Down to the Sea (9 page)

By the time Guam was finally secured two weeks later at a cost of 3,000 American lives,
Monaghan
was steaming for Puget Sound Navy Yard at Bremerton, Washington, to undergo a scheduled major overhaul.

Monaghan
floated into dry dock midafternoon on August 14, 1944, and shipyard workers began pumping out the seawater. Within two hours the destroyer was riding high and dry on keel blocks, receiving all shipboard power and fresh water from cables and hoses attached to the dock. As the crew hoped, twenty days' leave was granted to nearly half of the enlisted crew, and when they returned the others would be allowed to go home on leave as well.

Among the first group to leave was Fireman 1st Class Evan Fenn, twenty, of Pomerene, Arizona. Fenn, a sturdy cowpoke type raised around livestock on his family's 40-acre grain and alfalfa farm, was working in construction “when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.” He and a buddy had hightailed it 50 miles to Tucson to join the Navy but found the service had “filled their quota.” Not long after, Fenn followed his father to Utah. After working in a Provo steel mill, Fenn joined a crew building several 200-foot smokestacks, and while he was not keen on heights, he found it easy to get used to because they “started at the ground and worked up.” When he received his draft notice, Fenn again tried the Navy and was accepted. He went to boot camp in May 1943 and boarded
Monaghan
at Pearl Harbor three months later. His first impression was of a “good ship” that had been kept “pretty busy” in the war. Nothing had happened in the past year to change his mind on either count.

Their second day in dry dock, 114 enlisted men in dress blues stepped one at a time or in small groups onto
Monaghan
's quarterdeck, saluted the junior officer of the deck, then the U.S. flag on the fantail, and departed.

For many of them, it would be their last visit home.

Since coming aboard
Hull
shortly after Guadalcanal, Michael “Frenchy” Franchak, now a radarman 3rd class, who had been struck on his first liberty in the tropics at the sight of gaming cocks fighting in the street, had in the past year seen men, ships, and planes engage in similar struggles to the death.

One incident that proved difficult for Franchak to shake was a mercy mission to Espiritu Santo to pick up 200 wounded Marines and transport them to a naval hospital in Suva. Each crew member was ordered to clear his rack and go topside in order to make room below for the wounded, which included “quite a few amputees,” along with doctors and nurses. The ship was so overcrowded there was hardly room to get through the narrow
passageways. For the wounded, the 800-mile trip turned into a “murderous journey in sweltering heat” from which there was no relief, and some died en route.

For
Hull
's crew, more nightmarish memories ensued.

On the day
Monaghan
was covering the Tarawa invasion in November 1943,
Hull
had the same assignment at Makin Island, also in the Gilbert Islands. Unlike Tarawa, Makin was lightly defended—the 800 enemy defenders were overrun by 6,500 U.S. troops. The snappy radio message sent by Major General Ralph C. Smith, commander of the U.S. Army's 27th Infantry Division, on November 23—“Makin taken!”—was quoted in newspaper headlines across America announcing the first capture of a Japanese-held island. Although fewer than eighty American troops were killed at Makin, many times more that number of sailors went to their fiery deaths in full view of
Hull
the morning after Makin's capture.

Hull
and three other destroyers had formed an antisubmarine screen around three escort carriers. Shortly before sunrise, a “dim, flashing light”—which turned out to be “a float light” dropped by an enemy plane—was reported on the water's surface not far away. One destroyer went to investigate, leaving “a hole in the already thin screen” and “presenting a perfect target” for the submerged Japanese submarine
I-175
.

That morning,
Hull
sonarman Pat Douhan, the California Irishman who had worked on a seismographic crew before enlisting, awakened early with “an uneasy feeling.” Looking at his watch, he knew the crew would soon be called to general quarters prior to the carriers beginning flight operations. He decided to dress and head for the bridge, where he served during battle stations as the captain's talker—conveying the skipper's orders to various sections of the ship over a sound-powered telephone, which meant he had to be calm, reliable, and clear-spoken even in the midst of battle. Coming from below, Douhan had just emerged from the hatchway to the main deck when the escort carrier
Liscome Bay
(CVE-56) “blew up in front of me.” By now Douhan had seen and heard his share of blasts and explosions, “but never one that big,” which looked more like an ammunition dump going up than a ship.

When
Liscome Bay
was hit at 5:13
A.M.
by a single torpedo amidships, a “column of bright orange flame” shot a thousand feet in the air. Within seconds, bombs lined up on the flight deck detonated, and with a “mighty roar the carrier burst apart as though she were one great bomb,” tossing high in the air “men, planes, deck frames and molten fragments.” Ships in the vicinity were showered with “fragments of steel, clothing, and human flesh.” Commissioned only a few months earlier,
Liscome Bay
's first battle proved to be her last. Twenty-three minutes after being hit, the doomed ship “flared up for the last time and sank hissing.” Those who made it off the sinking carrier into the water found themselves immersed in a “spreading pool of burning oil.”

