Quite a few naval vessels weathered quite a few typhoons during the recent war in the Pacific, but I feel that very few could approach the record of survivals per typhoons encountered established by the U.S.S. San Jacinto.
The little CVL met her first tropical storm west of the Palau group of islands in September of 1944. However, her baptism was mild, and she only skirted the storm, suffering nothing worse than two days of heavy rolling and pitching.
The disdain for typhoons thus engendered in the minds of her ship’s company was shattered abruptly in December of that year when, as a unit of Task Force 38 supporting Army operations in the Central Philippines, she became entangled in the worst marine disaster the Navy had known to that time. That infamous typhoon, which capsized two destroyers and several smaller craft leaving no survivors, came upon Admiral Halsey’s carrier task force at precisely the time when it could not retire to safer waters. The Army had just landed troops on Mindoro Island and needed every bit of air support the Navy could provide. The decision to remain in the area and assist the invasion until the last moment was, no doubt, a difficult one to make but the success of the operation surely justifies the losses suffered at the hands of the elements.
Having been warned beforehand of the approaching storm the San Jac had set her typhoon bill. All moveable gear had been lashed down. Additional lines from aircraft on the flight and hangar decks were made fast to the securing grommets in the deck. Elevators were lowered to increase the GM and the “Little Queen” waited for the blast.
The intensity of the storm could never have been imagined beforehand. Winds of over 100 knots and seas 70 to 80 feet high lashed at the ships of the formation. To ease the ferocious pounding the course was adjusted to place the ships in the trough of the seas, and speed was reduced to the minimum required to maintain steerage-way. All hands stood by their respective spaces to insure their security.
It was a terrifying sight to watch the gigantic breakers on the crest of the seas looming up, sometimes as much as thirty degrees above the horizontal, as the ship slowly rolled through forty degrees or more. It would have been suicide to venture onto the flight deck. It speaks well for the flight deck crews that every plane located there held fast.
However, down on the hangar deck it was another story. The TBMs, the heavier planes, had been struck below. The hangar deck could just hold the ten of them in two rows of fives. They were lashed down with all the manila available, since this took place before the advent of steel cable securing lines. At the peak of the storm the weight the planes pulling against the lines under the excessive roll proved too much to hold. A plane broke loose and was hurled into the one beside it, breaking it loose from its moorings. With every roll of the ship the two would careen across the deck and smash against the bulkheads, carrying away everything in their paths—spare engines, belly tanks, tractors and other articles of gear.
An heroic effort to harness these murderous missiles and secure them to the bulkheads was led by the air group commander, Commander Gordon Schecter (who was subsequently lost in action over Kyushu), but it soon proved impossible and exceedingly hazardous.
In a very short time other planes had been cut loose by the wreckage of the first two, and within a half hour the entire hangar deck was a mass of flying carnage threatening sure death to anyone who dared enter into it. A spare engine near the port side aft broke its securing lines and, on a starboard roll, flew across the hangar deck and passed through a steel roller curtain as though it were a piece of paper.
Gasoline and oil covered the deck. A spark was struck, and flames leapt up in the middle of the hangar. The hangar deck sprinkling was turned on, and hoses and foam were played on the fire from the openings to the cat walks. This, combined with the torrential rain and sea water from openings punctured in the sides soon produced a virtual flooding of the hangar deck. Then machine gun ammunition from the planes began to go off, fired by the flames and by being struck with the flying debris.
The four uptakes and most of the ventilation piping led through the hangar. These were ruptured and carried away by the hurtling wreckage, and the salt water flowed into the openings, flooding many compartments below and freezing or shorting out much electrical equipment as well as cracking one boiler drum.
Spare steel plates, carried in the elevator pits, slithered back and forth mercilessly gouging the elevator pistons and rendering them inoperative. All ventilation and most lighting was lost. It seemed almost inescapable that if the storm continued the ship herself must soon be abandoned. Then, like a last minute reprieve, the storm began to abate. The fires were extinguished and flooded compartments pumped out.
As the ships re-formed toward sunset of the third day of the storm the San Jac seemed but a ghost of her former self. She had power for propulsion and steering, but not much else. The humid air, and the lack of ventilation and light, coupled with the sickening motion as the ship rode over the long swells characteristic of a passed typhoon, made living below unbearable. Meals in the wardroom, with tables and chairs lashed to the deck or bulkhead and with smashed china on the deck, consisted of unsatisfactory rations of cold sandwiches and rancid coffee. Two feet of water stood in the crew’s mess and had to be pumped out before meals could be served. Everyone aboard was exhausted.
But then as if by magic morale skyrocketed. The rumor swept the ship in a few minutes. Naturally she would return to the States for repairs! To a crew which has been in the forward area continuously for eight months the news was like manna from Heaven.
