“It’s all in the laps of the gods.”
—LT. COMDR. HENRY LEE PLAGE,
USS TABBERER
By Lt. Comdr. Henry Lee Plage’s reckonings—the plunge in barometric pressure, the strength of the gale, the movement of the combers—the destroyer escort Tabberer steamed through the teeth of Typhoon Cobra somewhere between 10:00 A.M. and noon on December 18.
At 7:00 A.M., after a haggard night, the barometer in the DE’s pilothouse read 29.58. Four and one half hours later the needle had fallen by almost two inches, bottoming out at 27.95. Around 10:30 Plage clocked the wind, blowing out of the north, at the maximum Beaufort reading of Force 12, and—after the ship’s anemometer was ripped from its stanchion and blown into the sea—estimated that gusts held steady at over 100 knots for several hours thereafter.
Titanic waves heeled the ship so hard to starboard that Plage transferred as much oil as safety allowed to the portside bunkers to compensate for the list. He also set special watches below to protect the generators and switchboard, which he had ordered draped with canvas tarps. And while the boiler water levels were kept at full to prevent sloshing that would add to the ship’s tilt, he’d drained some of the lubricating oil in the turbogenerator in order to prevent the windings from soaking. He had done, he thought, everything he could.
Throughout the storm, the remaining ships of the Tabberer’s hunter-killer submarine Task Group 30.7, at least the vessels Plage knew to be still afloat, had attempted to keep station about their flagship, the jeep carrier USS Anzio, steaming on a base course of 160 degrees, south-southeast. But because the Tabby’s helmsman was having such difficulty steering her through the mountainous swells, Plage radioed the Anzio that he was breaking station and ordered a course change to 90 degrees, nearly due east. Visibility was no more than thirty feet and—the near collision with his friend Capt. Raymond Toner’s Robert F. Keller fresh in his mind—he was afraid of being run down by the larger ships of Halsey’s scattered task force. The change of heading locked the Tabby in irons, but at least, settled deep in the trough, the rolls had decreased, to no more than 40 degrees.
When he felt he was well clear of any nearby vessels, Plage attempted to bring the Tabby back around to her south-southeast base course. This proved impossible. The ship pitched into the waves at full rudder with her engines dangerously stoked to 18 knots, and when this didn’t work, he attempted full ahead with one engine while backing the other down full. It was like trying to ride a motorcycle up the walls of the Grand Canyon. By midday he’d given up trying to break out of the massifs of water engulfing his little “sea dwarf,” and settled back into an easterly direction, the wind and sea pummeling his port beam.
The Tabby was sailing with 75 percent of her fuel capacity, which helped with stability, but the seas were just too high, an ocean conjured by Caliban. Her chief radioman, Ralph Tucker, became so anxious standing watch in the DE’s communications shack that he tried to push the dread from his mind by reading, from cover to cover, the comedian Bob Hope’s autobiography, I Never Left Home. He told crewmates he didn’t realize the book was funny until two days later.
The confused seas combined to create “a delicate situation” for the Tabby, as the understated Plage noted in his log. The ship had suffered damage to one of her screws, her driveshaft, and her motor, which had been temporarily knocked off its bed. A flying ammunition locker had punched a twelve-inch-by-twelve-inch hole through the hull of her motor whaleboat. And there had been a few minor electrical shorts when saltwater entered the air vents during big rolls and doused the switchboards. But the canvas sleeves the ship’s engineers had rigged to reroute seawater pouring belowdecks had done their job, and the tarps with which Plage had sheltered the generators kept them relatively dry. In fact, despite the rolls and spleen-rattling pitches, at no time during the height of the typhoon had the Tabberer lost all its power.
Those same rolls, however, had loosed several heavy 5-inch shells from their racks in the forward handling room as well as a number of aluminum gunpowder cases. The shells, their fuse caps knocked off (rendering them live), were ricocheting from bulkhead to bulkhead. Given the circumstances, Plage could not leave the bridge, and he refused to order any crewmen below to relash them—“It was almost a certainty that someone would get crushed trying to secure 5-inch shells under those conditions,” he said.
But nineteen-year-old Gunner’s Mate Tom Bellino needed no orders. He grabbed the first man he could find, a black steward’s mate, and the two dashed into the room. The projectiles weighed 54 pounds apiece, and the gunpowder cases 27 pounds each, but the two Tabby sailors strained to heft them off the grating and tie them back into their racks. They most likely saved the ship. Plage only later learned of their heroics.
By early afternoon, Plage calculated the Tabby’s position to be somewhat northeast of the bulk of Halsey’s flotilla. She was rolling heavier now, up to 55 degrees, as the wind backed around, first to the west and then to the south. But she was steaming fairly steadily at 10 knots.
Just past 1:00 P.M. the captain noticed his glass beginning to rise, and he picked up the destroyers Hickox and USS Benham as well as the destroyer escort USS Waterman on his radar screen. The three vessels, all from his task group, were bunched together some 2,000 to 5,000 yards ahead of him. Via TBS radio each skipper informed Plage that he had lost steering control. All three were steaming in troughs at no more than 3 knots. Plage backed his own vessel down to 3 knots in order to avoid running up their sterns, and with the loss of speed, the Tabby took a stupendous roll, the inclinometer registering 72 degrees.
