“That one reunion was worth the entire effort.”
—LT. COMDR. HENRY LEE PLAGE, CAPTAIN, USS TABBERER
Within forty-eight hours of the height of Typhoon Cobra’s deadly lashing, delirium and exposure had taken a toll on survivors across the Philippine Sea. On the same morning, December 20, that Pat Douhan and his Hull crewmates had begun to count the number of sharks ringing their raft, a few miles over the horizon the roster of Monaghan survivors under “oil king” Joe McCrane’s command had shrunk from twelve to nine.
The previous night the ship’s cook, Ben Holland, had succumbed from his head wounds, and two other seamen had gone “berserk” from drinking saltwater and swam off to their deaths. Not long afterward, nine became eight when another man who had swallowed too much seawater bit a shipmate on the shoulder, leapt over the side, and drowned.
Just past sunrise on December 20, a sailor jumped up and yelled that he could see land and houses. He dived off the raft with several men in his wake. They hadn’t made it far before McCrane and the fireman Evan Fenn somehow persuaded them they were hallucinating. Fenn was particularly convincing, hollering to his crewmates that he possessed a special sixth sense, and he was sure they were about to be rescued. The men stopped stroking, turned around, and made it back safely.
At one point during the ordeal, one of McCrane’s shipmates broke out a short rope and decided to “fish” for shark, using a chunk of salty Spam as bait. Many sailors knew that all fish eyes contain fresh water, and in their delirious state it sounded quite reasonable that a buffet of sharks’ eyes would slake their incessant thirst. The fellow sunk his line about ten feet below the surface and, sure enough, his shipmates watched in fascination as a five-foot shark nosed forward to investigate.
As the shark came closer, the man pulled in the line bit by bit, until it was clear out of the water. The shark followed, as if hypnotized, to the point where its head was resting on the side of the raft. Then another sailor plunged his small penknife into its scaly snout, directly between the large, dark nasal passages. This only seemed to rile the animal, which rolled and thrashed, its leathery tail fanning gallons of water over their heads. The Monaghan seamen decided that perhaps their quest for shark eyes was not such a good idea after all.
Not long after McCrane and the rest spotted an unoccupied raft skimming across the surface, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. Thinking it might carry additional stores, two sailors decided to brave the sharks and dived in after it. They boarded it just as it disappeared behind a huge swell. McCrane, Fenn, and a third weary seaman tried to paddle after them, using their hands and the one remaining oar.
It was impossible. They never saw the men again. They were now six.
As the day wore on, Fenn was the first to notice that one of the freshwater kegs was missing. He guessed that one of the parched and crazed sailors had tried to sneak an extra ration sometime during the night and failed to resecure the canister. Fenn’s legs were raw and bleeding, the lacerations racked by saltwater ulcers, but he kept his theory to himself. He saw no purpose in speaking ill of the dead.
Scattered showers throughout the second afternoon brought some relief from the incessant thirst, but by dusk the sky turned pink, russet, and purple, depending upon the vagaries of the light streaking through the loosening cloud cover. That night the sky was a sparkling dome of constellations and shooting stars. They were a mere 15 degrees north of the equator, and each man knew the morning would bring a merciless South Pacific sun.
The survivors slept fitfully, and as dawn broke on December 20, rose-tinged and unwelcome, McCrane began applying sulfa powder, ointment, and salt-crusted bandages to the wounds of his injured shipmates. Abruptly two American fighter planes appeared overhead. The six seamen realized they were close to land, or at least to an American carrier. Their spirits soared as the aircraft banked and dropped dye-bomb water markers. Twenty minutes later the black smoke of the destroyer Brown, nearly bursting her boilers racing toward the coordinates, appeared on the horizon.
For their part, seamen aboard the Brown were relieved to have again struck paydirt. After rescuing the Hull survivors from Douhan’s raft earlier that morning, her lookouts had spotted but three empty life rafts and a solitary floater net. The net had a single, scourged body, its limbs devoured by sharks, entangled in it.
When the Brown sailors tossed the Monaghan men a rope ladder, Evan Fenn, despite his ravaged legs, scurried up the lifeline like a squirrel. The rest had to be carried. McCrane was the last up, and as he reached the deck a Brown sailor told him that his raft had been shadowed during the entire rescue by a huge shark, the largest he’d ever seen.
