Down to the Sea (36 page)

On the subject of stability, Gates asked, “On any previous occasions had your ship acted in a manner which caused you to doubt its stability?”

“Having spent five months in a 2200-ton destroyer shortly before taking command of
Hull,
it was quite evident to me on taking command and maneuvering the ship that her stability was very poor
compared to that of the destroyer on which I had just served. However, in full power trials in which rudder tests were conducted throwing the rudder hard over in one direction and quickly reversing it hard over in the opposite direction and making complete circles at maximum speeds, the stability was within satisfactory limits in the relatively calm water in which the tests were conducted.”

An admiral now had a question. “How long before you rolled over had you decided that the ship was in such a hazardous position that you felt free to maneuver independently?”

“I would say about a half hour before the ship went down.”

“Up to that time,” the admiral went on, “you had continued your efforts to maintain your station. Is that correct?”

“That is correct.”

Asked if he had any idea of the number of men trapped inside the ship, Marks estimated “about 100 men were unable to make their way clear of the ship” due either to their location in the ship or to the difficulty of getting through closed hatches from spaces below.

Revealingly, the last question asked of Marks by the court was obviously aimed not at the destroyer captain but at a certain fleet admiral.

“If you had decided to maneuver independently at let us say 8 o'clock in the morning would your ship have behaved better and gotten along better?”

“Yes. If I could have steamed clear to the southward to get clear I am sure I might have avoided the storm center completely.”

That was, of course, based on information about the storm Marks only learned after the fact. More important, steaming clear to the south at 8:00
A.M.
was not a decision Marks could have made on his own. He knew, as did everyone in the wardroom, that the only way
Hull
or any other ship might have escaped to the south would have been had Halsey taken the Third Fleet southward much earlier that morning than he did.

Marks seemed to have scored well with the court. Neither the admirals nor the judge advocate had been particularly harsh on him. They had
asked direct questions that lacked a sharp edge, and he had appeared to answer them fully and competently.

Only a few
Hull
witnesses were called by the court, and Watkins, notwithstanding his days of preparation, was not among them. In fact, the only officer to testify was engineer George Sharp, who gave further details about the situation with the boilers, and also the amount of flooding in the forward engine room—“2 or 3 feet of water at 11:30 when I told them to pump bilges.” Asked why he thought
Hull
was unable to recover from her final roll, Sharp said it was possible that the longitudinal bulkheads between three fuel tanks had been “carried away” when the ship lurched to starboard about 11:30
A.M.
He thought that later rolls were worse because the “oil would flow over” in the direction of the roll.

Machinist's Mate Roy Lester, the throttle man in
Hull
's engine room on the 8:00-to-noon watch on the day the ship went down, was asked the maximum speed made by the ship on his watch.

“Flank speed, 22 knots.”

“Was this on both engines?”

“Yes, it was.”

“Can you tell the court approximately what time this was?”

“Just before we went over.”

It was the first hint of possible confusion on the bridge. Even though the admirals would know that flank speed would not be appropriate for a ship caught in a typhoon, they did not pursue the matter.

Fireman 2nd Class Roy Morgan was called to verify that there were countless men caught in “flooded spaces” below when the ship went over.

“In your opinion did everybody get out of the surrounding spaces?”

“No, sir, I wouldn't say they all got out.”

By the time the court was finished with the
Hull
witnesses, it was apparent that the admirals were not going to blame
Hull
's captain or crew for the loss of their ship. In most instances of ships being lost in non-combat situations, the actions of the captain and crew were carefully scrutinized. But in this case involving a typhoon that had hit a fleet—
sinking and damaging other ships as well as their own—the court's sights seemed to be aimed higher.

After a two-hour lunch break, court reconvened in the wardroom. The judge advocate recalled George Kosco to the stand. This time, the questions all came from the admirals, and their tone was adversarial.

“The court asked Admiral Halsey whether he considered that he had timely warning or did he know that a severe storm was approaching around the 16th and 17th of December. He answered, ‘I did not have timely warning. I will put it another way—I had no warning.' In view of the fact that you are the aerology officer for Admiral Halsey, how do you account for this answer?”

