The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  As ever, sailors learned to get by. In the mess, they could press a slice of wet bread under their supper tray to keep their meal on the table—when nausea permitted them to stomach a meal, that is. Some retched so badly they thought they might die. When landlubbing enlistees from plains states felt the ship heel over to starboard—thirty-five, forty, forty-five degrees—then make the long, creaking roll back to port, it was natural for them to fear the ship would sink. After suffering through a days-long spell of the cork-in-a-washtub gyrations, it was just as natural to worry that the ship might remain afloat. When the three-day ordeal was over, the feeling that the poor troops ashore were getting a raw deal had abated if not entirely disappeared.

  With memories of the typhoon fresh in his mind, Bray turned and shouted up to the wing of the bridge, where Bob Copeland had come for a breath of fresh air and a look at the action on the horizon. “Hey, Captain, look at that storm.”

  “That’s not a storm, son,” Copeland said. “It’s a battle. We’ve got it on the radio in here.”

  A battle. George Bray hadn’t been a shellback long enough to weigh knowledgeably the risks of possible combat against the perils of another hungry typhoon. For now, the Alabaman was glad simply to have something to look at, because nine nights out of ten the lone benefit of the midwatch was relief from the stale heat of the poorly ventilated sleeping quarters belowdecks. Navy men went to great lengths to find breathable air in the torrid latitudes of the South Pacific. You slept on deck if you could; under a blower or an air duct failing that. When no officer was looking, radioman third class Dick Rohde would stretch his standard-issue hammock from the bridge wing to a superstructure sponson and sack out, dangling from the starboard side of the ship. Whenever the ship went over to starboard, his makeshift aerie, with Rohde in it, would swing out over the open ocean. If it rained, the cool, fresh water rolling off the roof of the pilothouse would cascade down over him. He wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  If fresh air was the reward of the midnight deck watch, boredom was its potentially steep price. Snoozing on duty was a sure route to Captain’s Mast, a disciplinary proceeding where an enlisted man who was found guilty as charged could get busted down a rating or win himself eight hours of extra duty, possibly in that hell-on-earth known as the engine room. Though life in the wartime Navy was full of potentially catastrophic risk, mostly it was isolated and monotonous, broken only by the regimented pleasures of watching movies and opening mail from home. As the ship made its way, steaming, always steaming, yet never seeming to arrive at an actual destination, Bray and the three others in his gun mount took turns standing and sitting in pairs. While two of the men sat down and shot the breeze, the other two would stand, one with binoculars, the other donning headphones with a ready link to the officer of the deck on the bridge.

  Now the sudden spectacle of the distant pyrotechnics—the blooming and vanishing oases of light beneath the Pacific’s vast vaulting darkness—concentrated Bray’s attention. As he watched the gunfire backlight the southern horizon, a thought began pecking in the corner of his mind:

  If that’s a battle, well, God Almighty, what might we be getting into?

  San Bernardino Strait

  Sunrise would come at 6:27 A.M. on the day that might well settle the endgame, if not the outcome, of the long struggle in the Pacific. As the mightiest ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy boomed through the northern strait toward the wide waters of the Philippine Sea and the slumbering dawn, Admiral Kurita dared hope that the Sho plan might succeed. He had suffered losses severe enough to deter most commanders—the great battleship Musashi, victim of five waves of air strikes the afternoon before; three heavy cruisers, sunk or forced home by submarine attack. But battle was not new to him, nor loss.

  Kurita’s tenure with the fleet was deep. During the invasion of Java in March 1942, he had led the Japanese cruiser force that sank the USS Houston and HMAS Perth in Sunda Strait. He had commanded the heavy cruiser Mikuma, sunk at Midway, the battleship Kongo during the audacious Japanese bombardment of Guadalcanal’s Henderson Field, and the aircraft carriers that had covered the Tokyo Express, as the daring Japanese effort to resupply the besieged Solomon Islands became known. In the disastrous battle in the Marianas Islands in June, he had the distinction of being the only escort commander not to lose any of the carriers he was shepherding. The losses he had suffered on the present mission were but the latest chapter in a career scarred smooth by battle. According to an American historian, Kurita “had been bombed and torpedoed more often than almost any other Japanese admiral.”

