Com3rdFlt’s Aerological Officer [George F. Kosco] completed a three-year course in aerology in 1940; since, he has had two years’ experience in carriers and 2 years ashore on aerological duty, including three months in West Indies flying around in hurricanes to determine their location. He had had about six years’ naval experience before taking aerology course. He had been on his present station about one month. He is the most experienced aerological officer in THIRD FLEET today.
—FROM THE FINAL REPORT OF THE COURT OF INQUIRY
INVESTIGATING “HALSEY’S TYPHOON.”
By 10:00 P.M. on December 17, the destroyer Dewey’s barometer reading had dropped to 29.54. Long, sinuous cross-swells, outriders of the storm, bruted against diagonal waves whipped up by a 36-knot backing wind. The sea about Capt. Jasper Acuff’s oiler Task Group 30.8 rose and fell like a carousel, and in the dark of the Dewey’s pilothouse, the luminous glow of the ship’s instrument dials limned the ashen faces of the DD’s exhausted bridge crew, men gone gray from lack of sleep. Herman Melville noted that “meditation and water are forever wedded,” and even Calhoun, a spit-and-polish officer not given to lyrical odes to nature, declared the night’s conditions “eerie, and ominous.”
Calhoun ordered that additional lifelines be rigged around the Dewey’s weather deck, all loose gear be lashed down or struck below, and that the ship’s supply of fresh water be transferred from high to low tanks. At the last minute Calhoun realized he could have reduced topside weight and “sail” even farther by lowering the ship’s twenty-six-foot motor whaleboat into the sea, but he had forgotten. Listening to the gale whistling through the ship’s taut guy wires—the chorus of Ulysses’ sirens, one erudite sailor called it—he recognized it was now too late. He wouldn’t risk the lives of a deck gang for this. “If we lose it, we lose it,” he thought.
Simultaneously, aboard the New Jersey, running at flank speed well to the south, Third Fleet chief aerologist Comdr. George Kosco logged a comfortable barometer reading of 29.76. Although the big leviathans of Task Force 38 were still outpacing the typhoon, Kosco’s chart table was covered with piles of weather forecasts, including new reports from MacArthur’s command on Mindoro, and even intercepted Japanese messages. Yet he still could not locate the center of the storm.
Kosco had also been reading dozens of Third Fleet ship-to-ship weather communiqués and was aware that many commanders did not believe they could reach Halsey’s rendezvous site by dawn. Shortly before midnight he sought out the admiral in flag plot and advised him to again alter his refueling station, suggesting latitude 15° 30′ north, longitude 127° 40′ east, about midway on a north-south axis between the two previous rendezvous sites. Halsey reluctantly acquiesced and issued the fleetwide order, his third course alteration in the past twelve hours. On vessels spread about the heaving Philippine Sea, helmsmen and navigators began to smell panic—and some sailors began to experience it.
Clinging to the top of the Cape Esperance’s center mast with every muscle in his body, Paul Schlener was not sure what to do as the storm increased in intensity. His watch was technically over, but whether through oversight or intention, no crewmate had relieved him and no officer had signaled for him to climb down. In fact, the scud was so thick that he could barely make out the deck sixty feet below. He was petrified.
With no other recourse, Schlener began to pray. Only the Lord, he believed, could save him now. He promised God that if He spared him, he would dedicate the rest of his life to His work. He prayed for several hours atop the mast before an officer fought through the winds and flashed a light, relieving him of his duty. Gingerly, he inched down the long pole.
By midnight on December 17, the western edge of Typhoon Cobra’s counterclockwise windstream was swirling into the cold front Kosco had tracked sweeping out of the arctic. But instead of bouncing off the mass of cold air to the northeast—away from the fleet—the storm accelerated and gained strength as it chewed through the suddenly weak front. Typhoon winds now exceeded 100 knots at its center.
