On board the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Monterey was young Lieutenant (j.g.) Gerald Ford. The following excerpt from a new book by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin, HALSEY’S TYPHOON: The True Story of a Fighting Admiral, an Epic Storm, and an Untold Rescue (Atlantic Monthly Press), recounts Ford’s heroism.

The jeep carrier Monterey had taken part in every Pacific combat operation from Tarawa to Luzon. She had helped blast the Makin Islands in the Gilberts and clobbered the Japanese base at Kavieng in the Admiraltys. She’d supported the Marine landings in the Marshalls on Kwajalein in January 1944, and on Eniwetok a month later. She carried enough fuel to steam over 10,000 miles at 15 knots, and was capable of making 25 knots in a pinch. In the early morning hours of December 18, however, she was going nowhere. Gale-force winds whipping through her rigging sang like hell’s own chorus as she bounced from the crowns of frothing waves to the bottom of cavernous troughs.

To Lieutenant (j.g) Jerry Ford, Officer of the Deck on the Monterey’s midnight-to four a.m. midwatch, each descent was like the downbeat of an axe. From the bridge he surveyed the implausible scene unfolding before him. Lashing rain and 60-knot winds had whipped the sea into liquid mountains and few, if any, of the Third Fleet’s 130-odd vessels were visible through Ford’s binoculars. It struck the Lieutenant that in his 18 months at sea he had never seen waves so large. They reeled in from starboard in constant sets, gigantic walls of dark green water that appeared to defy gravity, cresting at between 40 and 70 feet. They battered the Monterey’s hull and washed over her flight deck, 57 feet above the waterline.

Since he’d drawn a billet on the Monterey in the spring of 1943 the 31-year-old Ford -- blond and broad-shouldered, with the square-jawed countenance of a young Johnny Weissmuller -- wrote that he’d seen “as much action as I’d ever hoped to see.” As a gunnery division officer, Ford had directed fire during the Marianas “Turkey Shoot,” where Japanese Zeros had fallen like autumn leaves. And just two months earlier, during the Leyte campaign, waves of enemy aircraft out of Formosa had hit the ship’s task group with everything they’d had for two solid days. It had rained iron, and Ford, commanding a 40-mm. anti-aircraft gun crew from the fantail deck, had watched as a torpedo narrowly missed the Monterey and tore out the bow of the nearby cruiser U.S.S. Canberra. He thought he’d seen the worst of it. Until this morning, watching the Philippine Sea churn. No one on his ship had ever sailed through this kind of weather.

The Monterey carried 23 aircraft, 14 fighters and nine torpedo bombers, divided and stowed between the flight and hangar decks. Before retiring on the night of December 17 her skipper, Captain Stuart H. (Slim) Ingersoll, had ordered all topside planes as well as any moveable gear lashed down with half-inch cable. He’d also had the aviation fuel drained from the aircraft stored below. Yet now, as another breaker crashed over the carrier’s housing, Jerry Ford wondered if nature was about to accomplish what the Japanese could not. Sometimes, in those rare, eerie hollows when the wind abated for an instant, he could just make out the distress whistles sounding about him, the deep beeps of the battlewagons, the shrill whoops of the destroyers. By the end of his watch there was already scuttlebutt on the bridge about 2,000-ton destroyers rolling abeam and taking water down their stacks.

His midwatch over, Ford had crawled into his bunk below decks at just past four a.m. His nerves on edge, functioning in that liminal state between sleep and awake, it seemed that his head had barely hit the pillow before Ingersoll sounded General Quarters. Ford bolted upright in his dark sea cabin. He thought he smelled smoke from somewhere amidships. Racing through the rolling companionway dimly lit by red battle lights, he reached the catwalk encircling the flight deck. He foot hit the first rung of the skipper’s ladder leading to the bridge at the precise moment a 70-foot wave broke over the Monterey, an avalanche unlit by moonlight. The sound reminded Ford of branches being ripped from giant trees.

The carrier pitched 25 degrees to port, and Ford was knocked flat on his back. He began skimming across the flight deck “as if I were on a toboggan.” By this time the waves were up over the ship’s island superstructure, and Ford was taking a 20-second slide down the flight deck. “It scared the hell out of me,” he later admitted. “I was going overboard.”

Before the war Ford had been an All-American football player at the University of Michigan, and he had passed up a professional contract in order to attend Yale Law School. But he remained in good shape, and aside from his duties as a gunnery officer he was also the Monterey’s athletic director. Crewmates groused that if Ford, “an exercise nut,” spied them loafing, even off duty, he’d order them to break into sets of jumping jacks. But Ford would jump right alongside them, and it was likely that this dexterity is what saved his life as the marbled whitewater washed him across the flight deck of the carrier.

Around the deck of every aircraft carrier is a tiny steel lip, about two inches high, called the deck combing, designed to keep the flight crews’ tools from slipping overboard. When Ford’s feet collided with the combing he managed to slow his slide enough to twist like an acrobat, grab the ridge with his fingertips, and fling himself down onto the ship’s catwalk. He landed flat on his back. As the Monterey reeled through another trough, he got to his knees, made his way back below decks, and started back up again. “Well, let me tell you,” he said, “my second trip back from that catwalk to the bridge, I was much more careful. I was scared as hell.”

