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The Naval Aviation Ready Room Podcast with Legends and Leaders
Halsey’s Typhoon: The Bull vs. the Barometer
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In the middle of December 1944, the most powerful naval force the world had ever assembled, dozens of warships, a thousand aircraft, the iron fist of American sea power in the Pacific sailed straight into a typhoon. Three ships went to the bottom. Roughly 800Americans died. And the man who gave the orders that put them there was one of the most famous, most beloved, most aggressive admirals in the history of the United States Navy. Ground X31 ready to check 1, 2.
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You know, the big battles, the famous names, the headlines. But what about the stories history forgot? I'm Ryan Keys, host of the Ready Room podcast. And in this special series, Footnotes of History, retired Navy captain Tim Kinsella discusses the obscure, the overlooked, and sometimes downright unbelievable chapters of military history. Here's lucky.
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The sea has given me moments of pure delight and wonder that I'll carry for the rest of my life. It has also given me terror. Pure terror. The sea scares me. And I say that as a career sailor who has seen his share of bad weather. I've ridden out a hurricane and I've flown a helicopter into the heart of a typhoon and a rescue into 30 foot seas and 100 knot wind. It was the only time in my career that I honestly didn't know if I was coming back. So I know just a little bit about what the sea can do. It can hand you the most beautiful thing you'll ever see and in the same breath plunge you into the depths of darkness. And perhaps that's why this story frightens me, because I know how helpless these men must have felt and how afraid. This is a human story, a story of heroism and tragedy, miracle and terrible error and the hubris that put them in harm's way to begin with. So picture it. A seed that has stopped behaving like water and started behaving like geology, mountains of it. 60 and 70ft from trough to crest the wind, shearing the tops clean off at 140 knots until a man can no longer tell where the ocean ends and the sky begins. Now put yourself aboard a destroyer in the middle of it, a ship 340ft long and not much wider than the driveway in front of your house. She's nearly out of fuel, which sounds like a small problem, but it's actually a fatal one because an empty ship is a lightship. And a light ship rides high. And a ship that rides high in a sea like this has nothing to hold her down. She rolls 40 degrees, she hangs in there. She rolls back. She rolls 50, she hangs there a heartbeat longer and the Men on her, boys, Most of them 19, 20 years old, are watching the inclinometer on the bulkhead, the little tilting needle that tells them the angle of the ship. And they're doing arithmetic that no sailor ever wants to do. How far can she go over and still come back? And here's the thing that every man aboard her knows in his bones. A destroyer rolls and she comes back. That is the covenant, the bargain between a tin can and her crew. She goes over. She hangs there for one sickening heartbeat, and then she shoulders her way back up. They have felt her do it a hundred times already that morning. So they wait. They cling to the stanchions and the ladder rails and to one another, and they wait for the rollback. 70 degrees. She's almost on her side. The bulkheads have become the deck. The funnels are almost touching the water. And then a wave throws tons of water against those funnels. The engines flood, the. The lights flicker. The men look at one another with knowing fear in their eyes. Because she's not coming back this time. In the middle of December, 1944, the most powerful naval force the world had ever assembled, dozens of warships, a thousand aircraft, the iron fist of American sea power in the Pacific, sailed straight into a typhoon. Three ships went to the bottom. Roughly 800Americans died. And the man who gave the orders that put them there was one of the most famous, most beloved, most aggressive admirals in the history of the United States. Nav. His name was William Frederick Halsey, and we know him as Bull. And this is the story of the one enemy he could not out fight, out, bluff, or outcharge. So today we're going to discuss a battle in which the United States Navy lost and lost badly, and the enemy never fired a shot. There was no Japanese fleet over the horizon, no torpedoes in the water, no kamikazes screaming out of the sun. The thing that nearly broke the third fleet in December 1944 was the weather. A storm the meteorologists would later christen Typhoon Cobra, and which history has rather unkindly but not unfairly, come to call simply Halsey's Typhoon. There are a lot of questions buried in the story, and I want to lay them out on the table at the start because they are the questions we're going to dig into. Who was this man Halsey? What kind of leader, what kind of personality, sailed an entire fleet into the teeth of a typhoon? Why were they out there at all? What exactly happened in those terrible 36 hours? The ships, the crews, the men in the water? What did it cost. And the question that has irritated naval officers for 80 years, why on earth did Halsey not get fired for it? What did Nimitz and King think? And what did the President think? And what, in the end, did it do to the legend of Bull Halsey? But before we can put a fleet into a storm, we gotta understand the man at the top of it. William Frederick Halsey, Jr. Was born in 1882 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, into a Navy family. His father was a captain. The