It is the opinion of the court that the commanding officers of the Hull, Monaghan, and Spence failed to realize sufficiently in advance of the fact, the necessity for them to give up the attempt to maintain position in their disposition and to give all their attention to saving their ships. It can be said that the good judgment for such decisions will, in many cases, require more experience than had the commanding officers of those ships.
—OPINION #59 OF THE REPORT OF THE COURT OF INQUIRY
INVESTIGATING “HALSEY’S TYPHOON.”
Lt. (j.g.) Alphonso S. Krauchunas was making his way from the Spence’s galley to the disbursing office amidships when the destroyer’s whaleboat was wrenched from its davits, sailed into the air, and nearly took off his head. Sopping and shaken, Krauchunas reeled into the passageway leading to the wardroom. A mess steward was inside, “as white as a ghost,” attempting, with no success, to tie down the compartment’s recoiling tables, chairs, and couches. Presently the ship’s lights blinked, dimmed, and went dark.
Struggling to remain upright, guided by guttering emergency lights, Krauchunas stumbled down the dim passageway toward a hatch that led to the main deck. He paused at the captain’s compartment, where in the shadows he recognized the ship’s doctor, Lt. George C. Gaffney. Gaffney had just transferred on to the Spence, and he looked terrified. There was little Krauchunas could do about that, but he stopped anyway to reassure the new sawbones that the destroyer was as sturdy and watertight as any ship in the navy. He was seated on the captain’s lower bunk, still heartening Doc Gaffney, when the Spence rolled.
Krauchunas was flipped backward off the bunk into the passageway, a drop of five or six feet, and buried in a shower of books, ashtrays, papers, and charts. His heart in his mouth, he scrambled on all fours toward an open hatch leading to the deck, Doc Gaffney, he thought, in close pursuit. He had nearly reached it when another wave rolled the destroyer, this time much farther, and gushing water poured in through the hatch and flooded the companionway.
The tide swept Krauchunas along with it, and as the long roll continued, the lieutenant found himself trapped underwater. He grabbed a bulkhead railing and held tight as the sea sped past him toward the wardroom. He lost sight of Doc Gaffney.
Krauchunas sensed that the Spence had flipped almost completely upside down. Holding his breath, he swam toward the outline of the open hatch, now twenty feet away. But the onrushing water was sucking him back like a river’s current, his lungs were bursting, and Alphonso Krauchunas began to contemplate his death. How would it come? Painful or peaceful? Fire or water? He relived a moment from his youth, when he was six years old, and he’d stolen a box of animal crackers from the grocery store. Stabbed by a sudden pang of regret, he fantasized that he was standing in that grocery store right now. He wished he could do something, anything, to atone for the theft.
Now the ship was rotated by another swell and bucked briefly back onto her side. This halted the flow of ocean inundating belowdecks, and Krauchunas saw the passageway leading from the radio shack deck rise momentarily from the water. He lunged, broke the surface, and gasped for air. He took four or five huge gulps, and as the Spence began to settle back into her overturned position he pulled with all his might for the open hatch.
* * *
Fireman Tom Stealey’s mouth engaged before his brain had time to stop it. He’d done it again, volunteered for an assignment that was likely to kill him. He wondered if he’d ever learn. The forward boiler on the Hull was shot, done, the sea surging down her stack having just knocked it completely out of commission. Now the chief was asking for men to crawl down the stern shaft to try and get the aft boiler back on line. Stealey said he’d go. He was joined by an engineer he did not recognize and a watertender named Cal Miller from Forsyth, Montana. “Dumb,” Stealey thought.
Back on December 7, 1941, Stealey had been a civilian contractor stationed at Pearl when the Japanese planes tore up the harbor. It was sometime during the second wave when he’d jumped in a truck and volunteered to fight fires on the two destroyers berthed next to the capsizing battleship USS Oklahoma. After several hours of this, there’d been a huge explosion, no more than a quarter mile away.
