The last thing Archie DeRyckere remembered seeing was the huge dorsal fin, gray with dark blotches, circling him like a hangman’s noose. Now he bolted awake and gaped at the wooden slats of the bottom of the bunk a few feet before his face. He rubbed his tender eyes—they were wet and gooey from the drops administered by Doc Cleary—and reached up to touch the latticework to make sure he was not dreaming. He turned to the bed beside him in the Tabberer’s sick bay and recognized Ray Schultz, whose own eyes had also crusted over.
“Man, oh man, oh man, this is living, huh, Ray,” he said. Schultz grunted.
Simultaneously, similar scenes were being played out belowdecks aboard the small flotilla of rescue ships steaming toward Ulithi.
DeRyckere’s shipmate Pat Douhan, on the destroyer Brown, could never recall so many officers being so friendly to him. The entire ship’s complement visited the sick bay, on each occasion laden with fruit juice, soup, coffee, and ice cream. When the Brown’s regular galley ran short of supplies, the officers’ galley was thrown open. Between these goodwill visits and much-needed sleep, Douhan and his Hull crewmates spent most of the time comparing the experience of having a ship sink out from under them with the survivors off the Monaghan. Only a few men recounted stories from the water. Shark attacks were an especially taboo topic of conversation.
Aboard the destroyer escort Swearer, the Spence’s Lt. Alphonso Krauchunas felt healthy enough to venture topside to air out his sore feet. They were still swollen and slightly streaked but didn’t hurt nearly as much, and the fresh breezes and sunlight instilled in him a new vigor. On the destroyer Cogswell, the Spence seaman William Keith had recovered enough to feel sheepish about brawling with his rescuers when they plucked him from the sea.
When the Tabby arrived at Ulithi on December 22—the first vessel to return with Typhoon Cobra survivors—most of the injured men were transferred to the hospital ship USS Solace berthed in the lagoon. Over the next several days, as more sailors from the doomed Hull, Spence, and Monaghan joined them, emotional reunions and surreal events took place. Evan Fenn, the Monaghan fireman, his legs still raw and scarred, was carried aboard the Solace on Christmas Eve and, aided by the morphine, thought the nurses singing Christmas carols were the voices of angels. On Christmas morning the Swearer’s nine Spence survivors came aboard, the last to arrive. To Krauchunas, the turkey-and-trimmings dinner he and his crewmates were treated to was the most memorable they’d ever eaten.
Although sailors like Douhan were initially astonished to discover so many fellow crewmates crowding the Solace—the sonarman fell into the arms of Chiefs DeRyckere and Schultz upon his arrival—after the Swearer contingent came on board, it gradually dawned on everyone that no more were coming. Elation turned to anguish, the living mourning the dead.
Among those killed by Typhoon Cobra were Lt. Comdr. Bruce Garrett of the Monaghan and the Spence’s Lt. Comdr. James Andrea. The Hull’s Lt. Comdr. James Alexander Marks was thus the only captain of a lost ship to survive the storm. On December 26, 1944, four days after he’d walked under his own strength down the Tabby’s gangway, he was designated a “defendant” by the three-admiral court of inquiry investigating what was even now being commonly referred to as “Halsey’s Typhoon.” Marks was the only man so named.
The court, executed swiftly and well out of public view, assigned Marks a defense attorney, and in the most dramatic flourish of the entire proceedings convened in the pilothouse of the destroyer tender USS Cascade to hear his testimony. This was done, Judge Advocate Capt. Herbert Gates said, “in order to best approximate the conditions on the Hull’s bridge during the storm.”
Marks’s face was a rash of saltwater sores and, like all the other survivors, his eyes remained bruised and blackened as he paced the Cascade’s wheelhouse. He told the court that had the Hull been released from her screening station early on December 18, she just might have been able to outrun the typhoon south. The point was moot; she had not been released. He was, he said, merely following orders.
In earlier testimony, Capt. Preston Mercer, commander of the destroyer squadron of which the Hull was a member, had diplomatically sidestepped questions concerning Marks’s command capabilities. Mercer’s several brushes with death sailing through Cobra aboard Capt. William Rogers’s battered destroyer Aylwin, tempered by an innate service loyalty, left him unprepared to cast stones. “The commanding officer of the Hull had served in the North Atlantic and experienced very heavy weather,” Mercer told the court, “and perhaps did not appreciate that the Hull was not as stable as previous destroyers in which he was embarked.”
In a tortuous evasion of the judge advocate’s follow-up question regarding his view of Marks’s overall leadership, Mercer added that it had to be taken into consideration that all his squadron commanders, Marks included, “are the most junior in destroyers.” No telling endorsement, that.