When Ford reached the bridge he found Captain Ingersoll struggling to keep the Monterey on her heading. Moments past nine a.m. Ingersoll sent a distress message to Rear Admiral Alfred E. Montgomery, commander of the Monterey’s Task Group 38.1: “Cannot hold present 180-degree course. Am coming to 140 degrees at 15 knots.”

But it was futile to attempt to sail into the cross swell. A moment later Montgomery received a more alarming message from Ingersoll: “Present course 220 degrees. All planes on my hangar deck on fire.”

Oddly, the exposed aircraft on the Monterey’s flight deck remained lashed tight for now. Down in the hangar deck, however, one plane had broken free from its cables and began bouncing about “like a pinball.” As it crashed into other aircraft they too broke loose, and showers of sparks flew like the Fourth of July. Warbirds collided with each other and slammed into the ship’s bulkheads. Soon the sparks from the collisions ignited the planes’ gas tanks and turned them into skidding torches. Although their tanks had been drained, it was impossible to deplete them of every last drop of fuel, much less the explosive gasoline vapors. The hangar deck of the Monterey became a burning cauldron of aircraft fuel, and one flaming plane plunged down into the ship’s elevator shaft and threatened the magazines stored in the ship’s pit.

As all hands worked frantically to jettison the ammunition before the heat touched it off, the flames from the burning aircraft were sucked down into the air intakes of the lower decks, and fires began breaking out below. Jerry Ford remembered the smoke he smelled when he bolted from his sack. Because of a quirk in her construction as a cruiser-turned-carrier, the vents designed to channel fresh air into the Monterey’s engine and boiler rooms were now funneling thick, oily, black smoke. One black gang sailor was already dead, and another 33 were down with asphyxiation. With no one to tend them, three of the ship’s four boilers were out. If she lost her last boiler, the carrier would also lose the pressure in the fire hoses now fighting the conflagration in the hangar deck.

The Monterey was ablaze from bow to stern as Ford stood near the helm awaiting orders from Ingersoll. From a distance she must have looked like she’d taken Greek Fire, for over the TBS the officers in her pilothouse overheard a transmission from an unknown vessel. “Well, check off the Monterey,” came the disembodied voice.

But Ingersoll would not let go so easily. He directed Ford to lead a team down to the hangar deck, evacuate the wounded, and douse the flames. Before Ford could comply Ingersoll received an order from flag plot, relayed via Montgomery. Halsey had indeed decided to abandon the Monterey. Montgomery informed Ingersoll that two cruisers and several destroyers had been directed to steam abreast of his carrier to rescue survivors, more of a pipe dream than a practical reality in these seas. Ingersoll mulled Halsey’s directive for a moment, then scanned the raging ocean. He turned to look into the faces of the men huddled about him in the pilothouse. Each, including Ford, was a pale silhouette in the dark.

“No,” he said. “We can fix this.”

He radioed Montgomery and advised him of his decision. There was precedent to Ingersoll’s resolution. War planners in Washington had long suspected, if not exactly articulated, that in the early stages of World War II too many vessels had been lost due to hasty orders from panicky captains to abandon ship. The Navy Department was clearly displeased. As a pointed reminder, the cover line on the Department’s 1944 “Damage Control Manual” was a none-too-subtle, “Don’t Give Up the Ship.”

Now, with a nod from Ingersoll, Ford donned a gas mask and led a fire brigade below. Aircraft gas tanks exploded as hose handlers slid across the burning hangar deck. Into this furnace Ford took his men, his first order of business to carry out the unconscious survivors. As one firefighter was overcome by smoke, or burned by the shooting flames, another sailor would take his place.

Up on the Monterey’s exposed flight deck, several aircraft had by now also torn loose from their lashings. As black smoke and fire edged toward the pilots’ ready room, the airmen made their way topside to escape. Wearing their yellow Mae West life vests, they laid flat on their stomachs clutching the heaving deck’s pad eyes, watching aircraft crash about them like rogue elephants.

Suddenly there was a commotion among the pilots, laid out like sardines in a tin. A flyer named Ray Thorpe, XO of the fighter squadron, had lost his grip and tumbled over the side. Squadron mates squirmed on their bellies to the edge of the flight deck. Forming a human chain, they slid down to the catwalk as the Monterey crested another wave. From this vantage point they watched as Thorpe, more than 100 feet below, floundered in the wash near the vessel’s hull. When the Monterey descended into the next trough its catwalk nearly dipped in the sea. And there, not two feet away from his fellow airmen was the flailing Ray Thorpe. They reached out and pulled him back aboard just as the ship began to roll and climb the next swell.

At 9:41 a.m. the Monterey’s Captain Ingersoll radioed Admiral Montgomery, “Have fire under control. Prefer to lie to until we can make formation speed.” To lie to, or heave to, means to reduce speed to bare steerageway in order to ride out a storm as best a ship can. In fashion nearing a miracle, one by one the carrier’s boilers were brought back on line. Of her 23 aircraft, she’d lost 18 burned in the hangar deck or blown off the flight deck, with the other five seriously damaged.

Years later, after Lt. Jerry Ford became President of the United States, he wrote of that morning, “I remembered that fire at the height of the typhoon, and I considered it a marvelous metaphor for the ship of state.”

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