Seventy-eight Degrees
A war correspondent wrote a graphic description of one of the Navy’s smallest ships:
A DE, my friend, is a Destroyer Escort. It’s a ship long and narrow, something like a destroyer but much smaller. They are rough and tumble little ships. Their decks are laden with depth charges. They can turn in half the space of a destroyer.
They roll and they plunge. They buck and they twist. They shudder and they fall through space. They are in the air half the time, under water half the time, their sailors say they should have flight pay and submarine pay both.401
The men of USS Conklin (DE-439) experienced their share of rolling and plunging during antisubmarine duty in the Pacific. In June 1945, however, they were struck by a typhoon with seas of a magnitude seldom seen by any sailor. After a night of violent wind and waves, the storm reached its peak at about 5:00 a.m.
Suddenly the men on the bridge saw an incredibly huge wave building off the port bow. Seconds later they were thrown around like matchsticks as the little ship was knocked over on her side. Three sailors were killed as the ship lost all power and fuel oil flooded the decks.
The Conklin ’s inclinometer measured a roll of seventy-eight degrees, past the point of no return for a ship of her type. After seventy-two degrees the laws of physics decreed that she should keep rolling. In the next instant, however, another wave struck the ship at just the right angle to knock her upright. The Conklin survived her ordeal thanks in part to the desperate efforts and superb seamanship of her crew. Most of them, however, ever after felt that they had experienced a miracle and the hand of God acting to save their little ship and their lives.402 Human hands could not have brought the Conklin back from a seventy-eight degree roll.
He got up and rebuked the wind and the raging waters; the storm subsided, and all was calm. “Where is your faith?” he asked his disciples.
—Luke 8:24–25