“Take care of the others first. Take care of the others first.”
—LT. (J.G.) ALPHONSO KRAUCHUNAS, USS SPENCE
On the afternoon of December 20, the destroyer USS Knapp sent a message to flag plot that it had recovered three more Hull sailors. One was Seaman 1st Class Al Taylor, Archie DeRyckere’s bodysurfing buddy, whose face was so battered by the wind, rain, and sun that one Knapp seaman thought it had been seared by a blowtorch. The sea was still too volatile for the Knapp to lower its high-sided, flat-bottomed Higgins boats, and Taylor had been recovered by the ship’s rescue swimmer, Owen “Red” Atkinson. Atkinson, a twenty-year-old seaman from Georgia, subsequently brought aboard an unidentified dead man whose dog tags were missing.
The sailor’s body had been fairly mutilated by sharks, his thighs bloody stumps nearly to the hem of his kapok, and the Knapp’s skipper ordered that his fingerprints be taken before preparing a burial at sea. A burial detail sewed the corpse into a canvas shroud and weighted it with 40mm shells, and sailors lined each side of the destroyer’s fantail as selections from the “Service for the Dead” and The Book of Common Prayer were read aloud. “We therefore, Oh Lord, commit the body of our shipmate unto Thy hands and into the depths.”
Not long after the ceremony was completed with a heartrending splash, Atkinson was back in the water, this time swimming toward a man floating faceup in his kapok. When Atkinson reached him, he slid a bight under his arms and, remembering his last “save,” gingerly slapped the seaman’s cheeks to see if he was still alive.
At that the floater’s eyes blinked open and his arm shot up from beneath the surface. In his hand he held a death grip on a pair of white boxer shorts.
“Lieutenant Lloyd Rust, CIC, USS Hull,” the officer said to a befuddled Red Atkinson. “The Good Lord has tested me, and it appears that I have passed His test.”
As the deck crew from the Knapp “reeled” Atkinson and Rust back toward the ship, their herky-jerky movements replicated those of a large wounded fish and acted as a lure for sharks, which began to shadow them. Moreover, because the destroyer had shut off her engines during the rescue, huge swells began to crash over her fantail deck, the lowest point of the vessel above the sea surface, where a swimmer would normally be hoisted aboard. Atkinson and Rust had to be towed nearly completely around the Knapp, and guns blazed as the two were lifted atop the cargo head.
Around the same time, the Keller’s sister DE, the USS Swearer, rescued nine Spence crewmen, including six clinging to a float ring. Among them was Lt. (j.g.) Alphonso Krauchunas.
Krauchunas’s floater net had escaped the sinking Spence with twelve desperate sailors clutching its mesh lines and rubber blocks. Six traumatized souls were lost as the days passed. The float ring had originally contained sufficient stores—two 5-gallon kegs of water and, cached in an empty shell casing, two K-ration food kits, a medical kit, flares, a signal mirror, two cans of dye marker, a hatchet, and two small medicinal bottles of whiskey. But as the night of December 18 wore on and waves pounded the craft, first the medical kit, then the food kits, and finally the flares were wrenched loose and swept away.
When the seas calmed somewhat, Krauchunas assigned each sailor a specific compass point around the net to prevent any one side from overloading and rolling over. The men were all weak, soaking, and freezing, barely holding their heads above water. At some point that first night, one of them snagged a large canvas bag washing by. It contained an uninflated, twenty-man yellow rubber raft, which a seaman managed to inflate by yanking on the toggle that sparked a CO2 cylinder. Krauchunas and three other sailors climbed aboard, but Krauchunas decided he did not trust the craft’s stability and swam back to the float ring. The wind and currents soon tore the raft away. Its three occupants were never again seen.
On the morning of December 19, Krauchunas and his party sighted two search planes far off on the horizon. He broke one of the die marker cans into the sea as his crewmates hollered, waved, and flashed the signal mirror. But the rough swells dissipated the dye and the aircraft did not see them. Like the Monaghan’s McCrane, as the ranking officer, Krauchunas had taken charge of doling out one swallow of fresh water to each man every three hours. The water kegs were actually sagging with the meshed net under the ocean’s surface, and since they were too heavy to lift, in order to drink men would have to submerge themselves and place their mouths over the spigot, as if siphoning a gas tank, while Krauchunas opened and closed the valve.
For some it was not enough, and they resorted to drinking saltwater. One was Ens. George W. Poer, who sometime after noon on that second day floated away from the raft while the others slept. When Krauchunas awoke, he saw Poer’s body, buoyed by its kapok and drifting facedown, perhaps fifty yards from the net. He felt obliged to retrieve the ensign’s dog tags, and swam out. When he lifted the sailor’s head out of the water to grab the silver chain around his neck, Poer opened his eyes and sputtered, “Why did you wake me? I want to sleep! Let me alone!”
