Twilight of the Gods
Page 52
Big ships were better able to withstand the storm, but even the Iowa-class battleships labored precariously in those gigantic seas. Mick Carney had feared for the survival of the New Jersey. “It’s difficult to describe the sickening lurch of that ship when she went way over, very close to her critical stability angle, and brought up at that particular point and then would hang there until she went back.”95 Even from his high perch on the New Jersey’s flag bridge, Carney had to tilt his head up to see the crests of oncoming combers. On the Ticonderoga, a 27,000-ton Essex-class carrier, Arthur Radford watched the storm in awe from the flag bridge veranda. As the Ticonderoga rolled to starboard, and the slope of a great wave rose up toward the ship, he had the odd feeling that if he stretched out his arm, he might actually touch the sea. The Hancock, one of Ticonderoga’s sisters, shipped tons of green water over her flight deck, nearly 60 feet above her waterline.96
Being narrower on the beam than their larger counterparts, the Independence-class light carriers (CVLs) rolled even more radically in the typhoon. On the Monterey, four F6F Hellcats parked on the flight deck broke loose and skidded into the sea, carrying away port-side safety nets and the landing signal officer’s platform. With the wind increasing, the captain ordered all hands to clear the flight deck and seek shelter. But the real emergency was below, on the hangar deck, where airplanes were heaving and straining alarmingly at their mooring lines. The airedales raced to tighten and redouble the lashings, but as the rolls surpassed 34 degrees, they found it hard to keep their footing. Shortly after 9:00 a.m., a Hellcat fighter tore free and was suddenly a 5-ton combustible battering ram. It thrashed back and forth, port to starboard to port to starboard, crushing ventilation ducts, electrical lines, water pumps, and other airplanes. Though it had been drained of gasoline, the residual fuel in its tanks and engine lines burst into flames, and soon an explosion ripped through the hangar. Several more planes tore loose and multiplied the mayhem. Smoke entered the ruptured ventilation ducts and poured down into enclosed spaces on the lower decks, forcing crewmen out of the engine rooms until they could return with portable breathing gear.
Scenes on the Monterey’s sisters Cowpens and San Jacinto were much the same. Planes tore loose of their cables, ripped steel eye bolts out of the deck, crashed into neighboring planes and tore them loose, and rocketed back and forth across the hangar with an accumulating bulk of wreckage. According to the San Jacinto’s poststorm report, “Spare engines, propellers, tractors, and other heavy equipment were all scrambled into the violently sliding mass, and smashed from side to side, ripping open and carrying away the unprotected flimsy air intakes and ventilation ducts. Repair parties and volunteers tried valiantly to secure the ungovernable and destructive heavy pieces item-by-item, and finally succeeded at about 1600, but not before a series of small electrical and oil fires had broken out.”97
With the Monterey’s engine spaces abandoned, the captain was forced to stop the engines. That left the carrier dead in the water, at the mercy of mountainous seas. Everything that might catch fire was jettisoned, including ammunition in the ready service magazines. Hoses were rushed to the hangar and jets of water aimed into the fires, and after a delay the sprinkling system was finally restored to operation. The ship was saved, but two-thirds of her hangar was completely gutted by fire. On the San Jacinto, fires were doused sooner, but the sheer quantity of loose wreckage precluded sending crewmen into the hangar on foot. According to the captain’s report:
To the uninitiated, the loud sound of crashing and tearing airplanes, and the banging and tearing of the flimsy metal of the ventilation ducts, and the avalanche of heavy weights being thrown violently from side to side, and the presence of much boiling water on the deck, plus a large volume of steam escaping from the ruptured atmospheric exhaust within the enclosed hangar deck space, created a wholly frightening situation. However, regardless of these frightening surroundings, men on the hangar deck were lowered from the overhead, and skidded on the deck in pendulum fashion on the end of lines into this violently moving pile of rubble, and succeeded in securing it and holding the damage to a minimum when to do so appeared to them to be almost certain death or very serious injury.98
