Down to the Sea (17 page)

The blond, blue-eyed Kreidler, who had enlisted a month after the Pearl Harbor attack, had served on the patrol craft
PC-476
beginning in July 1942 and for the next two years “participated in operations in the forward areas under hazardous conditions,” including the nighttime evacuation of twenty-nine civilians—of which a dozen were Catholic nuns—from the shores of enemy-held Bougainville, and another mis
sion “attacking with PT boats” in the Guadalcanal area a “resupply mission of Japanese destroyers.”

When they left Seattle,
Hull
's crew believed they would “not be back until the war was over,” although Douhan and others who had been aboard a while remembered thinking the same thing when they left for the Aleutians in early 1943. Nevertheless, the word was passed that it could be a long wait for the wives who had relocated to Seattle to spend time with their husbands, and most of them soon packed up and moved back closer to family.

Portia Kreidler returned to San Francisco, where her parents owned an apartment building. Going back to the same city was Greil Gerstley's wife, Eleanore, who had moved to Seattle after their September wedding. Also heading back to California was Pat Douhan's wife of nine months, Kathleen (Lassley). These young women had something else in common with ten other
Hull
wives: although some of them did not yet know it, all thirteen were in their first trimester of pregnancy.

Arriving at Pearl Harbor on October 23,
Hull
put on a “really embarrassing” show in the harbor of the Pacific Fleet's home port. For Boatswain's Mate Ray Schultz, it was the most humiliating arrival in port that he had ever experienced in all his years in the Navy. It was not such a surprise to Schultz or anyone aboard
Hull
because Marks had already demonstrated a lack of ship-handling ability. With Marks at the conn, Schultz considered “no dock safe,” and the destroyer had plenty of nicks and dents in her new camouflage paint job to show for it. But coming into a major fleet anchorage so sloppily after being commanded by one of the smoothest and best-known ship handlers in the destroyer Navy made it sting that much more. Schultz stood at the bow with his deck force, prepared to secure a line to the buoy. Each time Marks tried to “take the buoy and missed,” the destroyer had to make a wide circle and line up for another pass. After several failed attempts, Schultz told the deck phone talker to advise the captain they could put the whaleboat in the water and hook the buoy by hand. After the call went to the bridge, Marks shouted down from the bridge: “I don't want any more smart
remarks from the peanut gallery!” After a half dozen more misses, however, word came from the bridge to launch the whaleboat. Schultz did, and had the boat motor up to the bow. The hook rope was lowered and secured to the buoy. Schultz signaled the winch operator, and the ship and buoy finally were brought together.
Hull
's achievement was acknowledged by blaring sirens and whistles from scores of ships in the harbor.

By telephoning a friend on the staff of Commander Destroyers Pacific, Don Watkins was able to arrange for repairs to the torpedo tubes.
Hull
pulled alongside the tender
Yosemite
(AD-19) for several days' worth of work.

Then for several weeks,
Hull
spent days at a time training off Hawaii. During this period, countless crewmen tried to get off
Hull
through transfers to school or elsewhere, sometimes succeeding after “getting into it with the captain,” who expressed his own desire to “get rid” of any malcontents from “Consolvo's crew,” which in general he viewed as “spoiled.” A chief machinist's mate had a loud row with Marks, and he was soon gone, as “everyone else would have been if they had their way.” For Douhan, whose own hope for a transfer never materialized—and neither did his change of rate to yeoman, thanks to the new skipper—it was “tough” seeing the morale of a good ship “destroyed by a guy like Marks.”

On November 8, Greil Gerstley became the ship's new executive officer and navigator, replacing Lieutenant Maury M. Strauss, who had been aboard since a year before Pearl Harbor and was respected and well liked. Gerstley, now a lieutenant, was well qualified to become second in command, having benefited from Consolvo's training and served as senior watch officer. His fellow officers considered Gerstley a “good ship handler.” The “gentlemanly” Ivy Leaguer was known for “never saying a bad thing about anyone,” including Marks, who had given him a stern dressing-down one night on the quarterdeck for having renamed a star on the navigational chart Eleanore—“after my wife,” Gerstley had explained to the “not amused” skipper, who ordered him to “go back to the star's real name.”