Krauchunas was astonished. When he regained his composure, he convinced Poer to return to the net. Sometime later that day, again as his dog-tired raftmates napped, Poer drifted away a second time, never to be seen again. Soon thereafter two other sailors, Lt. (j.g.) John Whalen and Seaman 1st Class James Heater, also went out of their minds from drinking seawater. For eight or nine hours stronger shipmates held their heads above water, but by nightfall both had slipped beneath the surface for good.
When another seaman suddenly bolted from the float ring and stroked a short distance before returning, Krauchunas asked him what he was doing. The man answered that he’d seen a Coca-Cola sign lit up by a grocery store, and he’d swam out for a drink. But instead of Coca-Cola, he continued, he’d brought back an apple. He brandished a fist-sized chunk of rubber that had broken off from a buoy block, and bit down on it. Krauchunas’s cracked and swollen lips hurt just watching.
The group drifted aimlessly throughout the afternoon, their corneas painfully inflamed by the shattered-glass glare of the intense, lemon-colored sun. It hurt just to blink, and men buried their faces in the crooks of their arms in order to avoid even a glimpse of the reflective sea.
Sometime before dusk, small fortune smiled. Seaman Charlie Wohlebb, the first man Krauchunas had encountered in the water after the Spence went down, lifted his head and noticed the metallic flash of something bobbing on the surface perhaps a hundred yards away. He dived in, and returned pushing before him an industrial-strength can of vegetable shortening.
Krauchunas hacked it open with the hatchet and passed it around as sunblock. Krauchunas then peeled off his woolen socks and slathered his feet, which had swollen to twice their size. Some on the floater net were buoyed by the rumor that vegetable shortening acted as a shark repellent, although no one could say where it started.
That night, as the men shivered and moaned, Krauchunas led them, alternately, in prayers and songs in an attempt to revive their spirits. But by the early morning of December 20, Krauchunas realized their situation was bleak. He was dreading the dawn, and another day of blistering sun. By 3:00 A.M. he barely had the energy to raise his head when someone shouted, “A ship! It’s a ship!”
It was, in fact, a jeep carrier steaming into view, its running lights visible for miles. It had developed a leak in its fuel lines and been ordered to return to Ulithi for servicing. Krauchunas and his shipmates had thought their throats too parched and swollen to scream, but now they shouted hoarsely and waved their shirts. The flattop passed them by in the darkness, no more than one hundred yards away, and vanished over the horizon. Despair prevailed.
Unknown to the survivors, however, a lookout had heard their cries, and the escort carrier had dropped rafts and flares, invisible to the drifting men because of the large swells. Her skipper had also broken radio silence and informed the destroyer escort Swearer of the sighting. Presently Krauchunas saw the DE’s lighted mast steam into view. As the vessel closed on their port side, again the men screamed with all that was left in their hoarse throats. This time a returning voice blared over a loudspeaker system.
“Survivors in the water, we hear you but cannot see you. Yell once if you want us to turn to starboard, or yell twice if we are to remain on course.”
A single yelp, loud and clear, pierced the night. The Swearer swerved to starboard, and when it came to within fifty yards of the net, the men all began hollering, “Stop! Stop! You’re running us down!”
The DE slowed, turned broadside, and a searchlight swept the sea. The first several times the beam was aimed at their net, swells rose between the floaters and the ship and they were not sighted. Finally the light shone on nine upturned faces, as pale as cadavers, followed by another blaring announcement. “We have spotted you. Remain where you are.”
Next a rescue swimmer appeared from nowhere. Someone said, “What took you so long?” and the swimmer smiled. He tied a line to the floater net and signaled the ship. The net was pulled broadside to the destroyer escort, rolling deep in the swells. Timing the rolls as the net rose on the crests, deckhands clasped hands and linked arms with the Spence survivors and, one at a time, hoisted them aboard. Krauchunas was the last. He was caught by two husky officers before he collapsed to the steel deck.
He was out of his head, and suddenly the most drained he’d ever felt in his life. It was as if, after nearly three days of keeping his wits sharp to shepherd his floating flock, his life force was slowly leaking out of him. For some reason he demanded that an accounting of his possessions be officially taken—eighteen dollars was found in his saturated wallet—and he repeatedly mumbled, “Take care of the others first. Take care of the others first.” Someone assured him that everyone was being seen to.
By the fifth or sixth cup of strong, black coffee, Krauchunas began to come back around, as well as regain the feeling in his legs. This was not delightful. He sat wrapped in blankets, drinking the hot joe, while a pharmacist’s mate cut away his woolen socks, revealing two grotesquely swollen feet streaked with bright orange and inky black stripes. The pharmacist’s mate told him his socks had shrunk in the water and cut off the circulation to his lower limbs. The last thing he recalled of the night was thanking the mate treating his “immersion feet” for a second shot of morphine.
