Down to the Sea (28 page)

After drifting alone for several hours, Douhan saw that the waves and winds started to subside and darkness was coming on. A few hours later, Douhan spotted a searchlight, which gave him hope for rescue. But the light disappeared over the horizon, “never to appear again.” In the middle of the night something hit him in the back of the neck. He froze, “thinking of sharks.” When he turned around he found an ordinary broom. No doubt off the ship, it was like “finding an old lost friend”—something material to prove he had once been on a destroyer with nearly 300 other men. He discovered he could rest his feet on the broom's shoulder and that it was a relief from hanging in the life jacket, which caused numbness in his legs and feet.

Around what he estimated to be midnight, Douhan spotted a “little light.” He yelled out, and received a response: “Who's there?”

“Pat Douhan.”

“Get over here, Douhan.”

He found fourteen of his
Hull
shipmates in a partly broken-up raft. The line that secured the wooden slats to the raft had sagged, dropping the bottom down 3 or 4 feet. The men, most wearing life jackets, were standing inside the raft in water up to their shoulders. All the raft's supplies had broken loose in the storm, and there wasn't as much as a sip of water or a morsel of food; nevertheless, Douhan was thankful for having made it to the raft and finding “some company.”

The only officer in the raft was Lieutenant ( j.g.) Edwin Brooks, the proper and “self-assured” Virginian with an economics degree from the University of Richmond who served as
Hull
's sonar officer. Brooks, too, had been floating alone in his kapok life jacket until earlier that evening, when he happened across the raft filled with men.

When
Hull
went over, Brooks had jumped into the water and the first wave pushed him away from the ship. As
Hull
“started to settle,” Brooks was “pulled under by the suction” and thought “it was all over.” The rush of water pulling at him turned out to be a “compartment filling” rather than the ship sinking. Brooks came up inside a gun turret alongside the bodies of several men “killed by being thrown back against the ship” and having “their heads caved in.” He climbed out of the turret with the help of two enlisted men who “pulled me up with them,” and jumped again into the water. For eight hours he rode out the worst part of the storm alone, with his head “more than half the time underwater in heavy seas.” He ingested a lot of salt water, and by the time he reached the raft Brooks was “not in very good shape.”

Also on the raft was Gunner's Mate 1st Class John Valverde, twenty-five, of San Francisco, who spent his early childhood in the city by the bay and then was on his own from age fourteen, “picking fruit in the country” until he was old enough to enlist in the Navy. A first-generation American of Spanish descent, the stocky Valverde had been aboard
Hull
since a year before the Pearl Harbor attack, during which he used bolt cutters to break open the ammunition lockers in order to “get the machine guns going” against the attacking aircraft. Through three years of war, Valverde's favorite skipper had been Consolvo, and his least favorite was Marks, who “wasn't qualified for a seagoing command.”

When
Hull
started filling with water, Valverde had emerged from below deck near the crew's galley with Chief Yeoman Robert H. Ellis. The two men climbed over the side, where they hung on until a swell threw them into the air “right over the ship and clear to the other side.” In the water together, Ellis asked calmly, “What do you think, John?” Valverde replied, “Don't give up! Just hang on!” The problem was there “wasn't anything to hold on to,” and they were “sucked down” so deep that Valverde's “ears were bursting.” When he surfaced, Valverde came up under a life raft, hitting his head on the wooden bottom. When he worked his way out from underneath, another raft struck him in the
chest. After being “sucked back under two or three more times,” Valverde, who never saw his shipmate Bob Ellis again, was eventually washed clear of the sinking ship. For the next few hours, Valverde at times saw “a whole bunch of men” and at other times was alone. Once he was surprised to see the captain “floating by in his life jacket holding a seaman's knife in his hand.” There was no question in Valverde's mind that the unpopular Marks was holding the long-bladed knife at the ready for one reason: as “protection from the crew.”
Deservedly so,
thought Valverde, who knew an old-time gunner's mate who had threatened to “kill Marks with a machine gun” and was quickly transferred before
Hull
left the shipyard in Seattle. As they drifted past each other, neither Marks nor Valverde spoke to the other. Valverde, however, thought it would be a good idea to “keep away from the captain because of that knife,” and so he put distance between them.