The Oil King was nonplussed. “Well,” he said, “he’s welcome to the rest of the Spam, anyway.”
Thus, three days after she had capsized, did Admiral Halsey discover the fate of the USS Monaghan. Navy chief of staff Adm. Ernest King had been monitoring the rescue operations from Washington, D.C. He was aware of the sinking of the Hull and Spence, and pressed CINCPAC Nimitz at Pearl for updates on the Monaghan. On the morning of December 23, Nimitz wired King, “Monaghan believed lost.” Hours later, after hearing from Halsey that “Mick” Carney had crossed the legendary destroyer from his list, Nimitz amended his “belief.”
“Six survivors recovered from Monaghan,” he radioed King. “State she capsized and remained afloat about one half hour thereafter.”
To this day, United States Naval Bureau records count the six sailors rescued by the Brown as the only survivors from the capsized destroyer Monaghan. They neglect the “ghost sailor,” Keith Abbott.
Periodically—to keep himself awake to spot rescue ships, to stay alert, “to keep from going crazy”—Keith Abbott would slip over the side of his lonely raft and tread water beside it. This also helped minimize his exposure to the burning sun, which had risen like a red dahlia with blossoms ablaze on the morning of December 20. Although he was still wearing his standard-issue navy dungarees, T-shirt, and canvas shoes, the rays seemed to burn right through his clothes.
To avoid becoming waterlogged, not to mention shark bait—he had seen several dorsal fins—he tried to time his “dips” by the movement of the sun across the periwinkle sky: one hour in, one hour out. Nonetheless, as the temperature edged past 100 degrees, blotchy red blisters began to appear on his arms and face.
The blue of the ocean and sky seemed fused, and Abbott felt as if he were floating in the interior of a sapphire. He thought constantly of his wife, and of the baby daughter he had never seen, waiting for him back in Utah. At his lowest points, he told himself, over and over, that he had too many reasons to hang on.
The seas had reduced from mountainous to hilly to choppy by the time Abbott spotted the smoke from the Brown’s stack. It seemed like an eternity before the destroyer steamed alongside him and the rescue gang threw him a line. He was too weak to grab it, so the destroyer sent in a swimmer to pull his little raft athwart her starboard beam and lowered a rope ladder. He tried to climb it; it was no use. Members of the Brown’s deck gang scrambled down to assist him.
As he lay in the Brown’s sick bay, one thought seared Keith Abbott’s mind. What if he had died? As a “ghost sailor,” no one would ever have known how, or when, or where, or why.
Not long after daybreak on December 20, two destroyers hove out of the waves on either beam of the Tabberer and, at 8:40 A.M., after fifty straight hours of search-and-rescue operations, she was relieved of her duties by the jeep carrier Rudyerd Bay. Instructed to steam for Ulithi, Captain Plage was also notified by the Rudyerd Bay’s skipper to be on the lookout en route to the atoll for survivors of the Spence, who appeared to be drifting in that general direction.
Two hours later, as the Tabby steamed southeast, her lookouts spotted a floater net.
Bob Ayers and his Spence crewmates had been drifting for close to forty-eight hours. By the night before, December 19, every man on Ayers’s floater net was battered black and blue, and all had bruised eyes from being beaten by waves. As their kapoks became more and more waterlogged, Chief Watertender George Johnson had decided that sleepy men were sure to drown, and he talked himself hoarse to keep his shipmates awake.
Johnson had spoken about anything that came to his mind—the grub in the chow hall, the best bars on Pearl, the worst officers he’d ever served under, movie stars his crewmates most wanted to date. He chattered on about his family, particularly his wife, and the baby daughter he hadn’t yet seen back home in Fresno, California. By now nobody was listening, not even grunting in response to the conjured images of Hollywood starlets. Johnson’s voice, rasping, so gravelly it could scour a stove, was no more than white noise in the background. The chief watertender did not care. Even if he was losing his mind, he was determined to keep a sunny side up.
There had been one keg of water on the float ring, but a delirious sailor had tried to swim off with it in the night, a scuffle ensued, and its contents had become fouled with saltwater. As the hours passed with no sustenance, Ayers began to lose his floatmates.
