Planes were flying through it normally, patrol planes, making it look like a normal storm. On the same night, Pearl Harbor coded reports to me that gave us storm indications in about the same location, a tropical storm, very weak, and I didn’t think it would amount to much so I just took it under advisement. And I told the Admiral and Chief of Staff that I didn’t think it would amount to anything serious and that from present indications it wouldn’t give us much trouble.
—TESTIMONY OF COMDR. GEORGE F. KOSCO, U.S. NAVY, AEROLOGIST AND NAVIGATOR, COMMANDER, THIRD FLEET STAFF ABOARD THE USS NEW JERSEY, TO THE COURT OF INQUIRY INVESTIGATING “HALSEY’S TYPHOON.”
Positioning and utilizing his new destroyer escorts such as Lt. Comdr. Henry Lee Plage’s Tabberer was only one of the several strategies Halsey addressed before his Third Fleet sailed from Ulithi. There was also the dilemma of the kamikazes, compounded by a nettlesome mystery. After the Battle for Leyte Gulf, land-based Japanese aircraft from Luzon to Formosa had seemed to intuit the exact location of his carrier task forces each time he positioned them for air strikes. The admiral who claimed to favor the Police Gazette knew he needed sharp minds to help him solve this mystery. None, in Halsey’s opinion, came sharper than Vice Adm. John Sidney “Slew” McCain’s.
War is the best teacher of war, Clausewitz said, and McCain was an apt student. Thus when the Third Fleet steamed home from Leyte, Halsey rotated an exhausted Marc Mitscher out of the command of carrier Task Force 38 and replaced him with McCain.
Skinny and wrinkled, his face as pinched as a hatchet blade— “an ugly old aviator,” his friend the author James Michener called him—McCain looked as if he had been run over by a freight train and not fully reassembled. Wherever he went, he sported a drab and threadbare green fatigue cap upon which his wife had sewn an old “scrambled eggs” visor encrusted with verdigris. Even the tolerant Halsey found McCain’s hat “revolting.” But McCain’s subordinates knew to race as if their lives depended on it to retrieve the combat talisman should it blow off the admiral’s head at sea.
McCain looked as if he shaved with a blowtorch, and walked with a gait described as a “series of jerks,” a shambling pace that earned him the nickname “Popeye the Sailor Man” among enlisted men. He scattered tobacco to the winds as he rolled his own Bull Durham cigarettes with one hand, and was prone to uttering strings of muttered oaths through false teeth so ill fitting that his mouth inadvertently clicked and whistled as he spoke. Slightly stooped, and weighing no more than 140 pounds dripping wet, McCain, in short, did not look the part of a master tactical planner. But that is precisely what he was.
Although two years younger than Halsey, the two could have been separated at birth such were their common interests—not the least of which included their mutual fondness for a dram of spirits, in McCain’s case three fingers of Kentucky bourbon and water. A wartime magazine profile of McCain noted that the admiral preferred to work in his flag quarters in his stocking feet, and was “one of the Navy’s best plain and fancy cussers.” Once, when his wife suggested a new, expensive treatment for his congenital ulcers, McCain pounded his fist on the table and exploded, “Not one penny of my money for doctors—I’m spending it all on riotous living.”
McCain was of Scottish descent, the scion of illustrious military forebears who reached back through American history nearly as far as the Halseys. A maternal ancestor had served on Gen. George Washington’s Revolutionary War staff; two more on his father’s side had fought in the War of 1812 and the Civil War (for the Confederacy). He in turn would become the father to a future commander of the United States Pacific Fleet, and grandfather to a future Vietnam prisoner of war turned Arizona senator and Republican presidential candidate.
The McCains were an army clan, and Camp McCain, in Grenada, Mississippi, was named after an uncle. “Slew” became the first McCain to eschew West Point, and graduated from the Naval Academy in 1906. His initial post-Annapolis assignment was to the Philippines, where he acquired a lifelong love of gambling, and he was eventually posted as executive officer to the gunboat USS Panay, captained by Ens. Chester Nimitz—a vessel destined to be bombed to the bottom of the Yangtze River in 1937 during the infamous Japanese Rape of Nanking.
