Down to the Sea (25 page)

 

S
PENCE
SUPPLY OFFICER
Al Krauchunas, who was taking the measure of death even as he fought for his life, made it through the flooded passageway underwater and came up “gagging on oil and salt water.”

In the darkness as the sea had poured in around him, Krauchunas “relived an incident” from his childhood that he had not thought about in a long time. As a boy of six, he had walked into a store and removed a box of animal crackers from a shelf, placed it under his coat, and walked out without paying. He “regretted now” the dishonest deed. He also thought about the “essential records” from the supply department, which were in a waterproof box at his general quarters station in the decoding room. They consisted of pay accounts, cash book, receipts and vouchers. He had believed that in any emergency he would have time to grab the box and take it with him. How else would he justify to the Navy Department his monthly purchases and disbursements?

Krauchunas surfaced a few feet from the overturned
Spence,
which showed only her “freshly painted red bottom.” The proud warrior ship that had been a “bulwark of strength and stability” had turned turtle.

When the crush of water swept him back against the ship, Krauchunas heard disembodied voices, “screaming and curdling yells,” attesting to “the chaos and bedlam” taking place inside watertight compartments still containing air. Krauchunas had come out near the crew's galley, which he knew had been filled with enlisted men, as were other spaces after the skipper, James Andrea, had earlier that morning ordered all hands not on duty “to stay below” for their own safety. Now the sounds of the trapped men snapped Krauchunas out of his “shocked daze.”

Treading water to stay afloat, Krauchunas was not wearing his life jacket because “no thought of the ship capsizing had come to mind.” Concerned about getting caught in the “suction of the ship should it sink,” he started swimming away. Although continually bounced and spun around by the cascading seas and by winds he estimated at 100
miles per hour, Krauchunas reached a floater net adrift 20 yards away; two dozen men were hanging on to the 25-by-25-foot net. When they began to drift toward the sinking ship, the men kicked and paddled to “push the net” in the opposite direction. After some effort they were far enough away that they lost sight of
Spence
in the “gusts of rain and violent wind spray.” They all, however, heard the muffled explosion.

As did everyone at the floater net, Water Tender 3rd Class Charles Wohlleb, who the day before had watched
Spence
's aborted attempt to fuel alongside Halsey's flagship,
New Jersey,
knew that the “rumbling blast” was a boiler exploding. He understood, too, that anyone still alive in the fire room would have been instantly scalded to death when the boiler blew. Knowing the great explosive force would certainly have broken the narrow-beam vessel in half amidships, Wohlleb imagined for the first but not last time the forward and after sections of the ravaged destroyer sinking slowly to the depths below, taking untold men with her.

Wohlleb had been in the after fire room prior to coming topside with two shipmates, Water Tender Cecil Miller and Boilermaker Franklin Horkey, neither of whom Wohlleb saw again after all three were cast into the water from the alcove where they had been when the ship went over. The New Jersey native pictured the men who had been on duty in the fire room tending to the ship's only lit boiler: Frank Thompson, operating the oil burners; Norman Small, the six-foot-two Nebraska farm boy, watching the steam pressure gauges; Claude “Roy” Turner, monitoring the boiler's water level; and Layton Slaughter, the 1st class in charge, speaking to Horkey over the sound-powered phones. To a man they had been Wohlleb's buddies, and now they were gone.

One of the last to reach the floater net was Seaman 1st Class James P. Heater, twenty, of Auburn, Washington, who had been in the after crew compartment when the ship went over, and managed to swim “out from under the ship.” Although “pretty conscious at the time,” Heater, who was not wearing a life jacket, was having difficulty breathing due to his lungs being “full of water.” Wohlleb, one of the few men wearing a flotation device—a brown canvas life belt, inflated by “two new CO
₂
cartridges,” which he had kept on all morning because he had had a “funny feeling”—had Heater straddle him, then wrapped his arms around him.

Also finding his way to the floater net was Quartermaster Edward Traceski, who when the ship went over had “climbed the wall” inside the bridge to the nearest exit and “just fell out into the drink.” With the rain stinging like needles on his face and arms, Traceski realized how foolish he was not to have been wearing his life jacket. Luckily, he was pushed by the wind and sea to the floater net, which he “just clung to.”

