Down to the Sea Read online

  Six

  When their Alaskan duty ended in fall 1943, Monaghan’s crew returned to Pearl Harbor for a month of liberties on the beaches and in the bars of Honolulu while their ship underwent routine maintenance. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel had been taken over by the Navy, and some of the crew were able to spend a day or two at a time ashore. However, a strict curfew was in place in Hawaii—including a black-out—restricting night travel and activities.

  Even better news soon came for the homesick sailors: assigned to West Coast escort duty, Monaghan returned to the shores of the mainland United States for the first time since the war began. The visit stateside turned out to be all too quick, however, and there was not enough time for men to take leave for visits home.

  After brief port calls in California, Monaghan joined a convoy steaming to Espiritu Santo in the South Pacific. En route with three escort carriers conducting training, Monaghan was called upon to rescue five pilots who ditched at sea during flight operations. They reached their destination on November 5 and waited a week as the largest U.S. invasion force yet assembled for a single operation gathered: 35,000 soldiers and Marines in thirty-six transports, seventeen aircraft carriers, twelve battleships, twelve cruisers, and sixty-six destroyers. Their objective: a little-known atoll named Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands.

  Joseph Candelaria, the Ramón Novarro look-alike who had thought they were “goners” as Monaghan carried out the brazen torpedo attack in the Battle of the Komandorski Islands in March 1943, had been promoted to water tender 3rd class. Now, as they waited for the invasion of Tarawa, Candelaria received word that his mother had died unexpectedly. He immediately requested emergency leave to go home. The captain declined, telling Candelaria that he was “more valuable down in the fire room for the upcoming invasion” and that he was sure his “mother would understand.” Candelaria went away without another word but headed to the fire room and asked Water Tender 3rd Class Louie W. Childers for torpedo juice—denatured alcohol used as fuel for torpedoes mixed with fruit juice to make it palatable.* Childers, a Tennessean who had run moonshine into Georgia until caught and given the choice between jail or the military, usually had a batch ready to go. Not one to let a man drink alone, Childers joined Candelaria, who had taken his first sip of liquor on a troop train with other recruits headed to boot camp and was still a lightweight drinker. He got very drunk “thinking of my mother.”

  Early on the morning of November 20, 1943, Monaghan and other ships fired on Tarawa for nearly three hours before the assault troops started ashore. Although the bombardment and air attacks turned much of the one-square-mile island—at most places no more than a few hundred yards wide—into something resembling moonscape, the troops found stubborn enemy resistance and suffered high casualties, so many that the costly battle would be remembered in military annals as “Bloody Tarawa.” Although costly in lives lost, it was here that the Marines learned how to press the attack and beat the Japanese in their preferred style of warfare: hand-to-hand jungle fighting.*

  Stunned Monaghan sailors stood at the fantail and watched as landing craft, hopelessly hung up on coral reefs and fighting fluctuating tides, dumped out their troops in shallows some 500 yards from shore, requiring them to struggle toward the beach under “murderous fire.” Anyone who saw “the Marines in those shallow waters at Tarawa” would never forget.

  Not far away, the aircraft carrier Independence (CVL-22), one of the new smaller carriers converted from the hulls of other ships (usually cruisers and tankers) to meet the demand for greater naval air power in the Pacific, was attacked by a group of enemy planes zooming low over the water.† Six attackers were splashed, but not before several torpedoes were released, one of which struck the carrier, causing severe damage. Monaghan escorted the crippled carrier to Pearl Harbor, and once at the command center of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, the destroyer received surprising orders.

  As deck gunner Joseph Guio, who had narrowly missed being shot in the head during the running gunfight with an enemy submarine off Kiska, wrote to his younger brother, Bill, in West Virginia, “the President of the United States is sending us to San Francisco to have a good time on Xmas and maybe New Year’s.” Guio, who had advanced to gunner’s mate 3rd class and become one of the most popular members of the crew as a result of his “never-ending cheerfulness and sense of good humor,” knew that they would not be out of action for long. After the holidays, Guio told his brother in the same letter, “we are going to the Solomons to do more fighting.” Fighting was something the veteran crew knew about, as the ship had already earned a string of battle stars. “The Monaghan is known for her fighting crew,” Guio proudly wrote, admitting that “lots and lots and lots of action and some very narrow escapes” had taken their toll.

