INTERVIEWER:   We’ve covered already the pre-World War II and your Annapolis days and your extensive service patrolling at the very start of the war, which was very interesting.  Then a major action in the Pacific and I think we had left off, you had gone back and were, I guess you had gone back and I guess your ship was gone.  You had been reassigned now as … were you a 1st officer at this point?  I can’t remember.  We’re now after the Pacific, you’re back and eventually heading into the typhoon situation.

CALHOUN:   I don’t remember whether I had made the move from being ashore with the hospitalization.

INTERVIEWER:   Yes, we had done that.

CALHOUN:   I took command of the ship and we went to Ulithi.

INTERVIEWER:   Yes, so let’s start there.  You’re on what kind of ship now and you’re in charge now?

CALHOUN:   Now I’m in command of the USS Dewey named for the Admiral.  The Dewey was a 1500 ton destroyer with two stacks, about 50,000 horsepower, 4 or 5 inch guns, 21 inch torpedoes.

INTERVIEWER:  How big of a complement?

CALHOUN:   At that time we had a squadron flying aboard which meant that the commodore and his staff were both embarked in the ship.  We totaled about 250, 22 officers.

INTERVIEWER:   The date that you took command was?

CALHOUN:   Late in September of 1944.  We left Bremerton, Washington, proceeded to Pearl Harbor and then we went directly from Pearl Harbor to Ulithi Atoll which was the major anchorage for the entire 3rd and/or 5th fleets.  It was a coral atoll and it was elliptical in shape and it was about 20 miles long from north to south and about half that distance between east and west.

INTERVIEWER:   If someone was trying to picture where it’s at in the South Pacific, right, that’s where it was at?

CALHOUN:   No, not the South Pacific, near the Marianas Islands.  Not too far from the theater where we were going to be operating which was in the Philippines.  So the day that we arrived in Ulithi, it happened that there was a typhoon alert in effect which meant that the weather forecasters had determined that there was a typhoon threat.  The conditions were such that we might experience a typhoon sometime within the next two days so that required extra measures of security in water tightness and so on.

We had nothing else to do except remain at anchor so on the Dewey, I declared that this was to be a day, two days of school.  We were going to study what references we could find in our meager library about hurricanes and typhoons.

INTERVIEWER:   This had not been part of your training up to this point.

CALHOUN:   No, no, well of course we’d heard mention of it, but we had not done anything to learn any detailed information about the construction of the storms, the nature of their onslaught, how you recognized their approach, how big they were and what you could expect.  So that proved to be very valuable later anyway.

So we all familiarized ourselves especially with the information contained in a book by Bowditch, American Practical Navigator I think was the name of it, the title of the book.  It covered just about everything a mariner would want to know.  Seamanship, navigation and storms.

INTERVIEWER:   Let’s divert for a minute just for the person listening.  Typhoon is in essence a hurricane that’s just waterborne or is there a difference?

CALHOUN:   No, there’s no difference.  It’s exactly the same storm as a hurricane except that it occurs in the western Pacific where they call it a typhoon.  Same characteristics.  We left Ulithi for operations with the 3rd fleet on the 10th of December.  We had been operating in the meantime since our arrival with a unit called the Logistics Support Group.

This was a group of about I’d say 50 ships all and all comprised of a combination of fleet oilers, tankers, hospital ship or two, several jeep carriers which were used for transporting replacement aircraft out to the attack carriers so that these aircraft would actually take off from these little carriers and fly aboard the new ones.

INTERVIEWER:   Interesting, so they weren’t just stored.  They actually had a landing and takeoff.

CALHOUN:   They were actually in operating condition when they left on these jeep carriers prepared to take off on their new parent carrier.  And we had supply ships and ammunition ships, fleet tugs.  They went along because they were capable of operating in blue water, deep ocean water and they were very seaman like in their qualities.  They had very good sea keeping characteristics and they were equipped with lots of salvage equipment and repair facilities.  And of course they were good for towing.  They were very handy to have in the event something became damaged.

And then there was a screen of 20 destroyers, which accompanied them.  That force always operated in a circular disposition, which meant that the destroyers were arranged in a large circle around the main body of big ships which were in the center and the ships were usually in four, five or six columns. 

INTERVIEWER:   So you were the shepherds out front.

CALHOUN:   We were there for submarine and anti-air protection.  We operated with that group from the time we arrived in Ulithi until December 10 when we went out on a big operation to provide all of the logistics needs of the carrier attack groups called battle groups today.  The battle groups operated separately and there were several of those, four or five of them.  They were all units of task force 38 with the attack element of the 3rd fleet. 

INTERVIEWER:   And what was the target?

CALHOUN:   Well at the time the target was the island of Luzon.  You may recall General McArthur’s forces had landed I think on Mindoro early in December and they were going soon to land on Luzon which they did.  Admiral Halsey had promised McArthur that he would provide to his forces on Luzon all of the close air support that they needed for their fight against the Japanese ground forces.  Of course there were no other air forces that were available to him because there were no airfields there.

Halsey had given his personal commitment to this.  He felt very, very responsible for carrying out this commitment.  So the way they operated was to move to a launch point, probably 100-150 miles off the coast of the objective and that enabled them then to fly a maximum number sorties because they didn't have to fly long or far to get to their targets.

After three days of air operations which required high speed steaming with the carriers going almost always at about 30 knots, the destroyers, which had a much smaller capacity of gas, would run out of fuel or get low in their fuel and they would have to then retire from the launch points to a point further away from the coast where they could meet under relatively peaceful conditions and refuel from this logistics support group.

INTERVIEWER:   And that was your big group.

CALHOUN:   That was our outfit.  Of course we would much prefer to have been with the carriers because that’s where most of the air action was going on and that’s where there would be air attacks more than likely.

INTERVIEWER:   I was curious about that.  At this point of the war, had they knocked out the Japanese air force or was there still a lot of …

CALHOUN:   Oh no, this was at the very beginning of the use of the kamikazes.  In fact, we hadn’t even had one at that point.  So that was still to come.  But in that immediate area, there was no Japanese air to speak of.  So we operated with them from the 10th of December through the period up until the 17th of December with the fast carriers coming out every three days or so in order to enable their escort destroyers to refuel and replenish.  Of course they got more than fuel.  If they had had to oppose air attacks in the past three days, they had to use up ammunition and had to replace that.

INTERVIEWER:   Now were they moving people into your hospital ships too?

CALHOUN:   Yes, all of that was going on.  When they arrived for their refueling on the 17th, several things were worthy of note.  The first was that the weather had deteriorated beginning on the night of the 16th.  So on the 17th when the fast carrier forces arrived to refuel, they found that it was quite difficult to do underway refueling because underway refueling requires that the fueling ship and the ship being fueled had to steam within about, no more than 100 feet of each other.

INTERVIEWER:   A hundred feet! 

CALHOUN:   Quite common for them to be at 50 feet.

INTERVIEWER:   We’re talking a long hose of fuel going across?

CALHOUN:   It would be a long hose, hoses usually, fueling destroyers and there were usually two hoses, one for the forward tanks and one for the after tanks.  The manifolds are large receptacles into which these things fit were on the main deck where they could easily be handled and the hose was simply pushed down a large trunk, probably 3 feet long and 2 feet wide and then latched onto that trunk so it wouldn’t pull out.  Then they signaled to the oiler and he would begin pumping.

INTERVIEWER:   But even under the best of conditions, that sounds to me like a difficult process.

CALHOUN:   It was always extremely difficult especially for the destroyers because the destroyers were low freeboard.  Freeboard being the distance above the water off the side and hull of the ship.  Frequently the destroyer freeboards were like 3 or 4 feet, especially mid-ships.  On the focsle of the destroyer, it would probably be 8 or 10, maybe 12 feet. 