sea was more or less the family business, and young Bill went off to the Naval Academy in Annapolis fully intending to inherit it. He was not, it must be said, a scholar. He was a football player, a fullback, broad through the shoulders, the sort of young man who solves problems by running directly at them. And if you want a single image to hold your mind for the entire rest of this episode, hold that one. A full back, head down, running directly at the problem. Because that is precisely how Halsey fought a war and is more or less how he sailed into a typhoon. He graduated in 1904, not near the top, and he went into the destroyers. And this matters. So let me dwell on it just for a second. Halsey was by trade and by temperament, a destroyer man. The little ships, the greyhounds. In the First World War, he commanded destroyers on convoy duty in the dangerous waters around the British Isles, hunting U boats, shepherding merchantmen. And he was good at it. Good enough to win a Navy Cross. He loved the destroyers. He understood them in his bones. The way they handled, the way they took a sea, the way a light ship behaves differently from a heavy one. And keep that in your mind, because there's a grim irony in this story, and it's this. The ships that died under Halsey in the typhoon were destroyers, the very type of ship he had spent his youth learning to love and to keep alive. But Halsey was also an aviator. And it's something that people forget about Halsey. He was a latecomer to flight. In the early 1930s, the Navy was building aircraft carriers, and it had a rule, and we've talked about this rule before, and it's a sensible one, that the captain of a carrier ought to be an aviator himself. He ought to understand the thing that he was commanding. Halsey wanted carriers. That was the future of the Navy. So at the age of 51, 52, with eyesight that could charitably be called mature, a lot like mine now, he went to Pensacola. Yes, that Pensacola. And he earned his wings of gold. One of the oldest men ever to do it. He more or less bullied the flight surgeons into passing his eye exam. And that combination is the key to the hold man. A destroyer sailor's instinct for the offensive welded onto an aviator's command of the most powerful offensive weapon of the age, the aircraft carrier. So what was he like? The sailors adored him, and I can't stress that enough, they loved him. The lower deck, the enlisted men, the kids swabbing the decks and feeding the boilers. They absolutely loved Bull Halsey the way fans love a winning manager. He was profane, he was blunt, and he looked with that craggy face and those enormous bushy eyebrows, like a bulldog that had been told some upsetting news. He talked like a man who wanted to win and he did not much care about niceties. There's a famous line he was fond of, his rallying cry early in the war. And I'm going to handle it honestly, because we don't sanitize history. He used to say, kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs. It's ugly. It is the racialized fury of its moment and we should not pretend it was anything else. But it tells you something true about the man. There was no subtlety in him. There was. There was no calculation. There was a furnace where his caution should have been. And early in the war, that furnace was exactly what America needed. In the dark months of 1942, when the news from the Pacific was all defeat, it was Halsey's carriers, the Enterprise, the Hornet, raiding the Marshalls and the Gilberts doing something hitting back. It was Halsey who carried Jimmy Doolittle's B25 bombers within striking range of Tokyo in April of 42, the raid that told a beaten public the war could still be taken to the enemy's front door. And when a reporter asked how the bombers had reached Japan, Roosevelt smiled and said they'd flown from Shangri La, the mythical hidden kingdom. The real Shangri La was the deck of Halsey's flagship. And now here's the fork in the road. And it tells you everything about Halsey's place in the Navy. Just before the Battle of Midway, the hinge of the entire Pacific War, Halsey was struck down not by the enemy, but by his own skin. A savage, stress driven case of dermatitis that put him in a hospital bed, itching and miserable. While the most important naval battle of the century was fought without him. And asked to name his replacement, Halsey named a man almost completely unlike himself, Raymond Spruance. Cool, cerebral, calculating, a real chess Player Spruance won Midway with a calculator where all Halsey was have used a sledgehammer. And for the rest of the war, the navy in effect ran a controlled experiment between two philosophies of command. Spruance, the careful surgeon, and Halsey, the heavyweight brawler, sharing the same fleet, the same ships in alternating turns. And when Spruance had it, they called it the fifth Fleet. And when Halsey had it, the very same ships became the Third Fleet. The same hull numbers, two completely different minds at the helm. By the autumn of 1944, Halsey was a four star admiral, a national hero, his face on the magazine covers, his nickname a household word. And it was in that autumn, just eight weeks before the typhoon, that the brawler in him got the entire fleet into the most controversial mess of his career. And I have to tell you about it because you cannot understand why the typhoon was so dangerous to Halsey's reputation unless you understand what happened in October at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle in history. The Japanese dangled a decoy, a force of nearly empty aircraft carriers deliberately offered up as bait that to lure the aggressive American admiral away from the invasion beaches. And Halsey, head down, ran directly at the