Down to the Sea (7 page)

Plage quickly set out to show his young sailors what was expected of them at sea and on the beach, as well as the penalties for errant behavior, much of which he privately considered “youthful exuberance aboard ship and ashore,” while maintaining the image of a firm but fair disciplinarian. In his first captain's masts, he meted out attention-getting punishments: the loss of three liberties for being absent without leave (AWOL) less than two hours, five liberties lost for being nine hours AWOL, two days' solitary confinement on bread and water for being absent from duty station and insubordination, twenty hours' extra duty for the men of a gun crew who were caught gambling while on duty, and four days' confinement for direct disobedience of orders.

The period of extensive training and maneuvers began to mold the
young bluejackets of
Tabberer
into a functioning crew. Sonarman 3rd Class Frank Burbage, eighteen, of Newark, New Jersey, was impressed by the “very high morale” aboard the new ship, which the crew soon fondly nicknamed
Tabby
. Burbage, who had left high school before graduating to enlist in the Navy rather than be drafted into the Army when he turned eighteen, had attended Fleet Sonar School after boot camp. Aboard
Tabberer,
the sonar station was on the bridge, so he stood watch in close proximity to Plage and the other officers, all of whom “treated the enlisted men very well” and seemed to genuinely care about them, an attitude that permeated the ship from the top down.

Gunner's Mate 3rd Class Tom Bellino, eighteen, raised on a dairy farm near Boise, Idaho, had been sent to two gunnery schools after boot camp, emerging with his petty officer's “crow,” although it seemed for a time to be “attached to a zipper” because he kept getting written up for minor infractions and busted in rank. Still, Bellino soon joined his shipmates in their appraisal of the man who would take them to war: “everybody loved the skipper.”

A boon to shipboard morale was the quality of food served on
Tabberer,
which according to one old salt was the “best chow in the Navy”—surely an exaggeration but a fine compliment nonetheless for the man who did most of the cooking, Ship's Cook 2nd Class Paul “Cookie” Phillips, nineteen, of Texarkana, Texas. A butcher in civilian life, Phillips had enlisted a week before Christmas 1942 and after boot camp went to the Navy's cooking and baking school in Alameda, California. Phillips then spent ten months on the destroyer escort
Stanton
(DE-247), which was assigned to convoy-escort duty in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. There he learned how to cook and serve meals in varied sea conditions.

A high-energy, wiry type, Phillips had been the flyweight amateur boxing state champion back home before his seventeenth birthday and was still close to his fighting weight of 120 pounds. He just “couldn't get fat on my own food,” although it was his observation that a lot of Navy cooks did exactly that. Like every ship's cook, Phillips had been trained to follow the
Cook Book of the United States Navy
(1932 edition), which listed 170 pages of recipes—each designed to make 100 servings—for such
naval classics as Bean Soup No. 1, Chopped Beef en Casserole, and Fried Chicken. The latter called for 80 pounds of chicken, but Phillips soon learned that to feed
Tabberer
's enlisted complement, which averaged about 210 men (the officers had a separate mess with their own cooks), he needed 180 pounds of chicken and proportional increases to the other ingredients: flour, eggs, cracker meal, pork drippings, and fat for deep frying. Phillips soon found that the crew liked beef dinners best—Minced Beef, Pot Roast, and Roast Beef were favorites—and for breakfast, fresh eggs when available, coffee cake, and hot cinnamon buns, the latter made by Chief Commissary Steward/Baker Alan Lumb and acclaimed as the “best cinnamon buns in this man's Navy.” As was the case on every Navy ship,
Tabberer
was allocated $1.09 per man to feed each enlisted man three hot meals a day. Phillips found it “not too tough” to stay on his budget and was held accountable if he exceeded the weekly allotment, as it meant “cutting back next week,” which seldom happened on
Tabberer
.