  So much lay behind him; what lay ahead? Though the night was yet clear as he exited San Bernardino Strait after midnight on October 25, events were moving through the thickest of fogs. Of his countrymen—Admiral Ozawa and his decoy force, Nishimura in the south—he had had no word. Poor radio communications meant that he would not learn of their success or failure until it was far too late for the news to matter.

  There was no telling what would greet Takeo Kurita in the rain-squalls to the east, beyond Samar Island. At the moment, American eyes were looking elsewhere. Soon the whole world would be watching. For now, all that was watching him were the sharks.

  Part I

  TIN CANS

  “Captain, how often does a little ship like this sink?” “Usually just once.”

  —The Gismo, newsletter of the USS Samuel B. Roberts, September 30, 1944

  One

  On January 20, 1944, three months prior to the commissioning ceremony that would make it a U.S. Navy warship, the welded hull of DE-413, its prow festively draped in red, white, and blue bunting, slid off the ways at the Brown Shipbuilding Company and entered the Houston Ship Channel with a roaring sidelong splash. At the launching ceremony, administered by the employees of Brown’s pipe department, a prayer was said to be in the hearts of all who watched: “May she be a sound ship, capable of rising to the heights when her supreme moment comes.”

  The hull that would become the USS Samuel B. Roberts had been laid down alongside the hull that would become her sister ship, the Walter C. Wann, on December 6, 1943. Two weeks later the twins were moved from their initial production stations, and work began on the Le Ray Wilson and the Lawrence C. Taylor. From July 1942 to March 1944 the shipwrights, marine electricians, pipefitters, machinists, and welders at Brownship would turn out sixty-one destroyer escorts, one pair following the next with punch-clock efficiency.

  As the shipyard workers continued making the Roberts ready for sea, installing gun mounts, laying ducts and wiring, and testing the ship’s many internal systems, a group of newly minted seamen left the naval training center at Norfolk, Virginia, and boarded a train to Houston to fill out the ship’s complement of seamen and rated petty officers. The weathered World War I-era passenger train took five days to make the trip. The recruits’ place in the world was reflected not only in the nineteenth-century decor of their accommodations—a potbellied stove warmed one end of the car; gas lamps lit their card games—but in the unceremonious manner by which their train got shunted aside whenever a line of boxcars had to get through. During wartime, and decades before America would develop a culture of personal convenience, there was no denying that cargo could be as important as men.

  Once, interminably delayed while a long freight train squealed by ahead of them, the enlistees, accompanied by the two youngest ensigns assigned to the Samuel B. Roberts, John LeClercq and Dudley Moylan, piled out of their passenger car and passed the time riding cows bareback in a pasture. Another time, stuck in a mountain rail-yard with nowhere to go, they got off the train, took over a rural diner, and helped cook their own dinner. Three railcars full of young sailors and no drill-field exercises to burden their days—it was a memory that would grow dearer with time, and it bonded them as only the great adventures of youth can.

  What the kids had gone through in basic training was meant to adjust their perspective on their relative individual worth in this new world. Fo
r teenagers entering military service during wartime, the shock of boot camp was bracing, equalizing. It leveled the little hills and valleys of socioeconomic differences, broke down egos, and made new recruits glad to end up wherever the Navy Department’s Bureau of Personnel might send them. When Dick Rohde, son of a New York City ship chandler who went broke in the Depression, arrived at boot camp in Newport, Rhode Island, he first encountered the well-calibrated cruelty that would ensure his smooth entry into the wartime fleet.

  Sharply dressed in his neatly pressed uniform, the boot camp company commander, as World War II-era Navy drill instructors were known, lined his men up at first muster and addressed them gently. “I know what it’s like for you guys. A couple days ago you were home with your mothers and fathers. Now all of a sudden here you are. You’re up in this strange part of the country. You’ve been rooted out of your homes. You’re homesick. You’ve got your hair all shaved off and you got those shots. I just want to tell you that for the next six weeks, I’m going to be your mother and your father. I’m going to make sure things go just as nicely for you as possible. That’s the reason I’m here. If there’s any way I can accomplish these things I’m gonna do it. I want you to know that.”

