It was very difficult to see the men with searchlights as the sea was so rough the lights would pass over their heads unless the men were on crests of the sea.
—TESTIMONY OF LT. COMDR. HENRY LEE PLAGE, U.S.
NAVY, CAPTAIN, USS TABBERER, TO THE COURT OF
INQUIRY INVESTIGATING “HALSEY’S TYPHOON.”
By midmorning the Monaghan had been drifting for hours without power. Despite Capt. Bruce Garrett’s lack of command experience, he had done a magnificent job of helming her through the storm. Like a nineteenth-century sail master, he’d fought to keep her running before the wind, countering the ship’s natural tendency to broach-to each time she yawed with only the use of his rudder. Yet for all Garrett’s labors, the Monaghan had never been able to ballast her empty aft bunkers with seawater. She was down to thirty thousand gallons of fuel and sloughing like a rubber raft. Her crew sensed the inevitable.
Below, in the ship’s forward fireroom, twenty-one-year-old Fireman 1st Class Evan Fenn had finished standing his 4:00-to-8:00 A.M. watch. Living belowdecks, Fenn, a rough-and-tumble former railroad worker, was accustomed to being bounced about the bowels of the ship by “a little rough water.” Still, he had to admit his surprise when he came topside and, timing his sprints between pounders, it took him almost an hour to cross the heaving deck to his quarters in the stern. When he arrived, the berths about his were dark, nearly empty.
He spotted a shipmate running through the companionway and hollered to him. The sailor yelled back over his shoulder that men had already begun gathering topside, in the destroyer’s after deckhouse. Fenn climbed up to the deckhouse and discovered 40 or 50 sailors wedged into the small compartment. They were standing shoulder to shoulder, adjusting an assortment of kapok and older Mae West life jackets. Among them was the ship’s “oil king,” Senior Watertender Joe McCrane.
At 11:30 the Monaghan’s last generator failed and all her lights blinked off. McCrane, Fenn, and a few others groped their way back to lockers below to retrieve flashlights. They returned to find every sailor reciting, aloud, the Lord’s Prayer. For thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.
The waves were coming in constant sets from starboard. With each stupendous roll, the man beside McCrane shouted, “Don’t let us down now, Dear Lord. Bring it back, Oh God, bring it back.” With every return from a list, more voices joined in, chanting in unison, “Thanks, Dear Lord.”
McCrane counted seven giant rolls before he and his shipmates were lifted as one off the deck’s steel plating. His stomach rose to his throat as the Monaghan slide-slipped down the face of a sheer wall of water. She landed on her starboard quarter. An avalanche of ocean entombed her, and another, and another. She lolled on her side as if gasping for breath, pummeled by whitewater. Her 1,400 tons of steel frame quivered, and began tearing apart.
On the bridge of the destroyer Spence, Lt. Comdr. James Andrea turned to his executive officer: “What’s the Beaufort?”
“Force sixteen,” said the XO. It was a grim joke. Force 12—or “that which no canvas could withstand,” as Adm. Sir Francis Beaufort calculated—is the maximum rating on the mariner’s scale of wind intensity.
Andrea glanced at his barometer. It read 27.40. The anemometer was spinning at 125 knots. Great jagged bolts of lightning illuminated the starboard sky.
“It’s impossible,” the Spence’s navigator said. His voice was dull, resigned.
“I know,” Andrea said.
The Spence’s power panels and circuits had already shorted out, one by one. Her lights, radio, and radar were gone, followed presently by her steering motors. Her masts were bent like saplings, her whaleboat swung in the wind like a ragged pennant, and she was running on one boiler. Her rudder was jammed hard right, which left her wallowing broadside to the waves, and a foot of saltwater stood in all compartments below. Men worked furiously to shore her crumpling bulkheads.
A runner appeared on the bridge. “After deckhouse buckled,” he said.
Andrea nodded. He was staring at the destroyer’s stern, where a fifty-foot gash in the hull, as ugly as an exit wound, stood in place of the two depth-charge racks that were ripped out and carried away by the wind and waves. The Pacific Ocean was cascading like a waterfall into the hold of the Spence.
“Sir, we must be taking fifteen hundred gallons of water a minute.”
“Form bucket brigades,” Andrea said. For all the good they would do. The Spence was dying, and her captain knew it.
By 11:00 A.M. the storm had stripped clean the Hull’s deck. Lost were her long-range communications equipment and whaleboat, and most of her depth charges had been swept from their racks. Chief Quartermaster Archie DeRyckere, bolted to the wheelhouse floor, watched from on high as the metal covers of her ammunition lockers blew away, their screw-down hasps snapped in the gale.
He wondered if the bridge itself would shortly disintegrate. Viking blood DeRyckere may have possessed, but so did Canute, and neither could stem this tide.
Since daybreak Captain Marks had inexplicably attempted to conform to Halsey’s orders to remain in fleet formation, straining the engines at 22 knots, at one point even volunteering to aid the burning carrier Monterey. That was a joke. The Hull’s main propulsion systems were capable of developing close to 50,000 horsepower, but given the raucous state of the seas, DeRyckere thought it doubtful that she was making half that force as she tried to break free of the trough.