By this time, there was “a lot of grumbling” about Marks in the wardroom as well as the crew quarters. The officers' discontent had to do not only with his martinet-like personality but also with his deficiencies at ship handling. In the view of Lloyd Rust, the Texas lawyer who was now
Hull
's combat information center (CIC) officer, whether a commanding officer won a popularity contest wasn't as important as whether he was “capable of doing the job.” To Rust and others, Marks had shown he was “incapable…in every way.”

For
Hull
's sonar officer, Lieutenant ( j.g.) Edwin B. Brooks Jr., twenty-three, a Virginian and graduate of the University of Richmond with a degree in economics, artful ship handling was a “very big thing.” Aboard
Hull
since Christmas 1943, Brooks, five foot ten with dark features and a beaming smile, had enjoyed his time understudying Consolvo as he learned to become an officer of the deck (OOD) when under way—his “main ambition” as a naval officer. Like other
Hull
officers, Brooks' major criticism of Marks was over his inept ship handling. A proper “southern gentleman” to his core, Brooks was not a profane man, yet he was not above “calling Marks a real bastard.”

At the conn, Marks' mistakes and failings were so elementary that there was universal disbelief he had spent much time at the conn of destroyers, which given their narrow beam could be tricky to handle, particularly in a harbor at slow speeds or at sea in heavy weather. It was speculated that his previous captains had kept him off the conn as a junior officer (or even in his short five-month stint as executive officer) after he proved to be such a “bad driver.” In a wardroom where everyone had always good-naturedly “joked about everyone's idiosyncrasies,” there was now “an awful lot of serious talk about whether Marks was competent.”

On November 11,
Hull
left Pearl Harbor in a task force bound for the western Pacific. After a brief stop at Eniwetok for fueling, the ships made for Ulithi, home of the U.S. Third Fleet, arriving on the first day of December 1944.

The next day, Storekeeper Drummond wrote to his mother in Missouri:

As
Hull
's new commanding officer hoped, the destroyer and her crew were about to make naval history together, although not the kind he sought.

With a protected lagoon 20 miles long and 10 miles wide, capable of holding hundreds of ships, Ulithi was well positioned to serve as a staging area for the upcoming naval operations in support of the liberation of the Philippines, 850 miles to the west. Since being occupied by U.S. forces in September 1944, Ulithi had turned into the largest and most secret naval base in the world; for the next several months it would be identified in news stories only as “a Pacific base.”

At 8:05
A.M.
on November 30, 1944, while anchored in the Ulithi lagoon,
Monaghan
held a brief change-of-command ceremony. Departing was Commander Waldemar Wendt, who had been in command for eleven months. Newly arriving was an officer who had graduated from
Annapolis five years after Wendt: Lieutenant Commander Floyd Bruce Garrett Jr., twenty-nine, of Clarendon, Arkansas (near Little Rock), where his mother—Laura Redding Garrett, the “first female graduate of the University of Arkansas” and a lifelong teacher—still held class in a one-room schoolhouse. When, at age seventeen, he asked for permission to join the Navy, his mother initially declined in favor of his continuing his education. She changed her mind when he came home one night admittedly “skunky drunk.” Deciding that the Navy might teach him some discipline, she signed the necessary papers. After a year in the fleet, the seaman 2nd class was honorably discharged “to study for the U.S. Naval Academy,” which accepted him in 1934 at age nineteen. The “short, slight and boyish” Garrett—at five foot six and 115 pounds the “smallest and probably one of the youngest looking” in his class—paid attention to academics, ending up ranked 123rd in his class, which graduated 438 new ensigns in June 1938. One classmate remembered Garrett's “quiet dignity and winning smile.” His biography in the
Lucky Bag 1938
stated:

Garrett's first sea duty was aboard the aircraft carrier
Ranger
(CV-4), commanded by Captain John S. McCain, who would become a decorated wartime carrier admiral. After ten months on
Ranger,
Garrett was the subject of an exemplary fitness report written by McCain, who added: “Ensign Garrett is wide awake, energetic and capable. He is one
of the finest and most promising young officers it has been my pleasure to have serve under me.”

