Down to the Sea (31 page)

A radio message was received at 1:10
P.M.
from Commander Third Fleet, directing
Tabberer
to “proceed to rendezvous with other damaged ships” 90 miles south of their current position, to arrive there by sunset, and then to proceed together to Ulithi for temporary repairs.

Plage “believed other men were in the water” but possibly were so scattered that it would be difficult to find them. He continued searching for “as long as possible.” At 2:00
P.M.
, he ordered a new course in order to make the rendezvous. As soon as
Tabberer
turned to the new course, another man was spotted in the water, and he was brought aboard at 2:06
P.M.

Shortly after the course was “resumed for rendezvous,” a drifting man in a kapok life jacket was spotted. As the ship came closer, an 8-foot shark was observed circling beneath the man, who appeared to be unconscious. Plage ordered “our tommy guns, .30 caliber rifles, .45 pistols and everything else” quickly handed out to sailors topside. Hurrying to bring the ship alongside, Plage snapped commands on the bridge: “Right full rudder,” “All engines back full.” The sound of gunfire filled the air as marksmen fired “all around trying to keep the shark away.”

Awakening to the sound of machine guns and bullets landing nearby, Lieutenant ( j.g.) Don Watkins thought “they were Japs” and that “this was the end.” He soon deduced that the gunmen were either terrible shots or aiming at something else in the water. He then saw a line being thrown his way. Although it fell short by some distance and he was too weak to reach it, he knew an attempt was being made to rescue him. Since waving goodbye to Mackenzie some twenty-four hours earlier, Watkins had been drifting alone. During the night, he had seen lights of a ship in the distance and tried to swim toward them. It proved to be too much effort, however. Exhausted, he soon discovered that he could sleep in the life jacket, and did. The next thing he recalled was the rude awakening.

Tabberer
was still 50 to 60 feet away. On deck, executive officer Surdam saw the situation and thought the man might be “attacked by the shark before we could get to him.” Without any hesitation, Surdam, who did not take the time to don a life jacket, “dove in the water and swam out to the man.” Grabbing him by the back of his life jacket, Surdam hauled Watkins toward the ship as the shark—the target of a “steady stream of bullets”—circled menacingly 20 feet away. Stationed halfway down the cargo net, waiting to help board the survivor, Torpedoman 1st Class Robert L. Cotton, a wiry-framed cowboy from Cheyenne, Wyoming, dove headfirst into the water and swam out to assist Surdam, who by then was “pretty tuckered out.” Between them, Surdam and Cotton brought Watkins safely in.

More searching continued in the area, but Plage realized that unless they again turned for the rendezvous they would be late, and in violation of Halsey's latest directive. At 2:55
P.M.
,
Tabberer
was “again taken toward rendezvous,” although everyone aboard wore a “hangdog look” because they “hated to give up the hunt.” Dozens of men topside kept searching the sea for more survivors. At 3:15
P.M.
, a lookout yelled excitedly. A group of men had been sighted two miles away.

When the survivors—seven in all—were boarded fifteen minutes later, they turned out to be a group of
Hull
sailors under the command of the ship's engineering officer, George Sharp, the admiral's son, who had been “instrumental in saving the men.” After abandoning a broken raft, five men wearing life jackets had come across a sixth man, Fireman Roderick Mackenzie, floating on a soggy mattress. Initially assisted by Don Watkins shortly after they both went in the water, Mackenzie was still without a life jacket. The others took turns keeping Mackenzie from drowning by holding him up or having him hang on their backs. Sharp was the last to join the group. After evaluating the situation and seeing that Mackenzie was a “heavy burden to seaworn men,” the officer insisted on the men lashing themselves together in a circle. Mackenzie was then placed in the center so that everyone could help keep him afloat.
Tied up “like a bunch of asparagus,” Sharp, a “scientist by training and nature” who had not followed in his father's footsteps to Annapolis only due to defective eyesight, knew they would be easier to spot in a group than as individuals in the water. The seven men all made it.

Plage decided at that point to continue the search. He figured that without a mast and electronics
Tabberer
“couldn't do the fleet any good,” and although they were under orders to make the rendezvous, he decided to “hang with that, we're going to stay here” and look for more survivors. While he was “a little shaky inside because of [his] high-handed disregard for orders,” he felt sure that staying and “hunting for these men” was the right thing to do, even if he ended up with a reprimand.

