It was a clear day, sunny with a few puffy white clouds drifting across blue skies. Off in the distance, Stealey spotted smoke. Not believing his eyes, he looked away, then back again. The column of smoke was still there. Soon he saw a ship “starting to come up out of the water,” getting bigger as it came closer, heading directly for him. Oh, man, Stealey said to himself, I sure hope it’s American.
At a quarter of a mile away, the ship began to turn.
Stealey started hollering and waving.
Something hit him “in the back of the head.” His first thought was that a shark had bumped him. Turning around quickly, he saw a piece of board that was yellow on both sides. He had no idea what it was or where it had come from, but it seemed as if it had dropped from heaven. He frantically waved the board above his head.
The ship “came back around,” heading for his position.
As the vessel approached, Stealey heard rifle shots. He hadn’t yet seen the ship’s flag and thought only that it must be a Japanese destroyer and that they intended to shoot him in the water rather than rescue him.
The ship came close and all engines stopped.
The next thing Stealey knew, a “monkey’s fist”—a type of knot tied at the end of a line to serve as a weight, making it easier to throw—was headed his way. He grabbed the line and was pulled in by deckhands as other sailors kept firing at the sharks that had been circling Stealey.
It was 8:25 A.M. on December 20 when Stealey was rescued by the U.S. destroyer Cogswell (DD-651). He had been in the water for forty-four hours.
Stealey was too weak to pull himself up the ship’s cargo net, and several men jumped into the water to assist him. Unable to walk on his own—“no muscle control in my legs”—he was carried to the infirmary, where he was found to be in “unbelievably good shape.” After a freshwater shower, during which he had to be held up to keep from toppling over, Stealey was asked by a ship’s cook what he would like to eat.
“I’d sure like a nice steak. With potatoes, if you don’t mind.”
“Fix you right up, buddy.”
SONARMAN PAT DOUHAN, whose hope for a transfer off Hull never happened, was in the after deckhouse with some twenty other men when the destroyer rolled over to starboard “to the point of no return.” Up until then the men had been praying, as well as “cussing the captain” for not keeping the ship “headed into the swells or going away from them.” Instead, James Marks had placed them broadside to the wind and mountainous swells—“at the mercy of the elements.”
What followed was “pure panic” as water poured in through the opening where the starboard hatch cover had earlier blown off. In an effort to stay above the rising water, several men were “hanging on to the dogs” (heavy latches) that secured the port hatch cover. As the port hatch was “our only way out of a sinking ship,” Douhan, who was holding on to the hatch handle and had one foot planted inside an overhead vent, did the only thing he could “in order to save any of us.” He methodically began “kicking my shipmates’ hands off” the latches. As the men let go, they fell into the rushing water below. It was a haunting scene, one that Douhan would “never get over.” Finally able to open the hatch, he had begun to wriggle out when the heavy hatch cover came down on his back, pinning him. While several men squeezed out past without stopping to pull the hatch cover off Douhan, someone finally did stop and free him. He stepped out onto the side of the sinking ship without a life jacket—his was on the bridge, where he had spent most of the last eighteen hours until heading down to the berthing compartment that morning to hit the sack. It had been a “foolish thought,” as no sooner had he climbed into his bunk than he was “thrown out by a very hard roll to starboard.”
For now, the luck of the Irish was still with Douhan: he spotted a spare kapok life jacket “tied to a gun mount.” There was only one, and he was convinced that a “higher power up above”—and possibly his “praying mother”—had left it there for him. He put on the life jacket and was immediately “swept up amidship” near the 40 mm gun bays. As he grabbed one of the gun railings to keep from being washed overboard, he saw Chief Machinist’s Mate Archie L. Vaughan, a peacetime Hull crew member and Pearl Harbor survivor, “pinned against the bulkhead by a large broken life raft with no way to free himself.” Douhan, who considered Vaughan “a great guy,” wanted to reach the chief but with the “high winds and seas” was unable even to get close to him. Moments later, as Douhan and several other men were swept off the side of the ship, the trapped Vaughan held a fist high in the air, exhorting his shipmates: “Fight on!”