Ordered to the battleship
New York
(BB-34) in early 1939, Garrett made an unusual request the following year: to leave the ranks of young line officers—in training to one day command a ship, traditionally the most coveted position in the Navy—and be sent to the next session of the Navy's Finance and Supply School, and upon completing that course to be transferred to the Supply Corps. Garrett was sent to the three-month school in Philadelphia. However, shortly before graduation he asked to return to line duty following the school. Showing indecision about his career path, he soon followed that request with another: “I now request that my request for return to line duty be cancelled.” Four days later, Garrett was informed by the Bureau of Navigation, which handed out assignments for the Navy's line officers, that it was “impractical to approve” his latest request. He was ordered to report to the destroyer
John D. Edwards
(DD-216)—an obsolete four-piper (ship with four stacks) in service since 1920—then in the Asiatic Fleet on China station, which was considered a backwater assignment but which would heat up at the outbreak of war. In February 1942,
Edwards
participated in the Battle of the Java Sea—up to that time the largest naval surface engagement since the Battle of Jutland in World War I—in which ten U.S. ships and four Japanese ships were sunk.

In January 1943, Garrett volunteered for ordnance engineering school “because I would like to have a class of duty wherein poor eyesight is not such a great handicap.” If granted, the request likely would have resulted in his removal from lightly armored destroyers and future service in cruisers and battleships.
Edwards
' commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander William J. Giles Jr., although a close friend of Garrett's, disapproved the request before sending it up the chain of command because he considered Garrett's experience in destroyers too valuable to lose. Giles, who had been awarded a Silver Star for “an outstanding piece of navigation under fire” in bringing
Edwards
and three other destroyers safely through the treacherous Bali Strait with the enemy in pursuit during fighting in the Java Sea, explained:

Garrett's request for ordnance school was denied, and he remained second in command of
Edwards
until the destroyer was transferred to the Atlantic in June 1943, at which time he was ordered to the Bethlehem Steel Co. shipyard at Terminal Island, California, to become executive officer of the newly launched
Fletcher
-class destroyer
Cowell
(DD-547). That same month his wife, Virginia (Corbin), presented him with their first child and his namesake: Floyd Bruce Garrett III. Capable of “sudden and strong emotion,” Garrett had met his future wife at a costume ball, where she wore a veil that hid all but her eyes, and danced with her the entire evening. The next day he wrote his mother, vowing: “I am going to marry the girl who has those eyes.”

Assigned to a carrier group in the Pacific,
Cowell
took part in the landings at the Gilbert Islands in November 1943, and screened carriers launching air strikes at Hollandia, Kavieng, Truk, Wake Island, Guam, Iwo Jima, and elsewhere. In November 1944, facing his own rotation to a new assignment,
Cowell
's commanding officer, Commander Charles W. Parker, urgently wired higher authorities requesting that Garrett “be retained on board”
Cowell
due to his “experience and qualification for command this class destroyer.” While it seemed logical to Parker that Garrett should take command of
Cowell
—a ship he knew well—the Navy had other plans, and Parker's request was “answered by orders” two days later detaching Garrett from
Cowell
to command
Monaghan
. Both ships were then anchored at Ulithi.