In another eerie similarity to his old friend and superior officer, following McCain’s service aboard an armored cruiser during the Great War, he had hectored his way into navy flight school and, like Halsey, earned his wings past his fiftieth birthday. Promoted to vice admiral, he had served with “Bull” in the South Pacific, commanding all land-based aircraft during the Battle for Guadalcanal. One evening, while he, Nimitz, and Halsey were touring Henderson Field, the Japanese attempted to assassinate the three admirals with a lightning air raid. As bombs fell about him, McCain dived into what he thought was a drainage ditch, and spent the night in an active latrine. None the worse for his usual wear, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal and transferred to Washington, D.C., where he ran the Bureau of Naval Aeronautics with tactical brilliance.
McCain’s experiences on Guadalcanal taught him one overriding lesson: In the Pacific the navy had too few planes, too few pilots to fly them, and too few crews to service and maintain them. In Washington he lobbied, bullied, and brayed about the corridors of the War Department until he convinced the Joint Chiefs not only to accelerate production of the stubby, stubborn Wildcat fighter planes and Avenger torpedo bombers, but also to train and assign two separate crews for every aircraft in the theater. That mission accomplished, in the summer of 1944 he was reassigned to the Third Fleet, where Halsey referred to him as “not much more than my right arm.”
On Ulithi, Halsey maintained a deliberately casual routine, and it was his habit to refrain from discussing military tactics at dinner with his staff in flag mess. But as soon as the table was cleared, abiding by his war credo that too much is never enough, he schemed well into the night with his inner circle of Dirty Tricksters, now including McCain, who skiffed across the harbor from his berth on the carrier USS Hancock.
The New Jersey was a floating city, with a complement of 1,800 enlisted men and close to 100 officers. Halsey preferred the big battlewagon as his flagship—as opposed to a carrier—because his penchant for obtaining as many creative opinions as possible required space for a large staff. Flag country was in the tower’s superstructure, with the admiral’s bridge below it, and the chart-laden flag plot below that. Halsey slept in quarters beneath flag plot, and it was around the large oval table in the cabin next to his bedroom where the Dirty Tricksters argued into the night.
On Ulithi they approached the Japanese defenses on the Philippines in much the manner that a skilled boxer takes on a plodding puncher—with a lot of cape, and then the sword. Mindoro, a small, isolated island 250 miles north of Leyte, was tucked under the shadow of Luzon. Strategically worthless in and of itself as a military objective, it would, however, provide air bases within striking distance of Manila for MacArthur’s bombers.
The Japanese War Ministry had positioned 250,000 seasoned troops of the Fourteenth Imperial Army on Luzon for a last stand, and its radio propagandists labeled the coming battle the war’s “most decisive.” Even taking into account Radio Tokyo’s dependable hyperbole, MacArthur and Nimitz held little doubt that Tokyo Rose was deadly serious when she promised the invading American Sixth Army “the hottest reception in the history of warfare.”
With this phalanx of defenders facing him on the ground, MacArthur needed to be sure that America owned the skies when the Luzon landings finally occurred. Nimitz and MacArthur agreed that the Third Fleet’s responsibility, meaning Halsey’s responsibility, during the Mindoro invasion would be to suppress and destroy as much enemy land-based airpower as possible on Luzon and a few smaller, surrounding islands. It was left to Halsey and his staff to figure out how, all the while avoiding kamikazes.
As the carriers Intrepid, Belleau Wood, and Franklin had all retired to Pearl Harbor for repairs, McCain suggested that for the Mindoro campaign Halsey downsize his carrier groups, from four to three. This would not only retain ample space for air operations, but the compressed task groups would be more effective at concentrating defensive antiaircraft fire against suicide attacks. Halsey also directed that a substantial increase be made in the fighter aircraft complement aboard his attack carriers.
