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 are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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Posted on 12/18/2002 5:39:20 AM PST by SAMWolf
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are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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USS HULL, USS MONAGHAN and USS SPENCE  As father and son go, we've known each other only in our hearts. You were all of 19 when the Lord called you into another service. Dad, thank you for giving me life and a proud lifetime memory. I love you. On 17 December, 1944, my father's ship, DD-354 .U.S.S. Monaghan was steering toward Leyte Bay on a rendezvous course with the Pacific Task Forces 38 and 58. The Third Fleet was engaged in naval air strikes against Japanese forces in the Philippines. While the planes had been attacking central Luzon in support of the Mindoro invasion, the carriers and their destroyer protectors were in desperate need of fuel. Dad's ship was assigned to escort duty for the fuel ships of the fleet, an attractive enemy target. She ran at flank speed during the operations and was riding high in the seas from lack of fuel. Then she ran into Typhoon Cobra, described below as "more powerful than any western Pacific encounter with the Japanese." "In December 1944 as Admiral William Halsey's Third Fleet was operating in support of General MacArthur's invasion of the Philippines, the Third Fleet encountered a tropical cyclone more powerful than any western Pacific encounter with the Japanese. The result was three destroyers (the USS HULL, USS MONAGHAN and USS SPENCE) sunk with 800 men lost, 26 other vessels seriously damaged, and 146 aircraft destroyed (16). The Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet Admiral Nimitz said, "It was the greatest loss that we have taken in the Pacific without compensatory return since the First Battle of Savo." Halsey himself described it best. "No one who has not been through a typhoon can conceive its fury," he wrote in his autobiography. "The 70 foot seas smash you. The rain blinds you. The battleship NEW JERSEY once was hit by a 5-inch shell and I did not even feel the impact. The MISSOURI had kamikaze crash on her main deck and repaired the only damage with a paint brush. But the typhoon tossed our enormous ship the MISSOURI as if she were only a canoe."  One eyewitness account speaks to the conditions my dad found himself and his shipmates facing. "These destroyers were escorting the carriers, and they came out. We're trying to fuel them, and the seas are choppy; I mean, when I say choppy, they're twenty, twenty-five feet waves... They were going to move to another location and commence fueling in the morning again. Well, instead of taking us out of the typhoon they took us back into it. I'm talking about waves that were fifty and sixty feet high. Sometimes you'd see a destroyer, he'd be sitting up on top of a wave and the next time he would be down so low that you couldn't even see the mast. That's how deep the troughs were. There's no way those destroyers could fuel from the tankers." Former President Gerald R. Ford in May 1943 served as a pre-commissioning detachment for a new light aircraft carrier, USS Monterey (CVL-26). This was one of the ships in may dad's group. The following is an official record of an account by Lt. Ford who served as the assistant navigator, Athletic Officer, and antiaircraft battery officer on board Monterey. "Monterey was damaged by a fire which was started by several of the ship's aircraft tearing loose from their cables and colliding during the storm. During the storm, Ford narrowly missed being a casualty himself. After Ford left his battle station on the bridge of the ship in the early morning of 18 December, the ship rolled twenty-five degrees which caused Ford to lose his footing and slide toward the edge of the deck. The two inch steel ridge around the edge of the carrier slowed him enough so he could roll and twisted into the catwalk below the deck. As he later stated, 'I was lucky; I could have easily gone overboard.' " The fueling day was the first of Typhoon Cobra that claimed 790 lives in the 3d Fleet, and sank Spence (DD-512), Hull (DD-350), and Monaghan. The six survivors, rescued by USS Brown after drifting on a raft 3 days, reported that Monaghan took roll after roll to starboard, finally going over. Of the 6 hands that survived the sinking, 3 perished after rescue. From accounts passed on by one of his shipmates, my dad and other Monaghan crew members remained in the water because some of the men were injured and bleeding. Their being in the life raft was their only hope and the area was known to be shark invested. Quietly, on the night of the second day, without notice in the darkness and the rough seas, Dad joined the watery grave of the Spence, Hull and Monaghan. Of the tragedy, Admiral Nimitz said, "represented a more crippling blow to the 3d Fleet than it might be expected to suffer in anything less than a major action." Veteran of so many actions against a human enemy, Monaghan fell victim to the sailor's oldest enemy, the perils of the sea. Monaghan received 12 battle stars for World War II service.  Survivors from the Spence and the Hull ***NOTE: This dedication and story is not about my Dad*** Thanks to Freeper Comwatch for this story
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My dad served as a Lieutenant on USS Saratoga (CV-3), but I didn't get the first-hand descriptions from him.
My older brother after graduating from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy delivered ordnance to Vietnam, standing off-shore to be off-loaded rather than risking port. His accounts were rather reserved, stating only that the Pacific was anything but.
The early film of greatest impact to me was The Fighting Sullivans, a tale of combat rather than extremes of the sea, but indicative of the tremendous heroism of our Navy.
The new designs might afford some protection from those storms, as they seem to be virtually sealed vestigial superstructures, almost surfaced subs, rather than a profusion of hatches, portholes, vents.
As for snow....the forecast says that we will be getting some, perhaps beginning tomorrow. But it doesn't sound like it is going to amount to much. I would like to have a white Christmas now that I am here! I wish I could convince the kids to come here too. Although Minneapolis is the most socialist place! I hate that, but California isn't much better. In fact, its a sad reality that I probably have lived in the most socialist places in the country! I understand that St. Paul isn´t nearly as bad. If that´s true, I sure would like to move there! We are here to help my uncle and it blows us away how much the Minneapolis govt takes away from one´s property rights! I have some major complaints in that regard. I expect to be here for at least another year, it looks like. I am sure that I will be going nose to nose with the powers that be at least a few more times. They already know who I am.
My two older brothers were privy to stories I was not.
Somewhere here in the years of Proceedings is "Whatever Happened to Sara?" with underwater photo reconnaissance after sinking in the atomic tests.
Here is one account:
USS Saratoga, the largest Dive Wreck of the World
© Michael McFadyen - Devilfish Diving Services
It was 8.35 am on 25 July 1946 and the beginning of the end of the USS Saratoga came very dramatically. The explosion was centred 27 metres below the water and 300 metres or so away from the Saratoga. Less than a sixth of a second after the explosion, a pressure wave of 5,900 psi hit the hull of the ship.
Eleven seconds after the bomb exploded, a wave estimated at 94 feet high crashed into the starboard bow corner of the 888 feet long aircraft carrier. So powerful was the wave, it lifted a large stockless Navy anchor 54 metres from the seabed and another 16 metres out of the sea so that it crashed down onto the ship causing damage to the flight deck. The same wave lifted the bow of the 43,500 ton vessel 42 feet into the air. Water poured over the aircraft carrier’s deck, washing away five aircraft, a number of vehicles (including two tanks) and some other equipment. The wave from the explosion also caused the ship’s funnel and foremast to collapse while the pressure wave made a huge 15 cm indentation in the starboard side of the hull (for almost half its length) as well as cracking the hull in the same area. The flight deck collapsed from the stern more than 60 metres towards the bow under the weight of water that had flowed across the ship.
The combined effort of these two waves and another two tsunami sized waves pushed the Saratoga 500 metres away from the origin of the explosion before the wind blew it back 300 metres. The Saratoga started to sink, water entering its 1000 airtight compartments via the large crack on its starboard side and hundreds of other smaller pressure fissures. By 3.45 pm the sea was lapping at the stern flight deck. At about 4.30 pm, eight hours after the explosion, the Saratoga sank stern first, its bow slowly disappearing from view. The Saratoga was sitting upright on the coral/sandy bottom, 54 metres below the now calm waters of the lagoon.
This was not, of course, a normal type of bomb that exploded that beautiful summer’s day in the North Pacific Ocean. This was Baker, nicknamed “Helen of Bikini”, the world’s fifth atomic bomb (the first was on 16 July 1945 at Alamagordo in the New Mexico desert, the second was over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, the third was over Nagasaki on 9 August 1945 and the fourth was at Bikini Atoll on 1 July 1946). This latest explosion was also at Bikini Atoll Lagoon. The bomb was of the same type as that dropped on Nagasaki. Its yield was later estimated as being 20.3 kilotons and it lifted 2,000,000 tons of water (as water and steam) and 2,000,000 tons of lagoon bottom into the classic mushroom column. It also dug a hole eight metres deep in the lagoon under the bomb’s detonation point.
Now that enemy is our ally countering the threats of China and North Korea.
In the midst of change, the constant remains courage.
As displayed in your awesome photo at 142.
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