  Bill, I’ve changed a lot since I left home. I say my prayers every night before going to bed. A night never passes that I don’t pray for myself and all you people back home. There are many nights I lay in bed thinking of you, Mom, Dad, Luck, and [all] my sisters and brothers with big tears running down my weather beaten cheeks. This is a very tough life but I’m willing to fight so this Damn War will end so I can return home to Luck and settle down.

  Don’t ever tell mother and Dad about this letter. It’s best they never know about it. I wouldn’t have them worrying about me for the world…Bill, I want you to call Luck on the telephone then go up to see her and show her this letter. I also want you to take Luck to a movie once a week for me. She will be more than glad to go and see a movie with my kid brother. I’ll provide you with the money.

  Here is ten dollars.

  Love and kisses to all.

  The letter, which Guio posted on the day Monaghan arrived in San Francisco, was so detailed in listing specific battles fought by the destroyer—in violation of military censorship regulations—that he explained to his brother he was “putting a fake address on the envelope so it can’t be tracked.”

  The day before steaming under the Golden Gate Bridge, Monaghan held a change-of-command ceremony at sea, with Lieutenant Commander Waldemar F. Wendt, thirty-one, a 1933 graduate of the United States Naval Academy and a veteran destroyerman, relieving Lieutenant Commander Peter H. Horn, whom the crew had come to like as a “real laid-back guy” known for talking to his young sailors “like a father.” In the months ahead, Wendt would earn a reputation among his fellow destroyer skippers for handling Monaghan “exceptionally well.” As for his crew, they quickly nicknamed him “GQ Wendt” because “every five minutes, every time you turned around,” according to Water Tender 3rd Class Joseph C. McCrane, “he’d sound general quarters, sending all hands to their battle stations.”

  At twenty-seven, McCrane, of Clementon, New Jersey, was older than many of his shipmates. When he enlisted in 1941 shortly after Pearl Harbor, McCrane was informed by the Navy recruiter that “everyone wanted to be in aviation.” Told that if he picked aviation and washed out he could likely end up in the medical corps, which did not interest him, McCrane took the required exams without stating a preference. That found him after boot camp being sent to the Navy’s boiler school, from which he emerged a rated petty officer. His first day on Monaghan in October 1942, McCrane had been assigned one of the dirtiest jobs in the fire room: scraping out the tubes in the big boilers. There were about five or six sailors inside the boilers, “all wrapped up in cloth because of the dirt flying all over the place.” When they emerged for lunch, the guys got to talking, and someone asked McCrane his rate. When he said 3rd class, they looked at him as if he were crazy, explaining that scraping was routinely assigned to nonrated firemen. McCrane shrugged and went back into the boilers to finish the grimy job. Before long, the short, stocky McCrane, “a very religious man,” was being called “Mother McCrane” because of his propensity for doing the right thing and helping others.

  As Joe Guio hoped, he and his shipmates spent New Year’s as well as Christmas seeing the sights in San Francisco, a Navy-friendly town that looked like all the postcards, esp
ecially to wide-eyed bluejackets trying to forget a far-off war as they took their first rides on a Fisherman’s Wharf cable car.

  Monaghan took part in fleet exercises off San Diego the opening weeks of 1944. No one was surprised when the ship was sent westward with a task force for the invasion of the Marshall Islands, the next step in the island-hopping campaign to establish forward bases to support wider operations in the mid-Pacific. After a quick stop at Pearl Harbor for replenishment, the invasion force pushed onward, its objective 2,400 miles away.

