Down to the Sea

by Bruce Henderson

  Felty still intended to go out on deck to the hatch and ladder that went to the forward fire room because “it was my job to be there,” figuring since he had made it across the deck once he could do so again. But now his exit was blocked by the “scared sailors,” who would not move from the opening.

  AT APPROXIMATELY 10:30 A.M., supply officer Al Krauchunas left the galley after making sure that sufficient sandwiches had been prepared, since the crew would be subsisting on them until further notice. Clutching the handrail as the ship “pitched and tossed,” he made his way to his disbursing office, where he checked to see that all cabinet doors, furniture, and equipment had been made secure. He decided to go back to the wardroom, a journey that would take him on deck for a short distance. He did so facing “hazardous footing and raging wind.” On one roll to starboard, the whaleboat was engulfed in the flood and ripped free of the davits holding it in place. The whaleboat swept by, “narrowly missing” Krauchunas before disappearing over the side. He allowed himself the thought that it would be his responsibility to report the loss to the Bureau of Supplies and Accounts, and wondered if a checkmark in an appropriate column would suffice or whether he should write an eyewitness account.

  “Slowly and steadily,” Krauchunas made his way forward, overcoming the “blinding mist, wind and water” to stumble into the passageway leading to the wardroom, where he landed “completely drenched.” When he found the wardroom deserted, he decided to “seek relief from the pitching and rolling” by going to his nearby stateroom and “hitting the sack.” Once there, he removed his wet clothes, donned fresh dry ones, and lay in his bunk listening to the sounds of Spence enduring “continuous bucking and rolling,” including the roll to port from which the ship had not come fully back.

  Krauchunas heard a phone ring in an adjacent room. Soon the chief engineer peered into his room. “You better get topside, Al,” Sundin said. “We’ve taken water down the stack into the engine room.” Sundin hurried away, closing behind him the watertight hatch leading from officer country.

  Having recently been topside and nearly washed overboard with the whaleboat, Krauchunas still thought his stateroom was a safer place to stay. But then the lights blinked and went out. A dim emergency light flickered on in the passageway, and Krauchunas, “concerned with the sudden turn of events,” decided to head back to the wardroom. He stopped at the door to the wardroom and peered inside. Several officers not on duty were now sitting on lounges and in chairs, each with a “concerned look” on his face. Deciding the atmosphere was “not at all encouraging,” Krauchunas turned away and started down the darkened passageway toward the main deck, “struggling to remain upright,” as the ship had never straightened up again after rolling to her port side. As he passed the captain’s stateroom, he heard a voice “spouting a few words of anger and disgust.” Krauchunas looked in and saw the ship’s medical officer, Lieutenant ( j.g.) John C. Gaffney, sitting in a chair and having trouble keeping it from sliding across the compartment. Krauchunas liked Doc Gaffney and decided to stay. He sat down on the lower bunk of a double-bunk unit, and the two men exchanged “words of fear and some assurances regarding the storm.”

  Spence took a “sudden roll to port” and remained in this position for “agonizing moments” before slowly starting to come upright.

  Krauchunas by then was on the deck, having been thrown backward off the bunk into the passageway and showered with books, ashtrays, and other loose items from the cabin. Without hesitating, he scrambled on all fours for the nearest hatch—left open or pushed open—that led onto the deck.

  Then Spence rolled back to port just as far as before, only this time she did not stop until “almost completely upside down.”

  Krauchunas, grasping the railing of a ladder as a torrent of seawater gushed through the open hatch, found himself almost instantly underwater. With lungs bursting for air, Krauchunas experienced “a hopeless feeling.” He wondered: Is this the way I’m going to die?

  The wounded ship, still fighting, came back slightly, which abated the inflow of rushing water long enough to allow Krauchunas to surface and gasp four or five gulps of air. He pulled himself along the ladder closer to the opening. Now the ship began to settle again to her overturned position amid “gurgling and sucking sounds” as the sea again poured in.

  Krauchunas went under, reaching out in the dark for the open hatch.

