History would be kind to Adm. William Frederick Halsey Jr., for he intended to write it. And though he did devote four pages to the Third Fleet’s encounter with Typhoon Cobra in his 1947 autobiography Admiral Halsey’s Story (written with Joseph Bryan III), true to his word, he never spoke nor wrote about the ensuing court of inquiry for the rest of his life.
That task was left to naval historians, the most penetrating of whom, the Harvard professor Samuel Eliot Morison, defended Halsey vociferously in volume 13 of his fifteen-volume masterpiece History of the United States Naval Operations in Wold War II. Wrote Morison, “In my opinion—after rereading the testimony fourteen years later, and examining the meteorological data then available to Admiral Halsey—the court was not fair to Commander Third Fleet. It assumed that the typhoon sent out warnings long before there were signs of anything more than a normal tropical disturbance.”
From the perspective of sixty-odd years of hindsight, this sounds about right. Shining what the American revolutionary Patrick Henry called the “lamp of experience” on the typhoon incident, Morison spotlighted the primitive meteorological facilities available to Halsey at the time and contrasted this to the admiral’s inherently bold leadership, and strategic and tactical attack instincts. These same instincts again came to the fore during the final operations against Japan in the summer of 1945.
Halsey’s brilliant use of air strikes and “Slew” McCain’s “Big Blue Blanket” in the war’s closing hours further pulverized what was left of the enemy’s meager naval and air forces, and decimated the Japanese mainland’s industrial base and war industries. After the atomic bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Halsey would maintain that his life reached its climax at 9:25 A.M., September 2, 1945—when he joined MacArthur in formally accepting Japan’s unconditional surrender from Emperor Hirohito’s envoys aboard his flagship battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
Four months later Halsey was awarded his fifth star and promoted to fleet admiral, a position the U.S. Congress amended to “for life” in April 1946. “My only fear,” he wrote to a friend, “is that the extra stripe is going to interfere with my drinking arm.”
That same year Halsey embarked on a tour of Latin America at the request of President Harry Truman, and upon his return eschewed several lucrative private-sector job offers to accept the chairmanship of the development fund drive at the University of Virginia, the school he attended for a year before enrolling at Annapolis.
Now sixty-five, he and his wife settled briefly in Charlottesville, but the old seaman’s character remained his fate, and the “sheer boredom” of moving from command of the world’s greatest fleet to pleading with alumni for donations left him unfulfilled and discontented. When the offer came to join the board of directors of the International Telephone & Telegraph Company, he jumped at the chance to move to New York City.
As IT&T’s—and America’s—goodwill ambassador, Halsey circled the globe collecting shelfloads of foreign awards, national orders, and Grand Crosses from grateful allies. Through these years the admiral occasionally battled with historians and journalists who questioned his decisions during the Battle for Leyte Gulf (as Morison did) and Typhoon Cobra. His fiery defenses can be fairly well encapsulated by the ancient Greek proverb, “It is the sins we don’t commit we regret.”
In 1957, while raising money in a failed effort to turn his old flagship, the carrier USS Enterprise, into a naval museum, he suffered a mild stroke. He recovered enough to travel to California to visit his son, now married to Admiral Nimitz’s daughter. While there, he also took a trip to the production set of The Gallant Hours, the movie based on his book, starring James Cagney. But, now walking with a cane, afflicted by cataracts, on August 15, 1959, the admiral was vacationing on Fishers Island in Long Island Sound—not far from the Halsey family’s ancestral home in Sag Harbor, New York—when he took his usual wade through the beach surf, retired, and failed to appear for breakfast the next morning. He was discovered in his bed, dead from a heart attack at the age of seventy-six. He was given a state funeral in Washington’s National Cathedral and buried in Arlington Cemetery.
As Petrarch observed, a good death does honor to a whole life, and Admiral Halsey departed this vale within hailing distance of his beloved sea. He ranks among Jones, Perry, Dewey, and Farragut in the pantheon of American sailors. Like them, he kowtowed to no man, and his naval status and repute remain as fierce and honored as those of his legendary predecessors.