Someone raced over and said they needed a volunteer to swim out to the drifting and blazing destroyer USS Shaw to attach a fire hose. Stealey, being young and stupid and a good swimmer, well, somehow his hand had flown into the air. “Give me a rope,” he’d said.
And he’d swum out to the Shaw and attached the hawser to her stern and pulled the fire hose aboard and fought those damn fires. He’d even ventured below to make sure all the bodies scattered about were really dead, which they sure were. Stealey figured they’d never known what hit them. And then, after twenty-four solid hours of fighting fires, his reward had been to be thrown in the brig because some nervous young sentry with a tommy gun didn’t trust a civilian who had lost his papers.
Stealey had enlisted after that and thought he’d learned his lesson—“Never volunteer.” But upon reflection, he guessed now that he really hadn’t, because here he was crawling belowdecks through the bowels of the sinking Hull on an assignment sure to end badly. He and his two shipmates had just reached the aft boiler room when the destroyer capsized. Stealey lurched for the escape hatch that opened to the tunnel-like shaft that led to the deck. When he hit the handle that pressurized the shaft, all three of them shot to the surface like skyrockets.
Stealey landed hard and found himself trapped beneath a cargo net entangled on the waterlogged deck. Half the ship was underwater, and waves were roaring in from every direction. Even though it was close to noon, it seemed dark as midnight. Stealey watched in horror as a group of sailors, more than a dozen, were sucked under the keel and battered to death.
There were just two of them now, Stealey and Miller the watertender—Stealey had no idea what had happened to the engineer. When they crawled out from under the cargo net, they hoisted each other up to the davit used to raise the ship into dry dock. Stealey decided that their only fighting chance was to time a wave overrunning the ship, jump into it, and allow it to wash them away.
“We’re gonna run down the stack and jump on that water as soon as you see it coming,” he told his crewmate. “Holler when you’re ready.”
The watertender yelled, and they both ran down the stack, jumped, and the comber carried them well free of the submerging hulk of metal that had once been their ship. And that was the last Tom Stealey ever saw of the Hull. Or of his crewmate the watertender.
Al Krauchunas didn’t know how he made it, where he swam from, when he’d arrived. All he knew was he was floating in the sea, no more than a dozen feet from the capsized Spence. He vomited up oil and saltwater. He stuck his finger down his throat and retched some more. He was dazed, treading water with no life jacket, yet out of habit and officer’s pride, he paused to admire the fresh coat of red paint on the upturned keel of the ship.
Out of the blue, as if he’d materialized from a magician’s hat, Chief Watertender George Johnson appeared next to Krauchunas, handed him a kapok, and just as rapidly vanished. Another life jacket floated by—countless were strewn about the surface—and Krauchunas snagged it and strapped it around his legs.
Now he was driven against the hull of the Spence, and through the thin, one-inch steel plating he could hear the cries of shipmates trapped inside. The screams were curdling, as if coming from a mental institution. Again a man suddenly appeared, popped up to the surface right before Krauchunas, coughing for air. The lieutenant recognized the young sailor Charlie Wohlebb. He was snarled in wires and braces, and Krauchunas helped free him. Wohlebb said he’d escaped from the fireroom by wriggling through a small air hatch.
The Spence was now nearly broken in half, and it occurred to both men that when she sank, the suction would pull them to the bottom. Over the gale, Krauchunas heard shouts and screaming coming from beyond the mountainous swells. He and Wohlebb struck out “as if chased by crocodiles.” While close to the metal mass of the ship, they had been protected from the ravenous wind, but after only a few strokes the needlelike spray blinded Krauchunas, putting him in mind of an arctic snowstorm. They pushed on—they had no choice—and somehow came into contact with a floater net that had rolled from its cradle adjacent to the ship’s smokestack. Close to twenty sailors were already clutching at its mesh lines and buoys.
Krauchunas grabbed the net just as another comber broke over him. The floater net turned, rolled, and twisted, tossing everyone high into the air. Krauchunas hit the water and was pile-driven under for what seemed like eternity. Finally his two life jackets bobbed him back to the surface. When he found the floater net for the second time, he turned to look for the Spence. It was gone.
