Down to the Sea Page 3
Flying his three-star flag on Enterprise was Vice Admiral William F. Halsey Jr., commander of a task force consisting of the 20,000-ton carrier, three heavy cruisers, and nine destroyers. Pugnacious, charismatic, and unpredictable, often all at once, Halsey was a 1904 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he had excelled in athletics—lettering in football as a hard-nosed fullback—but not in scholarship. At graduation, he ranked forty-third in a class of sixty-two. (A midshipman’s class ranking is the product of a complex calculation that takes into account not only academic marks but also aptitude, leadership abilities, deportment, and adjustment to the Navy. This class number follows an officer throughout his naval career and determines his seniority in the service among other Academy graduates, including his own classmates.)* Halsey spent twenty-two of the next twenty-three years of sea duty in destroyers, known as “tin cans,” he would explain, because the 3/8-inch steel-plated hulls were “too thin to turn even a rifle bullet.” For sheer length of service in one type of ship, Halsey’s time in destroyers was a record unmatched by most naval officers, given the prevailing notion that diversified seagoing duty was indispensable for career advancement. Recognizing the emerging importance of aviation, Halsey, already a captain, earned his naval aviator wings in 1935 at age fifty-two, although he did not find the year-long course easy. Given both poor eyesight and a demonstrated lack of hand-eye coordination, he “never mastered any [aerial] stunt that took delicacy.” After flight school, Halsey was given command of the aircraft carrier Saratoga. Since 1940, he had commanded all the Pacific Fleet’s carriers and their air groups.
Halsey proudly claimed a long lineage of “seafarers and adventurers, big, violent men, impatient of the law, and prone to strong drink and strong language.” No doubt he would have fit in at any ancestral reunion. “There are exceptions, but as a general rule I never trust a fighting man who doesn’t smoke or drink,” he stated with all sincerity. Now fifty-nine and graying, Halsey still displayed a “fighting-cock stance and barrel chest,” along with “beetle brows [that] embodied the popular conception of an old sea dog.”
At 6:00 on the morning of the sneak attack, Halsey had ordered eighteen of Enterprise’s planes to fly ahead to land at Ford Island. After the planes were launched, Halsey went below to his quarters, shaved, bathed, and put on a clean uniform. He then joined his flag secretary, Lieutenant Douglas Moulton, at breakfast. They were on their second cup of coffee when the phone in the flag wardroom rang. Moulton answered it. Seconds later, stricken, he turned to Halsey.
“Admiral, the staff duty officer says he has a message that there’s a Japanese air raid on Pearl!”
Halsey leaped to his feet. “My God, they’re shooting at our planes!”
Although based on incomplete information, Halsey’s concern was not outlandish. Enterprise’s planes were fired on by anxious U.S. gunners at Pearl Harbor who mistook them for another wave of enemy aircraft. Five planes were shot down and three pilots were killed, including Ensign Eric Allen, who bailed out of his crippled fighter over the harbor channel near Pearl City and was shot as he drifted down in his parachute.
December 8, 1941
At 4:30 P.M., Enterprise entered the Pearl Harbor channel.
From the flag bridge in the island that towered above the flight deck, Halsey and his staff officers watched solemnly as they passed “scene after scene of destruction”—smoking hulks that had once been proud U.S. warships. It did not take long for Halsey to “see enough to make me grit my teeth.”
As they proceeded up channel along the northwest side of Ford Island, “the worst sight” for Halsey was the capsized Utah, sunk at the berth Enterprise would have occupied that Sunday morning had weather conditions not delayed his task force. But there was more—the oily black vapors that hung over the harbor like a shroud, and the pungent stench of burned flesh.
Along with the commensurate loss of life, the major warships of the Pacific Fleet and its home port lay in ruins, and a dangerous and unpredictable enemy was somewhere over the horizon with little in the way of naval forces between Tokyo and the West Coast of the United States.
The admiral’s staff officers heard the shaken Halsey mutter: “Before we’re through with ’em, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell.”
Two
BATH, MAINE
October 27, 1942
Near the mouth of the Kennebec River, 15 miles northeast of Portland, the yard whistle sounded at 3:40 P.M. at the Bath Iron Works, Maine’s largest private employer. More than a hundred workers stopped what they were doing and assembled in front of a bunting-draped platform at the bow of a sleek gray warship aground in one of the yard’s construction berths, over which towered a massive crane that could lift as much as 220 tons.
