“Well, if He wants to test me, I guess I’ll show Him what I’m made of.”
—LT. (J.G.) LLOYD RUST, CIC OFFICER, USS HULL
Communications officer Lt. (j.g.) Lloyd Rust was at his station in the Hull’s combat information center, just back of and below the bridge, when the destroyer capsized. The shack filled with seawater almost instantaneously. He was forced to swim underwater to escape but, as fate would have it, such was his lack of confidence in Captain Marks’s seamanship that he’d strapped on his kapok long before the ship went over. Before Rust freed himself completely, he’d become tangled up in the shack’s electric lines, which had cut his hands badly. Then a renegade life raft carrying several shipmates had dropped from the sky directly on top of him and nearly drowned him. Those crewmates were the last men he had seen for twenty-four hours.
After bouncing from wave to wave throughout the night, sometime after daybreak on the morning of December 19, Rust spotted a floatplane skimming the waves. It was obviously searching for survivors. Earlier, he had kicked off his shoes and doffed his pants, as he felt they were dragging him below the ocean surface. Now, with nothing to wave at the floatplane, he took off his white boxer shorts and brandished them as high as he could reach. The aircraft’s crew did not see him.
Sometime that afternoon Rust saw a destroyer bearing down on him. She was so close that he could make out the actions of her deck crew. But when she came within several hundred yards, she took an abrupt turn to starboard and steamed back over the horizon.
That was the final straw for Lloyd Rust. He was ready to give up hope. He was ready to die. Only his anger saved him. He decided that he was “mad at the Good Lord”—angry with Him for sinking his ship, and even angrier with Him that two rescue searches had failed to spot him. But then he turned some kind of spiritual corner.
“He’s just testing me,” Rust decided. “He just wants to see if I really want to stay alive. Why else would He have my rescue ship make a hard right turn out in the middle of nowhere on the ocean? Well, if He wants to test me, I guess I’ll show Him what I’m made of.”
Rust began stroking west, and vowed to swim all the way to the Philippines if necessary. He swam under the searing sun. He swam under the glittering stars. He swam until the eastern horizon bloomed with the faint glow of sunrise on December 20, when he could swim no more. It never occurred to Lloyd Rust that the ship he had seen the previous day was conducting a boxed search, and he’d undoubtedly carried himself away from its vector.
He rolled over on his back and lapsed into unconsciousness.
Ralph Tucker was proud of himself. He felt like a modern Edison, coaxing crackling life from an inert mare’s nest of wires and cable snaking about a backup steel antenna atop the Tabby. Granted, his makeshift TBS could not transmit very far, but it could pick up coded American communiqués beamed across the entire Western Pacific. Now, his skipper, Captain Plage, could overhear Third Fleet radio transmissions, although he was still unable to send messages more than a short distance.
Thus it occurred that sometime before midnight on December 19, Plage intercepted an ominous directive from Halsey’s flag plot. Two destroyers were ordered to peel off from their screening task group to investigate “a suspicious radar contact” not far from what Plage guessed were the Tabby’s coordinates.
Plage’s first thought was, “It could be us.”
Without his radar, Plage had no idea in what direction the fleet was, nor from which bearing the two destroyers would approach. He was well aware, however, that with her mast and radar rigging carried away, from even a short distance the Tabby could easily be mistaken for a Japanese man o’ war, or even a surfaced sub. It had already happened with more than a few survivors. But survivors didn’t carry cannons.
Over the TBS, Plage could hear the two Tin Can skippers speaking to each other about “the enemy target” as they steamed closer. The pilothouse was fraught as the Tabby cut her lights. Her bridge crew expected shells to start raining down upon them at any moment, and Plage himself had visions of being run down in the darkness. He found it “maddening” being able to listen to his own fellow captains, probably men he had met at some point, discuss zeroing in on his ship while not being able to call them off.
