Two weeks later, the Fleet Weather Central in Okinawa forecast a typhoon to move directly over northern Okinawa. White Beach could expect winds of well over one hundred knots. I told the admiral I intended to get underway before the winds in Buckner Bay got over thirty knots. The admiral again suggested that perhaps I look at the possibility of remaining at the pier with the ship’s anchor chain as bow and stern springs with the weight of their catenary to absorb the shock of the gusting winds. I told him that on the basis of our last conversation I had looked very carefully at this arrangement and could only conclude that it could result in severe damage to the ship.
On the morning when the forecast for the following day showed winds of thirty knots in Buckner Bay, I told the chief of staff that I would embark the admiral and his staff — if he wanted to be onboard for typhoon evasion — by nine o’clock the next morning. I wanted to be underway by eleven, before the winds had built up to dangerous velocities. He passed that information to the admiral, who said that his staff would be on board at nine and he would follow shortly afterward.
His two dozen or so staff members were on board on schedule, and the ship was at sea detail by nine o’clock. The admiral did not show up for an hour. The winds had by then increased to forty knots and it was raining hard. I was getting more upset by the minute. The wind would be on the Salisbury Sound’s beam as we were passing through the narrow entrance at the breakwater, the worst possible combination of wind and tide. The admiral came on board with his aide at about ten o’clock and the aide explained that there had been problems in taking care of the dependents. There were no structures on that part of Okinawa that would withstand a hurricane of the forecast intensity. The Army had sent a number of armored personnel carriers (APCs) to be parked in the quarters area for the dependents to use as a refuge during the height of the storm. The admiral had delayed his departure from his quarters until he was satisfied that the personnel carriers were in place and were satisfactory for their intended purpose.
An assortment of last-minute line handlers on the pier threw off our lines and the Salisbury Sound got underway with the winds gusting to forty knots and the rain horizontal. Once out of Buckner Bay we took a course southwest for the safe quadrant. As the storm approached Okinawa, we were proceeding away from the low-pressure center, and the wind and the seas remained constant. About 1900 the weather began to improve as the wind showed a definite abating trend and the seas were flattening. I had moved to the sea cabin and was spending most of my time on the bridge, with the regular officers of the deck exercising the con.
At about 2100, after the movie in the flag plot, the admiral appeared on the bridge and asked me why I was heading southwest. I told him that I wanted to be well clear of the typhoon. I would reverse course and head back when the typhoon center had crossed to the other side of Okinawa and was definitely no longer a threat. “You’re being overly cautious,” the admiral said. “You’ve evaded the eye of the storm and are in the safe quadrant. The center of the storm has moved to the northeast at twenty knots. If you follow a course of northeast, it will take you to Buckner Bay and at ten knots you’ll continue to open the distance on the storm center.” I was very uncomfortable with this advice. I had been on the bridge virtually full time since we first encountered the heavy weather, and there appeared to be many cells of severe weather within the overall mass of the typhoon. We had not really been able to anticipate what sort of weather we would encounter as we were evading. I started to explain this again to the admiral and he said, “No, I think you’re okay to return to homeport. Go northeast and return to White Beach.” The admiral turned and departed the bridge. It was with strong misgivings that I gave the orders to the helm to come to 045 degrees and asked the navigator to give me a course for the entrance to Buckner Bay. I rang up turns for ten knots on the engine room annunciator and we plodded into the blackness of the night and what appeared to me to be the renewed fury of the typhoon. In the next two hours the weather deteriorated markedly. The wind was gusting over one hundred knots and the seas were fifty feet. I was especially uncomfortable with the ship’s roll. We had the wind and the sea on the port beam, and the Salisbury Sound was rolling as much as forty degrees. On the more extreme rolls, she seemed to hesitate before starting a recovery back to the vertical. Anyone who has experienced this phenomenon on large ships at sea in very heavy weather knows how uncomfortable it can be.
At about two in the morning we seemed to hit an especially severe spot. The seas became confused and the wind was shifting unpredictably. At this moment the ship’s whistle started blowing. This added to the perception of confusion on the bridge. Three or four inches of water covered the deck in the pilothouse, trapped by the hatch coamings. Sloshing in this were pencils, paper trash, and cardboard coffee cups, among other things. At this point, the admiral appeared on the bridge in his pajamas and bathrobe. In contrast, I was a mess. I had been soaked to the skin for hours. The one consolation was that the weather was warm. It was not like some of the arctic storms that I had encountered in the USS Ringgold in World War II in the North Atlantic. But the entire bridge crew was supporting themselves by clinging to the vertical stanchions in the pilothouse, slipping and sliding from one to another as we moved from the chart table to the radar and the helm. Often three of us would be hanging onto the same stanchion or each other as the ship rolled. The admiral said to me, “I had always understood that a steady blowing the ship’s whistle indicated an emergency situation or that the vessel was going down and all hands should abandon ship.” He said this half jokingly but asked if we were having real problems. I told him that we suspected that the rope lanyard to the whistle actuating arm on the smokestack had parted and the engineers down on the greasy and heaving gratings were trying to find the valve that would shut off steam to the ship’s whistle. Other than that, the ship was not in immediate danger. I told him that I was planning to come around to a course that would allow us to ride more easily with the prevailing wind and swell and that it would probably not be toward Buckner Bay. The admiral replied, “You do what you think best in your judgment. You need to get us out of this bad weather.”
We did turn southeast again, and by daylight the foul weather had largely dissipated. The wind was now gusting to only thirty-five knots, the seas had dramatically flattened out, and there were patches of blue sky on the southeast horizon. At this point I shaped a course for Buckner Bay and instructed the XO to take a survey of the ship to determine the damage. In a half an hour the XO returned with the ship’s master-at-arms to report that most of the damage had been superficial. Ventilators had been ripped off and gone over the side, hatch covers had been blown loose and lost, some watertight doors were leaking and on the mess decks there were dishes and stores that had broken free from their moorings and had crashed to the floor. The broken crockery and loose gear could be taken care of in a day’s work by the crew, but of real concern was that an aircraft rearming boat (ARB) — a one-of-a-kind small craft with special gear to handle bombs and depth charges for the seaplanes — had been lost, disappearing sometime during the storm, having torn the lines right out of their padeyes. Also an aircraft refueling boat — another specialized craft with pumps, filters, and tanks installed to provide clean-filtered aviation gasoline to the seaplanes — had its bow stove in and its gunwalls splintered. These boats were made of wood in order to minimize the possibility of sparking when in contact with the metal hulls of the ship and the seaplanes. This boat would have to be completely refitted in a boat yard.