When the scud and spume had knocked out the Hull’s electrical grid and surface radar, Marks sent a general distress call via VHS radio, asking to be kept abreast of the whereabouts of any ships in the vicinity. He feared a collision. DeRyckere smiled, grim, at this. As if it would make a difference.
The wheelhouse’s windows were shattered, and as the wind and waves whipped about him, Archie DeRyckere had already begun to consider his beloved destroyer in the past tense. The Hull had been a tough little fish. She’d fought nobly in the Aleutians and distinguished herself during Spruance’s Turkey Shoot by rescuing several downed pilots. DeRyckere remembered the thrill of blasting enemy planes in the Marshalls and Gilberts, and “sinking” a Japanese schooner during the seesawing battle for Guadalcanal—until the crew discovered that the schooner had already been sunk and was sitting on the shallow bottom. They all had a good laugh about that.
He also recalled the Hull’s last refitting, when the vibrations of her turbines, striking a note as clear as a tuning fork, had told him that her engineering plant was in excellent condition. At flank speed, light brown wisps of smoke had coiled up from her stacks, trailing behind for 50 or 60 feet before dissipating into haze. White smoke would have meant the forced draft was giving her too much air, and too little air would have produced billowing black clouds. Now her funnel belched black, gaseous fumes.
The main difficulty had been her instability, and DeRyckere now wished he’d raised more of a protest about it. It was obvious that Nimitz and Halsey urgently needed firepower in the Pacific; the navy hadn’t spent all that time and money repairing ships and training sailors to have them sit out the war. Still, the Hull had been pushed back in harm’s way too soon, well before her top-heaviness could be addressed. Someone should have known. Someone should have said something. DeRyckere knew who that someone should have been.
Unlike the Spence, the Hull had been able to take ample fuel the previous day; she was sailing with at least 125,000 gallons, well above the minimum requirement for ballasting seawater. As one navy investigator was to note, “The ship’s company of the Hull probably felt that no ship of the United States Navy could capsize as long as she remained in compliance with ballasting instructions applicable to her class.”
DeRyckere recalled the edginess of the Hull’s crew when they’d arrived in Ulithi in early November. They were spoiling for a fight, and every man jack knew that the Philippines campaign was on deck, with the big invasions of Japan to ensue. More’s the pity, he thought now, as he was fairly sure that the Hull would never get the opportunity to follow Halsey into Tokyo Bay.
Chief Bosun’s Mate Ray Schultz now edged next to DeRyckere and shouted into his ear, “I joined the damn navy to fight, not to drown!” But the words barely registered, as DeRyckere was distracted by a strange noise emanating from the corner of the bridge. He turned to find the twenty-year-old enlisted man “Punchy” Parker weeping. Parker was the ship’s intramural boxing champion, and DeRyckere considered him one of the toughest sailors he’d ever met.
“I can’t swim,” Punchy Parker sobbed. The man was shivering. “I can’t swim.”
DeRyckere grabbed Parker by the shoulders and shook him hard. “Listen, none of us are going to make it any better than you are,” he said. “You don’t have to swim. You got a life jacket, don’t you?”
Then DeRyckere pointed to another huge breaker crashing over the Hull’s bow.
“Who the hell you think is gonna swim in that mess anyway?”
* * *
From his post high up in the Monaghan’s combat information center, radar maintenance technician Keith Abbott had a direct sight line to the ship’s inclinometer. He’d watched it inch past 78 degrees on several steep rolls and marveled at the sensation of sliding down the crest of an eighty-foot-high wall of water. When the ship slapped into the troughs, she made an earsplitting noise, like a clap of thunder, and on each occasion Abbott silently thanked God that Lieutenant Commander Garrett had been able to pull her out. Abbott was in awe of the skipper, “a real destroyer navy man,” who had not set foot off the flying bridge since dawn.
There had been little conversation in the Monaghan’s pilothouse since early morning, when she’d lost not only her power, but her forward stack. There was nothing left to say. At some point before the communications shop went silent, her radio operators had picked up anonymous TBS chatter, most of it desperate, much of it cursing Admiral Halsey’s refusal to release Third Fleet from formation stations. Abbott also overheard a distress call from the Hull, her sister ship, which was apparently floundering. But the Monaghan’s crew had its own problems to contend with. There was a palpable feeling among the officers on the bridge that only a miracle could save their fabled little destroyer.
A few minutes before noon, Abbott stepped out onto the open wing surrounding the wheelhouse. On earlier occasions he had been able to snatch occasional glimpses of the tall masts of carriers and cruisers, and the proximity of friendly ships had somehow reassured him. Now what he saw on the horizon was the largest wave yet bearing down on the Monaghan. Beneath its foaming white crown, the comber was as black as a rolling sandstorm, and when it collided with the ship, she shuddered and lifted, as if blasted from the ocean by a depth charge.