Adm. Chester Nimitz, who represented President Dwight Eisenhower at Halsey’s funeral, furled his CINCPAC flag at Pearl Harbor on November 26, 1945, in order to succeed Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King as Chief of United States Naval Operations. After two years in this post, he was appointed in 1949 by the United Nations as a roving goodwill ambassador, and two years after that moved home to San Francisco for good. Like Halsey, Nimitz was named five-star admiral “for life,” and also became an honorary president of the Naval Historical Foundation. He served for eight years as a regent of the University of California.
Ironically, Nimitz did much to foster postwar amity between the United States and Japan by raising funds to restore the battleship Mikasa, Adm. Heihachiro Togo’s flagship at the victorious Battle of Tsushima in 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War. Nimitz died on February 20, 1966.
The navy was not as kind to Vice Adm. John Sidney McCain. Having been awarded his second Distinguished Service Medal for actions off Iwo Jima, McCain was again at Halsey’s side, in command of Task Force 38, in June 1945 as it bombarded Okinawa and took heavy losses from kamikazes. Warned that a typhoon was approaching the American task groups from the south-southwest, Halsey ordered McCain to steam his ships due east. Once again the vessels sailed directly into the curving storm’s path. Though this time only 6 sailors were killed by what the navy dubbed Typhoon Viper, 36 ships were damaged and 76 aircraft destroyed. McCain became the scapegoat.
Following the court of inquiry investigating Typhoon Viper, a livid Navy Secretary James Forrestal was prepared to relieve both Halsey and McCain of their commands, but again Halsey’s reputation saved him. Admiral King convinced Forrestal that the demotion would be too great a blow to morale. This didn’t stop the Navy Department, however, from disciplining McCain. Halsey, ever loyal, rode for the brand and insisted McCain be present for the Japanese capitulation aboard the Missouri. But “Slew” left for the States as soon as the surrender papers were signed. He arrived home in California four days later. In the middle of a “Welcome home” party the following evening, he told his wife he felt ill, and fell dead from a heart attack. He was sixty-one.
McCain’s son, John Sidney “Jack” McCain Jr., a submarine commander during World War II, rose to the rank of four-star admiral as commander of all United States forces in the Pacific during the Vietnam War. It was during this conflict, in 1967, that his son, John Sidney McCain III, a naval aviator, was shot down over Hanoi, captured, tortured, and held in a North Vietnamese prison camp for five and a half years.
Fourteen years earlier, in 1953, the seventeen-year-old John S. McCain III had traveled to Bath, Maine, with his mother to witness Halsey deliver the dedication speech at the commissioning of the navy’s newest destroyer, the USS John S. McCain, named for his grandfather. Although “Slew” had been dead for eight years, Halsey began his speech haltingly, and midway through began to sob before announcing he was too overcome to speak any longer.
Later that evening, after the ceremony, the young McCain met Halsey at the reception. “Do you drink, boy?” the admiral asked.
The future United States senator eyed his mother warily and answered, “Well, no, I don’t.”
Halsey looked from the young McCain to his mother, and then back again. “Well, your grandfather drank bourbon and water.” He flagged a passing waiter. “Bring the boy a bourbon and water,” he said.
The two clinked glasses, and silently toasted the crusty and gnarled “Slew.”
Following Typhoon Cobra, Comdr. George F. Kosco remained the Third Fleet’s chief aerologist, serving on Halsey’s flagships New Jersey and, later, Missouri, for the duration of the war. He would later explore, by air and sea, the meteorology of both poles, and there is a glacier named after him in Antarctica. Like Kosco, Charles Calhoun, commander of the demasted Dewey, continued his career in the navy and retired at the rank of captain. In retirement he devoted time to researching and writing the book Typhoon: The Other Enemy, a detailed, first-person chronicle of the plight of his destroyer. It was published by the Naval Institute Press in 1981. When last contacted, in 2006, Calhoun was a hale and hearty ninety-three.
