Down to the Sea (14 page)

The personable style of the new
Spence
skipper, who was “much younger” than his predecessor and seemed to the crew “not much older than some of us,” soon became evident. Andrea let it be known that he
had a motto: “An efficient ship can be a happy ship.” His actions showed that he also believed a happy ship could be an efficient ship. Among those appreciating Andrea's style of command was supply officer Al Krauchunas, who noticed that when Andrea went to the wardroom it was often for “a friendly visit” and not just “to talk shop.” The new captain's impromptu visits were not restricted to officer country. In fact, Krauchunas judged their new commander to be “an enlisted man's skipper and a grand fellow.” No one aboard
Spence
had any way of knowing that Andrea had in his career been warned by higher-ranking officers against becoming “too close to the crew.” But that was what Torpedoman Al Rosley liked about the new skipper, finding him to be an “ordinary fellow who didn't try to rise above you.” The ship newsletter was soon raving: “It would only be a waste of space to tell you that we have both the best ship and the best skipper. Who could ask for more? The height of our regard and affection is 4.0 unanimously.”

Ordered stateside for a major shipyard overhaul,
Spence
departed Eniwetok in early August. Following an overnight stop at Pearl Harbor to fuel, the destroyer sailed for San Francisco, arriving August 18. After passing beneath the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay bridges,
Spence
eased into a berth at Hunter's Point Shipyard. A week later, the destroyer was nudged by a yard tug into a nearby dry dock. Once the underwater caisson closed, pumping commenced. Within two hours,
Spence
was high and dry atop keel blocks.

As the well-traveled ship underwent her first complete overhaul, a steady stream of men came and went with orders in hand and seabags on shoulders. In all, nearly 100 crew members transferred off in August and September—including half of the ship's complement of twenty officers. Departing for schools and other assignments, many of these veterans would use their experience to help commission new ships and train their young crews.

Gone were old hands such as Yeoman Al Bunin, already with more than two years of sea duty when he became a
Spence
plank owner and one of “5 percent” of the crew who put the ship into commission—now with enough sea time to request shore duty. Bunin, who “never wanted
to be a hero,” transferred to a naval communications office in California, where he was to safely spend the remainder of the war.

Replacing the veterans were newcomers such as Seaman 1st Class Ramon Zasadil, eighteen, of Cicero, Illinois. Fresh out of radio school, to which he had been sent after boot camp at Great Lakes in Illinois, Zasadil, who had been told “they needed radiomen in a hurry” in the fleet, had been surprised to be assigned to a warship sitting out of the water. For Zasadil, who had joined the Navy seven months earlier—two weeks before his eighteenth birthday—it would be a couple more months before he would have a chance to find his sea legs.

Those crewmen who were to remain aboard
Spence
—all had been told they would be headed back to the Pacific when the overhaul was completed—were given twenty-day leaves. They left in droves to try to put the war behind them for a time. One who traveled home was Machinist's Mate Robert Strand, the Pennsylvanian who had mailed to his parents from Purvis Bay the menu for
Spence
's belated Thanksgiving after the Battle of Cape St. George.

Stand, now twenty-three, had a serious girlfriend at home. He and Jane Michel, who was two years his junior, had dated since 1940, the year she graduated from high school. After Bob went in the Navy in 1942, Jane, a slim brunette, had considered joining the WAVES. He discouraged her, reasoning that their military leaves would never coincide. Instead, she had gone to work in an insurance office and waited for him. Now, with Bob home on leave, many believed he would propose to Jane—but he did not. A family friend who lived next door to the Strands later told Bob's younger brother, Richard, that when he asked Bob why he and Jane were not getting married during his leave, “Bob got a funny look in his eyes and said, ‘I'm not coming back.'” He expressed a foreboding that “all of the luck”
Spence
had in the war was “going to catch up” with them, and he did not want to leave Jane a widow.

Strand wrote his parents, Josephine and Alvin—a U.S. Army ammunition driver and veteran of the Battle of Argonne Forest in World War I—upon his return to
Spence
:

With
Spence
perched on keel blocks through September, Strand, who still hoped to one day own his own bowling alley, rediscovered his enjoyment of the sport. After visiting a bowling alley in nearby Redwood City, he was taken home for dinner by the owner and his wife, who had a son away in the military. Soon, in recognition of his competitive game, Strand was being sponsored in a tournament against “all the big name bowlers from Frisco, Oakland and Los Angeles.” Unfortunately, while working on shipboard machinery the day before, he injured his bowling hand, and played with a “very, very sore thumb.” He still rolled a strong score of 232 in the final game and finished with a 197 average in front of a cheering crowd, he proudly wrote his parents, “pulling for the sailor against all the big-time bowlers.” Thereafter, while many shipmates went drinking nightly—“it is no wonder they are broke” all the time—Strand regularly hopped a bus to Redwood City and bowled.

Flooding of the dry dock commenced on September 14 and in two hours
Spence
was again “waterborne.” When the dock gates swung open, the destroyer was towed out by a tug and moored to a pier where the remaining work would be completed over the course of the next two weeks. Although a normal destroyer overhaul lasted about ninety days in peacetime,
Spence
's overhaul took only half that long—a common occurrence during wartime.

In the final days before their departure, the young skipper gave a tour of his new ship to his wife, the former Jean Barton, with whom he had fallen “in love at first sight” while still at the Naval Academy, and their two-year-old daughter, Judith, the first of what her father hoped would be “lots of kids.” The couple had met when she accompanied a
girlfriend to a social function at Annapolis. In June 1939—two years after his graduation—they had returned to the Academy to be married in the chapel under tall stained-glass windows and a great dome rising higher than the Maryland state capitol. It had been a traditional military wedding in a beautiful setting, and the newlyweds exited the chapel under the raised swords of some of Andrea's former classmates who, coming back for the affair, wore dress white uniforms with matching gloves and oxfords. A reception followed at the Alumni House, with drinks and canapés.

