Down to the Sea

by Bruce Henderson

  Rushing water immediately broke over Stealey, who held tightly to the netting to keep from being washed away, as was one of the men with whom he had come up from the fire room. Stealey hung on the side of the overturned ship like a fly caught in a web, trying to catch his breath, as he found it impossible to breathe facing into the wind. Rain was coming down hard, and the wind was “really whistling.” The worst of it was the sea, however, “breaking over us constantly.” He looked toward the bow. In the area between the two stacks, he saw a “whole bunch of dead men, at least twenty-five or thirty,” most wearing life jackets; their bodies were being slammed into the side of the ship. It was obvious to Stealey they had been unable to get clear of Hull and had been “beat to death against the ship.”

  “Gotta climb out on the number two stack,” Stealey yelled between deep gulps of air. “Go to the end. Jump! Get away from the ship.”

  The two men timed their run down the length of the wide stack until they could catch a comber going away from the ship. Then they took off.

  With the hellish wind to his back, Stealey ran “faster than he ever had in his life.” At the end of his sprint and without slowing down, he planted his right foot at the lip of the stack, coiled—and jumped for it.

  Fourteen

  First word that Monaghan was in trouble on the morning of December 18 came at 9:27 A.M. in a message from the ship’s new captain, Bruce Garrett, with a total command experience of less than three weeks.

  “I am unable to come to base course,” Garrett radioed fueling group commander Captain Jasper Acuff aboard his flagship Aylwin, a Farragut-class destroyer commanded by Lieutenant Commander William K. Rogers, one of Garrett’s four Annapolis classmates (1938) who had recently joined Destroyer Squadron One within weeks of one another. With the storm having thrown Monaghan off the assigned southerly course of 180 degrees, Garrett reported they were going in nearly the opposite direction on a “heading of 330 degrees.” Acuff feared the wayward destroyer was in danger of colliding with ships of another fueling unit 3,000 yards to the northwest. He knew that several ships in the northern unit, “caught in similar circumstances,” had “given up trying to maintain station” or stay in formation, and sans radar were “manned by blind men.”

  Acuff ’s fleet fueling group was divided into three units, each made up of approximately the same composition of four oilers, one light aircraft carrier and escorting vessels. Monaghan was in the center group, with Hull in the northern group and Spence in the southern group.

  Acuff stepped to the TBS. “Use more speed,” he told Garrett.

  A few minutes later, Garrett reported: “Have tried full speed but it will not work.” After a brief pause, he said in a louder but still calm voice: “Cannot get out.”

  On Aylwin, which was rolling violently in the heavy seas and experiencing steering difficulties of her own, Acuff and Rogers took Garrett’s message to mean the typhoon “had the helm” of his ship, which doubtless had fallen into a deep trough and was now “out of control.”

  The last message from Monaghan was about 10:00 A.M., when Garrett came back on the TBS to warn an unidentified ship, “You are 1,200 yards off my port quarter. Am dead in water. Sheer off if possible.”

  After that, Monaghan fell silent.

  Aboard Monaghan, which lost TBS communication shortly after Garrett’s final message, things were anything but quiet, as the destroyer was “slammed back and forth between rumbling winds and booming waves.” At 10:30 A.M., with his ship in “grave jeopardy” after losing her main generator and steering motor, Garrett decided to take on ballast.

  Joe “Mother” McCrane, the New Jersey native who had been aboard ship more than two years and was now a water tender 2nd class, had sounded the fuel tanks as part of making out the morning fuel report. He had reported the ship’s fuel state as “between 122,000 and 130,000 gallons” at 8:00 A.M.—about 70 percent of total capacity. This placed Monaghan above the established minimum of 45 percent fuel capacity set by the Bureau of Ships for Farragut-class destroyers, below which ballasting would have been required. Even so, McCrane thought “putting on ballast” would help the laboring ship, which he had noted with concern took longer to “come back from steep rolls” since leaving the Seattle shipyard three months ago after having the new radar gear and weapons installed topside. Given the worsening seas that “racked and strained” the destroyer, McCrane recommended ballasting to Chief Water Tender Martin Busch, who went and spoke to the captain. Not long after, Busch passed the word to McCrane to begin pumping water into two empty after fuel tanks, numbers ten and eleven.