Oddly, this meteorological donnybrook was witnessed by long-range radar operators on several vessels near the eastern fringe of the fleet, but they did not know how to interpret what they were viewing on their newfangled “picture machines.” The science of radar was still in its infancy, and radarmen were typically trained to look for short-range “pips,” indicating either Allied or enemy vessels. As the fleet’s radar operators watched the atmospheric phenomenon of a cyclone swirling nearby, in some cases just sixty miles east of their position, they had no idea what to make of it.
At 2:00 A.M. on December 18, Kosco made his final report to a pajama-clad Halsey in the admiral’s flag quarters. The aerologist confessed he still could not pin down either the tropical depression’s center, or its direction. Despite Occam’s famous razor—the simplest explanation is usually the right one—Kosco was still not ready to admit that the storm had already matured into a typhoon.
Exhausted sailors sacked out fully dressed in dungarees and blue cotton workshirts, but any man who relaxed too much was liable to be catapulted into a bulkhead. Some tried to nod off with their arms and legs wrapped around bunk chains and stanchions, while the savvier veterans lashed themselves in with belts. It did not help. It was, said one seaman, “like sleeping on a trampoline.”
Cooks slapping together piles of cold bacon, Spam, or bologna sandwiches—there would be no hot chow for breakfast—secured themselves to cutting tables with lengths of rope, and so many were burned by boiling coffee sloshing out of sixty-gallon coppers that most simply shut down their stoves. Aboard one destroyer, a cook’s assistant started a betting pool on the number of knives and forks that would fly across his galley and embed themselves in bulkheads.
And in the wee hours of December 18, Lt. Comdr. George Kosco continued to assure Adm. William F. Halsey that he had made the correct decision in shaping the fleet south. The admiral, pacing his flag quarters, preferred somewhere, anywhere, north of their current heading. The Japanese air squadrons on the Legaspi Peninsula still gnawed at him. He felt his ships were sailing too damn close. What if some samurai flight commander did in fact order the unthinkable, and sent his kamikazes aloft in this blow? The entire Third Fleet would be trapped between the enemy to the west and the onrushing storm from the east. Defenseless, refueling vessels presented a powerful lure to an adversary already knocked back hard on his heels.
It was just the sort of reckless counterattack Halsey himself would order.
But kamikazes did not concern Kosco, who struggled to keep his mind from drifting elsewhere. The Japanese were not the primary enemy at this moment, he knew, and he argued that the weather made any course other than their current, southerly heading too risky. Station discipline was already falling apart, he informed Halsey. There was a good chance that many of Acuff’s vessels, including several of his oilers, would not even reach the existing rendezvous site by daybreak. He handed the admiral the stack of grim messages he’d received from the task group commanders. Acuff’s destroyers and destroyer escorts were in particular distress. To turn back north now would invite disaster.
With a final glance at his charts, the admiral agreed, and sent directions for the fleet to maintain its present course. He would take his chances with both the Japanese and the storm. He bid Kosco good night.
At the same time, steaming forty miles northeast of the New Jersey, Lt. Comdr. Henry Lee Plage prowled the open bridge of the destroyer escort Tabberer in quiet alarm. The open bridge on a DE is just that, forty feet above the waterline and completely exposed to the weather, offering a 360-degree view of the surrounding sea. From this vantage point, young Plage, eight weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday and with a five-month-old baby boy at home, could hardly believe what he was witnessing.
Towering masses of dull gray water rose on his port quarter and overtook the Tabberer until its fantail was awash in swirling fingers of foam that probed as far as the depth charge racks. The confused heap would then pass under the entire length of the three-hundred-foot destroyer escort like some huge, humpbacked sea creature, and Plage held tight as the vessel yawed in a drunken motion as it was lifted along on the crest. The Tabby’s bow would rise sharply, and then the skipper could feel a heavy drag, as if that very sea creature had wrapped its tentacles around his ship and was pulling her backward. The vibration of her twin screws, at times spinning free of the sea, caused the vessel to shudder like a paint mixer as the bow finally fell, only to be smothered in another mantle of eddying foam. And then the process would begin again.