A decade after the deactivation of Destroyer Squadron 23’s “Little Beavers” so saddened its commander, Capt. Arleigh “31-Knot” Burke, DS23 was reactivated by then Adm. Arleigh Burke, Chief of United States Naval Operations, and has operated continuously since within the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet. And after making way for Nimitz as Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Ernest J. King served in an advisory capacity in the office of the secretary of the navy, and as president of the Naval Historical Foundation. He died at the Naval Hospital, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on June 25, 1956.
Excepting Halsey, by far the most prominent name to escape the gales and giant combers of Typhoon Cobra was the Monterey’s Lt. (j.g.) Gerald Rudolph Ford. Ravaged by wave, wind, and fire, the Monterey was declared unfit for service and dispatched Stateside for repairs. Ford, meanwhile, was transferred to the Navy Pre-flight School in California, and from there to the Naval Reserve Training Command Air Station in Illinois. Promoted to lieutenant commander, he received his honorable discharge in 1946 and won his first U.S. congressional seat in his home state of Michigan in 1948.
Known as a reliable and loyal Republican, he served on the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and, in 1973, was appointed to the vice presidency under Richard Nixon after the resignation of Spiro Agnew. In 1974, after Nixon resigned, Ford took office. As president, Ford pardoned Nixon of any crimes (“Our long national nightmare is over”), and was the target of two assassination attempts. He ran for reelection in 1976, but lost to the Democrat Jimmy Carter.
Ironically, for all the glory and praise heaped upon the Tabberer and her crew, by far the most famous ship to survive Typhoon Cobra never existed. Following World War II, former Pacific Theater naval officer Herman Wouk immortalized the destroyer-minesweeper USS Caine in his 1952 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Caine Mutiny. It was subsequently made into an award-winning Broadway play, and a movie starring Humphrey Bogart.
Although Wouk had not been present for the typhoon, the setting for his fictional mutiny against the overmatched Captain Queeg is believed, especially among old tars, to be based on the actions in the pilothouse of the USS Hull on the fateful morning of December 18, 1944.
Following the war, the less-heralded actors in the drama that was Typhoon Cobra returned home, relocated, married, raised families, divorced, found God, took solace in the bottle, ran companies, worked in factories and farms, doted on grandchildren and great-grandchildren, lived productive or desperate lives, and—in many cases—never spoke about the events of December 1944 for years, if at all.
Some, such as the Hull’s Archie DeRyckere and the Spence’s loquacious Chief Watertender George Johnson, made a career of the navy. DeRyckere spent twenty-eight years in the service; Johnson, “from a navy family,” served for twenty-one.
Others, like Hull communications officer Lt. (j.g.) Lloyd Rust—who drifted for forty-four hours across the Philippine Sea—followed Ford into public service. Rust returned to Texas, earned his law degree, and raised four daughters as a widower while serving as a district attorney, a county judge, a district judge, and a twice-elected representative to the Texas state legislature. And at least one, Cape Esperance seaman Paul Schlener, fulfilled a promise he had made to his Lord for saving him that frightening night. Paul and his brother and their wives spent over forty years as missionaries in the Amazon section of Brazil.
Spence “deck apes” Floyd Balliett and Bob Ayers lost touch with each other. After Balliett’s discharge, he remained in Long Beach, California, and spent a career working for the Ford Motor Company. Ayers, meanwhile, was stationed in Utah for the remainder of the war, where he met and married a local girl, and when his enlistment expired he took her back to Chicago. Ayers’s bride did not care for the big city, and the two moved on to Iowa, where Ayers became a traffic manager for a trucking firm before starting his own small freight-hauling business. The old Great Lakes schooner sailor admitted in 2004 that he never lost his love of the sea.
After being hospitalized for pneumonia in New Mexico, Monaghan fireman Evan Fenn was discharged and remained in the Southwest, becoming an Arizona rancher. “I finally lost that fluid in my lungs and got well,” he said in 2005. “And I haven’t been sick since.”
