Down to the Sea (29 page)

Radioman 3rd Class George Pacanovsky, nineteen, of New York City, was on duty that morning in the radio shack adjacent to the bridge. He had graduated from P.S. 29 half a year earlier and joined the Navy the following month. After boot camp in Newport, Rhode Island, and two radio technician schools in Chicago and Bainbridge, Maryland, he had met
Tabberer
at Ulithi in early November. He had gone through a long period of severe seasickness before “finding my sea legs.” In fact, it seemed to him he had “stopped throwing up just in time for the typhoon,” during which everyone on board was “walking the bulkheads” to such a degree that work parties later went around to “wash off the footprints.” While Pacanovsky was still a seagoing novice, he saw enough that morning to have confidence that Plage was “in full control.” What impressed the young sailor was the way the captain “didn't try to fight the storm” but slowed the ship down and “let the typhoon bounce us around.” The pounding on the ship “would have been worse if we were going faster.”

When Plage received a report that some 5-inch shells and cartridges in the forward magazine had “broken loose,” he held off ordering anyone into the magazine because it was “almost a certainty that someone would get crushed trying to secure” the 54-pound shells. While the shells wouldn't explode on their own, it “created a delicate situation” because of the possibility one of them might hit the primer on a 27-pound cartridge filled with gunpowder. Plage's concern was soon relieved when he learned that two volunteers went in the magazine and secured the shells and gunpowder. It was the kind of thing a “close-knit crew” did for one another, believed one of the volunteers, Gunner's
Mate Tom Bellino, the young Idaho dairyman who, although he kept getting busted in rank for minor infractions, was among the many crewmen who “loved the skipper.”

Plage was informed of three radar contacts from 2,000 to 5,000 yards ahead. They were identified as two destroyers,
Hickok
and
Benham,
and the destroyer escort
Waterman
(DE-740). Raising them on the TBS, Plage learned that all three were “in troughs steaming at 3 knots and without steering control due to the wind and sea.” Plage quickly ordered a reduction in speed to 3 knots to avoid colliding with the other ships.

While “just looking at the tremendous seas” could “encourage exaggeration” as to their size—“they looked like vertical mountains bearing down on us”—Plage came up with a way to gauge their height. A destroyer escort of the same class as
Tabberer
was adjacent to them in formation and occasionally visible through the storm. He knew the top of her mast was “93 feet above the waterline.” When both ships were in parallel troughs, the tip of the other ship's mast would disappear behind the crest of a wave. As for frequency, Plage timed “nine seconds for a complete cycle—crest to crest.” When it came to wind speed,
Tabberer
's anemometer eventually “blew away at 100 knots.” Plage heard a report on the TBS that one ship's anemometer blew off at 130 knots.

So much solid water broke over the main deck that the “life nets all floated out of their storage racks,” even those floater nets twenty feet above the deck.
Tabberer
's whaleboat was demolished while secured to its davits. On one steep roll to starboard, water went through the topside ventilator intakes to the engine room. As the water flowed in near an electrical panel, quick-thinking engineers rigged a canvas sleeve to guide the water away from the electrical equipment.

The barometer began to rise by 1:15
P.M.
Just as everyone started to hope the storm was passing and the worst was over, at 1:51
P.M.
,
Tabberer
took a “quick 60-degree roll to starboard,” and the pressure on the mainmast caused one of the insulators on deck that secured a guy wire to crumble, allowing the supporting wire about three inches of slack. The mast—at the top of which were attached “such precious
devices” for communication and navigation as radar, radio, TBS, and IFF (electronic identification equipment to identify
Tabberer
to other U.S. ships) antennae—began to sway back and forth. A work party tried to take up the slack, but the men were unable to do so due to the force of the wind. Soon a second and then a third insulator gave way. With the mast now “swaying about eight feet,” the weld at the bottom soon broke.

Plage knew the mast could topple at any moment. His fear was that when it snapped off it might open a hole in the main deck through which seawater could pour inside. Not only could no one predict when the mast would go or the amount of damage that would be caused, “no one could do anything about it.” Plage considered it “all in the laps of the gods.”