Hull
, which had closed on the burning carrier before she sank, now “entered the oil slick” and lowered her whaleboat to search for survivors, many of whom were in “frightful condition, with shattered limbs, internal hemorrhages, head concussions and horribly disfiguring burns.” Within minutes,
Hull
's whaleboat was filled with survivors, most of them “thickly covered…by viscous, stinging fuel oil.” Boats from other ships joined
Hull
in the rescue operation; in all, 272 survivors were pulled from the water, while 644 of their shipmates—including task group commander Rear Admiral Henry M. Mullinnix (number one in his Annapolis class of 1916) and
Liscome Bay
commanding officer Captain Irving D. Wiltsie—lost their lives that morning.
*

Back at Pearl Harbor two weeks later,
Hull
's crew was called to quarters on December 8, 1943, for a change-of-command ceremony, with Lieutenant Commander Charles W. Consolvo, thirty-two, a dark-haired, blue-eyed Virginian and graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, taking over. Although he had finished in the bottom 15 percent of his Annapolis class (1935), Consolvo was already carving out a reputation as a highly effective and charismatic officer. In his previous assignment—as executive officer of the
Fletcher
-class destroyer
Ammen
(DD-527)—Consolvo had received outstanding marks in his latest fitness report for his “ability to command” and “ship handling.” Asked in the same report for his preference of next assignment, Consolvo wrote: “Remain in destroyers—Pacific Fleet.” During Consolvo's tenure as
Ammen
's second in command, the destroyer participated in the capture of Attu, for which the commander of amphibious operations in the Pacific had commended the ship's officers and crew for their “splendid contribution…to the accomplishment of the mission,” as well as the occupation of Kiska and “task force sweeps and ocean escort operations in North Pacific, Bering Sea and Aleutian Areas.” Consolvo had previously served as gunnery officer on the destroyer
Anderson
(DD-411), during which he had the unusual assignment of firing on another U.S. warship. Operating with the aircraft carrier
Hornet
(CV-8), notable for launching the Doolittle Raid from her flight deck (sixteen U.S. Army B-25 bombers led by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle in their raid on Tokyo) and participating in the victorious Battle of Midway,
Anderson
was ordered to sink the abandoned
Hornet
when the carrier was badly damaged during the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands in October 1942.

Aboard
Hull,
it soon became apparent that the seasoned Consolvo had a talent that did not come naturally to every commanding officer—in addition to his athletic parlor trick of “holding a broomstick in his hands and jumping over it forwards and backwards without letting go.” Consolvo was skilled at the training of junior officers to become competent ship handlers and qualified “officers of the deck under way,” capable of operating a vessel at sea in the absence of the captain from the bridge. Consolvo was a bit “didactic” by nature, which aided his tutorial role. To teach others, it also helped that he was a good ship handler, and in that arena Consolvo soon demonstrated his impressive abilities.

Consolvo showed his touch at the conn the first time he brought
Hull
alongside another ship at sea, which Navy vessels often did to take on fuel and supplies. Many commanding officers exhibited overriding caution when approaching a tanker or supply ship for an underway replenishment, a “high-stress situation” for everyone from the bridge down to the engine room given the potential for a collision. Consolvo
was bolder than most skippers, but he also knew what he was doing. Consolvo would overtake the supply vessel from the rear with unusual rapidity, approaching at two-thirds or full speed.
*
Then he threw the engines into reverse. At the right moment—this was a combination of experience and feel—he ordered ahead one-third, bringing
Hull
alongside the other ship on a parallel course. Consolvo's string of orders to the helmsman and engine room was clear, timely, and precise. Soon, the two ships—with lines tethering them together—were steaming along in unison. Done right, this high-speed maneuver was like “a car traveling at sixty miles an hour as it approaches a parallel parking space,” and the driver slamming on the brakes and pulling into the spot “cleanly, without an inch to spare.” Consolvo's deft handling of the old, prewar destroyer was an amazing sight to behold—awing even other ship captains—and something
Hull
's crew soon took pride in.

Ensign Lloyd G. Rust Jr., twenty-four, of Wharton, Texas (50 miles southwest of Houston), came aboard
Hull
on December 9, 1943—the day after Consolvo assumed command. Signing up right after Pearl Harbor for the Navy's V-7 program, in which college students were allowed to continue their education and receive commissions upon graduation, Rust, a pre-law major, graduated from the University of Texas in August 1942 and received a deferment to study for the state bar exam to be given in three months. Upon taking the exam, he was ordered to active duty in December and sent to U.S. Naval Reserve Midshipman School on the shore of Lake Michigan at Chicago's Northwestern University, which during the war would train nearly 26,000 naval officers—including a future PT boat commander named John F. Kennedy—thereby earning the nickname “Annapolis by the Lake.”