Along with James Marks of
Hull,
Garrett was among the first wave of young destroyer skippers from Annapolis class of 1938. As it happened, a total of five classmates within weeks of each other joined Destroyer
Squadron One—composed of the seven remaining
Farragut
-class ships—forming up at Ulithi under the command of the “intelligent, demanding and precise” Captain Preston V. Mercer (Annapolis 1924), who looked “more like a professor” than a career naval officer but was a “thoroughly seasoned professional” about the Navy in general and “destroyers in particular.” Mercer inspected each of the destroyers in his command for “watertight integrity” and found them “up to a proper standard.” He made sure, too, that all his young first-time commanding officers were “very much aware of the lack of stability” of the
Farragut-
class destroyers.
*

Within hours of assuming command, Garrett was at the conn of
Monaghan
patrolling around Ulithi for enemy submarines. During patrols and training exercises over the next ten days, the new skipper began to gain “the confidence and respect” of the crew for his “kind and considerate” ways of making “our duties more pleasant” whenever possible. Exuding “southern charm and personality” in dealing with officers and enlisted men alike, he also showed he knew his way around destroyers. Whatever doubts he had once harbored about ascending to command of his own ship, Bruce Garrett clearly took “great pride” in his beginning tour as a destroyer skipper.

 

A
T DAWN
on December 11, an armada nearly a hundred strong—large flattops crowded with warplanes, big battlewagons, menacing cruisers, and greyhound-like destroyers—sortied from Ulithi in the morning twilight of “crimson, yellow and green upon the eastern sky,” steaming
hard through “caps of silvery…cresting waves” for the Philippines. “The greatest fleet that ever sailed the seas” was commanded by Admiral William Halsey, “neat as a pin” with slicked-down graying hair, pressed khakis, and shoes that “shone like brown mirrors.” The admiral watched his warships returning to sea from his chair on the port side of his flag bridge aboard one of the newest battleships,
New Jersey
(BB-62). “As was his habit,” Halsey's posture was “head up, chin out [and] back straight.”

The U.S. Navy was “fresh from its greatest triumph” two months earlier at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, where, thirty-four months after the Imperial Japanese Navy struck so suddenly and devastatingly on December 7, 1941, “Japan's capacity to wage another fleet battle” had been “terminated.”
*
Revered as the Navy's most famous fighting admiral, Halsey had, however, received widespread condemnation rather than credit for his actions at Leyte.

Halsey had sported a bloodlust since observing from the flag bridge of the carrier
Enterprise
the horrific smoking ruins of Pearl Harbor the day after the surprise attack. He spoke regularly of his loathing for the Japanese—complete with denigrating racial slurs—to an American military and public that had vowed to “remember Pearl Harbor.” His well-publicized hit-and-run carrier raids in the Gilbert and Marshall islands in 1942, as well as the launching of Colonel Jimmy Doolittle's flight of B-26 Army bombers from the deck of the carrier
Hornet
on their mission to bomb Tokyo, helped the American public become “aware of the formidable Bull Halsey and his exploits.” Although hailed as “Pearl Harbor avenged” in some U.S. newspapers, these early strikes were “essentially pinpricks” that had “no discernible effect on enemy operations.” However, they were the first offensive punches thrown in the Pacific, and as such “morale rose appreciably in the U.S. armed forces and among the American public.” Halsey's reputation grew as the “first
American victor over the Japanese.” In October 1942, at a time of crisis when American and Japanese forces were stalemated at Guadalcanal, Halsey was put in command of the South Pacific Area (combined air, sea, and ground forces). Within a month, he “completely reversed the course of the conflict” on Guadalcanal, throwing the Japanese “on the defensive from which they never recovered”—and the war-torn island was eventually secured by U.S. forces in February 1943. By then, the bullish, take-no-prisoners, highly quotable admiral, who received his fourth star for his “successful turning back of the [Japanese] attempt to take Guadalcanal,” had become “a legendary figure in the American press” and a popular symbol of wartime military leadership.
*