problem. He took the entire fast carrier force and charged north after the decoys, leaving the San Bernardino Strait, the back door to the landing beaches wide open. A powerful Japanese battleship force came through that open door and fell upon only a handful of tiny American escort carriers and destroyers. Off Samark, those little ships fought one of the most heroic actions in naval history to survive. And far to the north, a famous agonized message reached Halsey from Nimitz asking where his battleships were. Through a quirk of wartime code padding, the message arrived, reading, where is Task Force 34? The world wonders. Halsey thought the last three words were a sneer from his own commander. He was so enraged, he threw his cap on the deck and he wept. Now, hold that picture, because the point is this. In October 1944, Halsey's defining trait, his headlong aggression, had just been put on trial in the court of professional opinion. Whispers had started. Was the bull too reckless? Did he charge without looking? And then, just two months later, with those whispers still in the air, the sea itself was about to set him an even crueler test. Because this time, the thing he charged at would not bleed, it would not retreat and could not be intimidated. This time it was a typhoon. So in December 1944, why was the third fleet out there at all? The answer is A place called Mindoro. General MacArthur, having returned to the Philippines, was pushing his invasion southward. And on the 15th of December, his troops went ashore on Mindoro, an island close to Luzon, close enough that the airfields there would put American planes within easy reach of Manila. The job of Halsey's fast carriers was to be the umbrella, specifically to suppress the airfields of Luzon, to keep the Japanese kamikazes pinned down on the ground, burning on their runways before they could fly out and dive into MacArthur's transports. The kamikaze had arrived that autumn as the war's newest terror. And the only real answer to it was to smother the airfields from the air day after day, relentlessly. And that relentlessness is the seed of the whole disaster, because relentless flying means relentless fuel consumption. The carriers themselves were large and thirsty, but it was the screen, the destroyers, the little ships forming the protective ring that ran dry first. Destroyers are sprinters, not marathon runners. They carry only so much oil and high speed, steaming through combat operations drinks it fast. But in 16th of December, parts of the screen were getting low. Some destroyers were down toward 15% of capacity. And here's the technical detail that we really want to pay attention to, because it's going to kill men in about 36 hours time. An empty fuel tank is not just an empty tank. On these older destroyers, fuel oil low in the hull acted as ballast. It sat down low and kept the ship's center of gravity where it belonged. Burn it off and the ship rides high and tender top heavy, eager to roll. The standard remedy was to pump seawater into the empty tanks, deliberately flood them to put the weight back. But seawater sometimes fouls the tanks and the captain, hoping to refuel soon, is reluctant to do it because then he has to pump it all out again before he can take on clean oil. So there was always a temptation to wait, to not ballast just yet, to gamble that the oiler was coming. And the oiler was coming, there's no doubt about that. On 17 December, Halsey ordered the fleet to break off and rendezvous with the fueling group, the oilers, the floating gas stations of the fleet under a hard working captain named Jasper Acuff. The plan was simple and routine. Meet up, top off the destroyers, then race back and resume hitting Luzon. The Navy had refueled at sea a thousand times. It was a chore. It wasn't drama, it was just something that the Navy did. Except the sea on the 17th was already getting up. A long heavy swell was rolling in and the wind was freshening and, and when the destroyers came alongside the oilers and tried to pass the fuel hoses across, the ships were pitching and yawning so violently that the hoses snapped. They snapped time and time again. A destroyer would struggle into position, the line would be passed, and a wave would have the two ships apart, and the hose would part and spray oil across the water. Some ships got a little fuel. Most of them got almost none. By midday, the attempt was a shambles and was called off to be tried again the next morning at a new rendezvous point further on, which meant the thirstiest destroyers in the fleet would spend the night of the 17th still nearly empty, still riding high, still unballasted, betting on a calmer dawn. But there was, of course, no calmer dawn coming. There was a typhoon coming. And the great, the haunting question of this whole episode how did the most technologically advanced navy on earth not know it? And here's the thing modern listeners find almost impossible to believe. In December 1944, the United States Navy was sailing essentially blind to the weather. There were no weather satellites. There were more than a decade and a future. There was no radar that could see a storm system whole. There were no aircraft flying dedicated reconnaissance into developing typhoons. That science was in its infancy. What the fleet had was a scattering of weather reports from islands and ships radioed in, plotted by hand on a chart by the fleet aerologist. And from that handful of dots, a man had to guess where a storm was, how big it was, and which way it was going. It was less like reading a map and more like trying to sketch a bowl of fruit in a darkened room. There was an art to it, but a very imprecise art. Halsey's fleet aerologist, his weather officer was