Storm losses and damage incurred by Fleet were basically due to (a) Maneuvering the Fleet unknowingly into or near path of a typhoon under false sense of security [based on] unsound aerological advice, based on insufficient data. (b) Certain amount of delay and maneuvering in face of storm in effort to fuel destroyers. In some cases a lack of appreciation by subordinate commanders and COs that dangerous weather conditions existed, until storm had taken charge of the situation.
—ONE OF THE CONCLUSIONS DRAWN BY THE COURT OF
INQUIRY INVESTIGATING “HALSEY’S TYPHOON.”
Though she’d managed to regain power in her generators after her midwatch calamity, the Aylwin’s Capt. William Rogers now sent word to McCain that his destroyer was pitching violently and steering blind. At 9:35 A.M. he reported narrowly avoiding a collision with another of the task group’s screening vessels—which one he had no way of determining—and by 11:00 A.M. the ship was sluicing through waves so huge that her inclinometer was registering 70-degree rolls.
At one point she lay over on her beam-ends for twenty minutes, completely out of control. “Hanging on the brink of nothingness,” one seaman described the sensation. Her radar and communications gear hung in ruins, and the pounding ocean had torn her port lifeboat from its davits. In a moment the davits were gone, too.
From his station on the bridge, Rogers warily eyed the tons of green water crashing into the Aylwin’s depth-charge racks. He briefly considered jettisoning the ash cans before their “safe” settings were jarred loose. But the ship was now nearly prone, her engines having failed again. Rogers worried that he would be signing his crew’s death warrant should one of the sub killers explode directly beneath her.
He coped as best he could, directing all hands to don life jackets and packing as many men as he could spare into the starboard living compartments in an attempt to offset the giant rolls to port. Fire-control parties dashed from stem to stern as electrical fires broke out about the ship, one even blazing across the bridge. Each was eventually brought under control.
In the end, however, Rogers had no choice but to cede the battle to the sea. He stopped all engines and allowed the Aylwin to settle in irons, heading downwind, wallowing in the trough of the huge waves like a bathtub toy. Lying to like this, however, allowed tons of seawater to course through her engine-blower intakes. One generator was washed out, and five feet of water stood in the engine room bilges. Without its ventilation blowers the engine room seethed, and across the ship the thin steel of the bulkheads grew superheated as steam filled the engineering spaces below. Fireroom personnel attempting to restore power could work no more than ten-minute shifts in the 180-degree heat.
The Aylwin’s chief engineer and his machinist’s mate had doffed their life jackets in the sweltering conditions. They kept them off in order to slip through the narrow overhead hatchway leading topside. Before they could don them again they were both blown overboard. Crewmates tossed them lifelines, but could do nothing more.
Neither man was recovered. Rogers wondered if he and the rest of his crew would shortly join them.
Just after 10:00 A.M., Commander Kosco stepped outside flag chart on the New Jersey to again observe, firsthand, the hellacious winds and spume. The salt spray was vicious, cutting into the skin on his face like tiny knives. And the gale-force wind was backing counterclockwise, meaning only one thing: Third Fleet was indeed sailing through a typhoon.
Kosco’s gut feeling became official when the carrier Wasp, steaming well east of the New Jersey, reported picking up the eye of the storm on her short-range radar. Someone looking at the radar screen knew what that vortex meant. At 11:49, Halsey finally issued the order releasing all vessels from fleetwide formation. Among his ship’s captains, this was likened to Mrs. O’Leary reporting her cow missing. It would still be another two hours before he sent an official typhoon warning to Fleet Weather Central at Pearl Harbor.
As the hours passed, the fleet’s more easterly vessels began to fill in the bleak picture. Kosco was informed that winds near the typhoon’s center were blowing steady at 125 knots. Seas had grown from “high” to “very high” to “mountainous,” although the rain and swirling scud made accurate height recordings difficult. Ships caught in irons reported waves, streaked with white, foamy veins, as tall as one hundred feet. On some vessels crewmen were already gathering in afterdeck houses awaiting orders to abandon ship.
Aboard the Dewey, steaming southeast near the typhoon’s eye, not a few sailors were making peace with their maker. The blown forward fireroom airlock hatch that Chief Watertender Andrew Tolmie had managed to close had nonetheless allowed nearly a thousand gallons of saltwater to flood the main distribution board. Her power had been shorted, she had no generators, and she was rolling heavily to starboard, dragging her shattered, flapping antenna wires behind her like broken wings. She was in fact listing so precariously that waves were cresting her gunwales, and her starboard weather deck was submerged for sixty seconds at a time.