At Leyte, Halsey, who had assumed command of the Third Fleet in June 1944, had been assigned to keep the Japanese from steaming through the San Bernardino Strait and attacking General Douglas MacArthur's invasion convoy, including loaded transports and troop ships. Instead, Halsey had taken his fleet—“sixty-five ships strong”—hundreds of miles away to chase what he believed to be a powerful enemy carrier force but was in fact four battle-scarred carriers depleted of all but a few dozen aircraft, along with a handful of escorts. Much to his consternation, Halsey had missed the historic naval battles at Midway and Coral Sea; as the war progressed he had become increasingly obsessed with wiping out “the last of the enemy's once mighty carrier force.” Regarding as “childish” his assignment “to guard statically” the San Bernardino Strait, Halsey “glimpsed the prospect of a moment of glory” in sinking the enemy carriers and rushed “recklessly toward it.” In his flag plot, Halsey had placed a finger down on a chart marked with the location of the Japanese force and told his staff: “We will go north and put these Jap carriers down for keeps.” He opted to do so in spite of expressed opposition from three of his task group commanders. One of
them, Rear Admiral Gerald F. Bogan (Annapolis, 1916), thought Halsey was making “one hell of a mistake” and picked up his ship's TBS phone to personally deliver the message that he feared a Japanese fleet was “heading right for” the unguarded strait. Bogan, who found himself speaking to the “rather impatient voice” of a Halsey staff officer, was told, “Yes, yes, we have that information.” Another of Halsey's top commanders, Admiral Willis A. Lee on the battleship
Washington
(BB-56), an officer of “alert mind and keen analytical sense whose advice was often sought on strategy,” reviewed a “mass of intelligence” that reached him and concluded that the Japanese force must be “a decoy with little or no striking power” attempting to lure the Third Fleet away. Lee sent by flashing light a signal to Halsey expressing his views. After not hearing back, Lee sent Halsey a similar message by TBS phone.
*
The vexations of Bogan, Lee, and others proved accurate: with the Third Fleet far removed from the San Bernardino Strait, a major Japanese naval force with a “formidable aggregation of fire power”—including the new battleships
Yamato
and
Musashi,
the world's largest fighting ships, possessing 18-inch deck guns—with “nothing but empty air and ocean between” them and Leyte Gulf, sailed through unmolested, heading straight for MacArthur's invasion force. During the resultant enemy attack against overwhelmed elements of the less-powerful Seventh Fleet—whose commander had expected Halsey's Third Fleet to have a powerful battle line (designated Task Force 34) in place blocking San Bernardino Strait—Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Chester Nimitz, monitoring the battle from 3,000 miles away in Hawaii, had wired the missing Halsey. The dispatch handed to Halsey on the flag bridge of
New Jersey
read: “Where is Task Force Thirty-four.
The world wonders.” The last three words were “padding to confuse enemy decoders” and should have been deleted before delivery. However, to Halsey, who knew that a pitched naval battle was being waged in Leyte Gulf as he raced in the opposite direction because he had ignored repeated calls for help, it appeared that Nimitz—in adding “the world wonders”—was openly “taunting him with heavy-handed sarcasm.” The tough-talking admiral was “stunned as if struck in the face” and went “pale with anger.” He pulled off his cap, threw it to the deck, and before the disbelieving eyes of his staff officers “broke into sobs.” His chief of staff, Rear Admiral Robert B. Carney, rushed over, grabbed Halsey by the shoulders, and shouted, “Stop it! What the hell's the matter with you? Pull yourself together!” So “mad he couldn't talk,” Halsey handed the message to Carney. Then he snatched back the dispatch, threw it to the floor, and stomped on it. “What right does Chester have to send me a Goddamn message like that?” (Halsey would “not until weeks later” learn that the message Nimitz had authorized was merely meant to ask the question “Where is Task Force 34?”)
*
As “furious” as he was at what he perceived to be a “gratuitous insult” from Nimitz, Halsey realized he had no choice but to turn around short of destroying the enemy carriers. Caught 400 miles out of position, Halsey rushed back with his fleet, but too late to give his fullest support when it was most needed.