Down to the Sea

by Bruce Henderson

  “Purvis eats by eight o’clock or doesn’t eat,” Phillips said.

  The messmen were clearing the steam table when Purvis came down the ladder. Told what was happening, Purvis said, “I run this mess hall. I eat when I want.” It was true that Purvis provided seamen from his deck force to clean up the mess hall, but otherwise this was Cookie’s turf.

  “This is my food,” Phillips told Purvis. “I cook it in my galley. These are my messmen. If you ain’t here on time, Purvis, you don’t eat.”

  With that, Phillips went past Purvis, headed for the galley.

  Purvis, the bigger man by 30 pounds, slugged Phillips, knocking him up against the bulkhead. Before Phillips could cover up, Purvis clocked him again. At that point, Phillips’ cooks wanted to stop the fight, but Purvis’ seamen wouldn’t let them. Phillips, who had always had a good left jab, then went to work with lightning punches and dancing feet, as he had learned from long days sparring in the gym. Soon, Purvis’ men were trying to stop the fight, only now the cooks wouldn’t allow it. When Phillips had Purvis whipped and defenseless against the bulkhead, he looked at the seamen. “Purvis is out now. If he had me like this, he’d work me over and scar me up. I’m just gonna put him down.” With that, Phillips dropped Purvis to the deck with one last punch and walked away. Phillips went directly to sick bay to have his cuts treated.

  “My God, what happened to you, Cookie?”

  “Don’t worry, Doc. Someone in worse shape will be here soon.”

  A few days later, Purvis, his face bruised and battered, gathered his deck force and told them they could fight anyone aboard ship except for one man. “Look what Cookie Phillips did to me,” Purvis said. “Stay away from him.” After that, Purvis, who never asked for a rematch, started eating on time. Before long, he and Phillips even became “good buddies.” Purvis would ask if Phillips needed extra help in the galley. If so, the boatswain’s mate would send a seaman or two around to help out.

  Upon joining the Third Fleet at Eniwetok, Tabberer’s task group was deployed to the fleet’s fueling area southeast of Luzon to conduct antisubmarine sweeps. They immediately found themselves on the edge of a typhoon and it got “pretty rough.” Plage was pleased, however, to see that his ship and crew “rode it okay,” although they “saved money on the chow bill.” Some of the new guys, fighting seasickness, “weren’t very hungry,” and men who could eat had to settle for sandwiches when the heavy seas made it impossible to prepare hot meals in the galley.

  When things turned calm and peaceful for several hours one morning, Plage took the opportunity to go below for a quick shower. He had a feeling that as soon as he stepped into the shower “the bridge would call,” so he put his hand on the water valve and waited a minute. When his cabin phone remained quiet, he turned on the water and soaped up, and then the “damn phone rang.” It was the OOD reporting a routine change of speed, as he was required to do. Following that interruption, Plage figured he would be able to enjoy “the cool water.” All of a sudden his cabin’s emergency buzzer went off and the general quarters alarm began to clang, calling all hands to their battle stations. Plage jumped from the shower soaking wet and soapy. With no robe handy, he grabbed his foul-weather coat and went running. By the time he reached topside he had fastened only the top hook. With the “rest of the coat flying in the wind,” he stepped onto the bridge “in all my glory.” His immediate problem was trying to “maintain discipline,” which he found difficult to do when “everyone is laughing.”

  On November 18, the Anzio task group registered its first kill after being alerted to the presence of a Japanese submarine in the area in a message from the military intelligence unit, which was reading Japan’s secret war code. Anzio launched aircraft for an extensive search, which resulted in a radar contact on a surfaced submarine. After a fourteen-hour chase, Tabberer’s sister ships Lawrence C. Taylor (DE-415) and Melvin R. Nawman (DE-416) carried out a coordinated depth charge attack, sinking the Japanese fleet sub I-41 with the resultant loss of her 114-man crew. Two weeks earlier, I-41 had torpedoed off San Bernardino Strait the new light cruiser Reno (CL-96), which had to be towed 1,500 miles to Ulithi for emergency repairs in order to steam under her own power back to the States for extensive work, ending her wartime service.