  As the ship’s “oil king,” McCrane was responsible for monitoring the more than 600 tons of black oil Monaghan could carry in about twenty different tanks. McCrane had his own little shack in the engineering department with laboratory equipment for testing the quality of fuel oil and boiler-feed water. Every few hours, he used the ship’s two fuel oil transfer pumps to move oil around from storage tanks to the ready-service tanks (two forward and two aft) that fed the fires under the boilers, making sure the ship was kept balanced and on an even keel.

  McCrane and his assistant, Water Tender 3rd Class Leonard Bryant, who seven weeks earlier had tried to talk Water Tender Joseph Candelaria out of leaving the ship to attend boiler school in Philadelphia, went below to shaft alley. In the watertight space that housed the propeller shafting that ran astern from the forward engine room, they discovered that large metal boxes holding spare parts and tools had broken loose from their racks, spilling their contents. Also, several 50-gallon drums of lubricating oil were rolling around on the metal grating, sections of which had to be raised in order to reach valves that needed to be opened to pump seawater. McCrane called the engineering compartment to ask for help. Water Tender 1st Class William Hally and Water Tender 2nd Class Roland D. Fisher soon showed up, and the four sailors started to clear off the grating—an exercise “not without plenty of excitement” with so many objects “flying around.” During one steep roll, a portable air blower broke loose, heading for Fisher, who was bent over at the time. McCrane stuck out his arm to deflect the heavy blower, but it was “coming too fast.” Before Fisher could get out of the way, the equipment struck him in the middle of the back, although “luckily it only knocked the wind out of him.” They were finally able to open the valves, and McCrane notified the engine room to start the “fire and bilge pumps” in order to “pump seawater into the designated tanks.” With communications failing throughout the ship, McCrane never received confirmation that the pumps were started as requested or that the ship took on any ballast.

  By then, Monaghan was “rolling so heavy” that McCrane and some of the others in engineering decided to go topside and wait out the storm inside the after 5-inch gun shelter. When they reached the small enclosed space, they found several dozen men already inside, huddled together—“just plain scared.” McCrane could “feel the tension in everyone.” They were all there for the same reason—to be topside in the event the ship went down—although McCrane could not imagine the unimaginable: having to abandon ship in the middle of such a storm.

  At 11:30 A.M., the lights went out, which everyone knew meant the auxiliary generator had failed. A few sailors—McCrane included—hurried down to their lockers to get flashlights, returning to the gun shelter about the time “the storm broke in all its fury.” With the ship rolling so heavily to starboard, McCrane could not “say for sure” whether they were making speed or stopped dead in the water. The ship had been “stopped quite a few times,” only to “pick up speed again.” Every man was “holding on to something” to keep from falling, and “praying as hard as he could.”

  One level below in the steering motor room, Machinist’s Mate 1st Class Lester J. Finch hollered up to say that if someone could get a course from the bridge, he would attempt to steer by using the manual steering gear. With “all communication between the forward and after part of the ship knocked out,” that meant someone had to make it to the
bridge and back. McCrane thought about it but “couldn’t find the courage” to attempt passage across the swamped main deck. Roland Fisher, even with his sore and bruised back, “volunteered without hesitation” and ducked through the outer hatch to begin the perilous journey—a selfless act, the other men agreed, that “deserved some kind of citation for bravery.”

  There were now “about forty men” crammed into the small space. One sailor fervently prayed aloud; each time the ship took another 70-degree roll to starboard, he cried out, “Please bring her back, dear Lord. Don’t let us down now!” Each time the ship struggled back, “shudderingly, from disaster,” he added gratefully: “Thanks, dear Lord.” The deep rolls and aloud prayers were repeated about “seven or eight” times before Monaghan went over and instead of coming back settled down to die.

  With the ship flopped onto her starboard side like a beached whale, the port hatch was 20 feet above them. Several younger men scrambled up the overhead on pipes and ductwork as if scaling a jungle gym. With the only illumination from the narrow beams of flashlights, they began the “difficult job” of trying to open the hatch against the obstructive forces of wind and waves “beating up against it.”

