“It’s a question of who wants it badly enough.”
—FIREMAN 1ST CLASS EVAN FENN,
USS MONAGHAN
Joe McCrane, the Monaghan’s “oil king,” was exhausted and forlorn when he heard a familiar twang.
“Hey, Joe, grab that raft back of you.”
The voice belonged to Joe Guio, the gunner’s mate from West Virginia who had helped pull so many men from the Monaghan’s afterdeck gun house just before she went under. Moments earlier Guio had cut the raft loose from the deck lines, and now McCrane lunged for the balsa-and-canvas float and seized it with the last of his strength.
As he looked around, he was, incongruously, reminded of Noel Coward’s classic lifeboat movie In Which We Serve, which had debuted two years earlier. He counted nearly twenty fellow crewmates hanging on for dear life. Several were injured, including the ship’s cook, Ben Holland, who was bleeding badly from ugly, serrated gashes on his foot and the back of his head, and the fireman Evan Fenn, who had stripped much of the skin off both his legs nearly down to the tendons attempting to reboard again and again.
When McCrane wiped the spume from his eyes, he also saw that half of Joe Guio’s foot was missing. He could tell easily, for Guio was naked.
As wave after wave battered the raft, spinning it topsy-turvy with each collision, McCrane and the healthiest seamen spent the afternoon helping the wounded back aboard. “It’s a question of who wants it badly enough,” Fenn told McCrane as yet another shipmate gave up and disappeared. These flips occurred four or five times before thirteen survivors finally managed to secure the craft in a bottom-down position.
The next several hours were a blur of onrushing wind and water as the sailors fought to remain afloat. It was only after dusk turned to total darkness that McCrane thought to fish through the emergency rations, and, as the ranking seaman, more or less take command of the tiny craft. He found watertight tins of hard biscuits, malted milk tablets (to slake thirst), and Spam as well as several five-gallon kegs of potable water and a medical kit containing sulfa powder and burn ointment.
Mentally dividing the stores by the number of survivors, he decided he would limit his “crew” to a biscuit and one cup of water two to three times a day. He guessed that would last them a week. There was no sense in stocking up for a desert island. He noticed that as soon as he knifed open a tin of Spam, huge, dark fins began circling the raft. He wondered how the sharks could smell it.
The Tabberer’s main mast snapped at 6:18 P.M. It crushed a flag bag and took the number 3 floater net basket with it over the starboard beam. The only wonder was that it hadn’t collapsed earlier. For over five hours Henry Plage had watched pensively from the Tabby’s wheelhouse as the fist-sized, porcelain insulators that maintained the mast’s guy wires crumbled and disintegrated with each stupendous roll. One by one the insulators washed away, and after each failure the gyrations of the sixty-four-foot-long pole increased exponentially.
Long before it began whipping in eight-foot arcs, Plage had ordered a deck crew tied into makeshift harnesses and sent topside, directing them to run a five-inch line through a lower eye on the main port guy in an effort to take up the slack. But though the sailors managed to get the hawser tied on, there was no way they could keep the mast taut in the throttling seas, and Plage dared not send any man aloft into the rigging.
The mast had shimmied in ever-widening arcs before ripping almost completely out of the step-weld on the main foredeck. Its base now rested on the signal bridge level, still attached to the ship by its wire stanchions and guys, and the large bullhorn was fouled in the main deck’s starboard bulwark. The tip, trailing in the ocean, was banging hard, dangerously hard, against the thin metal plating of the DE’s starboard hull. The Tabberer looked like a bomb had hit it.
Since the mast carried not only the ship’s radar but all her antennae, the little destroyer escort’s communications were now gone. Lost was any hope of sending out a distress call. The Tabberer was sailing blind, literally and figuratively, through the wild remnants of Typhoon Cobra.
The skipper turned to Bob Surdam and calmly ordered all engines stopped. They had to lose that mast completely before it punched a hole in the side of the ship. As tons of whitewater crashed over the Tabby’s stern, Plage broke out acetylene torches and axes, and called for volunteers.
Bob Ayers never saw the Spence slide beneath the sea. He had gone down with his destroyer while standing atop the bridge’s starboard, solid-panel rail, and somehow, even without a life jacket, he was spit back to the surface by the currents. A moment later a crate of potatoes washed by, and Ayers hopped atop it and hung on for all he was worth. He snagged a kapok skirting the spindrift and tied himself to the wooden crate as best he could. The water about him was littered with the ship’s flotsam, but he could make out no other survivors. The mangled Spence, hull up, refused to sink. She danced about the waves, threatening to crush him. He paddled his potato-crate raft away from the shattered ship as fast as he could.
