On 5 June 1945, a typhoon in the Pacific Ocean southeast of Japan struck the U.S. Navy’s 3rd Fleet. The high winds and mountainous waves damaged 33 ships. But no ship and crew had a more desperate fight against the storm now known as Typhoon Viper than the USS Pittsburgh (CA-72); her harrowing story remains one for the record books.
Readying for War
The third ship to carry the Steel City’s name, the Pittsburgh was a Baltimore-class heavy cruiser. She was built by the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation in the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. Laid down 3 February 1943, she was launched on 22 February 1944. When she was commissioned on 10 October of that year, the Pittsburgh had a complement of 1,142 officers and crew under the command of Captain John L. Gingrich, who had served on board several cruisers and battleships between the world wars.1 Gingrich spent the early years of World War II in Washington, D.C., serving as aide to both the undersecretary and secretary of the Navy before his assignment to oversee the completion of the Pittsburgh.2
After the cruiser’s commissioning, her crew trained in the Atlantic and Caribbean through December 1944, becoming familiar with routine duties and conducting damage-control exercises and drills. She sailed from the Quincy shipyard on 13 January 1945, passing through the Panama Canal on her way to the Pacific theater. She joined the 5th Fleet on 13 February and was assigned to Task Force 58.2, whose mission was to prepare the way for the land assault on the island of Iwo Jima, a step toward the invasion of the Japanese mainland.
On 18 March the task force’s planes bombed airfields and other military sites on the island of Kyushu, the most southwestern of Japan’s four main islands. The next morning the enemy struck back, dropping two bombs on the aircraft carrier Franklin (CV-13). The explosions turned the Franklin into an inferno, leaving her dead and defenseless in the water. The Pittsburgh steamed to the crippled carrier’s rescue. Her crew plucked at least 34 sailors from the water, and helped fight the fires with the crew of the Santa Fe (CL-60). The Pittsburgh secured a towline on the powerless carrier and kept her under tow until the next day. Twice the heavy cruiser’s guns repelled enemy air attacks. Though the Franklin lost 800 men, she survived and eventually made port under her own power. Through the ordeal, for 48 hours Captain Gingrich remained at the conn.3
In April and May, the Pittsburgh guarded American carriers as they provided support for the invasion of Okinawa, another strategic island in the advance to the Home Islands. On 28 May, Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey Jr. replaced Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, and the 5th Fleet/Task Force 58 was renamed the 3rd Fleet/Task Force 38.
On a Collision Course
The Pittsburgh and her crew were already experienced, but her greatest battle would be fought with a very different enemy. As June arrived, Navy meteorologists began to track a tropical storm. On 2 June the Pittsburgh received a typhoon warning advisory from the commander of the Pacific Fleet’s headquarters, where the storm’s position and path were being plotted.4
At 0813 on 4 June, Task Group 38.1, which included the Pittsburgh, received notice from its tactical command (CTU 38.1.2): “Ships secure for heavy weather. Tropical storm reported to south moving northwest.” Through the rest of the day, the Pittsburgh complied with the order. Among the other preparations, her observation planes were degassed and secured.5
No doubt the officers and crew viewed their situation with some apprehension. Just six months earlier, a typhoon had ripped through the fleet in the Philippines. The massive storm had damaged many ships, sinking three destroyers. Nearly 800 men were lost.6
During the early hours of 5 June, despite a series of exchanged messages with the upper levels of the command chain, Task Force 38.1 remained on a collision course with the typhoon, much to the concern of the officers on the Pittsburgh’s bridge. The executive officer, Commander Horatio Rivero, could see the typhoon on the ship’s radar. “We couldn’t understand why we were barging into the damn storm,” he recalled three decades later. “The whole damn task force was going full speed into it.”7
By the time Task Force 38.1 received permission at 0425 to “use your own judgment” in dodging the storm, it was too late.8 The storm had continued to build through the night. At 0300 the Pittsburgh’s deck log recorded a rating of 3 for both the seas and swells on a scale with 9 being the most severe. Winds were estimated at 42 knots. The ship’s crew was in Readiness Condition 3, the lowest of three preparedness levels, and the ship herself was in Material Condition Yoke, the middle of three levels.9
Over the next hour, seas and swells rose to a 5 on the scale, with the wind steady at 40 knots. By 0500 seas and swells were rated at 7, with winds up to 54 knots. At 0540, the wind had increased in intensity to 60 knots with gusts above 70. Ten minutes later, the port airplane was blown from its catapult, landing upside down on the deck, the catapult car frame carried away by the wind.10
At 0600 the ship was approximately 350 miles southeast of Okinawa. Visibility was reduced to 200 yards by rain. The seas were rated at 9 and the swells at 8.