Among those rescued that afternoon was Boatswain's Mate Ray Schultz, who since being washed off the bridge of the sinking
Hull
had drifted mostly solo until just an hour before being rescued, when he'd joined a cluster of his shipmates floating along in the kapok life jackets he had ordered some months earlier. After being hauled aboard
Tabberer,
Schultz learned that among those rescued that day was “Jack Ass” Marks. Of all the great guys who had not made it off the ship, Schultz was dismayed that this bastard had gotten lucky. Had the two men come across each other in the water, Schultz had no doubt what he would have done: “held underwater the head” of his captain and nemesis until the life went out of him.

It came as no surprise to the
Hull
survivors that Marks failed to come below to greet them and check on their well-being. In fact,
Tabberer
's Cookie Phillips, hearing complaints about Marks from weakened men who still “could hardly walk,” believed that Plage was “hiding Marks so he wouldn't go back in the water.” One of Phillips' shipmates, mail clerk William McClain, decided after speaking with numerous
Hull
sailors that Marks “wasn't much of a man,” which made him “the opposite of our skipper.”

At 4:30
P.M.
, Plage received a message from Commander Third Fleet
ordering
Tabberer
to “stay in the area and search until dawn” the following morning, when they would be relieved by other ships.

Plage went to the ship's public address system, announced their new orders, and heard his crew, who had been through a typhoon and not slept in more than two days, cheering wildly on deck and throughout the ship.

The search for survivors went on.

Tabberer
was relieved of her independent search at 8:40
A.M
. on December 20 by other ships assigned by Halsey to conduct what he would later term “the most exhaustive search in Navy history.” Unlike
Tabberer,
many of them found nothing, for which Halsey would later have an explanation: “a man in a life jacket is almost impossible to spot in a rough sea.”

Ordered to proceed to Ulithi, Plage set an easterly course at a speed of 16 knots while keeping extra lookouts posted. At 10:50
A.M.
, an object in the water was sighted. It turned out to be what was left of a life raft holding ten
Spence
sailors, all of whom were quickly boarded.

Senior man on the raft was Chief Water Tender James Felty, who had been transferring
fuel in preparation for taking on water ballast before the destroyer went over. Felty, a seven-year Navy veteran who had slipped into his life jacket minutes before
Spence
rolled, ended up in the sea next to the ship just before she turned over. The raft had started out with some twenty men crammed inside and hanging on the outside, but their numbers steadily dwindled. Some men died quietly; others “hallucinated and swam away,” never to be seen again.

The youngest man on the raft was Seaman 2nd Class Floyd Balliett, eighteen, of Plant City, Florida, who had joined the Navy shortly after graduating from high school. It seemed to Balliett that
Spence
was “underwater like a submarine” most of that last morning. After a “couple of steep rolls,” he had gone to the galley and found a life jacket, which he slipped on. Going back to the hatch that opened onto the main deck, he was standing there when the ship “made a 75 degree roll and didn't come back.” There were several men in front of him “screaming like babies,” and Balliett “climbed out over the top of them.” He grabbed a pole and “swung off into the water.” He was “caught in the undertow” and held underwater for so long he didn't think he would ever come up. Just as he concluded his life was ending, he saw his mother “reach in the mailbox and take out that little note that said her son is missing in action.” Popping back to the surface, he found himself swimming “in a sea of dead sailors.” Balliett had made it 40 or 50 yards from the ship when the “boilers blew” and
Spence
“broke in half and went down” in two pieces. After spending the rest of the day alone in the sea—where the wind spray hit with such force that it felt like someone “throwing a handful of gravel” in his face—he came to the broken-up raft, already overcrowded. He saw a rope dragging behind it, and held on all night and into the next day until enough “guys disappeared” that there was room for him inside the raft.

Within twenty minutes of bringing aboard the raft survivors,
Tabberer
picked up three more
Spence
crewmen, including Seaman Ramon Zasadil, who had been assigned to the ship after radio school. When
Spence
went over, he was on watch in the radio shack, from which he “crawled out on my hands and knees.” Not wearing a life jacket, Zasadil
had on “nothing but skivvies” because his dungarees had been soaked when he had gone from the crew quarters to the radio shack, and he had taken them off and hung them up to dry. Unsure at first whether he should leap into the water, he decided to do so just before the ship “turned keel up.” He met up with some guys in life jackets and hung on to them, treading water, through the night until meeting up in the morning with the raft party.