Torpedoman Al Rosley, who had served aboard
Spence
since her commissioning, had been standing the 8:00-to-noon watch in the torpedo shack located behind the bridge and one level above the main deck. For most of the morning, as the ship “rolled over and came back,” Rosley had been hanging on, keenly aware that
Spence
was riding unusually high and “bobbing like a cork” in the worst sea conditions he had ever known. After the ship turned into the trough, Rosley judged it wasn't “very long before we went over.” He pulled off the sound-powered headset he was wearing and opened the hatch above his head. Immediately, water started coming in. Fighting his way against the inflow of the sea, he barely made it out. Standing on the side of the ship, he jumped. While he was still only 10 or 15 feet away,
Spence
“rolled the rest of the way over.” Rosley was “blown way aft of the ship” by the wind and sea and found “the pressure so great” he had to cup his hand over his mouth and nose to breathe deeply. Unfortunately, his life jacket was still down below in his locker, but he was a strong swimmer, having grown up in western Maryland frolicking with his nine siblings in myriad lakes and rivers. He was pulled under several times but popped up still swimming. Willing himself to keep kicking and stroking, he swam his way right into the floater net, caught like a sardine—and gratefully so.

For the rest of the afternoon, frightened men kept themselves lashed to the tarred rope and cork floaters, with legs and arms hooked inside the foot-square openings in the heavy webbing, desperately trying not to lose hold in the raging storm that churned the floater
net into a “huge round mass of rope and rubber blocks.” As nightfall came, the high wind and driving rain subsided. Although the seas remained unruly, above them “the most beautiful South Pacific evening came into being.” The men were soon drifting silently under the stars.

Wohlleb realized the man he was still holding had stopped breathing. He tried without success to find a pulse at the neck and wrist, then placed his hand over Heater's heart, which was still.

“Mr. Krauchunas, I don't think he's alive,” Wohlleb said.

The other two officers in the group were in bad shape, which left the supply officer in charge. He had already inventoried the survival gear and supplies, finding two 5-gallon kegs of water, flares, K rations, a signal mirror, a dye marker, a hatchet, and some small bottles of medicinal whiskey.

“You'll have to let him go, Charlie,” Krauchunas said.

Wohlleb did, watching his shipmate “sink slowly in the dark sea.”

 

A
T THE END
it was the wind and not the sea that sealed
Hull
's fate.

Shortly after noontime, the ship—still being broadsided by great swells, and thereafter locked in a series of deep troughs—had rolled to “about 70 degrees” and begun to right herself when the wind “increased to an unbelievable high point,” which bridge personnel estimated at 125 miles per hour. The force of the wind “laid the ship steadily back over” to starboard and “held her down in the water” at an angle of “80 degrees or more,” allowing the seas to come flowing into her upper structures and down her stacks.

The bridge quickly flooded, and men scrambled for the exit on the port side. When Boatswain's Mate Ray Schultz crawled out onto the wing of the bridge, he found the skipper, who appeared “to be in shock,” already sitting there. It figured, Schultz thought, that Marks would be among the first out of a sinking ship and not the last man, as naval tradition dictated for the commanding officer.

Not long after declining Schultz's request to relieve Marks of his
command in an effort to save the ship, executive officer Greil Gerstley was thrown headlong into a bank of equipment during a bad roll. Gerstley came up with the fingers on one hand “broken and bent back.” “Would you see if you could get me something,” he calmly asked Schultz, who had been trying to reach the first aid kit to find a splint and tape when the ship went over and “didn't come back.”

Gerstley now was halfway through the exit from the bridge, not asking for help but “pleading with his eyes” to several men standing nearby on the side of the ship. Two sailors reached down, gripped the executive officer under his arms, and raised him up the rest of the way.

Quartermaster Archie DeRyckere assisted Gerstley in reaching the highest point of the ship: a searchlight platform on the port wing of the bridge. The chief sat down next to Gerstley, who was holding his shattered hand in front of him. The officer, shouting to be heard over the bedlam in which they had landed, said he wasn't sure he would be able to swim.

“When we go down, will you help me?” Gerstley asked.

“Yes, sir,” said DeRyckere, pulling tight the straps on his life jacket.