In any case, heavy green seas frequently descended upon the entire deck force of the destroyer when it was engaged in fueling and it was hazardous from the standpoint of losing people overboard.  Frequently that happened.

INTERVIEWER:   Now your own ships would have to do this at some point as well?

CALHOUN:   And we had done that on the 16th.  We had refueled the day before they arrived for that reason, that we wanted to get that out of the way.  So all of the ships in my squadron and there were only four of us there, the other four were elsewhere, had refueled and we all had more than 70% fuel aboard by that time.  Actually I think I had 76% on the Dewey.

So the day on the 17th proceeded with attempts to refuel these destroyers that had just come back from the battle area.  Several of those were exceptionally low in their fuel.  One was the Spence.  He was especially the lowest.  I think their total capacity on that type destroyer, which was a Fletcher class 2100 ton destroyer, was in the neighborhood of 180,000 gallons.  The Spence had 10,000 so that was very close to being out of gas.

So we were concerned about him and there were some others.  The Hickox and the Maddox and some others I could probably think of if I thought long enough.  There were probably a half a dozen that were quite low.  Admiral Halsey was especially concerned that those ships be refueled because he didn't want them to have to run out especially in light of the fact that the weather was worsening.

Well it got worse as the day went on.  At one point the Spence, which was the lowest of the low, was detached from attempting to fuel from a tanker and sent instead to refuel from the New Jersey battleship which happened to be the fleet flag ship. Halsey was aboard the New Jersey.  The reason for that was that the officer in tactical command called the OTC, John McCain’s grandfather, thought that it would provide a better lee and calming effect to be in the lee of a battleship and that that might make it easier.

The Spence came along the New Jersey about noon as I remember to refuel and Admiral Halsey was at that point in his flag mess having lunch.  He looked out from the flag mess, the door was open, and he could see the destroyer alongside and he was immediately aware that the destroyer was having to maneuver radically to stay onsite.  He made a comment to the effect that the commanding officer of the Spence wasn’t handling the ship very well.

Jimmy Andrea was the skipper.  He was having his hands full.  I think he managed to get something like 6000 gallons and that’s all he could get.  They had to break him off and send him back to the waiting station where they hoped he could be taken care of the next day.  This proceeded along the same lines until late afternoon at which point the officer in tactical commander called my squadron commander who happened to be the screen commander.

He not only was in command of the four ships and their squadron, but of the whole 20 ships as a screen.  So they called him, his name was Preston Mercer, and asked whether he thought that they should continue to try to refuel the destroyers or whether it was simply unfeasible whereupon he said to me, “Okay skipper, let’s say you take the Dewey up there and go alongside one of these tankers and find out what this is all about”.

So I proceeded to go alongside this tanker and I was able to get alongside.  I remained about maybe 20 minutes and during that 20 minutes, the helmsman was having to use hard rudder.  That is, he was putting the rudder over 30 degrees, that’s the maximum rudder angle, and then quickly shifted to 30 degrees the other way because we were yawing so.

INTERVIEWER:   And what was causing that?  The waves themselves?

CALHOUN:   Yes, the seas and the way they broke between the ships.  They were so large that when they broke between the ships, they yawed us apart and then the next one would bang us on the other side and yaw us back against the tanker. 

INTERVIEWER:   I wonder if people, you know, that’s a big, big ship, but in the ocean, it was really small against those waves, right?

CALHOUN:   Oh, we were like matchsticks in this sea.

INTERVIEWER:   So how high was that running then already?

CALHOUN:   We probably had 20 foot seas.

INTERVIEWER:   Which means from the top of that wave down to the bottom of the trough was 20 feet.

CALHOUN:   Yes.

INTERVIEWER:   And how about the tankers themselves, were they very stable?

CALHOUN:   Oh they were extremely stable.

INTERVIEWER:   Alright, so they were okay.

CALHOUN:   Yes, because they had deep hulls, probably I imagine about 30 feet and of course they had a million gallons of fuel.

INTERVIEWER:   (Laughter) Of weight.

CALHOUN:   To weight them down, so they were steady.  I turned to the commodore after 20 minutes, I said, “Commodore, I do not think it’s feasible to fuel destroyers today”.  He said okay, so he called up the OTC and said it’s not feasible (laughter).

INTERVIEWER:   You were the guinea pig.  But you didn't actually try to take on the hose and everything.

CALHOUN:   No, no, it would have been senseless (laughter).  In the first place, I didn't need it and in the second place I would have endangered all the people that we were in line with.  Anyway we went back to our station and continued to steam on the same course, but they did not attempt to do any more fueling that day. 

Finally late, maybe at about dusk, they told us that they would break up the combined forces and proceed independently with the task force 38 unit going in one direction and the logistics support going in another and then turn and rendezvous again at daybreak to resume fueling.  My commodore and I looked at each other, “What!  Resume!”.  We’re not going to be able to resume and tomorrow is going to be worse. 

INTERVIEWER:   Now what were you getting from a weather standpoint?  I mean what was the sophistication at that point as far as even understanding the weather?

CALHOUN:   You’d have to read my book to get the full picture, but the barometer was behaving in a manner typical of the approach of a typhoon.  We began talking about the fact that it looked like typhoon weather on the 17th.  That expression was not returned to us by the staff of the fleet commander.  They did send a severe weather warning late in the day on the 17th.  It looked as though we’ll likely have some severe weather (laughter).  Well we knew very well we were going to have severe weather, we were in it then.

But they did not say the word typhoon until the next day.  Anyway we took a diversion course and as I recall we headed south.  Part of the night we headed northwest which was the course that we had guessed that this storm was probably on.  We did that by examining the tracks of previous typhoons or cyclones and figuring the time of the year and what the pattern was at that time of the year and so on.  We assumed it was doing a west northwest course.

All of the old time sailors rules indicated that’s where it was.  There was a rule of thumb that if you faced into the wind and then looked to the right 120 degrees, that’s about where the storm will be and that’s where it was.  We proceeded through the rest of the night to take every conceivable action to better prepare ourselves for what we thought was bound to be a typhoon.  I mentioned in the book I had had a very salty, very tough old executive officer on my destroyer, the Sterett, Watso Singer.

Watso had what he called Singer’s Law (laughter) which was if you’re in rough weather in the Pacific and you encounter barometer readings that fall as much as 3/100 of an inch per hour for a period of three hours, you are probably heading into a typhoon and you had better haul ass.  I found words very similar to that but without the salty expression in the Bowditch. 

So anyhow we were convinced that we were running into a typhoon and we therefore moved everything that was movable in the ship down into the bottom of the ship. We moved all the gun ammunition out of the gun stands, the magazines, we took the depth charges out, put them down.  We moved all of the oil that could be pumped into the lower tanks.

INTERVIEWER:   Now we’re talking about, it’s now raining and storming?

CALHOUN:   Oh, it’s very nasty. 

INTERVIEWER:   Was it cold or was it still hot?

CALHOUN:   Probably in the high 60’s.

INTERVIEWER:   I just wondered if the temperature changed.

CALHOUN:   Good thing it wasn’t cold.  Anyway we spent the night doing that.  I think it was probably at about midnight, the squadron commander came up on the bridge and I told him what I was doing.  Of course he was very much in favor of that and then he asked if I knew the skipper of the Spence.  I said I did.  Of course the Spence I knew was on his mind as being the most jeopardized of these ships.  He said, “What kind of an officer is he”.  I said he was an excellent officer.  I told him he was a year ahead of me at the Naval Academy, I knew he was in the same battalion as me and I said, “He’s a good guy; however I don’t think he’s had much destroyer experience”.

“Oh” he said, “Why is that?”  I said I think if I recalled correctly that his duty prior to coming to the Monahan, which was the name of his ship, was to be probably the 1st lieutenant I think on a survey ship.  So I didn't think he had had much destroyer experience.  He said, “Well do you think he has ballasted with sea water?”  I said, “Well he’s a member of destroyer’s Pacific fleet and the destroyer Pacific fleet doctrine is that once you fall below 70% of your total capacity, you should bring it back to 70% with sea water”.  That was standard practice.