  On November 29, Tabberer pulled into Ulithi, where her depleted stores and ammunition were to be replenished. They had been at sea so long their fresh foods had run out, and main courses had consisted of canned “Vienna sausage, Spam and corned beef hash.” Unlike many ships where the lowest-ranking men did most of the heavy lifting, Plage required every officer and enlisted man not on watch to take part in boarding supplies and stowing them. To make sure that “everybody who eats loads stores,” Plage positioned himself in a bird’s-eye seat on the ship’s fantail, overseeing each work party. For many in the crew, it was such “evenhanded fairness” that made Plage so popular.

  On December 5, Tabberer “finally got some fresh food on board”—“meats, oranges, apples, potatoes, lettuce, cabbage.” In a letter home, Plage wrote: “It has been two months since we’ve had an orange on board.” He soon noted that with the improved chow, morale was “back up tremendously.”

  The crew had come together in ways that pleased Plage. A new supply officer, Ensign Travis E. Nelson, twenty-one, of Bryan, Texas, had started Sunday services that “really have taken hold.” At sea they were held in the mess hall with a “different person teaching or giving a short talk,” and soon the place was packed with everyone not on watch. “I am very pleased to see the crew enjoy a simple church service so much,” Plage wrote to his wife. “It means a lot and adds so much to life aboard ship.” Every Sunday, several hymns were sung, “of course with no organ or piano,” but Plage noted that “we have some good voices aboard.” In fact, the crew soon organized a small “choir or glee club” made up of “nine or ten fellows who gather on the fantail at sunset and practice” for the following Sunday. After working on the hymns, they “usually drift off into most any kind of song,” and the rest of the crew that came out to listen—again, practically everyone not on watch—“joins in.” Often Plage would be on the bridge as the sun went down, listening to the a cappella songfest. After each song, “there is a dead silence for a minute or two” before someone would start “singing some song quietly” and others chimed in. These sunset events were soon being called “happy hour,” with all hands, from the “kids who are naturally homesick” to the married men “just plain longing to get back to their wives and families,” enjoying the musical reprieve from wartime.

  Meeting Tabberer at Ulithi was Lieutenant Howard Korth, the former Notre Dame football player and the ship’s senior watch officer. Korth had gotten off the ship at Pearl Harbor in mid-October to attend fire-control school. Finishing first in his class, he had been spoken to about an instructor’s job. Korth had enjoyed Pearl Harbor, where he met up with a number of former Notre Dame classmates—including several with whom he had played football for the Fighting Irish—as they came through on ships and other military assignments. Since Korth was assigned to a ship deployed to a combat area, however, it was decided he should “first return” to Tabberer before being considered for any new shore assignment. Korth was not disappointed, since he considered Tabberer a “fine ship” and was pleased to be serving under Henry Plage—a “first-class guy all the way around” and “someone you could depend on.”

  Shortly after sunrise on December 10, Tabberer weighed anchor and departed Ulithi with Anzio’s hunter-killer antisubmarine group, consisting of four other destroyer escorts. Headed back to the fleet’s fueling area, they were scheduled to arrive a few days before the Third Fleet’s main body was expected to commence fueling operations on December 17.

  On December 15, Tabberer came alongside Anzio and received “18,582 gallons of fuel oil.” Two days later, when the fleet’s first fueling operation was cancelled by Halsey due to the worsening weather, Tabberer still had “79,256 gallons of fuel on hand,” some
260 tons—approximately 75 percent of the ship’s fuel capacity.

  As did the rest of the fleet, Tabberer’s small group—given the familiar assignment of protecting the warships and tankers when they were most vulnerable to submarine attack, which was as they maintained a straight course and steady speed during fueling—turned to a northwest course in the early morning hours of the eighteenth, steaming at between 12 and 15 knots for the next fueling rendezvous at 6:00 A.M.

  When the fleet’s course was switched to the south only to change again after sunrise to a northerly one—into the wind in an effort to fuel in spite of the heavy weather—Plage noted that the barometer on the bridge, which measured 29.58 at 7 A.M., thereafter began falling rapidly. That meant one thing to Plage: a typhoon. It was no surprise to him when shortly after 8:00 A.M. fueling was cancelled and all ships were ordered to proceed south.