Once clear of the ship, Douhan found himself in a large group of men trying to grab hold of several wooden-bottom life rafts, which “kept being swept up into the air.” Each time a raft came down, several men would attempt to climb inside, with limited success. Douhan was able to grab hold of one raft connected by a length of line to another raft. When the two rafts were swept high in the air they “came together with such force” that a number of men caught between them had their “heads popped open like popcorn.” Douhan had enough of life rafts and let go. About that time a huge swell separated him from the others. He was “all alone in heavy seas,” with rain coming down so hard he had to shield his face from what felt like countless needle pricks.
Shortly afterward, Douhan heard a muffled underwater explosion, and felt “a lot of pressure on the lower part” of his body. He surmised that the sinking Hull had gone “deep enough to cause the boilers to explode.”
While floating alone, Douhan was suddenly pulled down so deep that he thought his “ears would explode.” His first thought was that he was being sucked into the screws of one of the large ships in the task force; the low visibility would have made it “impossible to see any ship,” even one passing nearby. He envisioned being “chopped up by the screws.” To his surprise, he suddenly shot to the surface. When the same thing happened again, Douhan realized that the huge swells breaking over him were driving him down. He began to anticipate the next swell, taking a deep breath, then tucking into a roll and “riding with it.” Even though the “depth was about all he could stand,” he developed a workable technique.
Douhan had time to think as well as react. He was alone in the ocean in the middle of a typhoon, not knowing how many—or even “if any”—of his shipmates had survived, nor whether he realistically stood a chance of being rescued. With great trepidation, he wondered: When will the sharks show up? While there were lots of things to “keep me guessing,” there was something he “never lost sight of”: he had to make it because he had left his “beautiful wife expecting our first child.” He did not intend for his Kay (Kathleen), one of thirteen pregnant Hull wives, “to be a widow.”
After drifting alone for several hours, Douhan saw that the waves and winds started to subside and darkness was coming on. A few hours later, Douhan spotted a searchlight, which gave him hope for rescue. But the light disappeared over the horizon, “never to appear again.” In the middle of the night something hit him in the back of the neck. He froze, “thinking of sharks.” When he turned around he found an ordinary broom. No doubt off the ship, it was like “finding an old lost friend”—something material to prove he had once been on a destroyer with nearly 300 other men. He discovered he could rest his feet on the broom’s shoulder and that it was a relief from hanging in the life jacket, which caused numbness in his legs and feet.
Around what he estimated to be midnight, Douhan spotted a “little light.” He yelled out, and received a response: “Who’s there?”
“Pat Douhan.”
“Get over here, Douhan.”
He found fourteen of his Hull shipmates in a partly broken-up raft. The line that secured the wooden slats to the raft had sagged, dropping the bottom down 3 or 4 feet. The men, most wearing life jackets, were standing inside the raft in water up to their shoulders. All the raft’s supplies had broken loose in the storm, and there wasn’t as much as a sip of water or a morsel of food; nevertheless, D
ouhan was thankful for having made it to the raft and finding “some company.”
The only officer in the raft was Lieutenant ( j.g.) Edwin Brooks, the proper and “self-assured” Virginian with an economics degree from the University of Richmond who served as Hull’s sonar officer. Brooks, too, had been floating alone in his kapok life jacket until earlier that evening, when he happened across the raft filled with men.
When Hull went over, Brooks had jumped into the water and the first wave pushed him away from the ship. As Hull “started to settle,” Brooks was “pulled under by the suction” and thought “it was all over.” The rush of water pulling at him turned out to be a “compartment filling” rather than the ship sinking. Brooks came up inside a gun turret alongside the bodies of several men “killed by being thrown back against the ship” and having “their heads caved in.” He climbed out of the turret with the help of two enlisted men who “pulled me up with them,” and jumped again into the water. For eight hours he rode out the worst part of the storm alone, with his head “more than half the time underwater in heavy seas.” He ingested a lot of salt water, and by the time he reached the raft Brooks was “not in very good shape.”