Mountainous Waves
Shipfitter Third Class Russell Barr later described the waves in a letter to his parents after referring them to page 15 of their copy of The Ships and Aircraft of the U.S. Fleet, Second War Edition, which showed a photograph of a Baltimore-class heavy cruiser. “We took waves as high as the navigating bridge,” he wrote. “It’s the center one of the three very distinct ‘levels’ you can see above the #1 8” turret. At times all the guns in the foreground, the big ones, were under water. Hope you can understand this.” 11
At 0608 an electrical fire broke out in one of the windlass rooms, but it was quickly controlled. At 0610 the wind velocity was estimated at 100 knots. Two minutes later, Condition One, the highest level of personnel readiness, was ordered throughout the ship.12 At 0625 Condition Zebra, the highest material condition alert, was ordered throughout the ship. At this point, hatches were sealed and valves were closed to make the vessel watertight. Personnel were evacuated from the forward part of the ship on all decks.
The mountainous waves posed various dangers, as they could rip fixtures off the main deck. Although heavy cruisers were more stable in high seas than the destroyers that capsized in the earlier typhoon, if a 90- or 100-foot wave hit the Pittsburgh broadside, she could roll and then capsize.
As the storm intensified, Shipfitter Second Class William “Bing” Bingler was on duty at Repair Station 2, located forward on the second deck portside between the two 8-inch gun turrets. He would later write of being part of a team of three men sent forward on the second deck “to see how things looked,”an order that in moments would put him directly in harm’s way.13 From below the main deck, Bingler and company were unable to see that things did not look at all good topside.
Marine Corporal William A. Newsom was stationed on the air control bridge above the bridge. Through the driving rain and howling winds, he had a view of the bow. “My station was exactly 85 feet above the waterline,” Newsom recalled in an interview a month after the typhoon, “but when that typhoon kicked up the waves, I had to look up to see them. I estimate those combers were between 100 and 125 feet high at the worst of the typhoon.”14
On the bridge just below him, Executive Officer Rivero also witnessed the bow being swamped by walls of water. “I saw that the bow was moving up and down,” he later said.15
Captain Gingrich vividly described what happened next. “Suddenly, about 6:30, we saw two tremendous seas. One threw us 10 or 15 degrees. At the next one, the deck-plates buckled—and the bow just ripped and floated off.”16 According to the ship’s deck log, at 0633 the “bow just forward of frame 26 buckled upward with the sea, and then fell off as the sea passed under the ship.”17
“We were being tossed like a toy from one wave to another,” Newsom remembered. “Finally we plunged down one tremendous roller, our nose slipped smack bang into the next wave, and the wave after that lifted the bow right up in the air. [We] had too much water on top and too much coming up beneath. The bow broke off like the head of a match.”18
On the second deck, the three-man crew that included Bingler was at frame 26 the moment of separation. “We moved along the second deck toward the bow, closing and dogging the bulkhead doors as we passed through to maintain water tight conditions until we reached frame 26,” Bingler later wrote. He added:
Chief Bursch, in the lead, opened the bulkhead door and stepped through. I was straddling the opening, and Willingham had his hand on the door. At this moment, a shaft of light appeared as the bow of our ship ripped her remaining ties with main deck and the starboard side. Water poured through the opening and drenched Chief Bursch as the second deck ripped off leaving only 18 inches of steel where Chief Bursch was standing.
The three-man crew managed to get on the safe side of the hatch and seal it.19
Shipfitter Barr told a similar story after the war. A member of another three-man crew, he had been sent belowdecks to close hatches and doors, starting at the bow and making their way toward the stern. Barr and a second crew member had just stepped through a hatchway when the bow began to break off. The third member of the team was yanked through the open hatchway, which was quickly sealed. Had they been a few seconds later, all three would have been swept into the sea.
