Down to the Sea

by Bruce Henderson

  Lieutenant Howard J. Korth, twenty-four, of Saginaw, Michigan, was one of Tabberer’s few experienced officers. A 1941 graduate of Notre Dame University, where he majored in engineering and played guard on the Irish’s nationally ranked football team for head coach Elmer Layden (the all-American fullback in Notre Dame’s famed backfield known as the “Four Horsemen”), Korth had been offered a football coaching position at a small Catholic college in Kansas City but instead signed up for a Navy commission a month after Pearl Harbor. Called to active duty in March 1942, he was sent to California—Treasure Island and San Diego—for training. In line for an engineering position on an aircraft carrier due to his academic background and expressed interest in aviation, Korth, upon being informed that gunnery officers were sorely needed by the fleet, volunteered to switch to gunnery. The handsome, square-jawed, solid six-footer, whose four brothers had nicknamed him “Hutch” after a favorite action-movie hero, Hurricane Hutch, soon found himself on stormy Atlantic crossings as the officer in charge of the gun crew aboard the troop transport John Lykes. Before being assigned to Tabberer as gunnery officer, Korth completed special gunnery work on the old battleship Wyoming (BB-32), converted to a training ship operating out of Chesapeake Bay, and packed with the latest fire-control radars and mounted guns from 5-inch to .50-caliber. (Wyoming, which would never fire a shot in anger, expended more ammunition than any Navy ship in the entire war, and in the process trained some 35,000 fleet gunners and gunnery officers.)

  Plage wasted no time in fitting out Tabberer for sea. The day after he took command, the final loading of equipment, spare parts, and assorted stores was completed under his watchful eye. The last of these included 204 pounds of bread, 300 dozen eggs, 20 gallons of milk, 90 pounds of butter, 40 pounds of raisins, 100 pounds of tomatoes, 60 pounds of cantaloupes, 5 cases of Camel cigarettes, 5 cases of Chesterfields, 5 cases of Lucky Strikes, 3 cases of Philip Morris cigarettes, 25 boxes of Life Savers, and 10 boxes of spearmint gum. Two days later, Tabberer was under way in the Houston Ship Channel, headed for the San Jacinto Ordnance Depot dock, where the crew loaded ammunition. The following day, Tabberer pulled into Galveston and tied up to Pier 37, with new members of the deck crew shown how to secure the six wire-rope lines—three forward and three aft—each doubled to prevent drifting. The next day, Tabberer nudged away from the pier and headed for open waters.

  Although Plage was on the bridge, a Coast Guard officer charged with piloting the ship out of the harbor was giving the orders. Twenty minutes after leaving the pier, Tabberer, with “engines going full astern and rudder amidships,” struck the outboard wall of a floating dry dock. Before the harbor pilot was finished, he steered Tabberer into a motor whaleboat moored alongside another ship, capsizing the whaleboat. Returning to the pier, Tabberer remained dockside for the next three days as damage was assessed and collision reports written. When Tabberer got under way again, Plage was at the conn.* There would be no more collisions, and it would not take long for his crew to realize that in Plage they had a “very capable, very good captain” who also happened to be a “great ship handler.”

  The new destroyer escort cleared the harbor after midnight on June 11. The log entry signed by the officer of the deck (OOD)—an officer standing watch on the bridge who is in charge of the navigation and safety of the ship unless relieved by the captain—for the midnight-to-4:00 watch read: “Cruising in the Gulf of Mexico for training purposes. War cruising condition of readiness, split engineering plant, ship darkened topside.” Tabberer and many of her crew were at sea for the first time.

  When they pulled into Bermuda three weeks later in the middle of an exhausting shakedown cruise to test men and equipment alike, more of Tabberer’s seamen were sick than able-bodied. The North Atlantic near Bermuda—a British territory located 650 miles due east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina—was famously rough, which was why Navy ships often trained crews hereabouts. Accepted theory held that new sailors had to get seasick before they could find their sea legs, and thereafter they would not get seasick again. With so many men too ill to carry out their duties—others shakily stood their watches with a pail close at hand—the ship at times could “hardly stay up with the maneuvers” being conducted. For a month the ship was in and out of Bermuda. At sea, the crew ran through constant drills such as torpedo runs and gunnery practice, as well as learning how to tow another ship and be towed. When in port, the men relaxed ashore, enjoying this exotic island of pink sand, turquoise seas, and bronzed women; for most of them it was their first trip to a foreign port.