But the same confused seas that had so battered the Tabberer now saved her. Because of the giant swells, neither destroyer commander could get a fixed radar bead on the little DE. They were forced to move closer than normal firing range, and after several heart-pounding moments, the two ships sailed to within hailing distance of the Tabby’s short-range transmission power.
Plage frantically identified his vessel just as, he was to later learn, not only the destroyers, but the big guns of the Third Fleet’s heavies were preparing to open fire. As he put it, “All the guns of the New Jersey and other fire-support ships were aimed at us, ready for business.”
After nearly being blasted from the sea by her own task force, the Tabberer searched in vain for survivors throughout the evening of December 19 and into the morning of December 20. The seas were calmer now, placid enough, Plage knew, for a Japanese sub to surface to periscope depth. He ordered his searchlights turned off. Yet without the lights, it was entirely too dark to spot any drifting men in the rolling, and still dangerous, swells. Not one did the Tabby’s crew sight.
Nonetheless, it was to the great good fortune of men floating about the Philippine Sea that Lt. Frank Cleary, medical officer of the DEs in Task Group 30.7, had chosen the Tabberer for his maiden sea voyage. Cleary was a greenhorn, a California kid but six months in the service, though he had a natural physician’s touch. Assisted by the Tabby’s two pharmacist’s mates, his sick bay as well as an adjacent cabin were soon overwhelmed. He knew what he was dealing with.
When the recovered drifters were strong enough, Cleary directed that they be helped out of their clothes and immediately given hot showers, wrapped in blankets, and administered spoonfuls of fruit juice and hot soup. Immobile men were carried by stretcher to tables in the wardroom next to sick bay, stripped, and inspected for injuries. All had their blood pressure and heart rates monitored.
Since so many had been only half clad, if that, when they went into the water, dungarees and T-shirts were dug out of the Tabby’s meager stores, and precious cigarettes were scrounged from across the ship. Most of the survivors had not eaten since the day before Typhoon Cobra struck hardest, December 18, and Cookie Phillips and his galley mates prepared mountains of sandwiches and brewed gallons of coffee. “Spiz” Hoffman, the Hull cook, had even recovered enough to volunteer to help out.
Sailors pulled from the sea were suffering from a host of maladies, including exposure, saline poisoning from drinking saltwater, saltwater lesions, and shark and barracuda bites. Nearly all had swollen, red-and-purple-tinged eyes and faces from battling the huge surf. Cleary knew that a boy or young man robust enough to serve in the United States Navy carried, on average, about 20 percent body fat and could live under ordinary circumstances for perhaps three weeks without food, and a week without potable water. But for most of the survivors, these were no ordinary circumstances.
Aside from large predators such as sharks and giant barracuda, the Western Pacific teemed with bacteria and other tiny organisms and smaller fish that feasted on open flesh wounds, of which few Typhoon Cobra survivors were free. Navy scientists had determined that men could live, theoretically, for many days drifting about the warm, 80-degree surface waters of a body such as the Philippine Sea (unlike, say, in the frigid waters off the Aleutians, where washing overboard ensured nearly instant death). But navy doctors also knew that over the same period of time the stripping of a human’s epidermal layer of naturally protective oils through saltwater immersion would turn sailors’ skin either as fragile as papier-mâché or as coarsened as beef jerky.
Even immersion up to twenty-four hours would result in painful, acidic ulcers similar to bedsores that could eat through exposed flesh down to muscle and bone. And pulmonary edema, brought on by the ingestion of saltwater—whether inadvertently while being tumbled by combers or out of delusional thirst—would lead to breathing problems and, if left untreated, quickening, irregular heartbeats and pneumonia. Swallowing seawater, with its high sodium chloride content and trace elements of potassium, boric acid, magnesium, and sulphate, was like drinking a toxic cocktail. Those chemicals would seep from a man’s lungs into his bloodstream and begin breaking down red blood cells. This would hasten anemia, and weakened men become delusional and subject to visions. The Tabby’s crew listened in disbelief to stories of hallucinating survivors swearing they heard mermaids’ voices.