With the light of day, the men in the raft found that they faced another enemy. Dorsal fins appeared for the first time. As he counted the number of sharks circling the raft, Douhan could make out their torpedo-like body shapes, beady eyes, and conical snouts. He reckoned they were about 12 to 14 feet long and “looking for something to eat.” With the men hanging in their life jackets inside the raft, the sharks could easily have struck at “our legs any time.” They continued making constant passes at the overcrowded raft, which “made a big target,” only to turn away at the last moment. For the time being, however, the sharks seemed to be biding their time.

That night, two sailors became violent and started thrashing around. They had both been seen drinking ocean water. The first to go was one of the new recruits who had picked up the ship some weeks earlier in Pearl Harbor and whom “no one really knew.” He was stripped, a short prayer was said, and his body was pushed away from the raft. His clothes and life jacket were given to Radioman 2nd Class Lester C. Mullins, who had escaped the sinking
Hull
by squeezing through a small porthole. To do so he had had to remove his life jacket and clothing, and he had been suffering in the elements: his skin was
burned by the sun, and he shivered in the cold at night. Mullins died later that night. After another prayer his body, too, was allowed to drift away. Although the men “did not know if the sharks got” the bodies, pushing their dead buddies out into shark-infested waters “didn't set very well” with Fireman 2nd Class Edward J. Price, twenty-one, of Topeka, Kansas, who also had escaped
Hull
by climbing out a porthole, or with any of the others on the raft. But it was something they all knew “had to be done.”

Not long after, one of the men thought he saw something on the horizon. He right away wanted to “start calling out,” but Douhan and other veterans picked up a sweet odor—rather like incense, and reminiscent of a scent they had detected while patrolling close to Japanese-held islands. Everyone was told to keep quiet because they might be drifting near an enemy island or even a Japanese submarine at the surface charging its batteries. All agreed that staying in the raft with hope of rescue was better than being taken prisoner by the Japanese—possibly to be executed.

The next morning Douhan and several others decided to keep someone on watch at all times to look for “some kind of life and rescue.” The long, hot day was uneventful except for the “sharks still circling and making passes at us,” something that never became routine. Also, several men became delirious. One wanted to “go down to the galley and get a sandwich,” while another said he was going to borrow his brother's “Model T Ford and bring back some 7UP” for everyone.

When a delirious Brooks was seen to take a swig of sea water, Fireman 1st Class Nicholas Nagurney “pounced on and rammed his finger” down the officer's throat to make him regurgitate. In the process, Brooks bit Nagurney's finger. It was soon Nagurney's turn to have “strange delusions”—he swam a few yards away, intent upon finding out “how deep the water is under the raft.” Before he could get back, he was bitten by a shark, which tore a thin slab off the top of the right forearm. Back in the raft, Nagurney's bloody arm—with a row of half-inch-deep teeth marks on the underside—was wrapped with a piece of
torn shirt. Jolted back to his senses, Nagurney summed up his afternoon: “I guess I'm the only guy that's ever been bit by a shark and an officer the same day.”

The next morning, someone hollered, “Task force on the horizon!” At first everyone thought the guy was “a little out of it,” but he kept insisting. Douhan “rubbed the salt water crust” out of his eyes and, “sure enough, saw ships on the horizon.” About nearly the same time, two planes crossed overhead a “little on the high side.” Even with “all our waving,” the men began to think they hadn't been seen. But then the planes came back over nearly at sea level and wiggled their wings to let the men in the raft know they had been spotted. It was enough “to make us cry.”

Soon the men saw a column of black smoke. Being destroyer sailors, they knew what it meant: a tin can was “lighting off extra boilers” to speed to “our rescue.” In short order, the destroyer
Brown
(DD-546)—which an hour later would also pick up the six
Monaghan
survivors—pulled up next to the raft and threw over a line. At that moment, the sharks—“knowing they were going to lose their dinner,” surmised Douhan—went into a frenzy. Sharpshooters on
Brown
fired accurate volleys at the sharks to keep them away as the raft was hauled in.

Starting at 10:46
A.M.
on December 21, the survivors were helped one by one up the side of the destroyer by their rescuers. Having not seen anyone else or other rafts or debris since
Hull
went over, the men had no way of knowing whether or not they were the only members of their ship's company of 258 officers and enlisted personnel still alive.

The thirteen
Hull
crewmen had been in the water for seventy hours.