Plage, who had not slept in twenty-four hours, looked as if he’d been ridden hard and put away wet. He had two black eyes from the battering wind, which had bent to a 45-degree angle the thick coach-whip antennae mounted about the ship’s wheelhouse. Spindrift, sliced as if by razor from the crest of the breakers, scudded through the troughs far below him like eerie, white tumbleweeds. When the wind slammed into the ship’s superstructure, it hissed against her stack, an ungodly sound that forced the captain to shout at full lung to make himself heard to his officer of the deck and helmsman.
Plage knew his Bowditch and had skirted the edges of hurricanes chasing Nazi subs for ten months in the Caribbean. This weather was far more frightening. Throughout the night and early morning, between what he took to calling the DE’s “surfing runs,” he periodically crouched down on his hands and knees and pulled himself out to the open bridge along the lifeline strung from the wheelhouse. Measuring the moments between rolls reaching 62 degrees, he would stand facing the wind and extend his right arm just as Buys-Ballot’s Law instructed. Most tropical rainstorms, he knew, progressed in a circular motion, and this did not necessarily signify an approaching typhoon.
The wind direction of this blow, however, never wavered as the hours passed. Watching his barometer drop, occasionally checking the radar screen mounted in the four-foot post in the center of the open bridge, he was fairly certain that the fleet lay smack in the path of a major cyclone.
He had already directed the Tabberer’s crew to batten down for weather and make the ship watertight. He set fore and aft lookouts, moved heavy equipment to starboard compartments to offset the deep lists to port, and had all hands don life jackets. He also instructed his chief electrician to construct tunnels out of canvas, three feet in diameter, to intercept and redirect any saltwater that infiltrated the companionways leading to the ship’s electrical boards. Until Plage heard different from his task group commander, there was nothing more to be done.
Plage at least had the satisfaction of knowing that he and his XO, Lt. Bob Surdam, a twenty-seven-year-old former track and soccer star from upstate New York, had trained the Tabby’s crew of 124 for just such an emergency. He had confidence in his sailors, and despite their precarious position, he felt a frisson of pride in his officers’ and crew’s preparedness.
Down in the Tabby’s galley, Shipfitter Leonard Glaser, the sailor to whom Plage had delivered kosher food, was not certain what to make of his vessel’s predicament as he drank a carton of milk with one hand while holding on to a roll bar with the other. He was hungry, and Cookie Phillips had someow managed to bake pies, but given the body blows the Tabby was taking, eating was out of the question.
Glaser, like the majority of the DE’s green crew, had scant experience with Pacific storms. Snug in his kapok life jacket, he was not all that frightened until a chief bosun’s mate with thirty years’ experience, one of the few veterans on the ship, rushed past him in a daze. The man’s face was drained of color. The bosun’s mate had earned a reputation as a garrulous seaman who rarely stopped talking, yet now he pushed by Glaser without so much as a word.
“What’s your hurry, Chief?” Glaser said. “What’s goin’ on up top?”
“Never seen as rough a sea like this,” said the bosun’s mate before stumbling off down the companionway.
Glaser immediately began reevaluating his circumstances. As he wobbled through the galley, a sudden bucking motion sent him airborne, nearly into the arms of a haggard-looking Cookie Phillips. Phillips must have read the fear in the skinny shipfitter’s eyes.
“Nuthin’ to worry for,” said the cook. “Ol’ Cap’n, he got it all under control. He’s a seaman, dontcha know?”
Back in flag quarters, Halsey tossed fitfully in his bunk. He could not shake the idea of an enemy sneak attack. Shortly after 3:00 A.M. he draped a thin, cotton robe over his pajamas, stepped into his slippers, and padded to the office adjacent to his sleeping quarters. There were maps of Luzon and weather reports strewn about the bulkhead. Something, a gut feeling, left him off balance and jittery. With his finger he drew a line across one chart, in a northwesterly arc. Toward northern Luzon. Away from the enemy-held Legaspi Peninsula.