Now another young sailor, Signalman 2nd Class John Connolly, took hold of the net next to Krauchunas. Connolly looked to be in shock and moaned repeatedly, “I can’t go on anymore. I can’t. I can’t.” Krauchunas shook him by the shoulders and began shouting encouragement. He didn’t see any wounds, and he was angry with Connolly for giving up so easily.
Another wave again tore the men from the net. When Krauchunas resurfaced, Connolly was gone. No one ever saw him again.
The last wall of water had submerged the Hull’s forward stack. Strain as she might, she could not right herself fast enough, and the ocean poured down her main funnel and into her boilers. It doused her fires, and Chief Bosun’s Mate Ray Schultz raced below.
He was too late. The firerooms were pressurized, and in order to keep the firebox stoked, the compartment had to maintain its compression. With the ocean rushing in, this proved untenable, and the flames, thirsting for oxygen, shot into the after fireroom. Schultz saw several sailors fried to blackened crisps.
There was nothing Schultz could do except fight his way back to the bridge. For some reason he remembered the storm he’d encountered back in ’38, when the Hull had been berthed off Long Beach, California. The winds had reached 80, maybe 90 miles per hour, nothing like this to be sure, but brutal nonetheless. The old destroyer had dragged anchor and shot along the bottom as her captain fled the harbor, taking the waves head-on, leaving at least half the crew back on the wharf. There’d been a halfhearted attempt to put out whaleboats, but the skiffs had ended up in some parking lot, resting atop civilian cars. The Hull had ridden that one out just like the book said, all buttoned up and steaming straight into it at 3 knots.
Schultz compared this quick thinking with his current commander’s frozen uncertainty. He was beginning to despise Captain Marks, hate him more than the devil hated holy water. Schultz thought, “This Marks, dumber than a turd. And a greenhorn to boot. No idea what to do in a blow. He said he’d seen storms in the Atlantic? I’ll bet he never did.”
He was still stewing about Marks—if the captain had ducks, DeRyckere figured, they’d drown—when the final wave hit. The Hull went over, and stayed over. Schultz was almost to the bridge when he spotted Archie DeRyckere crawling out on the port face of the wheelhouse and pulling himself atop a twelve-inch signal searchlight fastened to the bridge railing. DeRyckere straddled the light with his legs and lifted Schultz up behind him to an adjoining searchlight. Then they both hefted Lt. Griel Gherstly, the Hull’s executive officer, and cradled his limp body between them.
Gherstly’s hand had been badly mangled when a piece of heavy equipment had torn loose from the bridge as the Hull heeled, and the XO was bleeding badly and in obvious pain. Gherstly was pale, and frightened, as he looked from DeRyckere to Schultz. “When we go down, will you help me?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” said DeRyckere.
“Yes, sir,” said Schultz.
The Hull was lolling on her side at a 90-degree angle, still locked deep in the trough between waves. Their height, incongruously, reminded Schultz of a visit to New York City, when he’d strolled down Fifth Avenue gaping up at the skyscrapers. “Who knew the crazy things you think of when you’re going to die?” DeRyckere, meanwhile, suddenly recalled that he had forgotten to make his noon report to the captain informing him that the ship’s chronometers had been wound.
And then the Hull dropped out from beneath them. It happened very fast. DeRyckere and Schultz each put an arm around Gherstly. They nodded their good-byes as the Pacific Ocean surged around them. DeRyckere had read the charts; he knew they were sailing close to the deepest part of the great Philippine Trench, an area named the Galathea Depth where the seabed was nearly seven miles below the surface. The pressure at that depth would be equal to over one thousand of the earth’s atmospheres. But DeRyckere also knew that he’d be long dead before his corpse reached the bottom. Fish food.
Before he was sucked down into the vacuum with the USS Hull, before he was driven so deep he thought his eardrums would explode, the last thing Chief Quartermaster Archie DeRyckere from Laurel, Montana, heard was the rough, bitter plaint of his friend Chief Bosun’s Mate Ray Schultz.
