Court: “How did you get out of the passageway just forward of the galley when the ship capsized?”
“I climbed on the side of the bulkhead of the issue room just alongside of the port hatch. I sat there until all the rush had gone by. I couldn’t get out because of the number of men going up. They were just knocking you every way.”
—TESTIMONY OF ROY G. MORGAN, FIREMAN 2ND CLASS,
USS HULL, TO THE COURT OF INQUIRY INVESTIGATING
“HALSEY’S TYPHOON.”
When she broached to starboard for the final time, the Monaghan’s oil king, Joe McCrane, was knocked over with violence and became snarled in a sweaty ball of men’s bodies. The destroyer bobbed on her side, and the after deckhouse’s portside hatch was nearly directly above him, perhaps ten feet away. McCrane watched three or four crewmates put their shoulders into it, balancing precariously on the prone bulkhead.
The wind and waves were beating hard against the door, and it took several moments before it swung open, and in good order sailors began filing out. McCrane felt an incongruous flush of pride. There was no panic. Each seaman waited his turn patiently. Given the circumstances, there was little, if any, confusion.
Third Class Gunner’s Mate Joe Guio, with no concern for his own safety, squatted outside the hatch in the lee of the gun mount, pulling men out one by one in a chain, like tent caterpillars ascending a tree. But the waves were too strong, and when sailors reached the open deck, most were lashed overboard unless they quickly found something to cling to.
For the fireman Evan Fenn this was a single depth charge, the last still attached to its rack. Soon enough, however, Fenn’s grip gave out, and he was carried over the destroyer’s fantail and into the sea. About him the ocean foamed and bubbled under a cloud of black smoke issuing like a death rattle from the Monaghan’s coughing boilers.
Fenn became tangled in the wires trailing from the ship’s wrecked antenna, and as they whipped him about like a gaffed marlin, he saw several crewmates being pounded to pulp against the side of the heaving vessel. He managed to disengage himself and began swimming away from the gurgling Monaghan as fast as he could.
Since early morning, gun mechanic Floyd Balliett had been certain the Spence was going to sink. He didn’t know quite how to explain the premonition, and he certainly had not articulated his thoughts to anyone, not even his new friend Bob Ayers as they shared cold bacon sandwiches down in the galley. It was just a gut feeling, and though he was only several months in the navy, Floyd Balliett had learned to trust his gut. It was why he was wearing his kapok.
Most of his shipmates had not followed suit. The kapok life jackets were bulky, and the access hatches leading topside were so small that it was difficult to wriggle through them while wearing one. Many of his crewmates had stashed theirs on the deck outside the hatches, within easy reach should they need them in a pinch. Of course, many of Balliett’s crewmates had not figured that the Spence would go “Tango Uniform”—Tits Up—in the blink of an eye.
Balliett was in his compartment below the bow when a huge comber rolled the Spence hard to port. Tons of seawater lashed her exposed hull, and he heard men screaming, crying—the noise reminded him of newborns in a hospital maternity room—as they raced from their berths into the narrow, clogged companionways. They were bashed against bulkheads as they hauled themselves up hand over hand, clawing and fighting each other as well as the deluge streaming into the passages.
Balliett was lithe and quick, and even while strapped into his kapok he was able to pick his way among the berserkers until he was standing almost directly beneath a starboard hatch in the bow of the ship. The knot of sailors flailing and rolling and crawling beneath the hatch were either too confused or too frozen with fear to move. They wouldn’t mount the ladder, and they wouldn’t get out of his way.
Balliett lifted himself to the top of the scrum and began climbing over men until he reached the open air. A jet stream of water gushed in through the opening, and he fought it hard, forcing first his head, then his shoulders, and then his entire torso through the hatch until he was standing on the starboard hull. He looked back, reached down, and extended a hand through the foaming cataract. No one grabbed it.
Any damn fool could see that the Hull was sinking. Archie DeRyckere reckoned that someone forgot to tell the ship. She was trying to sit up, God bless her, fighting like hell to come out of her roll. DeRyckere could feel the vibrations of the engines straining beneath his feet. She was gutsy, all right, but as the old tars often said, there was the devil to pay and no pitch hot. She was at too much of a disadvantage in this wind and big sea, at nature’s mercy, and at the moment nature did not appear very forgiving.
DeRyckere was on the bridge, bucking up the panicky kid Punchy Parker, when he looked aft and noticed the eight-foot screws ticking over in the air from whatever pressure was left in the boilers. Across the stern, any sailors who could scrambled from belowdecks—crawling from hatches, wriggling through portholes and blower vents. Men streamed out of the after deckhouse like ants poked with a burning stick. Some were washed overboard and cut to pieces by the turning propellers. Others made the mistake of attempting to climb back aboard. But as the syncopated breakers drove the ship deeper into the sea, the nearest floaters were crushed.
DeRyckere watched as one crewmate, a fire controlman from Cincinnati, tried to claw his way back just as one of the 5-inch guns swung down and caved his head in like a melon. Even in this maelstrom the chief could make out the blood in the water. He wondered about sharks. Did they attack in high seas?
Groups of sailors huddled together on the side of the heaving vessel, clinging to gun screens, radar mounts, anything to keep from plunging into the roiling water. But as the ocean scoured the floundering Hull, each successive wave thinned their ranks. He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to see a seaman, he couldn’t tell whom, calmly stroll to the end of the horizontal main stack and step off into the water.
