Down to the Sea (16 page)

When he took over
Hull,
Lieutenant Commander James A. Marks, twenty-nine, of Washington, D.C., where his father held a high-ranking staff position in the Treasury Department, was among “the most junior [commanding officers] in destroyers,” being a member of the Naval Academy Class of 1938. Always a good student, Marks ranked 52nd in his class of 438 graduates. While excelling in academics at Annapolis, Marks, “short and slight” with dark hair and an olive complexion, engaged in many extracurricular activities—including soccer, wrestling, and tennis—but found his calling in music, playing clarinet and becoming leader of the academy's swing band, the NA Ten. While some classmates judged him to be “very serious and very regulation,” other peers found an agreeable side to him, as reflected in the
Lucky Bag 1938
:

While he had obtained a command for which he was rather young, Marks did have experience in destroyers, most recently as executive officer of the newly launched
Allen M. Sumner
–class destroyer
Brush
(DD-745). As soon as
Brush
arrived in Pearl Harbor—after training off both U.S. coasts—ready for action in the Pacific, however, Marks had been detached to command
Hull
. Prior to that, he spent four years (1939–43) as a junior officer aboard
Trippe
(DD-403), a
Benham
-class destroyer assigned to Atlantic convoy duty. Fresh from the Academy, Marks had been assigned to the battleship
Colorado
(BB-45) as an assistant engineering officer. One night in New York harbor,
Colorado
had been in a collision with another ship, which “pierced” the battleship's hull, crushing to death several crewmen in the engineering spaces. It had fallen to Marks to go below and identify the dead sailors, a sad task he “never forgot.”

Lieutenant ( j.g.) C. Donald Watkins, twenty-two, of Columbus, Ohio, a friendly, soft-spoken 1942 graduate of the Carnegie Institute of Technology who had gone to Midshipman School at Notre Dame and been assigned to
Hull
in September 1943, could see that things under the new commanding officer were going to be different for the officers as well as enlisted men. Watkins understood it could not be easy to command a warship and shoulder all the related responsibilities, and he also realized that a “stellar captain and excellent ship handler” such as Consolvo would be a “hard act to follow.” In Marks, however, Watkins came to see a “remote” man who brought many of “his problems” on himself by being demonstratively “asocial.” All of
Hull
's officers were reservists—recent civilians from fields as diverse as business, banking, and law—and from the beginning Marks showed no interest in getting to
know any of them. Watkins found it revealing that Marks “did not eat in the wardroom with the other officers” and took his meals alone in his cabin. While such a self-imposed distancing of a ship captain from his junior officers was commonplace on larger vessels such as cruisers and battleships, where regulations and formalities were generally more rigidly enforced, it was rare on destroyers and other smaller ships. On
Hull,
it went in the direction of increasing the new commanding officer's remoteness.

Proving that his first speech was not an aberration, Marks repeatedly made it clear that he was “in a hurry to get out” into combat in the Pacific, while most of the veteran crew were happy in port in Seattle, where many
Hull
wives had taken up temporary residence. To Watkins, Marks acted as if he was “afraid the war would be over” before he could take
Hull
into action. To get
Hull
released sooner from the shipyard, Marks began “closing up all the open work orders whether they were finished or not,” also not endearing himself to his veteran crewmen, who after a long combat cruise were happy to be home.

Within three days of assuming command, Marks held his first captain's mast—a nonjudicial disciplinary hearing aboard ship wherein the captain hears the evidence and either dismisses a case or imposes punishment on an offender. It was the first captain's mast held aboard
Hull
in months. Ten days later, Marks held his second captain's mast. In all, more than twenty enlisted sailors were brought up on charges ranging from smoking in a barracks ashore to being late returning to the ship to wearing an “improper uniform with cuffs rolled up and hat on back of head.” The improper-uniform charge, more than the others, showed that a new day had dawned on
Hull,
which like most destroyers had enjoyed the relaxed dress code of the dungaree Navy. The initial punishments handed down by Marks included warnings, extra duties, and losses of liberties. The regularity of captain's masts was unlike anything
Hull
's crew had known before. Marks, showing that he intended to lead with an authoritarian hand, held his third and fourth masts during his first thirty days. He took away from a radioman 2nd class his next five
liberties, effectively keeping him from going ashore for two weeks, for “use of foul language,” and he sentenced a young seaman—whose offense was not documented in the log—to “20 days confinement on bread and water” with a “full ration every third day.” The enlisted men judged their “hard-fisted” new skipper a poor replacement for a guy who “just couldn't be beat.” Consolvo was remembered as being “all for his crew and the crew all for him,” one veteran crewman wrote to friends, “but our new skipper is just the opposite.” Soon Marks was being called “every unlegal name in the dictionary.”

At 3:00
P.M.
on October 9, the crew was called to quarters for the issuance of life jackets, which took twenty minutes. The new kapok life jackets, complete with whistles and lights—ordered by Boatswain's Mate Ray Schultz—were the subject of much conversation. In the wardroom, officers discussed how long they would keep a man afloat before becoming waterlogged—the consensus was “three or four days”—while among the deck and engineering divisions there was concern about their bulkiness when performing certain tasks. In those cases, sailors were told, they could keep the life jackets “available at GQ stations or on their bunks” in berthing compartments when off duty. When it was suggested that men wearing the life jackets “could sleep in the water” because the high necklines would hold their heads up, most thought the notion of ever having to “stay afloat for that long” seemed “totally unrealistic.”

The next day,
Hull
pulled away from the dock for the first time in nearly two months. With Marks at the conn, they headed into the Strait of Juan de Fuca “on various courses and speeds attempting [a] full power run.”