On the deepest rolls the Dewey’s crewmen watched from the wardroom as her XO, Lt. Comdr. Frank Bampton, stepped off the bridge and crawled onto the side of the now-horizontal conning tower in “absolute certainty” he would presently drop into the sea. Bampton wore a look of bemusement when, on each occasion, the Dewey ever so slowly righted herself and he crawled back down to the pilothouse.
In one sense, if it can be construed so, the Dewey was fortunate that destroyer squadron commander Capt. Preston Mercer had chosen her as his flagship. Mercer was the screening commander for all the destroyers in the Dewey’s unit, and when Captain Calhoun realized it was idiocy to attempt to maintain fleet formation, he simply turned to Mercer and said, “Commodore, I’m concerned about my ship. I have to save my ship.”
Mercer nodded. “I agree with you,” he said. With that Calhoun broke station and, in all likelihood, saved the lives of his crew.
At noon the Dewey’s barometer read 28.10, a drop of .74 inches in the last hour. Venturing topside was suicide, and her terrified crew huddled belowdecks, where her bulkheads were stove in, leaking badly, and the groans from her creaking frame reverberated through the thin metal plates like the cries of ghosts. Men kneeled in common prayer, and though the Dewey sailed with no chaplain, a Protestant lay leader, Quartermaster Lawrence “Preacher” Johnson, gathered as many sailors as possible and led them in a continuous recital of the navy hymn.
In the wardroom on the main deck, the thoughts of Chief Warrant Officer Steven F. Yorden turned to “the poor guys down below; I felt so sorry for them. You know, you’re holding on for dear life, with no lights. Those guys dogged down in them compartments— they didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance to get out of there.”
Chief Yorden, dark, squat, with a huge walrus mustache, was in charge of the construction and repair division of the Dewey’s shipfitter’s shop, and as the destroyer rolled helplessly, he decided to dare an ascent to the bridge to offer assistance. This was treacherous, as Yorden had to await the ship’s roll to starboard before opening the compartment’s port hatch and making the mad dash across the ship’s hull to the skipper’s ladder that led up to the wheelhouse.
Timing his movements perfectly, he emerged face-to-face with Captain Calhoun, who shouted above the gale, “What can you do?”
The chief could think of only one option: sever the destroyer’s seven-ton gun director, which along with her mast and main stack were acting as sails to keep the ship heeled over. If that didn’t work, Yorden added, then cut off her mast, too.
“Cut ’em off,” Calhoun ordered.
Yorden returned to the wardroom and asked for volunteers to help him retrieve acetylene torches and oxygen tanks from the shipfitter’s shop in the bow of the vessel. An electrician and a gunner’s mate stepped forward. The three made their way to the stem and managed to drag the heavy acetylene and oxygen bottles back to the wardroom through the pitch-black interior of the Dewey. It was only after Yorden ran the oxygen hose out onto the deck that he realized that the acetylene torch would not cut through the aluminum at the base of the gun director. He crawled back to the pilothouse.
“Can’t do it,” he told Calhoun. “She’s made out of aluminum. I’ll start working on the mast.”
After crewmates tied a lifeline around Yorden’s waist, he began belly-crawling across the deck. Twice he was washed overboard. Twice he was “fished back out.” Reaching the base of the mast, Yorden now realized he could not keep his acetylene torch lit in the gale. He tried several times; in each instance the wind and spume immediately doused the flame. He returned to the bridge, his eyes met Calhoun’s, and he motioned wordlessly in the direction of the destroyer’s portside lifeboat. It seemed their last, best hope.
An instant later a stupendous wave, slashed with blue shadows, slammed into the Dewey, rolling her over more than 70 degrees to port. Seawater cascaded through the bridge’s smashed windows. The helmsman swung with the wheel, water up to his armpits. Calhoun was slammed against the bulkhead, where he landed in a tangle of arms and legs with his officer of the deck. The two scrambled to their feet and watched incredulously as the inclinometer climbed past 70 degrees, past 80 degrees, before finally coming to rest at 84 degrees.
“She’s going!” the helmsman shouted, unnecessarily, as every man in the wheelhouse knew well that only divine intervention would save a ship from a roll so precipitous.
And at that moment a sound like the firing of cannons drowned out the gale. Calhoun whipped around as the half-inch guy wire that ran from the deck to support the main forward stack snapped past his ear like a rifle shot. He watched in astonishment as the stack snapped at her base and slowly crumpled.