The purpose of the ceremony was threefold: the first wartime observance of Navy Day—intended to acquaint the public with the Navy through parades and open houses—since its inception in 1922 on the birthday of the late president and ardent Navy supporter Theodore Roosevelt; the presentation of the Army-Navy “E” (for excellence) pennant to the shipbuilding plant; and the launching of the yard’s newest destroyer, built in five months and one week.*
On the stand where the official party had gathered, Bath mayor Walker C. Rogers took the podium. “Our Navy has suffered some serious losses, and also has many outstanding victories to its credit.” The men of the fleet, he went on, “are grimly determined to repay our enemies for their vindictive acts against us. It is the recognized duty of the men and women of Bath Iron Works to continue their fine labors in producing destroyers of the highest type as expeditiously as possible.”
Bath had been a shipbuilding center since colonial times; the first English-built ship in North America was launched from this shore. Bath Iron Works (established 1823) had been building fighting ships of steel dating back to 1891, when the gunboat Machias (PG-5) slid down the ways to mark completion of the first steel vessel built in Maine. At the turn of the century the shipyard started building the U.S. Navy’s new torpedo boats, and soon it gained a reputation for producing sturdy seagoing vessels. The complimentary term “Bath boats” stuck even in a navy that traditionally called vessels ships, not boats. From those small torpedo boats—designed to sink larger vessels with self-propelled torpedoes—evolved the bigger, well-armed, and speedy destroyers of World War II, which would become the fighting greyhounds of the sea. Destroyers were universally considered the most versatile vessel in any fleet—no admiral believed he ever had enough of them—serving in roles as diverse as fleet and convoy escort, screening and patrols, gunfire support, radar pickets, submarine hunting, and independent strike forces, often doing battle with larger vessels. And any new destroyer built here—a prized Bath boat—was considered “the Stradivarius of destroyers.”
An account in the Bath Daily Times of the day’s ceremony at the shipyard noted that “throughout…could be felt the spirit of gravity and determination which seems to be settling over the people of this nation, a feeling which has not been lightened by the latest news from the Solomons.”
Indeed, as new ships were being built, others were being sunk. Off the Solomon Islands in the southwestern Pacific the previous day, the aircraft carrier Hornet (CV-8), which four months earlier had participated in the U.S. victory at the Battle of Midway, during which the four Japanese carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor were sent to the bottom along with most of their planes and experienced naval aviators, was so badly damaged by dive-bombing and torpedo-plane attacks that the ship had to be abandoned and sunk.
When the speeches ended, Mrs. Eben Learned stepped forward with a raffia-covered bottle of champagne in her kid-gloved hands. Wrapped against the autumn chill in a black cashmere coat with a Persian lamb collar, she wore a smart hat with a velvet bow and ostrich feathers placed forward on her forehead, the style of the season. A handsome and confident figure, she smashed the bottle with authority against the sculpted bow. The new ship’s sponsor was the great-granddaug
hter of the ship’s namesake, Captain Robert T. Spence (1785–1826), who during the War of 1812 successfully defended Baltimore harbor against a powerful British fleet.
Spence was the twelfth Fletcher-class destroyer launched at Bath since Pearl Harbor.* A third again as large as their immediate predecessors (the 1,400-ton Farragut class), the 2,100-ton Fletcher-class ships (fueled and fully loaded, they weighed 3,000 tons) were “fast, roomy, and capable of absorbing enormous punishment.” At 376 feet in length, Spence was longer than a footfall field but with a narrow beam of only 39 feet. Two General Electric steam turbines on two shafts provided 60,000 horsepower and a rated top speed of 35 knots (in excess of 40 miles per hour). The Fletcher-class ships, with enclosed gun mounts and partial armor over vital spaces, were essentially seagoing gun platforms set atop thin-hulled power plants. In addition to five 5-inch deck guns and four mounted .50-caliber machine guns, Spence had four twin 40 mm and six 20 mm weapons, which could lay down a lethal blanket of antiaircraft fire, and carried ten torpedoes and racks of 300-pound and 600-pound depth charges.
Launches at Bath were tightly run affairs, and this one was no different. They were carefully timed during slack water at high tide, when there was no strong current to carry the new vessel—as yet without machinery, controls, or crew—into the nearby twin-spanned Route 1 bridge over the Kennebec.
