The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  The Sho plan’s audacity—orchestrating the movements of four fleets spread across thousands of miles of ocean and the land-based aircraft necessary to protect them—was both its genius and its potentially disastrous weakness. Adm. Jisaburo Ozawa, leading the remnants of Japan’s once glorious naval air arm, would steam south from Japan with his aircraft carriers and try to lure the American fast carrier groups north, away from Leyte. With the U.S. flattops busy pursuing the decoy, two Japanese battleship groups would close on Leyte from the north and south and deal MacArthur a surprise, killing blow.

  Admiral Kurita had departed Brunei on October 22 with his powerful Center Force, led by the Yamato and the Musashi, the two largest warships afloat, aiming to slip across the South China Sea, pass through San Bernardino Strait above Samar Island, and close on the Leyte beachhead from the north. Meanwhile, the Southern Force, led by Vice Adm. Shoji Nishimura and supported by Vice Adm. Kiyohide Shima, would cross the Sulu Sea and approach Leyte from the south, through Surigao Strait.

  On the morning of October 25, after their thousand-mile journeys through perilous waters, Kurita’s and Nishimura’s battleship groups would rendezvous at 9:00 A.M. off Leyte Island’s eastern shore, encircling the islands like hands around a throat. Then they would turn their massive guns on MacArthur’s invasion force. Japan would at last win the decisive battle that had eluded it in the twenty-eight months since the debacle at Midway.

  Kurita’s grandfather had been a great scholar of early Meiji literature. His father too had been a distinguished man of learning, author of a magisterial history of his native land. In the morning Takeo Kurita, who preferred action to words, would make his own contribution.

  Off Samar

  Gathered around the radio set in the combat information center of the destroyer escort USS Samuel B. Roberts, they listened as a hundred miles to their south, their heavier counterparts in the Seventh Fleet encountered the first signs that the Japanese defense of the Philippines was under way. There was no telling precisely what their countrymen faced. It was something big—that much was for sure. And yet, until the scale of the far-off battle became too apparent to ignore, they would pretend it was just another midwatch. By the routine indications, it was. They watched the radar scopes and the scopes watched back, bathing the darkened compartment in cathode-green fluorescence but revealing no enemy nearby. The southwest Pacific slept. But something was on the radio, and it put the lie to the silent night.

  The tactical circuit they were using to eavesdrop was meant for sending and receiving short-range messages from ship to ship. Officers used it to trade scuttlebutt with other vessels about what their radar was showing, about their course changes, about the targets they were tracking. By day, the high-frequency Talk Between Ships signal reached only to the line of sight. But tonight, the earth’s atmosphere was working its magic and the TBS broadcasts from faraway ships were propagating wildly, bouncing over the horizon to the small warship’s vigilant antennae.

  They had come from small places to accomplish big things. As the American liberation of the Philippines unfolded, the greenhorn enlistees who made up the majority of the Samuel B. Roberts’s 224-man complement could scarcely have guessed at the scope of the drama to come. On the midnight-to-four-A.M. midwatch, the Roberts’s skipper, Lt. Cdr. Robert W. Copeland, his executive officer, Lt. Everett E. “Bob” Roberts, his communications officer, Lt. Tom Stevenson, and the young men under them in the little ship’s combat information center (CIC) had little else to do than while away the night as the destroyer escort zigzagged lazily off the eastern coast of Samar with the twelve other ships of its task unit, the small, northernmost contingent of the sprawling Seventh Fleet. When morning warmed the eastern horizon, the daily routine would begin anew: run through morning general quarters, then edge closer to shore with the six light aircraft carriers that were the purpose of the flotilla’s existence and launch air strikes in support of the American troops advancing into Leyte Island.

  With a mixture of pride and resignation, the men of the Seventh Fleet called themselves “MacArthur’s Navy.” The unusual arrangement that placed the powerful armada under Army command was the product of the long-standing interservice rivalry. The two service branches, each wildly successful, were beating divergent paths to Tokyo. From June 1943 to August 1944, MacArthur’s forces had leapfrogged across the southern Pacific, staging eighty-seven successful amphibious landings in a drive from Dutch New Guinea and west-by-northwestward across a thousand-mile swath of islanded sea to the foot of the Philippine archipelago. Simultaneously, Adm. Chester W. Nimitz’s fast carrier groups, accompanied by battle-hardened Marine divisions, had driven across the Central Pacific.