Nearly simultaneously Kosco sat upright in his bunk. He was overwhelmed “with a feeling of great, leaden weights pressing on [my] shoulders.” He threw on his heavy weather gear and scrambled up the iron skipper’s ladder to the navigation deck. Leaning into the wind and listening to the pounding surf, he surveyed the otherworldly tableau; giant, mottled whitecaps stretched endless in every direction under a black, starless dome. If the dark side of the moon were covered by sea, he thought, this is what it would look like.
And in that instant the word “typhoon” took shape in his mind. He realized he needed more than intuition before suggesting to Halsey, much less CINCPAC, that an official, fleetwide warning to break stations be issued. Still. He groped his way back to Halsey’s quarters, found the admiral awake, and laid out his concerns.
Halsey sent for his chief of staff, Rear Adm. “Mick” Carney, and Capt. Ralph Wilson, his operations officer. The four spent the next forty-five minutes in flag mess gulping coffee and weighing various options. A fug of cigarette smoke obscured the charts they passed among themselves. Halsey had Kosco radio Task Force 38 commander Slew McCain on the Hancock and Task Group 38.2 commander Rear Adm. Gerald F. Bogan aboard the carrier USS Lexington. Both were sailing a-weather of his flagship; perhaps they could provide more firsthand information. Neither offered much of substance.
Given the cross-swell and backing winds, McCain and Bogan ventured that the storm was somewhere to the fleet’s east, and probably bearing northwest. Where, specifically, to the east? Their answers varied. Bogan guessed 220 miles northeast; McCain 240 miles southeast. McCain appears not to have mentioned that his carrier’s aft metal gun shields had already been buckled by a gale strong enough to rip the steel hatch off a magazine storeroom and flood the compartment.
Halsey was no closer to knowing that at this moment Typhoon Cobra was ninety miles east-southeast of the New Jersey. He lit another cigarette and paced. His subordinates wondered at his indecision. He felt, he told Carney, “like a matador going into the bull ring with a splint on his leg.”
Moments before 5:00 A.M., with the robust gale running hard out of the north, Halsey made his decision. He canceled the previously arranged rendezvous site and ordered all task groups to begin refueling “as soon as practical” after sunrise. His fleet commanders were taken aback. Only in poetry do fighting men refrain from asking the reason why. How did the Bull expect ships sailing south to take fuel with this blow running at their backs? Hadn’t the old man learned anything from yesterday’s fiasco? There were already scattered reports of vessels locked in irons, 100-knot gusts nipping at their sterns.
In fact, Halsey was unaware that one of his ships was already fighting for its life. One hour earlier, the destroyer USS Aylwin, flagship of Acuff’s oiler group, had gone dead in the water.
“Tough as a sandbag” is how one enlisted man described the Aylwin’s young skipper, Commander William K. Rogers. Rogers had come aboard the DD seven months earlier, and though only in his first command, in that time he’d acquired an instinctive feel for both his crew and his ship. He knew how she came about under fire, and how she reacted to unsteady seas.
The previous morning, during the aborted fueling attempts, he’d confessed to having a “bad feeling” about this storm to his XO, and ordered the deck crew to carry below every object that could be blown overboard and to double-lash all essential topside gear such as torpedoes and depth charges, including their ready tubes and racks. He had his oil gang pump seawater into the ship’s empty holds as ballast, and damage control parties were formed up to fight any electrical fires that might break out. Belowdecks, Rogers also ordered stowed any loose clothing or rags that might conceivably clog suction-pump stations.
Rogers was not only tough, but smart. He was well aware that, in a crisis at sea, the danger to a ship’s survival rapidly becomes exponential. The more trouble a ship is in, the likelier she is to run into more. Blown hatches lead to flooded bilges and flooded bilges lead to electrical shorts and electrical shorts lead to failed steering mechanisms. The list, Rogers knew, was endless. Like all the commanders of the Farragut-class destroyers, he was especially wary of the Aylwin’s ability to remain upright in high seas and heavy wind.