Tabberer,
the new Houston-built destroyer escort under the command of Lieutenant Commander Henry Plage, the tall Georgian and former retail credit company employee who had proven to be a natural-born leader, sortied in mid-October 1944 from Pearl Harbor in company with the escort carrier
Anzio
(CVE-57) and several other vessels.

En route westward to Eniwetok, the ship's dog, Tabby, stopped coming around the galley for food. The word went out, and a stem-to-stern search was conducted. It was Plage who broke the news over the ship's address system, explaining that “poor little Tabby must have been washed overboard.” In a letter to his wife, Plage wrote: “The gang is pretty blue about it.”

Ship's Cook Paul “Cookie” Phillips, the wiry former amateur boxing champion, had been one of the first to notice Tabby was missing, and he took the loss of everyone's favorite pooch as a bad omen. Ironically, not long afterward, Phillips found himself involved in his first fistfight aboard ship. The altercation was with Boatswain's Mate 1st Class Louis A. Purvis, twenty-four, of Chatham, New Jersey. Purvis, the leading petty officer in charge of
Tabberer
's deck force, was a “rugged character” and “smart-aleck tough guy” known for “throwing his weight and power around” to keep his young seamen in line.

One morning Phillips went through the mess hall after chow had already been served, and he was surprised to find hot food still on the steam table. He asked one of the messmen standing by why the spread hadn't yet been picked up. “Waitin' on Purvis. He's always late.”

“Purvis eats by eight o'clock or doesn't eat,” Phillips said.

The messmen were clearing the steam table when Purvis came down the ladder. Told what was happening, Purvis said, “I run this mess hall. I eat when I want.” It was true that Purvis provided seamen from his deck force to clean up the mess hall, but otherwise this was Cookie's turf.

“This is my food,” Phillips told Purvis. “I cook it in my galley. These are my messmen. If you ain't here on time, Purvis, you don't eat.”

With that, Phillips went past Purvis, headed for the galley.

Purvis, the bigger man by 30 pounds, slugged Phillips, knocking him up against the bulkhead. Before Phillips could cover up, Purvis clocked him again. At that point, Phillips' cooks wanted to stop the fight, but Purvis' seamen wouldn't let them. Phillips, who had always had a good left jab, then went to work with lightning punches and dancing feet, as he had learned from long days sparring in the gym. Soon, Purvis' men were trying to stop the fight, only now the cooks wouldn't allow it. When Phillips had Purvis whipped and defenseless against the bulkhead, he looked at the seamen. “Purvis is out now. If he had me like this, he'd work me over and scar me up. I'm just gonna put him down.” With that, Phillips dropped Purvis to the deck with one last punch and walked away. Phillips went directly to sick bay to have his cuts treated.

“My God, what happened to you, Cookie?”

“Don't worry, Doc. Someone in worse shape will be here soon.”

A few days later, Purvis, his face bruised and battered, gathered his deck force and told them they could fight anyone aboard ship except for one man. “Look what Cookie Phillips did to me,” Purvis said. “Stay away from him.” After that, Purvis, who never asked for a rematch, started eating on time. Before long, he and Phillips even became “good buddies.” Purvis would ask if Phillips needed extra help in the galley. If so, the boatswain's mate would send a seaman or two around to help out.

Upon joining the Third Fleet at Eniwetok,
Tabberer
's task group was deployed to the fleet's fueling area southeast of Luzon to conduct antisubmarine sweeps. They immediately found themselves on the edge of a typhoon and it got “pretty rough.” Plage was pleased, however, to see that his ship and crew “rode it okay,” although they “saved money on the chow bill.” Some of the new guys, fighting seasickness, “weren't very hungry,” and men who could eat had to settle for sandwiches when the heavy seas made it impossible to prepare hot meals in the galley.

When things turned calm and peaceful for several hours one morning, Plage took the opportunity to go below for a quick shower. He had a feeling that as soon as he stepped into the shower “the bridge would call,” so he put his hand on the water valve and waited a minute. When his cabin phone remained quiet, he turned on the water and soaped up, and then the “damn phone rang.” It was the OOD reporting a routine change of speed, as he was required to do. Following that interruption, Plage figured he would be able to enjoy “the cool water.” All of a sudden his cabin's emergency buzzer went off and the general quarters alarm began to clang, calling all hands to their battle stations. Plage jumped from the shower soaking wet and soapy. With no robe handy, he grabbed his foul-weather coat and went running. By the time he reached topside he had fastened only the top hook. With the “rest of the coat flying in the wind,” he stepped onto the bridge “in all my glory.” His immediate problem was trying to “maintain discipline,” which he found difficult to do when “everyone is laughing.”