Commander George Cosco. And Cosco was working with almost nothing. The storm that became Typhoon Cobra was small, intense, and fast moving. The very worst combination. Because a small storm leaves a small footprint in the scattered weather reports, and a fast one outruns yesterday's guess for a crucial day or more. The fleet's best estimate placed the storm center well to the east and northeast of where it actually was. They thought they knew where the danger lay, and they steered in good faith on courses to refuel and then to get clear of it. And those courses, and this is the cruel heart of it, those very courses chosen to avoid the storm kept carrying the fleet across its path. Every time they maneuvered to dodge, they were dodging toward a phantom, and the real beast was somewhere else closing in on them. There's an old piece of seamanship called Bice, Bulot's law. Stand with your back to the wind, and in the northern hemisphere, the center of the low pressure, the heart of the storm, lies roughly to your left. Any old sailing master knew it. The barometer falling, the wind backing and strengthening the swell marching in from a steady direction. These are the storm announcing himself if you read them. And down on the individual ships, some captains were starting to read them and starting to worry and starting to feel that the official picture being broadcast from the flagship did not match the violence they could feel building under their own keels. But you do not lightly break formation and steam off on your own initiative, away from the commander of the Third Fleet. So they held station, they held formation, and the formation was steaming slowly into a wall. By the small hours of 18 December, the barometers across the fleet were falling off a cliff. And every man who has been to sea knows what a barometer falling like that means. It means it is too late to run. It means whatever you are going to do to save your ship, you should have done it already. It means the thing is actually here. Dawn on the 18th of December was not really a dawn. The sky simply went from black to a sick, bruised gray. The wind, which had been a gale, became something beyond the limits of normal descriptive words. Estimates of the highest wind gusts run as high as 140, 150 knots. That's about 165 miles an hour. At those speeds, the wind picks the tops off the waves and drives the water horizontally, so thick that men on the bridge could not see their own bow. Several officers, veterans of years at sea, said afterward they could not tell where the ocean stopped and the sky began. The barometer and one destroyer fell below 27 inches, a reading so low that many sailors had simply never seen it and at first did not believe their own instruments. And into this, scattered across many miles of howling ocean, was the Third Fleet. Not in neat formation anymore. Formation was a fantasy, but ships fighting individually for their lives. Battleships and fleet carriers. The big ships, the heavy ships took a fearful beating, but had the mass to survive it. It was the smaller ships and above all, the light carriers and the destroyers that were in mortal danger. So let me take you aboard a few of them, because this is where the statistics become human beings. So let's start with the light carriers, the Monterey, the Cowpens, the San Jacinto. Smaller than the great fleet carriers, built on cruiser hulls, they rolled viciously. And on a carrier, a violent roll means the worst thing imaginable. Aircraft breaking loose. Picture the hangar deck, a long enclosed steel cavern packed with parked planes, each one a ton and a half of metal soaked in high octane aviation fuel lashed down with cables and chocks. Now roll that cavern 30 degrees one way and 30 the other. Again and again the lashings part. A plane breaks free and slides across the deck and slams into the next and into the bulkhead and crumples and its fuel tank splits and somewhere there is a spark. And now you have a fire in an enclosed steel box full of fuel and bombs and ammunition on a ship that will not stop rolling. Aboard the light carrier Monterey, that is exactly what happened. Planes tore loose on the hangar deck and caught fire and the fire spread. The ship filled with choking smoke. And for a time it was a genuine question whether the Monterey would survive at all. Damage control parties went into that rolling inferno to fight it. And I want you to hold one image of one of them because of who he turned out to be. There was a young officer aboard the Monterey, a lieutenant, athletic level headed during the height of the crisis. He came up onto the flight deck and the ship gave one of those murderous rolls and his feet went out from under him and he began to slide and across the wet pitching deck toward the edge toward the sea, where a man overboard in that storm was simply a dead man. He slid the entire length of the deck. At the very last instant he managed to drop and catch the steel lip of the catwalk at the deck's edge, just a 2 inch ridge of metal, and it stopped him and he scrambled down to safety. That lieutenant's name was Gerald Ford. 31 years later he would be President of the United States. He came within an ankle's width on that deck of never existing in the history books at all. Down in the hangar, the fight to save her was something close to a vision of hell. The lashings, soaked and strained, were parting one by one with a crack like a rifle shot. And once a single five ton aircraft was loose on that rolling deck, it became a battering ram, careening into the next plane, splitting its tanks, tearing it free so that 1 became 2 and 2 became 4. Men below said the sound was like being shut inside a kettle drum. And into that the damage control