Because she was “beamier” than a destroyer, with a lower center of gravity, the Tabby recovered from these heels much more quickly. But not long after another such roll, one of the mainmast’s porcelain insulators gave way, and the long metal pole began to whip and sway. As it worked itself loose, Plage knew it was only a matter of time before the mast crashed. The only question was how large a hole it would gouge from the foredeck when it ripped from its base. He gazed at the seventy-foot waves pounding his ship and turned to his XO Bob Surdam. “It’s all in the laps of the gods,” he said.
Chief Quartermaster Archie DeRyckere was drawn so deep by the suction of the sinking Hull that he thought his eardrums would explode. They didn’t, but his head ached for days afterward. Prior to helping the Hull’s wounded executive officer, Griel Gherstly, up onto the doomed destroyer’s searchlight and nodding good-bye to his friend Chief Bosun’s Mate Ray Schultz, DeRyckere had managed to lash a kapok tight around his beefy chest.
Now, before he followed the Hull all the way to the cold ocean floor, the life preserver shot him back to the waterline, not that he could know it from the solid sheets of wind-driven rain. In fact, the spume was as thick as the sea, and the only sign that he had surfaced was the deafening sound of the gale. His ears hurt even more, and it felt as if someone were throwing sand in his face. DeRyckere had to turn away from the gusts and cup his hands around his nose just to breathe. Before long, the driving rain would chip all the skin from his nose, neck, and ears.
As the chief gulped for air, he silently thanked Schultz for procuring the new life jackets to replace the Hull’s old Mae West inflatable life belts. Third Fleet sailors liked the rectangular kapoks. They could be used as pillows while, say, standing long watches at general quarters, and in a pinch even served as a modest flak vest against shrapnel. But now, as he treaded water, Archie DeRyckere recognized their true worth. They would keep a man afloat much longer than a flimsy Mae West, perhaps up to three or four days. DeRyckere prayed it would not come to that.
Neither Gherstly nor Schultz was anywhere to be seen when, out of the corner of his eye, DeRyckere spotted a raft with several shipmates already on board. He made for it. The raft was donut-shaped, gray canvas stretched taut over balsa wood, and he was barely inside when a huge comber drove the craft down deep, held it underwater for what seemed like an eternity, and then blasted it back 15 to 20 feet into the air like a hollow stick. Every sailor was knocked from the float, and in the scramble to reboard, DeRyckere felt men grabbing at his hair, his ears, gouging his eye sockets. This happened three, four times in the next few moments before he thought, “To hell with this, I’m getting the hell out of here.”
He started to swim, to where he did not know or care. Soon enough he realized he could “sense” by the surface current and wave action the impending crash of one of the huge crushers. As it closed on him he would hear the roar, and seconds before the wave broke, out of some primal instinct, he kicked his feet, folded his arms across his chest … and taught himself to bodysurf, as if learning to fly while falling. He began gliding down the face of ninety-foot combers.
He saw shipmates doing the same. He rode one wave with Fire Controlman 1st Class Al Taylor, who curved in midair with the resilience of a dolphin and hollered, “Woo-ee, Chief! What a ride!”
Next he found himself bodysurfing parallel to Chief Radioman Burt Martin, who screamed, “Any port in a storm, right, Arch?”
“You got that right,” DeRyckere yelled back. And then Martin, like Taylor before him, was gone.
DeRyckere rode the waves like this for a good five hours. The water was warm, well over 75 degrees Fahrenheit he guessed, and he was not uncomfortable. But he knew the night air would be cold, and he was tiring. In the gloaming, as he skimmed down the face of another wall of water, he nearly collided with the Hull’s skipper, Lt. Comdr. James A. Marks.
“Hey, DeRyckere,” Marks said. “Like to know what time it is?”
What the hell was this man talking about? “Yes, sir, Captain. I would.”
Marks glanced at his waterproof watch, still working perfectly, and said that it was a little past 6:00 P.M. Then the skipper disappeared. Not a word about attaching lines and staying together. Not a thought for his crew. Just gone. Archie thought this par for the course.
As night fell on December 18, an ashen-faced Halsey conferred unremittingly with his flag staff aboard the New Jersey. He had accounted for all his “heavies,” from battlewagons to attack carriers to cruisers. Of the DDs and DEs, from which there was no word and no trace, he hoped that this was merely the result of their masts, or antennae, or both, having been blown away in the typhoon. Although the smaller jeep flattops such as the Monterey, Cowpens, Cape Esperance, and San Jacinto radioed flag plot that most, if not all, of their aircraft were either resting on the seabed or hopelessly demolished, Halsey was heartened by his escort carriers’ sustained seaworthiness. Planes, he thought, he could replace. He would later learn that he had lost 146 of them.
Via his Task Force 38 commander, Adm. “Slew” McCain, Halsey directed the Monterey’s Capt. Stuart Ingersoll to form up the battered vessels most in need of repair and, after refueling, shape course for Ulithi ahead of the rest of the fleet. Among these ships was the broken and limping destroyer Aylwin.
At 6:45 P.M., with the Hull, Spence, Monaghan, and Tabberer still unaccounted for, the admiral sent a TBS order to McCain alerting all ships to post lookouts for floating survivors. There was nothing else to do but smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, watch, and wait. As damage assessments dribbled into flag plot, Halsey paced between the port side of flag mess and his seat at the conference table. Occasionally he would peer over the shoulder of his chief of staff, Adm. “Mick” Carney, who kept a running tally sheet of the fleet’s vessels on the table before him. Carney’s damage assessment continued to grow.