Released from her restraints, the ship slid down the ways, slowly at first, then building up speed. Plunging into the water for the first time, the destroyer sent up an enormous splash, then rose and shook as the spectators ashore cheered and whistled. Her momentum carried Spence to midriver, where two tugboats waited adjacent to the bridge to collar the drifting vessel. Such was the frenetic schedule of wartime shipbuilding that a huge crane held the keel of the next ship to be built, ready to swing it into place on the now-empty ways.
“We will fight them as well as you build them,” Chief Quartermaster R. E. Furry, representing “the enlisted men of the United States Navy,” had promised the onlookers from the platform shortly before the launching.
A new warship had been born, and she was soon to join the fight.
On March 26, 1943, six U.S. Navy warships—the heavy cruiser Salt Lake City, the light cruiser Richmond, and four destroyers—were strung out in a scouting line 180 miles west of Attu, at the farthest end of the Aleutian Islands, and 100 miles south of the Komandorski Islands, a group of treeless Russian islands set in the Bering Sea east of Kamchatka Peninsula. In the vanguard of the 6-mile-long column was the destroyer Coghlan, with Monaghan in the rear. They were making 15 knots and zigzagging. The air temperature hovered around freezing, and the water temperature was 28 degrees.
Nine months earlier, the Japanese had invaded the Aleutians—a chain of more than 300 small volcanic islands extending for 1,200 miles from Alaska to Kamchatka—capturing Attu and Kiska Islands. While the Japanese had no plans to invade Alaska, and U.S. strategists had ruled out attacking Japan via this isolated northern route, this region of “perpetual mist and snow” would become a costly sideshow in the war in the Pacific, with neither side willing to relinquish it to the other.
The six American warships formed a task force under the command of Rear Admiral Charles H. McMorris, who flew his flag in Richmond. For several days they had been patrolling on a north-south line to prevent the Japanese from reinforcing and supplying their garrisons on Attu and Kiska.
As the crystalline Arctic morning broke, light winds blew from the southeast and a gently heaving sea sent an occasional wave swishing over Monaghan’s bow. Visibility was excellent; lookouts on the bridge and forecastle could observe fish broaching miles away. Just as the crew finished morning chow and was preparing to set the morning watch (8:00 to noon), the lead ships in the column made radar contact on five enemy vessels bearing due north, ranging between 8 and 12 miles.
Lookouts and radar operators determined the vessels to be two transports or cargo carriers screened by two destroyers and a light cruiser. On the flag bridge of Richmond, McMorris anticipated a “Roman holiday”—sinking soft-target auxiliaries while outgunning a few escorts.
In Monaghan’s fire room, Fireman 2nd Class Joseph J. Candelaria, nineteen, of Bakersfield, California, who had been aboard ship fourteen months, still found himself “just thrilled by the power surge” of a destroyer whenever the throttle man in the engine room opened it up when the bridge rang up flank speed. It wasn’t just the increased speed but the sound that came with it. On a Farragut-class destroyer, the four fire rooms, which each housed a boiler, were pressurized to prevent blowback from the fireboxes; the forced-air blowers providing the air to the fire rooms were mounted in pairs on the main deck, port and starboard. When the speed increased, the boilers gulped air in huge quantities. To meet the demand, the blowers rapidly “revved up to a high-pitched whine that could be heard throughout the ship.”
Of Italian and Mexican heritage, the handsome, dark-haired Candelaria, with a likeness to screen star Ramón Novarro, had dropped out of high school and enlisted ten days after Pearl Harbor. Only days later he was saying farewell to his mother and father, three brothers, a sister, an uncle, and assorted cousins on the platform of the Bakersfield depot as he boarded a train for San Diego. Following boot camp, Candelaria caught a Navy freighter bound for Hawaii to meet Monaghan at Pearl Harbor in January 1942.
As Monaghan sped up to join the task force, Candelaria manned the oil burners that fed the boiler. Supervising the fire room operation was Chief Water Tender Martin Busch, an old sea dog who mesmerized young sailors with his story of escaping from the battleship Oklahoma, which in the first twenty minutes at Pearl Harbor was hit by three torpedoes and rolled over until her masts touched bottom, taking more than 400 sailors to their deaths.
“Cut ’em in!” Busch yelled to Candelaria, who opened more burners to spray oil into the fire so added steam could be generated and superheated to 850 degrees Fahrenheit before being directed into the geared turbines.