On November 18, the
Anzio
task group registered its first kill after being alerted to the presence of a Japanese submarine in the area in a message from the military intelligence unit, which was reading Japan's secret war code.
Anzio
launched aircraft for an extensive search, which resulted in a radar contact on a surfaced submarine. After a fourteen-hour chase,
Tabberer
's sister ships
Lawrence C. Taylor
(DE-415) and
Melvin R. Nawman
(DE-416) carried out a coordinated depth charge attack, sinking the Japanese fleet sub
I-41
with the resultant loss of her 114-man crew. Two weeks earlier,
I-41
had torpedoed off San Bernardino Strait the new light cruiser
Reno
(CL-96), which had to be towed 1,500 miles to Ulithi for emergency repairs in order to steam under her own power back to the States for extensive work, ending her wartime service.

On November 29,
Tabberer
pulled into Ulithi, where her depleted stores and ammunition were to be replenished. They had been at sea so long their fresh foods had run out, and main courses had consisted of canned “Vienna sausage, Spam and corned beef hash.” Unlike many ships where the lowest-ranking men did most of the heavy lifting, Plage required every officer and enlisted man not on watch to take part in boarding supplies and stowing them. To make sure that “everybody who eats loads stores,” Plage positioned himself in a bird's-eye seat on the ship's fantail, overseeing each work party. For many in the crew, it was such “evenhanded fairness” that made Plage so popular.

On December 5,
Tabberer
“finally got some fresh food on board”—“meats, oranges, apples, potatoes, lettuce, cabbage.” In a letter home, Plage wrote: “It has been two months since we've had an orange on board.” He soon noted that with the improved chow, morale was “back up tremendously.”

The crew had come together in ways that pleased Plage. A new supply officer, Ensign Travis E. Nelson, twenty-one, of Bryan, Texas, had started Sunday services that “really have taken hold.” At sea they were held in the mess hall with a “different person teaching or giving a short talk,” and soon the place was packed with everyone not on watch. “I am very pleased to see the crew enjoy a simple church service so much,”
Plage wrote to his wife. “It means a lot and adds so much to life aboard ship.” Every Sunday, several hymns were sung, “of course with no organ or piano,” but Plage noted that “we have some good voices aboard.” In fact, the crew soon organized a small “choir or glee club” made up of “nine or ten fellows who gather on the fantail at sunset and practice” for the following Sunday. After working on the hymns, they “usually drift off into most any kind of song,” and the rest of the crew that came out to listen—again, practically everyone not on watch—“joins in.” Often Plage would be on the bridge as the sun went down, listening to the a cappella songfest. After each song, “there is a dead silence for a minute or two” before someone would start “singing some song quietly” and others chimed in. These sunset events were soon being called “happy hour,” with all hands, from the “kids who are naturally homesick” to the married men “just plain longing to get back to their wives and families,” enjoying the musical reprieve from wartime.

Meeting
Tabberer
at Ulithi was Lieutenant Howard Korth, the former Notre Dame football player and the ship's senior watch officer. Korth had gotten off the ship at Pearl Harbor in mid-October to attend fire-control school. Finishing first in his class, he had been spoken to about an instructor's job. Korth had enjoyed Pearl Harbor, where he met up with a number of former Notre Dame classmates—including several with whom he had played football for the Fighting Irish—as they came through on ships and other military assignments. Since Korth was assigned to a ship deployed to a combat area, however, it was decided he should “first return” to
Tabberer
before being considered for any new shore assignment. Korth was not disappointed, since he considered
Tabberer
a “fine ship” and was pleased to be serving under Henry Plage—a “first-class guy all the way around” and “someone you could depend on.”

Shortly after sunrise on December 10,
Tabberer
weighed anchor and departed Ulithi with
Anzio
's hunter-killer antisubmarine group, consisting of four other destroyer escorts. Headed back to the fleet's fueling area, they were scheduled to arrive a few days before the Third Fleet's main body was expected to commence fueling operations on December 17.