But before tackling the problem of how to negate the kamikazes, however, he first fretted over the apparent Japanese foreknowledge of the movements of Third Fleet’s carrier groups. Several of the Dirty Tricksters blamed MacArthur, whose communications staff was suspected of lax discipline and loose lips. But Halsey had another idea. One day, while he treated his senior officers to a picnic on Mog Mog, he put it to the test.
Studying the Third Fleet’s post-Leyte after-action reports, the admiral noted that on numerous occasions his carriers had launched air raids from virtually the same coordinates in the Philippine Sea. They had also employed similar, fleetwide radio traffic patterns prior to the launches. To check his theory, Halsey ordered his radio operators to broadcast a series of bogus messages mimicking his previous transmissions. Sure enough, scout planes reported that after each broadcast, kamikazes mobilized and Japanese merchant vessels ran for cover from Luzon to the far side of the South China Sea. Despite the seriousness of the intelligence breach, Halsey had to laugh at the irony. He knew he was denigrated in certain navy quarters for “never doing the same thing twice.”
Following what he called his “picnic launch,” Halsey sent the antiaircraft cruiser USS San Juan to a remote position in the Western Pacific, where it began transmitting “urgent” dummy messages that he hoped would create the impression that the Third Fleet was already at sea. To further confuse the Japanese, on the advice of his Dirty Tricksters he directed all vessels remaining at Ulithi after the fleet’s departure three days hence to begin broadcasting communications of the same urgency and type. He hoped that any enemy code breakers would think the fleet was in two places at the same time.
Halsey and McCain next turned their attention to another ruse the Japanese had perfected, which was to tuck individual kamikazes close in behind returning American carrier-bound squadrons. “Tail-End Charlies” they were called, and to thwart them McCain suggested deploying a number of “Tom Cat” picket destroyers sixty miles off the attack carrier’s flanks. Each destroyer would be specially equipped with modern “bedspring” radar antennae as well as homing devices to act as buoy markers for the returning American planes.
As navy pilots made tight turns around these Tom Cats on their way home to their carriers, regular combat air patrols, or CAPs, protecting the destroyers would weed out and pick off these trailing bogeys—“delouse them,” as McCain had it—as well as alert the “Jack Patrols” flying low cover for the main body of the carrier fleet. Any aircraft failing to follow this procedure was automatically assumed to be a bandit.
Finally, at the end of the day it was McCain who deserved the lion’s share of credit for lifting the cloud that had darkened Halsey’s mood since the morning he had watched the suicide bandit slam into the Intrepid. For it was “Popeye” who spearheaded the plan for the preemptive “Big Blue Blanket,” an audacious strategy to completely nullify any kamikazes emanating from Luzon.
Named after the Naval Academy’s football team, the Big Blue Blanket gambit consisted of putting up a twenty-four-hour screen, or blanket, over every Japanese airfield on Luzon. To accomplish this, not only would Marine Corps fighter squadrons be incorporated for the first time ever into navy carrier air groups, but aboard each flattop the complement of fighter planes would be doubled, from 36 to 72, while dive bombers were halved. The number of torpedo planes, the two decided, would remain about the same.
The fighting component of the Third Fleet, Halsey’s carrier Task Force 38, was scheduled to weigh anchor for Mindoro on December 11. But the fleet’s undertaking was far from a one-day operation. Long-range picket destroyer escorts such as the Tabberer had departed December 9, and on December 10 the fleet’s oiler logistics group, dubbed Task Group 30.8, steamed from Ulithi.
TG 30.8 was a “unique and new refueling-at-sea organization” commanded by Capt. Jasper T. Acuff, a former submariner. Prior to the war, midocean refueling was as laborious as it was rare, accomplished one ship at a time by transferring oil by a lengthy hose that ran from fantail to bow. But innovations in refueling engineering now permitted two ships to take on oil simultaneously, not only hastening the procedure, but allowing carrier task groups to remain at sea for weeks while conducting air strikes.
Nimitz went out of his way to praise “the utmost skill in seamanship” of the unsung tanker crews who risked life and limb for little glory. As CINCPAC noted, “Not many an oiler will ever be able to paint a Jap flag, for planes downed or ships sunk, upon her bridge—but every man in the task force is aware of the importance of the contribution of these service ships.”