INTERVIEWER:   Explain to me why that’s important.

CALHOUN:   It’s important because the governing stability of a destroyer or any other ship for that matter, depends on, to a large extent, the amount of fuel it has aboard.  The weight of the fuel figures prominently in the determination of how far you can roll.

INTERVIEWER:   Back and forth.

CALHOUN:   Yeah, if you were out of fuel, your center of gravity has risen which you don’t want.  You want it to be low and you’re more inclined to tip over.  So there was a doctrine in the destroyers of the Pacific fleet issued by the commander that any time that your total fuel capacity fell below 70%, you should make up the 70% with sea water.

INTERVIEWER:   That means you literally fill your tanks?

CALHOUN:   That means you literally ran sea water into your fuel tanks.

INTERVIEWER:   But then what happens when you want to put on fuel later?  You pumped it out?

CALHOUN:   Oh sure.  You pump it out and of course the water would go to the bottom.  The oil is lighter than the water so any water that you introduced would be in the bottom of the tank and theoretically there should not be a problem.  Of course in practice, there were occasions when that water got into the fuel that was suctioned off into the burners under the boilers.  That meant that you got a shot of salt water into your burners and that put the fires out.  No disasters that I know of occurred.

Anyway nevertheless, of course engineers knew this and engineers throughout the fleet hated to introduce sea water into their fuel tanks.

INTERVIEWER:   That’s what I wondered.

CALHOUN:   And that very well could be a factor in what happened to this ship because the captain wouldn’t know whether or not they were pumping water into the tank.  He’d just have to take somebody’s word for it or assume that they were doing what he told them to do.  It might well have been that they found it convenient to delay the execution of that hoping things would improve.

Anyway I told him I assumed he had ballasted, but I said, “Commodore, the only way you’re going to know for sure is to ask him”.  He said that was right and he was going to do that.  So he picked up the voice radio and called him, asked him how he was doing, how the ship was behaving.  He told him kind of rough, but things were holding together.  So he said, “Have you ballasted?”  “No sir”.  He looked as if he could pass out (laughter).  “What!!”

“Well, Commence ballasting immediately and ballast in such a manner that by daybreak when they have scheduled us for refueling”, and this of course was ridiculous because we knew damn well we weren’t going to be able to refuel, “Be at 50% of capacity when daybreak arrives so in case we can fuel, you’ll be able to take 50% of your fuel”.  He said, “Aye aye sir” and that was that.

Then I proceeded to assemble an inspection party comprised of the executive officer and the first lieutenant and the ship fitter, who incidentally is a close friend and still visits me every year on this particular date, his name is Steve Yarden, and two or three other boatswain mates and the warrant post and we proceeded to inspect the ship from top to bottom.

INTERVIEWER:   Your ship or the other ship?

CALHOUN:   My ship to be certain that we hadn’t overlooked anything.  As it turned out, we did overlook something.  All of us missed it and that was the whale boat.  The whale boat was rigged out in the Davids.  When I say rigged out, it means it overhung the side of the ship so in the event that we had to put that boat in the water, it was ready to lower.

INTERVIEWER:   So it was hanging…

CALHOUN:   Normally at sea, especially in rough water, you would swing those Davids in and the boat would be inboard so in case it was lowered, it would lower to the deck.

INTERVIEWER:   Now you used the term Davids?

CALHOUN:   Davids were steel supports probably 6 or 8 feet tall and they were crooked at the top so when you swung them out, they reached over beyond the side of the ship and lowered the boat clear of the side.

INTERVIEWER:   And you could swing that back and put it more in the center of the boat.  Is that where you want it?

CALHOUN:   Yes.

INTERVIEWER:   So you changed that when you found it?

CALHOUN:   No, we did not.  We didn't find out about it or it didn't come to mind until the next day when we were in no shape to rig it in (laughter).  Anyhow I went to bed feeling we had done everything we could do to get ready for this.  On destroyers, there’s an emergency cabin for the commanding officer which is always right behind the pilot house on bridge level so in case anything happens, the captain can come right out of his bunk and be on the bridge.

INTERVIEWER:   Now had you turned around and hauled ass at this point or not?

CALHOUN:   No.

INTERVIEWER:   You’re still going into…

CALHOUN:   We’re still proceeding with the understanding that we were going to refuel in the morning at a certain rendezvous point.

INTERVIEWER:   But you actually know that you’re heading toward this…

CALHOUN:   Well actually what we knew, what I thought at the time was that we were probably running parallel to the storm, ahead of it.  It would have been on our starboard quarter.  I deduced this from the fact that there wasn’t much happening to the barometer.  It was remaining fairly steady.  It was still low, but it wasn’t going through  any gyrations like it had been before.  But I attributed that to the fact, well we’re maintaining a steady position away from it so there wouldn’t be any change in the barometer reading relatively.

Anyhow about 4:00 in the morning, I was awakened when all of the books on my bookshelf fell off onto my head.  That had never happened before.  What in the hell is happening?  So I got up, I was dressed anyhow and I went out onto the bridge and inquired about what was going on.  Well they had just executed a turn into a southerly course.  Well that was to my liking because I figured that would take us further away from the storm.

We proceeded on that course until such time as we had to turn around and come back to meet the rendezvous which we meant we then had to head northeast to go the rendezvous.  When we got to the rendezvous point, before we got there, when daybreak came, I was still out on the bridge and I looked up ahead and saw a destroyer, a Fletcher class destroyer, headed on an opposite course up ahead of us so it was headed back towards us.

Well of course that was of interest to me.  I didn't want to have a collision with them and I turned to say something to the officer of the deck.  When I turned back to look at this destroyer, it wasn’t there.  The reason it wasn’t there of course was because it was in the.

INTERVIEWER:   It was that low.

CALHOUN:   That’s the first time I realized exactly how high the seas were.  I then did some calculation with seaman’s eye as we call it.  I called the squadron commander on the voice telephone and said I thought he should come to the bridge.  So he came up two minutes later and I said, “I think we’re in it”.  He said, “No doubt about it”.  Well we had about 60 foot seas.

INTERVIEWER:   60!  And how tall is a destroyer?

CALHOUN:   The height of water normally on the bridge was 54 feet so these waves were higher than our height…when the ship was in the trough, you couldn’t see over the top of the wave. 

INTERVIEWER:   Now what is your goal with that big trough, so you’re cutting through the waves at that point?

CALHOUN:   Our courses were determined by the officer in tactical command and at that point he had ordered us to take for fueling which meant that he tried to put us on a course 10 degrees to the right of the wind which meant we were going at a course of about 060, 60 degrees to the right of north and we were pounding very heavily.  Conditions deteriorated rapidly.  The visibility decreased to the point where I could not see the jack stand.  That’s the little flag staff that’s up in the bow of the ship that carries the Union Jack on it.

INTERVIEWER:   So we’re talking the front of your ship which was 100 feet?

CALHOUN:   Probably about 120 feet.

INTERVIEWER:   You couldn’t see that at all?

CALHOUN:   Couldn’t see that.

INTERVIEWER:   Yet alone this other destroyer?

CALHOUN:   Frankly I don’t thought much more about that destroyer.  I don’t know what happened to it.  Maybe he avoided us.  In any case, I can’t recall exactly what happened next but the rain and spume from the wind, and the wind had increased now probably into the 70 knots or thereabouts…

INTERVIEWER:   Which would be miles per hour or what would that be?

CALHOUN:   77 miles an hour. 

INTERVIEWER:   Oh my goodness.

