Down to the Sea

by Bruce Henderson

  Marks was pale and seemed to be “frozen in place.”

  Schultz, droplets of water cascading down his face, looked hard at the captain he despised and now blamed for the deaths of a dozen shipmates. “Sir,” he said loudly over the cacophony of crashing swells and howling winds, “shall I have everyone man their life jackets?”

  “What are you trying to do?” Marks asked. “Panic my crew?”

  Schultz saw that Marks was wearing his own kapok life jacket, tied tightly across the chest. Without the slightest hesitation, Schultz went over to the ship’s public address system and pressed the transmit button. The man who was most responsible for having ordered the new kapok life jackets was now going to make damn sure they were worn. Schultz said in the firm, steady voice he had used many times over the PA when reading the daily schedule each morning, a job of the duty boatswain’s mate: “All hands man your life jackets. Repeat. All hands man your life jackets.”

  Throughout the ship, officers and enlisted men alike who didn’t have their life jackets went to where they had left them. Many who were off duty and could wear the bulky life jackets did so, and those who couldn’t because they were working in tight spaces kept them close at hand.

  One officer on the bridge without a life jacket was Lieutenant ( j.g.) G. C. Nelson, of Suffield, Connecticut, the assistant communication officer. He asked if Schultz could fetch him a life jacket.

  “Sure,” Schultz said. “But where’s yours?”

  Nelson said it was at his battle station in the gun director—just one level above the bridge—but that the captain wouldn’t let him go get it.

  Looking directly at Marks, still wedged in his corner no more than six feet away, Schultz hollered disparagingly: “Why don’t you ask the captain for his life jacket? He’s supposed to go down with the ship anyway.”

  Marks gave Schultz a “dirty look” but said nothing.

  A few minutes later, Schultz saw that Nelson had on his life jacket.

  Not long after, Hull’s radar went out of commission for good, leaving the destroyer blind in near-zero visibility with no way to know the whereabouts of other ships in their fueling-unit formation. A TBS message was sent informing the screen commander that Hull’s radar was inoperable and requesting they be kept advised of their position in the formation. A reply came back stating that Hull was at present “fairly well on station.”

  Taking in the “pandemonium on the bridge,” where young sailors had begun to “huddle around like wet chickens, scared as hell,” and conversations that he never dreamed he would hear on a Navy ship, DeRyckere kept an eye on the inclinometer used to measure the angle of a vessel’s horizontal sway. The scale of Hull’s inclinometer had a limit of 73 degrees, beyond which it did not register. The steep rolls to starboard for the past hour were getting close to the end of the scale.

  The chief quartermaster saw that the duty helmsman was occasionally lifted clear off the deck by backspin from the wheel. Next to the helmsman stood the executive officer, Greil Gerstley, who had been directed by the captain to remain there to ensure that his commands were “obeyed for wheel and engine,” which seemed unnecessary and even “silly” to DeRyckere. Keeping the cool-headed and experienced Gerstley pinned to that spot—when there were other places on the ship where the second in command might have been of greater service—was one of the few orders Marks had given. DeRyckere, who stood “ten feet away from [Marks] most of the time” that morning, thought that in an odd way Marks seemed “not to be fully in command” of his ship or crew. He issued no orders to DeRyckere, who stood by waiting for an assignment, or any of the growing number of personnel who had gathered on the bridge. Obsessed with speed and course, Marks seemed detached from all else. He listened without comment to reports brought to him by officers and chiefs about deteriorating conditions on the ship, such as “leaks in superstructure decks and compartments allowing spray to be driven in by high wind” that caused “troubles in radio, radar and electrical circuits.” Through it all, Marks kept himself wedged in on the port side of the bridge, clinging to the pelorus stand with his knees and arms during the hard rolls. DeRyckere noticed that most of the frightened sailors stayed on the high side of the bridge, too, apparently because they “felt safer” there than on the side closest to the sea. He wondered why Marks hadn’t ordered all the hangers-on to go below, and beyond that, why the captain wasn’t issuing a succession of rapid-fire orders in the fight to save the ship.