Before sunrise on Saturday, September 30, fires were lit under
Spence
's number three boiler. Two and a half hours later the ship was under way from the dock, “backing into the stream” at first, then “standing down the channel on various courses and speeds” heading for the ammunition depot at Mare Island. From 11:00
A.M.
to 5:30
P.M.
ammo was loaded aboard by a working party consisting of most of the crew not on watch. The ship then returned to Hunter's Point.

All hands knew that with live ammunition aboard,
Spence
would be leaving the shipyard shortly. Before they did, it was time for a bon voyage party. The supply division had accumulated extra goodies—such as cigarettes and candies—which were freely passed out that night in a large banquet room at the fashionable, seven-story Oakland Hotel across the bay. Tuxedoed bartenders were kept busy all evening—“everyone was half bombed”—and a local torch singer and band performed favorites, keeping the dance floor filled with married couples and singles with girlfriends and dates; officers, chiefs, and sailors alike. Clearly enjoying the evening was a beaming Jim Andrea, and the new commanding officer warmly greeted all who approached him, regardless of rank. He often took his wife's hand and adjourned to the dance floor—“such a romantic”—where they swung to popular numbers such as “I'll Buy That Dream” and “Sentimental Journey.”

After a run to the Farallon Islands—27 miles outside the Golden Gate—to test-fire weapons, and several other mornings and afternoons spent maneuvering in the San Francisco Bay calibrating the magnetic compass and testing new and refurbished equipment,
Spence
was ready.

At 8:00
A.M.
on October 5, the crew mustered with only a single absentee: a seaman 2nd class who would be reported as AWOL.
Spence
was under way at 9:10
A.M.
for Pearl Harbor in the company of three other destroyers that had also concluded shipyard overhauls. Arriving five days later,
Spence
took on fuel and supplies, and replenished the ammunition that had been expended in gunnery drills during the crossing. For several days they conducted exercises in Hawaiian waters, during which they practiced antisubmarine warfare with a U.S. submarine.

On October 26
Spence
and six other ships—three of them the newly commissioned escort carriers
Makin Island
(CVE-93),
Lunga Point
(CVE-94), and
Bismarck Sea
(CVE-95), each carrying approximately thirty aircraft—left Pearl Harbor bound for a fueling stop at Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands. Things were moving quickly now, and there seemed an urgency behind fleet orders and ship movements. After a short layover at Eniwetok,
Spence
and the other ships pushed on westerly.

On the second day out,
Spence
conducted a surprise abandon-ship drill. After the general quarters horn blared
oooga-oooga-oooga
came the announcement over the loudspeaker: “This is a drill, this is a drill. All hands prepare to abandon ship.” It was the one order that no seaman ever wanted to hear for real, but it had to be practiced, like everything else aboard ship. It took twenty minutes for the crew to be in their proper places wearing their life jackets, and with large life rafts ready to be cast off—at which point they were “secured from drill.”

On November 5,
Spence
arrived at Ulithi, a large atoll in the Caroline Islands occupied by U.S. forces with no opposition only two months earlier.
Spence
had no sooner anchored at a depth of 130 feet “over a sand and coral bottom” some 100 yards from shore when a priority message was received indicating that all ships in the lagoon were in “Condition of Readiness Typhoon II,” requiring them to stay in a “high degree of readiness” to encounter a typhoon that might hit in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The alert lasted three days, until a lower condition of readiness was set, which meant that a storm was “no longer imminent” but still could materialize.

Aboard
Spence
and other destroyers in the squadron, the weather
alerts “impressed upon” officers and enlisted crew alike that they would be operating in a region where they had to be prepared to deal with typhoons. Commanding officers and junior watch officers alike broke out copies of Austin M. Knight's
Modern Seamanship
and Nathaniel Bowditch's
American Practical Navigator
—both classic naval titles were carried on the bridge of every U.S. Navy ship—“to reacquaint themselves” with cyclonic storms. The former title was of little help, as it contained only a single-page reference to typhoons, and stated: “At the present time the available evidence concerning the formation of tropical cyclones—they are called typhoons in the Far East—is incomplete and inconclusive.” Bowditch, however, had a twenty-two-page chapter titled “Cyclonic Storms,” which contained information “of great value to the uninitiated destroyer skipper so far as typhoons were concerned.” Sections in Bowditch included “Fixing the Bearing of the Storm Center” and “Handling the Vessel Within the Storm Area.” Of special interest were the “thumb rules regarding local indicators of a typhoon's approach,” including increased and shifting winds, and falling pressure readings on the barometer. Fully developed typhoons were described as covering an area 300 miles in diameter with a calm center—the eye of the storm—up to 20 miles wide. For mariners, the “dangerous semicircle” of the storm—the right-hand side in the northern hemisphere—was the worst place to be, according to Bowditch, as the “seas within this area are violent and confused, sweeping in from all sides with overwhelming violence.” The left-hand side or southernmost side was considered the “navigable semicircle.”

While most crew members of
Spence
and the other destroyers at Ulithi had not been through a typhoon and had “no conception of the overwhelming destructiveness of such a storm,” their officers hoped that should they have the “bad luck to encounter one” they would at least be able to recognize its approach and take appropriate measures to avoid the worst of it. While all agreed there was value in discussing typhoons, they reasoned that “only if we were operating independently did it seemed necessary to concern ourselves with avoiding bad weather.” Otherwise, they believed, the fleet would provide the eyes, ears, exper
tise, and leadership needed to avoid a typhoon, which in the lower to middle latitudes traveled at relatively slow speeds of from 5 to 17 miles per hour along its path.