CALHOUN:   Rain was being driven horizontally and it was being driven with such force that it actually took the paint off the bridge bulk head.  If you were to raise your face above the bulwark of the bridge so that you’re facing into the wind and then turn away from it, you would have capillary bleeding marks wherever you were exposed, little pinpoints of blood all over your face.

People were beginning to be very apprehensive at this point.  Most of my bridge crew was huddled down on the port wing of the bridge below the bulwark so there was some shelter with their knees drawn up.

INTERVIEWER:   Now your bridge is an open bridge?

CALHOUN:   No, the sides of the bridge were open, but in the center the central portion of it was closed.  That was the pilot house.  So we just continued to wallow in this mess with everything going to hell in a hand basket.  People were then reporting men overboard one ship after another.  Some of them reported two or three men overboard.

INTERVIEWER:   You’re getting phone traffic all the time?

CALHOUN:   We had what they called TBS for talk between ships, radios.

INTERVIEWER:   And how many ships are still within talking distance?

CALHOUN:   That was one of the problems.  We had of course a total of somewhere close to 50 and there were probably 85 or 90 of the other task forces around us so we had over 130 ships in the area.  Aircraft carriers began to report that their planes were being torn off of their moorings and falling overboard and these were planes that were secured with multiple lines to pad eyes that were riveted, that were welded into the deck.  It pulled the pad eyes out of the deck and blew them overboard.

In some cases, it blew them into the island structure of the carrier, piled them up one on top of the other.  In fact, I have a couple of pictures in my book of just that.  Two or three aircraft that are piled one on top of the other.

INTERVIEWER:   How about your guys down in the bowels of the ship?  What in the heck is happening to them down there?

CALHOUN:   They were undoubtedly petrified.  I’m sure all of them were thinking that if the ship were to sink, they’d be lost because they’d never get out.

INTERVIEWER:   They probably were thrown around and buffeted.

CALHOUN:   They were thrown around unmercifully.  In the case of the Dewey for example, the men in the fire room of the Dewey found themselves in water that was shoulder deep when it rolled on its side and they would suspend themselves by grabbing chain falls and projections from the overhead and holding on.

INTERVIEWER:   Now this is your ship?

CALHOUN:   Yeah.

INTERVIEWER:   But how did they even keep the boilers going? 

CALHOUN:   It took some doing.  For example on that class of ship, the fire arms were under pressure which meant that they had forced draft to provide the necessary pressure that would force the gases up the stack.  They had to have a secure hatch with an air valve or a water tight compartment that you could come into and close the hatch above and then open the hatch below and get in that hatch.

Well that meant that every time that opening onto the main deck was rolled under water which happened frequently, you practically filled that hatch compartment with water and then whenever anybody emerged or went into the fire room, the process would put a couple of hundred gallons of water into the fire room.  People were not able to stand up on the bridge of the ship and no one could stand up on the deck, the main deck.  No one was allowed on the main deck.

INTERVIEWER:   I was wondering about that.

CALHOUN:   We had made life jackets the uniform of the day.  Everyone had a life jacket except me for a while.  I later got one, but in the early part of the storm I didn't have one.  We had rigged life rafts and life buoys on the after conning station of the ship.  That was a raised platform above the main deck where there was a wheel and compass and so on so in the event the bridge was disabled, you could steer the ship from that point.

We had sent four men back to that station early in the morning and latched them to the structure of the ship so that they could not be washed overboard.  Their job was to look for anybody who fell overboard and make sure that the life rafts were released.  No way could you have rescued them.  They were going to have to make it through that storm in the water.

So things were deteriorating in a big hurry.  We were hearing these reports of men overboard and then we heard reports that on some of the carriers, the planes that were in the hangar of the carrier also tore loose from their moorings and they were sloshing back and forth banging into each other.  The fuel tanks were being ruptured and the fuel caught fire and they had conflagrations raging on two or three of these carriers. 

One of those carriers, which reported those conditions was the Monterey CVL, converted cruiser.  He said that he had a fire and was calling for a fleet tug to come alongside and help him fight the fire.  At about that point we still had our surface search radar and I was watching the radar scope and I could see this target in front of me.  Of course I couldn’t see it visually, but I could see it on the radar screen.  It didn't appear to be moving.

I suddenly saw this huge ship dead ahead of me, probably no more than 500 yards, and I couldn’t see it very well.  I just knew it was there and I couldn’t tell which way it was going or if it was going at all.  But we were on the starboard bow of the formation so I figured he wouldn’t be going to the left because if he did, he’d be running into the main body of the center.  So I assumed if he was moving at all, he was probably moving to the right so I came left hoping to miss him.  We cleared him by maybe 50 yards.

INTERVIEWER:   Oh my God.  And it was this big carrier?

CALHOUN:   It was the Monterey and I could see the name on the stern as I went by and could see this big ball of smoke coming out from the hangar and then he was swallowed up in the storm and I lost sight of him.  But coming left had put me into the trough of the sea where previously we had been heading a little bit to the right of the wind, now we were coming around and we were in the trough which meant our rolling was greatly exaggerated.

We began rolling severely to the right, always to the right, never quite back up to the vertical, always to the right.  I could not get out of the trough.  I had never heard of a destroyer with 50,000 horsepower not being able to exert enough power on the rudder and so on to turn.  We could not turn even when I went ahead full on my port engine and back on my starboard engine, with a hard right rudder I still couldn’t turn more than 10 degrees.

INTERVIEWER:   So it was just the power of the wave itself?

CALHOUN:   We were in irons.  That’s a sailing term.  If you were a sailor, you’d know it means the wind and the sea are such that you simply can’t turn, period.  So I called up the formation commander and told him that we were out of control, that we were proceeding from starboard to port headed through the center of the formation and if you see us, please avoid contact (laughter).  They couldn’t have changed course either probably, but I didn't know what else to do (laughter).

INTERVIEWER:   So you’re going to go right through the middle of the whole group.

CALHOUN:   We went through this whole formation.

INTERVIEWER:   Could you see the other ships at all?

CALHOUN:   No (laughter), could we see them!  We came so close we could have thrown a spud at them.  You know, it was one hair-raising incident after another.  There were about five columns of them, I don’t even remember how many columns there were.  I remember in one case seeing this huge tanker.  It looked to me as if he was going to come right down on top of us, but the next sea came along and picked him up and we got away from him.  I don’t know how we managed, but anyhow we got through the formation.

When we got through, I said to the squadron commander, “Commodore, I’m not about to try to get back to my station.  I’m going to look out for the Dewey and I don’t give a damn what the hell happens to that formation”.  He said, “Absolutely”.  (Laughter).  So we didn't pay any attention to the formation or anything else.

INTERVIEWER:   It was everybody for themselves.  What’s your wind at this point?  It’s at its peak?

CALHOUN:   No, I don’t know if it was at its peak at that time.  Peak probably occurred around noontime.  By that time, it was up around 125-130 knots.  We had all kinds of interesting things happening.  At one point I became concerned, really concerned about the degree to which we were rolling.  I called the exec over.  Well I should explain the exec. 

The executive officer, Frank Bamton, had been aboard for two years.  He was a very competent officer and knew the ship well, but he had been relieved of his job as exec by a new arrival who was high lined to us from one of the tankers on the 10th or 11th somewhere in there.  Maybe closer to the 17th, I’ve forgotten what date they came aboard.  This new exec arrived and relieved Frank Bamton two days before the storm.

When the storm occurred, I said, “Frank, you’re the exec again.  Dave, all power to you, but I’m not going to have you as the exec now.  You don’t know the ship; he does”.  So Dave said, “aye, aye sir” (laughter) and stayed out of the way. 

INTERVIEWER:   Which wouldn’t have been fair to him, to try to run the ship.

CALHOUN:   No, and later he performed a very wonderful and useful service which I’ll try to explain.  Anyhow I called Frank over because I knew he was more familiar with the ship than I was and I said, “Frank, I recall looking at the stability curves for the Dewey before we sailed and if I recall correctly they indicate that we should be able to recover from a roll of 72 degrees.  That’s the maximum”.  He said that was correct.