“I take it that the admiral means he had no warning that a severe storm was approaching, although he did have a warning that there was a light, moderate storm in the area,” Kosco said. “On the morning of the 16th, I showed him the weather map and told him that it looked like a small storm was developing between Ulithi and Guam. I continued telling him that this storm wasn't indicated to be very much of a storm.”

While he might not have been helping his own cause, Kosco was at least showing a willingness to fall on his sword for his fleet commander.

“On the 17th, when we decided to knock off fueling operations, I framed a dispatch on the storm and also indicated to the admiral that a storm was somewhere to the east of us. No typhoon warning was given at any time. That is about all I can answer to that question, sir.”

The admiral confronted Kosco with more of Halsey's testimony.

“The court asked Admiral Halsey what seemed to be wrong with the weather service in this case, and his answer was in part: ‘It was nonexistent. That is the only way I can express it…. It is the first time in four months that I have been operating in this area that I haven't had reports that enabled me to track a storm.' What have you to say in regard to this answer?”

“The reason I think the admiral said that is that in the case of the other storms, they were so far away from his location that he had warnings of them two or three days before they came to his operating area,
so that he could have notice to get out of the way. In this case the storm formed almost on top of him, and he was the first one to report it, so that he didn't have the advance information that he had in other storms. That is the only plausible answer that I could give to that.”

With that, Kosco was gone, leaving the court with two seemingly contradictory positions. While he had spotted the storm days before it hit the fleet and admittedly underestimated its size in briefings to Halsey, Kosco also described the storm having formed on top of them with no advance warning. Clearly, both situations could not be true.

Following a brief recess, the court reconvened at 3:45
P.M.
to hear from the
Monaghan
survivors. There were so few of them that there was no need to meet in the larger pilothouse. Heartbreakingly, the six sailors were all that remained of a crew of 262 officers and enlisted men.
*

The senior survivor, Water Tender Joseph McCrane, read his narrative, which, curiously, was a page longer than Marks'. McCrane's view of events was narrower, too, because he had not been on the bridge the morning of the sinking or in communication with other sections of the ship.

McCrane told of
Monaghan
's unsuccessful efforts to fuel on December 17th. That night “the weather was so bad and the ship was rocking and rolling so much that it was impossible for any of us to sleep. We all lay in our sacks and held on to keep from rolling out.”

McCrane described receiving “word from the bridge” about 10:30
A.M.
on December 18 to pump seawater ballast into two empty fuel tanks aft, and how he began the process until “the lights went out” at 11:30
A.M.
Minutes later, the ship “went over on her side.” He spoke about the courage of Gunner's Mate Joe Guio in assisting men from the sinking ship, and how he ended up with “thirteen of us hanging on the outside of a raft.” McCrane went on for several pages about their ordeal in the water, and the rescue of the six survivors by the destroyer
Brown
on December 21.

When McCrane was finished, the
Monaghan
sailors were given their chance to “lay to the charge of any officer or man,” and all declined.

McCrane, however, did wish to register a complaint that would add weight to the possibility that
Farragut
-class stability problems had contributed to the sinking of
Monaghan
and, by extension, perhaps
Hull
. “The only thing I could complain about is ever since we left [Seattle] the ship seemed top heavy. I was on there for two years. Ever since we left [the shipyard] in October 1944, she seemed to roll worse than she ever did. Even in the calmest weather and even when anchored, she seemed to roll lots more than she used to.”

While McCrane and four other survivors were called to testify, few new details emerged as to how or why
Monaghan
sank on December 18. All any of them could recount was that ballasting had begun (no doubt belatedly), lights and communications failed, and then the ship rolled over, unexpectedly and seemingly without much of a struggle.

Asked how many men had made it off
Monaghan,
Water Tender 2nd Class James T. Story estimated “at least 40 fellows” who had come out of the same hatch on the port side as him were “washed over the side.” The rest, more than 200 men, were never seen in the water. Presumably they had gone down with the quickly sinking ship, trapped in spaces below.