From their perch, DeRyckere saw sailors below in the water—wearing life jackets but unable to get clear of the ship—being battered against the “guns and appendages” that “kept hitting them.” The horrific scene made him determined to stay with the ship as long as possible. That point soon arrived:
Hull
“just sunk underneath” them like a diving submarine. The suction pulled DeRyckere so deep he thought his eardrums would burst. As he struggled to regain the surface, he heard a boiler explode, then the howl of the wind as he broke the surface. Gerstley was nowhere to be seen; neither was Schultz, Marks, or anyone else.

Prior to
Hull
going over for the last time, Radarman Michael “Frenchy” Franchak, who would also earn the nickname “Moose” because of his physical strength, had been “sweating it out” in the crew's galley, one level below the main deck just forward of the forward stack. Off watch since 4:00
A.M.
, he had stayed there rather than going back aft to the berthing compartment. Shortly before noontime, Franchak decided to head to his general quarters station on the bridge to fetch his life
jacket. When he reached the radar shack, he had difficulty opening the door because there were so many men crowded into the small space—none of whom had any business there except for radar operators. Wanting to be above deck but having seen numerous men already washed overboard, they had all ducked inside the radar shack for cover. Franchak went to where he had left his life jacket, and found it gone. He saw his life jacket on Storekeeper 3rd Class Arnold Niss, of Chicago. Because Niss was “one of the best sailors on board,” Franchak told him he could keep it. Franchak found himself another one, which had the name Torkildson stenciled on the back. Knowing that Yeoman 3rd Class Keith Torkildson was “one of the men who had already been washed over the side,” Franchak slipped on the life jacket. Not wanting to stay in the crowded radar shack and with the ship riding like a roller coaster, he crawled through the bridge back to the chart room. On the way he noticed the “terrific pounding” Gerstley had taken, suffering what looked to Franchak like a compound fracture of the hand and perhaps lower arm.

The chart room was filled with frightened sailors, and Franchak sat in a corner on a bucket—one of many set out to catch the water coming in through the overhead. Franchak realized he was getting so “wet from above” that he put on a steel battle helmet for protection. He wasn't “annoyed for long” by the “plunking of drops” on the helmet because a few seconds later “the ship turned very quiet” and rolled over on her side.

The nearest exit was quickly nearly underwater, with just a thin horizontal slit showing. “Panic ensued” as “60 or 80 men made one dash for that opening.” As those in front reached the narrow opening, the “ship descended,” pushing them in the opposite direction. It was then Franchak made his move to get out, during which he “kicked and stepped over bodies.” The ship seemed to rise on a crest, causing the water to recede slightly from the exit, leaving a larger escape hole for Franchak. With his “chin barely above water all the way,” he grabbed on to “halyards, pipe stanchions, and whatever,” using all his strength to pull himself toward the opening. He came out near the platform for the
forward 20 mm guns. His first impression was that the stacks were “making an awful hissing sound,” and then he was doused with “steaming hot oil” backing up the stacks from the fire room.

Looking down into the sea, the first person Franchak saw was the captain, “the most hated officer on board ship.” Marks had two life jackets—one he was wearing and one he was holding tightly. The sight made Franchak “angry enough to go after him,” so he jumped. Immediately pulled underwater, he became disoriented and never saw Marks again.

Franchak surfaced to a “panic-stricken scene.” A life raft had been freed forward, and once in the water it was soon overcrowded. Just as the men “all got settled,” the sea “hammered them against” a gun mount. To Franchak, it was “like breaking wooden matches.” Long after the screams ended, the sea kept battering the broken bodies against the ship.

Making it to another raft, Franchak got hold of the rope handle and then was hit in the back of the head by what felt like a “loose timber” but was actually a swell breaking over him. Suddenly, he and the raft filled with men were “about thirty feet underwater,” “spinning like a top in a whirl-pool.” Not until the swell completely subsided were the men and raft “shot up like they were on an elevator” to the surface. By then, though, some men had let go. The first swell, in fact, took most of the men on the raft. Franchak and the others now knew the score—“inhale as much air into your chest and cheeks” as possible before being immersed. When the next swell came it was “just as strong,” but now the men “had a little experience” and their “chances to survive were better.”