  Plage quickly set out to show his young sailors what was expected of them at sea and on the beach, as well as the penalties for errant behavior, much of which he privately considered “youthful exuberance aboard ship and ashore,” while maintaining the image of a firm but fair disciplinarian. In his first captain’s masts, he meted out attention-getting punishments: the loss of three liberties for being absent without leave (AWOL) less than two hours, five liberties lost for being nine hours AWOL, two days’ solitary confinement on bread and water for being absent from duty station and insubordination, twenty hours’ extra duty for the men of a gun crew who were caught gambling while on duty, and four days’ confinement for direct disobedience of orders.

  The period of extensive training and maneuvers began to mold the young bluejackets of Tabberer into a functioning crew. Sonarman 3rd Class Frank Burbage, eighteen, of Newark, New Jersey, was impressed by the “very high morale” aboard the new ship, which the crew soon fondly nicknamed Tabby. Burbage, who had left high school before graduating to enlist in the Navy rather than be drafted into the Army when he turned eighteen, had attended Fleet Sonar School after boot camp. Aboard Tabberer, the sonar station was on the bridge, so he stood watch in close proximity to Plage and the other officers, all of whom “treated the enlisted men very well” and seemed to genuinely care about them, an attitude that permeated the ship from the top down.

  Gunner’s Mate 3rd Class Tom Bellino, eighteen, raised on a dairy farm near Boise, Idaho, had been sent to two gunnery schools after boot camp, emerging with his petty officer’s “crow,” although it seemed for a time to be “attached to a zipper” because he kept getting written up for minor infractions and busted in rank. Still, Bellino soon joined his shipmates in their appraisal of the man who would take them to war: “everybody loved the skipper.”

  A boon to shipboard morale was the quality of food served on Tabberer, which according to one old salt was the “best chow in the Navy”—surely an exaggeration but a fine compliment nonetheless for the man who did most of the cooking, Ship’s Cook 2nd Class Paul “Cookie” Phillips, nineteen, of Texarkana, Texas. A butcher in civilian life, Phillips had enlisted a week before Christmas 1942 and after boot camp went to the Navy’s cooking and baking school in Alameda, California. Phillips then spent ten months on the destroyer escort Stanton (DE-247), which was assigned to convoy-escort duty in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. There he learned how to cook and serve meals in varied sea conditions.

  A high-energy, wiry type, Phillips had been the flyweight amateur boxing state champion back home before his seventeenth birthday and was still close to his fighting weight of 120 pounds. He just “couldn’t get fat on my own food,” although it was his observation that a lot of Navy cooks did exactly that. Like every ship’s cook, Phillips had been trained to follow the Cook Book of the United States Navy (1932 edition), which listed 170 pages of recipes—each designed to make 100 servings—for such naval classics as Bean Soup No. 1, Chopped Beef en Casserole, and Fried Chicken. The latter called for 80 pounds of chicken, but Phillips soon learned that to feed Tabberer’s enlisted complement, which averaged about 210 men (the officers had a separate mess with their own cooks), he needed 180 pounds of chicken and proportional increases to the other ingredients: flour, eggs, cracker meal, pork drippings, and fat for deep frying. Phillips soon found that the crew liked beef dinners best—Minced Beef, Pot Roast, and Roast Beef were favorites—and for
breakfast, fresh eggs when available, coffee cake, and hot cinnamon buns, the latter made by Chief Commissary Steward/Baker Alan Lumb and acclaimed as the “best cinnamon buns in this man’s Navy.” As was the case on every Navy ship, Tabberer was allocated $1.09 per man to feed each enlisted man three hot meals a day. Phillips found it “not too tough” to stay on his budget and was held accountable if he exceeded the weekly allotment, as it meant “cutting back next week,” which seldom happened on Tabberer.