The “torment lasted” until 6:28
P.M.
, when the mast finally buckled during a 50-degree roll. Snapping in half, the top portion with all the electronic gear fell into the sea over the starboard side, while the base remained tenuously attached to the ship by its tangled-up guy wires.

Plage stopped all engines. A damage control team with axes and a cutting torch was standing by. He sent the men out with orders to cut loose the remaining portion of the mast, which they did while secured by lifelines to the superstructure. At 7:03
P.M.
, the remaining mast fell over the side “without even denting the ship or scratching the paint.” While the dismasting resulted in lost communications and navigational systems, the severity of the ship's rolls was noticeably less without the drag of the dangling mast.

At almost the same time, steering control was regained. Finally “freed of the irons” that had held her locked in one trough after another,
Tabberer,
whose power plant had “operated without serious casualty” all day, turned south for the new fueling rendezvous point radioed some hours earlier and scheduled for sunrise. “As deaf as a stone and blind as a bat” without radar or radio in this “highly populated slice of ocean,”
Tabberer
was provided “courses to steer and speeds to make” by blinker signals from a nearby destroyer.

Proceeding at 8 knots and making slow headway,
Tabberer
“pitched
and pounded” through a dark night filled with “weird sounds of shrieking winds” of gale force. Although the typhoon had “left the scene”—rushing westward before finally curving northward—bolts of lightning electrified the sky, followed by booming claps of thunder.

Chief Radioman Ralph E. Tucker, twenty-seven, of Somerville, Massachusetts, had been hunkered down all day in
Tabberer
's radio shack trying to take his mind off the “terrific rolling” of the ship by reading Bob Hope's book
I Never Left Home,
the comic's account of entertaining members of the armed forces during the war. Admittedly very frightened, the barrel-chested and normally happy-go-lucky Tucker would not realize the book was funny “until two days after the storm.”

At 9:50
P.M.
, Tucker was on an upper deck rigging an emergency radio antenna near the forward stack to restore communications when he heard a shout and noticed a small light shining in the water.

“Man overboard!” Tucker yelled. “Light off starboard beam!”

The radioman was close enough to the bridge to be heard by Plage, who feared “one of our men” had gone over the side. He directed the duty boatswain's mate to sound the man-overboard alarm, which was soon clanging loudly followed by the “terrifying word” over the public address system that no sailor ever wanted to hear, let alone at night in storm-tossed seas: “All hands, man stations to rescue man overboard.”

Someone from the bridge hollered to Tucker asking what had happened. The chief answered that it was “not one of our men” who had fallen overboard but possibly someone from “another ship.”

Peering through the line of portholes on the bridge, Plage scanned the darkness. He spotted the light off the starboard beam, blinking on and off as it “rose and sank among the waves.” He had the 24-inch searchlight turned on and sighted a “waving man” in a life jacket.

Plage ordered the helmsman to a new course. In picking up survivors, the usual procedure—and one that
Tabberer
's crew had practiced countless times—was to maneuver the ship downwind, turn the bow into the wind, and proceed upwind, as a ship did when approaching a
mooring buoy. The equipment needed for a rescue comprised two cargo nets thrown over the side, life rings with long lines attached, and other lines with monkey's fists tied at the end. Also needed were a couple of capable swimmers in life jackets with safety lines attached. As the ship neared the survivor, lines were thrown to the man; in the event he was unable to reach them, they were taken to him by a swimmer. The man would then be hauled in. Two men were stationed on the heavy-webbed cargo nets to help him onto the deck, where other sailors waited to assist.

With
Tabberer
in position downwind, Plage discovered that as their forward momentum slowed in the face of the gale-force winds he lost steering control, and the “large seas and strong wind” kept pushing the ship away from the man in the water. Plage realized that normal procedures wouldn't work in this sea state. Electing to take a “calculated and highly dangerous risk,” he drove the ship upwind on the windward side and about 50 yards from the man in the water, and turned broadside to the heavy seas so that the waves and wind would push them sideways toward the drifting man. The seas accommodated the maneuver, taking the ship “in their grip at once.” As
Tabberer
rolled heavily with the onrushing swells—so far over that the edge of the main deck dipped underwater—she was hurried toward the man like a “huge hunk of tumbleweed” blowing across the Texas Panhandle. Plage knew it would be tricky work bringing the man aboard before the careening vessel overran him. It certainly wasn't the way he or anyone else had been taught to conduct at-sea rescues.

