“Them sharks, they don’t like onions for breakfast.”
—SHIP’S COOK 1ST CLASS PAUL “COOKIE” PHILLIPS, USS TABBERER
Sometime past midnight, one of Pat Douhan’s raftmates pointed and said, “Hey, there’s something out there on the horizon.”
Another sailor said, “Yeah, looks like an island.”
There was indeed some sort of dark hulk lurking in the distance. It had no running lights; in fact, it was shining no lights at all. It was too big to be a raft. Why couldn’t it be land? The twenty-five or so men began yelling, screaming, waving, until one voice cut through the celebration.
“Shut up!” he hollered. “You smell that?”
The men quieted, and Douhan recalled sailing near several Japanese-held islands the Hull had skirted in previous campaigns. They all had a distinctive odor from the enemy’s cook pots; a little fishy, but much more pungent, like a strong incense. It was, however, an odor combat veterans never forgot, and now each man on the raft smelled it, too. But there was something else, another scent, and it seemed to dawn on the Americans all at once. Diesel oil.
“It’s a Jap sub,” someone whispered. “Surfaced. Recharging its batteries. Keep quiet. Douse those flashlights.”
A blanket of silence descended upon the raft.
* * *
Beloved by his crew for his amiable disposition, in an emergency Henry Plage proved cool and hard. If he were weather, he’d be sleet. The Tabberer’s all-night boxed searches had carried her over twenty-five square miles of liquid cordilleras, and despite the fact that nearly 90 percent of her officers and crew were untested reservists, not one of them had been lost or injured. The Tabby had cut through the tossing seas like a clarinet glissando, and as December 19 dawned steel gray, the ship carried thirteen Hull survivors in her sick bay. Sharks had bitten several of the rescued sailors, and one had had his foot slashed deep by a scavenging barracuda.
Numerous species of shark—makos, white tips, blues, and the rapacious tigers, which have been eviscerated with objects ranging from reindeers to monkeys to barrels of nails in their gullets—have coursed through what is now known as the Philippine Sea for millions of years. Though marine biologists and shark experts maintain that the carnivores have never acquired a taste for stringy, sinewy human beings, they are, in the end, scavengers. The scent of blood from wounded survivors was a strong attraction, and seamen recovering aboard the Tabby told gruesome tales of watching fellow shipmates being torn apart by the “hyenas of the sea” before slipping forever into the depths. Hearing these, Plage ordered a squad of riflemen ready on deck each time they spotted a drifting sailor.
Some floaters, like Louis Purvis’s poor seaman, were found dead. The little Tabby had no spare room to store bodies, so the corpses had their dog tags removed and were cut loose from their life jackets to sink to the bottom, accompanied by a crewman on deck reading a prayer aloud. Empty kapoks were gaffed and taken aboard to avoid redundant searches. With each dead sailor, or even an empty life preserver, the thoughts of the Tabby’s young crew turned to the telegrams parents and wives and sweethearts back home in the States would soon receive. We regret to inform you …
Though the seas still ran choppy, with daylight came more moderate winds, and for the first time in three days the Tabberer’s fatigued crew felt that they were through the worst of the weather.
All night, as Plage conducted his boxed search, his destroyer escort had climbed and descended endless ranges of white-lathered combers. Lookouts, deck gangs, and rescue swimmers had been beaten black-and-blue, and the crew manning the cargo nets had, at times, been completely submerged as the ship rolled and heeled.
Belowdecks, the ship’s black gang had squeezed enough power out of the Tabby’s engines to escape capture in the still-cavernous troughs. Now, although she continued to pitch down waves like a toboggan on a volcano, at least her constant rolls had decreased to “only” 30 degrees.
The Tabberer missed her sunrise rendezvous with the rest of the fleet, yet not one crewman gave it a second thought. There was no time. Shortly after 6:00 A.M., two more survivors were spotted and hauled in, one more thirty minutes later, and another thirty minutes after that. Among them was twenty-two-year-old Ship’s Cook 1st Class Milburn “Spiz” Hoffman, who had never been outside of landlocked Oklahoma before enlisting and being billeted on the Hull.