As oil hoses stretched no farther than 100 feet, this new technique of open-ocean refueling required attaching the hoses to ships pulling abreast of each other, to within 40 or 50 feet on either side. Sometimes a third vessel could even be refueled astern. This was no mean task even in calm waters: too slack and the hoses washed into the sea; too taut and they broke. Destroyers “drank” from the larger carriers, battlewagons, and cruisers, which in turn filled their own bunkers from the oilers. These piggyback assemblies steamed together like moving gas stations for up to four hours at a time at between five to twelve knots, which left them sitting ducks for enemy aircraft.
During refueling operations all captains personally assumed the conn, and only the most experienced helmsmen were allowed to maneuver the vessels. Further, the ship’s most qualified watch officer and a second helmsman were stationed aft in the emergency manual steering gear compartment, ready to assume control in the event of a malfunction on the bridge.
Acuff’s task group consisted of 27 oilers, 7 ammunition ships, 8 escort aircraft carriers, and 7 oceangoing tugs, with a combined 40 DDs and DEs assigned to screen them. Sailors had taken to calling the tough little escort carriers, with their flat tops laid over a tanker’s hull, “jeeps,” after the small but mighty creature Eugene the Jeep from the Popeye comic strip.
In addition to fuel oil and aviation gasoline, the task group was also charged with replenishing Task Force 38’s depleted stocks of aircraft replacement parts, food, ammunition, and—most important to sailors stranded at sea for weeks—mail. These underway replenishment operations, or “unreps,” proved vital to morale, although a moment’s inattention during these transfers could also spell disaster.
As one warning put it, “Aside from collisions, a parted line can cut men down like a scythe, a shattered block can be as lethal as a cannon shell, and unwary soldiers have been crushed to death by pallets of ammunition, food, and even bags of mail.” As Acuff well knew, unfavorable weather conditions only rendered the procedure all the more hazardous.
On December 10, as Acuff breached Ulithi harbor and shaped his task group west, he chewed over a particular dilemma. He was charged with not only locating coordinates in the Philippine Sea that would provide some cloud cover for the vulnerable refueling process, but at the same time finding a placid enough stretch of ocean to accomplish the delicate task. Moreover, as Halsey had reorganized his task force into three task groups, it was now Acuff’s mission to also trisect his oiler groups accordingly and plan a rendezvous for three predetermined sites.
Poring over his own weather charts, and consulting frequently with the Third Fleet’s chief aerologist, Comdr. George F. Kosco aboard the New Jersey, Acuff pinned down three locations to “top off” the battleships and large carriers of Task Force 38 along the thousand-mile path between Ulithi and Mindoro. Each of these behemoths held nearly 7,000 tons of thick, black oil, as opposed to the 500 to 600 tons required by the destroyers and destroyer escorts.
Halsey quickly signed off on Acuff’s coordinates, and the transfer of oil, aviation gas for the planes, and some diesel fuel was scheduled for December 13. Because Task Force 38 would be only two days out of Ulithi, more stores and ammo transfers weren’t necessary. But Halsey knew that those conveyances—by way of cargo nets, breeches buoys, canvas bags, and temporary trolleys—would be sorely needed after three days and two nights of constant combat from Mindoro to Luzon. He scheduled another rendezvous with Acuff’s oiler fleet for 6:00 A.M. on December 17. They were to meet about 450 miles east of Luzon.
While MacArthur’s army stormed Mindoro’s beaches and Halsey’s task force threw its Big Blue Blanket over Luzon, Acuff’s task group was to mark time and remain cruising at sea, within hailing distance at all times. The entire Mindoro operation could conceivably take weeks, and Acuff issued orders that any of his oilers less than half full should transfer their cargo to other tankers and return to Ulithi for replenishment. Every three days or so, three newly filled oilers would join Acuff’s group while three others would be sent back in ballast.
No matter how long the Mindoro assault lasted, Halsey would never lack for replenishment stores. At least, such was the plan.
