Down to the Sea (19 page)

Kosco applied for aviation training but was disqualified due to imperfect eyesight. He was ordered to the battleship
Colorado
(BB-45) as a gunnery officer. On November 4, 1931, as
Colorado
engaged in training exercises off San Pedro, California, a 5-inch deck gun exploded during firing practice. In what the Associated Press reported as “one of the worst accidents in Pacific Fleet history” up to that time, four men were killed instantly as “broken steel, hurled like shrapnel, raked the decks.” Two more would die as a result of their injuries; another twenty-two men were hurt, including Kosco, who, although hit by shrapnel that imbedded in his neck, back, and buttocks, was singled out in a front-page newspaper article the next day for “giving all possible assistance to fallen comrades” be
fore seeking treatment. For the next six years Kosco served as a gunnery officer on several ships. In 1937, his request to attend postgraduate school—listing ordnance engineering as his preferred course of study, with the newly developing field of aerology his second choice—was approved. He returned to Annapolis for a two-year program during which aerology became his specialty. To complete his meteorology studies, Kosco was sent with a select group of other naval officers to MIT, where he earned a master's degree in 1940. Following duty as an aerological officer on two aircraft carriers—six months on
Saratoga
(CV-3), operating off California, and a year and a half aboard
Ranger
(CV-4), in the Atlantic—Kosco, by then a commander, was assigned in fall 1942 to the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. For the next two years he was involved in several projects, not all weather-related, including the study of wave propagation, training in chemical warfare, hurricane research in the Caribbean, and the establishment of naval air transportation to Africa and Ireland. After receiving his new orders, Kosco had caught up with the Third Fleet at Ulithi, boarding Halsey's flagship on December 2, 1944—his first wartime assignment to the Pacific and first tour to the region as an aerologist.

When Kosco had boxed at Annapolis, the officer representative to the team (as well as commander of the academy's receiving ship,
Reina Mercedes,
which served as both barracks for instructors and “prison ship for midshipman transgressors”) was Captain William Halsey Jr., a fortuitous crossing of paths early in Kosco's naval career that would “not hurt” in his new assignment to Halsey's flag staff, a close-knit group led by chief of staff Rear Admiral Robert B. Carney. Kosco found himself rooming with one of the more notable members of Halsey's staff, assistant chief of staff Commander Harold E. Stassen, the former Minnesota governor (and youngest, having been elected in 1940 at thirty-two) who had resigned his office in 1943 to serve in the Navy.

As December 17, 1944, dawned amid stiff winds and boiling seas some 430 miles east of the Philippines, Kosco noted that they were getting “a little bad weather” and assumed it meant the fleet was running into the front already on his maps. The latest reports from various
stations showed southwest winds at Ulithi and east winds at Guam. Weather map analyses were made every six hours at Pearl Harbor by Pacific Fleet Weather Central, which then radioed their forecasts to fleet units. Kosco also had some “quite delayed” plane reports from the previous day. While there were long-range patrol aircraft flying in and out of the Marianas, Ulithi and elsewhere, reporting weather conditions was not their primary mission. In fact, they pointedly avoided heavy weather and only in “exceptional cases broke radio silence” to send any reports back prior to landing. As a result, the majority of aircraft advisories were at least twelve hours old before they reached individual ships. Checking the atmospheric pressure as measured hourly aboard
New Jersey
, Kosco noted that the barometer was dropping slightly—down from the normal fair-weather pressure of 29.92 inches at sea level, which it had been shortly before midnight—to a still “reassuring 29.84” inches at 8:00
A.M.
As Kosco well knew, an “unsteady barometer” was listed in Bowditch's naval bible as one of the “rules for establishing the existence of a tropical cyclone and for locating its center.” A barometer fall of between .12 and .15 inches could place the center of the storm at only “50 to 80 miles distance.” A drop of a tenth of an inch or more could be found in a larger territory “surrounding the actual storm area.” While Kosco “sort of thought” that the accumulated data suggested a “wind with cyclonic circulation,” he believed the “disturbance…lay 450 miles east” of the fleet's position, and stuck with his prediction that it would move on to the northeast—as he believed “all normal storms” did in the area—without threatening the fueling operation. Of course, the rendezvous position selected by Halsey, while expeditious for the purpose of getting back in time for the planned air strikes, did “lay in the normal track of typhoons.” The Third Fleet had been “chased out” of Ulithi on October 3 by a typhoon; Halsey well knew, as he wrote Nimitz that day, that “the same thing may happen again at any time up to the middle of December.” However, no reports had been received by the Third Fleet about a new typhoon “even existing.” In fact, that possibility was “not given serious thought” by Kosco.

Awaiting Halsey's carrier group, designated Task Force 38, at the
planned fueling area in the eastern half of the Philippine Sea—at latitude 14 degrees 50 minutes north and longitude 129 degrees 57 minutes east—was the replenishment unit, commanded by Captain Jasper T. Acuff. At forty-six and a 1921 graduate of Annapolis, Acuff was a seagoing veteran. His At-Sea Logistics Group, Third Fleet, currently included a dozen filled-to-the-brim fleet oilers—several at a time alternated steaming back and forth to Ulithi to refill their bunkers with Navy Special Fuel Oil, the heavy by-product of crude oil that fed the fires in ship boilers, as well as aviation gasoline and diesel. Also attached to Acuff 's group were several escort carriers that would launch fighters to provide protection for the fleet from air and submarine attack while it fueled, as well as to supply Halsey's carriers with replacements for pilots and planes lost in the latest round of air strikes. With newer and speedier destroyers—including the
Fletcher
-class ships—assigned to Halsey's fast-attack carrier force, the tankers, cargo ships, and escort carriers of the logistics unit were screened by older destroyers, among them
Hull, Monaghan,
and their
Farragut-
class squadron mates, along with ten smaller destroyer escorts, including
Tabberer
.