Hoffman had virtually “floated up” from the Hull’s forward galley when the destroyer capsized, and upon clearing the sinking vessel through an air vent, he had snagged a drifting life preserver and tied in with an injured Hull shipmate. During the night the two sailors had spotted the Tabberer and recognized that she was conducting boxed searches, but Hoffman’s partner said he was too weak to swim for it. Hoffman removed his trousers, draped them around the man’s shoulders, and began towing him like a lifeguard toward the searchlights in anticipation of her next turn. But the ship remained too distant to flag down.
Hoffman then passed out, and when he came to the next morning his floatmate was dead. He untied their connecting lifelines, removed the sailor’s kapok, and watched him sink from view, swirling down through the clear blue water until he was no bigger than a toy soldier. His crewmate’s death sent Hoffman into a kind of despair, and he slipped out of his own kapok and tossed it away. “I gave up,” he said.
Then Hoffman began thinking about his mother. He hadn’t thought of her lately. He was an only child, and his father had passed away ten months earlier. He decided he could not die this way; he could not leave his mother alone. He swam after his kapok and recovered it floating beside a waterlogged horsehair mattress. Fastening the life jacket to the mattress, he fashioned a makeshift raft and climbed aboard.
He’d lost his pants during his tow-rope duty, and while floating on the mattress he used all his remaining clothes, including his skivvies, to try to shield his eyes from the unrelenting morning sun that beat down on him between rainsqualls. Eventually the wind whipped every stitch away, and that is how the Tabberer’s deck gang found him: splayed across his mattress, naked, sunburned, half dead.
Plage immediately dubbed him “Lord Godiva”—as if the skipper was one to talk, Hoffman thought later. For the Tabby’s skipper was by now himself half naked, stripped to only a borrowed pair of ill-fitting trousers and his officer’s peaked cap. He had not slept in close to sixty hours, most of it spent pacing the open bridge during the height of the storm, when his uniform had been shredded to tattered rags. He was no longer “Cary Grant,” unless, that is, Grant was starring as Robinson Crusoe, and his XO Surdam even noted that the skipper’s bruised, swollen eyes were in worse condition than most of the survivors’ they were pulling from the ocean.
This, naturally, only endeared Plage further to the Tabberer’s industrious young crew, which seemed to gather strength from their skipper’s unfaltering energy and good cheer. By 10:00 A.M., December 19, the Tabby’s rescue total had reached twenty-seven Hull sailors and, in fact, the reason Plage had had to borrow a pair of trousers was because he had loaned his backup uniform to the nineteenth man plucked from the sea—the Hull’s Lt. Comdr. James A. Marks.
A delirious Marks was hauled in clutching a hatchet, which the Tabby’s crew assumed he was carrying to ward off sharks. Soon enough, however, word spread across the ship from other Hull survivors in sick bay. As one crewmate told the Tabby’s shipfitter Leonard Glaser, “He had that hatchet to make sure nobody from his own crew would try to get rid of him.”
Recovering in officers’ country, Marks told Plage that while bouncing over the whitecaps he’d become so sick from inadvertently swallowing saltwater that his body’s involuntary reflex to retch had probably saved his life by keeping his head and face above the surface. There was little food in his stomach to throw up, he added, since he had not eaten a thing since December 17, the day before Cobra struck. But after puking for hours, he’d inexplicably become so ravenous that he’d started chewing, first on his kapok’s whistle, and then on a strip of leather torn from his shoe. When he failed to visit his crew in sick bay for the entire journey back to Ulithi, several Hull seamen had other suggestions as to what Lieutenant Commander Marks could chew on.
Although the rain had tapered to soft showers, at a few moments past sunrise on December 19 it was still bleak, overcast, and depressing in the quadrant through which Chief Quartermaster Archie DeRyckere was drifting. Suddenly he caught sight of a column of gray smoke rising, as if from a chimney, on the western horizon. He nudged Tom Spohn and George Guy awake.
All three watched as a ship, no one was sure what class, steamed back and forth—right to left, left to right—inching a bit closer with each vector. DeRyckere recognized the movements as a “traffic square,” or boxed search, and he told Spohn and Guy to unhitch the kapok tag lines that had lashed them together throughout the night. His plan was to spread out in a triangle pattern, to put perhaps a quarter of a mile of sea between them.