  Schultz, who had remained on the bridge, lobbied Marks to ballast the ship’s high side with seawater or transfer fuel to tanks on the port side to balance the ship and lessen the steep rolls to starboard. The captain—his normally arrogant countenance replaced by a pale fright mask—shook his head distractedly, as if he had weightier matters on his mind.

  From where DeRyckere stood, he saw in Marks a man who “did not listen to anyone.” Every recommendation concerning “damage control” was “denied or ignored,” and in effect he “made fools” out of Schultz and other experienced personnel who braved conditions topside to reach the bridge and report to him.

  During one terrifying roll as he practically walked up the bulkhead of the wheelhouse, DeRyckere saw the forward stack “swallow” a huge amount of water. Knowing the result would be flooding in the critical engineering spaces below, DeRyckere for the first time began to think that the ship was “going to go down.”

  Chief Electrician’s Mate Joseph J. Jambor fought his way up from the flooded engine room to the bridge to report there was “too much free water below”—now rising to the men’s waists. Jambor pleaded with the captain to “reduce the demand” for engine speed provided by the ship’s two turbines being fed with steam from only one boiler. That would allow them to concentrate maximum efforts on pumping, Jambor explained. It was difficult to converse on the bridge over the sounds of the storm, and Jambor yelled not only to be heard but because he considered the situation dire.

  In the corner from which he refused to budge, Marks did not acknowledge Jambor’s urgent request. Seeing that he was being ignored, Jambor spun angrily and stomped away, cursing the captain loudly enough for DeRyckere to hear the chief ’s “very salty language” as he passed.

  DeRyckere’s worst fear came closer to reality shortly after 11:00 A.M., when Marks abruptly ordered a change in course that would turn the destroyer from running perpendicular to the gigantic swells to a course parallel to the swells, setting up Hull to be struck broadside by the monstrous seas. Marks was reacting to a static-filled TBS report from an escort carrier somewhere in the vicinity reporting a hangar-deck blaze.

  Schultz heard Marks reply on the TBS: “We’ll be right there.”

  Up to then, the destroyer had been running downwind, considered a “good place to stay.” Hearing the captain’s intention to assist the carrier, both DeRyckere and Schultz thought he had lost his senses. Neither had any idea what Hull—her own engineering spaces flooding—could do to help. They lacked radar even to find the carrier and would be in danger of colliding with other ships if they set out looking for the vessel.

  Standing next to the helmsman, where he had been stuck all morning, Gerstley suddenly came to life. He knew what others on the bridge also knew: Hull was likely to be rolled like a toy boat.

  “Sir!” Gerstley yelled, his voice strangely disembodied amid the crashing surf and high-pitched winds. “Don’t turn the ship!”

  Marks, still not listening to others, repeated his order.

  The helmsman obeyed the captain and spun the wheel.

  What came next happened quickly: Hull turned into a deep trough between swells. Like a sailboat that had lost the wind, the destroyer was caught “in irons,” stuck and unable to make headway. Hull awaited the knockout punch like a beaten boxer no longer capable of putting up a fight. Repeatedly, swells slammed into the port quarter of the destroyer, pushing her over to starboard, where she hung precariously until starting to recover, but not succeeding before the next swell hit.

>   Giving orders to the conn, Marks tried unsuccessfully “every combination of engine and rudder” to turn out of the deep trough. He attempted to “turn away from the wind” as before, and when that didn’t work, he tried to bring the “ship’s head into the sea.” Hull was being “blown bodily before the wind and the sea,” yawing wildly in “the trough of the sea” that was so deep swells rose ominously on both sides of the ship twice as tall as her mast.