As the storm reached the peak of its fury, the wind was a maniacal shrieking darkness of rain and spume. Visibility closed in to 30 or 40 feet. Men stationed topside could make no meaningful distinction between sea and sky, or even between up and down, and their only remaining sensation of the enormous seas was felt in the rollercoaster motion of the decks beneath their feet. The sea captain-turned-author Joseph Conrad had once described a ship’s ordeal in a nineteenth-century typhoon in these same waters: “Her lurches had an appalling helplessness: she pitched as if taking a header into a void, and seemed to find a wall to hit every time. . . . At certain moments the air streamed against the ship as if sucked through a tunnel with a concentrated solid force of impact that seemed to lift her clean out of the water and keep her up for an instant with only a quiver running through her from end to end. And then she would begin her tumbling again as if dropped back into a boiling cauldron.”99
When Farragut-class destroyers rolled past 45 degrees, their engines lost lubricating oil suction and shut down.100 Without steerageway, wallowing at the base of tremendous seas, they were pinned down like defeated wrestlers. Radio masts, radar antennae, searchlights, whaleboats, davits, and depth-charge racks were carried away into the maelstrom. Heavy steel covers were ripped from ammunition lockers. Lieutenant Commander James A. Marks, captain of the Hull, was concerned that his ship’s smokestack might be uprooted from the deck. As a 100-knot gust knocked the ship down, “the junior officer of the deck was catapulted from the port side of the pilot house completely through the air to the upper portion of the starboard side of the pilot house.”101 Gradually, after a “breathless eternity,” the ship righted herself. On the Dewey, the cables and eye pads securing the smokestack tore loose, and the stack came down, hanging loosely over the starboard side of the ship. By lowering her center of gravity and reducing her wind profile, this seeming disaster might actually have saved the Dewey. “Almost immediately,” her skipper concluded, “there was a perceptible change for the better in the way the ship rode.”102
Aboard the Alwan, the engine room blowers failed and the temperature in the engineering spaces shot up to 180 degrees, forcing all personnel to evacuate. Water sloshed around below, rising to several feet above the floor plates. At about 11:00 a.m., the Alwan lay down on the sea, nearly on her beam ends, and remained there for twenty minutes. Without her engines she could not steer out of her predicament—but somehow, using the hull as a sail, her captain managed to maneuver her stern far enough into the wind to take pressure off the ship. That brought her back to an incline of “only” 60 degrees, and she remained afloat in that desperate condition until the storm abated.103
The Hull was not so fortunate. Shortly before noon she was knocked down onto her starboard side, pinned down at an angle of about 80 degrees, and stayed there. Water flooded into the pilot house and poured down her stack. There was no coming back from such a blow. Lieutenant Commander Marks stepped off the port wing of the bridge and swam away. Held up by his kapok life vest, he turned and caught a last glimpse of the Hull as she was swallowed by the sea. “Shortly after, I felt the concussion of the boilers exploding underwater. . . . I concentrated my efforts thereafter to trying to keep alive in the mountainous seas which pounded us.”104 A similar fate was suffered by the destroyers Spence and Monaghan.
That evening, as the wind and seas abated, Halsey directed McCain to detach a search-and-rescue force to head north, along the track the fleet had taken. The rest of Task Force 38, licking its wounds, headed northwest to attempt another round of airstrikes on Luzon. But conditions remained foul, with heavy swells from the north. At midday on December 21, Halsey canceled the strikes and ordered the fleet to retire toward Ulithi.105
The search-and-rescue force kept up their efforts for seventy-two hour
s. The vessels spread out in a broad scouting line, destroyers on the flanks, and scanned the sea ahead with searchlights at night. The fleet diary noted, “numerous empty life rafts, cork rafts, and floating debris were sighted and investigated for personnel during the search.”106 Many whistles were heard. Life rafts were dropped into the ships’ wakes. On December 21, the destroyer escort Tabberer (which had suffered badly in the storm) discovered a raft with ten survivors of the Spence. Maneuvering upwind of the rafts and swimmers, the Tabberer’s skipper let the wind blow his ship gradually down toward the castaways, so that the hull shielded the swimmers from wind and waves. Two large cargo nets were lowered over the leeward side of the ship, and life rings with long lines attached were thrown out to the swimmers. Several of the Tabberer’s own crewmen, attached to lines and wearing kapok life vests, leapt into the sea and swam out to the castaways, hauling them back into the cargo nets.107 The Tabberer kept at it, fishing out a total of fifty-five survivors of the Spence and Hull.