  From where he stood in the shadows waiting to make his escape along with everyone else, McCrane observed how “the fellows kept their heads,” with “no confusion or pushing” and “everyone trying to help the other guy.” Before long, they started through the hatch one by one.

  McCrane was helped by a set of strong arms from above and eased through the hatch by Gunner’s Mate Joe Guio, who “with absolutely no thought of his own safety” was leaning over “pulling everyone out.” The sturdy Guio, who had worked in coal mines back home in Holliday’s Cove, West Virginia, fought to keep from falling overboard but continued to help his shipmates from the gun shelter until the last man.

  McCrane figured he was “about the tenth one” to get out of the gun shelter. As he stood “so nervous” on the side of the hull, he began to inflate his rubber life belt by blowing into a nozzle. He had been one of the “very few” men in the gun shelter who had a life belt or jacket, as most kept them at their general quarters station and had been unable to reach them. “Waves were breaking steadily” over the ship, each time “carrying fellows right off.” McCrane did not know how he was managing to stay on, and he no sooner had that thought than a huge swell knocked him off.

  When McCrane landed in the sea amid swells “seventy feet from trough to crest,” he “lost all sense of direction,” although he knew he was being taken deep by what felt like “a whirl-pool.” The force that was dragging him down had taken other men, too, and McCrane felt them “knocking up against” him. He flailed his arms and legs, trying to “beat my way to the surface.” As he started to rise, other men grabbed at him in desperation. McCrane surfaced atop a gigantic swell that took him up and up and then placed him “right on the side of the torpedo tubes.” He scrambled to the highest point of the ship, which appeared to be the shelf for the 20 mm guns. He had just about reached that perch when another wave “took me and wrapped me around the antenna.” He spun around the antenna several times before being “thrown out into the sea again.” To avoid being dragged underwater once more, he swam as fast as he could on the surface, but soon he realized he had to slow down or his “strength wouldn’t last very long.” He found it “impossible to keep from swallowing the salt water and oil.” He looked around to see if he could spot the ship or any of his shipmates, but visibility was “almost zero” and he saw nothing. After what seemed like “an eternity,” an exhausted McCrane heard Joe Guio yelling for him to turn around. McCrane swung around to see a life raft, grabbed on to it, “and thanked God that it came when it did.” Guio and other men were hanging on around the outside of the raft, which they hadn’t been able to climb into because they kept being “beaten off by the sea.”

  One of the men with the raft was Evan Fenn, the rough-and-tumble cowboy from Arizona by way of Utah who was now a water tender 3rd class assigned to the forward fire room as a “water-gauge watcher,” monitoring pressure levels on the steam boilers. He had stood the 4:00-to-8:00 watch that morning, and upon being relieved went to get chow and found in the galley “everything a mess with dishes flying all over the place.” He washed down a cold sandwich with a cup of tepid coffee, then went up on deck, where he “waited to time the waves” until he found an opening to run back aft to the berthing compartment. In the head, he washed up and shaved, then climbed up to his bunk at the top of the trilevel tier and tried to go to sleep. Eventually, his mattress went out from under him on a hard roll, spilling him onto the deck. When the compartment went dark, Fenn decided to don his life jacket and head topside. He arrived on the fantail shortly before the ship went over for the last time. He became “tangled up in antenna wires” and had a “helluva time getting loose.” When he worked himself free, Fenn was blown overboard. He was one of the first to reach the raft—the only one released from Monaghan, as all the others had been lost off the deck earlier in the storm. The raft had been freed from its own entanglement with great effort by the ever-present Joe Guio. With one foot badly injured, Guio was still able to get the raft into the water. Fenn, like others that day, owed his life to their “big husky” shipmate Guio.