With visibility holding at 8 miles, Halsey's Task Force 38 began appearing around 10:00
A.M.
as ghostly silhouettes emerging over a misty horizon. Acuff 's logistics group was already in formation, deployed along several widely spaced parallel lines. Throughout the morning, thick, low-slung cumulus clouds closed in overhead until the last traces of sun and sky were obliterated. The wind was gusting to more than 30 knots with increasingly choppy seas, along with longer and deeper swell sets that gave sailors the most discomfort—as opposed to smaller waves caused by the wind. Some 130 ships came “steaming in close proximity to each other,” causing a “congested area” for miles around. The fleet course was set at 040 degrees—a northeasterly heading—and speed at 8 knots. Warships lined up astern of one of three replenishment units, ready to take their turn at the pump like cars at a busy gas station.

The men on the tankers and cargo ships were well drilled in what had become for them these past months a routine chore that never lost
its potential for sudden danger. Ships running together—separated by 30 or 40 feet of churning ocean—on parallel courses at identical speeds for the hours it took to fuel up and transfer ammunition and other supplies left little room for error even in favorable weather conditions. With ships close alongside in winds and seas as unruly as this day, “collisions were constant threats.”

By the time the underway replenishments—known as “unreps” in naval vernacular—began in earnest, there had been another “noticeable change in the air and sea.” In the last hour, the swell had increased; its “latent power could be felt,” especially aboard the destroyers and other smaller ships as they were “rhythmically lifted” to the top of each crest and then “let to settle into the trough” that existed between swells, only to be followed by another cycle. The wind, too, was picking up steadily, with gusts of 45 knots recorded on
New Jersey
. Even the bigger ships—the carriers, battleships, and cruisers—rose and fell with the seas as they took on fuel and supplies. Replacement pilots, hanging on “for dear life,” were sent over from the escort carriers to the attack carriers in “swaying, swirling” chairs hung on lines between ships, and were hauled in soaking wet. Soon these transfers of personnel were cancelled for safety reasons. The aircraft sent aloft to protect the fleet were “fighting air as rough as the sea” in pelting rain, gusty winds, and low visibility, and finally were ordered to land. Before they all made it down safely the conditions became “too rough” to attempt further carrier landings, and two pilots still aloft were ordered to turn their planes upside down and bail out nearby. After asking for the unusual order to be repeated, the pilots did as instructed and were rescued by a destroyer.

Before long, anxious exchanges over ship radios announced the plight of the smaller vessels trying to receive fuel from the tankers. The destroyers were having great trouble “maintaining station” alongside their assigned oilers. Yawing in the swells, they either came too close to the tankers or suddenly veered in the opposite direction until the distance became too great for the extended hoses, which were “lashed and whipped until they were unmanageable.” When a hose parted—or had to be cut adrift to keep from losing it altogether—hundreds of gallons
of black oil gushed onto the destroyer's deck and superstructure, adding to the danger for the deck hands as they struggled to do their work on the slippery and rolling steel surfaces.

Members of Acuff 's logistics group were “shocked” to learn that Halsey's destroyers had been “allowed to deplete their fuel” to such low levels—some reporting as little as 15 percent of capacity remaining aboard—which seemed “incredible.”
Dewey
's commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Charles R. Calhoun, and the commander of the squadron of
Farragut
-class destroyers, Captain Preston Mercer, who used
Dewey
as his flagship, had “never known destroyers to be that low on fuel before.” Why, Calhoun and Mercer asked each other on the bridge that morning, had the refueling of the destroyers screening the carriers during the past several days been “deemed inconsistent” with the carrier task force's primary objective? Everyone knew a fleet's destroyers had to be fueled every second or third day, oftentimes replenished by bigger warships rather than awaiting the arrival of oilers. Calhoun and Mercer were left with the “unhappy impression” that Halsey, as fleet commander, had been nothing less than “remiss in permitting this critical fuel situation to develop.”

“I wouldn't be surprised,” said Mercer, “if some of them ran out of gas before the weather allowed them to refuel.”

One of those destroyers running dry was
Spence
.

 

A
BOARD
S
PENCE
,
Water Tender Charles Wohlleb, who had seen his ship nearly ram an aircraft carrier one dark night the previous month and had wondered along with his shipmates how their new “nice guy” skipper, Lieutenant Commander James Andrea, would handle the ship when things got rough, was topside as they approached
New Jersey
shortly after 11:00
A.M.

Spence
had been attached to the Third Fleet since rendezvousing with Halsey's carriers off Guam in mid-November. During the Mindoro strikes,
Spence
(along with other screening destroyers) had “operated at high speeds for three days” and had been detailed numerous times for
“high-speed pilot rescue missions,” all of which had expended most of the destroyer's 150,000-gallon fuel capacity.
Spence
had been directed to replenish her almost empty fuel tanks from
New Jersey
in the hope that the bulk of the battleship would block the wind and seas for the smaller ship and “provide a steadier platform” than could an oiler for the two hours or so it would take to fill
Spence
's tanks. Any quantity of fuel transferred successfully to
Spence
from
New Jersey,
which had “on hand 1,878,398 gallons” that morning, would not be missed by the battleship, but could keep the destroyer from running out of fuel and losing her engines, steering, and electrical power.

At the same time
Spence
closed on
New Jersey
, another
Fletcher
-class destroyer,
Hunt
(DD-674), approached on the opposite side to take on fuel.