“Those bastards are gonna abandon us.”
—CHIEF QUARTERMASTER ARCHIE DERYCKERE, USS HULL
Employing the same perilous maneuver they had on their first rescue, Henry Plage and his deck crew plucked nine more Hull seamen from the ocean over the next ninety minutes. The Tabby’s engineering officer, Arthur Carpentier, listened appalled as two of the survivors described how they’d twice nearly been run over by the DE before being spotted. When this news was relayed to the skipper, he could not keep from wondering how many other helpless men he’d missed. Or crushed to death beneath his keel.
When a floating sailor was found unconscious, or proved too weak to grab a lifeline and haul himself in, the strongest swimmers in the Tabby’s deck crew did the unthinkable and tied their life preservers onto thread lines and plunged in to haul the floaters back in life rings. More than once, rescue swimmers were lost under the eave of the rolling vessel’s deck. On one occasion the Tabby’s gunnery officer, reservist Lt. (j.g.) Howard Korth—a burly, blond, former Notre Dame football player from Bay City, Michigan—was on duty at the cargo net and dived beneath the ship to pull in both a survivor and his floundering rescuer.
During another attempted rescue, Bosun’s Mate 1st Class Louis “Skip” Purvis, a rugged and fearless twenty-four-year-old from Chatham, New Jersey—who had once survived being washed overboard into the icy waters off Casco, Maine—reached a man who he thought was unconscious, but turned out to be dead. Purvis yanked the floater’s dog tags from around his neck, and as he swam back to the ship, the slack in his lifeline fouled on the bulbous sonar dome welded to the bottom of the DE.
Twice the rolling Tabby’s suction pulled him beneath her keel; twice he broke the surface for an instant and managed to gulp a lungful of air before being dragged back under. On his third descent, unable to disentangle his line from the keel, he barely managed to wriggle out of his life jacket altogether and breach the surface on the other side of the vessel. He hollered for help, and surprised lookouts hoisted him aboard.
“Dammit,” the lantern-jawed Purvis said after being hauled in. “I bet I’m the first sailor to be keelhauled in two hundred years.” He was back in the water within an hour.
Not long after his brief encounter with Captain Marks, Archie DeRyckere literally bumped into two Hull crewmates, Seaman 1st Class Tom Spohn and Seaman 2nd Class George Guy. They were both wearing kapoks and asked the chief if they could tie in with him. DeRyckere laced the life preservers’ lines together, and the three formed a tight circle in the somewhat becalmed ocean. Rain spouts still drenched them, the wind still howled, and the swells remained huge. But the whitewater at their crests had abated, and there was no longer any need to bodysurf.
At one point they saw a ship’s running lights on the horizon, and DeRyckere unhooked the tiny flashlight from his kapok. Using Morse code, he began blinking repeated SOSs. When the vessel did not respond, he flashed another message.
“S-E-N-D H-E-L-P.”
Now the ship seemed to return their entreaty. It was disheartening.
“W-E A-R-E L-E-A-V-I-N-G T-H-E A-R-E-A.”
DeRyckere thought, “Those bastards are gonna abandon us.” Then the vessel’s lights disappeared.
As they drifted, DeRyckere, Spohn, and Guy kept up a running conversation. The chief thought it would improve everyone’s emotional state. They did not speak about whether they were going to drown, but, rather, what they could do to stay alive. DeRyckere recounted his bodysurfing experience, and the two seamen, obviously disoriented, and perhaps succumbing to hypothermia, promised DeRyckere they would hang on until another rescue ship arrived.
DeRyckere saw a Bermuda onion floating by. He scooped it up and offered it to his floatmates. Both declined, and he stuffed it into the front pocket of his dungarees. The two enlisted men were by now on the verge of delirium, and the discovery of the onion apparently steered the conversation to food, specifically the next morning’s breakfast.
“I’m going to have hot dogs and french fries,” Spohn said.
“Naw, I’m gonna have pancakes, man, with sausage, and eggs, and ham,” Guy said.
And though DeRyckere did not answer them, he was struck by a “crazy idea,” and thought with a breezy quarterdeck laugh, “Well, Arch, you’re not in such bad shape. These two guys are gonna have breakfast, and you’re tied into them. What the hell are you worried about?”
Not long past midnight, as the Tabberer made slow search headway through the gales and high seas, she again made visual contact with Capt. Raymond Calhoun’s now-stackless Dewey. The vessel was but a shadow in the distant mist, but recognizable from the Tabby’s wheelhouse, even without her funnel, as an American destroyer.
Ralph Tucker had managed to repair the communications gear to the point where it could receive fleet communiqués, although it could transmit only a short range. Doubting he could reach the destroyer with Tucker’s makeshift antenna, Plage ordered his young signalman John Cross to flash the identity of the Tabberer via Morse code blinker, and inform the ship’s skipper that his deck crew was pulling Hull survivors from the water. The possibility of a Japanese submarine intercepting his message crossed Plage’s mind. But since no enemy had yet to see his searchlights, and with the possibility of more Americans still in the water, it was a chance he had to take. Moreover, he asked himself, what Japanese commander would be foolish enough to surface a sub in these seas?