Abbott leaped for a handhold and was knocked into the bridge railing as the Monaghan twisted, reeled, and began the long descent, as if in slow motion, down the face of the wave. She landed on her side, and seawater surged through her superstructure. The rush of ocean knocked Abbott back into the pilothouse, where he caught a final glimpse of the inclinometer. It had passed 78 degrees. He nearly laughed. It was the only instrument on the ship still working.
Abbott thought of his bride, and the baby daughter he had never seen, and for an instant wondered over the “simple twist of fate” that had conveyed him from his cozy berth on the destroyer escort Emery to this doomed vessel. As a sailor on temporary detail he had been something of a loner, and he hadn’t gotten to know many of his Monaghan shipmates. There were the seamen in the communications shack, of course, and a few officers and enlisted men stationed regularly on the bridge. But he’d never acquired that sensation of camaraderie common to fighting ships’ crews, and, now, in some bizarre sense, he regretted not knowing the names of the men with whom he was about to die.
He felt a thrum in his gut, and a slightly metallic sensation developed in the back of his throat. It took Keith Abbott a moment to recognize the taste of fear.
Bob Ayers asked himself if this could really be life in the United States Navy. Eight days into his first billet aboard the Spence, and he’d spent the first four making ratlines and the last four thanking God they were in place to catch him before he was pitched over the side. Bad luck had not yet abandoned him. At 8:00 A.M. he’d finished his watch in the pilothouse and headed below to eat yet another cold bacon sandwich. Two straight days of cold bacon sandwiches. Ayers was sick of cold bacon sandwiches.
In the mess he’d met his friend Floyd Balliett, with whom he had shipped out on the train from Great Lakes Naval Station, through Pearl, and on to Ulithi. Floyd was a Florida kid, just turned eighteen, and he and Ayers—two newbies among an established destroyer crew—had formed a greenhorns’ bond. They finished their sandwiches together, and Ayers suggested they make their way topside. Balliett said he wanted nothing to do with that, and Ayers, left alone, climbed as far as the companionway leading to the base of the bridge.
As he stumbled yet again from the ship’s heavy heels, a blast of warm air whistled across the deck, and Ayers realized they were close to the eye of the typhoon. He was hanging on tight to a crossbar near the starboard hatch of the radio shack, deliberating his next move, when the Spence took a huge roll to port. He ducked into the shack—fell in, really—and banged against four or five sailors clustered against the port bulkhead.
He said, “Hey, look at this.” He was standing on the bulkhead, the vertical deck rising before his eyes. No one answered him.
The ship came back from the roll, but she never did swing to starboard like the manual said. Another wave sent her listing even deeper to port, and from this one she did not recover. The Spence was on her side now, at the bottom of a trough, and Ayers scrambled with his shipmates from the radio shack. His knees buckled as he stood on the side of the wheelhouse. Waves washed over him, but he was not sure where to go. The ship had two lifeboats as well as a dozen life rings; Ayers could see none of them.
He finally guessed that his only slim chance was to reach the bridge’s starboard rail, the solid-panel rail, and from there shin out to the rigging. And then? He had no idea, but he’d worry about that when the time came.
In any event, Ayers never made it. He’d edged across the side of the starboard bulkhead and barely managed to swing himself up onto the bridge railing when the Spence began to turn turtle. He stood on the rail as the sea swirled and hissed about him, rising to his ankles, to his knees, to his waist.
It was only then that Ayers remembered he’d left his life vest at his battle station, number 27 gun mount, far back in the stern. He studied the rising sea and fretted for his new friend Floyd Balliett, trapped somewhere belowdecks. He wondered if Balliett had remembered to wear his.
* * *
Petty Officer 2nd Class Pat Douhan cursed himself. How could he have been so stupid, leaving his kapok up on the Hull’s bridge like that? He had meant to retrieve it at daylight—if you could call this spitty mess daylight—but when he’d been relieved from his sonar watch, he was bone-weary. He promised himself he’d go back for it after just a few moments of sack time. Now that Douhan thought about it, that had been pretty foolish, too, imagining that he could sleep through this blow.
Tossed from his bunk repeatedly, he’d risen, dressed, and just made his way across the vessel’s treacherous deck from bow to stern—don’t ask him how; don’t ask him why; he was certain he’d seen men being blown over the side—when the Hull took the big roll to starboard. Douhan flung himself through the hatch of the house mounting the 5-inch guns. He was startled to find five or six terrified shipmates jammed into the compartment. He noticed straightaway that they all were wearing life jackets.
With a loud bang! the hatch on the gun mount’s starboard side blew. The steel door soared into the gray sky as if shot from a howitzer, and the compartment began taking water. Each time the ship took a starboard roll, the deckhouse would fill with more sea, and in the confused recesses of his mind Douhan realized his fellow sailors were yelling, screaming, “Reverse those rudders! Reverse the goddamn rudders!”
Douhan knew Captain Marks better than that. The man would never break station, even if he could hear the hollered pleas, which he could not. No, Marks would sail the ship to hell first, and when that notion sank in, Pat Douhan, gripping an overhead roll bar for dear life, began to wonder how he would escape this death trap.