According to Bowditch, any wind’s force increases proportionately as the square of its velocity. Thus, the 110-knot gales the Dewey was encountering would have produced about 78 pounds of pressure per square foot on the destroyer’s 600-square-foot stack. This amounted to at least 23 tons of sustained pressure on the funnel, taking into account the increases in force due to the breathtaking gusts as well as the seawater now pouring down her spout. Against a weight of this magnitude, it is a wonder that the Dewey’s stack had not broken off earlier.
As the funnel collapsed and crashed across the destroyer’s deck, it knocked into the sea a gun turret, two ammunition lockers, and the vessel’s whaleboat, davits and all. The flattened heap of shredded metal, its tip now dragging through the waves like an abandoned oar, reminded Calhoun “of an old sock that had been thrown across the ship by some playful giant.” Black smoke billowed out of the gaping hole on the deck, and white-hot steam shot skyward from a broken line. Yet, with the smokestack no longer holding her over, with this reduction of “sail,” the crew of the Dewey felt her quiver and begin to stabilize.
Massive waves continued to pitch the vessel to starboard, but she never again rolled as deep. It was as well. For at 1:00 P.M., as she bobbed in a trough, the Dewey’s barometer needle went completely off the scale, down to the “U.” of “U.S. Navy.” One officer estimated that it dipped under 27 inches, perhaps to 26.30—which would have made it the lowest barometer reading ever recorded by the United States Navy. The Dewey was sailing through the eye of Typhoon Cobra.
* * *
As noon approached, oiler task group commander Capt. Jasper Acuff found himself out of TBS range on the floundering destroyer Aylwin. He dictated a clipped message to be sent via battery-operated VHF to the nearby carrier Wasp and forwarded to Vice Admiral McCain on the Hancock. Acuff, whose call sign was “Dracula,” had moved his command post to the Aylwin’s chart house from the bridge, where the shriek of the wind through the smashed wheelhouse windows made it impossible to communicate orders. Acuff’s radio operator, sloshing in knee-deep water in the flooded communications shack, dutifully sent off the terse communication.
“Dracula has lost control. Commander Task Group 30.8 unable to control his group.”
McCain took the report and ordered the individual commanders of the oiler task group to fall in behind his Task Force 38 as best they could. Despite her tribulations, the Aylwin was also lucky. She was still afloat.
As bleak morning turned to bleaker afternoon, Halsey logged increasingly anxious entries into his war diary for December 18:
0942: The [escort carrier] Kwajalein reported she had lost steering control.
1007: Wind 62 knots. Barometer 29.52.
1012: The Wisconsin reported one Kingfisher [scout plane] overboard.
1016: The [heavy cruiser] Boston reported one Kingfisher overboard.
1017: The [escort carrier] Rudyerd Bay reported she was dead in the water.
1051: The [light carrier] Cowpens reported fire on her hangar deck.
1100: Wind 55 knots. Barometer 29.47.
1128: The [escort carrier] Cape Esperance reported fire on her flight deck.
1300: Winds 66 knots. Barometer 29.30.
1310: Wind velocity increased sharply from 75 to 83 knots, with gusts reaching 93 knots. Barometer 29.23.
By this time, the peak period of the fleet’s encounter with Typhoon Cobra, the sky and sea seemed fused in one aqueous element. The oiler USS Nantahala recorded a record wind velocity of 124 knots (or 142.6 miles per hour), and visibility was reported at three feet. Sailors who dared crossed decks by snaking on their stomachs, and turning one’s back to the wind created a vacuum in which it was difficult to breathe. Sopping, injured men belowdecks were manhandled as wind and waves pitched and battered their vessels like buoys. Bailing gangs—water penetration repair parties—felt as if they were pushing Sisyphus’s rock, and one seaman wondered if he might actually drown inside his ship while it was still afloat.
Rising above all this was the cacophony of racked and groaning ships, the creaking of bulkheads, the working of stanchions, the slide and tear and roar of wreckage bouncing from bulkhead to bulkhead.
“No one who [has not] been through a typhoon can conceive its fury,” Halsey wrote. “The 70-foot seas smashing you from all sides. The rain and the scud are blinding; they drive at you flat out, until you can’t tell the ocean from the air. At broad noon I couldn’t see the bow of my ship, 350 feet from the bridge. The New Jersey was once hit by a five-inch shell without my feeling the impact; the Missouri, her sister, had a kamikaze crash on her main deck and repaired the only damage with a paint brush; yet this typhoon tossed our enormous ship as if she were a canoe. Our chairs, tables, and all loose gear had to be double-lashed; we ourselves were buffeted from one bulkhead to another; we could not hear our own voices above the uproar.”
He concluded his entry on a forlorn note: “What it was like on a destroyer one-twentieth the New Jersey’s size,” he wrote, “I can only imagine.”