The one factor Cleary counted in the survivors’ favor was that the capsized destroyers had been so low on fuel, and sunk so rapidly, that little or no oil had coated the sea’s surface, as was common in most shipwrecks. The roiling waves that had so quickly scattered the drifting sailors had actually helped in this regard, as men swallowing toxic fuel oil not only become violently ill, but the acidic, viscous liquid ate into the seams of life preservers. Eventually, it would rot their kapoks from the inside out.
But, Cleary also knew, this small run of luck did not amount to much. A single overnight of drifting about the ocean, even at these equatorial latitudes, would most likely trigger hypothermia. The heart rates, respiratory rates, and blood pressures of desperate men would all plummet until the hapless sailors, passing from stupor to unconsciousness, died. He informed Plage that rescue had best arrive sooner than later for drifting seamen battered and beaten to pulp by Cobra’s waves and winds.
From the movement of the sun, Ray Schultz guessed it was close to noon on December 19 when he caught sight of another floater, the first human being he had seen in close to twenty-four hours. Striking out, Schultz soon recognized the sailor as the teenage storekeeper Ken Drummond. How he knew this boy, he did not remember.
The young sailor appeared near death and wore a blank look on his face, a sphinx without a riddle. Schultz attempted to buck him up by convincing him the storm was finally ebbing. It was true. The sky was loosening, and though the swells were still huge, the wind had softened and the rainspouts had become less violent and less frequent.
“I’m sure you’ll get picked up really soon,” Schultz yelled to Drummond. He added that he was certain he’d spotted searchlights on several occasions during the night. He had, he said, even tried to swim toward them. “Somebody knows we’re out here,” he said.
Drummond did not reply. In fact, he did not say a word as he drifted away. The boy was in shock, and Schultz was too weak to help him.
The chief floated alone for several more hours before, sometime late in the afternoon, he drifted into a cluster of five Hull shipmates who were trying to keep one of their crewmates alive. It was another boy, and though Schultz did not know his name, he almost wept. The kid had been pounded so viciously by waves that at least one rib had snapped and punctured his lung. He was in excruciating pain, barely able to swim, and with every breath he coughed up mouthfuls of blood.
Not long after Schultz joined the group, the boy died, and the other survivors looked to the ranking chief bosun’s mate for guidance. Schultz saw no option other than to relieve him of his dog tags, life jacket, and white undershirt, and allow the corpse to sink.
Schultz was still herding these sailors when, just before sunset, the Tabberer steamed over the horizon. The chief eyed this demasted vessel with its superstructure so torn up and, like so many others, was convinced she was a surfaced Japanese submarine. They would all spend the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp. At this point, however, no one seemed to care. Selecting the smallest and lightest seaman in the group, they lifted him as high in the air as they could. He waved the white T-shirt from the boy dead with the punctured lung.
When the DE neared, Schultz and his drifting crewmates recognized the sailors on her foredeck as Americans. But the Tabby’s deck gang seemed agitated, pointing, waving, and before long muted yells could be heard, but not made out, above the wind. The floating survivors had no idea what to make of this pantomime until, soon enough, the familiar ring of automatic rifle fire split the air, and the circling sharks were dispersed.
Ray Schultz was finally lifted on deck after floating for thirty-three hours across the Philippine Sea. Like his friend and fellow chief Archie DeRyckere, he assured the Tabby sailors that he could walk on his own. By now this reaction had become predictable, and when Schultz tried to take a step, he fell face-first. Tabby sailors caught him before he hit the deck.
“I guess I’m closer to dead than I think I am,” he said as they guided him down to sick bay. Schultz was led to a bunk adjacent to that of DeRyckere, whose eyes had gotten so bad he was temporarily blinded. Their exchange could have been lifted from an Abbott and Costello routine.
“Hey there, Archie, how ya doing?”
“I’m doing good, great, glad to be here. Who are you?”
“I’m Schultz.”
“No, I haven’t seen Schultz. But who are you?”
“It’s me, Arch, Ray Schultz.”