  Although none of them had seen the destroyer sink because the “spray was so heavy” and visibility so low, they all were convinced Monaghan went down quickly. Seaman 1st Class Doil T. Carpenter, twenty-four, of Pasadena, California, told of being in the flooded steering motor room and hearing from a phone talker that the overhead in both the forward engine and fire room “began to rip loose from the bulkheads five or ten minutes before she capsized.” Carpenter also heard that the “bridge ripped off” just before the end, which could explain why no bridge personnel—including the captain, Bruce Garrett, whom Fenn “never once saw” in the short time he was in command of Monaghan—were seen after the ship went over. The majority of the survivors, in fact, had been topside near the fantail when the ship rolled, with only “one or two of them” from on deck amidships and none from the spaces or compartments below.

  The thirteen men with the raft were the only ones known to have made it off the sinking ship. Gone were 256 shipmates, including Chief Martin Busch, who had lived to tell of his harrowing escape from the capsized battleship Oklahoma during the attack on Pearl Harbor only to perish three years later aboard a destroyer in a typhoon.

  SPENCE SUPPLY OFFICER Al Krauchunas, who was taking the measure of death even as he fought for his life, made it through the flooded passageway underwater and came up “gagging on oil and salt water.”

  In the darkness as the sea had poured in around him, Krauchunas “relived an incident” from his childhood that he had not thought about in a long time. As a boy of six, he had walked into a store and removed a box of animal crackers from a shelf, placed it under his coat, and walked out without paying. He “regretted now” the dishonest deed. He also thought about the “essential records” from the supply department, which were in a waterproof box at his general quarters station in the decoding room. They consisted of pay accounts, cash book, receipts and vouchers. He had believed that in any emergency he would have time to grab the box and take it with him. How else would he justify to the Navy Department his monthly purchases and disbursements?

  Krauchunas surfaced a few feet from the overturned Spence, which showed only her “freshly painted red bottom.” The proud warrior ship that had been a “bulwark of strength and stability” had turned turtle.

  When the crush of water swept him back against the ship, Krauchunas heard disembodied voices, “screaming and curdling yells,” attesting to “the chaos and bedlam” taking place inside watertight compartments still containing air. Krauchunas had come out near the crew’s galley, which he knew had been filled with enlisted men, as were other spaces after the skipper, James Andrea, had earlier that morning ordered all hands not on duty “to stay below” for their own safety. Now the sound
s of the trapped men snapped Krauchunas out of his “shocked daze.”

  Treading water to stay afloat, Krauchunas was not wearing his life jacket because “no thought of the ship capsizing had come to mind.” Concerned about getting caught in the “suction of the ship should it sink,” he started swimming away. Although continually bounced and spun around by the cascading seas and by winds he estimated at 100 miles per hour, Krauchunas reached a floater net adrift 20 yards away; two dozen men were hanging on to the 25-by-25-foot net. When they began to drift toward the sinking ship, the men kicked and paddled to “push the net” in the opposite direction. After some effort they were far enough away that they lost sight of Spence in the “gusts of rain and violent wind spray.” They all, however, heard the muffled explosion.

  As did everyone at the floater net, Water Tender 3rd Class Charles Wohlleb, who the day before had watched Spence’s aborted attempt to fuel alongside Halsey’s flagship, New Jersey, knew that the “rumbling blast” was a boiler exploding. He understood, too, that anyone still alive in the fire room would have been instantly scalded to death when the boiler blew. Knowing the great explosive force would certainly have broken the narrow-beam vessel in half amidships, Wohlleb imagined for the first but not last time the forward and after sections of the ravaged destroyer sinking slowly to the depths below, taking untold men with her.

  Wohlleb had been in the after fire room prior to coming topside with two shipmates, Water Tender Cecil Miller and Boilermaker Franklin Horkey, neither of whom Wohlleb saw again after all three were cast into the water from the alcove where they had been when the ship went over. The New Jersey native pictured the men who had been on duty in the fire room tending to the ship’s only lit boiler: Frank Thompson, operating the oil burners; Norman Small, the six-foot-two Nebraska farm boy, watching the steam pressure gauges; Claude “Roy” Turner, monitoring the boiler’s water level; and Layton Slaughter, the 1st class in charge, speaking to Horkey over the sound-powered phones. To a man they had been Wohlleb’s buddies, and now they were gone.