parties went with their hoses on a deck heeled 30 degrees where the very wreckage they were fighting was sliding toward them. And the smoke was being drawn down into the fire rooms to choke the men at the boilers. Watching the Monterey smoke from the bridge of the New Jersey, Halsey signaled her captain Stuart ingersoll asking in effect whether he was prepared to abandon ship. Ingersoll's reply was the reply of a man who trusted his crew. He believed they could save her. And they did. In under an hour, at the cost of several men dead and dozens more hurt or overcome by smoke. With every aircraft in the hangar wrecked, the Monterey lived. Her crew saved her, but she was so badly hurt she had to limp out of the war zone for major repairs. And she was not alone. The same scene, loose aircraft, fire men with hoses on a heaving deck with was playing out across the task force almost in unison, like some terrible synchronized performance. Aboard the light carrier Cowpens, the mighty Mu, a Hellcat, tore loose on the flight deck, slammed into the catwalk and caught fire in a wind now strong enough to knock a man flat. Her crew went out onto that open deck into the teeth of the typhoon itself to fight it. And when the burning wreck could not be put out, they did the only thing left and cut it loose and let the sea carry it over the side. The Cowpens lost her air officer that morning, swept overboard as he directed the work. The ship lived, he did not. Aboard the San Jacinto, the hangar deck became a demolition derby. Loose aircraft smashing into one another and tearing open ducts and fittings as she rolled past 40 degrees. And her sailors did a thing that still raises the hair on the back of my neck. They went in amongst the sliding wreckage with lines and cargo nets timing the rolls and lassoed multi ton aircraft on the move like cowboys working inside a crushing machine. And then there's my favorite detail of the whole long day. And it comes from the little escort carrier, Cape Esperance. A fire broke out among the mashed together aircraft on her flight deck. A jeep carrier in a typhoon. The nightmare scenario. And before her crew could even fully come to grips with it, the Typhoon put her it out. The wind and the boarding seas simply tore the fire to pieces and washed it over the side. The storm, it turned out, was an equal opportunity destroyer. It would kill you or it would save you with this very same magnificent indifference. Those were the carriers. Beaten, scorched, stripped of their aircraft, but still afloat. They were in the end the lucky ones because they had the mass to take the beating. And now we come to the ships that did not. The destroyer Spence was a Fletcher, one of the famous hard fighting Fletcher class, the workhorses of the destroyer fleet. She had been part of Arleigh Burke's celebrated squadron, the Little Beavers. She had a proud war record on the morning of the 18th, she was running on fumes, desperately low on fuel, rying high and tender. And her attempts to take on seawater ballast had come too late and too little. As the typhoon took hold, she began to roll and the rolls grew and she lost steering and then lost power. And a destroyer without power in a sea like that cannot keep her bow. Waves and a ship caught broadside to those mountains of water is a ship at the storm's mercy. The Spence rolled over and went down. Of a crew of some 340 men, 24 were eventually pulled from the sea alive. 24. More than 300 men were lost from a single small ship in a single morning. And the enemy was the wind. Then the two Farragut class destroyers, the hull and the Monaghan, older ships and ships with a known vice. Over the course of the war, they had been loaded with more and more equipment. Topside radar, more anti aircraft guns, all of it weight up high, and they had grown top heavy, less stable, more prone to a dangerous role. Light on fuel, top heavy by design, in the worst sea any of them had ever seen. It was a death sentence waiting on the weather. The hull's captain fought her as long as a man could. He tried every combination of engine and rudder to claw her bow back up into the wind. But the typhoon pinned her down, heeled her over on her beam and held her there. And once a ship is held over far enough, the sea pours in through every opening, the funnels, the vents, and the weight of water inside finishes what the wind started. The hull went over and stayed over. Men leapt and were thrown into the water as she rolled. And then she was gone. And they were alone in the storm. And the Monahan. The Monahan breaks your heart if you know her history, because the Monahan was a famous ship, a lucky ship, a ship that had been at the very center of the war from its first minute on the morning of Pearl Harbor. The Monaghan had gotten underway in the chaos and rammed and helped sink a Japanese midget submarine inside the harbor, among the first American blows of the entire war. She had been up Midway in the Aleutians, all through the Pacific. She had survived everything the Empire of Japan could throw at her for three long years. And on the 18th of December, 1944, the sea simply rolled her over and drowned her of her entire crew. Six men survived. Six. A ship that the enemy could never kill. Killed by the weather. Two days before, she might have started home for Christmas. Not every small ship died, and the stories of the ones that survived Are, in their own way, just as harrowing. Because survival was a matter of inches and seconds. The destroyer Dewey rolled by her own inclinometer to 75 degrees. Think about that for a second. 