MONAGHAN vs. THE TEMPEST

The Pacific war was a long one for USS MONAGHAN (DD-354).  She was the ready destroyer at Pearl Harbor on the morning of 7 December 1941 and was just getting underway to investigate a report of a submarine off the entrance to the harbor when all hell broke loose.  She went on to fight at the Coral Sea, Midway, and in the Aleutians.  December 1944 found her screening carriers of the 3^rd Fleet for airstrikes against the Japanese in the Philippines.  December 17^th had been designated for refueling at sea, however rough seas postponed that evolution for a day.

But through the night the weather only worsened.  Water Tender 2^nd Class Joseph C. McCrane didn’t get much sleep and around 0630 the 18^th arose to find MONAGHAN in the throes of a severe typhoon.  She rode better than did her sisters with less fuel, MONAGHAN still had 76% of her capacity on board.  But by 0800 that mattered little–even the carriers had abandoned station-keeping and were fending for themselves.  The destroyer was rolling frighteningly, and McCrane and WT3c Les Bryan were sent to ballast the empty aft fuel tanks.  They struggled to keep their footing and labored even harder to accomplish their task.  Upon finishing, they took shelter with a growing group of shipmates in the aft 5″ gun turret.

But the rolls only got worse.  After seven or eight rolls onto her beam ends, MONAGHAN’s sailors in the gun turret recognized how untenable was their shelter!  They began to pile out onto the deck, Gunner’s Mate Joe Guio standing just outside the hatch in disregard of his own safety, to help his shipmates.  Loose gear crashed about, and cracks started to rip the overheads from the bulkheads below decks.  Electric power failed, then steerage.  And just at this moment the group of sailors was swept overboard.  Someone had the sense to throw a liferaft at the dozen or so flailing in the water.

The scene shifted to the liferaft, where nine made it aboard and clung for dear life.  Several hours later a half-naked, shivering Guio drifted by the raft and was pulled aboard.  McCrane cradled Guio to keep him warm through the night.  The next morning Guio awoke, thanked his shipmates for hauling him to safety, then curled up in the bottom of the raft.  Half an hour later he was dead.  Hypothermia claimed two more in the days that followed.  Another went mad, insisting he saw an island and disappearing overboard.  At one point an onion drifted by the famished sailors.  But an 8-foot shark circling nearby discouraged any recovery.  The only survivors from MONAGHAN were the six in this liferaft, rescued this day by BROWN (DD-546) (along with 13 from HULL (DD-350) who also foundered in this typhoon).  The exact time and details of MONAGHAN’s demise will never be known.

Watch for more “Today in Naval History”  27 DEC 25

CAPT James Bloom, Ret.

Department of the Navy, Naval History Division.  Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Vol 4 “L-M”. Washington, DC: GPO, 1969, pp. 412-14.

Morison, Samuel Eliot.  History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol XIII  The Liberation of the Philippines: Luzon, Mindinao, the Visayas.  Little Brown and Co., Boston, MA, 1959, pp. 71-77.

Parkin, Robert Sinclair.  Blood on the Sea:  American Destroyers Lost in World War II.  New York, NY: Sarpedon, 1995, pp. 274-79.

Roscoe, Theodore.  United States Destroyer Operations in World War II.  Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1953, pp. 449-50.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:  FADM Nimitz said this storm, “…represented a more crippling blow to the 3^rd Fleet than it might be expected to suffer in anything less than a major action.”

Turreted guns are not secured to the deck by anything other than their massive weight.  As such, should the destroyer capsize, the turrets would simply fall out of their cradles and sink like rocks, carrying anyone inside to Davy Jones.

MONAGHAN remembers ENS John R. Monaghan, a Spanish-American War veteran who was killed in a Samoan uprising in 1899 while trying to rescue his stricken Commanding Officer.  USS BROWN remembers George Brown, an Able Seaman who died aboard USS INTREPID during that ship’s daring raid in Tripoli Harbor in the Barbary Wars of 1804.  HULL, of course, remembers Commodore Isaac Hull, commander of USS CONSTITUTION during her engagement with HMS GUERRIER in 1812.

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