At daybreak on December 11, Ulithi harbor was a whorl of activity. Gangs brought anchors to short stay and battle guidons whipped in the breeze as the ninety-odd ships of Task Force 38 steamed Indian-file at five-hundred-yard intervals through Ulithi’s Mugai Pass, the only navigable passage into and out of the vast anchorage.
On either side of this nautical parade, sailors cheered from the rails of the hundreds of Third Fleet auxiliaries remaining behind—the hotel barges and distillery ships, the refrigerator vessels and reserve fuel tankers, the dry docks and hospital ships. Overhead, land-based combat patrols formed a two-tiered umbrella guarding against stray bandits from Yap Island. Yet despite the “sortie fever,” it was a tranquil, almost idyllic morning, with the sunlight sending flickers and flashes of reflections glancing up from the mirrored sea; one sailor remarked upon “the caps of silvery filigree topping the cresting waves” of the long line of breakers on the reef. Beyond them lay blue water.
The core of Halsey’s flotilla, the three carrier groups that formed Task Force 38, were his floating airfields, consisting of seven heavy carriers of the huge Essex class and six Independence-class light aircraft carriers. It was their payload of about 540 fighter planes, 150 dive bombers, and 140 torpedo bombers with which Halsey would execute Slew McCain’s Big Blue Blanket strategy. Escorting and screening the carriers were 9 battleships and 16 cruisers, a mix of heavy and light, their guns glistening in the rising sun. Finally came the destroyers, numbering close to 60, skimming the surface like a disciplined school of porpoises.
No eyewitnesses to the procession could refute the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison’s description of this contemporary armada as “representing the last word in the energy and ingenuity of man on the ocean.”
The previous night Halsey had hosted a farewell dinner on the beach, and as one attendee put it, “There was more, but less formal, shoptalk, but no ringing fight talk by the admiral.” Now, alternately pacing and seated in an armchair on the flag bridge of the hulking battleship New Jersey, he watched as the greatest naval force in the history of warfare shaped course beneath him. He had been on the bridge two days before as his DEs steamed away, and again a day earlier as the oiler Task Group 30.8 set sail. With the departure of Task Force 38, the chessboard was complete.
It was, all told, a magnificent enterprise. Despite the threat of kamikazes, despite the enemy buildup on Luzon, despite the certainty of the countless more American deaths and casualties that stood between Mindoro and Tokyo, there was a sense on the tiny atoll that morning that the United States had finally broken the back of the Japanese; that a war-ravaged nation had come full circle since the dark days following December 7, 1941.
As Halsey stood upon his towering bridge inspecting his departing vessels below, he surely noticed the slender forward stacks of the destroyer USS Monaghan as she departed with the oiler task group. There was no more fitting representative of the war’s circle being squared than the plucky Monaghan. For, in a sense, the Monaghan’s World War II narrative not only encapsulated the conflict as a whole, but embodied all that American sailors thought right and true with America’s collective military effort.
Named in honor of a twenty-six-year-old ensign who had been killed defending a wounded fellow officer against a native uprising in Samoa in 1899, the Monaghan was the last of the Farragut-class “gold-platers” constructed at the Boston Navy Yard. Commissioned in 1935, she’d spent her early years as a training vessel in the Atlantic before being transferred to the Pacific Fleet in the closing months of 1939.
During the attack on Pearl Harbor the Monaghan had been the port’s ready-duty destroyer, and was preparing to slip her cables just as the first Japanese aircraft appeared overhead. Her guns filled the sky with ack-ack as she steamed toward the mouth of the harbor less than thirty minutes after the initial bombs fell. Just inside the entrance, one of her lookouts sighted a periscope pointed toward Battleship Row. Heeling about, the Monaghan struck an enemy midget submarine a glancing blow before perilously dropping two depth charges that sank the sub in the harbor’s shallow waters. A week later she was steaming with Halsey’s carrier task force in the failed attempt to relieve Wake Island.