Every craft on water, from a ketch to an aircraft carrier, has a degree of roll from which she will no longer return upright. Depending upon the size of the ship, this usually falls within the 60-to-80-degree range. Upon the Aylwin’s commission in 1940, her stability rating showed a relatively adequate GM, or metacentric height, of 2.41 feet. A vessel’s metacentric height determines the length of her righting arm, which is the lateral distance between the two opposing forces of buoyancy and gravity. On a trim ship, these two forces are equal and cancel each other out. This means a vessel will roll easily, but also snap back quickly. By contrast, the smaller the GM, the slower a ship’s return to an even keel.
Calculating a ship’s GM involves a complex mathematical formula that, in essence, subtracts a ship’s center of uplifting buoyancy from her center of down-pushing gravity. Very simply put, a large GM gives a ship a large righting arm, which in turn gives a ship a large righting moment. The larger the righting moment, the more stable the ship.
But in the four years since the Aylwin’s keel was laid, the Navy Department’s technology had outrun its vessels’ utility. Rogers’s ship, like the other Farragut-class destroyers, was now burdened with tons of supplementary topside weight, including a new combat information center and modern radar antennae, transmitters, and platforms at the tip of her mast. Her deck was also fully loaded with additional machine guns as well as cumbersome crates of ammunition. Given her already high center of gravity, when this added tonnage was taken into account, her GM had decreased accordingly, by .78 feet, to 1.63 feet. In other words, she was now much easier to push over.
On the night of December 17, Rogers retired to his quarters with nagging apprehensions. He had good reason. Roused from his bunk at 3:48 the next morning, he was dismayed, if far from surprised, when an aide handed him a copy of the distress call his officer of the deck had just broadcast to all her task group’s escort carriers, oilers, tugs, destroyers, and destroyer escorts:
“Aylwin to TG-30.8. We are broken down. Have lost all power on generators. Am trying to come to base course.”
Despite Rogers’s precautions, the ocean had poured in through a sprung hatch on the Aylwin’s weather deck and shorted all her generators. Her lights were out, her electronic steering control gone. When Captain Butterfield on the Nehenta Bay received the Aylwin’s distress call, he directed his carrier to close on her in support. Rogers, meanwhile, donned his foul-weather gear, raced to the bridge, and ordered his chief quartermaster to make his way through the sea foam gushing from the scuppers to the ship’s after steering compartment under the aft fantail, where the hand-steering mechanism was located.
Although oiler Task Group 30.8 commander Jasper Acuff was sailing aboard the Aylwin, Rogers was her captain, and it was his job to save his ship. He took the conn. With his main turbogenerator out of service, Rogers employed various engine-thrust combinations to try to regain course. But the roiling seas pummeled the DD out of control, and she swung wildly due north. When the hand-steering wheel was finally manned, her helmsman was able to wrestle her back on station. But she was now lagging well behind the rest of the oiler group. Sometime after 4:00 A.M. the ship’s lights and electronic steering were brought back on line. Presently Rogers picked up Halsey’s new fueling directive, via McCain on the Hancock:
“Cancel previous rendezvous. All groups come to course 180 degrees. Commence exercises when practical. Suggest leading destroyers take it over stern, if necessary.”
By now Acuff had joined Rogers on the Aylwin’s bridge. Acuff was in a peculiar position, commanding a task group that was sailing well ahead of him. Before he fell out of TBS range, which carried only to the horizon, he radioed all vessels to comply with McCain’s directive and designated Butterfield on the Nehenta Bay to take tactical command of the escort carriers. The oilers and their escorts swung to course 180, due south, running on a parallel track, and behind, Halsey’s task force.
The new heading placed the entire fleet nearly at a right angle to the typhoon. Already buffeted by a backing gale force—a wind so savage it was lopping the tops off slate gray sixty-foot combers and driving the whitewater like horizontal rain—Task Group 30.8’s bobbing vessels were now being broadsided by long, sweeping swells out of the east. Sailors were thrown from their bunks—the Dewey’s Captain Calhoun was buried under a pile of books—and galley coppers crashed.