  At 10:30 A.M., steering on Tabberer became difficult due to the increasing wind and sea. The wind out of the north was measured on the bridge as “force 12”—equating to “above 75 miles per hour,” at that time the highest category on the Beaufort wind scale. The official “seaman’s description of the wind,” often at variance with the terminology used in U.S. Weather Bureau forecasts—for example, a “calm” wind (less than one mile per hour) to a seaman was called a “light” wind by weather forecasters—was in this situation identical. Force 12 on the Beaufort scale meant the same thing to everyone: a hurricane, which in the Pacific was called a typhoon.

  Due to their steering problems and the “close proximity of numerous other ships” on the same southerly course, Plage decided to head for a short time on a course of 90 degrees until they could “get clear of other ships.” Unfortunately, the turn “put the vessel in the trough of the sea,” but Plage judged it not immediately dangerous since the steepness of the ship’s rolling at that point did not exceed 40 degrees. When Tabberer came clear of other ships, Plage brought her back around to the base course of 160 degrees only to find that they were unable to maintain the course because they kept falling back into the trough. He made repeated attempts to keep the ship headed downwind using “various speeds up to 18 knots with full rudder” and even “ahead full on one engine while backing with the other engine,” but nothing worked. They were stuck on a giant roller-coaster ride: rising high with each swell that broadsided them, only to drop into the next deep trough. Realizing they would have to ride out the storm with wind and sea on the port beam, Plage decided to shift as much fuel oil as possible to the port tanks to compensate for the starboard list.

  At 12:30 P.M., when other ships and sailors not far away were meeting their tragic end, Tabberer was “riding quite well” at 10 knots, “rolling up to 55 degrees” in winds estimated at “over 100 knots.” Even as the wind shifted rapidly to the west and then to the south, however, the ship stayed stuck in the line of troughs despite all attempts to get out. During the “greatest ferocity” of the typhoon, Tabberer’s rolls reached 72 degrees, although each time she recovered “rapidly with no hesitation.” In a later official report, Plage would judge “this type of vessel very seaworthy in rough sea,” stating that the new class of destroyer escorts could “withstand rolls in excess of 72 degrees without danger of capsizing.”

  Sonarman Frank Burbage, the New Jersey teenager who had been impressed with the “high morale” of the crew under Plage ever since the ship’s shakedown cruise to Bermuda, had the 8:00-to-noon watch on the bridge. From his vantage point, Burbage decided that “those big waves at the beach at Asbury Park” were nothing more than “ripples compared to the size” of the ones washing over the bow. He also observed Plage, standing nearby at the conn, “handling the ship magnificently” without looking “nervous or taking a hopeless attitude.” In fact, after one deep roll, Plage asked the man at the pitometer how far they went over. Told 60 degrees, “the captain jokingly replied, ‘She’ll take 20 more.’” What scared Burbage “more than when I used to come home with my new Sunday pants torn” was the “persistent pounding of the waves on the bow.” One minute they would be rising on the crest of a swell, and then the deck “would give out from under us” and the bow would crash down into the trough and the “whole ship would shake and tremble.” Burbage knew that such pounding on the hull could eventually “crack the seams.” Which, he began to wonder, would last longer: the ship or the “watery hell of the typhoon”?

  Radioman 3rd Class George Pacanovsky, nineteen, of New York City, was on duty that morning in the radio shack adjacent to the bridge. He had graduated from P.S. 29 half a year earlier and joined the Navy the following month. After boot camp in Newport, Rhode Island, and two radio technician schools in Chicago and Bainbridge, Maryland, he had met Tabberer at Ulithi in early November. He had gone through a long period of severe seasickness before “finding my sea legs.” In fact, it seemed to him he had “stopped throwing up just in time for the typhoon,” during which everyone on board was “walking the bulkheads” to such a degree that work parties later went around to “wash off the footprints.” While Pacanovsky was still a seagoing novice, he saw enough that morning to have confidence that Plage was “in full control.” What impressed the young sailor was the way the captain “didn’t try to fight the storm” but slowed the ship down and “let the typhoon bounce us around.” The pounding on the ship “would have been worse if we were going faster.”