“They’ll have a better chance of spotting us this way,” he said. “Splash a lot, splash all you can. And don’t forget, if one of us gets picked up, there’s still two more of us out here.”
For emphasis, he repeated, “There’s still two more of us out here!”
The sailors wished each other luck, and separated.
By this time DeRyckere’s eyes were nearly completely swollen shut and so scabbed over from saltwater sores that he considered it a small miracle that he’d even spotted the smoke from the ship. He had stroked only a few dozen yards when something knocked, hard, against his back. A frisson of electricity ran up his spine as he wheeled. Through blurred vision he barely made out the outline of a large dorsal fin. The shark had to be six feet. “A big bastard,” he thought, and said aloud, “You know, God, first you take my ship. Then you have me swim around in this ocean all night. And now you’re gonna feed me to the sharks? That ain’t right.”
The chief was unaware that the navy had only a year earlier experimented with a shark deterrent called the Life Jacket Shark Repellent Compound Packet, a noxious mixture of ammonium acetate, black dye, and decaying shark flesh. The plan had been to equip navy-issue life preservers with this witches’ brew should it prove effective in driving away sharks. It had not, and the navy had dropped the project. Even had DeRyckere known of the tests, however, they would have offered no solace. As the monster circled him, he felt in the pocket of his dungarees for the Bermuda onion. He wondered if sharks ate onions.
The big fish continued to stalk him as he squinted to watch the Tabberer trawl up, first George Guy, and minutes later Tom Spohn. The way the DE maneuvered herself upwind and then tumbled sideways, DeRyckere thought at first that her captain was crazy, and that his shipmates would be crushed. But once he saw Spohn and Guy plucked from the sea, he realized that this was the only feasible manner with which to approach a drifter, given the gale and the enormous swells. His admiration for this skipper’s seamanship ticked up several notches. “Must be a real shellback,” he thought.
Within twenty minutes the Tabberer was closing on DeRyckere, and .30-caliber Springfield rifles and Thompson submachine guns erupted from her foredeck. The sea around him pocked with bullets. A rescue swimmer was swiftly beside him, tying him into a looped line, and he was being hauled up the cargo net slung over the side of the ship’s port beam. Two sailors, one under each arm, supported him, and one asked if he could stand.
“Hell, yeah, I’m fine,” he said. They let him go, and Archie DeRyckere fell flat on his face.
He was helped down to the crowded sick bay, where a corps-man examined him for broken bones, and poured eyedrops over his crusted-closed eyelids. Then Cookie Phillips handed Archie DeRyckere a pear. DeRyckere hated pears. But he ate that pear down to the stem, seeds and all. As he swallowed the last of it, he told Phillips the story of the shark, and pulled the sodden Bermuda onion from his dungaree pocket.
“Well, then, that’s what saved you,” Cookie Phillips said. “Them sharks, they don’t like onions for breakfast.”
At 9:00 A.M. on December 19, the Third Fleet’s chief aerologist, Comdr. George F. Kosco, strode into Admiral Halsey’s flag plot in search of the latest weather reports. He was intercepted by Capt. Leonard Dow, the fleet’s communications officer, who handed him a decoded report just delivered by chute from the intelligence shack belowdecks.
Kosco stared at the message tape. He was, he said, “literally stunned by surprise.” The communiqué had been filed from the seaplane tender Chandeleur early on the morning of December 17. It detailed how, at 5:00 A.M. on that date, a reconnaissance pilot flying out of Palau in the Western Carolines had come upon, and marked on his charts, the coordinates of a nascent typhoon developing just southeast of the fleet. For some reason, when the report had been dispatched to the New Jersey, a copy had not been sent to Fleet Weather Central at Pearl. Kosco reeled at the what-ifs.
When he regained his composure, the aerologist marched down to the code room. Why had it taken nearly forty-eight hours for this message to be delivered? No one had a satisfactory answer. The best Kosco could determine was that it had merely been buried under a stack of reports while higher-priority communications from MacArthur, CINCPAC, and Washington, D.C., had been decoded. It was, someone said, just the navy way.