Also on the raft was Gunner’s Mate 1st Class John Valverde, twenty-five, of San Francisco, who spent his early childhood in the city by the bay and then was on his own from age fourteen, “picking fruit in the country” until he was old enough to enlist in the Navy. A first-generation American of Spanish descent, the stocky Valverde had been aboard Hull since a year before the Pearl Harbor attack, during which he used bolt cutters to break open the ammunition lockers in order to “get the machine guns going” against the attacking aircraft. Through three years of war, Valverde’s favorite skipper had been Consolvo, and his least favorite was Marks, who “wasn’t qualified for a seagoing command.”
When Hull started filling with water, Valverde had emerged from below deck near the crew’s galley with Chief Yeoman Robert H. Ellis. The two men climbed over the side, where they hung on until a swell threw them into the air “right over the ship and clear to the other side.” In the water together, Ellis asked calmly, “What do you think, John?” Valverde replied, “Don’t give up! Just hang on!” The problem was there “wasn’t anything to hold on to,” and they were “sucked down” so deep that Valverde’s “ears were bursting.” When he surfaced, Valverde came up under a life raft, hitting his head on the wooden bottom. When he worked his way out from underneath, another raft struck him in the chest. After being “sucked back under two or three more times,” Valverde, who never saw his shipmate Bob Ellis again, was eventually washed clear of the sinking ship. For the next few hours, Valverde at times saw “a whole bunch of men” and at other times was alone. Once he was surprised to see the captain “floating by in his life jacket holding a seaman’s knife in his hand.” There was no question in Valverde’s mind that the unpopular Marks was holding the long-bladed knife at the ready for one reason: as “protection from the crew.” Deservedly so, thought Valverde, who knew an old-time gunner’s mate who had threatened to “kill Marks with a machine gun” and was quickly transferred before Hull left the shipyard in Seattle. As they drifted past each other, neither Marks nor Valverde spoke to the other. Valverde, however, thought it would be a good idea to “keep away from the captain because of that knife,” and so he put distance between them.
With the light of day, the men in the raft found that they faced another enemy. Dorsal fins appeared for the first time. As he counted the number of sharks circling the raft, Douhan could make out their torpedo-like body shapes, beady eyes, and conical snouts. He reckoned they were about 12 to 14 feet long and “looking for something to eat.” With the men hanging in their life jackets inside the raft, the sharks could easily have struck at “our legs any time.” They continued making constant passes at the overcrowded raft, which “made a big target,” only to turn away at the last moment. For the time being, however, the sharks seemed to be biding their time.
That night, two sailors became violent and started thrashing around. They had both been seen drinking ocean water. The first to go was one of the new recruits who had picked up the ship some weeks earlier in Pearl Harbor and whom “no one really knew.” He was stripped, a short prayer was said, and his body was pushed away from the raft. His clothes and life jacket were given to Radioman 2nd Class Lester C. Mullins, who had escaped the sinking Hull by squeezing through a small porthole. To do so he had had to remove his life jacket and clothing, and he had been suffering in the elements: his skin was burned by the sun, and he shivered in the cold at night. Mullins died later that night. After another prayer his body, too, was allowed to drift away. Although the men “did not know if the sharks got” the bodies, pushing their dead buddies out into shark-infested waters “didn’t set very well” with Fireman 2nd Class Edward J. Price, twenty-one, of Topeka, Kansas, who also had escaped Hull by climbing out a porthole, or with any of the others on the raft. But it was something they all knew “had to be done.”
Not long after, one of the men thought he saw something on the horizon. He right away wanted to “start calling out,” but Douhan and other veterans picked up a sweet odor—rather like incense, and reminiscent of a scent they had detected while patrolling close to Japanese-held islands. Everyone was told to keep quiet because they might be drifting near an enemy island or even a Japanese submarine at the surface charging its batteries. All agreed that staying in the raft with hope of rescue was better than being taken prisoner by the Japanese—possibly to be executed.