She subsequently earned two of her twelve battle stars for actions during the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, where she was cited for distinguished service after retrieving several downed pilots. And when a Japanese submarine fired three torpedoes into the carrier USS Yorktown two days after that heraldic victory, she helped rescue its crew before the flattop disappeared beneath the waves. From Midway she sailed for the Aleutians, and in March 1943 had the unique “honor” of taking part in the war’s only old-fashioned, slug-it-out, surface gun duel with a Japanese task group off Siberia’s Komandorski Islands.
No submarines or aircraft were involved in the fight, just the Monaghan’s outgunned and outnumbered cruiser task group trading shell and torpedo, shot-for-shot and brace-for-brace, for four breathtaking hours. The Monaghan and two sister destroyers led the charge, and the enemy eventually withdrew. After the war, a Japanese commander who fought in the engagement remarked, “I do not know how a ship could live through the concentration of firepower that was brought to bear upon the leading destroyer. All three ships were literally smothered with shell splashes.” Three months later the Monaghan capped a one-on-one night shoot-out with a surfaced submarine by driving the vessel onto the shoals surrounding Kiska Island.
Recalled to Pearl, she covered the landings at Tarawa and ran patrols near the Marshalls. But by this stage of the war the Monaghan, as well as the remaining Farraguts such as her sister ship the Hull, had become desperately outdated. Beloved by their crews, particularly the veteran hands who’d served on the old “China Station,” the ships were nonetheless unable to match the newer and more sophisticated destroyers of the Fletcher and Sumner classes in armament payload or communications technology. Worse, the somewhat haphazard attempt to modernize the Farraguts had inadvertently served to make them less seaworthy.
The Hull, for instance, now steamed at over 2,000 tons, more than 500 tons over what she had been designed to carry. Her topside bristled with four 5-inch deck guns, a full complement of depth charges and racks, two centerline-mounted clusters of four torpedo tubes each, and several antiaircraft machine guns. This additional deck weight combined with her two stacks to form “sails” just waiting to be caught by heavy winds. If a wave knocked her over, a gale would keep her heeled, fighting her return to an even keel.
The Hull’s chief quartermaster, Archie DeRyckere, was well aware of this hazardous anomaly as the destroyer prepared to steam from Ulithi. Eighteen months earlier, in June 1943, he’d been at the helm when the destroyer had joined a task group bombarding Wake Island. On approach to the fire zone, the wake from a cruiser sailing on her port beam—“A cruiser’s wake, for Lord’s sakes!”—had laid the ship so far over that the coppers in the galley dumped the midday mess and her starboard whaleboat dipped into the sea. More disturbing yet, during the Hull’s most recent Stateside refitting in Washington State’s Bremerton Navy Yard, Captain Marks had ordered a test power run at 28 knots at 50,000 horsepower in the calm waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. When he called for left full rudder, she’d laid over like a beached whale and had to be coaxed back up, oh so slowly, with an immediate countermanding right full rudder. DeRyckere was not surprised.
And even when older vessels like the Hull or Monaghan had been jury-rigged as best as possible with modern radar systems, there still remained a dearth of seamen who had any experience in operating the new technology. Sometimes, however, a ship got lucky. Such was the Monaghan’s case in May 1944, when radar expert Keith Abbott was unexpectedly billeted aboard the fabled vessel and assigned to her new Combat Information Center.
A rawboned lad, as a teen Abbott had taken to “fooling around” with radios, breaking them down and reassembling their component parts. He had also done some electrical work on construction sites before enlisting a year ago, in March. When the navy learned of his mechanical bent, it had sent him through the Point Loma training school for radar operation and maintenance in San Diego before assigning him to the destroyer escort USS Emery.
Abbott had been blooded early, joining the Emery just as she’d been assigned patrol duty on the waters in and around the Japanese-held Palau Islands. Soon after his berthing, an enemy PT boat had darted out from a cove and raked the destroyer escort with machine gun fire, killing a crewmate. And once, while serving night raft-boarding duty, he’d recovered the samurai sword with which he’d witnessed a Japanese soldier commit hara-kiri rather than be taken prisoner.