  Schultz could see that the captain was confused about what to do now. In his haste, Marks had failed to “let anything take effect to see if it worked” in trying to regain control of the ship. Schultz knew that a number of other officers trained as skilled ship handlers by Consolvo, as well as DeRyckere and other veteran chiefs, could have handled the ship better. The boatswain’s mate included himself in that select group, and he knew exactly what he would be doing at that moment. Rather than ringing up increased speeds, he would have shut down the engines and let the ship “ride the sea,” allowing her to find her own way. Schultz agreed with mariners who believed that a modern warship “functioning properly and handled with wisdom” and adequately ballasted should be able to ride out a typhoon. The main problem was the “incompetency” of Hull’s commanding officer, who seemed “in a state of shock” and clearly “did not know what he was doing.” The same man who had demonstrated he could not bring the ship safely alongside a pier on a calm day now had the conn during a Pacific typhoon, with the fate of more than 300 men hanging in the balance. If Consolvo—or any of a long list of others aboard Hull who were better ship handlers than Marks—had been at the conn, Schultz thought, they would not be in their current dire predicament.

  Schultz could stand idle no longer. He approached Gerstley and, in full view and earshot of Marks and other personnel, made a plea that doubtless had not been heard on any other U.S. Navy ship during the entire war: “He’s sinking the ship! You better relieve the captain!”

  DeRyckere heard Schultz and thought it was a damn fine idea. The chief quartermaster would support the change of command, even if it meant escorting the captain off the bridge to his quarters. He thought the ship “could be saved” if “action was taken” by someone other than Marks.

  At first Gerstley said nothing. The debonaire Cornell graduate, who had been aboard Hull since mid-1943 and had excelled in his varied assignments aboard the destroyer, did not seem shocked at the unprecedented suggestion that he take command in a desperate bid to save the ship. Schultz wondered if Gerstley had been contemplating the deed. The executive officer looked at Marks, then back at Schultz. He had made up his mind. “If I take over and save the ship,” Gerstley yelled against the rampaging seas and howling wind, “he’ll say it was mutiny. If we don’t all drown, he’ll have me tried for mutiny and hanged.”

  Schultz knew Gerstley was right. “The bastard would,” he hollered, looking back at Marks with utter contempt. “Even if you saved his life.”

  THE SEAWATER that DeRyckere saw go down the stack had flowed into the forward fire room, dousing the superheater on boiler number one. Lieutenant ( j.g.) George H. Sharp, Hull’s engineering officer, ordered the boiler secured, which meant bleeding the steam down to a level that allowed the safety valve to cut off the pressure. That left Hull operating on only one of four boilers: the number two, located in the forward fire room. With seawater also pouring down the ventilation intake blowers that extended just four feet above the main deck—making the openings vulnerable to flooding even in moderate seas breaking across the deck—the forward fire and engine rooms were swamped in “two or three feet of seawater,” resulting in “many tons of free water” sloshing to the low side on every roll.

  Sharp, twenty-three, of Washington. D.C., the soft-spoken son of an admiral in command of the Pacific Fleet’s minesweeper force, had come aboard Hull in July 1943, a few months after his graduation from Johns Hopkins University with a degree in mechanical engineering. Although everyone in the crew knew he was a top admiral’s son, Sharp had earned a reputation for “not throwing his weight around.” Precise and fair-minded, Sharp was respected by the enlisted men who worked in engineering.

  Sharp ordered bilge pumping to commence immediately. In the engine room, however, they had difficulty doing so because the “basket for the main drain line was amidships” and whenever the destroyer rolled and the water pooled on one side they could not get suction from the drain. The accumulated free water added greatly to the weight on the low side, and made the rolls steeper and the ship’s recovery slower.

  With the forward fire and engine rooms flooded, and unsure how much longer the lone boiler could continue to power the ship, Sharp, who was having a hard time hearing whenever he phoned the bridge due to the “tremendous noise of the storm,” decided it was urgent to light an after boiler. He asked for volunteers from members of the engineering division, explaining that the number one boiler was out, the forward fire room was flooding, and they needed to get an after boiler lit or else there was a danger of Hull losing all power and going dead in the water.