Twenty-one hours later, as the Swearer steamed toward Ulithi, Krauchunas awoke in a sweat-soaked panic. “The ship is rolling over!” he screamed. “The ship is rolling over!”
He bolted from his bunk, pushed past a young seaman assigned to watch over him, and sprinted on throbbing feet for the deck. Along the companionway he burst into the ship’s dimly lit wardroom. There his minder caught up to him and found him staring at a pitcher of water and several glasses. They were not moving, much less crashing to the floor.
The young seaman placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder, and Alphonso Krauchunas again regained his wits. The sailor led him back to his bunk.
The sharks had begun to circle Pat Douhan’s raft sometime after daybreak on December 19. Huge dorsal fins atop ghostly gray shadows, one after another, sometimes a dozen at a time, like Indians making a war dance. First Charybdis, now Scylla. Every so often one of the predators would make a close pass at the floating balsa craft, turn on its side, bare its teeth, and roll its huge saucer eyes far back in its head. There was an open gap of two to three feet between the sides of the raft and the sunken deck, and though no snout had yet probed it, all hands stood ready to beat and kick any that tried.
Douhan was vaguely aware that sharks had been known to trail deepwater ships, feeding on the scraps of garbage disposed in their wake. Their “sonar” sensors were also attracted to the low-grade electrical currents emitted by modern motorized vessels. And though it is logical to assume that the riverine-like underwater currents churned by Typhoon Cobra may have thrown them off the scent of the Hull, chances were good that the subsonic vibrations from the sinking ship’s detonating boilers and depth charges, filled with the explosive Torpex, had refocused their attention.
Moreover, though sharks are notorious for their poor eyesight, they are not blind, and the contrasting colors of, say, a pale white naked arm, leg, or torso against the aquamarine hue of the deep South Pacific made for an attractive lure. In all likelihood, up to this point they had scavenged as many dead sailors as possible, and per their opportunistic eating habits, were now seeking a meal from the fresh meat still floating about them.
It was during one of these “shark runs” that a Hull sailor reached out over the side with his knife and sliced a big fish, opening a foot-long gash in its back. The cheers at this moral victory died instantly when the school went into a feeding frenzy at the smell of the blood in the water. The sea boiled and gushed, and Douhan wondered if one of the writhing sharks would wing into the raft.
Several of Douhan’s raftmates were near death from shock, dehydration, diarrhea, or a combination thereof. And despite the tropical latitude, hypothermia had also begun to set in among some floaters. As night had fallen the previous evening, the air temperature had dropped nearly 20 degrees, down to the low 80s. The human body can function only over a very narrow range of internal core temperature, normally between 97 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and survivors drifting in even the warm waters of the Philippine Sea lost anywhere from six to eight degrees of body temperature after the sun set.
As this drop in the body’s heat-balancing mechanisms occurred, cellular chemical changes began to induce intense shivering, blurred vision, and a lack of coordination. The survivors’ skin turned pale, cold, and rubbery, speech became slurred, and muscles stiffened to the point of rigidity. But mostly, Douhan noticed, his raftmates’ mental acuity had become impaired and disoriented.
At first the heartier and more lucid sailors had tried to prevent the delirious from drinking seawater, making them spit it out whenever they caught them. But it proved impossible to police every man. Geysers of water broke over the raft, and the thirstiest would simply open their mouths and swallow. As the hours passed, this ingested saltwater overwhelmed their kidneys and circulatory systems and, in the most simple medical explanation, shorted out the neurons in their brains. Some slipped over the side and died in quiet agony, their blood-red pupils unclouded by consciousness. Others foamed at the mouth in violent fits, their tongues curled and their swollen blue lips inverted, before closing their eyes and taking a final breath.
Several of the surviving seamen had gone into the water nearly naked, and others had had their clothes torn off by the bashing waves. Thus, before the dead were lowered into the sea with a prayer, their garments were removed and distributed among the neediest. By the morning of December 20, Pat Douhan’s raft was down to a dozen men.
As the day wore on and the relentless sun beat down, even those men not suffering from delirium were too spent to stand vigil over weaker shipmates. Finally, the anguished sailors could only watch as a surreal drama began to play out. First, one man leapt into the sea, swam a little distance among the sharks, and returned with a tale of visiting his uncle’s farmhouse. He said he had even tried to drive back his uncle’s old Model A Ford to pick up his crewmates, but the car would not start.
Now two more men jumped the raft, disappeared beneath the surface, and popped back up saying they had just been to the Hull’s galley, where they’d feasted on bologna sandwiches. A crewmate, angry that they hadn’t brought sandwiches back with them, dived in, saying he was going to retrieve a case of 7-Up for everyone to share.