At Odds With Her Own Bow
The loss of the bow posed immediate danger for the Pittsburgh’s survival. If the quarter-inch bulkhead at frame 26 failed, the ship’s interior could be exposed from main deck to keel. She could flood and be in immediate danger of sinking, casting any crew members who escaped into the mountainous seas. Any maneuver by the bridge to protect the exposed bulkhead from the waves could position the ship in such a way she would be broadsided by a giant wave and capsized.
Still, the logical maneuver was to turn the ship’s stern to the sea, which would help protect the exposed bow. But the Pittsburgh faced a new danger. After separating from the ship, the bow did not sink because it had also been made watertight by the execution of Condition Zebra. As Gingrich protected the ship’s vulnerable new bow while avoiding a wave that could capsize the cruiser, he also had to avoid a dangerous collision with the old bow as it was tossed about in the waves.
The deck log noted that moments after the separation, the bow was “about 30 to 40 feet ahead of ship and slightly on port bow.” At 0635, Gingrich ordered the cruiser to “back full to back away from the bow.” He notified adjacent ships that the Pittsburgh’s bow had broken off and the ship was coming around to left.
At 0638, the Pittsburgh went ahead two-thirds on the starboard engine, and backed full port engines to turn left to course 350 degrees. “He turned the ship around in the middle of the storm,” Rivero later remembered. “It was a feat in itself, without turning over. We put the stern to the sea.”20
At 0647, the Pittsburgh steadied on course 350 degrees. But Gingrich’s successful maneuver did not eliminate the grave threat from the sea. The stern was equally vulnerable to the monstrous waves, with even more severe consequences. “All the time we thought of the possibility that the stern also might be carried away,” Gingrich recalled, “which would mean that the propeller shafts would be lost and the engine rooms flooded, with the power and steering ability lost.”21
While the bridge wrestled with the ship’s position against the towering waves, the crew found equally challenging conditions. Further inspections topside revealed that the port and starboard gangways were torn from their stowage and lost overboard. The number 1 motor whaleboat strong back broke, and the hull of the whaleboat was stove in. The number 2 motor whaleboat hull was also stove in, and five floater nets had been lost overboard. The starboard airplane was heavily damaged.22
Below the main deck, the second-deck bulkhead at frame 26 was leaking but for the moment still intact. Located roughly beneath the Number 1 gun turret, compartment A-306-L was partly flooded. On the lower decks, compartments A-405-A, A-505-A, and A-605-A were flooded. Compartment A-901-F was ruptured and water was displacing fuel oil.23
The endless damage-control drills and exercises, along with the urgency experienced in the Franklin’s fiery ordeal, had prepared the Pittsburgh’s crew for the tasks they had to execute to save the ship. Sailors removed ammunition from magazines adjacent to the Number 1 8-inch handling room on the second platform deck. Engineering repair parties proceeded with the isolation of damaged electrical cables, ruptured fuel oil, steam, and fresh water lines. The ship began to pump fuel oil overboard through forward fire and bilge pumps to calm the seas. According to the deck log, the results were judged “effective.”
‘Ordered Chaos’
But the ship’s ultimate survival lay in the hands of the damage-control party, which consisted of 3 officers and 18 enlisted men. The officers were Commander J. J. Kircher, damage control officer; Lieutenant (junior grade) Fred I. Calfee, ship’s carpenter; and Lieutenant (junior grade) Thomas E. Acton, repair officer. Their job was to shore up the bulkheads with wooden timbers, an exercise they had practiced in damage-control training and now had to do for real—under the most difficult conditions.
By 0700, preliminary boundary lines had been set at frame 33. The ship was down by the head an estimated six feet. The one bulkhead between the men and the sea was cracking and buckling under the pounding of the waves. All of the hatches behind the compartments where the men were working had been sealed, blocking any escape. The damage-control party faced certain death if the bulkhead between them and the sea failed. “I guess we thought about it,” Kircher later admitted. “But we’d either save the bulkhead or the whole ship would go. It wasn’t a matter of choice. It was something that just had to be done.”24
Before the shoring up could even begin, the work area had to be cleared. Flooded compartments were swirling with broken furniture and water-soaked stores, and normally harmless items were suddenly made dangerous by the back-and-forth movement of the water as the ship was tossed in the waves. The team quickly cleared away the debris.