The task force retired to Ulithi, where representatives of ComSeron 10 inspected the damage. The scuttlebutt continued. The crew nervously awaited the word that the next port would be San Francisco. But the fates decided otherwise, and a sister ship, the Monterey, also badly damaged, was elected to return to the States after being cannibalized by the San Jacinto.
The “Little Queen” went alongside a repair ship where she stayed for ten days; the ten days over Christmas. The crew of the repair ship, the Hector, worked untiringly during that time, twenty-four hours a day, and did a miraculous job of overhaul. By the first of the year the ship was as good as new and at sea, about to participate in the next operation.
Needless to say the information that the ship would remain in the forward area did very little to help morale, particularly in view of the fact that every man aboard had been quite certain he would soon be home, and because the repairs were effected over Christmas week. It would be difficult to depict the depth of the gloom which settled over the ship Christmas morning when, instead of reveille, Deck the Halls with Wreathes of Holly was piped over the P. A. system.
However, it was but a matter of a few days at sea until all hands felt normal Again. A week after leaving Ulithi the task force was in the South China Sea where, it was hoped, the remnants of the Jap fleet could be ferreted out and destroyed. Three weeks later the task force steamed through the Balintang Passage, leaving the South China Sea without having seen a major Jap naval vessel, a smooth sea, or the sun.
Operations during the month of February placed the San Jacinto successively off Iwo Jima, Tokyo, Iwo again and Tokyo again, and finally in the Inland Sea, headed for strikes against the Nagoya area. These latter strikes were cancelled, however, for icy winds from the north were churning up such violent seas that aircraft operations were deemed too hazardous to attempt. The task force then retired to Ulithi to prepare for the nightmarish three months of strikes against the Japanese mainland and the Nansei Shoto, including the invasion and securing of Okinawa. The only pleasant feature of that whole affair was, ironically, the weather.
The respite from the fury of the elements terminated in June, however, when the task force, operating southeast of Okinawa, encountered, simultaneously, two typhoons which culminated their northeasterly movement by combining at approximately the same geographical location occupied by Task Force 38.
The task group of which the San Jacinto was a unit bore the brunt of the storm and experienced a rare accomplishment in passing through the eye of the westernmost typhoon. At that point the wind and sea moderated considerably, and a patch of blue sky could be seen overhead. The barometer had reached a record low of, I believe, about twenty-seven inches. Of course as the cyclone moved on, its force again built up to a maximum, and then gradually subsided. The violent effects of the storm were felt for approximately forty-eight hours.
During the greater part of the storm the ships were headed so that the wind was on the port bow and the sea on the starboard bow. Turns were made for five knots, but actually the ships barely moved through the water.
The Pittsburgh, alongside the San Jacinto, was so violently shaken that she lost her bow. The Duluth narrowly escaped a like fate, but suffered such severe pounding that she was forced to retire to Guam to have her bow strength members repaired. The Bennington and Hornet, the CVs of the group, suffered identical casualties when both of their flight decks forward collapsed over their forecastles after the supporting members had been carried away by the seas. It was interesting a few days later to watch them launch aircraft off the after end of their flight decks. Practically all scouting planes topside on the battleships and cruisers were either carried away or hopelessly battered.
The San Jacinto rode out this typhoon with a minimum of damage, having suffered nothing worse than several buckled deck plates and cracked seams, and a number of slightly bent deck stringers. However, the personnel experiences were quite harrowing. For a period of about five hours as the ship rode out the mountainous seas the effect was as though some titanic crane were lifting the bow higher and higher, until it seemed the ship would surely break her back, and would then release it and permit it to drop with a frightening crash and shudder.
After the storm had passed the San Jac found herself, with the exception of the 20 mm sponsons forward, in full operating condition. She had learned from experience how to conquer a typhoon.
As the Japanese envoys were signing the terms of surrender aboard the Missouri on September 2,1945, the U.S.S. San Jacinto was headed for San Francisco, after seventeen months of uninterrupted operations against the enemy, for which she later received the Presidential Unit Citation.
It seemed that even in peacetime the little CVL could not escape the violence of the sea. In December of 1945, while engaged in the Magic Carpet operations, she was en route from San Francisco to Manila, P. I. Her first ten days out were devoted to a continuous fight against violent seas in the form of breakers which hammered night and day against her starboard bow and succeeded in tearing away most of her stack supports and smashing number one stack into uselessness.
Permission was obtained for the return trip to avoid the rough great circle route and to take the longer, balmy route due east from San Bernardino Straits to just south of the island of Hawaii. By that time the San Jac had seen her last rough seas, although she narrowly missed the fatal tidal wave which two days after her arrival in San Francisco devastated the city of Hilo on Hawaii. '
For two years now the San Jacinto has been resting peacefully, inactivated, alongside a pier at the Alameda Naval Air Station, and the worst weather she experiences is the fog rolling in through the Golden Gate and condensing on her flight deck. She seems to have settled into a sort of blissful retirement.