When he failed to reappear, Fireman 1st Class Nick Nagurney dived in after him. Nagurney was no more than five feet from the raft when the shark struck. It was a classic “bump and bite” attack. The fish shot like a guided missile from deep beneath the fireman and knocked him almost completely out of the water. Its jaws, capable of applying over ten tons of pressure per square inch, locked on the meaty, upper portion of his arm and began sawing, tearing away hunks of flesh. Nagurney screamed, the shark loosened its grip, and Douhan and several others reached out and hauled him back aboard.
Nagurney was bleeding badly from his shoulder to his elbow, and sailors began desultorily stripping off their shirts to make bandages. There was nothing they could do for their pitiful shipmate who had gone over the side to salvage the case of 7-Up. Everyone noticed that the sharks now seemed to be coiling about the raft in an evertightening ring.
Two planes passed high overhead, too high to spot a speck on the sea. Douhan guessed they were not search planes at all, but aircraft busy with the business of war. Still, the men about him waved T-shirts and hollered. The aircraft were soon gone. The day wore on, the silence broken only by the swish of the dorsal fins and the occasional soft keens of injured and defeated men.
Douhan could not stop thinking about his pregnant wife. Who would help her raise the baby? His unborn child had become his only lifeline. That child he would live for. The moment you give up hope, he told himself, is the moment you are lost. He played name games, both girls and boys, and wondered what he’d say if his wife gave birth to a son who would one day ask his permission to join the navy. Would he tell him about shipwrecks and drowning sailors and man-eating sharks? He thought less, dreamed more.
By December 21, after drifting for seventy-two hours, Douhan and his raftmates faced the sunrise feeling like a collection of passages from the Book of Job. Most were sleeping when a young lieutenant surreptitiously began scooping seawater into his mouth. The fireman Nagurney, recuperating from his shark wounds, was the only one to see him. He yelled for the officer to stop.
“Drop dead,” came the reply. The fireman pounced like an angry badger and pinned the lieutenant’s arms and legs. He jammed a finger down his throat.
“Puke that stuff up before it kills you,” he hollered.
The officer obliged, but not before clamping his teeth down so hard on Nagurney’s finger he nearly bit it clean through.
Conflating the time in his near delirium, the confused fireman said, “Jesus, I gotta be the only guy who ever got bit by a shark and a lieutenant on the same day.”
Like the unhinged lieutenant, Douhan was near out of his head, and thus certain the man lolling next to him was hallucinating when he unexpectedly croaked, “Hey, look, over there. On the horizon. It’s the task force.”
Douhan could barely rouse himself. They’re no more still searching for us than they’re searching for the man in the moon. Yet others stirred. It was their weak shouts that finally prompted Douhan to turn and gaze. He rubbed the salt from his eyes to make sure he was not seeing things. There were indeed many ships on the horizon. American ships, Halsey’s ships—carriers and cruisers and battlewagons. They looked like floating blocks of apartment buildings. They had drifted into the goddamned task force.
Within minutes every Tin Can sailor on the raft recognized the thick puff of black smoke emanating from the stack of one destroyer in particular. Black smoke meant that the vessel was “lighting off” all boilers and answering all bells to steam at full speed. Someone had spotted them. Now two fighter planes circled the raft, banked, and waggled their wings. I see you!
For Pat Douhan the next moments were a blur, literally and metaphorically. The sharks went into a frenzy, poking their snouts into the gap beneath the waterline, as if realizing their floating feast was on the verge of vanishing. A ship, the destroyer, closed on them and tossed a line. Small-arms fire echoed above him, and tiny splashes erupted from the ocean about the raft. A shark’s nose butted Douhan’s ankle. He jumped and kicked. Now he was being lifted by the shoulders, his feet guided into the footholds of a cargo net draped over the side of the vessel.
“No, I can walk,” he heard himself say. The words were slurred, and distant, as if echoing from a place far away.
Between small sips of water, someone poured a shot of whiskey down his throat, and it blazed all the way to the soles of his feet. Now a steaming mug of soup was placed in his cupped hands, and he burned his crusted lips and tongue inhaling it. He was addled, more confused than he ever remembered being, and asked one of his rescuers why in the world he was speaking English.
“This is a Russian submarine, isn’t it?” he said.
The sailor smiled and gently draped a blanket over Douhan’s shoulders. The rescuers were aghast at the survivors’ appearances. Here were boys their own age, some not yet out of their teens, yet they resembled wizened old men. Sunburned, their features raw and flaking, swollen tongues protruding, it was as if their faces had been subtly adjusted by a funhouse mirror.
“No, sir,” the sailor said. “You’re on the USS Brown.” The same man led Pat Douhan down to a bunk in sick bay.
When he awoke the next day, he was told that his raft had drifted sixty-six miles from the coordinates where the Hull had capsized.