“No, I told ya, I haven’t seen Schultz.”
“Fer cripesakes, Arch, what the hell’s the matter with you, anyway? It’s me, Ray Schultz.”
“Ray! God, Ray! You’re alive! Oh, Jesus, am I glad to hear your voice. I can’t see nothing. They say I’m blind, but just for a little while, from all the salt coating my eyes.”
Minutes before 5:00 A.M. on December 20, flag plot received a report from the jeep carrier USS Rudyerd Bay. Four hours earlier, one of the DEs in her rescue group had picked up five survivors from the destroyer Spence.
“Statements indicate,” the message continued, “Spence capsized suddenly and believe few personnel survived.”
Halsey’s shoulders slumped. He stood, crestfallen, as “Mick” Carney removed the Spence from his fleet roster. The admiral prepared to compose another depressing communiqué for Nimitz.
Since the evening of December 18, all Third Fleet vessels had been conducting ad hoc searches for survivors despite the unlikelihood of spotting an individual floater, or even a small raft, from a heavy’s towering deck. Lookouts tied into gun sponsons, some hastily equipped with “shepherd’s crooks” lashed to long poles, on the carriers USS Cabot and USS Hancock, as well as the battleship USS Iowa, and the carrier USS San Juan reported seeing flashing kapok lights and hearing whistles (later determined as most likely being from Hull survivors). But they could not reach the men, and when destroyers arrived thirty-nine hours later to search each area, they discovered no one.
Similarly, specific DD searches for Hull survivors launched toward the coordinates at which she was believed to have capsized proved futile. The only object recovered was a small, empty whaleboat washed off the cruiser USS Pittsburgh. (“Have sighted a suburb of Pittsburgh and have taken it in tow,” radioed the recovering ship’s commander.)
The day after the storm, Halsey had designated the jeep carriers Rudyerd Bay and Anzio to accompany three destroyers and two destroyer escorts—including Lt. Comdr. Raymond Toner’s Robert F. Keller—in the van of what he was to label “the most exhaustive and extensive sea search ever organized in maritime history.” As a wide arc of reconnaissance planes and vessels fanned out to the west-northwest, on December 20 the Robert F. Keller picked up not only four teenage Hull sailors who were certain they had been abandoned, but a seaman from the Anzio who had been washed over the side when the carrier took green water over her bow. One oddity, noted by the Keller’s Captain Toner, was that as he sighted the Hull survivors through his binoculars, they all appeared to be wearing white gloves. Later, after they were brought aboard, the Keller’s medic informed him that their white skin was a medical condition known as “immersion hands,” caused by exposure to the sun and saltwater. Toner personally broke out a bottle of brandy and gave each lad a dram.
Meanwhile, at 8:25 A.M. on December 20, the destroyer USS Cogswell nearly ran down the Hull’s Tom Stealey, the fireman who, moments before she’d capsized, had volunteered against his better judgment to crawl into the aft boiler room to try and stoke her doused fires. Stealey had seen two of his crewmates eaten by sharks before his glazed eyes, and when the Cogswell’s deck crew hauled him in, he was semiconscious and near out of his head. Following a hot shower, he told a harrowing story through the swollen and bloody saltwater sores that lacerated his mouth.
He had begun his ordeal in the water with fourteen to fifteen shipmates, he said, each gripping a single, floating ship’s line perhaps fifty feet long. Some men wore life jackets; others did not. But, one by one, every one had been either picked off by sharks or given up and slipped, exhausted and traumatized, below the surface, as if off on some far greater mission. Stealey had awakened that morning drifting beside the last, dead body, floating facedown in its kapok. The Cogswell sailors listened rapt until one thought to offer him a meal.
“Anything,” Stealey muttered.
“How about a nice steak, and some potatoes?”
“Oh, man, that’d be great.”
A few minutes later, when Stealey cut his steak and tried to bite down, he howled in pain. His mouth and tongue were too swollen and sore. His lips began to bleed again. He placed his silverware aside and began to weep.