The typhoon had claimed 790 American lives. Three destroyers were gone and several others severely damaged. Ninety-three castaways were rescued in the search operations after the storm. The highest mortality rate was among the crew of the Monaghan, of whom just six men survived. One hundred forty-six carrier aircraft had been destroyed or blown overboard, mostly from the CVLs. The Monterey, Cowpens, and San Jacinto were badly damaged and would require major overhauls.108
On Christmas Eve morning, the New Jersey entered Ulithi and maneuvered carefully into her designated “berth.” A long procession of heavy warships arrived by Mugai Channel, including dozens of carriers, until “Murderers’ Row” once again dominated the north anchorage.
Admiral Nimitz had flown into Ulithi for a planned conference with Halsey and the Third Fleet staff. The CINCPAC, recently promoted to the new five-star rank of “fleet admiral,” was piped aboard the New Jersey at 1:50 p.m. For the first time in the navy’s history, a five-star flag was broken out at the masthead. After niceties, the brass convened in flag country wardrooms to review recent operations and plan for the future.
Christmas Eve dinner was held aboard the flagship in Admiral Halsey’s mess. Nimitz and his entourage had arrived from Pearl Harbor carrying a Christmas tree decked with ornaments. This kind gesture, noted the war diary, “contributed to the Christmas spirit on the occasion.”109 But Halsey later confessed that he found it difficult to enjoy the festivities, considering that the holiday marked “four consecutive Christmases away from home, four Christmases of sea and sand instead of snow and holly.”110 Though he did not admit it, either at the time or later, Halsey must have known he bore grave responsibility for the beating the fleet had just suffered. His subordinates were comparing notes and opinions, and many agreed that Halsey had erred by failing to dodge the storm when there was still time, on the afternoon of December 17. The brownshoe admirals were typically outspoken in their criticism. Admiral Gerry Bogan “felt that it was just plain goddamn stubbornness and stupidity.”111 Jocko Clark, on standby status aboard the Hornet, was similarly harsh, as was Arthur Radford. Ted Sherman attested that the appearance of sky and sea on December 17 had been a sure sign that a typhoon was brewing.
Halsey had done what he had done because he was determined to keep his promises to MacArthur. That motive was admirable, but the end result was no airstrikes on Luzon and a storm-mauled fleet. For the second time in two months, Nimitz was forced to question Halsey’s fitness for the critically important job he held. According to Truman Hedding, a senior member of Nimitz’s staff (and a former Task Force 58 chief of staff to Mitscher), the CINCPAC found it “difficult to understand taking the task force right into the dangerous semicircle of the typhoon . . . he was very concerned about it and very upset about it, because that is a reflection on your seamanship. That is something that officers usually pride themselves on—being good seamen.”112 Hedding also heard, through the grapevine, that Admiral King was furious, and he “practically tore the Navy Department apart about it.”113
Nimitz spent most of Christmas Day aboard the New Jersey, holding numerous conferences. He and Halsey faced the press together that afternoon, refusing to entertain any questions about the typhoon. But Nimitz ordered a court of inquiry to investigate the loss of the three destroyers. Halsey gave testimony on December 28.114
The court’s formal report, issued in early January 1945, placed a “preponderance of responsibility” on Halsey for failing to dodge the storm, and faulted him for “errors of judgment under stress of war operations.” Although the court did not recommend any specific sanction, its ruling was sufficiently critical that it might have justified relieving Halsey of his command. Spruance was due to return as commander in chief of the Fifth Fleet later that month; he could simply have been recalled a few weeks early. But after conferring privately, Nimitz and King decided not to do it. Truman Hedding believed, as did many others, that Halsey’s popularity with the press and public saved his command, “because Admiral Halsey was a national hero, and in time of war you don’t do that.”115