  The perpetual motion of the American industrial machine had built a naval and amphibious arsenal of such staggering size, range, and striking power that the vast sea seemed to shrink around it. “Our naval power in the western Pacific was such that we could have challenged the combined fleets of the world,” Adm. William F. Halsey, Jr., would write in his memoirs. The rival commanders had used it so well that the Pacific Ocean was no longer large enough to hold their conflicting ambitions. There was little of the Pacific left to liberate. Behind them lay conquered ground. Ahead, looking westward to the Philippines and beyond, was a short watery vista bounded by the shores of Manchuria, China, and Indonesia. Once the Far East had seemed a world away. Allied soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen operating along the far Pacific rim early in the war—the Flying Tigers in China, the U.S. Asiatic Fleet in Java, the Marines on Wake Island, the defenders of Bataan and Corregidor—were consigned to oblivion, so desperately far from home. Now that U.S. forces had crossed that world, the greatest challenge was to agree on how to deliver the inevitable victory as quickly as possible.

  For most of the summer of 1944 a debate had raged between Army and Navy planners about where to attack next. On July 21 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, newly nominated at the Chicago Democratic Convention for a fourth presidential term, boarded the heavy cruiser Baltimore at San Diego and sailed to Oahu for a summit meeting of his Army and Navy leaders. In a sober discussion after dinner at the presidential residence in Honolulu, Nimitz and MacArthur repeated to their commander in chief the same arguments they had been espousing to the Joint Chiefs of Staff these many weeks. The Navy preferred an assault on Formosa (now Taiwan). MacArthur had other priorities. On a large map FDR pointed to Mindanao Island, southernmost in the Philippine archipelago, and asked, “Douglas, where do we go from here?”

  Without hesitation, MacArthur replied, “Leyte, Mr. President, and then Luzon!”

  It had been nearly three years since Bataan fell and the American Caesar fled that haunted peninsula by night aboard a PT boat, arrived in Mindanao, and boarded a B-17 bomber for Australia to endure the exile of the defeated. On March 20, 1942, at a press conference at the Adelaide train station, he declared, “The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines … for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan, a primary object of which is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return.” Torn from context and conflated to a national commitment, “I shall return” became MacArthur’s calling card and his albatross.

  For the general, fulfilling his famous promise to the Philippine people was not solely a question of military strategy but also a point of personal and national honor. He told his president of the backlash in public opinion that might arise if the United States abandoned seventeen million loyal Filipinos to their Japanese conquerors. And the lives of some 3,700 American prisoners—the ravaged survivors of Bataan and Corregidor—would fall in immediate peril if the archipelago were bypassed and its occupying garrison starved out, a strategy many U.S. planners favored after seeing it succeed against other Japanese strongholds.

  Nimitz reiterated the Navy’s preference for driving further westward to seize Formosa. Such a move would land a more decisive blow against the long communication
s and supply lines that linked Tokyo to its bases and fuel supplies in Sumatra and Borneo. Mac-Arthur and Nimitz made their best arguments, and after extended discussion FDR sided with his general. MacArthur had flown in with virtually no time to prepare. Such was the force of his personality and persuasive gifts that even Admiral Nimitz was ultimately won over. The Philippines—Leyte—would be next.

  And so it began. Two great fleets gathered at staging areas at Manus in the Admiralty Islands and at Ulithi in the Carolines for the final assault on the Philippines. Under MacArthur, as it had been since March 1943, was Vice Adm. Thomas C. Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet. Nimitz retained the Third Fleet, which sailed under the flag of Admiral Halsey.

  The Seventh Fleet had a wide variety of ships to ferry and supply the invasion force itself. In addition to an alphabet soup of troop-, tank-, and equipment-carrying landing craft—APAs, LSTs, LSDs, LSMs, LCTs, LCIs and LVTs—it had amphibious command ships, ammunition ships, cargo ships, oilers, seaplane tenders, motor torpedo boats, patrol craft, coast guard frigates, minesweepers, minelayers, repair and salvage ships, water tankers, floating drydocks, and hospital ships. Standing guard over this wide assortment of hulls were the combatant vessels of the Seventh Fleet: Jesse Oldendorf’s bombardment group, composed of battleships and cruisers, and, farther offshore, Task Group 77.4, a force of sixteen escort carriers under Rear Adm. Thomas L. Sprague, divided into three task units and screened by destroyers and destroyer escorts.