The next morning Douhan and several others decided to keep someone on watch at all times to look for “some kind of life and rescue.” The long, hot day was uneventful except for the “sharks still circling and making passes at us,” something that never became routine. Also, several men became delirious. One wanted to “go down to the galley and get a sandwich,” while another said he was going to borrow his brother’s “Model T Ford and bring back some 7UP” for everyone.
When a delirious Brooks was seen to take a swig of sea water, Fireman 1st Class Nicholas Nagurney “pounced on and rammed his finger” down the officer’s throat to make him regurgitate. In the process, Brooks bit Nagurney’s finger. It was soon Nagurney’s turn to have “strange delusions”—he swam a few yards away, intent upon finding out “how deep the water is under the raft.” Before he could get back, he was bitten by a shark, which tore a thin slab off the top of the right forearm. Back in the raft, Nagurney’s bloody arm—with a row of half-inch-deep teeth marks on the underside—was wrapped with a piece of torn shirt. Jolted back to his senses, Nagurney summed up his afternoon: “I guess I’m the only guy that’s ever been bit by a shark and an officer the same day.”
The next morning, someone hollered, “Task force on the horizon!” At first everyone thought the guy was “a little out of it,” but he kept insisting. Douhan “rubbed the salt water crust” out of his eyes and, “sure enough, saw ships on the horizon.” About nearly the same time, two planes crossed overhead a “little on the high side.” Even with “all our waving,” the men began to think they hadn’t been seen. But then the planes came back over nearly at sea level and wiggled their wings to let the men in the raft know they had been spotted. It was enough “to make us cry.”
Soon the men saw a column of black smoke. Being destroyer sailors, they knew what it meant: a tin can was “lighting off extra boilers” to speed to “our rescue.” In short order, the destroyer Brown (DD-546)—which an hour later would also pick up the six Monaghan survivors—pulled up next to the raft and threw over a line. At that moment, the sharks—“knowing they were going to lose their dinner,” surmised Douhan—went into a frenzy. Sharpshooters on Brown fired accurate volleys at the sharks to keep them away as the raft was hauled in.
Starting at 10:46 A.M. on December 21, the survivors were helped one by one up the side of the destroyer by their rescuers. Having not seen anyone else or other rafts or debris since Hull went over, the men had no way
of knowing whether or not they were the only members of their ship’s company of 258 officers and enlisted personnel still alive.
The thirteen Hull crewmen had been in the water for seventy hours.
Seventeen
Tabberer, the new Houston-built destroyer escort under the command of Lieutenant Commander Henry Plage, the tall Georgian and former retail credit company employee who had proven to be a natural-born leader, sortied in mid-October 1944 from Pearl Harbor in company with the escort carrier Anzio (CVE-57) and several other vessels.
En route westward to Eniwetok, the ship’s dog, Tabby, stopped coming around the galley for food. The word went out, and a stem-to-stern search was conducted. It was Plage who broke the news over the ship’s address system, explaining that “poor little Tabby must have been washed overboard.” In a letter to his wife, Plage wrote: “The gang is pretty blue about it.”
Ship’s Cook Paul “Cookie” Phillips, the wiry former amateur boxing champion, had been one of the first to notice Tabby was missing, and he took the loss of everyone’s favorite pooch as a bad omen. Ironically, not long afterward, Phillips found himself involved in his first fistfight aboard ship. The altercation was with Boatswain’s Mate 1st Class Louis A. Purvis, twenty-four, of Chatham, New Jersey. Purvis, the leading petty officer in charge of Tabberer’s deck force, was a “rugged character” and “smart-aleck tough guy” known for “throwing his weight and power around” to keep his young seamen in line.
One morning Phillips went through the mess hall after chow had already been served, and he was surprised to find hot food still on the steam table. He asked one of the messmen standing by why the spread hadn’t yet been picked up. “Waitin’ on Purvis. He’s always late.”
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