  ON THE BRIDGE, quartermaster Ed Traceski noted the time—11:00 A.M.—when Spence lost all electrical power after seawater poured down the after fire room ventilator shaft, shorting out the ship’s main electrical switchboard. Up until then, “all the reports of damage” the bridge had received involved the loss of the whaleboat and a depth charge breaking loose from one of the racks.

  For most of the morning the captain had been at the conn, with the executive officer also on the bridge along with the duty OOD, Ensign William I. Sellers, the ship’s sonar officer. Chief Quartermaster Harlan K. Carrigan was handling the wheel, an exhausting job in such elements when both ship and sea exerted powerful wills of their own. For hours they had listened to reports coming in over the TBS about the struggles of other ships in the storm and men washing overboard. Concerned about “the safety of his crew,” Andrea had ordered all topside watches—those in exposed areas on deck—secured to prevent mishaps. Addressing the crew over the ship’s intercom, Andrea directed “all personnel not authorized topside” to remain below in their compartments, and anyone with business topside “should wear life jackets.”

  With engineers working below to restart the ship’s main steam-driven generator and restore electrical power—the cessation of which stopped not only ballasting but the electric bilge pumps used to control flooding—Spence continued to try to maintain her assigned station in the formation. Although still listing after rolling as much as “43 degrees to port,” no distress call was broadcast. In fact, at 11:17 A.M., Andrea sent a routine voice message to his task unit commander over the TBS: “My last position 7,000 yards north of Task Unit 30.8.4,” he said calmly, “course 220 degrees, formation speed.”

  Steaming at 12 knots, Spence had winds “well over 100 knots (115 mph)” off her starboard quarter and “huge” swells rolling in from dead astern as she ran southwest. The wind and unruly seas had pushed the destroyer “a little left” of the formation course that was “supposed to be steered.” Eager to get back on their assigned course, Andrea ordered, “Hard right rudder.”

  As directed, the helmsman spun the wheel to 30 degrees right rudder, which immediately increased the list to port to 47 degrees, as noted by Traceski on the wheelhouse inclinometer.

  “Caught in a trough” between swells higher than her mast, Spence wallowed. When the helmsman tried to correct, Traceski saw that he “didn’t have steering control”—the rudder stayed jammed on hard right. Spence laid way over, hung there, came back only partway, and then laid over again.

  Just before the combined forces of wind, sea, and instability joined for one final push and Spence “gradually capsized,” Traceski, who was trained to make note of important shipboard events, looked at the bridge clock. It read 11:23 A.M.

  Thirteen

  Storekeeper Ken Drummond, who had feared Hull’s luck had run out as he listened to the new captain’s first speech to the crew two months earlier, saw a shipmate die around 10:00 A.M. on December 18.

  Drummond, who stood his regular watches in the radar shack, tucked into a corner of the wheelhouse, arrived on the bridge that morning for the 8:00-to-noon duty. Crossing the storm-tossed deck from the aft hatch where the ladder rose from the crew quarters had been “really tough…holding on to whatever you could find” as he worked his way forward. With the ship rolling so steeply, the radar dish on the mast swept straight down into walls of seawater, obscuring the returns on the screen. Drummond, who alternated with another radar operator every hour, put on his life jacket “because it seemed like a good idea” and, “trying to stay out of the way,” stepped onto the port w
ing of the bridge, which was enclosed except for a small platform on each side—called wings—from which lookouts and deck officers stood to search for obstructions in the path of the vessel and to monitor underway replenishments or dockside approaches. Leaning against the bulkhead near the entrance to the bridge, Drummond held tightly to a railing as the ship pitched wildly in swells that broke forcefully over the forecastle and weather decks, shooting spray higher than the bridge. Whenever it was his turn to man the radar, Drummond came inside, where he found neither the bridge nor the wheelhouse “a great place to be,” with all hands struggling to remain upright.

  Out on the starboard wing, also at a railing bracing himself against the storm, was Radarman 3rd Class Billy Bob Dean, nineteen, a “good ole boy with a twang” from Texas who had never worn anything on his feet other than cowboy boots before joining the Navy. Finding that regular shoes hurt, he had received permission from Consolvo to wear his cowboy boots—and so far the new by-the-book skipper had “not become aware” of the Texan’s nonregulation footwear.

