From John Riise in Lake Isabella, California:
“Just read your book DOWN TO THE SEA and was compelled to scribble a few lines. My father was in Halsey’s Typhoon. He was aboard the light carrier Monterey. His recollection is just what you noted: planes breaking loose from their lashings and sliding all over into other planes and the sides of the hangar deck starting fires. I don’t recall him saying anyone was killed, but there were certainly injuries when trying to fight a fire in a heavily rolling ship with all sorts of heavy things slamming around. The smoke from the fires got sucked into ventilators which distributed it into living spaces below deck. The captain eventually ordered all stop on the engines and dropped both his bow anchors as drogues to keep the ship’s head into the wind and seas, which is how she rode it out. Dad always felt that Halsey’s conceit was mostly to blame. His impression was that Halsey DID know that he was sailing into a typhoon, but did it anyway. Your book certainly shed new light on that aspect for me…Great book.”

Evan Fenn, the last surviving sailor from the destroyer Monaghan (DD-354), which sank in a deadly typhoon in the Pacific on Dec. 18, 1944, died at age 84. Evan was one of the Greatest Generation that I felt honored to have talked to during my research for DOWN TO THE SEA. A rough-and-tumble cowboy from Arizona, Evan somehow made it off the capsized ship that horrible morning when 256 of his shipmates perished. Evan was one of only six Monaghan survivors to be pulled from the storm-tossed sea two days later.

U.S. Navy Lieutenant Howard J. Korth, of Saginaw, Michigan, was the gunnery officer aboard the destroyer escort Tabberer (DE-418) in December 1944 when Haley’s 3rd Fleet was hit by a typhoon in the western Pacific. After three destroyers sank — with 761 men lost at sea — Korth, then twenty-four, repeatedly dove into the treacherous seas to pull struggling survivors aboard his badly-damaged ship. His own shipmates were in awe of his strength and endurance. For Howard, who had been a lineman for the Notre Dame “Fighting Irish” football team prior to his 1941 graduation, it just seemed like a job that had to be done.