  On October 20, 1944, two and a half years after retreating from the strategic archipelago, Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, Allied Forces, Southwest Pacific Area, made good on his grand promise. At seven A.M. sharp, the Seventh Fleet battleships Maryland, West Virginia, and Mississippi trained their main batteries on Leyte Island’s beaches and hills and opened fire on the conquerors and murderers of Bataan. The American liberation of the Philippines was under way. For exactly two hours the massive rifles roared. Then, precisely on schedule, the shelling stopped and Higgins boats began spilling out of the larger ships that housed them. Lt. Gen. Walter Krueger’s troops clambered down rope ladders thrown over the sides, the landing craft circling until their full number had gathered. Then the invasion force spiraled out into a series of waves that surged across San Pedro Bay and broke on Leyte’s eastern shore.

  As two corps of Sixth Army soldiers pushed inland from the coastal towns of Dulag and Tacloban, newspapers back home captivated the public with reports of the ongoing offensive. MACARTHUR RETURNS TO PHILIPPINES IN PERSONAL COMMAND OF AMERICANS. FDR VOICES GRATITUDE FOR NATION. The drama had been stage-managed from the beginning. On Leyte’s Red Beach the cameras were ready for the general’s star turn, carefully positioned to capture the liberator coming ashore. He obliged them with a flourish, wading from a landing craft ramp to inspect the damage inflicted by the Navy’s bombardment. Then, with Philippine president Sergio Osmeña at his side, General MacArthur, resplendent in pressed khakis, sunglasses, and marshal’s cap, corncob pipe in hand, leaned into a microphone held by an Army Signal Corps volunteer and spoke to history:

  This is the voice of freedom, General MacArthur speaking. People of the Philippines! I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil—soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples…. Rally to me. Let the indomitable spirit of Bataan and Corregidor lead on. As the lines of battle roll forward to bring you within the zone of operations, rise and strike…. The guidance of divine God points the way. Follow in His Name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory!

  If anyone aboard the Samuel B. Roberts fancied that his ship would be spearheading something so grand as a God-inspired drive to righteous victory, he was probably wise to keep it to himself. The destroyer escort was but a tiny cog in this unimaginably large and capable engine of war, its men smaller still, though collectively they were the long arm and clenched fist of an enraged democracy at war. Their flotilla, Task Unit 77.4.3, with the radio call sign Taffy 3, was far from center stage. One of three escort carrier task units positioned off Samar to watch MacArthur’s back, Taffy 3 had a supporting role, vital in its way if unlikely to generate for its leaders headlines to match those of its theater commander. Its six squadrons of FM-2 Wildcat fighters and TBM Avenger torpedo bombers flew air cover for, and struck ahead of, the American troops advancing ashore. As the planes came and went from their oceangoing hives, seven small warships—destroyers and destroyer escorts, including the “Sammy B.”— steamed in a protective ring that encircled Taffy 3’s escort carriers.

  Like the twelve other skippers in Taffy 3, Captain Copeland well knew that his task unit was far from being the most formidable American force operating in the Leyte Gulf area. As the happenstance transmissions coming to him via the TBS circuit now reminded him, that honor belonged to Admiral Oldendorf’s battle line. Steaming a hundred miles to Taffy 3’s south, the six battleships of Oldendorf’s Bombardment and Fire Support Group were the Seventh Fleet’s heavy hitters. Five of them—the California, the Maryland, the Pennsylvania, the Tennessee, and the West Virginia— were scarred veterans of Pearl Harbor. Each had absorbed the enemy’s treacherous blow on that Sunday morning nearly three years before. Now, lifted from the harbor mud, refloated, refitted, and sent to rejoin the Pacific Fleet, they were together again. They had set a trap in the deadly gauntlet of Surigao Strait, and tonight that trap was closing on one of several Japanese fleets sailing to challenge MacArthur’s invasion.

