December 18, 1944
The Philippine Sea, 500 Miles East of Luzon
Chief Quartermaster Archie DeRyckere was more astonished than frightened. He craned his neck to stare at the massive waves, churning gouts of water, some reaching ninety feet in height. The seas were not only mammoth, but confused by a backing wind that slammed into the sheer, flint gray walls of ocean and seemed to suspend them in midair, like looming, petrified hills. The USS Hull rolled at unprecedented angles, slip-sliding nearly stern-first into the trough.
DeRyckere had sailed through weather before, none like this. The rain blew hard, horizontal, pelting the bridge like grapeshot and pocking the skin of any seaman who had the hard luck to face it. As another huge comber marbled the Hull’s deck with whitewater, the chief was reminded of a set of tumblers clicking into place, locking the 2,100-ton destroyer in irons.
For the better part of the morning DeRyckere had listened with mounting disbelief from his station on the bridge as the Hull’s TBS (talk-between-ships) ship-to-ship wireless flashed scratchy distress calls from across the whole upheaval of the Philippine Sea. Vessels unaccounted for. Men swept overboard. Fighter planes blown into the sea off the decks of carriers. Cruisers dead in the water. The 170-odd ships comprising Adm. William F. Halsey Jr.’s Third Pacific Fleet, the United States Navy’s Big Blue Fleet, had been ambushed by a tropical cyclone, and the most powerful armada in the world was scattered and running for its life. This was far worse, DeRyckere thought, than anything the Japanese had thrown at them over the past three days.
As the long swells rocked the Hull, DeRyckere kept a wary eye on the ship’s inclinometer, the device used to measure the angle of a vessel’s horizontal sway. The wind and waves were beginning to push the instrument’s needle to its stop limit of 73 degrees. After each roll the destroyer would rebound painfully, as if wounded, and begin the slow, vertical climb to right herself. Belowdecks, pumpers and bucket brigades were encountering nightmares. With each seismic heel, sailors grabbed onto fittings and projections in the overhead, their feet hanging free of the deck. On some rolls they lost both their footing and their grips, and pitched shoulder-deep into water that sloshed up against the bulkheads.
DeRyckere remembered the Hull’s variance; she had been certified to recover from a maximum roll of 72 degrees. Soon enough, he feared, there would come a heel from which the ship would not recoup. She was too top-heavy. The destroyer, one of the old Farragut-class “gold platers,” had been designed in the mid-1930s as a 1,500-tonner. Compared to the cumbersome four-stackers of the Great War, her lines and living quarters were considered luxurious. But over the course of this conflict the addition of radar mounts on the tip of her mast and extra armament on her deck had pushed her well past her projected sailing weight.
In the pilothouse, beneath the starboard portal, DeRyckere watched as Joe Jambor was knocked to his knees as the Hull was rocked by another mountainous surge. Jambor was the ship’s chief electrician, a pale, willowy sailor who looked as if daylight would kill him. The chief read the expression on Jambor’s face as he scrambled to his feet; it was as if he were mentally composing a suicide note. He told DeRyckere that water was pouring in through blown hatches from stem to stern, yet the ship’s pumps were not operating to full capacity because her new skipper, Lt. Comdr. James Alexander Marks, refused to divert electricity from the engine room.
The bilges were already overflowing, Jambor said, and he couldn’t pump them out. “He’s going full power because he’s getting reports from all over the fleet that ships are in trouble,” he said, his face turned away from the captain. “He thinks he can save them.”
Jambor wiped his brow with a dirty neckerchief. “Maybe he’d better think about saving us first.”
Then Jambor was gone, scrambling down the outside skipper’s ladder, bent double against the wind lashing the sea-washed deck. In seconds his silhouette disappeared behind a veil of gray rain and scud, and DeRyckere turned back toward Marks.
At six-foot-three, with wide, strong shoulders tapering down to a wasp waist, DeRyckere towered over the Hull’s commander. Four days shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, the chief cut a figure with his jutting chin, long aquiline nose, and broad forehead shading hooded blue eyes that seemed to flicker with some hidden delight. Among the crew he was known for his self-deprecating humor and sea chest full of stories—including the time he’d inadvertently helped load the Hull’s antiaircraft guns with star-shell flares instead of frags during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. “We’re trying to kill the bastards, not illuminate them!” an angry gunner’s mate had finally shouted.
His scant formal education belied DeRyckere’s intelligence, and he had “booked up” from seaman second class to chief quartermaster in his four years on the Hull. Chiefs were the backbone of the U.S. Navy, and DeRyckere fit the template. He was an adroit helmsman, skilled at navigation and celestial sailing, and one of his collateral duties was to synchronize each of the ship’s clocks. As such he was also considered a “walking newspaper” on his daily rounds belowdecks, spreading scuttlebutt, making small talk—a fair posture from which to take the temperature of the destroyer’s complement of 263 sailors.
He told friends that he’d inherited his affinity for the sea from his paternal forebears, one of whom, a Spanish sailor, had gone down with the Armada in 1588 and washed up on the lowland shores of the Netherlands. There he’d anglicized his name and begun a line of DeRyckeres that extended to Archie’s father, who’d emigrated to the United States, settled in Laurel, Montana, outside of Billings, and married a Norwegian girl whose parents still lived in the tiny arctic circle village of Sunndal.
DeRyckere liked to joke that it was from his mother’s side of the family that he’d acquired his “Viking blood.” But in truth, though a strong swimmer in lakes and rivers as a boy, he had never glimpsed the ocean until he enlisted in October 1940 with the notion of becoming a fighter pilot. He had spent part of his youth as a section hand, a gandy dancer, on the Northern Pacific Railroad, and when railroad work was scarce he’d picked cherries and thinned apple trees in orchards throughout Washington state. And he had a mechanical touch, which led to a stint as a grease monkey—“lubrication technician,” DeRyckere preferred—at a Montana service station. But before he’d joined the navy he’d rarely seen so much as a church steeple as tall as the breakers that now fashioned the liquid walls of the canyon engulfing the USS Hull.
The captain’s paralysis bewildered DeRyckere. The chief was aware that “Bull” Halsey was so anxious for a fight with the Japanese that he had directed every vessel of the fleet to remain on station despite the high seas. The smart move, the seaman’s move, would have been to allow them to run for their lives. And though it would later be made known that individual commanders throughout the fleet’s task groups had disobeyed Halsey and taken the initiative to dog down for a typhoon, no official typhoon warning had yet emanated either from the CINCPAC weather station at Pearl Harbor or from Halsey’s flag bridge on the battleship USS New Jersey.
The Hull’s job was to screen for enemy submarines as Halsey’s fighting task forces rendezvoused and refueled, mid-ocean, from the bunkers of the lumbering oiler groups. Captain Marks’s stubborn insistence on maintaining station may have had admirable motives but, given the circumstances, the skipper’s fealty to duty in his first combat command did not instill in Chief Quartermaster Archie DeRyckere any great sense of confidence.
Just before 10:00 A.M. the largest wave yet, streaked with blue shadows, slammed into the Hull’s starboard quarter. The ship lurched awkwardly and heeled to port. There she remained, “as helpless as a cork in a river eddy,” refusing to respond to any combination of rudder and engines. DeRyckere planted his feet on the bulkhead, the deck now at eye level. He was standing several paces behind Marks, who was staring straight ahead, wedged into the rear port corner of the pilothouse. The captain uttered not a word and refused to return DeRyckere’s measured look, as though unable to acknowledge that he was losing control of his ship.
DeRyckere wondered over the fate of the other vessels in Admiral Halsey’s flotilla.