  Tabberer carried a full-fledged mascot: a rat terrier mix that one of the sailors had brought aboard as a puppy and who promptly won the hearts of all hands, including the captain, who overlooked regulations against having a pet aboard ship. Named Tabby, the little white dog with a blackish snout and straight-up ears was becoming a sailor in his own right. Already he was able to scamper on his short legs up and down the steep ladders between decks, something “not many dogs could do.” He knew, too, the best times to stand outside the galley hatch and yip persistently until Cookie Phillips arrived with leftovers, usually slices of bologna or meat scraps. Tabby had also needed to find his sea legs, once losing his balance and falling overboard as the ship pulled up to a pier. With no thought to his own safety, a sailor dove into the murky water and grabbed the frightened mutt. A line was dropped and they were hauled aboard, so covered in oil that “they didn’t look like themselves.”

  Tabberer pulled into Boston harbor on August 4. The crew went on alternating duty sections, and those who did not have the watch could go ashore at the end of each workday. One night, a handful of Tabberer sailors, as Plage would later recall, were visiting an “establishment that sold liquid refreshment” when some sailors from a destroyer “made a few remarks about destroyer escorts” and those who served on the smaller ships. Five Tabberer sailors “took on about twenty” destroyer sailors and came back to the ship “bloody, with a black eye or two, but with big grins and slapping each other on the back.” In Plage’s view, his sailors had become “a real crew of a fighting ship.” While he was still having to remind them that they were “not supposed to beat-up on the Shore Patrol,” Plage let the incident pass without dispensing any punishment. Plage for “the first time fully realized” that his men had “developed real pride in themselves,” which made him “so very proud.” He knew they were ready at last for whatever awaited them at sea.

  After two weeks at Charlestown Navy Yard, which included a few days atop keel blocks in dry dock to inspect her underwater exterior—such as valves, propellers, rudder, and other fittings—Tabberer was deemed ready for fleet assignment. It did not take long. Orders were received to get under way on August 16 to escort the oiler Severn (AO-61) to Hawaii.

  Tabberer arrived at Pearl Harbor on September 7 and for the next five weeks conducted underway training, including antisubmarine and gunnery exercises, in Hawaiian waters. The ship also screened and served as plane guard for the aircraft carriers Ranger (CV-4) and Coral Sea (CVE-57) during night-flying qualifications involving extensive launching (takeoff ) and recovery (landing) operations. Tabberer would be stationed astern of the carrier, ready to pick up any pilot who went in the water—and pick up numerous drenched pilots they did, in the process working out what Plage considered a “pretty good system.” When a pilot went down, as did Ensign James Brenner of Coral Sea shortly before 9:00 P.M. on October 9, Tabberer hurried to the crash site. After Plage maneuvered the ship into position, the motor whaleboat was lowered. Brenner was picked up and aboard Tabberer in under twenty minutes. After being checked out by the pharmacist’s mate—who served as Tabberer’s medical staff in lieu of a doctor (which smaller ships did not normally carry)—the pilot’s clothes were rushed to the laundry as he took a hot shower, then he was served coffee and a sandwich in the officer’s wardroom. When flight operations ended two hours later, Tabberer approached the starboard side of Coral Sea and returned via high-wire chair their orphaned pilot dressed in freshly ironed clothes suitable for liberty ashore and clutching a gallon of his favorite flavor of ice cream.

  The latter touch was undeniable grandstanding; traditionally, a carrier would gratefully send over ice cream to any smaller ship that rescued a pilot. Ships the size of destroyer escorts were not allocated ice cream makers. The machine that found its way to Tabberer—meant for another ship but not yet picked up by its crew—was liberated one night from a Pearl Harbor pier by Cookie Phillips, who also served as the ship’s unofficial scrounger, and his galley gang. They also grabbed several cartons of the dry mix, which came in three flavors: vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. When a little water was added to the mix, the machine produced in about forty minutes a gallon of soft ice cream that could be eaten immediately or frozen. Plage at the time did not ask Phillips how they suddenly had an ice cream machine aboard, but he did drop by the galley most nights after the crew had eaten to see if there was any left over. Not surprisingly, “there always was some ice cream for the skipper.” And every Friday night, the skipper was invited to the galley to enjoy broiled filet mignons expertly sliced off quarters of beef by Phillips, the former butcher who kept his own set of sharpened knives. The menu never varied: steak, ice cream, cinnamon buns. When it was time and the smells were wafting to the bridge directly above the galley, Plage would turn to the officer of the deck and say, “Sir, you have the conn. I’m off duty.” The skipper would soon be knocking at the locked galley hatch. Also invited on Friday nights was the ship’s mail clerk, Seaman 1st Class William A. McClain, nineteen, of Knoxville, Tennessee, in exchange for giving the galley crew their mail right after the officers and before everyone else.