  When Plage received a report that some 5-inch shells and cartridges in the forward magazine had “broken loose,” he held off ordering anyone into the magazine because it was “almost a certainty that someone would get crushed trying to secure” the 54-pound shells. While the shells wouldn’t explode on their own, it “created a delicate situation” because of the possibility one of them might hit the primer on a 27-pound cartridge filled with gunpowder. Plage’s concern was soon relieved when he learned that two volunteers went in the magazine and secured the shells and gunpowder. It was the kind of thing a “close-knit crew” did for one another, believed one of the volunteers, Gunner’s Mate Tom Bellino, the young Idaho dairyman who, although he kept getting busted in rank for minor infractions, was among the many crewmen who “loved the skipper.”

  Plage was informed of three radar contacts from 2,000 to 5,000 yards ahead. They were identified as two destroyers, Hickok and Benham, and the destroyer escort Waterman (DE-740). Raising them on the TBS, Plage learned that all three were “in troughs steaming at 3 knots and without steering control due to the wind and sea.” Plage quickly ordered a reduction in speed to 3 knots to avoid colliding with the other ships.

  While “just looking at the tremendous seas” could “encourage exaggeration” as to their size—“they looked like vertical mountains bearing down on us”—Plage came up with a way to gauge their height. A destroyer escort of the same class as Tabberer was adjacent to them in formation and occasionally visible through the storm. He knew the top of her mast was “93 feet above the waterline.” When both ships were in parallel troughs, the tip of the other ship’s mast would disappear behind the crest of a wave. As for frequency, Plage timed “nine seconds for a complete cycle—crest to crest.” When it came to wind speed, Tabberer’s anemometer eventually “blew away at 100 knots.” Plage heard a report on the TBS that one ship’s anemometer blew off at 130 knots.

  So much solid water broke over the main deck that the “life nets all floated out of their storage racks,” even those floater nets twenty feet above the deck. Tabberer’s whaleboat was demolished while secured to its davits. On one steep roll to starboard, water went through the topside ventilator intakes to the engine room. As the water flowed in near an electrical panel, quick-thinking engineers rigged a canvas sleeve to guide the water away from the electrical equipment.

  The barometer began to rise by 1:15 P.M. Just as everyone started to hope the storm was passing and the worst was over, at 1:51 P.M., Tabberer took a “quick 60-degree roll to starboard,” and the pressure on the mainmast caused one of the insulators on deck that secured a guy wire t
o crumble, allowing the supporting wire about three inches of slack. The mast—at the top of which were attached “such precious devices” for communication and navigation as radar, radio, TBS, and IFF (electronic identification equipment to identify Tabberer to other U.S. ships) antennae—began to sway back and forth. A work party tried to take up the slack, but the men were unable to do so due to the force of the wind. Soon a second and then a third insulator gave way. With the mast now “swaying about eight feet,” the weld at the bottom soon broke.

  Plage knew the mast could topple at any moment. His fear was that when it snapped off it might open a hole in the main deck through which seawater could pour inside. Not only could no one predict when the mast would go or the amount of damage that would be caused, “no one could do anything about it.” Plage considered it “all in the laps of the gods.”

  The “torment lasted” until 6:28 P.M., when the mast finally buckled during a 50-degree roll. Snapping in half, the top portion with all the electronic gear fell into the sea over the starboard side, while the base remained tenuously attached to the ship by its tangled-up guy wires.

  Plage stopped all engines. A damage control team with axes and a cutting torch was standing by. He sent the men out with orders to cut loose the remaining portion of the mast, which they did while secured by lifelines to the superstructure. At 7:03 P.M., the remaining mast fell over the side “without even denting the ship or scratching the paint.” While the dismasting resulted in lost communications and navigational systems, the severity of the ship’s rolls was noticeably less without the drag of the dangling mast.

  At almost the same time, steering control was regained. Finally “freed of the irons” that had held her locked in one trough after another, Tabberer, whose power plant had “operated without serious casualty” all day, turned south for the new fueling rendezvous point radioed some hours earlier and scheduled for sunrise. “As deaf as a stone and blind as a bat” without radar or radio in this “highly populated slice of ocean,” Tabberer was provided “courses to steer and speeds to make” by blinker signals from a nearby destroyer.