Plage sent out a radio message to other ships that they were still finding men in the water.
Tabberer
was soon joined by the escort carrier
Rudyerd Bay
(CVE-81) and other vessels. At 12:25
P.M.
, Plage was again ordered by Commander Third Fleet to set his ship's course for Ulithi, thereby ending the destroyer escort's role as hero rescue ship.

Tabberer
steamed into Ulithi lagoon late on the morning of December 22 carrying fifty-five “storm-tossed and exhausted” survivors. Before their guests could be unloaded, Plage was directed alongside the moored oiler
Sebec
(AO-87).
Tabberer
's half-empty bunkers were filled to capacity, receiving some 160 tons of fuel oil in less than an hour.

Moving slowly through the crowded harbor,
Tabberer
anchored on the west side of berth eight at 1:30
P.M.
Three hours later, the stream of guests—most wearing borrowed dungarees and shirts—began to depart amid handshakes, backslaps, and fond farewells. All were healthy enough for thirty days' survivor's leave—sent to the transport
General S. D. Sturgis
(AP-137), serving as a station receiving ship—except for one man who went to the hospital ship
Samaritan
(AH-10) for treatment.

Tabberer
was so badly damaged that extensive repairs would be required at Pearl Harbor. The officers and enlisted men alike were more than willing to give credit where they knew it was most due: to their steady and quick-thinking captain, who had stayed on the bridge and at the conn during the typhoon and rescues for “three days and two nights”—at times, Robert Surdam thought, Plage “looked worse” than some of the survivors.

While the enlisted crew had long liked and respected their fair-minded, even-tempered captain, “we didn't really know how good he
was,” Cookie Phillips realized. “But we found out. So did those guys we picked up in the water.” Phillips would hear Plage say that “the good Lord saved
Tabby
and all those men.” Phillips agreed, at least in part: “The good Lord had some help from the captain.” Sonarman Frank Burbage wrote his parents about “the wonderful way the captain handled the ship, and saving the lives of 55 men.” Still, Burbage wondered: “What would have happened to all those men if that first guy's flashlight hadn't been working?”

Tabberer
's crew—with much to be grateful for—celebrated Christmas at Ulithi. The supply officer and galley gang went all out with the menu: turkey soup and crackers, roast young tom turkey, giblet gravy, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, buttered peas and carrots, stuffed olives, fruit salad, cherry pie, ice cream, hot rolls, butter, nuts, and candy.

At 11:30
P.M.
on December 29, Halsey came aboard
Tabberer
with members of his staff including Rear Admiral Robert Carney and four “four-striper captains tagging along.” The admiral, who since
New Jersey
's arrival at Ulithi on Christmas Eve had been dealing with questions from the highest echelons of the Navy in the aftermath of the tragic loss of ships and men in the typhoon, seemed to relish taking this time to visit the officers and sailors of one of his smallest ships.

Learning of
Tabberer
's lifesaving work while she was still at sea, Halsey had wired: “Well done for a sturdy performance.”
Tabberer's
captain, he was told, “while ships around them were barely keeping afloat,” maneuvered alongside and hauled men out of the water. Inquiring about the captain's background before he pinned a medal on him, Halsey admitted he “expected to learn that he had cut his teeth on a marline-spike,” and was shocked when Henry Plage turned out to be not yet thirty years old or an Annapolis graduate but a reservist who had earned his commission at Georgia Tech ROTC. “How could any enemy,” Halsey later wrote, “ever defeat a country that can pull boys like that out of its hat?”

Stepping up to a microphone that faced the assembled officers and crew, Halsey said: “Captain Plage, officers and men of
Tabberer
. I am
greatly honored and privileged, and it is with great pleasure that I come over here this morning to tell you what I think of you, as the Commander of the Third Fleet. Your seamanship, endurance and courage and the plain guts that you exhibited during the typhoon that we went through is an epic of naval history and will long be remembered by your children and their children's children. It is this plain guts displayed throughout the world by the American forces of all branches that is winning the war for us. How those yellow bastards ever thought that they could lick American men is beyond my comprehension. Keep going until the final thing, and the final thing should be the complete destruction of the Japanese empire. If I had my way there would be not a Jap yellow bastard alive, but I guess I won't have it my way.”