75 degrees is past the point of falling down. It is nearly flat on her side, the masts almost touching the water. The man inside flung against what had once been the bulkheads. Her captain and crew fought her through it. They lost a smokestack torn clean off. They jettisoned Waite, they nursed her. And somehow, each time she hung at that impossible angle, she came back. She came back. The difference between the Dewey and the hull was not courage and it was not seamanship. Both crews had both in abundance. The difference was a margin so thin you could not measure it. The last few degrees of stability that fuel oil low in the hull would have bought and that an empty ship did not have. All across the fleet it was like this. Cruisers and carriers with men injured and washed overboard. Around 150 aircraft lost, torn from their lashings and hurled into the sea or smashed and burned on the carrier decks. Steel bent whaleboats ripped from their davits. Men killed by flying gear, by falls, by fire. Roughly two dozen ships damaged, nine of them seriously, and three destroyers. The Spence, the Hull and the Monaghan simply erased from the order of battle. With the better part of 800American sailors, it was, in terms of ships lost, as if the fleet had fought a major engagement against a powerful enemy. Except there was no enemy, only the storm. Surviving the sinking was not surviving. For the men thrown into that sea from the Spence, the hull and the Monaghan, the ordeal was only beginning. They clung to anything that floated. Cargo nets, scraps of debris, a handful to a life raft built for fewer. The storm did not relent for them. Waves broke over them and tore men away from one another. The fleet, scattered and battered, and not even certain at first how many ships were gone, did not know precisely where to look. And so the survivors drifted through the rest of the 18th, through the night, through the next day. Some of them for two days and more, 50, 60, 70 hours in that open ocean. And in the time they died, one by one in the ways men die in the sea. Exposure as the body's heat bled away into the water, hour after hour, exhaustion, as men, too tired to hold on any longer, simply let go in the dark. Thirst. The terrible irony of dying of thirst while floating in an ocean, and the men who could not bear it and drank the sea water and went mad and saw things and slipped over the side towards the islands that were not there. And the sharks came as sharks do come, drawn by the scene and took men from the edges of the groups. The survivors. Accounts of those rafts are among the hardest things in the literature of the Pacific war. Men holding dying friends so they would not drift off alone. Men giving up their place on a raft, Men praying, men weeping, men going quiet. It is not the storm that haunts the survivor's memoirs. It is the water afterward and the friends who did not last the night. And here, at the very bottom of the story, and the worst of it, this is where I get to tell you about the best of it. Because this is also a story of heroism. And the finest of it belongs to a little ship called a taborer. The taborer was a destroyer escort even smaller than a destroyer, a humble little ocean going minnow commanded by a reserve officer, not a career Annapolis man, a lieutenant commander named Henry Lee Plage. The taborer had taken her own savage beating in the typhoon. She had her mask snapped clean off. And here is what Plage did. As the storm eased, the taberer began to come across men in the water, survivors of the lost destroyers. And Pledge made a decision. He did not steam off to rejoin the fleet, as standing orders might have implied. He stopped. He stayed. And through what was left of the storm and into the night, the taborer hunted for survivors in the dark, heaving sea. And the way they did it was extraordinary. To pull a man from those waves. You cannot just throw a line and hope an exhausted oil soaked man hasn't the strength to grab it or hold it. So the sailors of the Terror tied lines around their own waists and went over the side into that sea again and again, to swim out and physically wrap their arms around a drowning stranger and be hauled back aboard with him. Imagine that. Imagine the courage it takes to do that. Plage maneuvered his crippled little ship with exquisite care, putting her hull between the survivor and the wind so the ship herself made a patch of calmer water, a lee in which a man could be lifted out hour after hour, man after man through the night with searchlights probing the swells. By the time it was over the Tabor, this one small, dismasted destroyer escort had pulled 55 men alive out of the Pacific Ocean. And now the detail that I really enjoy. Pledge, having disobeyed the implied pull of the formation to do this, fully expected to be hauled onto the carpet fort in front of a court martial. When the tower was finally ordered to report to the flagship, Plage steeled himself for a reprimand. Instead, a signal came across from Admiral Halsey himself, a personal, characteristically blunt message of congratulation, calling it a sailorly job well done. Plage received a decoration, his crew received a unit commendation, and the rescue efforts spread. Other ships joined the search once the scale of the loss became clear. But it was Pledge and the Taborer, the smallest ship in the story, who set the example and who pulled the most men back from the dead. When you weigh this whole grim episode, weigh that too. The same storm that exposed the worst failures of judgment at the top, produced at the level of one small ship and one reserve lieutenant commander, about as fine a piece of seamanship and plain human decency and bravery as you will find in the whole war. So now the storm has passed, and the dreadful arithmetic is done. Three ships gone, some 800 men dead, dozens of ships damaged, scores of aircraft destroyed. A