Samuel Eliot Morison wrote, “For some reason that goes deep into the soul of a sailor, he mourns over shipmates lost to the dangers of the sea even more than for those killed by the violence of the enemy.” So it was that as Bob Ayers raced to escape the dying Spence, he thought at that moment of his friend Floyd Balliett, trapped belowdecks in the bowels of the doomed destroyer. Then a mountainous breaker crashed over him and drove him deep below. When he came to the surface, his makeshift raft was gone, as was his life jacket. He could not see more than fifteen feet in any direction. The noise was earth-shattering, the waves towered above him, and the wind-driven rain stung him like needles.
A month earlier the eighteen-year-old Bob Ayers had been riding a train across America’s heartland, seemingly bound for glory with the Tin Can Navy. Now the onetime Great Lakes schooner sailor, nine days out of port on his first seagoing assignment, was bobbing alone in the vast Pacific Ocean.
When Chief Bosun’s Mate Ray Schultz broke the surface, he counted at least two dozen of his Hull shipmates bobbing in “a big glob” where the destroyer had once been. After one, and then another, and then a third giant comber washed over them, Schultz could locate no more than two or three men. The rest had gone under and not come back up. He spied a life raft, stroked for it, and looped a line from his life preserver through one of its small pad eyes. On board he recognized a hemp-haired giant, a young ship’s steward named Chambers, and warned the big man to lash himself on.
“I’m gonna do better than that,” Chambers said, and before Schultz could stop him, the steward had wedged his foot between the slats of balsa wood grating that constituted the raft’s deck. The next wave lifted the raft high into the air, snapping Schultz’s lifeline and most likely Chambers’s leg. From a distance Schultz watched it land facedown. He saw the steward’s foot sticking up through the grating as he drowned.
Swearing off rafts, Schultz rolled himself into a ball, smacking from wave to wave. Their convection created powerful, mini-whirlpools that alternately flung him into the air or drove him deep beneath the surface. He had gone into the water fully clothed, but by nightfall the sea had torn away every stitch except for his kapok life jacket and the belt and pockets of his dungarees. He soon learned to stop fighting the down-driving current—the honeycombed air pockets in his kapok would always propel him to the surface just as he felt he could not hold his breath a moment more. He rolled through the Philippine Sea like this well into the night.
Several planks washed by near him, but from the experience with the life raft, he had learned his lesson about latching on to anything rigid. He never thought to bodysurf, and though a good swimmer, he was certain he would soon join the steward Chambers at the bottom of the sea. Before the Hull had shipped from Pearl to Ulithi, she had picked up twenty-five new men, predominantly seventeen-and eighteen-year-old kids, and Schultz rued the fact that he’d never gotten to know them, to teach them what he knew, to pass on to the greenhorns the U.S. Navy’s vaunted “chief’s lore.”
He was fairly certain the radioman on the Hull had failed to get off a distress signal before she capsized. This meant that no one knew he was out here. Sometime in the middle of the night, Ray Schultz began to think of his family, about how they would never get the straight story of his death. These thoughts left him angry, and sad.
Capt. Henry Plage handed Leonard Glaser a torch and an acetylene tank as several shipmates laced looplines in and around his life preserver. “It’ll either bang a hole in the hull, or get caught in the screws, so it’s got to go,” Plage said.
Glaser glanced at the flopping mast dragging along the side of the Tabberer and nodded. When ax blades had proven futile against the thick steel, Glaser had volunteered to be lowered over the side to burn it off. It was the least he could do for the skipper who had gone out of his way to bring him kosher food.
Plage stopped all engines and ordered live power cut from all the mast’s leads so as not to electrocute Glaser or the damage control party, and the twenty-six-year-old shipfitter was dropped down to the raging water level. A few times giant swells engulfed him, blinding him momentarily, knocking out his acetylene torch, but on each occasion he relit it quickly enough. Within five minutes he had severed the long pole and its cables and sent it all to the bottom without even scraping any paint, much less denting the ship. Glaser gave the “All clear,” and as they hauled him back up, he felt the rumble of the Tabby’s engines being restarted.
Once the cumbersome mast had been jettisoned, the Tabberer’s roll was reduced immeasurably, and the ship was able to break free from the troughs that held her in irons. Yet with the mast went all the ship’s communications equipment, and Plage now had no way of informing flag plot that his vessel was still afloat. He realized that the swirling vortex of Typhoon Cobra may have washed over him and his crew, but the tremendous seas worked up by the typhoon were still running. In fact, the wind and waves actually seemed to be increasing. He pointed his bow south and steamed on thin fumes of hope.