In the long tradition of frontline fighting troops, seamen eyed the heavy seas, joked with false bravado—“Weather great for buildin’ character, huh?”—and bellyached about the brass. Outside the wheelhouse on the destroyer Hull, Chief Bosun’s Mate Ray Schultz turned to Chief Quartermaster Archie DeRyckere and asked, in all seriousness, if he thought their “bullheaded fighting admiral” actually had a death wish. “Guy’s supposed to be the smartest officer in the fleet, but every seaman second who just came aboard and don’t know nothing abut the navy knows we’re in a typhoon.”
In fact, more than one DD commander was wondering about the ambiguity of the orders being transmitted, not the least of which was McCain’s directive to “commence exercises when practical.” Easy for an admiral riding a carrier as big as an apartment complex to say. But Comdr. William K. Rogers aboard the Aylwin did not have the luxury of contemplating the impending perils involved with refueling. He eyed the seven large, upright machine gun shields strewn across his vessel’s deck. In his ship’s precarious condition, if the swells and howling gale pushed her over into a deep roll, those “sails” would make sure she stayed pushed over.
North of the Aylwin, on the fleet’s most vulnerable perimeter, Capt. Bruce Garrett of the Monaghan was entertaining similar thoughts. With each sledgehammer roll the destroyer took, the level of lubricating oil in her engines dropped below its suction point. If Garrett lost engine power, he knew, the ship was done for. The Monaghan was being bruted wildly off course like driftwood, albeit, as Garrett well knew, driftwood does not sink.
Although steaming with what should have been a sufficient bunker capacity of 76 percent, close to 130,000 gallons of viscous black fuel oil, the Monaghan was being buffeted unmercifully as she took the brunt of the storm’s leading edge. Her anemometer registered 100-knot winds, the needle was still climbing, and no matter how much power Garrett rang up to keep her on a southern heading, the sea continued to push the little destroyer almost due west.
As the vessel heeled and pitched through the dizzying seas, sailors below clung to handholds and wrapped their arms and legs around any stationary object available, often lying in puddles of their own urine and vomit. As one officer noted, “It was bruising, painful, and exhausting. At any moment it could be fatal. It took a healthy measure of guts to stay below under those circumstances.”
Finally, Garrett realized that no amount of rudder and screw combinations would turn the Monaghan back south and, in desperation, concluded that the only way to avert the ship’s capsize was to ballast her aft bunkers with seawater. Given the weather conditions, this was close to suicidal, a thought not lost on twenty-year-old radar technician Keith Abbott as he listened to the skipper give the order from his station on the Monaghan’s bridge.
Not for the first time that morning, “ghost sailor” Abbott marveled at the wicked fates that had carried him from his family’s sugar beet farm in Idaho to this reckless place and time.
Now he watched in anguish as Captain Garrett, with a total of seven days in command of the destroyer, transmitted a general distress signal reporting that his generator and steering motor had failed, and that the Monaghan was out of control, bucking violently, and taking water.
Captain Calhoun on the Dewey, sailing parallel and perhaps three thousand yards west of the Monaghan, picked up one of Garrett’s TBS messages. Calhoun grabbed his own TBS microphone and tried to reassure his Academy classmate that he, too, was taking major rolls. He received no reply. By now the Monaghan’s onboard communications system had also failed, and Garrett could not even talk to his engine room from the bridge.
In a final bid to save his ship, Garrett ran a messenger to his “oil king,” Watertender 2nd Class Joe McCrane, instructing him to open the valves to two of the Monaghan’s empty aft fuel tanks and connect them to the main waterline attached to the bilge pumps. McCrane dutifully notified the engine room to fire the pumps. But since he was using the failed steering motor telephone to communicate, he never found out if the black gang received the order.
McCrane had no way of knowing that, because of the pounding the ship was taking, the overhead in the engine room was starting to rip loose from her bulkheads. The Monaghan’s ferocious swings up fluted waves and down into troughs were beginning to tear her hull apart. In dark compartments below, men gathered in groups to pray in tender oblivion. And on the Monaghan’s bridge, Radar Maintenance Technician 2nd Class Keith Abbott thought once again of his former berth on the faraway and safe destroyer escort Emery.