Typhoons

"We went through a lot of storms. I saw the ocean so calm you could drop a penny out and see it splash, and then there were times that were so rough I didn’t know if we were going to make it back home. We saw every kind of mood she could ever come up with, along with two typhoons.

The scariest time of my life was typhoon Cobra off the Philippines. We were fueling destroyers at this particular time and the seas were getting really rough. We fueled them as long as we could and then it started to get dangerous, coming to us with high winds and waves. The Captain ordered us to just cut the ropes and get out of there as it was getting worse by the second. We just left the fuel lines on the deck and everyone went below decks.

A little while later the Captain came over the speaker and said, ‘Now here this, all hands stand clear of the main deck,’ meaning nobody goes up there. We continued playing games and whatnot and then he came on the speaker again to tell us, ‘All hands stand clear of the boat deck’ which is the next deck up so we knew things were getting worse out there. Soon after he came on once again, ‘Now here this, all hands stand clear of all weather decks’ and we began to realize we were headed for a typhoon.

While playing pinochle, one of our head men of the division walks by and tells about fifteen of us to get our lifejackets on, we were going topside! This I will never ever forget, no Japanese plane ever scared me as much as this: three of us went up to the very tip of the bow, the others were spread out along the number one turret and were going to tie down the fueling lines. At the bow, before we even touched the lines, the ship went up on a swell and we knew that we were going to take on a good bit of water so we grabbed onto whatever we could find. We went down and about three foot of ocean hit us and sent us sprawling. We got up and got back to position when we started to go up on a swell again, this time WAY up and when we started to head back down I knew this was going to be really bad. I grabbed a cable that ran from a 40mm mark down into the deck and when we went down I pulled the whole thing out and I just remember being washed down the deck towards the number one turret and hitting all these obstacles under all this water and when I came to the top I was under the spray shield of the sixteen inch guns. The ship was lurched to the port side and I was heading out over the side and all I could see when I came to the top was the top life line. I put my arms straight down as far as I could and when I hit the top and middle lines I held on and just hung there like a shirt on a line until all that water went on through. Had those lines broken I would have died because one thing I wasn’t was a very good swimmer and in that kind of a sea they wouldn’t have been able to pick up anyone anyway. Another man was hanging onto the life line as well but he was hanging on the outside with a broken leg. But we didn’t lose a single man in all of this. We were banged up but very lucky.

We all went to Sick bay to get fixed up, for the first and only time we were all given a shot of brandy. "

- Robert L. Palomaris