Bingler, who moments earlier had witnessed the bow’s separation, was one of the 18 enlisted men in the damage-control party. “The one-quarter-inch plate along frame 26 would breathe in and out as much as six inches,” Bingler recalled. “The deck plate along frame 26 for two or three feet back was now wrinkled steel due to the tremendous pounding sea.” At any moment, the bulkhead could rupture, flooding the compartment and possibly dooming the ship.
The damage-control party quickly devised a plan to pre-construct shoring sections in the warrant officers’ mess. As the ship began to rise, the preassembled timbers were imported, positioned, and braced. According to Bingler: “Work was performed in double fast motion as the ship’s bow section rose upward causing water in this compartment to recede to aft end. . . . As the ship began its downward route, one could only hold on and wait often in water up to our armpits as it would rise. Many of the shoring timbers were actually floating in.”25
Assisted by others who somehow provided light, air, and other necessities, often working in four feet of water as they pushed 4 x 4 shoring timbers into place, the damage-control party worked feverishly for five hours to shore up the bulkhead.26 Gingrich would later credit the party with saving the ship. “They went into the greatest possible danger,” Gingrich noted. “They were risking their lives every moment.” 27
Battered but Afloat
By now the ship had passed through the worst of the storm. At 1200 the deck log recorded the sea and swell amounts at 7 on the 1 to 9 scale. By 1300 the level fell to 5 and 7 respectively, and by 1400 it had reduced to 4 and 6.
The Pittsburgh was battered and literally broken but still afloat. Eyewitness accounts would later estimate that 104 feet of the bow was lost, approximately 15 percent of the ship’s length. But due to the wisdom and skill of the captain and the expert seamanship of her crew, not a single man had been lost or seriously injured.
In all, 33 ships suffered damage during the typhoon. Among them, the light cruiser Duluth (CL-87) suffered cracks in her structure at frame 21 but her bow did not separate from the ship. The heavy cruiser Baltimore
(CA-68) experienced some buckling of the main deck between frames 18 and 26.
At 1520 the Pittsburgh steamed slowly on a base course of 130 degrees. Captain Gingrich was designated commander of task unit 38.1.9, consisting of the Pittsburgh, Aylwin (DD-355), Stockham (DD-683), Conklin (DE-439), Waterman (DE-740), and Munsee (ATF-107). Their destination was Guam, where repairs to the Pittsburgh would be made.28
The cruiser’s floating bow posed a hazard for other ships and also provided salvage possibilities. At 1842, the Munsee, escorted by the Stockham, left the task unit to salvage the bow. The Munsee secured a towline on it and began the long journey to Guam. The bow was immediately dubbed “a suburb of Pittsburgh” in some reports, and in others unofficially named the “USS McKeesport,” a reference to an actual Pittsburgh suburb. The task of towing the bow proved difficult and on 8 June, a second tug, the Pakana (ATF-108), was ordered to rendezvous with the Munsee. Together the tugs managed to tow the bow to Guam.29
The Pittsburgh docked there on 10 June, having traveled approximately 900 miles at an average speed of 8 knots. With her bow far behind, she was nicknamed the “longest ship in the Navy.” No doubt the moniker carried an unspoken element of respect for her officers and crew.
At Guam, the ship was fitted with a false bow that one crew member compared to a snowplow. On 26 June she left the island under escort headed for Pearl Harbor. From there, she set course for the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington, where work on a new bow was already underway. The ship docked in Bremerton on 16 July. She was still undergoing repairs when Japan surrendered on 2 September 1945.
The Pittsburgh’s ordeal had immediate implications for the Navy’s inventory of heavy and light cruisers. An investigation into the bow separation was extended to include the damage suffered by the Baltimore and Duluth. It determined that the ships had structural weaknesses in their bow sections that failed under the relentless pounding of the typhoon’s waves.