  As he had done on America’s first day of war when he was a civilian worker at Pearl Harbor awaiting transportation to Wake Island, Fireman Tom Stealey stepped forward to help save a ship—this time his own. Since coming aboard the worn-out Hull undergoing an overhaul at the Seattle shipyard and being assigned to the fire room, Stealey had learned firsthand just how hot and exhausting tending to boilers in a cavernous fire room far below deck could be. Still, the conscientious, hardworking Stealey had learned his job well, and he liked the other two men in his watch section. Now Stealey, who normally worked in the after fire room, looked at the other guys in his section and said, “Let’s go get it done.” The three men put on their life jackets and went on deck. Struggling not to be washed overboard, they opened the hatch to the fire room and hurried down the ladder. The last man through closed the hatch. As they descended into the fire room it “did not enter our minds that we weren’t going to come back out.” They knew they had to work quickly, however. They took off their life jackets and hung them on hooks nearby.

  Rather than starting the boiler-lighting process from scratch, they used an emergency procedure: tying into the main line and diverting steam from the forward boiler. The oil that fed the fire in the number four boiler began to heat up, and Stealey was soon able to ignite the oil that sprayed out of the burners. Once a fire was going, the boiler started making steam. “Within twenty minutes” they had “400 pounds of pressure” in the boiler, sufficient to provide steam to the turbine running the twin screws and main generator. During the time they were tending the boiler, Stealey and the other two men were “hanging on for dear life” whenever the ship rolled, although the three sailors were “kidding and joking” with one another the way frightened young men sometimes do to steel their nerves.

  Suddenly, one roll “put us over on our side”—more than 70 degrees to starboard. Rather than fighting to come back, as Hull had done previously, the ship begin “to settle as if being pushed down by the sea.” Stealey and the other men ended up sprawled on the bulkhead; then, as the ship kept going over, they were tossed onto what had been “the ceiling but was now the floor.” As they hung on to pipes and ducts built into the overhead, Stealey was convinced they had gone over “more than 90 degrees.” He knew at that point the destroyer was “done for.” The sounds of the wounded ship were dreadful: the groaning and creaking of bulkheads about to give way, and the banging of everything from coffeepots to footlockers to vital equipment that had ripped loose.

  As Hull came back a bit in the opposite direction, the firemen slid back onto the bulkhead, next to the superhot boiler. Fearing a boiler explosion, which would kill them instantly and rip apart the ship, Stealey worked himself into position to shut off the valves feeding the flames, and they furiously doused the fire. After doing so, the three boiler operators were left “trembling.” There were no wisecracks now. They all knew it was time to get out of the bowels of their sinking ship or go down with h
er.

  The only hatch leading out of the fire room was on the port side, which was a lucky break. With the ship laying over to starboard, all the hatches on that side were underwater. Their escape route, however, was now high above their heads. The three sailors put on their life jackets and skimmed up pipes and ducts. When they reached the rungs of the ladder, they swung themselves hand over hand to the hatch cover, which they managed to open. They crawled into a narrow passageway about 15 feet long that led to the main deck, then scrambled on all fours in darkness until they reached the hatch to the deck.

  When they came out topside they were underneath a floater net, a mesh of heavy-gauge rope about 5 inches round, coated with tar so it didn’t absorb water and with cork floaters attached at intervals. All Navy ships carried floater nets, which were designed for survivors to grab on to in order to stay afloat as well as remain together, making it easier for rescuers to see them in the water and pick them up as a group rather than individually. The nets were kept on deck amidships and aft in storage bins that were easy to open—designed to spill out when a ship began to sink.

  Stealey was amazed how dark it had turned. Although just past noontime, day had “turned into night.” He understood the loss of daylight came from being smack in the middle of a storm with a combination of winds and seas he never would have believed possible. He estimated winds were more than 100 miles per hour, and would not have bet against some gusts being twice that speed. The swells pounding the ship into submission were higher than the flight deck of the new, large aircraft carriers—walls of blackish water 70, 80, and even 90 feet high rolled in with the destructive force of a tidal wave.