Tabberer
carried a full-fledged mascot: a rat terrier mix that one of the sailors had brought aboard as a puppy and who promptly won the hearts of all hands, including the captain, who overlooked regulations against having a pet aboard ship. Named Tabby, the little white dog with a blackish snout and straight-up ears was becoming a sailor in his own right. Already he was able to scamper on his short legs up and down the steep ladders between decks, something “not many dogs could do.” He knew, too, the best times to stand outside the galley hatch and yip persistently until Cookie Phillips arrived with leftovers, usually slices of bologna or meat scraps. Tabby had also needed to find his sea legs, once losing his balance and falling overboard as the ship pulled up to a pier. With no thought to his own safety, a sailor dove into the murky water and grabbed the frightened mutt. A line was dropped and they were hauled aboard, so covered in oil that “they didn't look like themselves.”

Tabberer
pulled into Boston harbor on August 4. The crew went on alternating duty sections, and those who did not have the watch could go ashore at the end of each workday. One night, a handful of
Tabberer
sailors, as Plage would later recall, were visiting an “establishment that
sold liquid refreshment” when some sailors from a destroyer “made a few remarks about destroyer escorts” and those who served on the smaller ships. Five
Tabberer
sailors “took on about twenty” destroyer sailors and came back to the ship “bloody, with a black eye or two, but with big grins and slapping each other on the back.” In Plage's view, his sailors had become “a real crew of a fighting ship.” While he was still having to remind them that they were “not supposed to beat-up on the Shore Patrol,” Plage let the incident pass without dispensing any punishment. Plage for “the first time fully realized” that his men had “developed real pride in themselves,” which made him “so very proud.” He knew they were ready at last for whatever awaited them at sea.

After two weeks at Charlestown Navy Yard, which included a few days atop keel blocks in dry dock to inspect her underwater exterior—such as valves, propellers, rudder, and other fittings—
Tabbere
r was deemed ready for fleet assignment. It did not take long. Orders were received to get under way on August 16 to escort the oiler
Severn
(AO-61) to Hawaii.

Tabberer
arrived at Pearl Harbor on September 7 and for the next five weeks conducted underway training, including antisubmarine and gunnery exercises, in Hawaiian waters. The ship also screened and served as plane guard for the aircraft carriers
Ranger
(CV-4) and
Coral Sea
(CVE-57) during night-flying qualifications involving extensive launching (takeoff ) and recovery (landing) operations.
Tabberer
would be stationed astern of the carrier, ready to pick up any pilot who went in the water—and pick up numerous drenched pilots they did, in the process working out what Plage considered a “pretty good system.” When a pilot went down, as did Ensign James Brenner of
Coral Sea
shortly before 9:00
P.M.
on October 9,
Tabberer
hurried to the crash site. After Plage maneuvered the ship into position, the motor whaleboat was lowered. Brenner was picked up and aboard
Tabberer
in under twenty minutes. After being checked out by the pharmacist's mate—who served as
Tabberer
's medical staff in lieu of a doctor (which smaller ships did not normally carry)—the pilot's clothes were rushed to the laundry as he took a hot shower, then he was served coffee and a sandwich in the officer's wardroom.
When flight operations ended two hours later,
Tabberer
approached the starboard side of
Coral Sea
and returned via high-wire chair their orphaned pilot dressed in freshly ironed clothes suitable for liberty ashore and clutching a gallon of his favorite flavor of ice cream.

The latter touch was undeniable grandstanding; traditionally, a carrier would gratefully send over ice cream to any smaller ship that rescued a pilot. Ships the size of destroyer escorts were not allocated ice cream makers. The machine that found its way to
Tabberer
—meant for another ship but not yet picked up by its crew—was liberated one night from a Pearl Harbor pier by Cookie Phillips, who also served as the ship's unofficial scrounger, and his galley gang. They also grabbed several cartons of the dry mix, which came in three flavors: vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. When a little water was added to the mix, the machine produced in about forty minutes a gallon of soft ice cream that could be eaten immediately or frozen. Plage at the time did not ask Phillips how they suddenly had an ice cream machine aboard, but he did drop by the galley most nights after the crew had eaten to see if there was any left over. Not surprisingly, “there always was some ice cream for the skipper.” And every Friday night, the skipper was invited to the galley to enjoy broiled filet mignons expertly sliced off quarters of beef by Phillips, the former butcher who kept his own set of sharpened knives. The menu never varied: steak, ice cream, cinnamon buns. When it was time and the smells were wafting to the bridge directly above the galley, Plage would turn to the officer of the deck and say, “Sir, you have the conn. I'm off duty.” The skipper would soon be knocking at the locked galley hatch. Also invited on Friday nights was the ship's mail clerk, Seaman 1st Class William A. McClain, nineteen, of Knoxville, Tennessee, in exchange for giving the galley crew their mail right after the officers and before everyone else.

