crawled to the cage and wrestled the gate’s locking pin back into place.
And on the Monterey a flight deckhand, fresh from fighting fires with Lt. Jerry Ford below, attempted to secure a runaway fighter plane that had broken its mooring. He was lifted like a kite by a 100-knot gust and blown into the sea. A fellow crewman risked his life by shimmying to the edge of the deck to hurl a fire hose in his general direction and, miraculously, the sailor came to the surface right beside it. He grabbed the hose and pulled himself, hand over hand, back aboard. On the flight deck, he joked to his rescuer that he’d needed “a good cold bath after fighting those damn fires.”
At the same time, as black smoke and fire edged toward the pilots’ ready room on the Monterey, the airmen stationed on the carrier made their way topside to escape. Strapped into their yellow Mae West life vests, they lay flat on their stomachs clutching the heaving deck’s pad eyes, watching aircraft crash about them like rogue elephants. Among them was twenty-five-year-old Lt. Ronald P. Gift, commanding officer of the carrier’s torpedo plane squadron.
Presently the Monterey crested a wave, and Gift squinted through the spindrift and spotted a destroyer in the distance. The ship was nearly vertical, bow up, as if rearing and about to fly like an arrow from a bowstring into the gunmetal sky. Gift lost sight of the vessel as the Monterey slid into a trough. But a moment later, climbing another giant comber, Gift again saw the DD, still vertical, but this time bow down, its screws spinning freely in the air.
Suddenly there was a commotion among the pilots, laid out like sardines in a tin. A flier, Ray Thorpe, XO of the fighter squadron, had lost his grip and tumbled over the side. Squadron mates squirmed on their bellies to the edge of the flight deck. Forming a human chain, they slid down to the catwalk as the Monterey crested another wave. From this vantage point they watched as Thorpe, more than one hundred feet below, floundered in the wash, the carrier’s hull threatening to crush him. When the Monterey descended into the next trough, its catwalk nearly dipped into the sea. And there, not two feet in front of his fellow airmen, was the flailing Ray Thorpe. They reached out and pulled him back aboard just as the ship began to roll and climb the next swell.
Such valiant narratives, however, proved the exception to the rule. By midmorning, Third Fleet communications shops were in chaos. Radar stations were unable to plot the locations of individual ships in task groups, and though flag plot was still capable of receiving TBS messages, few were encouraging.
Aboard the jeep escort carrier Cape Esperance, lookout Paul Schlener may have been recovered from the center mast, but so many planes had broken loose from their lashings on the flight deck that her commander, Capt. R. W. Bockius, feared that his bridge would topple, as it was being slammed by rogue aircraft. Ignoring protocol that forbade smoking in the wheelhouse, Bockius turned to his officers and offered each a condemned man’s final cigarette. Having smoked them, however, and finding themselves still afloat, they left the bridge and joined their crews, including men released from the brig, in fighting fires burning on both decks.
Two war correspondents aboard the Cape Esperance noticed that the ship’s enlisted men had already begun referring to the vessel, constructed by Kaiser Steelworks, as a “Kaiser coffin.” The ship listed so perilously that the starboard gun wells were taking water, and the wind blew so hard that it sandblasted paint from the bridge. One seaman standing watch atop a gun mount high over the flight deck drew his hands back in horror after wiping what he thought was saltwater from his cheeks. The capillaries in his eyes had burst, and the liquid trickling down his face was blood.
Even before her fires were contained, Captain Bockius radioed Halsey that his deck guns and sights had been so severely damaged by aircraft ramming into their mounts before flying overboard that they were useless for combat. The Cape Esperance, he added, was dropping out of formation because of steering malfunction. Every one of her planes except a single, unmarked Hellcat fighter was wrecked or had been lost over the side.
In rapid succession the escort carrier USS Kwajalein transmitted that she, too, had been forced to heave to, and the light carrier USS Langley reported that she was rolling consistently to 70 degrees from side to side in a snapping, pendulum motion. The destroyer USS Buchanan’s gyro compass had broken down, and the disabled Cowpens was being assisted by the cruiser USS Baltimore and three destroyers.
On top of this, salt to the wound, Halsey also learned from Slew McCain that the oiler group’s flagship, the DD Aylwin, was again broadcasting distress signals.