  As life aboard Tabberer settled into a routine in the Pacific, one officer on the ship had added reason to be grateful for having traded the often inhospitable Atlantic for another, balmier ocean. Executive officer (and, as such, Plage’s second in command) Lieutenant Robert M. “Dusty” Surdam, twenty-seven, of Hoosic Falls, New York, sporting crew-cut blond hair, was six foot two with the lean, sinewy build of a runner. The son of a local bank president, he had prepped at Deerfield Academy, where he competed in track and soccer. He turned down an appointment to West Point in favor of Williams College, a small liberal arts school in western Massachusetts, where he majored in economics and graduated cum laude in 1939. After a vacation that summer to England, Germany, and France as the clouds of war in Europe became darker by the day, Surdam went to work as a bank clerk in Albany, New York. He enlisted in the Naval Reserve in October 1940 and five months later was sent to Midshipman School aboard the old battleship Illinois (BB-7)—renamed Prairie State (IX-15) and serving as a floating armory and naval school in New York harbor. After three months of training, Surdam was commissioned an ensign and received orders to the destroyer Warrington (DD-383), a Somers-class destroyer of 1,850 tons that had just finished an overhaul at Charlestown Navy Yard when Pearl Harbor was attacked and was ordered the next day into the South Atlantic to patrol “under war conditions during the national emergency.” In Surdam’s first fitness report submitted that same month, Warrington’s commanding officer noted: “Ensign Surdam is exceptionally quick witted and has unusually sound judgment for one having so little experience. He is willing to assume responsibility and has the intelligence and ability to do so with excellent results. An officer of distinct value to the Navy.” Two weeks into the new year, Warrington was sent to the Pacific, where the destroyer remained until mid-1944, when she returned to the East Coast to undergo routine repairs.

  Surdam had several times requested other assignments—to the Naval War College, where many of the brightest officers ended up in preparation for command and top staff positions,* and also to flight training—but had been turned down each time because he was too valuable aboard ship. Comments on fitness reports such as “As officer of the deck during action against Japanese aircraft, Lieutenant Surdam proved himself practically indispensable to the Commanding Officer” did not help him get his ticket punched off the ship. After more than two years on Warrington, Surdam finally rece
ived new orders: to Submarine Chaser Training in Miami. Thereafter, he was ordered to Brown Shipbuilders in Houston for “the fitting out of USS Tabberer and for duty as executive officer of that vessel when placed in commission.”

  On September 10—three days after Tabberer arrived in Hawaii—Warrington departed Norfolk for Trinidad, in the southern Caribbean. Two days out to sea, the destroyer encountered a violent storm along the Florida coast. After receiving word that they were steaming directly into a hurricane, Warrington tried to change course, but it was too late. In the early morning hours of September 13, the destroyer lost part of her bow and water flooded the forward engine room, knocking out the ship’s electric power. The main engines shut down and the steering mechanism failed. By noontime the following day, it was apparent that Warrington, foundering badly in mountainous seas, would not survive. Almost immediately after the abandon-ship order was given, the destroyer went down. A prolonged search over the next two days found only seventy-three survivors—more than 250 men perished.

  When word circulated of Warrington’s loss, Surdam, like other mariners who left a ship shortly before it went down, would long recall the names and picture the faces of lost shipmates. At the same time he mourned their deaths, Surdam counted his own but-for-the-grace-of-God blessings, grateful not to have been on his old ship in the Atlantic, with its unpredictable weather and dreadful storms.