He was perplexed when the American destroyer flashed back the message, “WE ARE LEAVING THE AREA.” And she did, her running lights disappearing in the troughs of the roiling Pacific.
Captain Calhoun had, in fact, spotted the white shafts of the Tabberer’s searchlights far off his port beam and assumed that some vessel was conducting rescue maneuvers. But such was his ship’s perilous condition that when he tried to turn to investigate, the pounding and slamming sea nearly scuttled his shambling vessel. Water poured into the hole in her deck left by the stack’s disintegration, and across her foredeck ropes and lines were snarled and iron posts and ammunition lockers had been twisted into “queer shapes.” The tip of the mainmast was bent at a 90-degree angle, and the galley was out of commission. The Dewey’s crew was subsisting on plates of cold beans and stale, soggy bread.
By then Halsey had ordered all ships to rendezvous at an assembly point well south of their position, but the admiral had exempted the Dewey upon learning of her wreckage. Calhoun was directed to shape course directly for Ulithi.
Hours later, as they neared the atoll’s anchorage, Calhoun and his staff began rummaging through the pile of decoded dispatches received over the past twelve hours. They came across the Tabberer’s flashed message.
“Hull capsized with little warning,” it read in part. “Only two life rafts launched and neither yet sighted by us. Have ten enlisted survivors and will remain in area searching.”
Calhoun thought of his Academy classmate Jim Marks. His heart sank.
* * *
After drifting alone for what he guessed was a good twelve hours, treading water, occasionally trying to conserve energy by paddling in an awkward, modified backstroke, Bob Ayers came across a floater net carrying a large cluster of Spence crewmates. He was too weary and spent to determine their exact number.
Floater nets are huge circular affairs, their “decks” meshed with two-and-a-half-inch open weave lines and equipped with enough rubber disks, or blocks, secured at intervals around their perimeters, to support kegs of water, medicine, rations … and, optimally, twenty-five men. As opposed to rigid balsa life rafts, floater nets are flexible to the motions of the seas, and survivors thrust their feet through the weave and ride atop the swells without risking being overturned. At least, theoretically, such is the case. But at this point on the evening of December 18, conditions were still so atrocious, with breakers rolling in constant sets, that Ayers had no more than grasped a rubber block with his fingertips than a wave hit and tossed him, the net, and everyone riding it high into the air.
Heads knocked and bodies tangled, and when Ayers splashed down he found himself trapped beneath the meshed lines. “I can just see myself tied up in a knot in this thing with my head facing down,” he thought. Better to drown on his own terms. He broke free and, with neither a life jacket nor his long-gone potato crate to buoy him, began stroking away. Ayers would never again see the sailors he left on that float ring. Yet soon enough he had recovered several life jackets from the detritus about him. He spent the remainder of December 18 on a lonely vigil, battling the confused seas.
He guessed it was sometime around midnight when he spotted another floater net and swam for it. This one’s mesh bottom had torn away, and sailors were clinging to the lines and the buoys forming the outer ring. Those with life jackets paired up with those without, and someone took a head count. There were tweny-seven frightened men clutching for life. One of them would not stop talking. It was the Spence’s chief watertender, George Johnson.
* * *
Shortly after the Tabberer’s fleeting encounter with the Dewey, Captain Plage, via his jury-rigged receiver, confirmed Halsey’s fleetwide order directing all stray ships to rendezvous at sunrise, about ninety miles south of his current position. From this site all surviving ships were to finally refuel, and convoy together either back to station off Luzon or on to Ulithi.
But as soon as Plage pointed his vessel south, another drifting sailor was spotted. He was rescued, as was another survivor fifteen minutes later. Again the Tabberer set her course for the rendezvous with Halsey. To Plage, “Everyone aboard the Tabby wore a hang-dog look, not because they were exhausted, but because they hated to give up the hunt.”
The hunt, however, was far from over. At 1:10 A.M. another floater was spotted and retrieved, and another at 2:50 A.M. Twenty minutes earlier the Tabby had managed to get off a brief radio message to the passing destroyer USS Benham, giving her location and status. Before the Benham sailed out of radio range, Plage also informed her skipper that he was plucking from the sea sailors from the capsized destroyer Hull.
Pat Douhan could make out the search beacons just over the horizon. They resembled long, sweeping ovals of frozen moonlight reflecting off the gray cloud cover. But the water current was too strong, carrying him in the opposite direction, and the lights soon vanished behind the gray veil of rain. He recalled his experiences mistakenly “pinging” whales for submarines as the Hull’s rookie sonar operator. He banished the hope. No sonarman would ever pick up a lone man drifting across the Pacific.