Now Marks’s narrative of the final, tragic hours of the Hull was read aloud in the makeshift floating courtroom. It contained no hint of the panic and tension permeating her bridge at the time. Judge Advocate Gates asked Marks if he had an official complaint to register against any surviving officers or crew. Archie DeRyckere, seated in the gallery, leaned forward in his chair and peered expectantly through eye sockets swollen to the size and color of small plums. He was still weak, and the skin on his ears and nose had been sloughed off by wind and waves, leaving ugly red scabs.
DeRyckere exhaled deeply when Marks said he had no accusations to make. When the court addressed the same question to the Hull’s survivors, eyes shifted downward and feet shuffled. Each man’s face resembled a hard winter breaking up, but not a single sailor said a word. DeRyckere stole a glance at sullen Chief Bosun’s Mate Ray Schultz, and thought of the XO Griel Gherstly. No man is an island. Gherstly was dead.
DeRyckere was heartsick. But, like his shipmates, he felt he had no other option but to remain silent. Who was he, a twenty-five-year-old enlisted man, to vouchsafe an officer’s testimony under oath? He planned to make a career of the navy. It wouldn’t do to call out one’s superior in public. “What did they expect us to say in there?” he asked the coxswain transporting him and his crewmates across Ulithi lagoon back to the white hospital ship. “What with everywhere you look, all you see are them braided admirals boring holes through you with their eyes.”
The court of inquiry would eventually reach the conclusion that the commanding officers of the Hull, Monaghan, and Spence “maneuvered too long in an endeavor to keep station, which prevented them from concentrating early enough on saving their ships.” But after poring over the minutiae of the case and paying special attention to the engineering faults and failures of the top-heavy destroyers, to Judge Advocate Gates the pelts of three young junior officers, two of them deceased, were but stray doggies compared to the snorting “Bull.”
When Halsey took the stand, on the day after Christmas, Gates bored in on the admiral’s contradictory testimony. Nearly all of Third Fleet’s officers, he noted, saw the storm coming. He read back testimony definitively illustrating that each of Halsey’s three task group commanders, as well as several subordinate ship captains, had already surmised that they were steaming into a typhoon as early as the afternoon and the gloaming evening of December 17. In fact, Gates suggested, it was the admiral who seemed to be the last to realize that the storm posed a danger to his ships.
It was not until 4:00 A.M. on December 18 that the weather—“for the first time,” in Halsey’s words—suggested “that the Fleet was confronted with serious storm conditions.” Further, it took an additional eight hours before Halsey thought “to issue orders to the Fleet as a whole to disregard formation keeping and take best courses and speeds for security.”
“Why?” Gates demanded.
Storm warnings, Halsey replied, “were nonexistent until the horse was out of the stable.” Hewing close to his warrior script, he added, “The thought of striking Luzon was uppermost in our heads right up to the last minute.”
Virtually ignoring these inconsistencies and contradictions, on January 3, 1945, the naval court of inquiry returned a single-spaced, typewritten, two-hundred-page document that delineated 84 separate “Findings” regarding the facts surrounding Third Fleet’s encounter with Typhoon Cobra, 63 separate “Opinions,” and 10 “Recommendations.”
In brief, the court found that the losses of the Hull and Monaghan were due primarily to the inherent instability of the top-heavy Farragut-class destroyers, and further suggested that Bruce Garrett of the Monaghan and James Marks of the Hull had not been experienced enough commanders to realize they should have broken station and tended to the safety of their ships. Capt. James Andrea of the Spence, unable to defend himself, was faulted posthumously for “probably” failing to ballast his ship’s bunkers and remove extraneous topside weight from her decks.
The court attached no blame nor reprimand for damage to or the loss of aircraft to any of the jeep carrier commanders or officers whom, it found, had reacted as best they could given the dreadful circumstances. Similarly exonerated were the commanders of the wrecked, if still floating, destroyers Dewey, Aylwin, and Hickox.
The fleet aerologist, Comdr. George F. Kosco, was mildly admonished for relying too greatly on far-off weather reports and analysis from Pearl and other outlying stations, and task force commander Vice Adm. John Sidney “Slew” McCain was held responsible for briefly turning the fleet into the heart of the storm on the morning of December 18. Oddly, they never questioned McCain about this decision.
Finally, the court made clear, the liability to Third Fleet for damages during Typhoon Cobra, and specifically for failing to issue a fleetwide typhoon warning on that same morning, accrued to Admiral Halsey.