At that point, we were rolling about 55 degrees.  Well the inclinometer on the bridge on the after bulkhead and in front of it is the helm and the telegraph and the enunciator which indicated the exact number of turns you want each propeller to make and those two things are standards that stick up vertically from the deck.  I wedged myself between the telegraph and the enunciator because otherwise I couldn’t stand up.

By wedging myself that way, I was looking in toward the wheel, helm and if I looked to my left, I was looking at the bow.  If I looked to the right, I was looking at the after bulkhead or the inclinometer was.  So I could see the inclinometer at 55, 56, 57, 58.  Then I began really wondering.  Well every time we rolled over, we would hesitate before we returned and the further we rolled, the longer we would hesitate.

It got to the point where we were lying over, practically on our side.  A minute seems like 10 hours under these circumstances. 

INTERVIEWER:   So show us with your hands what’s really happening.  If the boat is your fist, what’s happening.

CALHOUN:   Well I’ll use this hand.  We were moving, we were going from the vertical down to about like this.  First it was this (indicating with his hands) and then it was this, then it was this, finally it was down to about like that at what I estimate was about 80 degrees. 

INTERVIEWER:   And it was only supposed to be 72?

CALHOUN:   It should have gone no further than 72 and the inclinometer had a little peg, a stop, which limited the movement of the arm that swung and that was at 75 degrees.  Of course, we rolled up against the stop and then still continued to roll.  So it was more than 75 degrees.

INTERVIEWER:   And 90 degrees would mean you were actually flat on the water?

CALHOUN:   And that did happen of course to three destroyers.  So anyway I’m sure I can’t remember everything, but a lot of this time I was engaged in conversation with the squadron commander who was in the pilot house with me.  He had a chair on the portside and I had one on the starboard side, but I had long ago given mine up.  He’s trying to hang on to his (laughter) without much success.  We frequently found ourselves hanging by our hands from vertical stanchions.  He was actually hanging from the support of his bridge chair.

INTERVIEWER:   Because you went so far over that if you didn't hang on, you’re sliding.

CALHOUN:   You couldn’t keep your feet on the deck.  I’ll explain myself.  I was hanging for the vertical stanchion by my hands with my feet clear of the deck and when I looked past my feet, I was looking through the open starboard bridge window into the sea.  Had I let go, I would have fallen right into the ocean.

INTERVIEWER:   Oh my God.

CALHOUN:   At one point, my friend, Frank Bamton, the exec, was standing on the Polaris stand on the starboard wing of the bridge.  The Polaris stand was a stand about that high, about that big around that had a gyrocompass on the top of it and he was standing on it with both feet with his helmet bailing.  And I said, “Frank, you’re going to have to bail out that whole Pacific Ocean.  He said, “I know, but I have to do something”.

Anyhow the commodore was obviously concerned and I was concerned that I might be able to do something that I hadn’t done.  So I asked him if he had any advice.  He said, “Well the only thing I can think of is maybe you ought to move whatever oil and water you can out of the starboard tanks into the port tank.”  Well you know, it sounded pretty good.  So I ordered that done.  We moved 30,000 or so gallons.

INTERVIEWER:   One side or front to back?

CALHOUN:   To one side.  In later analysis, I determined that probably wasn’t the right thing to do, but anyhow it didn't turn us over.  But it sounded like a good idea at the time and I did it.  Then I thought we’ve got a lot of weight up at the top of the mast.  There’s a big radar antenna there.  I wondered if I could cut the mast.  So I told him that I thought by cutting the mast, would he have any comment about that.  He said anything I could do was alright with him.

So I sent for Steve Yorden who was the ship fitter.  I said they should tell him to come to the bridge and to bring his cutting torch with him.  “I’m thinking about cutting off the mast”.  I didn't know how in the hell he was going to get up to the bridge with all the gear he carries, but he got there somehow.  He later told me that he got a couple of volunteers to help him.

He came up to me on the bridge (laughter), on the wing of the bridge and said, “Okay Captain, where do you want her cut?” 

INTERVIEWER:   Ever practical, huh? (laughter)

CALHOUN:   But I had been looking at the mast during this interim while he was on his way and I was struck by the fact that there was a mass of cable, steel enmeshed, what we call armor cable, going up the side all clumped together.  If I cut the mast, the mast is going to break, but I won’t have cut those wires and they’re going to act like a hinge.  Then I could perceive that the mast was going to fall over and the yard arm at the top of it was going to come down and could go right into the fire room.

I said, “Yarden, we’re not going to cut it.  I changed my mind”.  “Oh”, he said, “Can we cut something else?” (laughter).  “How bout cutting off the gun director?”  I said no, we’re not going to cut off the gun director.  I couldn’t see how we could ever cut the gun director free not without having to tumble down on the deck and putting a big whole in it. 

While I was out there looking at that, I noticed that the guide wire, which was a 1 inch wire, ran from the main deck up to the top of the forward stack.  It was obviously there to support it and reinforce it so the wind wouldn’t cause it to bust or bend.  I noticed that these gusts that were probably 140 knots or so…

INTERVIEWER:   Which in miles per hour would be now 150-160?

CALHOUN:   A knot is a mile and a tenth, 155.  It was very, very strong.  I said that that guide wire is going to carry away because each gust was thrusting against the stack and everything that it drew this wire taut and then it would relax, there’d be a slight bend in it, then bang again.  I cleared everybody off the bridge and told them to get inside the pilot house because if this thing blows, it’s going to decapitate anybody that’s out here.

Well it wasn’t more than 15 minutes later that it carried away.  It sounded like a loaded cannon, BANG, and then we watched this stack just slowly bend all the way down, right down on top of the boat, knocked the boat off, knocked the Davids off, flat down onto the deck and limped, like a sock that you’ve thrown over the side, and the top aperture of the stack is now under water about three feet.

INTERVIEWER:   Now how tall is this stack that we’re talking about?

CALHOUN:   Well it was 60 feet or so.

INTERVIEWER:   And the whole thing just went?

CALHOUN:   I’m sure I’ve got pictures of it; I’ll show you.  In fact, I could get them and show you on the screen.  The minute that happened, God was with us.  It was a great thing because we immediately noticed that we weren’t rolling quite as far because we had lowered the center of gravity by the amount of that weight of the stack and we had removed this huge sail area that the wind was working against.

INTERVIEWER:   Interesting.

CALHOUN:   And it knocked the boat over.  In fact, we lost the boat.  The boat was torn off the ship, so was the Davids, everything went.  But the boat had been picking up like 400 or 500 gallons of water every time we came up. 

INTERVIEWER:   But what was that stack; that was a smoke stack?

CALHOUN:   Yeah from the forward boiler room.

INTERVIEWER:   So where was the smoke going?

CALHOUN:   Still going out of the stack, through the water.

INTERVIEWER:   But it didn't break off the stack?

CALHOUN:   No, no.

INTERVIEWER:   Just bent it?

CALHOUN:   Just bent it.  It did break off the line that ran up the stack to the whistle and siren and that line came right off the top of the boiler.  So that was venting boiler pressure steam, like 500 pounds per square inch steam.  Made a terrible racket.  Of course I didn't know what it was.  I could just see this cloud of smoke, a cloud of steam and it occurred to me that we had had a casualty in the fire room and that what I was seeing was the issue of some steam from the broken steam line in the fire room.

I thought oh God, we probably lost everybody in that fire room.  I didn't know because we had no phone connection by that time.  The next thing I knew, maybe 20 minutes later, here was the chief water tender from the fire room.  “How the hell did you get here?”  “Well I came up the ladder, Captain” (laughter).  He had come to tell me that everything was alright in the forward fire room.