Manning the helm was Chief Quartermaster Archie G. DeRyckere, twenty-four, a rangy, six-foot-two, good-natured native of Laurel, Montana, not far from Billings. It took strength and coordination to handle the wheel of a destroyer and keep the bow on an exact compass heading—particularly in rough seas—and DeRyckere, a solid 225-pounder, had the requisite long, powerful arms and wide shoulders. While being transported in January 1941 on the battleship
West Virginia
to Pearl Har
bor, where he would pick up
Hull,
DeRyckere had taken offense at being cursed by another sailor and lit into the guy, “giving him a good fight” until it was broken up by an officer, and only then learning that he had held his own against the heavyweight boxing champion of Battleship Division 3. DeRyckere had learned the sport in a youth boxing club run by a former pro boxer, and after nearly four years in the fleet he could still boast that he had “never been whipped.”

Traditionally the master of the quarterdeck—the location behind the bridge where the helm is situated and most navigation is performed—a ship's chief quartermaster is responsible for the maintenance, correction, and preparation of navigational charts and instruments, as well as the training of the ship's lookouts and helmsmen. It was a job for a keen and precise mind, and DeRyckere—his lack of formal education belying his natural intelligence—had what it took in that department, too. A skilled helmsmen and excellent navigator, he had recently been promoted to chief petty officer after taking a test filled with questions taken directly from Bowditch's
American Practical Navigator,
which DeRyckere had to know inside and out to pass.

That day in the “relatively calm water” of the seaway, Marks took
Hull
up to 30 knots, then called for the rudder to be “thrown hard over in one direction,” at which point the ship “rolled over at least 50 degrees.” Although some 20 degrees less than the maximum roll
Farragut
-class ships were certified by the Bureau of Ships to be able to recover from, it was extremely alarming. At the helm, DeRyckere released the wheel to help bring her back upright, then went with hard opposite rudder to counter the roll. DeRyckere held his breath as the ship “sat back up” very slowly. With years of experience at
Hull
's helm, DeRyckere was familiar with the ship's top-heavy characteristics—once in 1943 when he steered across a cruiser's wake
Hull
had laid over so far that the whaleboat, secured at the edge of the main deck, dipped into the ocean like a ladle into a big bowl of gravy. Even DeRyckere was shocked, however, by the suddenness and steepness of the roll that day in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and also by the slowness of the ship's recovery. He surmised that the added weight of all the new heavy equipment installed
topside during the overhaul was the culprit.
Hull
had received “more alterations during the recent overhaul” than had the other
Farragut
-class vessels, and it was the only one to have had the plate-glass bridge windows replaced with small portholes, a modification that would “add slightly to the topside weight of the ship.” It occurred to DeRyckere that the increased top-heaviness should be reported to officials at the shipyard. However, he had been in the Navy long enough to know that it was not his place to do so.

While it was “quite evident” to Marks that
Hull
's stability was “very poor” compared with the new destroyer on which he had recently served, he deemed it “within satisfactory limits.” Upon their return to the shipyard, the new commanding officer made no complaints about his ship's stability or readiness, going forward with preparations to deploy to the Pacific.

One evening shortly before
Hull
was due to depart, a group of her enlisted crew were at their “hang out”—Seattle's Club Maynards—“having the time of our lives” when a shipmate hurried in exclaiming that he had just visited a fortune-teller. He claimed to have been warned of a dire future for
Hull
: foretelling that the ship was “going to be sunk on the 23rd of December or before.” The sailors laughed their “heads off,” but with the worsening morale on what had once been a happy and proud ship, word rapidly spread among the crew about the terrible prophecy, and “it stuck in our minds all the time.”

At 7:00
A.M.
on October 17,
Hull
departed Seattle bound for Pearl Harbor. The destroyer left behind an unusually large number of AWOL crewmen, “a sure sign of poor morale.” In all, twenty enlisted men “jumped ship,” choosing to be reported for missing their ship's movement in wartime, a serious offense. In some cases, they had revealed their plans in advance to shipmates, who “tried to talk them out of it.” Their main reason had to do with the prediction of the fortune-teller, which seemed especially believable given the crew's growing lack of confidence in their new commanding officer. The prevailing fear, in fact, was that Marks would do something to “lose the ship.” Surprisingly, half of those who missed
Hull
's departure were rated petty
officers: gunner's mate, water tender, fire-control man, torpedoman, steward's mate. Most of the missing men turned themselves in soon afterward, aware that they would be dealt with punitively—busted in rank and sentenced to time in the brig. None of them would ever rejoin
Hull
's crew.

As soon as
Hull
steamed clear of land, Marks ordered a “simulated depth charge attack.” The following day and each day thereafter gunnery practice was held for the 5-inch, 40 mm, and 20 mm gun crews. However, due to the cancellation of work orders, they had left without the newly installed torpedo tubes operating correctly. Don Watkins,
Hull
's torpedo officer, found they “would not train,” which was “a dangerous situation” in the event
Hull
made an enemy contact during the crossing. Furthermore, it would not go over well for a ship right out of a major stateside overhaul to have to be scheduled for repairs at the crowded fleet repair facilities upon arrival at Pearl.

One of the wives left behind in Seattle was Portia (Elam) Kreidler, a vivacious, twenty-two-year-old brunette whose husband, Sonarman 1st Class John Kreidler, twenty-three, had transferred aboard
Hull
a month earlier. The couple, both of whom had graduated from high school in Yakima, Washington, where they had met, had been married less than three months. Prior to reporting to
Hull
, Kreidler had taken a long leave, and the couple enjoyed an idyllic honeymoon, spending time at a “hunting cabin up in the hills,” then settling in Navy housing at Port Orchard, not far from the shipyard. Mostly it had been about being together after not seeing each other for two years. Before he had left the first time for the South Pacific, they had discussed getting married, but Kreidler was “not too sure he was going to survive.”