Word passed among Monaghan’s crew that the task force was closing on some enemy freighters and an attack was imminent. From the sound of it, Candelaria thought the action would “all be over in a few minutes. Duck soup.”
As the range between the two forces decreased, new reports reached McMorris. Any hope of pouncing on an overmatched enemy soon vanished as one Japanese heavy cruiser was sighted, then a second—followed by two additional light cruisers. When the enemy ships were all accounted for, the U.S. ships were outnumbered two to one. At that point, the Japanese warships turned to engage, while their two transports headed in another direction.
At 8:40 A.M., enemy cruisers opened fire from 12 miles away, straddling Richmond with salvos that caused 60-foot-high waterspouts.
Realizing there was now slim hope of catching the freighters, and fearing unacceptable losses if he engaged the superior enemy force, McMorris ordered his ships to retire at high speed. With the Japanese in pursuit of the fleeing U.S. ships, the two forces continued to slug it out through several course changes, which found the Americans heading away from their nearest Aleutians base at Adak (600 miles away), from which they could have expected air support by land-based aircraft, and toward a Japanese base at Paramushiro at the southern tip of Kamchatka (400 miles away). If that wasn’t bad enough, the Japanese were making a couple of knots more speed than the U.S. ships and were gaining.
At 9:10 A.M., an enemy shell landed on Salt Lake City amidships, followed ten minutes later by another hit on her quarterdeck. It was clear the Japanese were aiming to take out the largest U.S. ship. The cruiser fought on valiantly with some fancy shooting, landing 8-inch shells squarely on the decks of two Japanese warships.
At 10:02 A.M., Salt Lake City’s steering gear failed, restricting course changes to only 10 degrees and limiting her ability to zigzag to thwart enemy gunners. During the next forty minutes, the cruiser took two more direct hits, which left her after engine room flooded. As engineers counterflooded to correct the ship’s list, they accid
entally let water into the fuel oil, which extinguished the burners and stopped the production of steam. A few minutes before noontime, Salt Lake City went dead in the water, leaving the cruiser with her crew of 612 men a “sitting duck” with “little chance” against the closing enemy. A smoke screen was ordered, and the destroyers released from their stacks thick columns of black smoke to obscure the big warship—now a stationary target—from enemy gunners.
To buy his fire room crews time to restart the burners, Salt Lake City’s commanding officer, Captain Bertram J. Rodgers, asked McMorris to order the destroyers to unleash a torpedo attack on the advancing enemy, and the admiral complied. Any admiral would trade a destroyer for a cruiser, which came as no secret to fleet destroyermen, who knew their smallish ships were “expendable” in such situations. The destroyers Monaghan, Bailey, and Coghlan—after hours of steaming with their sterns to the enemy force—now reversed course. In a “magnificent and inspiring spectacle,” they charged at flank speed toward two Japanese heavy cruisers 17,000 yards distant.
Monaghan had come close to making a similar sacrifice during the Battle of Midway in June 1942. After being struck by several enemy torpedoes, the aircraft carrier Yorktown lost power and went dead in the water. The crew abandoned the badly listing ship, but the carrier somehow stayed afloat through the night. The next morning a 170-man salvage party went aboard in a last-ditch effort to save the vessel. Brought alongside was the destroyer Hammann, which tied up to the crippled carrier’s starboard side to furnish pumps and electrical power. Shortly after 3:00 P.M., a Japanese submarine lurking nearby released a salvo of torpedoes that churned toward Yorktown’s starboard beam. Standing lookout watch on Monaghan’s bow, Candelaria spotted the white wakes in the water. He looked up toward the bridge, where he saw standing on an outside platform Lieutenant Commander William Burford, who had earned the nickname “Wild Bill” as a result of his aggressive attack on the submarine at Pearl Harbor. Before Candelaria could sound the alarm, another lookout yelled, “Torpedoes!” Almost immediately, Monaghan sped up. To his disbelief, Candelaria realized Burford was trying to maneuver Monaghan into the path of the torpedoes to keep the aircraft carrier from being hit. Had he succeeded, Candelaria knew, the bow would have been blown off and “I wouldn’t be here,” but the spread of torpedoes missed Monaghan. Two impacted Yorktown, sealing her fate, and a third struck Hammann amidships, breaking the destroyer’s back in a fiery explosion and causing her to sink in less than a minute, killing many of her crew.