I asked how things were down there now, and he said there was nothing to worry about, that the only casualty they suffered was one pair of under-drawers got caught in the flashback, but he said it didn't matter.  They would have had to burn them anyhow (laughter). 

A little while after that, the quartermaster who was also our lay religious leader, we called him preacher, he came to me and said, “Captain, the barometer just went up two hundredths of a point”.  That meant we’d gotten through the center and we were now in the second half of the storm and it was going to be a little bit better than it was at first because of this reduction in sail and we were going to make it.

INTERVIEWER:   Now did you have an actual eye that you felt at all?

CALHOUN:   No.  I don’t remember an eye.  Maybe we went through it, but I don’t remember it.  Anyhow the second half of it was just like the first half, not quite as bad.  And shortly after that upward movement of the barometer, which, incidentally, had gotten down to the U of U.S. Navy, that’s the way it was reported to me because it didn't go that far.  The scale didn't go that far.  It went to the end of the scale and then further to the U. of U.S. Navy. 

The commodore later estimated that that was a reading of something like 26.3 I think inches, I’m not sure how accurate that was, but that was his guess.  I went back into the pilot house and I thought about all the guys who were locked into those compartments.  They were probably scared to death and didn't know how they were going to get out of there if we roll over.  It looked many times like we were.

So I called the guy who had been the temporary relief, “Dave, I want you to go down below and visit each of the living compartments and assure the crew that we’re going to make it.  Tell them that the Captain sent you to tell them that we were going to make it”.  “Yes sir”.  He said, “I was never so scared in my life.  I was going to have to go down those God damn steps into those compartments where I knew I’d never get out if we rolled over.”

But somehow he managed to do it and he said they were so grateful to hear that the captain said that.  He said he found in every compartment men were saying their prayers.  I heard the bridge crew being led in prayer by Preacher out on the wing of the bridge.  I said later that he probably didn't know any other prayer, but anyway they were repeating the Navy hymn which goes “Eternal Father, strong to save, whose arm does battle with the rest of this wave.  Oh hear us when we cry to Thee for those in peril on the sea”.  It couldn’t have been more appropriate.

Anyhow that was the high point of the storm and then things kind of sort of lulled through for the rest of the day.  Still frightening and at one point the squadron commander asked me, “Do you think you could make it if you get in the water?”.  I said, “Oh yeah”.  He said, “You do?”  I said, “Sure” (laughter).  He said, “Well you’re younger than I am” (laughter).  He said, “Besides I’m not a very good swimmer.  On the other hand, I’ve got all my insurance paid up”.  (laughter)   He said, “I’m thinking about all these kids.  I’ve had a good life, these kids haven’t even started yet”.

INTERVIEWER:   And how old was he, 40?

CALHOUN:   He was probably in his 50’s.

INTERVIEWER:   That is pretty old.

CALHOUN:   See in those days, promotions didn't come very fast.  Well prior to the war, they hadn’t.  They went fast during the war.  He was a very senior captain and he had quite a role to play later on in the court of inquiry that was convened to investigate the cause of how we got into this and so on.

INTERVIEWER:   So how many days now have you been in this storm?  Really two full days?

CALHOUN:   No, we were in the worst of the storm one day.  We were one day on the edge of it and one day coming out of it after we got through it.

INTERVIEWER:   Did it like lighten up and all of a sudden it was better weather?

CALHOUN:   Yes, it was like coming out of a cylinder of fog and spray and wind into almost clear, still terribly overcast, still raining, but not as hard.  Very confused seas.  I couldn’t tell you where the sea was from.  It seemed to me it was coming from every direction.

INTERVIEWER:   But the waves were not 60 feet.

CALHOUN:   No, but they were still rough.

INTERVIEWER:   I was going to say, they surely didn't get calm very quickly.

CALHOUN:   No, they were probably 30-35 feet something like that.  Shortly after we came out, which was shortly before dusk, about a mile behind us, I saw the Tabberer and D.E. emerge from this spray.  He sent me a signal immediately by light saying, “I have just lost my mast”.  So I said, “Cheer up, I just lost my stack”.  (laughter)   So then he said, “Please give me the course to Ulithi”.  So we flashed back to him what the course was to Ulithi and then there was no more communication from him.

We continued on a course to Ulithi and noticed…I watched him for quite a while.  He seemed to be diverging from our path as though he was steering 5 to 10 degrees to the left of our course, which I didn't understand.  I didn't know why he was doing that unless maybe his gyro was off and he thought he was steering what we told him to, but he really wasn’t.  It doesn’t matter. 

I was still on the bridge until long after dark and at about 11:00 I noticed on our port quarter a loom of light over the horizon, but it was in the direction that I had last seen him.  So I immediately assumed that he had encountered someone in the water and that he was rescuing.  Otherwise I could see no reason to turn the light on cause we normally were all dark.  So I turned and started to head over in that direction and when I did, I began to pound very heavily, up and bang, and bang!

INTERVIEWER:   The waves were such that you…

CALHOUN:   Yeah, so pretty soon there’s a buzz.  It’s the commodore calling me on his voice-activated telephone, “Skipper, what the hell are we doing”.  I explained that I had seen this light and concluded it was probably the Tabberer and probably he was picking up survivors and I thought I would go over and help him.  He said, “Well of course it’s your ship.  You do what you want to do, but I would like to remind you that we don’t know what we have done to the Dewey.  You know we took some heavy pounding and I’m not at all comfortable with the thought that we haven’t done some structural damage to the ship.  This pounding is not going to help it so that’s something you should consider before you go over there”.

I said, “Thank you very much” and I turned back to Ulithi.  To get ahead of the story, we went back to Ulithi.  Of course ultimately we were repaired over a period of about two months.

INTERVIEWER:   You did have a lot of damage then?

CALHOUN:   A terrible amount of damage.  I lost my train of thought.

INTERVIEWER:   What happened to that other ship?

CALHOUN:   We got to go to Iwo Jima and I managed to finagle myself into a deal where I got into the objective area.  I got away from tankers.

INTERVIEWER:   Was Iwo Jima still a hot area at that point?

CALHOUN:   Well the landings were just going to take place.

INTERVIEWER:   Oh man.

CALHOUN:   I wanted to be there if possible (laughter).  So funny how these things happen.  I had visited this particular tanker which was the tanker on which my old friend, Blackwell, stationed.  I told you the story of Blackwell.  He was now the navigator of that tank.  When I went aboard the tanker in the Philippines, no, in Ulithi, then we knew we were going to Iwo Jima, I said, “Somebody is going to have to go in for the objective area to fuel the destroyers and the escorts that are in there because they will use up all of their ammunition and that will have to be replenished and they will use up a lot of their fuel and that will have to be replenished and you may be designated as the tanker to go in and fuel them”.

He said, “Yeah”.  I said, “Well if that happened, you’re going to have an escort to take you in there, right?”  “Yeah”.  I said, “Well would you please request that Achilles, which was our voice call, accompany you if you go into the objective area?”  He said, “Yeah, sure”. 

INTERVIEWER:   And he did.

CALHOUN:   The night before the landing, they called him (laughter) and designated him to go in to refuel the escorts and he immediately came back and said, “Roger, request Achilles accompany me as my escort”.  They said, “okay, Achilles go ahead.”  So we left which got us in there.  We got there in time.  I saw the flag about two minutes after it was put up on Mount Suribachi.  They called all the ships on the voice radio and said that the Stars and Stripes had just been erected on Mount Suribachi, and I could look up and see it.  We were assigned to provide gunfire support to the Marines.

INTERVIEWER:   So now you’re escorting, one day after the storm?

CALHOUN:   No, no, this was February.

INTERVIEWER:   So now you’re firing guns like crazy.

CALHOUN:   So we went in and fired all of our ammunition.  We had a great time.  We gave gunfire support on the eastern side of the island for about three days.