blow to the United States Pacific fleet roughly comparable to losing a battle and inflicted entirely by the weather on the watch of the Navy's most famous admiral. Just eight weeks after that same admiral had been quietly criticized for recklessness at Leyte Gulf. The Navy did what navies do. It convened a court of inquiry. The court met the day after Christmas 1944, at the Fleet anchorage of Ulithi, presided over by a tough and respected admiral named John Hoover. And the court did its work seriously. It examined the courses, the weather plots, the orders, the fuel states. And its conclusion was, in the careful language of these things, the devastating and forgiving. In the same breath. The court found that the preonderance of responsibility for the disaster rested with Admiral Halsey. He had been at the top. The fatal courses had been set on his authority. There was no hiding that, and the court did not try to. But, and here's the hinge, the court characterized his errors as, and I'll give you the sense of the language, errors of judgment committed under the stress of war operations and stemming from a commendable desire to meet the requirements of the war. In other words, yeah, he got it wrong, and, yeah, it was his responsibility, but he got it wrong while trying aggressively to do his job in a fog of bad information, not through negligence or cowardice or stupidity. And the court recommended no further disciplinary action, no court martial, no relief from command. Halsey was, in effect, found responsible and simultaneously excused. Which brings us to the question I promised you at the very top, the one that has annoyed a lot of naval officers for the better part of a century. Why wasn't he fired? A junior captain who lost three ships and 800 men to an avoidable error would never have commanded again. Why did the man at the very top walk away with his four stars intact? I think the answer is a tangle of three things, and we need to look at each one. The first is a fog of war itself. The genuine real point. That the weather intelligence was wretched, that Halsey was working half blind, and that punishing an admiral for guessing wrong about a storm nobody could properly see might make every future commander timid in exactly the moments the Navy needed. Boldness. And there's a legitimate principle in there, and it would be unfair not to grant it. The second thing is Chester Nimitz. Nimitz, the commander in chief of the Pacific, was Halsey's boss, his old friend and his protector. It was Nimitz who reviewed the court's findings and Nimitz who declined to press the matter further. But Nimitz was no rubber stamp, and this is important. Rather than crucify Halsey, he did something more useful. He issued a fleet wide letter, a clear eyed, unsparing lessons learned document hammering home the duty of every commanding officer to read the weather himself and to act on his own authority to save his own ship without waiting for permission from above the ballast down when the fuel runs low, to treat the barometer as an order. The thrust of it was a line every mariner should tattoo somewhere. The time to take all measures for ship's safety is while you are still able to do so. Nimitz chose to fix the Navy rather than to hang a man. Whether that was wisdom or favoritism is a question. You can argue both ways, and people have for 80, 85 years. And the third thing is the simplest and the least comfortable. Halsey was a hero, and heroes are useful. By December 1944, Bull Halsey was one of the most famous men in America. His aggression, his profane confidence, his very name were a national morale asset. To relieve him, to publicly admit that the great Bull Halsey had blundered an entire fleet into a typhoon would have handed a propaganda gift to Tokyo and a gut punch to the American public. In the middle of a war still very much being fought, the gruff, cold Admiral Ernest King, the Navy supreme commander in Washington, was reportedly far less forgiving in private than Nimitz. King was not a man who forgave much, but even King recognized the calculus. And the president, President Roosevelt, who valued Halsey as a fighter and a symbol, had no appetite to tear down one of the war's great popular heroes. So the Machinery of accountability ground forward, reached the edge of actually punishing the man at the top. And then, for reasons part principled and part purely practical, stopped. But before we leave the reckoning, I want to give you those 800 men their due. Because the Navy did do something with their deaths. It simply did it at the level of the institution rather than the individual. Some of it was hardware. Out of December the 18th came an apparatus that had not existed before. Weather reconnaissance aircraft flown deliberately into developing storms. New weather stations strung across the Pacific. Dedicated fleet weather centrals whose whole job was to hunt and warn of typhoons. The direct ancestor of today's Joint Typhoon Warning center, built in a real and traceable sense on the graves of the hull, the Spence in the Monahan. But the deeper change was a change in doctrine, and it is the most quietly radical thing in the whole story. Several of the captains who died on the 18th had held formation on courses. The flagship had set long past the point of survivability, because that is what the signal said to do. Nimitz's letter told every commanding officer in the Pacific the that no order from above ever relieves him of the duty to fight for his own ship. That the barometer outranks the formation and that he is permitted, required even to turn away when the sea demands it, admiral or no admiral. The men who drowned that morning bought that permission for every skipper who came after them. And