Fenn’s “ghost sailor” crewmate, Radar Maintenance Technician Keith Abbott, rode out the end of World War II aboard the destroyer escort Emery, taking part in the landings on Iwo Jima. From there the Emery sailed to San Francisco for reservicing in preparation of the invasion of mainland Japan. Abbott was in San Francisco when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He never went back to sea. Plagued by nightmares for six months following the typhoon—“survivor’s guilt dreams,” he called them—Abbott said in 2005, “I was glad to get them out of my system before I brought them home to my family.” Honorably discharged in November 1945, the navy gave Abbott $32.30 in mileage allowance to make his way home to St. George, Utah. From there he moved his family to California, where he became a successful businessman.
Like many survivors, for fifty-eight years Abbott never told a soul, not even his spouse, about his experience in and after Typhoon Cobra. In 2004, at the urging of his wife, the couple booked a cruise through the South Pacific tailored specifically for World War II veterans. His cruise ship skirted the waters of seven of the Monaghan’s campaigns as well as sailed to within a few hundred miles of where the destroyer now lies on the ocean floor. This inspired Abbott to begin, first, a journal, and finally a brief record of his adventures for his family.
Many of the men who endured the typhoon kept in touch, and ships’ reunions that lasted through the 1980s and 1990s were common. The Hull’s were usually organized by the sonarman Pat Douhan who, following the typhoon, returned to the States on survivor leave in time to be present for the birth of his son (who grew up to become a Seabee and serve two tours of duty in Vietnam). Of the thirteen Hull sailors who had left pregnant wives behind on the vessel’s last voyage, Douhan was one of three to make it home alive.
Afterward, Douhan was assigned to duty in the Fleet Post Office in San Francisco, and was responsible for forwarding mail to the remaining Hull survivors or—“the saddest part”—stamping “Return to Sender” on letters and packages addressed to dead crewmates. He had been a trumpet player before enlisting, and he soon found himself playing with the Fleet Post Office’s dance band in small San Francisco nightclubs and halls. He enjoyed it so much that when his hitch was up, he enlisted for six more years. Upon his discharge, he and his family moved back to his hometown of Madeira, California, just north of Fresno. As a member of his local VFW Honor Guard, Douhan still plays taps at funeral services for local veterans and remains an avowed “water bug,” swimming laps every morning.
Hull chiefs Ray Schultz and Archie DeRyckere became regular attendees at the reunions Douhan organized, which were, needless to say, often bittersweet. Schultz married a Seattle girl, moved to the Pacific Northwest, and became a Seattle firefighter. He arrived at one reunion with cartons of ball caps to hand out to his former shipmates. Above the brim they read “Halsey’s Swimming Team.” To this day, he said in 2005, “I don’t go near the water.”
Not to be outdone, DeRyckere showed up at the next reunion with ball caps that read “USS Hull Bodysurfing Team.” Unlike Schultz, his experience of capsizing and drifting across the waves did nothing to dim DeRyckere’s enthusiasm for the sea. He went on to command a U.S. Navy fleet tug in Alaska, run the Navy Hydrographic Office in Honolulu, and rise through the ranks to become an operations officer and amphibious training officer aboard various vessels. He retired in 1968 as a lieutenant commander, still studying his Bowditch, still loving the Hull.
“You say, ‘How can you love a ship, it’s just a piece of steel,’” he replied in response to a reporter’s question in 2005. “But it’s not just a piece of steel. It’s an accumulation of personalities and people. The captain, the exec, all of your shipmates, they all become brothers to you. The admiration is just there. And when you see a ship like that in danger, when you lose it, you lose a part of yourself.”
As the years passed and the ranks at the reunions thinned, Douhan began inviting former seamen from the rescuing ships to the affairs, and among the Hull crewmen were always sprinkled men from the Knapp, the Brown, the Swearer, and most especially the Tabberer.