The Pittsburgh’s bow separation was attributed to a failure in the upper bow structure similar to the Baltimore’s, which was exacerbated when “a poor weld in the flat keel at frame 24-1/2 apparently broke and started a crack which progressed around the ship. Since the lower portion of the bow structure is highly stressed in tension as the ship dives down into the sea, the continual working of the ship headed into the sea caused the crack to progress rapidly through the remaining structure, which is all welded.” The investigation found that the faulty weld had been made in April 1943, “when the pressure was the greatest for a speed-up in naval construction and when labor and inspection forces were both diluted and inexperienced.”30
Following the investigation, the Navy implemented a program to strengthen the bow structures of its Cleveland- and Baltimore-class ships. The program impacted 28 light cruisers and 14 heavy cruisers, including the Pittsburgh.
That battered cruiser would sail again. Her repairs completed, she was placed in reserve and decommissioned on 7 March 1947. She was recommissioned on 25 September 1951 to help build U.S. Navy strength as the Korean War raged on and the Cold War intensified. With a new commander and crew, she would make a series of goodwill cruises, serving in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indian and Pacific oceans. She was again decommissioned on 28 August 1956, and remained docked in the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard until 1974 when she was sold for scrap.
Long after her decommission, the Pittsburgh’s legacy lived on in legendary stories about seamanship. For years, at the Naval Damage Control Center in Philadelphia, her epic victory over the typhoon was cited in damage-control classes as an example of how a ship and her crew could triumph over certain disaster.
1. “USS Pittsburgh” in Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships.
2. ADM John E. Gingrich, USN, Biographies in Naval History, Naval History and Heritage Command.
3. “USS Pittsburgh” in Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships.
4. Commanding Officer [John Gingrich] to Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, Damage Report –Typhoon of 5 June 1945, dated 26 June 1945, RG19, National Archives, College Park, MD (hereafter NARA), 1.
5. Ibid.
6. Bob Drury and Tom Calvin, Halsey’s Typhoon: The True Story of a Fighting Admiral, an Epic Storm, and an Untold Ordeal (New York, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007).
7. ADM Horacio Rivero, USN, “Reminiscences of Admiral Horacio Rivero Jr., U.S. Navy (Retired),” (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, May 1978), 151.
8. Damage Report, 26 June 1945.
9. USS Pittsburgh Deck Log, 5 June 1945, RG24, NARA.
10. Ibid.
11. Letter, Russell Barr to Alva and Hazel Barr, undated, in possession of author.
12. USS Pittsburgh Deck Log, 5 June 1945.
13. SF2/c William Bingler, USN, “An Episode Recalled,” in Buccaneer, the USS Pittsburgh Association newsletter, January 2010, 9.
14. Fergus Hoffman, “Two-Thirds of Cruiser Limps in for New Bow,” Seattle Post Intelligencer, 18 July 1945, 2.
15. “Reminiscences of Admiral Horatio Rivero, Jr., U.S. Navy (Retired),” 153.
16. Robin Coons, “Crew Averts Disaster in Raging Sea,” Seattle Times, 13 July 1945.
17. USS Pittsburgh Deck Log, 5 June 1945.
18. Fergus Hoffman, “Two-Thirds of Cruiser Limps in for New Bow.”
19. SF2/c William Bingler, USN, “An Episode Recalled.”
20. Rivero, “Reminiscences,” 155.
21. Robin Coons, “Crew Averts Disaster in Raging Sea,” 1, 7.
22. USS Pittsburgh Deck Log, 5 June 1945.
23. Ibid.
24. Fergus Hoffman, “21 Men Saved Pittsburgh,” Seattle Post Intelligencer, 19 July 1945.
25. SF2/c William Bingler, USN, “An Episode Recalled,” (continued) in Buccaneer, the USS Pittsburgh Association newsletter, July 2010, 10.
26. “Gale Scatters Vast American Fleet Over 125-Mile Area,” Seattle Daily Times, 13 July 1945.
27. Fergus Hoffman, “21 Men Saved Pittsburgh.”
28. USS Pittsburgh Deck Log, 5 June 1945.
29. “USS Munsee,” in Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships.
30. E. W. Mills, Acting Chief of Bureau, to Chief of Naval Operations, Subject: CL55 Class and CA 68 Class: Strength of Bow Structure, 30 July 1945 (RG38, NARA).