The Overlook
By Tom Clavin
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The major World War II event we take notice of every December is Pearl Harbor. This past December 7 was the 82th anniversary of the attack that provoked the U.S. to enter what then truly became a world war. There is another anniversary in December of a significant event in World War II that many people still don’t know about. This one took place on December 18, 1944 – 79 years ago this week -- when Typhoon Cobra almost destroyed the 3rd Fleet in the Pacific Ocean. This event became the basis of the first Bob Drury and Tom Clavin collaboration, Halsey’s Typhoon.
We learned of this disaster two decades ago, when for the book Dark Noon I was reading accounts of naval disasters. One was In Harm’s Way by Doug Stanton, about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. It included three paragraphs about a typhoon striking the mighty Pacific fleet commanded by Admiral William “Bull” Halsey. I was surprised by the offhand way this information was provided, as though everyone knew about it. Well, I was a pretty good student of history but I didn’t know about it, so I did a bit of research.
One evening I was in a can’t-stop-thinking-about-it state when I walked into a local watering hole and my friend Bob Drury was there. He had recently published The Rescue Season to enthusiastic reviews. When I told him about “Halsey’s Typhoon,” he immediately saw it as a riveting story. Bob was a contract writer for Men’s Journal then, and he suggested pitching the story to his editor, Michael Caruso. Sure, why not.
By the way, how did Admiral Halsey earn his nickname? The people back in the States during the war believed it was because of the admiral’s aggressive, charge-ahead style of fighting the enemy. The less-dramatic truth: In one of the war’s earlier dispatches from the Pacific Theater, a drunken reporter bashed the wrong typewriter key and turned Bill Halsey into Bull Halsey. The editor liked it, the name stuck, but Halsey himself never cared for it.
Bob and I did get the assignment, and thus began a collaboration that has to date resulted in eight books being published. The first one, Halsey’s Typhoon, grew out of the 8000-word article we researched and wrote for Men’s Journal. For our most recent book, The Last Hill, published by St. Martin’s Press, we returned to World War II, also in 1944, though in the European Theater. (By the way, it would make a good holiday gift for those into military history or simply stories with a lot of action.)
Here is the basic story of that first book: In mid-December 1944, Halsey’s fleet was steaming west to support Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s “I shall return” invasion of the Philippines. The admiral did not realize until too late that his fleet was on a collision course with Typhoon Cobra -- the first major storm named by the U.S. government. On the 18th, that collision occurred. Three ships were sunk, others were badly damaged, and of the 900 men tossed into the raging sea, only 80 were rescued. It was the worst loss of life the U.S. Navy suffered in World War II, and that includes battles like Midway and the Coral Sea.
For the whole story, you can always go buy Halsey’s Typhoon or find it at the library. But for now, I want to offer the experience of one sailor whose ship sank. It is harrowing, and we got it from the sailor himself.
The communications officer of the USS Hull, Lieutenant Lloyd Rust, was at his station when the destroyer capsized. He was forced to swim underwater to escape. Fortunately, he’d strapped on his kapok vest long before the ship went over. Alone, he bounced from wave to wave throughout the night, kept afloat by his vest, then sometime after daybreak on the morning of December 19, Rust spotted a floatplane skimming the waves. It was obviously searching for survivors. Earlier, he had kicked off his shoes and doffed his pants, as he felt they were dragging him below the ocean surface. Now, with nothing to wave at the floatplane, he took off his white boxer shorts and brandished them as high as he could reach. The aircraft’s crew did not see him.
Sometime that afternoon, Rust saw a destroyer bearing down on him. She was so close that he could make out the actions of her deck crew. But when the ship was within several hundred yards, she took an abrupt turn to starboard and steamed back over the horizon. That was the final straw for Lloyd Rust. He was ready to give up hope. He was ready to die.
Only his anger saved him. He decided that he was “mad at the Good Lord,” angry with Him for sinking his ship, and even angrier with Him that two rescue searches had failed to spot him. But then he turned some kind of spiritual corner. “He’s just testing me,” Rust decided. “He just wants to see if I really want to stay alive. Why else would He have my rescue ship make a hard right turn out in the middle of nowhere on the ocean? Well, if He wants to test me, I guess I’ll show Him what I’m made of.”
Rust began stroking west, vowing to swim all the way to the Philippines if necessary. He swam under the searing sun. He swam under the glittering stars. He swam until the eastern horizon bloomed with the faint glow of sunrise on December 20, when he could swim no more. He rolled over on his back and lapsed into unconsciousness.
That afternoon, the destroyer USS Knapp’s rescue swimmer, Owen “Red” Atkinson, a 20-year-old seaman from Georgia, dove into the sea and swam toward a man floating face-up in his kapok. When Atkinson reached him, he slid a bight under his arms and gingerly slapped the seaman’s cheeks to see if he was still alive. At that the floater’s eyes blinked open and his arm shot up from beneath the surface. In his hand was a pair of white boxer shorts.
“Lieutenant Lloyd Rust, C.I.C., USS Hull,” the officer said to a befuddled rescuer. “The good Lord has tested me, and it appears that I have passed His test.”
As the deck crew from the Knapp “reeled” Atkinson and Rust back toward the ship, their herky-jerky movements replicated those of a large wounded fish and acted as a lure for sharks, which began to shadow them. The sailors pulled harder on the rope and the sharks swam faster. Crew members fired rifles to kill or at least slow the sharks, and with only seconds to spare, Atkinson and Rust were hauled aboard.
Thanks to his rescue, Lloyd Rust returned home to Texas, married, had four daughters, and for decades served as a judge. He finally met Red Atkinson again more than 60 years after Typhoon Cobra, after Drury and I supplied both men with contact information. It was quite a moment for the proud veterans.
There are many more stories in the book about sailors’ experiences, and at least a dozen of them came from the men themselves. That was still possible when researching a book nearly two decades ago. Now, with surviving World War II veterans few and far between, obtaining eyewitness accounts is difficult, as we experienced while researching The Last Hill. The Veterans Administration estimates that by 2036 there will be no veterans of that war still alive, and that is probably optimistic.
Thankfully, there have been many oral history projects undertaken in the past 30 years so that many accounts of World War II exist. Our three books on that war – including the B-17 saga Lucky 666 -- have made some contribution to that history.
Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books, including The Last Hill (with Bob Drury) and The Last Outlaws, which was published last month by St. Martin’s Press. Please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com to purchase a copy.
My father, who has passed, served in the Army Air corps in World War ll. I am happy to see that you are keeping the stories of these heroic men and their sacrifices alive.
Once again, Clavin tells a dramatic story, this one about a WWII naval veteran's survival against impossible odds. But it's just one such compelling tale from Clavin's book "Halsey's Typhoon," which this reader heartily recommends. If you are not thoroughly astonished and unable to put this book down until you finish it, you likely don't have blood in your veins. Buy it, borrow it, get it!