  Dawn was still hours away as Copeland’s officers and the rest of the crew in the Sammy B.’s CIC gathered to listen to an accidental play-by-play broadcast of an era in naval warfare thundering to a close. They did not immediately grasp the significance of the rogue bursts of radiation that skittered off the nighttime ionosphere and into their shipboard radio receiver. The signal—now crisp and clear, bringing the voices to them as if over an intercom, now cut through with static, incomplete—gave them only hints of what was happening in waters far to the south. They were American voices, Navy voices: upright, impersonal, but girded with the confidence that comes from long hours of drill and training. Their tenor and cadence had a practiced nonchalance, but there was no escaping the sense that down in Surigao Strait, big things were happening.

  “Skunk 184 degrees, 18 miles.”

  “Captain of McDermut is taking first target, you take one farthest north.”

  “Proceed to attack. Follow down west shoreline. Follow other groups in. Then retire to north. Make smoke.”

  On most nights, Bob Copeland and the others in the CIC gladly hit the sack when the midwatch ended at four A.M. But tonight the escalating drama of the events in Surigao Strait had moved them past the point of needing or wanting sleep. They were camped out for the long haul. Sleep could wait. As the men of the morning watch began to rouse themselves to relieve the midwatch, the voices on the radio were joined in chorus by the sound of something else: gunfire.

  “Fish are away.”

  “This is going to be quick.”

  “I have a group of small ones followed by a group of large ones. When the large ones reach twenty-six thousand yards, I will open fire.”

  Twenty-six thousand yards. Fourteen and three-quarter statute miles. To a sailor aboard a destroyer escort, the reach of a battleship’s big guns inspired awe. When they fired, sending their armor-piercing bullet trains shrieking out over the horizon, shooting out of a thun-derhead of cordite smoke, the shock wave flattened the seas around them. The full sonic experience of the shelling could not be appreciated over the radio. Indeed, it could seldom be fully appreciated by anyone other than its target. But the sudden sharp cracks of the great guns now and again obliterated the voices coming over the speaker.

  The sound and the fury stirred the men’s imagination and their curiosity.

  If they switched off the TBS radio, it would all have gone away. The echoes of the American battle line loosing hell to their south would have vanished, leaving them contemplating their blank radar scopes. Since its defe
at in the Marianas Islands in June, the Japanese Navy had stayed out of sight, gathering its strength for a final showdown. Now it was increasingly apparent that MacArthur’s move against the Philippines had at last stirred it to action.

  In the radio shack next to the CIC, the Roberts’s communications department—Tom Stevenson’s group—had been picking up an unusual amount of radio traffic. It was all in code, its meaning mysterious until the inscrutable five-character sequences could be transcribed and decrypted. The only unfiltered real-time information they got came via the Talk Between Ships radio. They sat around the plotting table, studying charts, building a visual picture from the clues coming over the TBS frequency. As the fragmentary broadcasts began to resolve into a notion of what was happening in the narrow straits south of Leyte Gulf, no level of drill or training could quite suppress their jubilation.

  They felt no concern for their own safety. The flanks of Taffy 3—and of their sibling task units Taffy 1 and Taffy 2—were guarded by the Seventh and Third Fleets, the greatest gathering of naval strength the world had yet seen. Let the Imperial Japanese Navy come to challenge the invasion. The contest had begun, and the men aboard the Samuel B. Roberts had it right there on the radio.

  * * *

  OUTSIDE, FROM HIS WATCH station in the starboard twenty-millimeter gun tub just forward of the bridge, seaman second class George Bray, an enlistee from Montgomery, Alabama, saw quick flashes of light illuminating the southern horizon and figured them for a storm. Most of the enlisteds had no particular love for the ocean, and the rainy season in the southwestern Pacific seemed to do its level best to keep things that way. A few days before, en route to their station off the island of Samar, the Roberts and her consorts had been swallowed by an unexpected typhoon. The ship had rolled so sharply—to fifty-nine degrees on the inclinometer—that at terrifying intervals it was easier to walk on bulkheads than stand on deck. The rolling lasted for three full days. Most of the crew who had not been to sea before lay in their bunks, paralyzed by nausea. But the pitching hull permitted that luxury only to the resourceful. After a few hard falls out of the sack to the deck, a bluejacket learned to sleep—or suffer—with a leg hooked around the chain that suspended his bunk from the ceiling.