After a meticulous listing of the damage and losses to the fleet, the court’s final statement read, in part, “The preponderance of responsibility for the above falls on Commander Third Fleet, Admiral William F. Halsey, U.S. Navy. In analyzing the mistakes, errors, and faults included therein, the court classifies them as errors in judgment under stress of war operations, and not as offenses.”
The judgment went on to compare the catastrophe to an act of God, and concluded, “The extent of blame, as it applies to Commander Third Fleet or others, is impractical to assess.”
And there it was. Some, not least those seamen who had drifted across the Philippine Sea for days and witnessed their shipmates die under the most horrific circumstances, saw the ruling as a whitewash. When, nine days later, CINCPAC Nimitz’s office issued its own meager, three-page summary of the court’s findings, there were murmurs that the entire inquiry had become, in a distinctive swabbie acronym, FUBAR—“Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.”
Nearly 800 men had died and over 80 were injured; 3 destroyers had capsized and another dozen ships had been rendered inoperable; 146 aircraft were lost or damaged beyond repair; and America’s Big Blue Fleet was literally decimated. It seemed no wonder that some naval observers viewed the court’s conclusions as distinctly lenient.
Following the court’s “Recommendations,” it was up to Nimitz to decide whether disciplinary action should be taken. During the proceedings, CINCPAC and his staff had lived up to their reputation for thoroughness by spending much of their Ulithi stopover informally interviewing those survivors who were strong enough to speak. In addition to Nimitz’s personal conversations with Halsey, his staff had visited the hospital ship Solace and invited seamen aboard the New Jersey, where Nimitz was billeted. One of the first of these was the “ghost sailor” Keith Abbott. His story was of particular interest to the investigators, as he was the only man who had made it off the Monaghan’s bridge alive.
The room was crowded for Abbott’s appearance—everyone was curious—and CINCPAC’s staff officers listened rapt as the radar technician related the story of Captain Garrett’s heroic efforts to save the ship, of watching the inclinometer’s needle surge past its stop, of the titanic waves that preceded the destroyer’s final, terrifying moments.
On the basis of these interviews and the court’s findings, CINCPAC composed a “classified” overview of the catastrophe as well as a new set of future fleetwide weather guidelines. These included more reconnaissance aircraft and weather ships stationed across the Western Pacific, a new “weather central” station established on Leyte, and an expansion of the existing station on Guam. He also instructed the Bureau of Ships to initiate a design study of destroyer stability. In Nimitz’s “confidential” letter dated January 1945—which was not released from “classified” status until ten years later, in 1955—an angry CINCPAC called the disaster “the greatest loss that we have taken in the Pacific without compensatory return since the First Battle of Savo.”
His official memorandum of January 22, 1945, however, was somewhat more modulated. In it Nimitz officially approved the Proceedings, Findings, Opinions, and Recommendations of the court of inquiry. In the terse Recommendation Number 8, he wrote, “No further proceedings recommended in case of Lt. Comdr. James A. Marks, U.S.N., CO Hull.”
Regarding Halsey, Nimitz was “of the firm opinion that no question of negligence is involved.” Mitigating the court’s findings somewhat, he softened its language toward the admiral by removing the word “faults” and wrote that Halsey’s mistakes “were errors of judgment committed under stress of war operations and stemming from a commendable desire to meet military requirements.”
In conclusion, he said, “No further action is contemplated or recommended.”
The Navy Department concurred. In fact, such was Halsey’s fame and reputation that Adm. Ernest J. King, commander in chief of the U.S. Navy, further moderated the judgment by substituting the words “firm determination” for Nimitz’s phrase, “commendable desire,” in the final official report.
All in all, it appeared that most navy brass were more than anxious to put this typhoon unpleasantness behind them and move forward with the business of warfighting. MacArthur’s Luzon invasion was slated for January 1945, with Task Force 38 again scheduled to provide “Big Blue Blanket” air cover.
Survivors of the capsized Hull, Monaghan, and Spence were transported in stages to hospitals at Pearl Harbor. Upon sufficient recovery from their wounds, they were given back pay and granted four weeks of Stateside shore leave. Their lives, and stories, scattered to the four winds.
On January 2, Lt. (j.g.) Alphonso Krauchunas, along with the other 23 Spence survivors, was transferred from the Solace to the receiving ship USS Sturgis. Every man was asked to write down the names of any shipmates they had seen in the water following the Spence’s capsize. They reported spotting an additional 23 shipmates in the high seas. These names were incorporated into the roster of 294 officers and men presumed to have gone down with the ship. This was about 45 more men than the Monaghan and Hull had each lost.