“We didn’t feel like heroes at the time, it was just our job,” Tabby shipfitter Leonard Glaser said in 2005. Nonetheless, the captain of that little destroyer escort holds a special place in the hearts not only of the fifty-five men she plucked from the sea, but of the men who served under him. Through campaigns that encompassed the Mindoro landings, Typhoon Cobra, the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and the bombardment of the Japanese mainland in the final days of World War II, the Tabberer never sustained a single casualty. She was a lucky ship … for her crew and for others.
“I just thank the good Lord for Henry Plage,” said the Hull’s Ray Schultz. “I have more respect for him than anyone in the world.” Added the Spence’s Bob Ayers, “If he hadn’t disobeyed orders and kept looking, they wouldn’t have found us. Thank God for Henry Plage.”
For the remainder of his life Henry Plage corresponded with the sailors who served under him not only aboard the Tabberer, but also from the Donaldson and the LeHardy. In 1997 he addressed a letter to the entire surviving crew of the Tabby via the ship’s newsletter. “This I do know,” he wrote. “We will never give up our ties with each other and our mutual love. We came together during perilous times and survived by working together and looking out for each other, and by the Grace of God, Marge and I will look forward to future contact with each of you. Marge joins me in sending our everlasting love.”
In 2005 the former enlisted man Lawrence Howard, who sailed with Plage aboard the LeHardy, summed up his former commander thusly: “You’d have to know the man to understand exactly the way he was, so gentle, so concerned, but a man’s man through and through.”
On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of “Halsey’s Typhoon,” in 1984, Marjorie Plage penned the “Ode to the Men of the 418.” It reads, in part:
But, soon, you formed firm bonds
Of friends that were tried and true
Together you brought the Tabberer
Through Hell—safe—what a crew
The caps with Tabberer 418
Made each especially glad
For it showed that they were one
Of the best ships the Navy ever had
So again we salute you
Always hold your head high
For the record of your “Tabby”
Will never, never die.
Ten years later, on May 23, 1994, the exact date of the fiftieth anniversary of the USS Tabberer’s commissioning, survivors and shipmates of the Hull and Tabberer gathered on the grounds of the Admiral Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg, Texas—since renamed the National Museum of the Pacific War—to dedicate a plaque to Plage and the crew of the Tabby.
When Henry Plage appeared before the court of inquiry in late 1944, his testimony was limited to any suggestions he might have as to how to technically improve the stability of ships caught in a typhoon. He was not asked his opinion regarding Admiral Halsey’s complicity in the disaster, and for years never offered one. Later in life, however, he did volunteer to a reporter that he felt Halsey “was working blind,” and that the court of inquiry had been too harsh on the “old man.”
“I felt that was a bad decision because your hands are tied without the information,” Plage said in his Florida home. “You can’t predict a storm’s path. Or, you couldn’t back then, anyway.”
There was one more plaque to be dedicated. That was at the church of Henry and Marguerite Plage in Ocala, Florida, in December 2003. Services for “Mrs. Tabby” had been held there several years earlier, and more recently for her husband. The beloved captain had died on September 24, 2003, almost sixty years after he, his crew, and his little ship stayed in a typhoon to rescue men from the sea. The plaque, paid for by survivors’ donations, reads:
IN MEMORY OF
HENRY L. PLAGE
CAPTAIN USS TABBERER DE418
WITH GRATITUDE FOR THE 55 LIVES
HE SAVED
12-18-1944
FROM THE SURVIVORS AND CREW OF THE USS HULL DD350
Recently, those survivors—led by Archie DeRyckere and supported emphatically by former President Gerald Ford—have mounted a letter-writing campaign and public relations drive to have Comdr. (Ret.) Henry Lee Plage awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor, the United States’ highest military award (www.typhooncobra1944.net).
In DeRyckere’s petition to the secretary of the navy, he cites Plage’s distinguished and conspicuous gallantry and, “intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty.” And Ford, in a 2005 letter to the Department of the Navy’s Board of Decorations and Medals, offers “my strong support for a favorable decision on behalf of LCDR Henry L. Plage for the award of the Medal of Honor.”
The navy, as of this writing, has yet to render a decision.