The Overlook
By Tom Clavin
“The Overlook” appears every Thursday at tomclavin.substack.com. An overlook is a place from which one can see in several if not all directions, including where one has been and where one is going. If you enjoy the column, please "like" it and let me know what you think by commenting (check out previous ones while you're at it). Likes, comments, and shares help with author “discoverability” on Substack.com, and all support is appreciated. Don't forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!
The major World War II event we take notice of every December is Pearl Harbor. That was especially true this month because December 7 was the 80th anniversary of the attack that provoked the U.S. to enter what then truly became a world war. Though not a special one, there is another anniversary in December of a significant event in World War II that took place on December 18, 1944: Typhoon Cobra almost destroyed the 3rd Fleet in the Pacific Ocean.
I have a couple of personal connections to this event. One is, my Uncle Jim Clavin was on one of those ships. I don’t recall him ever talking about it and it was years after his death that I first learned of him being one of the thousands of sailors at risk.
The other connection is how I learned of the event and what came of that knowledge. Almost two decades ago, for the book Dark Noon, I was reading accounts of naval disasters. One was the book 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 stopped in at 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 seven books being published. The first one, Halsey’s Typhoon, grew out of the 8000-word article we researched and wrote for Men’s Journal.
Here is the basic story: 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 wanted 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 U.S.S. 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 float plane, 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 U.S.S. 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., U.S.S. 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 we had supplied both men with contact information. It was quite a moment for both of 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. The Veterans Administration estimates that by 2036 there will be no veterans of that war still alive, and that is probably optimistic.
This gives me a new perspective on the first two Drury/Clavin collaborations, Halsey’s Typhoon and The Last Stand of Fox Company. The latter is about a Marine Corps company in Korea in the fall of 1950, and much of that story also came from men who participated in it. What fortunate writers we were to still have that human resource available. Thankfully, there have been many oral history projects undertaken in the past 20 or so years so that many accounts of World War II and the Korean War can be preserved. Our two books have made some contribution to that history.
Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 18 books, including Tombstone, Blood and Treasure (the latest with Bob Drury), and Lightning Down: A World War II Story of Survival, just published by St. Martin’s Press. To purchase any of these titles, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, or BN.com.
Nice work, Ton