Not long afterward, the Hull’s chief bosun’s mate, Ray Schultz, was being conveyed to Pearl on an ancient minesweeper when, fifteen days out of Ulithi, the vessel broke down. Fearful that her skipper would issue the order to abandon ship, he nearly collapsed in relief when she was instead attached to a freighter’s towline and lugged into port. Similarly, during Pat Douhan’s Stateside journey from Pearl aboard an old four-stack destroyer, a fire broke out in her engine room and her skipper was contemplating abandoning ship. When Douhan and several other typhoon survivors heard this, they raced belowdecks to assist the firefighting gang in dousing the flames. There was no way they were going back into the water.
Monaghan fireman Evan Fenn remained on the Solace for a month while being treated for the saltwater ulcers on his legs. Arriving finally at Pearl, he hitched a ride on a destroyer to the naval base at California’s San Pedro Island. He slept on the cold steel deck and developed a hacking cough. From San Pedro he was transferred to a naval station in Utah, where the freezing weather exacerbated his condition, and he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He was shipped back to a California naval hospital, where his diagnosis was downgraded to pneumonia. He spent the next eight months in sick bay before being transferred to a naval hospital in New Mexico, where he recovered fully.
Tragicomic indignities continued to shadow the Monaghan’s “ghost sailor” Keith Abbott. As he had never officially been stricken from the roster of the destroyer escort Emery, he was immediately transferred back to her without any shore leave other than the few days he spent recovering on Ulithi. From Ulithi, Abbott was unable to contact either his wife or his parents, and worried that his brother, a naval intelligence officer based in Florida, had surely heard of the Monaghan’s sinking and delivered to his folks the bad news. He hadn’t, as Abbott learned when he finally exchanged telegrams with his brother. So Abbott evasively wrote his wife and parents that he “had gotten off the Monaghan,” deliberately trying to give the impression that he had already transferred back to the Emery before she went down. He knew he was to remain in the Pacific Theater for the remainder of the war and didn’t want his loved ones to worry needlessly.
On December 29, 1944, Halsey was piped aboard the Tabberer to personally award Lt. Comdr. Henry Lee Plage the navy’s Legion of Merit. A day earlier, when inquiring about Plage’s experience, Halsey had been flabbergasted to find that the skipper was not only just twenty-nine years old, but a reservist to boot. “I expected to learn that he had cut his teeth on a marlinspike,” he wrote. “How can any enemy ever defeat a country that can pull boys like that out of its hat?”
After pinning the medal on Plage’s tunic, the admiral turned to address the Tabby’s crew.
“Captain Plage, officers and men of the Tabberer,” he began. “I am greatly honored, privileged, and it is with great pleasure that I come over here this morning to tell you what I think of you as the commander of Third Fleet. Your seamanship, endurance, and courage, and the plain guts that you exhibited during the typhoon that we went through, is an epic of naval history and will be long remembered by your children and their children’s children.
“It is this plain guts displayed throughout the world by the American forces of all branches that is winning the war for us. How those yellow bastards ever thought they could lick American men is beyond my comprehension. Keep going until the final thing, and the final thing should be the complete destruction of the Japanese empire. If I had my way there would not be a Jap yellow bastard alive, but I guess I won’t have it my way.”
Despite wartime protocols, by mid-January 1945 military censors realized it was no longer possible to keep the story of Typhoon Cobra under wraps. The Navy’s Public Affairs Department reminded reporters of the need to hold back detailed information regarding specific Third Fleet losses and damages—which could render aid and comfort to the enemy—and released the account with an emphasis on the rescue operation. Lt. Comdr. Henry Lee Plage and members of his crew were made available to the press. Their first-person accounts made front-page headlines across the United States—a deft counteraction to the bad news emanating from the disturbing Nazi advances at the Battle of the Bulge.
“Courage and Plain Guts,” the Atlanta Constitution called it. “Destroyer Crewmen Risk Lives to Save 55 During Typhoon,” bannered the Honolulu Advertiser. The narratives of individual Tabby sailors whose hometowns were nearby were provided to the Boston Globe, Kansas City Star, and San Francisco Examiner, among other newspapers. The front-page, January 20, 1945, account in the New York Times began, “One of the most dramatic play-by-play accounts of rescue at sea to come out of the war in the Pacific was told here today by the commanding officer of the USS Tabberer.” Two days later correspondent Webley Edwards in Pearl Harbor filed an audio report for CBS World News Today, which included a live interview with Plage.
This initial burst of publicity obscured the fact that the transcript from the official court of inquiry was classified “Top Secret,” and so buried for decades to come.