On December 30, the same morning the Third Fleet weighed anchor in Ulithi lagoon and headed westward—during the first week of 1945, Halsey's carriers would conduct air strikes on Formosa, reporting 111 enemy planes destroyed, and Luzon, covering MacArthur's landings at Lingayen Gulf—the court of inquiry convened for the fifth day.

Before beginning testimony that morning, the court announced
that Preston Mercer would no longer be considered “an interested party.” Although the court gave no reason, it could be assumed that the admirals believed Mercer had had no complicity in the sinking of the three destroyers. At that point, Marks requested that Mercer be appointed to replace his counsel, Ira Nunn, who had informed the court the day before that his ship would be leaving with the Third Fleet. The court agreed to have Mercer act as stand-in counsel, and he took a seat next to Marks.

It now came down to
Spence,
the newest of the three destroyers lost in the typhoon, and also the one with the least amount of fuel aboard.

The reading of the official narrative fell to supply officer Al Krauchunas, the only officer to live and therefore the senior survivor. Krauchunas and five other “shivering figures still clinging to the floater net” had been picked up by the destroyer escort
Swearer
(DE-186) in the wee hours of December 20. They had already had one near miss that night: they thought they had been spotted in the dark by a passing aircraft carrier, but it had not slowed, and “our hopes dashed away with the disappearing carrier.” When a rescue swimmer from
Swearer
appeared with a lifeline, one of the survivors asked: “What took you so long?” Among those rescued with Krauchunas after forty hours in the sea were Water Tender Charles Wohlleb, Quartermaster Edward Traceski, Torpedoman Al Rosley, and the Boy Scout from New Jersey, Edward Miller, who had been advised by an uncle to join the Navy so he would have a “dry bunk and three hot meals a day.”

There were 24 survivors from
Spence
's crew of 339 men. A short list of 23 other names had been compiled by the survivors identifying shipmates seen to have made it off the ship into the water, suggesting the strong likelihood that most of the 315 missing men had been trapped inside the capsized and rapidly sinking ship.
*

Among the dead was Machinist's Mate Robert Strand, the amateur
bowler whose duty station was in the after engine room, and who had hoped to return home to Pennsylvania and marry his girlfriend, Jane, and own the local bowling alley one day. Like other families, the Strands would not receive the telegram advising them that Bob was “missing while in the service of his country” until January. On February 9, they received a second telegram from the chief of naval personnel stating that “there is no hope for his survival” and explaining that Bob had “lost his life as a result of typhoon on 18 December.” It was only then Jane recalled a strange incident that had happened a week before Christmas. When Bob came home on leave he would sometimes arrive on the train after midnight and go directly to her family's house and throw pebbles at her second-story bedroom window so he could say hello before walking home. When she learned the date of
Spence
's loss and Bob's death, Jane remembered being awakened that night by “pebbles striking the window.” Thinking it might be Bob surprising everyone by making it home for the holidays, she had jumped up and looked out her window. Not seeing anyone, she had returned disappointed to bed but had a difficult time getting back to sleep. Only now—and for as long as she lived—was Jane certain it
had
been Bob at her window that night, saying goodbye.

With the pilothouse of
Cascade
again crowded with survivors, Krauchunas read his narrative. He told of
Spence
being down to 10 percent fuel capacity as of 4:30
P.M.
on December 17, but at that time “no attempt was made to ballast the ship because the captain, James Andrea, thought it possible we could fuel that evening”; indeed,
Spence
had been left with the fueling group for that purpose. An attempt to fuel alongside an oiler was made at about 5:30
P.M.
, but after “10 or 15 minutes the lines parted.” Still another unsuccessful attempt was made “before darkness set in,” said Krauchunas. After a “lengthy informal discussion over the TBS” between various ship commanders, it was decided to fuel the destroyers in the morning. “From this decision,” Krauchunas went on, “I would say that our captain did not attempt to take on any ballast. The ship was not in danger of turning over, nor was there any thought in that line. Normal routine was carried on through the night.”