The highlight of his service had occurred while the Emery was escorting a troop transport to the Ellice Islands (now Tuvalu) deep in the South Pacific. Abbott had tracked several returns, what the sonar men called pings, on his radarscope. He was certain that a Japanese submarine had surfaced nearby. The Emery and the enemy sub played a cat-and-mouse game for the next twenty-four hours, culminating with the destroyer escort’s launching depth charges that sank the sub.
But three months ago, just as he’d received a message that he was the father of a beautiful baby girl, Abbott had been transferred from the Emery to teach a radar maintenance course at Pearl. Abbott had been anxious to return to his original berth on the destroyer escort Emery, but by the time the curriculum was complete the Emery was thousands of miles away, patrolling the deep South Pacific. His new orders directed him to pull temporary duty on the Monaghan—the first American vessel to draw enemy blood after the attack on December 7, 1941—“until such time as [Abbott] can come in contact with and be transferred back to DE 28 Emery.” As it happened, such time did not arrive until Abbott had fought with the Monaghan through the Marianas Turkey Shoot and the invasion of Peleliu, one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific.
During her approach to Peleliu, the destroyer had plowed through the tail end of an unnamed typhoon, and Abbott was duly impressed. Once, aboard his former ship the Emery, he had been ordered to climb the ninety feet to the tip of the DE’s mast in the middle of a violent squall to repair a malfunctioning radar connector. Yet he had never encountered a storm as furious as the one the Monaghan faced off Peleliu. The waves were so large that the huge aircraft carriers she was assigned to escort completely disappeared from view. But, to Abbott’s astonishment, no major damage was recorded in the ship’s log.
It occurred that not long after the Peleliu landings, both the Emery and the Monaghan found themselves reprovisioning together at Manus Island, in the Admiralties off New Zealand. Abbott had already transferred his seabag, hammock, and prized samurai sword from the destroyer to his old cabin on the DE when he was summoned to the Emery’s bridge.
“I’ve had a request from the Monaghan to keep you aboard,” the Emery’s skipper, Lt. Comdr. R. G. Coburn, informed him. Coburn explained that the Monaghan had been slotted to take part in the Third Fleet’s upcoming support of MacArthur’s Philippine invasions, and her captain was loath to sail without an experienced radar technician. The choice, he said, was completely Abbott’s, as his orders explicitly stated. But he added that the Emery was scheduled for no more than to continue her fairly routine South Pacific patrols, an unsubtle hint that the radarman could much better serve the war effort aboard the Monaghan.
Abbott was conflicted. He peered out over the bridge wing as small swells lapped against the Emery’s hull. Vessels of every shape and size bobbed across Manus Island’s harbor. He considered his wife, Hannah, who had recently delivered the couple’s first child, a baby girl they’d named Sherran. “I’m no thrill-seeker,” he thought. Still. This was a war. He was a patriot.
“Of course I’ll do it,” he told his skipper. He saluted, turned, and left to retrieve his seabag.
Unfortunately, no one ever filed the paperwork recording this transfer. So it was that Radar Maintenance Technician Keith Abbott found himself a ghost sailor lost in the U.S. Navy’s vast bureaucracy as he sailed with the Monaghan out of Ulithi harbor on December 10, 1944, as part of the destroyer screen for the oilers of Task Group 30.8.
* * *
As the several components of Halsey’s fleet sailed west toward the Philippines, seamen busied themselves as they had for centuries. Enlisted men swabbed, chipped, and painted. Chiefs plotted charts and readied battle stations. And officers caught up with the mountainous tide of official directives that flow up and down the chain of command of any enterprise as large as an entire fleet on war footing.
One of the most recent of these directives, sent from the Navy Department in Washington, D.C., was a Pacific Theater–wide warning to all vessels regarding typhoons, specifically declaring the storms as great a threat to Allied shipping as the Japanese. The notification carried an ominous addendum: “All the scientific methods available to modern meteorology are not sufficient to forecast accurately the movement and intensity of the frequent typhoons of this area.”
Nevertheless, as the invasion of Mindoro loomed large, the divine winds that most concerned Halsey and his sailors had the blazing orange fireball of the rising sun stenciled upon their wings.