Meanwhile, attempts to rerig an emergency transmitter antenna across what was left of the DE’s superstructure proceeded desperately. Ralph Tucker, the Tabby’s chief radioman who had spent the worst of the storm immersed in Bob Hope, was now on top of the pilothouse, lashed in, skipping over the cavity left when a solid wall of water had sheared off a section of its roof a few moments before the mast snapped.
Tucker worked for hours fusing cables to a spare, forty-four-inch-long TBS antenna rod, and by midnight he would establish a weak radio signal, albeit one that could not transmit farther than a few thousand yards. But for now the Tabberer was still sailing incommunicado.
Minutes before 10:00 P.M., Tucker was straddling the after bridge, jury-rigging the antenna wire between a gun mount and the remaining flag bag, when he glimpsed a pinpoint flicker of a light perhaps one hundred yards away.
“Man overboard!” he shouted. “Light off the starboard beam!” Plage, pacing the bridge below Tucker, wheeled about. By then, what Tucker was certain he saw was the glint of a small, one-cell, battery-charged flashlight attached to all U.S. Navy–issue kapok life preservers as it had disappeared into a trough as black as a deep cave. It took a minute or two before Plage saw it cresting another wave. Had one of his crewmen been washed overboard? No, that was impossible. He assumed it was just an empty kapok blown off some vessel or another.
Nevertheless, he ordered the Tabby swung about. In spite of standing, antisubmarine blackout orders, he directed that his 12-inch and 24-inch searchlights be trained on the tiny, flickering beam bobbing atop the whitecaps. The sea lit up like a stadium at night.
Although he never lost consciousness, the twenty-one-year-old radarman Keith Abbott had no idea how he had been knocked from the Monaghan’s combat information center into the sea. All he knew was that the rain flaying his face stung like sharpened hailstones, and something was whipping into the back of his head. He turned to find the straggling rope of a four-by-eight-foot balsa-bottomed raft. His arms flailed and he grabbed the line. Without even trying to heft himself aboard, he held on as tight as he could.
The raft rode the combers with Abbott trailing behind it like the tail of a kite. Each wave presented its own private battle—up, over the crest, a dizzying descent—and his mind became so preoccupied with winning every one of these battles that it was some time before he realized there were no other sailors from the Monaghan in sight.
Hours later, when the bruised, battered, and drained Abbott finally eased himself into the raft as if there might be snakes inside, he began scavenging for provisions. There were none. He was alone with no water, and no food. He told himself there had to be people throughout the fleet who were aware of the Monaghan’s plight. He was not naïve. It would certainly be difficult to locate one man in a small raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But if anyone could do it, Admiral Halsey could. Of this he was certain. He could not believe, he did not want to believe, that he had been the only survivor from the fabled destroyer.
Henry Lee Plage trained his binoculars on the bobbing light, and a living, waving form took shape. It was indeed a sailor, and as the Tabby closed on him, Plage heard the shrill keening of the whistle also affixed to every kapok life preserver. The captain assumed the floater had been lost from the destroyer Dewey, which had passed his ship several hours earlier.
Plage attempted several by-the-book rescue approaches into the wind, as if shaping toward a mooring buoy at anchorage. As an aircraft carrier screener the Tabby had plucked at least twenty-five downed American pilots from the drink since her commission (and always offered the puzzled flyboys a brimming bowl of ice cream from Cookie Phillips’s pilfered machine), but no rescue rules applied in these high seas. The waves were still so precipitous that on each occasion, as the ship drew near to the desperate floater and slowed, the ground swell and the cross-seas would cause her to lose steering control and her bow would drift away from the man. “Normal procedures,” Plage decided, “just won’t work.”
He could think of only one other maneuver, a highly dangerous course of action he’d once read about a squadron of Merchant Marines experimenting with off the wild coasts of New England. The naval reservist, with less than eighteen months at sea, drew the Tabby about fifty yards to the windward side of the floater, and turned his ship broadside into the heaving seas. It was a stroke of genius from such a novice seaman. Now the gale and waves plowed the Tabby sideways toward the drifting man, “rolling toward him like a hunk of tumbleweed.” But it also exposed her thin-skinned starboard hull to a jackhammer pounding from the combers.
As the Tabby closed the gap, she listed so sharply that the portside edge of her main deck plunged underwater with every heel. On her final approach, even as it appeared she would roll atop and crush the man, a deck gang managed to heave a life preserver and a looped line. The floating seaman caught it and fastened the bight beneath his arms. On the Tabby’s next return roll, when the green swells and frothing white foam retreated from her deck, it left behind an unconscious heap swathed in a kapok life jacket, its rescue beacon still blinking.