As life aboard
Tabberer
settled into a routine in the Pacific, one officer on the ship had added reason to be grateful for having traded the often inhospitable Atlantic for another, balmier ocean. Executive officer (and, as such, Plage's second in command) Lieutenant Robert M. “Dusty” Surdam, twenty-seven, of Hoosic Falls, New York, sporting crew-cut
blond hair, was six foot two with the lean, sinewy build of a runner. The son of a local bank president, he had prepped at Deerfield Academy, where he competed in track and soccer. He turned down an appointment to West Point in favor of Williams College, a small liberal arts school in western Massachusetts, where he majored in economics and graduated cum laude in 1939. After a vacation that summer to England, Germany, and France as the clouds of war in Europe became darker by the day, Surdam went to work as a bank clerk in Albany, New York. He enlisted in the Naval Reserve in October 1940 and five months later was sent to Midshipman School aboard the old battleship
Illinois
(BB-7)—renamed
Prairie State
(IX-15) and serving as a floating armory and naval school in New York harbor. After three months of training, Surdam was commissioned an ensign and received orders to the destroyer
Warrington
(DD-383), a
Somers
-class destroyer of 1,850 tons that had just finished an overhaul at Charlestown Navy Yard when Pearl Harbor was attacked and was ordered the next day into the South Atlantic to patrol “under war conditions during the national emergency.” In Surdam's first fitness report submitted that same month,
Warrington
's commanding officer noted: “Ensign Surdam is exceptionally quick witted and has unusually sound judgment for one having so little experience. He is willing to assume responsibility and has the intelligence and ability to do so with excellent results. An officer of distinct value to the Navy.” Two weeks into the new year,
Warrington
was sent to the Pacific, where the destroyer remained until mid-1944, when she returned to the East Coast to undergo routine repairs.

Surdam had several times requested other assignments—to the Naval War College, where many of the brightest officers ended up in preparation for command and top staff positions,
*
and also to flight training—but had been turned down each time because he was too valuable aboard ship. Comments on fitness reports such as “As officer of
the deck during action against Japanese aircraft, Lieutenant Surdam proved himself practically indispensable to the Commanding Officer” did not help him get his ticket punched off the ship. After more than two years on
Warrington,
Surdam finally received new orders: to Submarine Chaser Training in Miami. Thereafter, he was ordered to Brown Shipbuilders in Houston for “the fitting out of USS
Tabberer
and for duty as executive officer of that vessel when placed in commission.”

On September 10—three days after
Tabberer
arrived in Hawaii—
Warrington
departed Norfolk for Trinidad, in the southern Caribbean. Two days out to sea, the destroyer encountered a violent storm along the Florida coast. After receiving word that they were steaming directly into a hurricane,
Warrington
tried to change course, but it was too late. In the early morning hours of September 13, the destroyer lost part of her bow and water flooded the forward engine room, knocking out the ship's electric power. The main engines shut down and the steering mechanism failed. By noontime the following day, it was apparent that
Warrington,
foundering badly in mountainous seas, would not survive. Almost immediately after the abandon-ship order was given, the destroyer went down. A prolonged search over the next two days found only seventy-three survivors—more than 250 men perished.

When word circulated of
Warrington
's loss, Surdam, like other mariners who left a ship shortly before it went down, would long recall the names and picture the faces of lost shipmates. At the same time he mourned their deaths, Surdam counted his own but-for-the-grace-of-God blessings, grateful not to have been on his old ship in the Atlantic, with its unpredictable weather and dreadful storms.