The Tabby spent several weeks in January reservicing at Pearl. As she was being fitted with a new mast and had her superstructure repaired, her crew was housed in the swank Royal Hawaiian Hotel and feted with free beer and ice cream. Rumor had it that Adm. Alexander Sharp, father of rescued Hull lieutenant George Sharp, had personally arranged for the accommodations. No one complained. Nor was there any objection when the entire crew was awarded, en masse, the first-ever Navy Unit Commendation Ribbon from Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal.
Meanwhile, on Capt. Henry Plage’s recommendation, Lieutenants Robert M. Surdam and Howard J. Korth, Torpedoman’s Mate 1st Class Robert Lee Cotton, and Bosun’s Mate 1st Class Louis Anthony Purvis were each awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for heroism. For Purvis the honor was particularly freighted with irony. After completing basic training in 1941, Purvis had been assigned to the light cruiser USS Juneau, but a case of the mumps had kept him from reporting to the ship and it sailed without him. He was thus billeted on a destroyer escort on Friday, November 13, 1942, when the Juneau went down off Guadalcanal with all hands, including the five Sullivan brothers memorialized by Hollywood in the 1944 film The Fighting Sullivans.
Within a month of her completed repairs, the Tabberer returned to bombardment and submarine screening duties during the landings on Iwo Jima. One day, when Plage was summoned ashore, he anchored the Tabby close enough for the crew to watch the American flag being raised on Mount Suribachi. From Iwo Jima she subsequently saw action during the invasion of Okinawa, bombarding the island and fending off kamikazes as her crew watched in horror from the aft fantail as Japanese women and children, so petrified at the arrival of the “barbarian” Americans, jumped to their deaths from the seaside cliffs.
On April 24, 1946, less than a year after Henry Plage had been transferred to the Naval War College at Annapolis, Maryland, and two years and a day after she had been commissioned at the Brown Shipbuilding Yard in Houston, Texas, the USS Tabberer was decommissioned. She had steamed over 110,000 miles, none so important as the few hundred of her boxed search on December 18, 19, and 20, 1944.
In the name of the President of the United States, the Commander, Third Fleet, United States Pacific Fleet, takes pleasure in awarding the Legion of Merit to
LIEUTENANT COMMANDER HENRY L. PLAGE
UNITED STATES NAVAL RESERVE
for service as set forth in the following
CITATION
For exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service to the Government as Commanding Officer of the U.S.S. Tabberer operating in the Western Pacific war area from December 18, 1944 to December 20, 1944. During this period, while his ship was combating a storm of hurricane intensity and mountainous seas causing severe damage, Lieutenant Commander PLAGE directed the rescue of fifty-five survivors from two destroyers which foundered as a result of the same storm. In spite of seemingly insurmountable hardships and adverse conditions, he persisted in the search for survivors for fifty-one hours. Lieutenant Commander PLAGE’s courageous leadership and excellent seamanship through treacherous and storm-swept seas and his timely reports aided materially in the rescue of additional survivors by other ships which later arrived at the scene. His outstanding conduct was in keeping with the highest tradition of the United States Naval Service.
W. F. Halsey
Admiral, U.S. Navy
THE SECRETARY OF THE NAVY
WASHINGTON
The Secretary of the Navy takes pleasure in commending the
UNITED STATES SHIP TABBERER
For service as follows:
For extremely meritorious service in the rescue of survivors following the foundering of two [sic] United States Destroyers in the Western Pacific Typhoon of December 18, 1944. Unmaneuverable in the wind-lashed seas, fighting to maintain her course while repeatedly falling back into the trough, with her mast lost and all communications gone, the U.S.S. TABBERER rode out the tropical typhoon and, with no opportunity to repair the damage, gallantly started her search for survivors, steaming at ten knots, she stopped at short intervals and darkened her decks where the entire crew topside, without sleep or rest for 36 hours, stood watch to listen for the whistles and shouts of survivors and to scan the turbulent waters for small lights attached to kapok jackets which appeared and then became obscured in troughs blocked off by heavy seas.
Locating one survivor or a group, the TABBERER stoutly maneuvered to windward, drifting down to her objective and effecting rescues in safety despite the terrific rolling which plunged her main deck under water. Again and again she conducted an expanding box search, persevering in her hazardous mission for another day and night until she had rescued fifty-five storm tossed and exhausted survivors and had brought them aboard to be examined, treated and clothed.
Brave and seaworthy in her ready service, the TABBERER, in this heroic achievement, has implemented the daring seamanship and courage of her officers and men.
All personnel attached to and serving on board the TABBERER, during the above mentioned operation, are hereby authorized to wear the NAVY UNIT COMMENDATION RIBBON.
James Forrestal
Secretary of the Navy