“Goddamn Halsey,” Schultz said. “Sailed us right into the middle of this goddamn typhoon.”
Aboard the mine lighter USS Tracy seaman Elwood Link had just been relieved from the forenoon watch. He was crouching low in the ship’s wheelhouse when he imagined he heard an explosion over the roar of the gale. Link stood up, turned, and glimpsed something dark in the water several hundred yards to port. Bracing himself with his knees, covering his eyes with cupped hands, he squinted through the scud and rain.
His first impression was that the object was like no vessel he had ever before seen. Perhaps, he thought, it was a surfaced submarine. It disappeared into a trough and was raised again on the next wave. And only then did the thought dawn. Link was staring at the hull of a capsized destroyer. All about the floundering hulk the tiny figures of men flailing in the sea took shape.
The Tracy’s officer of the deck took in the gruesome scene at the same moment, and shouted for hard left rudder. The little lighter pitched over a wave and heeled precariously. Link watched the inclinometer register 61 degrees. The vessel, an ancient, converted four-stack destroyer remaindered from World War I, had been built for durability and speed, not for power. She was designed to roll a maximum of 64 degrees before her stacks took water. Link held on tight as the captain screamed for his helmsman to balance her. The Tracy rolled again, 59 degrees to starboard this time, and Link found himself standing on a bulkhead, the Tracy’s deck now a vertical wall.
By the time the Tracy climbed from the trough and breached the crest of the next wave, the capsized vessel had disappeared. Elwood Link and the bridge crew scanned the water with binoculars in every direction. They saw not a piece of flotsam nor jetsam. They never knew which vessel they had witnessed go under.
* * *
At 1:45 P.M. on December 18, Adm. William F. Halsey Jr. received a transmission from Vice Adm. John Sidney “Slew” McCain, and entered a notation in his war diary:
“Commander Task Force 38 reported the center of the typhoon showed on his radar at 000 (due north), distance 35 miles.”
Halsey was finally driven to admit, officially in a message to CINCPAC Nimitz at Pearl Harbor, that his Big Blue Fleet had been swamped by a massive typhoon.
Almost simultaneously, Comdr. William Rogers, captain of the limping Aylwin, conveyed another report to McCain via VHS radio. His destroyer was on the fleet’s far-eastern flank, and her barometer readings were rising.
She had been battered, beaten, inundated for twelve solid hours. Her secondary conn wheel and her annunciators had been torn from their foundations, and the cracked metal deck around her forward stack was a spider’s snarl of lifelines and floater nets. The two main generators in engine room number 1 were inoperable, as were her engine room blowers. Her radar and TBS radio were out, and she’d finally managed to jettison her depth charges in order to lose topside weight. Rogers had tried to fire her torpedoes, but no crewmen could get close enough to the tubes without risking death. But now Typhoon Cobra had washed over her, its residue a rush of clouds trailing lightning bolts that dissected the western skyline.
Captain Calhoun on the Dewey, not far away, noted that exiting the vortex and seeing a brilliant white sun overhead was comparable “to coming out of a cloud formation in an aircraft. One minute we were in a thick soup of violent wind and spray, and the next we were out in the clear.”
On the Aylwin, wind readings were down to 50 knots, but the seas were still so mountainous and confused that, seven hours later, Rogers would direct his crew to prepare to abandon ship. “That she did not capsize was miraculous,” he would later tell the Dewey’s Calhoun. In the end, however, she survived. She was lucky.
As the afternoon wore on, most of Halsey’s vessels continued to fight for their lives. The admiral ordered all ships to steam southeast, to within the left, or more navigable, semicircle of the storm’s cyclonic winds. He set a rendezvous site for seven the next morning at latitude 12 degrees north, longitude 129 east, about seventy miles away. It was a belated command easier issued than carried out.
It would be several hours before Halsey learned he had already lost at least three of his ships, and possibly one more: The Tabberer had disappeared.