Moments past 10:00 A.M. on December 19, the Tabberer’s crew picked up the distant drone of aircraft. Soon two Helldiver SB2C (“Son of a Bitch, Second Class”) dive bombers were circling the destroyer escort, close enough for Plage to get off a message via his jury-rigged antenna. He requested their assistance in his search. An airman replied that they were en route to their own search grid coordinates. In minutes the two planes were specks in the sky.
Three hours later, Plage received a radio message from Halsey, giving the coordinates of a second rendezvous site, this one scheduled for sunset, again some ninety miles due south of the Tabby’s current position. The admiral ordered Plage to break off his search-and-rescue and rejoin the remainder of the fleet. But as soon as Plage abandoned his boxed search and shaped a southerly course, another floater was spotted. By the time the survivor was picked up and the Tabberer had again turned back south, Plage realized he would not meet the sunset deadline.
This was confirmed when, at 3:15 P.M., one of the Tabby’s lookouts saw a group of men floating some two miles distant. This was the farthest away they’d yet spotted any floaters. The survivors turned out to be seven Hull seamen, led by Lt. (j.g.) George Sharp, the destroyer’s chief engineer and son of the rear admiral commanding the Pacific Fleet’s minesweepers. At Sharp’s insistence, the group had abandoned a capsizing raft and lashed themselves together with belts, kerchiefs, and lengths of rope the night before, “tied up like a bunch of asparagus.” Sharp had convinced them that they’d be easier to spot floating in a large cluster.
One seventeen-year-old seaman, quite smaller than the rest, had joined the group only that morning when the mattress upon which he had been floating for almost twenty-four hours finally fell to pieces. The boy had no life jacket, and the rest had taken turns boosting him on their backs to keep his head above water. He weighed only 120 pounds, but this was nonetheless an incredible act of strength for fatigued and frightened men treading water, trying to keep their own noses and mouths above the surface.
This knot of survivors had watched through most of the day as the Tabberer conducted her expanding squared search, and several sailors had wanted to swim for the ship when it first hove into view. But Sharp, realizing she was too far away, and recognizing the systematic hunt, persuaded them to stay together until she eventually came to them. The men had just been carried aboard—only one sailor, the bantamweight, could walk under his own steam— when another Hull officer, Lt. (j.g.) Cyrus Watkins, was spotted several hundred yards off.
The Tabby closed on Watkins, and the deck crew recognized that he was barely conscious and being circled by an eight-foot shark. Again rifles and tommy guns crackled, and the shark was momentarily driven away. But Watkins was still a good thirty yards from the Tabby when XO Bob Surdam saw the fin heading back toward the struggling floater.
Surdam stripped off his uniform blouse and, without a life jacket, dived from the signal bridge. He reached Watkins and began towing him by his life preserver collar toward the ship. He was still fifty feet away when Torpedoman 1st Class Robert Cotton, manning the cargo nets, saw that Surdam was flagging. He, too, dived in. With the shark coiling about them, the two lifted Watkins aboard.
Four more rescues followed within the next hour, interrupted by frequent wild goose chases after empty life jackets. By 4:30 P.M. the Tabby had forty survivors in sick bay. The sensate men all kissed the deck.
Here the twenty-nine-year-old Henry Lee Plage made a calculated decision to countermand Admiral Halsey’s orders. He assumed he was sailing the same ocean currents that were carrying Hull survivors toward his ship, and decided to remain on this grid throughout the night and early morning of December 20. At least until daybreak, he told his officers; if he saved just one more man, the insubordination would be worth it. Privately, he thought he’d get either a medal or a court-martial.
The Tabberer’s crew, whose zeal was contagious, let up a great cheer when word circulated about the skipper’s “rebellion.” The rescues had become, one Tabby sailor put it, “a proud and wonderful chore.” Plage, however, would later admit to feeling “a little shaky inside because of the high-handed disregard for orders I had shown.” Yet, as he told Surdam, “In [our] battered condition, this ship is no good to the fleet. But it can still save lives.”
The captain’s hazard paid off almost immediately, as the Tabberer pulled in her forty-first survivor a little after sunset. Moreover, through radioman Ralph Tucker’s yeoman efforts, Plage was able to pick up a message from Halsey’s flagship changing the DE’s orders. The admiral now instructed the Tabby to continue its searches until relieved by an escort carrier the following day.