INTERVIEWER:   And were the planes coming in heavy at that point too or not so bad?

CALHOUN:   Yeah, we were running very heavy air attacks against them.  All of the firing that we did was on call from the Marines where they would designate a target and then we would fire at it. Every once in a while, we could see what we had.  One night we were standing off rendering fire support and they called us and said there was a missile battery firing missiles at them and they asked us if we could see them.  Well I could see it.

INTERVIEWER:   With binoculars or the naked eye?

CALHOUN:   Binoculars, we were about 3000 yards off the beach.  So no mistaking what it was.  They asked us if we would take it under fire, which we did and we hit it.  It really blew up (laughter).  So we felt very good about that.  Anyhow on the last day we were there and I was up on the bridge and we were still shooting, word came up from the forward fire room that they had a leak.  I said what kind of a leak and they said I had better come down there and take a look at it.

So I went down into the fire room and here we had these geysers coming up from the base of the hull through cracks in the hull.  Of course they were coming up as high as the water was outside.  So it was probably 12 feet high.

INTERVIEWER:   You had a hole in the boat in other words.

CALHOUN:   Probably six or seven holes. 

INTERVIEWER:   From what?

CALHOUN:   We had cracked the shell plating in the storm.

INTERVIEWER:   And that repair just never picked that up?

CALHOUN:   No, never picked it up.  And then they called me over to look at the ribs called the transverse wet frames, the ribs of the ship and right at above the turn of the bilge, the beam that came down and met the beam coming from the rib of the bottom was welded together and there were 12 of those joints that were moving.  The well had broken and these were all adjacent so there was a space maybe 30 feet long…

INTERVIEWER:   That was unconnected?

CALHOUN:   We were limber in that 30 feet and everything was moving back and forth.  We could have broken an aft.  The keel probably was still in tact, but I’m not sure it was.  Anyway they asked if we were going to report this to the commander chief of the Pacific fleet and I said not until we fire the last bullet (laughter), which we did probably about two hours later.

Then I reported that we had this problem and explained what it was.  We got an urgent message, “Return to Ulithi immediately” which we did and they patched us up.  But the commodore knew what we were talking about.

INTERVIEWER:   Did you ever find out what happened with that other boat?  The one that you turned away from that had the lights.

CALHOUN:   Oh sure.  As a matter of fact, on the weather channel a couple of days ago, Paul Stillwell, the guy that got me into the thing with Fox News, was the narrator of a documentary about that typhoon and the subject of the story focused on the Tabberer.  He picked up about 65 survivors.

INTERVIEWER:   From another boat?

CALHOUN:   Several other ships.  I guess he got some from each … three of them capsized and sunk. 

INTERVIEWER:   So in that whole storm, three ships were actually lost completely?

CALHOUN:   Yes.

INTERVIEWER:   So he was picking up people, you were also right, that that’s what he was doing, picking up survivors.

CALHOUN:   Exactly.

INTERVIEWER:   And you might have been able to help, but you may have been broken in half.

CALHOUN:   I’m sure we could have been of help, but we may have broken in half.  One comment that I thought was really unique to this situation, the day after the typhoon we were trying to put things back together, trying to repair the worst of the damage, get things cleaned up and organized.  I’m standing on the starboard wing of the ship looking down at the activity on the main deck and Preacher, the quartermaster, came up.  “Captain, what do you think saved us?”  I’m thinking be quiet please.  “Well a lot of things”, I said.  Of course we were lucky, but the ship was in excellent material condition and the crew was absolutely wonderful.  Nobody left their station.  Nobody abandoned their job.  They all did what they were supposed to do, a combination of things.  “Why?”, I asked him, “What do you think?” 

He said without any hesitation, “Oh, no question Captain.  Just take a look at the port yard arm”.  So I looked at it, that’s a three inch pipe that runs across the top of the mast and it was bent up at about 30 degrees.  I said, “How did it get like that?”  When we rolled, if the water had done it, it would have been the starboard yard arm, but this is the port yard arm.  That would clear the ocean; it couldn’t have been that.

He said, “Don’t you see Captain, that’s when God sent the angel to grab us by the port yard arm and pull us back up”.  I said okay, that’s good enough for me and my yeoman did a rendition of that in what he envisioned the way that happened and made it into a certificate which we passed out to all our crew.

INTERVIEWER:   Now you talked about the court of inquiry.  Did you get pulled into that later?

CALHOUN:   Oh yes, I was a witness.

INTERVIEWER:   Give us a flavor for what’s involved there.  Now you went on to continue in service for the rest of the war.

CALHOUN:   Well the court of inquiry occurred just after Christmas.  The typhoon was on the 18th.

INTERVIEWER:   So they hold it immediately.

CALHOUN:   Immediately because all of the principal commanders were due to go out for another operation pretty soon so they had to get it over with in three to four days.

INTERVIEWER:   Who conducts that?

CALHOUN:   That was done by a three man court, Admiral Hoover, Admiral Murray and I forgot the other one, all junior to Halsey incidentally which I thought was interesting. 

INTERVIEWER:   So he didn't get blamed.

CALHOUN:   Yes he did.  The court when it finished its inquiry determined that the principal responsibility for this disaster rested on the shoulders of the fleet commander.

INTERVIEWER:   Well what could he have done?  How do you fight a storm?

CALHOUN:   They found fault with the fact that he had not anticipated the likelihood that we were getting into this typhoon.

INTERVIEWER:   How about that one destroyer, the stern that had less than 50%?  What happened to it?

CALHOUN:   It sunk.

INTERVIEWER:   Oh, it was one of the ones that sunk.

CALHOUN:   That was the Spence.  The Monaghan and Hull, which were sister ships of mine, sunk.

INTERVIEWER:   But they didn't have a fuel problem, they just were overwhelmed by the ocean?

CALHOUN:   They were overwhelmed by reason of the fact that they had only marginal stability.  I haven’t talked about that I guess or have I?

INTERVIEWER:   No, but was it because of the fuel?

CALHOUN:   No, it was not because of the fuel.  They both had 70-some percent.  They were marginally unstable.  The ships themselves were not sufficiently stable and we had determined that before we ever left the United States.

INTERVIEWER:   What do you mean they were unstable?  They weren’t built right?

CALHOUN:   That’s correct.  They were built right originally, but the war had involved shipyard overhauls in which major armament changes occurred and most of these changes were in the manner of antiaircraft weapons which were high in the ship and which were big, heavy and compensatory reduction in weight at a lower level or higher level, whatever, were not made in order to compensate for that.

INTERVIEWER:   So they were top heavy?

CALHOUN:   They were top heavy.

INTERVIEWER:   Right from the beginning.

CALHOUN:   Not from the beginning.

INTERVIEWER:   I mean after they were repaired.

CALHOUN:   Yes, yes, and that awareness occurred to me immediately upon my conduct of a post-repair trial before we left the shipyard.

INTERVIEWER:   But your ship did not have those same alterations.

CALHOUN:   Yeah, we all had the same alterations.

INTERVIEWER:   So you also were at risk.

CALHOUN:   Oh sure, yes.  We were all of that class at risk. 

INTERVIEWER:   Did anybody get called into question on that one too?

CALHOUN:   No and that’s why I wrote the book because I thought the Bureau of Ships was negligent in my opinion, criminally negligent because we called their attention to it.  I suspected something was wrong when I took the ship out two days after I had become the skipper.  We were leaving in another three or four days to go to the western Pacific and when I took it out for my first time, something was the matter with it.

We weren’t behaving like any other destroyer I had ever been on.  I’d been on them for five years.  So I asked my friend, Frank Anthony, if we always had a slow roll like we were having.  He said, “It’s always been a slow roller, but it’s a little worse now I think”.  I said it was worse enough so that I was concerned about it. 

INTERVIEWER:   But if you hadn’t had the weather, it may have muddled through.