  On one steep roll to starboard, water came up as high as the bridge. As the raging foam cleared, Drummond looked across the bridge to see Billy Bob parallel to the deck, twisting in the wind like a flag in a gale and struggling to keep hold of the railing. When he lost his grip he fell, his body slamming against the rigging of the whaleboat before being flung overboard like a cloth doll. Drummond had little doubt the likeable Texan was dead before hitting the water. Most of the bridge personnel saw the accident, although “no one said anything.” Drummond believed “all thought it was a lost cause” and there was “nothing anyone could do.” The ship, fighting to maintain station in the formation, did not slow or alter course.

  After all the battles and close calls since December 7, 1941, Hull had taken her first wartime casualty. The loss of Billy Bob Dean, washed overboard in his favorite cowboy boots, became for Drummond a harbinger of the might of nature’s combined forces. At that point, the situation “really started getting bad,” as the seas took on “those confused pyramidal shapes” characteristic of a typhoon with wind velocities in excess of 100 miles per hour.

  Chief Quartermaster Archie DeRyckere, who had been at the helm two months earlier during full-power runs in Puget Sound and was shocked by the increased top-heaviness of the old destroyer after the latest additions to electronics and armament, had assigned two helmsmen to alternate at the wheel that morning. Given the physically exhausting work of steering in the violent seas, Quartermaster 3rd Class August R. Lindquist and Quartermaster 3rd Class John T. Horton, “two of the best helmsmen in the Navy,” relieved each other every twenty minutes.

  Pacing the wheelhouse and bridge as he kept a wary eye on the worsening weather—“so thick and dirty that sea and sky seemed fused”—DeRyckere was still fuming over the scuttlebutt from Hull’s radio shack that an admiral on an aircraft carrier had been heard on the TBS radio earlier that morning asking Halsey for permission to steer around “this typhoon” because he was concerned about the “small boys.” Upon hearing the one word that filled with dread every sailor in any man’s navy, DeRyckere had railed: “Typhoon! What in the hell are we doing near a typhoon?” The reported casual response from Halsey on New Jersey that the storm would give the crews on the smaller ships a “chance to practice seamanship” had caused DeRyckere’s blood to boil.

  Having recently been tested for his chief ’s promotional examination on Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator, including the “Cyclonic Storms” chapter, DeRyckere was well versed on the advice given to mariners for “fixing the bearing” of a cyclonic storm center in the Northern Hemisphere: when an observer was standing facing the wind, the center would be found “approximately 10 points (112 degrees) to the observer’s right.” When DeRyckere went out on deck and faced the wind, he placed the storm to the west. And yet for one hour that morning the fleet had steamed toward the typhoon to facilitate a fueling operation that anyone in his right mind who looked outside at the tumultuous seas knew would never take place. DeRyckere understood that Bull Halsey could be aggressive and stubborn, and after being “fooled by the Japanese at Leyte” the feisty old sea dog had proved he was not the world’s greatest naval tactician, but hadn’t Halsey read Bowditch? Hadn’t the admiral ensured something as basic as checking the wind conditions to find the storm center? Instead, he had kept the fleet “maneuvering right in front” of a typhoon? If there was any seamanship to practice, DeRyckere seethed, it damn well should have started with Halsey.

  Boatswain’s Mate Ray Schultz was equally perturbed, not only with the reported admiral-to-admiral TBS radio chat and news of the approaching typhoon but also with one James A. Marks, whose initials he had morphed into the moniker “Jack Ass Marks,” which he peppered his speech with whenever talking about the unpopular commanding officer. Since his embarrassing performance at the conn upon their arrival at Pearl Harbor two months earlier, Marks had done nothing to redeem himself with the crew. In fact, when they entered Ulithi three weeks earlier, Marks had ordered the men on watch topside to change into undress whites for their arrival at the big Navy base, although the uniform of the day in the Pacific theater had long been blue dungarees for enlisted crewmen because whites provided good targets for enemy gunners. A message from an admiral ordered Hull’s captain to “report to headquarters immediately.” After docking, Marks did as directed, and word soon spread among the crew that he “got his butt chewed off for having us in the wrong uniform.”