  On January 25, during routine flight operations aboard the escort carrier Sangamon (CVE-26)—recently converted from an oil tanker—a returning plane’s tail hook failed to catch any of the recovery wires stretched across the flight deck. Crashing through reinforced barriers, the plane careened into aircraft parked on the forward flight deck. Upon impact, its belly tank tore loose, spewing aviation fuel, which ignited. Although the blaze was quickly brought under control, eight crewmen died and seven were seriously injured. To escape the flames, fifteen other sailors leaped off the flight deck into the sea below.

  Rapidly responding to the red and yellow diagonal signal flag Oscar for “man overboard,” Monaghan carefully searched in the carrier’s wake, rescuing eleven of the thirteen men who were picked up (two were never found), and eventually transferring the survivors to Sangamon.

  Four days later, the invasion of Kwajalein in the heart of the Marshalls began. For a week Monaghan protected a group of carriers launching daily strikes against enemy positions. Offshore, things usually quieted down at night, and when they did someone in Monaghan’s radio shack would often tune in Tokyo Rose and pipe the sentimental music into compartments for the crew to hear. Of course, those torch songs came with propaganda—such as how the Japanese fleet “knows where you boys are and we are going to annihilate you.” More difficult for the men to hear was her chatter about what the women at home might be doing. “Now I’m going to play you something on the lonely side. Think about where you girlfriend is tonight.” And the men, lonely and homesick, did wonder: “Is she dancing the night away while I’m out here?”

  The same day Kwajalein was stormed by Army and Marine units, Majuro Atoll, an undefended island group 300 miles southeast of Kwajalein, was also seized. It was soon turned into a major resupply and repair anchorage for U.S. ships, and Monaghan would visit it often over the next several months while participating in a series of invasions and strikes at places that most Americans had not heard of but which soon became familiar names—Eniwetok, Palau, Yap, Hollandia, Truk. On May 4, Monaghan again put in at Majuro and this time stayed several weeks for routine repairs and maintenance to ready the ship for the upcoming invasion of Guam in the Mariana Islands.

  On May 31, Louie Childers was at the fantail sleeping off another bout with torpedo juice when it started to rain. He was seen to rise and stagger across the wet deck. When Childers didn’t show up for duty in the fire room at 4:00 A.M., Candelaria, now water tender 2nd class and in charge of the morning watch section, didn’t think much of it and assigned another man. The next morning, Childers was still missing and Candelaria had to explain his failure to report Childers’ absence. “I thought he was sleeping it off somewhere,” he said.

  Childers was never seen again. An official investigation would declare him dead a year later, the most likely cause “falling over the side” and drowning, as at the time he went missing Monaghan was moored in a berth in the middle of Majuro harbor with land “over a mile away” and no other ships “closer than 600 yards.” Candelaria was never completely convinced, however, and it “wouldn’t have surprised” him at any time to see “Louie walk in right now because he was streetwise and no one ever got the best of him.” He even pictured Louie having made it back home to the Smoky Mountains, running moonshine.

  Another Monaghan crewman also got a one-way ticket off the ship shortly before the invasion of Guam. As far as Joe McCrane was concerned, it was high time for the young fellow called Sailor. It wasn’t until his older brother, a Marine Corps officer, came aboard and took the youth away that the bureaucratic process was begun to boot the fourteen-year-old out of the Navy. How “they took the kid in the Navy” to begin with McCrane could not figure, since Sailor, who worked in the fire room, “looked like he was fourteen.”

  Arriving off Guam on July 17, Monaghan took up position screening a force of cruisers as they “pounded the enemy’s beach defenses at Agat Bay on the island’s west side.” That night, Monaghan moved close to shore to protect underwater demolition teams as they blasted passages through dangerous reefs for the landing boats. Monaghan then went back to bombarding “all night and all day and all night the next night.” The bone-jarring salvos went on for such a long time they became “monotonous” for the shell-shocked crew; “back and forth, guns flashing.” It would have been worse had they known at the time that the naval bombardment was “not doing much good because the shells would ricochet and bounce off” without killing many of the dug-in defenders, as the soldiers and Marines who hit the Guam beaches on July 21 found out for themselves.

  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.

  Seven

  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.