On December 15,
Tabberer
came alongside
Anzio
and received “18,582 gallons of fuel oil.” Two days later, when the fleet's first fueling operation was cancelled by Halsey due to the worsening weather,
Tabberer
still had “79,256 gallons of fuel on hand,” some 260 tons—approximately 75 percent of the ship's fuel capacity.

As did the rest of the fleet,
Tabberer
's small group—given the familiar assignment of protecting the warships and tankers when they were most vulnerable to submarine attack, which was as they maintained a straight course and steady speed during fueling—turned to a northwest course in the early morning hours of the eighteenth, steaming at between 12 and 15 knots for the next fueling rendezvous at 6:00
A.M.

When the fleet's course was switched to the south only to change again after sunrise to a northerly one—into the wind in an effort to fuel in spite of the heavy weather—Plage noted that the barometer on the bridge, which measured 29.58 at 7
A.M.
, thereafter began falling rapidly. That meant one thing to Plage: a typhoon. It was no surprise to him when shortly after 8:00
A.M.
fueling was cancelled and all ships were ordered to proceed south.

At 10:30
A.M.
, steering on
Tabberer
became difficult due to the increasing wind and sea. The wind out of the north was measured on the bridge as “force 12”—equating to “above 75 miles per hour,” at that time the highest category on the Beaufort wind scale. The official “seaman's description of the wind,” often at variance with the terminology used in U.S. Weather Bureau forecasts—for example, a “calm” wind (less than one mile per hour) to a seaman was called a “light” wind by weather forecasters—was in this situation identical. Force 12 on the Beaufort scale meant the same thing to everyone: a hurricane, which in the Pacific was called a typhoon.

Due to their steering problems and the “close proximity of numerous other ships” on the same southerly course, Plage decided to head for a short time on a course of 90 degrees until they could “get clear of other ships.” Unfortunately, the turn “put the vessel in the trough of the sea,” but Plage judged it not immediately dangerous since the steep
ness of the ship's rolling at that point did not exceed 40 degrees. When
Tabberer
came clear of other ships, Plage brought her back around to the base course of 160 degrees only to find that they were unable to maintain the course because they kept falling back into the trough. He made repeated attempts to keep the ship headed downwind using “various speeds up to 18 knots with full rudder” and even “ahead full on one engine while backing with the other engine,” but nothing worked. They were stuck on a giant roller-coaster ride: rising high with each swell that broadsided them, only to drop into the next deep trough. Realizing they would have to ride out the storm with wind and sea on the port beam, Plage decided to shift as much fuel oil as possible to the port tanks to compensate for the starboard list.

At 12:30
P.M.
, when other ships and sailors not far away were meeting their tragic end,
Tabberer
was “riding quite well” at 10 knots, “rolling up to 55 degrees” in winds estimated at “over 100 knots.” Even as the wind shifted rapidly to the west and then to the south, however, the ship stayed stuck in the line of troughs despite all attempts to get out. During the “greatest ferocity” of the typhoon,
Tabberer
's rolls reached 72 degrees, although each time she recovered “rapidly with no hesitation.” In a later official report, Plage would judge “this type of vessel very seaworthy in rough sea,” stating that the new class of destroyer escorts could “withstand rolls in excess of 72 degrees without danger of capsizing.”

Sonarman Frank Burbage, the New Jersey teenager who had been impressed with the “high morale” of the crew under Plage ever since the ship's shakedown cruise to Bermuda, had the 8:00-to-noon watch on the bridge. From his vantage point, Burbage decided that “those big waves at the beach at Asbury Park” were nothing more than “ripples compared to the size” of the ones washing over the bow. He also observed Plage, standing nearby at the conn, “handling the ship magnificently” without looking “nervous or taking a hopeless attitude.” In fact, after one deep roll, Plage asked the man at the pitometer how far they went over. Told 60 degrees, “the captain jokingly replied, ‘She'll take 20 more.'” What scared Burbage “more than when I used to come home
with my new Sunday pants torn” was the “persistent pounding of the waves on the bow.” One minute they would be rising on the crest of a swell, and then the deck “would give out from under us” and the bow would crash down into the trough and the “whole ship would shake and tremble.” Burbage knew that such pounding on the hull could eventually “crack the seams.” Which, he began to wonder, would last longer: the ship or the “watery hell of the typhoon”?