  Around 9:30 A.M., Schultz made his way across the heaving main deck to the bridge, where he asked Marks for permission to “ready the ship for heavy seas.” Schultz knew as well as anyone in the Navy that the Farragut-class destroyers had been top-heavy from their earliest days, given their narrow beam. After the addition of topside weight through the years, they had become “too top heavy” even in normal seas. With a typhoon approaching, the experienced sailor figured anything done to reduce topside weight would be beneficial.

  Marks asked what it was that the boatswain’s mate proposed. Schultz explained that he would organize a special detail to “button the ship up tightly” and “stow below all the ready ammunition” kept topside.

  Marks looked as if Schultz had lost his mind. “Stow the ammo? We’re in a war zone. We can’t do that.”

  The gung-ho captain was still looking for his first combat in the Pacific, thought Schultz, who knew full well that no enemy ships, subs, or planes would be operating in such heavy weather. Schultz next asked permission to cut away the 26-foot motor whaleboat, which was “dipping in the water” and filling up on every steep roll to starboard. Knowing that a cubic yard of seawater weighed nearly a ton, the boatswain’s mate knew the added weight on the side was not helpful to a ship already struggling to right herself. Too, he thought it likely that the whaleboat could break loose, and perhaps in the process cause other damage and even injure someone.

  “Permission denied,” Marks said sternly. “Get off my bridge.”

  Never one to let an ill-conceived order slow him down, Schultz gathered his gang of deckhands and went about the ship securing loose gear, setting condition Affirm by closing the watertight hatches between many compartments, and otherwise preparing the ship to ride out the typhoon, although even the irascible Schultz was not so insolent as to stow the big ammo lockers or cut away the whaleboat without orders to do so.

  Although Marks had “expected to receive orders to fuel” that morning, Hull was—after the cancellation of fueling operations—better off than Spence and a number of other destroyers. As of 8:00 A.M., Hull had aboard “about 124,000 gallons of fuel,” representing 68 percent of capacity. Marks had been informed that morning by the ship’s engineering officer that they were “above the required ballasting point” as directed by Bureau of Ships for Farragut-class destroyers, and therefore he had elected not to take on seawater ballast. The required level for ships of the Farragut class to maintain stability was 82,500 gallons, or about 45 percent of fuel capa
city, although that figure was based on a 1942 inclining test and not the more current fall 1944 inclining test of the destroyer Aylwin in the Seattle shipyard. As a result, the correct level of fuel and ballast had never been recalculated after all the wartime additions and modifications to the Farragut-class ships.

  By 10:30 A.M., Hull was taking a terrific pounding. Her bow would rise out of the sea on a giant swell only to slam down moments later, which then brought the stern out of the water along with the rudder and spinning screws. At the same time, Hull was being knocked over repeatedly, taking “steady 70 degree rolls to starboard,” recovering briefly, then laying over again. During one roll, the front davit that held the whaleboat in place sheared off, and the boat swung wildly, snapping the rear davit. Free of its restraints, the whaleboat “washed right down the deck,” careening against the torpedo tubes and crashing into the after deck house.

  Schultz, nearby securing some gear topside, saw what happened next in slow motion as if stuck in a horrible nightmare. A group of sailors, “about twelve of them” by his count, had emerged from the after hatch leading up from the crew quarters and were working their way forward between rolls. The absence of a covered, safe means of passage between the forward and after parts of the ship—one of the design flaws of the Farragut-class destroyers—required crew members to navigate across the wet and slippery main deck. The motorboat, after bouncing off the torpedo tubes and the aft deck house, now slid into the group of sailors, knocking them down like bowling pins. The boat along with the men, many of whom did not have on life jackets, were carried overboard.

  When Schultz burst onto the bridge, he had a full head of steam. Finding Marks wedged into a corner of the bridge between the port bulkhead and the chest-high pelorus, an navigational instrument used to take accurate relative or compass bearing at sea—where he had been situated since the ship began rolling heavily—Schultz spat out the news about the whaleboat carrying a dozen men over the side. He felt strongly the tragedy could have been avoided had “Jack Ass Marks” let him cut away the whaleboat as he had wanted to do earlier.