For Rust, a solid six-footer with brown hair and eyes to match, and a
gregarious nature that included a Texas-size laugh that shook “his whole body and could be heard across a room,” it was not only his first Christmas in uniform and away from home but also his first trip outside his “beloved” Lone Star state. Any pangs of homesickness were eased by his meeting and beginning a serious romance with Dee Dee Wrigley, the attractive scion of America's leading chewing-gum family, with whom he spent the holidays.
*

Although possessing excellent study habits forged by the rigors of law school, Rust found at Midshipman School a curriculum crammed with complex subjects such as celestial navigation, ordnance, and seamanship. For example, one had to solve problems involving math and geometry just to grasp the principles upon which celestial navigation is based. Yet in a scant few months, the Midshipman School turned out newly minted ensigns ready for the fleet. The same process took four years at Annapolis—the main reason for the resentment that graduates of the Naval Academy harbored toward the “ninety-day wonders.” After graduation, Rust went to antisubmarine warfare school in San Diego, then to Pearl Harbor for a brief stint as a decoder—until the Navy finally agreed with him that he was a terrible typist—before being assigned as assistant to a commodore embarked on the destroyer
Phelps
(DD-360) in Alaskan waters. Not long after, Rust received a card in the mail notifying him that he had passed the state bar examination. After years of hard work to become a lawyer, which had always been “so important” to him, he had made it—yet Rust did not feel like celebrating. After all, he was in the middle of a war with no end in sight, and had already seen enough to know there was no guarantee he would “make it home alive,” let alone ever step into a courtroom as a barrister.

It did not take long for Rust to form an opinion of his new commanding officer on
Hull
. Rust found Consolvo to be a “tremendous seaman” and “100 percent competent.” Consolvo let it be known he believed
it “his duty to teach every man on the ship as much as he could,” and that if he was successful it would not only “help the Navy” but also assist “the war effort and the whole country.” Consequently, if they were not in a “serious situation,” Consolvo often stepped aside at the conn and let his junior officers “handle the ship” so they could gain experience. Rust and the other officers knew they had “a whole lot to learn,” but they did not find it a chore to be taught by Consolvo. Quite the contrary, they found it “a privilege to talk to him for five minutes about anything.” As for the enlisted men, Consolvo “never treated them differently than the officers” and showed that every man regardless of rank was important to him. This went far toward building good morale on
Hull,
where some of the officers and enlisted men became friends, talking about wives or girlfriends, families, home, hopes, and dreams as they stood their round-the-clock watches side by side at various stations on the ship.

Another of the young officers Consolvo set out to mentor was Lieutenant ( j.g.) Greil I. Gerstley, twenty-three, a five-foot-eleven, slender Philadelphian with a charming smile, dark curly hair, and “Jewish movie-star good looks.” Prepping at William Penn Charter School and graduating in 1941 from Cornell University, where he was president of Zeta Beta Tau—and known with other “natty ZBTs” as models of the “urbane, suave, genteel” man—Gerstley had grown up in a “privileged environment in terms of money and social status in Philadelphia's Jewish community.” His father had made a fortune in liquor distribution and securities, and his mother came from a prominent Montgomery, Alabama, merchant family named Greil—hence his rather unusual first name. Gerstley, who had taken two years of Army ROTC in a field artillery unit at Cornell, applied for a commission in the Naval Reserve shortly after Pearl Harbor. In the months since his college graduation, Gerstley had been working as a clerk in his father's securities firm, which held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. It was no secret that his father was grooming his son to take over the family's businesses; however, any such talk would have to wait, for young Gerstley was eager to offer his “services to the country in this time of need.” Writing
recommendation letters to the Navy were a Cornell English professor (“a young man of lively personality, good intellectual ability, and dependable moral character”), Cornell's director of public information (“member of an old American family, steeped in the finest traditions of our land…his loyalty and dependability can be counted on 100 percent”), and a justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania (“unimpeachable integrity…has physical courage, is ambitious to duty…a fine specimen of young American manhood”). Commissioned in March 1942, Gerstley wound up at Northwestern's Midshipman School, too. Upon graduation, he drove a new Chrysler sedan to San Francisco on the first leg of a journey that took him nearly halfway around the world to meet his ship. The greenhorn ensign caught up with
Hull
in September 1942, losing his cover on deck to a stiff breeze and watching forlornly as his cap drifted in the water between the ship and pier. Notwithstanding that rookie move, Gerstley was soon writing glowing reports to friends and family about the Navy and his ship: “I am getting an enormous kick out of the Navy with plenty of thrilling experiences and fascinating times daily” and “I wouldn't swap destroyer duty for anything else, except maybe for subs, but the folks wouldn't like the latter.” At various times, Gerstley handled myriad duties on
Hull
—including gunnery, communications, and navigation—and his superiors found him to possess “good judgment” and a “cheerful disposition.”