CALHOUN:   Yes, it might have, but they knew and of course we knew that we were going into an area where we had to expect typhoon weather.  The point was I had reported it to my squadron commander and taken him out the next day to demonstrate to him what concerned me and he became concerned just as much as I was. 

He then contacted the Bureau of Ships the next day to tell them about it and to suggest that we begin an inclining experiment which would determine precisely what our riding moment was and what our maximum roll would be.  They refused to do it saying that we were so urgently needed in the Pacific, they couldn’t allow us to delay another day.  This was ridiculous.  So we left knowing.

Then in researching the book of course, all of my suspicions came to fruition.  I discovered while we were concerned and had made an inquiry, the Aylwin, a sister ship which was also in the storm and also went through an experience like mine, had been given an inclining experiment while in the shipyard during the same overhaul period and they had left a day or two before us. 

That report had gone back to the Bureau of Ships in Washington indicating that the inclining experiment disclosed that the Farragut-class destroyers, if they were all like the Aylwin, were only marginally stable and that it was dangerous to send them into typhoon weather.

INTERVIEWER:   Oh my goodness.

CALHOUN:   And no one said a word about that.  No one even asked a question during the inquiry about stability.  They didn't ask me about it, didn't ask the squadron commander about it.  All they asked me was what did I think caused my main electrical switchboard to flash over.  That was easy, it got wet (laughter).  It was right under a hatch. 

Then I went back to the Bureau of Ships and I asked them, when I did the research for the book in 1980, and no one in the Bureau of Ships knew where any records were that would cover this period.  So I went to the National Archives and I looked through their records and I found that the Bureau of Ships records were not all there.  They had been moved to an annex of the National Archives out of Suitland, Maryland.

So I went out to Suitland and when I went to the research area, I found the area in which the Bureau of Ships records were contained with a specific area set aside for them.  I went to that area and it was the worst mess I have ever seen.  Stuff was disorganized.  There were pages of stuff that were not bound.  Piles of papers, you know, they weren’t in folders.  They weren’t organized in any sequence of time.

So I privately engaged two professional researchers that work there all the time and I told them what I was looking for and I asked them if they would undertake to search these things.  I set a maximum expenditure.  They found what I wanted.  They found an internal memorandum from the desk of the officer who was monitoring destroyer stability to the surface desk officer who was in charge of all this business in which he said, “Here is the Aylwin’s inclining experiment data.  As you will see, they are only marginally stable.  It would be wise to place some kind of restrictions on this class if they were to be employed in this area”.  Nothing was done about that.

INTERVIEWER:   So actually there were how many of that class in the storm?  There were 20 of you?

CALHOUN:   No, there were only four of that class in that storm and two of those capsized.  The other two, just by the grace of God, did not.

INTERVIEWER:   That’s right.  In other words, you were over at 80 some degrees.  If you get to 90, you can go under, right?

CALHOUN:   When you think that those that went over laid on their side and simply filled with water and capsized the rest of the way and sunk.  It was a very heavy loss of life, 778 all together. 

INTERVIEWER:   How about other ships in the storm?  They survived better than those four.

CALHOUN:   Nineteen ships were seriously damaged.  Of course those carriers suffered major damage.

INTERVIEWER:   How about the one that you almost ran into that had the fire, did he get through?

CALHOUN:   Oh, he got through the storm alright, but he had to go back to Pearl Harbor to get repaired.  That skipper later became a rear admiral and was my boss when I was in the Strategic Plans Division in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations and never once did either one of us know that we had been that close.  I didn't know he was the skipper of the Monterey and he didn't know that I’d been the skipper of the Dewey.

INTERVIEWER:   Well we’re about at the end of this interview and we usually like to ask the question, what wisdom do you give to your children and grandchildren or great-grandchildren, with the World War II experience, would you do it again?

CALHOUN:   Oh, I’d do it again in a minute.

INTERVIEWER:   Not so much would you do it, but at the time what did it mean to be part of this kind of saving the world?

CALHOUN:   You know, this gets to the crux, to the very soul of the United States of America.  When I went to the Naval Academy, all of us who went there went because we thought it was a noble thing to do to defend our country.  In my case I had the additional incentive of the fact that my father had been killed in World War I and that had made me anxious to follow the same role that he had played.  I wanted to be a Naval officer.

In fact, I didn't ever conceive of myself becoming an admiral.  That was never my objective.  Of course I think it was the objective of many people who made that the point of their existence even to the point when they didn't achieve that rank, they were devastated, they should have been an admiral.  Of course it was never my idea of success.  I wanted to become the commander of a major combatant unit, which was preliminary to becoming flag rank. 

You couldn’t become a flag officer if you hadn’t had that.  But the flag officer thing was secondary.  There were times when I thought it would be nice to be an admiral, but I never had that drive to get stars, which was a good thing.

INTERVIEWER:   And you did get stars?

CALHOUN:   No, I ended up a captain, which I considered to be a successful career.  And you know you have to answer to yourself.

INTERVIEWER:   But everybody in the war was there to do the job because of the times, right? 

CALHOUN:   Correct and you recall, well you don’t recall (laughter), the attitude of Americans in 1941 after Pearl Harbor was akin to the attitude that prevailed in the United States for a few days after 9/11.  Unfortunately this time that attitude was quickly dissipated to some degree.

INTERVIEWER:   Different circumstances.

CALHOUN:   And other things seemed more important than defense of our country and I’m concerned, I’m greatly concerned about the fact that we are not making any kind of psychological preparation of the people of the United States to the fact that we are probably facing the worst period in our history.  It is almost inevitable I think that once hostilities commence in Iraq, there will be a spontaneous outbreak of terrorist activity.

Much of it will happen in the United States.  Probably some of it will be even more horrible than what we experienced in New York.  No one seems to be thinking about that and when that strikes us unless we’re prepared for it, I’m concerned about how strong the spine of the people of the United States will prove to be. 

We are a country that has become used to wars conducted from an altitude of 20,000 feet where there are no casualties.  It isn’t going to be that way and for the first time in our lives, we will have civilian casualties, perhaps even surpassing the casualties of the combat forces.  We’re not ready for that.  No one has prepared us for it and that bothers me.

INTERVIEWER:   Well in defense of the current generation, I doubt if your generation anticipated the impact of Pearl Harbor either. 

CALHOUN:   No, no, of course we didn't.

INTERVIEWER:   And I’m saying you rallied.

CALHOUN:   And hopefully that will happen again.

INTERVIEWER:   And Germany was doing terrible things, but we seemed to still be at a distance even with that because it hadn’t hit us.  But I think you have some wise words there of worry about if we go to war with Iraq, it will change…

CALHOUN:   We could become almost a duplication of Israel in terms of the kind of terrorism that we would face.  It’s going to be hard to maintain the kind of strong fiber in the face of that which will be required.  I happen to be somebody that has a religious bend.  I’m not a fanatic, but I very deeply believe in God and the power of God to support us and render us strong when it’s necessary.  I don’t see much in the way of religious tendencies to ask for God’s help.

Regardless of whether you agree that there ought to be war or not, it seems to me that if you are a believer, you should be praying for God’s support and guidance to the President of the United States and to the members of the Armed Forces that are serving and risking their lives every day, and I don’t hear it and I’m a Catholic.  In fact, I’ve had a running argument with our pastor about this.  Why don’t we pray for the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces and for the members of the Armed Forces, why don’t we do it every week.

His response was that suggestion was politically motivated.  I said it had nothing to do with politics.  It had everything to do with patriotism and love of country and the willingness to ask for God’s help when we need it.  I’m not suggesting that we pray to God that God tells the president to do this or that.  I’m suggesting that we pray to God that He will advise the president in such a way that it will be best and in accordance with God’s will, whatever that is.

INTERVIEWER:   Well that’s a good note to end on.  Thank you.