One young crewman passed away from head wounds he had received just before the Spence sank. In the throes of the typhoon, he had climbed into the housing holding one of the gun mounts. But when the ship overturned, a 5-inch shell had rolled off its shelf and slammed into his forehead. His head was stove in and now, his skull most likely fractured, Ayers watched helplessly as the boy removed his ring from his finger, asked a shipmate to see that his mother got it, and quietly died.
Others just drifted away out of sheer exhaustion and hallucinations. One seaman announced, “I’m going to swim over that wave and catch a plane home.” A fellow sailor said, “I’ll go with you.” The two left the floater net and were never seen again.
By the morning of December 20, there were ten miserable souls remaining on Bob Ayers’s float ring. Like his lieutenant, Alphonso Krauchunas, two days earlier, Ayers began to wonder how he would die. Though some of his floatmates assumed they were sure to be picked up—to the point where George Johnson led a sort of giddy roundtable discussion asking each how and where he planned to spend his survivor’s leave—Ayers realized there was a distinct possibility that by this time all rescue searches had been called off.
After fifty hours in the water, he had reached his lowest psychological ebb when, a little after 11:00 A.M., he glimpsed the outline of a ship on the horizon. From that distance the superstructure looked stripped bare—no mast, no radar gear, a giant tear in the roof of its pilothouse—and Ayers took it for a Japanese submarine. He laughed out loud. He was aware of the horrors of Japanese prison camps, that is, if they didn’t just machine-gun him and his crewmates and be done with it right here. He also realized he was not supposed to feel such joy over the prospect of being captured by the enemy. He did not care.
But as the vessel closed on his bedraggled float ring, it slowly dawned on Ayers that he was watching a much-battered American destroyer escort. Finally he was able to make out her lettering. USS Tabberer. Jubilation. But there was still one more adventure left for Bob Ayers.
When the Tabby approached Ayers’s floater net, a deckhand tossed a heave line to the drifting sailors. At the end of the rope was a monkey fist, a lead weight encircled with twine. It landed short of the ring. Mustering the last vapors of adrenaline remaining in his system, Ayers decided to swim for it. He took no more than a half dozen strokes before the Tabby’s deck crew opened fire. Bullets whizzed into the water about him. Ayers knew damn well what they we aiming at. Later, witnesses told him he took “ten strokes out after that line, but only two strokes back.”
The sharks dispersed, and Ayers and his crewmates were hauled in by the Tabberer, which began to circle the area. Ostensibly relieved of rescue duties, Henry Plage refused to give up, and the Tabby subsequently picked up four more disparate floaters from the Spence.
One of them was a chief petty officer whose best friend, also a chief petty officer, had been stationed on the Hull and been rescued by the Tabby on the night of December 18. The Hull chief had recovered enough to spend the past twenty-four hours pulling in survivors alongside the Tabby’s crew, and as the Spence sailors were taken aboard, he approached each one separately, asking after his buddy. When they finally came face-to-face, both men cried.
To an exhausted and emotional Plage, “that one reunion was worth the entire effort.”
But theirs was not the only reunion to take place on the Tabberer’s deck that morning. A rescued Spence survivor, Chief Machinist’s Mate Henry Deeters, happened to be a neighbor of the Tabby’s radioman Ralph Tucker back in Somerville, Massachusetts. And, finally, one of the last sailors the Tabby hauled aboard was Bob Ayers’s newfound friend Floyd Balliett.
Upon their return to dry ground, both vowed to avoid bacon sandwiches for the rest of their lives.
Admiral Halsey called off the search for survivors at sundown on December 22. The final sailor to be recovered was Seaman 2nd Class William Keith of the Spence, who by a stroke of great good fortune had been swept by the currents into a shipping channel and was spotted on the afternoon of December 21 by a lookout from the destroyer USS Gatling. Keith was floating alone, his waterlogged kapok punctured in several places and losing buoyancy.
Upon being hoisted to the deck, the dazed and hollow-eyed sailor was in such a deranged state he fought his rescuers, broke free, and tried to leap back into the sea. As they tackled him, Keith ranted that he had been riding a torpedo, which he intended to convey all the way to Japan to blow up the city of Tokyo.