All the ship's lights were now blazing so as not to lose sight of the life-jacketed man, and sailors on deck stood at the ready to take part in the rescue operation. With Plage at the conn, the senior officer on the weather deck was the ship's executive officer, Lieutenant Robert M. Surdam, the upstate New Yorker and bank president's son who had previously served in the Atlantic on the destroyer
Warrington,
which had gone down three months earlier in the Caribbean during a typhoon with the loss of more than 250 of Surdam's former shipmates. In recently recommending Surdam for an appointment to the next class at
the prestigious Naval War College staff course, Plage had stated that his second in command “demonstrated outstanding ability and initiative in carrying out his duties aboard this vessel.”

When they were close enough to the man in the water, Surdam shouted for him to grab the line about to be thrown and loop it under his arms. When the rolling ship was almost alongside, the line “flashed through the air.” The man reached out and caught it. Just then, the ship rocked hard and was pushed by the sea toward him. The vessel went sideways so quickly that it seemed impossible not to overrun the man. Deckhands quickly took in the slack on the line as “green water and white lather swirled over the edge of the deck and retreated.” When the water receded, the man in the life jacket was lying unconscious on the deck. He was quickly carried below to be examined by the destroyer escort division's medical officer, Lieutenant Frank W. Cleary, twenty-seven, of Burlingame, California. Cleary, a 1943 graduate of the McGill Faculty of Medicine in Montreal, happened to be aboard
Tabberer
for this patrol—his first sea voyage—rather than on one of the squadron's other five ships.

As soon as Plage received word on the bridge that the man in the water had been revived in sick bay and was claiming to be from a destroyer that had capsized during the typhoon, he rushed below to get firsthand information.

When
Hull
quartermaster August Lindquist awakened in sick bay, the first thing he wanted to know was how many of his shipmates from the sunken ship had been picked up. Told that no one knew anything about any lost ship, Lindquist, who had been at the helm of
Hull
when the destroyer went over, had been as shocked as Plage was upon arriving below and hearing from Lindquist the dramatic details of
Hull
's capsizing.

“There are probably more men in the water,” said a weary Lindquist. “Probably right in this vicinity, sir.”

“We'll look for them,” promised Plage, who told the sailor to rest.

Lindquist, who had been in the water approximately ten hours and was the first survivor rescued from any of the three lost destroyers, did
as he was ordered and went to sleep. When he awakened it was past midnight on December 19—his twenty-fourth birthday.

As soon as Plage returned to the bridge, he ordered extra lookouts topside and searchlights turned on in spite of the danger of being spotted by an enemy submarine, a possibility they were keenly aware of, as they were now “only 150 to 200 miles off the coast of Luzon,” where they had been “hunting submarines for the past month or so.” He undertook a retiring search—“start at the center and expand as you go out.” Plage figured they could “get the most men that way,” with less danger of passing up anybody. Steaming on various courses and speeds,
Tabberer
commenced a systematic search for further survivors. As noted in the ship's log, results were forthwith:

2215 Recovered second man.

2230 Recovered third man.

2245 Recovered fourth and fifth man.

2255 Recovered sixth and seventh man.

2315 Recovered eighth, ninth and tenth man.

2320 Recovered eleventh man.

Near enough to
Tabberer
to see “the loom” of her searchlights sweeping back and forth over the horizon, the destroyer
Dewey,
commanded by Charles R. Calhoun, the Annapolis classmate of both James Marks of
Hull
and Bruce Garrett of
Monaghan,
was steaming on course for the fleet's fueling rendezvous the following morning. On
Dewey
's bridge, it occurred to Calhoun that another ship—he thought at the time that the light “must be from
Tabberer
”—“might have found someone in the water.” He turned his vessel in that direction and “headed over to see what was happening,” knowing that if a rescue operation was under way, “
Dewey
could be of some assistance.”