Just then something “whomped” Douhan in the back of his neck. He froze. Shark? Barracuda? In 1944 there were dozens, hundreds, of contradictory “shark antidote” theories circulating through the ranks of the U.S. Navy (as there are today). Punch them in the nose; poke at their eyes; roll up in a ball, become horizontal, and remain perfectly still; thrash as hard as you can to scare them away; get hold of their fins and ride them. Then (again, as today), no one could say for certain what worked. The navy found it prudent not to dwell on the subject in boot camp, bad as it was for morale, and most Third Fleet sailors had given as much thought to shark attacks as they had to capturing Tojo. Sure, it might happen, but not likely to me.
In a near panic, Douhan turned and threw a punch. His fist grazed the bristles of a floating push broom. It had “USS Hull” stamped into its handle. He clutched at it “like a long-lost friend,” and after a time he began to experiment. He realized that if he turned on his back and positioned the long handle just so along his spine, he could prop his legs on the shoulders of the broom. He floated this way for some hours.
Douhan guessed it was around midnight when he saw the next light. It wasn’t a ship’s searchlight, too small for that, but it wasn’t an optical illusion either. His throat was raw and his voice was hoarse, but he yelled for all he was worth.
“Who is it?” came the reply.
“It’s Pat! Pat Douhan! Off the Hull!”
The light moved closer, and Douhan recognized sixteen shipmates crowded onto a donut-shaped raft. Its balsa latticework deck had collapsed from the weight of so many men, but it remained suspended by ropes, perhaps three feet below the surface. His fellow survivors were standing chest-deep in water inside the ring, their arms draped over the side. They pulled him aboard. They told him they had no food, and no fresh water.
He recognized Lt. (j.g.) E. B. Brooks, one of Captain Marks’s few friends on the Hull. Brooks was the ship’s assistant communications officer, and when he’d come aboard he was anxious to learn as much as he could about the sound gear apparatus. Douhan had spent hours teaching the man the intricacies of the machine. It wasn’t but a week later that the know-it-all Brooks had returned and berated Douhan for not operating it properly. Typical officer bullshit. It didn’t matter now.
Pat Douhan again had something solid, albeit submerged, beneath his feet. He was relatively safe. He was no longer alone.
At 2:30 A.M. on December 19, Halsey’s flag plot sprang to life with the news that the Tabberer was still afloat. The message was relayed via TBS from Capt. William Rogers’s limping Aylwin, which reported that she had in turn received word from the Hickox, which had steamed past the little DE with the Benham and intercepted the message Plage had sent out. Rogers gave the approximate coordinates of the sighting—latitude 14° 52’ north, longitude 127° 28’ east—just under one hundred miles from the rendezvous site. The jubilant reaction on the New Jersey’s bridge was tempered when Rogers added that the Tabberer reported that she was recovering survivors from the capsized destroyer Hull.
“Mick” Carney added the Tabberer’s name to the roster of surviving vessels and crossed the Hull off the list. One witness in Halsey’s wardroom noticed “the lifting of eyebrows as soon as word about the Tabberer’s rescue effort got around. Wasn’t a destroyer escort just a little out of its element on an operation of this sort in the wake of a typhoon?”
By this time, Third Fleet vessels that had been scattered over three thousand square miles of ocean were now coalescing around Halsey’s flagship. With Typhoon Cobra swirling away to the northwest, it was finally possible to recommence fueling and servicing. The seas, however, remained highly confused and continued to hinder the effort. The admiral resigned himself to the fact that the operation would most likely take all day. Now, he realized, he was even shaving close on his promise to MacArthur to steam Task Force 38 back to its station off Luzon by December 21. This time, chastened, he did not wait to inform the general. That morning, at 9:22 A.M., he also sent a coded communiqué to CINCPAC Nimitz at Pearl:
“Typhoon center passed thirty miles north of fleet guide midday 18th. Tracked by surface radar. Gusts to 93 knots. Fleet took beating. Tabberer (DE418) reports Hull (DD350) capsized with little warning at 10:30. Only ten enlisted survivors at time of report. Several other stragglers still unreported.”
Halsey further informed Nimitz that he had already ordered several ships, including the Tabberer, back to Ulithi and would “strike intentions and movements of cripples in separate dispatches.” In other words, as soon as he knew where these cripples were. Or, in the cases of the Monaghan and Spence, if they were.
Then, draping sea charts over any available space, Halsey’s staff began planning the rescue mission. His navigators studied equatorial currents and trade winds, making allowances for the longest possible distance in every direction a single floating man or raft could drift. Aerologists factored in a natural phenomenon called the Leeway Effect, that is, the correlation among a floater’s exposed body surface, the local ocean currents, and the typhoon’s gales. In essence, this meant that men drifting alone in sodden kapoks, or in low-tothe-waterline groups aboard floater nets, would be more apt to be carried southwest toward central Luzon by the current. Conversely, survivors aboard rafts would be pushed northwest by Cobra’s winds.
As soon as his larger ships were refueled, Halsey would direct them to cover every square inch of ocean into which a drifting sailor might have carried. Hundreds of airmen prepared to take to the sky. Thousands of lookouts were designated. It was all well and good that the Tabberer had stumbled upon a few floaters. But one really couldn’t expect a little destroyer escort to bear the brunt of a rescue so enormous in scope.