Of the roughly 900 men who had seen their ships go into the Philippine Sea four days earlier, only 93 officers and enlisted men were recovered. The Tabberer rescued 55 of them—5 officers and 36 seamen from the Hull, and 14 seamen from the Spence. The destroyer Brown had taken aboard 13 Hull survivors as well as the only 7 seamen to make it off the Monaghan. The destroyer escort Swearer had picked up 9 Spence floaters, and her sister DE Robert F. Keller 4 more from the Hull. The destroyer Knapp accounted for 3 more men from the Hull, including the officer Lloyd Rust. And the destroyers Cogswell and Gatling had found one man apiece, from the Hull and the Spence, respectively.
By this time Typhoon Cobra had turned sharply and begun curving northwest, and Halsey, gathering what was left of his armada, hoped to employ the same “Dirty Trick” he had used over two months earlier, when his task force had sneaked in behind the screen of “Good Guy” Typhoon Zero-Zero to shell Okinawa.
This time luck eluded him. Despite cobalt skies and a burning white sun off the east coast of Luzon, the residue of the typhoon had left the Philippine Sea too turbulent and the winds far too gusty for Halsey to launch aircraft from the bobbing flattops of Task Force 38. Continuation of the Big Blue Blanket would have to wait. The admiral radioed MacArthur, “Regret unable to strike on 21st due to impossible sea conditions. Am retiring eastward.”
He seethed at having to give the general “an excuse instead of an attack.” Unlike the proverbial British field marshal, “who talked of action tomorrow when he should have talked of action today,” Halsey preferred his action yesterday. But his hand was stayed by the weather. He set a return date for early January 1945, to coincide with MacArthur’s long-anticipated invasion of Luzon, and shaped course for Ulithi to service his ships and personally assess the damage to his fleet.
Meanwhile, far to the northwest, Typhoon Cobra was done in by the same cold front through whose peripheral edge she had churned on the night of December 17. By 9:00 P.M. on December 19, Cobra had penetrated the bulk of this blanketing front’s frigid air mass, about one hundred miles off the northeastern tip of Luzon. Deserted by the warm water and languid air that stoked her engine, she was encompassed by the enormous accumulation of cold air and “literally chilled into disintegration.”
During her death throes, according to navy weather scientists, “gargantuan chunks of charged atmosphere flew in all directions as the air masses and typhoon clawed and chewed at each other high over the ocean surface; torrents of rain slammed into clouds as if forced from gigantic pressure hoses; mighty winds struck with diabolical force. This great eruption of violence spread in all directions over hundreds of oceanic square miles in every direction of the compass and caused severe weather conditions along the coast of Luzon, over which the Third Fleet planned to stage those launching operations, which had to be canceled.”
The crippled Tabberer was one of the last of Third Fleet’s vessels to steam through the Mugai Pass and into Ulithi’s vast harbor on December 22. Plage had gone belowdecks to check on the survivors several times over the preceding three days, and many, including Archie DeRyckere, had ventured up to the bridge, wishing to shake his hand.
Now, as he neared the atoll, Henry Lee Plage lined up the Tabby’s crew on her foredeck and invited the rescued seamen who could walk to personally thank their saviors. Battle-hardened sailors hugged, and wept.
The death toll of U.S. Navy officers and seamen lost in the wake of Typhoon Cobra was enormous, more than twice the number of sailors and airmen killed in action at the Battle of Midway, and nearly as many as at Midway and the Battle of Coral Sea combined. As one eyewitness was to write in the wake of the killer storm, “Compared to the staggering total of some 790 men who were lost or killed during Cobra’s attack, the rescue ratio … seems pitifully small. But when the circumstances that governed the majority of these rescues are brought into consideration, they become a monumental tribute to the skills and courage of our sailors and the binding bonds of the Brotherhood of the Sea.”
When the Tabby limped into Ulithi’s anchorage, most of Halsey’s ships, in various states of disrepair, were already in dry dock or having their battered keels and hulls attended to by divers wielding underwater welds. Before reaching the atoll, Plage had received a “Well done for a sturdy performance” communiqué from the admiral for his ship’s epic heroism and selfless service. But as she entered the harbor, no one seemed to take particular notice of the scalped and battered little destroyer escort.
When she shaped toward her mooring across from the New Jersey, however, she received a blinker message from the behemoth battleship.
“What type of ship are you?” it asked.
Plage was tired, and irritated, and in no mood to be condescended to. He felt it was about time a destroyer navy man, even a reservist, set the smug BB boys straight, insubordination be damned. With no hesitation he ordered his signalman to blink back the following response:
“Destroyer escort. What type are you?”