With that, Halsey nodded to one of his staff officers and began pinning medals on the five men lined up next to him at attention. The Navy–Marine Corps Medal for Heroism went to Lieutenants Robert Surdam and Howard Korth, Torpedoman Robert Cotton, and Boatswain's Mate Louis Purvis. Then it was Plage's turn. After Halsey read a short citation that made the young officer “blush from hairline to Adam's apple,” the admiral pinned the coveted Legion of Merit Cross on Plage's chest. Plage was so “flabbergasted” that he didn't know whether to “salute or shake hands,” and Surdam, overcome by thoughts of the hundreds of sailors who had perished at sea in this typhoon as well as the storm three months earlier that had sunk his former ship,
Warrington,
at such a great loss of life, didn't help matters by bursting into tears.

In the wardroom a few minutes later, Halsey was served coffee with pineapple upside-down cake, apple pie, and Commissary Steward Baker Chief Alan Lumb's acclaimed hot cinnamon buns. Halsey took a small bite of everything, then looked up, raising his bushy eyebrows. He stuffed in his mouth what was left of the bun, wiped his lips with a napkin, and asked to adjourn to Plage's quarters.

Soon after, Lumb was summoned to the captain's cabin, where Halsey and Plage were waiting, the latter with a much different look on his face than when he and his men were receiving accolades and medals.

Halsey complimented the chief on his cinnamon buns. Then he said, “Chief, pack your seabag. You've been transferred to my ship.”

The only man pleased to see the chief baker go was Cookie Phillips, who with the departure of his boss was now “in charge of everything in the galley.” As for Plage, he admitted he “hated to lose Lumb,” although he allowed it would be “good for him to be with Admiral Halsey.”

Tabberer
left the next day for Pearl Harbor via Eniwetok.

On January 11, 1945, as the dismasted and beat-up destroyer escort entered the channel at Pearl Harbor,
Tabberer
presented an unusual profile. As the ship moved slowly toward her anchorage, a nearby battleship asked by signal light: “What type ship are you?”

As far as Plage was concerned, “that hurt.” He believed “our type of fighting ship” should be recognizable with or without a mast. So he signaled back to one of the largest and most majestic ships in the fleet: “Destroyer escort. What type are you?” There was no reply.

No sooner had
Tabberer
tied up to the dock when a “sedan with a Marine driver” arrived with orders for Plage to report immediately to the headquarters of the Commander Destroyers Pacific Fleet, Vice Admiral Walden L. Ainsworth. After earlier winning a Navy Cross for “outstanding leadership, brilliant tactics and courageous conduct,” Ainsworth was now in administrative command of all cruisers, destroyers, destroyer escorts, and patrol frigates of the Pacific Fleet.

Reporting as ordered, Plage was ushered into the admiral's office, where Ainsworth, “looking very stern,” sat behind a gunmetal desk.

“Plage, did you ask that battleship what type of ship she was?”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

The admiral stared at the young officer for a moment, then “put his head back and roared laughing.” He stood up and came around the desk to shake Plage's hand, congratulating him for rescuing the scores of men in the typhoon as well as for putting destroyer escorts in the fleet “one up” on the battleships. An Annapolis classmate, Ainsworth explained, was a battleship division commander, and his flagship was the one Plage had signaled back. He had called Ainsworth to report the
cheeky response received by the battlewagon from one of Ainsworth's smaller ships. “My battleship buddy thinks you must be a proud ship with a great crew.”

The next day Plage was shown by his own division commander a copy of a letter the commander had sent to headquarters that included remarks about
Tabberer
being the “best ship in the division” and how during maneuvers Plage always had his ship “in correct position.” Typically, Plage was quick to credit others, writing home to his wife that such praise was due to “the alertness of the OODs, the crew in the engine room, in CIC and on the bridge.” He also added, “A part of the team must include the firemen on watch. We have such a swell bunch on board I can't help bragging.”

On December 18, 1944, coincidentally the same the day the typhoon hit the Third Fleet, the Navy Unit Commendation had been established by order of the secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, to be awarded to any ship, aircraft, detachment, or other unit of the U.S. Navy or Marine Corps that distinguished itself in action again the enemy or for non-combat service in support of military operations that was “outstanding when compared to other units performing similar service.”
Tabberer,
within weeks, was awarded the first Navy Unit Commendation. The citation read, in part: