Down to the Sea (27 page)

When Fireman Tom Stealey ran the length of
Hull
's stack and jumped off, he went “right into a roll.” Falling deeply into the swirling sea, he thought his “lungs would give out” just as he popped up to the surface. Buffeted by fierce winds and rain, he managed “one big breath” before dropping into a “deep funnel” that took him down again. Stealey “started flapping” his arms and legs in a desperate bid to reach the surface. He came up just when he was again near the end of his endurance, “right on top of a wave” that took him “sailing 30 or 40 feet through the air” to the crest of another swell, forcing his now nearly limp body to roll and twist and turn as if trapped in a frenetic water ballet.

Stealey lost his shoes and pants; he had his
kapok life jacket “stripped off,” too, but was able to snag it and put it back on. When a 5-gallon can passed nearby, he grabbed the handle, thinking the container might provide added flotation. The next funnel he dropped into “beat the living hell” out of him. When he surfaced, he was holding the handle without the can attached. He saw a bench float by but decided to let it go, fearing that he might be “beaten to death” if he tried to hold on to it.

After an hour or so he spotted the first person he had seen since entering the water. The visibility had begun to “clear up a little,” and although “the big waves were still there,” he wasn't dropping into as many funnels. The two men waved, then swam toward each other. “Circles of water,” however, kept them separated. Stealey had the idea to swim along with the circular currents. When he did, the next time he came around they were closer. With each man “swimming with the circles,” they eventually came together. Although Stealey did not know the guy and they never traded names, they used the straps on their life jackets to tie themselves together. By evening, they had “thirteen guys hooked up.”

Throughout the long night no one saw any lights or ships or heard anything other than the angry wind and sea. It was as if they were all alone in the middle of the ocean. Shortly after sunrise, “one guy went out of his head all of a sudden.” Untying himself before he could be stopped, he took off and disappeared from sight.

The next day, a single dorsal fin appeared in the water.

The shark looked to be 10 to 12 feet long, with a large and conspicuously rounded fin that had a white tip. The fin aimed straight for the men. With circular eyes inset into a rounded snout, the shark hurtled toward the men like a maasive gray torpedo. It first bumped a man in the center of the line in a hard body check, then twisted around, eyes bulging and jaws snapping, and seized the man at about waist level. Amid violent splashing, the shark “pulled him down so fast he made no outcry.”

Surfacing some yards away, the shark released the bloody and now shrieking man like a dog dropping a bone. Whirling back toward the line of men, the shark—teeth glinting in the sun—hit furiously again, grabbing and pulling down a second man.

Panic had set in and everyone was hollering. Men desperately worked to untie themselves from the line and as soon as they were free started swimming away. Stealey did likewise—nearly “running on top of the water getting the hell out.” There were more terrible cries behind him. Although Stealey did not look back, he knew that the shark was either finishing off the first two men or striking new victims. Certain that “a mess of sharks” would be attracted by the sounds and smells of men dying in the water, Stealey swam as hard and fast as he had back in the days when he was winning ribbons in high school swim meets in California.

Eventually, Stealey found himself with three men from the larger group. Once again they tied themselves together. Anxiously they searched the horizon and skies in all directions for would-be rescuers, but there was “nobody in sight, no ships, no nothing.” The hopelessness of their situation “started to get to everybody.” A couple of the men talked about nobody looking for them and being left for dead. Stealey changed the subject to home and family and the first things he wanted to eat when he was rescued. Steak and potatoes sounded good to Stealey, who tried to recall the exact tastes and textures.

Stealey turned to the man next to him to ask a question. To his shock, he saw that the guy was “dead, just like that.” Whether from “exposure, exertion, or a little bit of everything,” Stealey had no way of knowing. Before nightfall, a second man passed away as suddenly, leaving Stealey and a young seaman he knew only as Smitty, who said he was from Gridley, California, about 30 miles “down the road” from Stealey's hometown of Stockton.

In the wee hours of the morning, Stealey, who had managed to drop off to sleep in his high-collared life jacket, awakened to the sight of the sweeping beam of a ship's searchlight off in the distance, obviously looking for men in the water. Observing the sweep of the light, Stealey realized the ship was going to pass too far away to spot them.

“They're gonna miss us,” Stealey said. “We gotta swim toward them.”

He and Smitty started swimming. After a few minutes Smitty stopped, saying he was too tired to keep going. Stealey “egged him on.” In
another ten minutes Smitty was finished. “You know I'm here,” the exhausted man said. “When you get picked up, send someone to get me.”

Stealey swam on.

The next thing he knew, he awoke after daybreak “in torture,” lying on top of his life jacket with no memory of taking it or anything else off. He was “bare-assed” and “little fish were nibbling” on his legs. His skin was blistered from the sun, and his eyes, swollen from the salt water, were nearly shut. His lips were swollen, too, and his ears ached. His life jacket was so waterlogged that when he put it back on he hung so low in the water that the sea came up to just below his chin.

There was no ship to be seen, and Smitty was gone, too.

Literally inches from death, Stealey saw a vision that looked like one of those postcards of a cascading waterfall at a national park, only this one flowed with pineapple juice. It looked wet, cool, and delicious, and he was so very thirsty—and yet, somewhere in the parched recesses of his memory, he recalled that he “didn't even like pineapple juice.”

It was about then that Stealey decided to commit suicide. He knew one way he did not want to go: to be “eaten by a shark” like his shipmates. He started drinking salt water—“as much as I could get down.” His first feeling was unexpected: he felt better at having something in his stomach for the first time in days. If he kept drinking salt water, he figured, it would be only a matter of time before he died. He hoped it would be like going to sleep, as some of the other men had so quietly expired. He began to make his peace: saying goodbye to his wife, Ida, and telling her that he was sorry, and how he had tried to get out of this mess but couldn't.

It was a clear day, sunny with a few puffy white clouds drifting across blue skies. Off in the distance, Stealey spotted smoke. Not believing his eyes, he looked away, then back again. The column of smoke was still there. Soon he saw a ship “starting to come up out of the water,” getting bigger as it came closer, heading directly for him.
Oh, man,
Stealey said to himself,
I sure hope it's American.

At a quarter of a mile away, the ship began to turn.

Stealey started hollering and waving.

Something hit him “in the back of the head.” His first thought was that a shark had bumped him. Turning around quickly, he saw a piece of board that was yellow on both sides. He had no idea what it was or where it had come from, but it seemed as if it had dropped from heaven. He frantically waved the board above his head.

The ship “came back around,” heading for his position.

As the vessel approached, Stealey heard rifle shots. He hadn't yet seen the ship's flag and thought only that it must be a Japanese destroyer and that they intended to shoot him in the water rather than rescue him.

The ship came close and all engines stopped.

The next thing Stealey knew, a “monkey's fist”—a type of knot tied at the end of a line to serve as a weight, making it easier to throw—was headed his way. He grabbed the line and was pulled in by deckhands as other sailors kept firing at the sharks that had been circling Stealey.

It was 8:25
A.M.
on December 20 when Stealey was rescued by the U.S. destroyer
Cogswell
(DD-651). He had been in the water for forty-four hours.

Stealey was too weak to pull himself up the ship's cargo net, and several men jumped into the water to assist him. Unable to walk on his own—“no muscle control in my legs”—he was carried to the infirmary, where he was found to be in “unbelievably good shape.” After a freshwater shower, during which he had to be held up to keep from toppling over, Stealey was asked by a ship's cook what he would like to eat.

“I'd sure like a nice steak. With potatoes, if you don't mind.”

“Fix you right up, buddy.”

 

S
ONARMAN
P
AT
D
OUHAN,
whose hope for a transfer off
Hull
never happened, was in the after deckhouse with some twenty other men when the destroyer rolled over to starboard “to the point of no return.” Up until then the men had been praying, as well as “cussing
the captain” for not keeping the ship “headed into the swells or going away from them.” Instead, James Marks had placed them broadside to the wind and mountainous swells—“at the mercy of the elements.”

What followed was “pure panic” as water poured in through the opening where the starboard hatch cover had earlier blown off. In an effort to stay above the rising water, several men were “hanging on to the dogs” (heavy latches) that secured the port hatch cover. As the port hatch was “our only way out of a sinking ship,” Douhan, who was holding on to the hatch handle and had one foot planted inside an overhead vent, did the only thing he could “in order to save any of us.” He methodically began “kicking my shipmates' hands off” the latches. As the men let go, they fell into the rushing water below. It was a haunting scene, one that Douhan would “never get over.” Finally able to open the hatch, he had begun to wriggle out when the heavy hatch cover came down on his back, pinning him. While several men squeezed out past without stopping to pull the hatch cover off Douhan, someone finally did stop and free him. He stepped out onto the side of the sinking ship without a life jacket—his was on the bridge, where he had spent most of the last eighteen hours until heading down to the berthing compartment that morning to hit the sack. It had been a “foolish thought,” as no sooner had he climbed into his bunk than he was “thrown out by a very hard roll to starboard.”

For now, the luck of the Irish was still with Douhan: he spotted a spare kapok life jacket “tied to a gun mount.” There was only one, and he was convinced that a “higher power up above”—and possibly his “praying mother”—had left it there for him. He put on the life jacket and was immediately “swept up amidship” near the 40 mm gun bays. As he grabbed one of the gun railings to keep from being washed overboard, he saw Chief Machinist's Mate Archie L. Vaughan, a peacetime
Hull
crew member and Pearl Harbor survivor, “pinned against the bulkhead by a large broken life raft with no way to free himself.” Douhan, who considered Vaughan “a great guy,” wanted to reach the chief but
with the “high winds and seas” was unable even to get close to him. Moments later, as Douhan and several other men were swept off the side of the ship, the trapped Vaughan held a fist high in the air, exhorting his shipmates: “Fight on!”

Once clear of the ship, Douhan found himself in a large group of men trying to grab hold of several wooden-bottom life rafts, which “kept being swept up into the air.” Each time a raft came down, several men would attempt to climb inside, with limited success. Douhan was able to grab hold of one raft connected by a length of line to another raft. When the two rafts were swept high in the air they “came together with such force” that a number of men caught between them had their “heads popped open like popcorn.” Douhan had enough of life rafts and let go. About that time a huge swell separated him from the others. He was “all alone in heavy seas,” with rain coming down so hard he had to shield his face from what felt like countless needle pricks.

Shortly afterward, Douhan heard a muffled underwater explosion, and felt “a lot of pressure on the lower part” of his body. He surmised that the sinking
Hull
had gone “deep enough to cause the boilers to explode.”

While floating alone, Douhan was suddenly pulled down so deep that he thought his “ears would explode.” His first thought was that he was being sucked into the screws of one of the large ships in the task force; the low visibility would have made it “impossible to see any ship,” even one passing nearby. He envisioned being “chopped up by the screws.” To his surprise, he suddenly shot to the surface. When the same thing happened again, Douhan realized that the huge swells breaking over him were driving him down. He began to anticipate the next swell, taking a deep breath, then tucking into a roll and “riding with it.” Even though the “depth was about all he could stand,” he developed a workable technique.

Douhan had time to think as well as react. He was alone in the ocean in the middle of a typhoon, not knowing how many—or even “if any”—of his shipmates had survived, nor whether he realistically
stood a chance of being rescued. With great trepidation, he wondered:
When will the sharks show up?
While there were lots of things to “keep me guessing,” there was something he “never lost sight of”: he had to make it because he had left his “beautiful wife expecting our first child.” He did not intend for his Kay (Kathleen), one of thirteen pregnant
Hull
wives, “to be a widow.”