When the sailor regained consciousness in sick bay, he identified himself to his rescuers as Quartermaster 3rd Class Vernon Lindquist, from the capsized destroyer USS Hull. When word of this was passed topside to Plage, the captain was staggered. He had no idea a destroyer had gone down. An old battlefield bromide cautions: Never believe a straggler and rarely believe a casualty. But here was living, breathing proof.
Plage rushed belowdecks to interrogate the seaman, who insisted “there are more of us out there.” The skipper ordered cargo nets draped over both sides of the Tabby to provide handholds and footholds. All crewmen who could be spared were directed topside to search for lights and listen for whistles. Sailors crowded the weather decks and lined the rails, eyes straining.
Despite the high seas, despite the blinding rainsqualls, despite his lost radar and radio, Plage began a systematic, dead-reckoning boxed search of the area: fifteen hundred yards a side at a speed of 10 knots. Up, over, and down waves the Tabby flew. At ten-minute intervals, as regular as the Angelus, the skipper doused all running lights, turned off the bridge’s ventilation blowers, and cut his engines in order to better see the blinking kapoks and hear the desperate whistles and hollers above the gale.
Presently, whistles were indeed heard in the distance. At first it was difficult to distinguish floating men from whitecaps, however, lights flickering unsteadily from the tor-like peaks gradually came into view before disappearing into the troughs.
When Sonarman Pat Douhan had splashed into the water, he lunged after the first object his hands brushed against. It was one of the Hull’s large life rafts, already carrying several sailors, and it bounced on the high seas attached by slack lines to a second raft.
Douhan pulled himself up so that his shoulders were nearly inside, his legs trailing in the sea. At that moment a thunderous wave broke over both rafts, and Douhan watched as the heads of the men trapped in the water between the two crafts were “crushed like popcorn.” He let go, slid back into the sea, and allowed the current to take him.
The “ping jockey” was not wearing a kapok, merely the old Mae West life belt he’d grabbed off the aft gun—named, naturally, after the curvaceous vaudeville and movie star. He wondered how long the worm-eaten yellow rubber tube fastened about his waist would last in this ocean. Not long, he bet. He thought he was well clear of the sinking Hull when he was violently sucked downward in a giant whirlpool. His ears popped at first, and then his eyes, so hard he thought they would blow out of their sockets. He was certain he was being siphoned into the big screws of a passing carrier or battlewagon. He couldn’t see a ship, he couldn’t see anything in this muck, but he was sure it was there.
Then he shot back to the surface, as if fired from a gun. A huge swell carried him up its face, and from this vantage point, as if peering over a cliff, he watched the Hull gurgle and disappear beneath the slate gray sea. One moment she was lying on her side, a floating abattoir, and in the next she was gone. Douhan was too high in the air to make out how many sailors she pulled below with her.
Not long after this he sensed her boilers exploding, maybe her depth charges, too, a wave of pressure spiraling up from the deep. He felt it in legs, in his torso, in his bowels, in his kidneys, and he thought of all the good men who had not made it out. More surf broke over him and he curled up into a tuck position and let the current carry him.
Douhan was a “water bug” who had starred on school swimming teams since he was a little boy, but he knew there was no swimming through this maelstrom. Waves tossed him like a toy. Sometime around dusk, as he was lofted up another huge swell, he peered across a liquid valley and recognized a shipmate. It was the Hull’s Storekeeper 3rd Class Ken Drummond, dropping through the gaps on the opposite face, as if falling from the heights of a ragged line of hills. He waved, but Drummond did not wave back.
And then it was dark, an inky, suffocating murk, blacker than Pat Douhan thought it could ever become.
The Monaghan’s gunner’s mate 3rd class Joseph Guio Jr., from Hollidays Cove, West Virginia, died naked in Joe McCrane’s arms sometime after 10:00 P.M. He abruptly ceased shivering and passed away as the “oil king” cradled him in an attempt to keep him warm.
Moments earlier McCrane and his fellow survivors had spotted the running lights of a ship quite a far distance from their raft. They’d begun hollering and waving, but the vessel steamed on without noticing them. Guio had looked up and said to McCrane, “Joe, can you see anything?”
McCrane thought Guio was talking about the passing ship. It was obvious to all his raftmates that Guio was bleeding out from his severed foot, and McCrane had tried to buoy his spirits. Sure, he said, he could see something. A ship. Coming for them.
“I can’t see a thing,” Guio said, and closed his eyes.
McCrane and Seaman 1st Class Doyle Carpenter prepared the burial at sea. Carpenter said the Lord’s Prayer, and McCrane gazed one last time at the pallid face of the man who had saved his life. Then he and Carpenter gently rolled Guio’s body over the side.
They were now twelve.