DeRyckere glanced one last time at his navigation charts. Another hundred miles south, less than two degrees of latitude, and they’d all be laughing about the close call with the typhoon. Now the Hull was almost horizontal, and DeRyckere stepped out onto the side of the wheelhouse to watch the stack dip into the sea. The funnel came back up slightly, but he knew what it meant. How many tons of water the Hull “swallowed” was anyone’s guess. More sailors arrived on the bridge from below, huddled together, no one saying a word.
The Monaghan bobbed on her side, and “oil king” Joe McCrane clung to the ship’s gun shelter. His eyes scanned the waterline as shipmates and friends were crushed to death beneath the rocking destroyer. He frantically adjusted his rubber-tube life vest and reminded himself to stroke for all he was worth when his turn finally came. The ship’s metal plates were keening when a spout of foaming green water snatched him and swept him over the side.
McCrane was pushed deep under the wave and lost all sense of direction. He felt as if he were caught in a whirlpool. He clawed like a madman for the surface, banging off flailing bodies as he forced himself upward. Unseen hands clutched at his arms, his feet, his head; he shook them all loose. When he emerged at the waterline, another large swell lifted him and rammed him shoulder-first into the side of the Monaghan’s port torpedo tubes. This, he thought, was a chance.
He hefted himself back onto the ship and picked out the highest point he could make out through the spume, the side of the 20mm gun shield. He started climbing, crawling really, his hands and feet seeking any purchase, his fingernails nearly digging into the steel hull, like a child inching up a jungle gym. He had nearly reached the gun shield when another wave enveloped him, tossing him sideways and wrapping him around the ship’s prone antenna. The current spun him about the metal pole three or four times, propelled him into the air, threw him loose, and deposited him back in the sea.
The pain was like electricity shooting through his torso, and McCrane thought his ribs were surely broken. He again found himself almost beneath the ship, her wheelhouse churning like a piston. It was all he could do to keep from being pummeled. Water and fuel oil choked him, gagged him. He began beating the water, “like a puppy,” trying to will himself away from the pounding steel. He was on the brink of panic.
“No,” he told himself, “conserve your strength. Close your mouth and breathe through your nose. Stop swallowing saltwater and oil, now. Swim.”
Midway through his first stroke he was washed under again, this time not as deep. When he surfaced, the Monaghan was gone. Vanished. Where? He turned in a 360-degree radius, searching for his ship, his crewmates. It was impossible. The rain and spume stung his face like shrapnel. Visibility was zero. The ocean was empty. Joe McCrane was alone.
It was close to noon, and nineteen-year-old Radioman James Elder was monitoring the TBS from his combat station in the rocking combat information center of the jeep carrier Cape Esperance. The frantic chatter he’d listened to all morning had been broken only by static. Now, inexplicably, came a long silence, followed by an all-points distress call. The speaker identified himself as Capt. James Andrea, skipper of the destroyer Spence.
“We are taking water down our stacks,” Andrea said. His voice was calm, almost matter-of-fact. “We can’t make it.”
Elder listened for more. No words followed. Moments later the Cape Esperance’s executive officer dashed into the CIC.
“Did you get that, did you get that recorded?” said the XO.
Elder read the message back to the officer. He would remember the exact words for the rest of his life.
The Hull was rolling unmercifully, locked tight in the trough. She wasn’t getting out, and the sonarman Pat Douhan knew it.
The opening to the after gun mount’s blown-away starboard hatch lay flush with the sea, and the handle to the portside hatch was now above him. He scrambled over several bodies—men yelped as he stepped on their hands—turned the latch, and flung open the door. He crawled out on deck and was blown flat on his back. The hatch, swinging on its hinges, came down on top of him and knocked the wind from his lungs. He was trapped beneath the heavy steel door for several minutes.
Two seamen who followed him out managed to free him, and when Douhan got to his knees, he spied a life jacket tied to one of the aft guns. It was one of the old, rubber-tubed Mae Wests, just hanging there, forlorn. He grabbed it and threw it over his shoulders.
No sooner had he donned the Mae West than another wave snatched him and swept him amidships, depositing him just below the 40mm gun director. A few yards away he spotted a shipmate— he couldn’t see a face—pinned against the bulkhead by a rogue life raft. The balsa-floored donut had broken its mooring and been caught in the rigging, and when the rigging collapsed it had wedged the seaman in tight. Douhan and several others tried to wrench it loose. It wouldn’t budge. The trapped sailor had freed one of his arms, and with it he waved them away. “Fight on!” he cried.
Douhan was at a loss. He could not just leave the man. The decision was made for him. The next comber, the size of a building falling on him, washed him into the sea.
At the exact moment the Monaghan broached—her overhead buckled, her rivets popped, water pouring in through the seams—Nathan Abbott was eight thousand miles away working a field of his sugar beet farm in Nampa, Idaho. Bent over a hoe, he was abruptly overcome with a tremendous feeling of despair. It was if a dark cloud was encompassing him, and the distress was unbearable.
Nathan Abbott, father of the Monaghan’s “ping jockey,” Keith Abbott, fell to his knees and began to weep. His tears fell into the fresh-turned, loamy soil. Nathan Abbott had two other sons as well as a son-in-law fighting the war. But he instinctively knew what the premonition portended.
Clearing his head, he rose on shaky legs and ran as fast as he could toward his farmhouse, some three hundred yards away. He burst through the door and shouted for his wife, Mary.
“Keith is in great danger,” he hollered. He was nearly wailing. “He needs our prayers.”
For the next two hours Nathan and Mary Abbott knelt in their living room in landlocked Nampa, Idaho, beseeching the Lord to save their son from the sea. The contours of battle had not changed in over two thousand years, since Cicero noted that, in peace, sons bury fathers; in war, fathers bury sons.