The Pacific Fleet chief took the extraordinary step of addressing himself to the entire fleet on the subject, in a long and detailed memorandum entitled “Lessons of Damage in Typhoon.” In bygone eras, Nimitz wrote, before the advent of radio, naval fleets encountering storms had had no means of maintaining formation or command unity. In such conditions, every captain became his own master, and did whatever he thought best to save his ship, regardless of the wishes of the fleet commander. In 1944, the case was somewhat different, in that a fleet commander could and did continue to issue commands even at the height of a violent storm. In such conditions, still relatively new in the long annals of maritime history, “It is most definitely part of the senior officer’s responsibility to think in terms of the smallest ship and most inexperienced commanding officer under him.” He must not take their capabilities for granted, or assume that they will “come through weather that his own big ship can.” In the same spirit, it was every skipper’s responsibility to do what he must to save his own ship, and when confronted with a “fatal hazard,” he must take it upon himself to break formation. Moreover, he must not wait too long to take such measures, because “Nothing is more dangerous than for a seaman to be grudging in taking precautions lest they turn out to have been unnecessary. Safety at sea for a thousand years has depended on exactly the opposite philosophy.”116
Chapter Nine
WITH ALLIED VICTORY IN SIGHT, BOTH IN EUROPE AND THE PACIFIC, minds were turning to the postwar future and the challenges of demobilization. Many expressed growing concern about a wide psychological gulf that had opened between men fighting overseas and the “folks back home.” Among veterans, feelings of bitterness and alienation were common. Their resentments were complicated, sometimes ambivalent or inchoate—but in general, veterans felt let down by their fellow citizens. Their anger tended to flare up suddenly and unexpectedly, often taking civilians by surprise. Any mention of industrial strikes aroused their fury, as for the sailor who wrote his wife to condemn the “union devils and high wage workers that I loathe so intensely.”1 Rumors of corruption, profiteering, hoarding, and black-market chicanery reached their ears. They scowled at the shrill caterwauling of Washington politicians, who bickered over issues that the servicemen would have considered frivolous even in peacetime. Infantrymen in foxholes sometimes even mused that it would be a good thing if an American city were bombed by the enemy, because it might shock the civilians and awaken them to the reality of war.2
Servicemen were keenly aware that the home economy was booming—that there was lots of money to be made, lots of ways to spend it, lots of single women, and a favorable (to men) gender ratio. They could not stand to hear civilians complain about such trivialities as rationing, high rents, blackouts, carpooling, long lines, overcrowded trains, or the price of meat. They assumed, as did many professional economists, that the war would bankrupt the nation and peace would return it to the immiseration of the 193
0s. Just in time for their return to the chilly embrace of American capitalism, all those once-in-a-lifetime “big money” jobs would vanish. So they pessimistically assumed and believed.
Civilians fed on a three-year diet of censored press coverage presumed to know what was happening in the war. And indeed, in a sense, a well-read civilian might be better informed than the average soldier, sailor, or marine about the intricacies of global military strategy. He might be able to recite details and statistics about the progress of Allied forces in various foreign theaters. But a civilian who had not fought in combat never really knew what he was talking about, and it irked the veteran to hear him speak so glibly. “Talk, talk, talk, that’s all they do,” said one American GI of the chatty civilians he met at home, “and what they have to say about the war is stupid or it doesn’t matter.”3 When a mother visiting her wounded son at a veterans’ hospital began talking about the war, he turned sour and asked, “Did you read that in some newspaper?”4 Servicemen grimaced to hear radio announcers speak in the first-person plural—“We”—when referring to American forces fighting overseas. They snorted at the expression “home front.” As if scrap metal drives and victory gardens could turn a peaceful republic into a battlefield! Posters on factory walls told workers to think of themselves as “soldiers of production.” Soldiers! With their eight-hour shifts and fat paychecks! Everywhere on this so-called home front, servicemen encountered billboard patriotism and war bond sales kitsch. They shook their heads in sorrow at the appropriation of the American flag for commercial advertising. When films were screened for fighting men, and Old Glory unfurled to the accompaniment of swelling orchestral music, they sometimes even groaned and jeered: “Boo, wave that flag!”5 Their scorn was not aimed at the flag itself, which they revered, but at the gross machinations of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. A marine officer observed of his troops, in late 1944: “The great illusion of fighting a glorious war they had forgotten or had never known. Although they might have been stirred once by a parade, a cheering crowd, and a brass band, they knew now that fighting was a dirty business in which the glamour that had existed once in their imagination was lost.”6