the public, well, the public at the time barely knew. Wartime censorship saw to that. The loss was not trumpeted. It was disclosed carefully, in measured terms, weeks later, folded into the larger story of a fleet that was winning. There was no scandal, no headlines screaming that Halsey had drowned 800 men. To the American public bull Halsey remained exactly what he had been, the bulldog, the winner, the man who hit back. Within a year, he would be promoted to the very top, to five star fleet admiral, and it would be on the deck of his flagship, the Missouri, that Japan would formally surrender. The legend in public did not so much as wobble, but among the men who knew, the officers and later, the historians, the typhoon left a permanent mark. A line in the ledger against Halsey's judgment that sits there beside Leyte Gulf and will not rub out. And this is, I think, the truest and most interesting thing about the whole affair. Halsey's greatest strength and his greatest weakness were the same thing. The headlong aggression that made him magnificent in 1942, that carried Doolittle to Tokyo and steadied the line at Guadalcanal and made sailors love him that exact quality, the fullback's instinct to put his head down and charge was a catastrophe. When the thing in front of him was not an enemy to be beaten, but a force of nature to be respected, read and avoided. You cannot charge a typhoon. The typhoon does not care that you are Bull Halsey. The typhoon does not retreat. And now there's a detail that turns this from a tragedy into something closer to a tragedy with a terrible punchline. Because six months later, in June of 1945, with the war nearly won, Admiral William Halsey, in command of the very same third Fleet, sailed into another typhoon. It was not as deadly as Cobra. No destroyers capsized. The loss of life was far smaller. But the damage was spectacular and the embarrassment was total. Ships were mangled. A heavy cruiser, the Pittsburgh, had over 100ft of her bow torn off by the sea, sheared away like a snapped pencil. And the severed bar floated off on its own. And the crew, with the gallows humor of sailors, nicknamed the drifting wreckage McKeesport, after suburb of Pittsburgh. The ship limped home with a stump for a bow. And the Navy convened a second corps of inquiry into a second typhoon under the same admiral inside of a single year. The second Corps was harder. There were senior figures and the sector, the Navy Forrestal among them, who felt that twice was no longer bad luck. That a man who sails into two typhoons has demonstrated something about his judgment that cannot be kept being waved away as the fog of war. There was serious discussion of finally relieving Halsey, or at least of formally faulting him. And once again Admiral King and the Navy's leadership pulled back from the brink for the same reasons as before, only more so. The war was almost over. The man was a national hero. To break Bull Halsey, now in the final weeks, in the hour of victory, was judged to cost more than it was worth. So the bull kept his stars a second time. He stood on the Missouri in Tokyo Bay in September and watched the war end. And he died decades later, a five star admiral, a beloved national figure, his statue in the parks, his name on the ships. So what do we make of him? I don't think the honest verdict is that Halsey was a fool, because he was not. He was a brilliant, fierce, inspirational leader who gave a frightened something to believe in when it needed it most. And I don't think the honest verdict is that he was a great captain undone by bad luck, because twice is not luck. And the courts were right, that the barometer and the swell and the wind were telling him things. He of all people, the old destroyer man should have read the honest verdict is a harder, more human one. He was a man whose one great gift, ferocious head down aggression was exactly the wrong instrument for one particular kind of problem. And he met that kind of problem twice and good men paid for it both times. And that is why the story matters beyond the Navy, beyond 1944 because every one of us has some quality that is our strength right up until the moment it is our undoing, some instinct that wins us the easy fights and ruins us in a hard one that requires the opposite virtue. Halsey's was aggression. He could outfight any man and any fleet. He could not out fight the weather because the weather will not be fought. It can only be respected. The Spence, the hull, the Monaghan learned that and roughly 800American sailors paid the tuition. So remember them, not the Admiral. He is well remembered. Statues and everything else that goes with it. But remember the boys watching the inclinometer creep past 70 degrees in the dark. Remember the six men of the Monaghan, the lucky ship that the enemy could never sink. Remember the sailors or the tabor going over the side on a line again and again to wrap their arms around drowning strangers. They met the enemy without a flag and most of them did not come home. And they earned their place in the long memory of the sea. So that's it for today folks. I hope you enjoyed this podcast and learning about the history you don't know that happened before the history you know. If you enjoyed it, please give us a like give us a share and support the National Naval Aviation Museum and the Museum Foundation. Until next time, this is Lucky signing off.
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Thanks for tuning in to the Radio Rooms miniseries Footnotes of History hosted by Captain Tim Kinsella, where you experience the obscure, the overlooked and often unbelievable chapters of military history. Don't forget to like subscribe and leave a five star review. Fly Navy.