  Well, this I can handle, Rohde thought. Maybe it wasn’t so bad that the Marines had turned him away, the big sergeant behind the desk saying something alluringly dismissive like, “Go home and grow up and then come back and we’ll talk to you.” Rohde didn’t go home. He went around the corner to the Navy recruiter, who had ready good use for an eager seventeen-year-old. Let the Marines slog through mud—Dick Rohde from Staten Island was going to sea.

  “Now, I’m going to call the roll,” the company commander said. “I don’t know how to pronounce some of your names, so if I make a mistake, please correct me.” He got down to Rohde on the list and called out, “Road?”

  “Uh, sir, that’s Rohde,” his young charge offered, emphasizing the long e.

  The company commander walked up to the freshly cropped boot, and it was then that Rohde discovered the true nature of the instructor he had dared to admire. “No, that’s Shithead!” he roared. “Your name from now on is Shithead!”

  Thus began a six-week program of drill-field marching, obstacle-course running, weapon maintenance, latrine cleaning, and more. Each morning when Rohde’s name came up at muster, the company commander called out “Shithead?” When Rohde’s mother heard about the treatment her son was getting at the hands of the U.S. Navy, she vowed to blow the lid off the scandal through the good offices of Mr. Walter Winchell and his little newspaper column. Her son put an end to that plan. Perhaps mothers were poorly equipped to appreciate the educational value of scrubbing a concrete courtyard with a medium-bristled toothbrush. Dick Rohde survived boot camp. He became a sailor.

  Rohde had skills the Navy prized. As a one-time page to a Wall Street investment banker, he was a proficient typist. That, combined with the rudimentary Morse code he had learned in radio club at Staten Island’s Curtis High School, set him up to strike for a radioman’s rating. With new ships launching daily from shipyards all around the country, bodies were needed—and minds too. There was a shortage of trained radiomen to man the sets. In March 1944 Dick Rohde went to the U.S. Naval Training School in Boston, where radiomen were made.

  The genius of the Navy’s personnel system was that it sorted young men by their talents, trained them for specialized duty, and funneled them to places where their knowledge would benefit the nation most. A recruit with promise in a particular technical area could go to a service school to study a specialty. Someone with a keen ear for pitch recognition would be encouraged to attend sound school in Key West, Florida, where he learned to operate sonar equipment. An enlistee with an engineering background might be a candidate for radar school at MIT in Cambridge. Most recruits went straight to sea, where they got about the sweaty business of scraping paint, loading supplies, maintaining equipment, and doing anything else the petty officers said needed doing. Seamen who discovered their callings aboard ship could affiliate themselves with a particular department and “strike for a rating” in that area. A sailor with the designation “seaman first class (radioman striker)” would be the gofer of the radio department. As long as he didn’t slip too often with the coffeepot, he would in time get promoted to radioman third class, a petty officer rating that signified his expertise in the chosen field.

  After completing basic training at Newport and graduating from radio school in Boston, Rohde went to the receiving station at Norfolk, Virginia, where like scores of men he awaited assignment to a ship and got further training. The training never quite ended, for there was always something else to learn. At Norfolk Rohde’s training went beyond drill-field rote and began to reflect the realities of life under fire. One day he entered a large room enclosing an indoor swimming pool. Into one end of the pool was poured fuel oil, which was summarily set alight. He and his fellow seaman recruits were directed to jump into the smoking, flaming water, to splash the burning fuel away from them, and to make their way to the clean end of the pool. Nary an eyelash was singed, but their minds were seared indelibly with a glimpse of what might lie ahead.

  Like many others in the mob that had boarded that train in Norfolk, George Bray had not joined the Navy looking for a fight. Like most enlisted men, he was a pragmatist. The calculus was simple: a war was on. If you were eighteen or older, the thing to do was join the service. If you were seventeen, you could get a parent to sign your enlistment papers. Or you could just lie about your age. Ends justified means: if you wanted to impress a girl, your best bet was to get yourself in uniform as quickly as possible. The only question was what service you preferred.

  When the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor and the war started, Bray had been as eager to sign on as the next kid. But he tempered idealism with practicality. He looked at the options available to him and chose the Navy for reasons that recruiters surely exploited in the 1940s: he would get three meals a day, clean bed linens, and none of the trench-humping that was the daily lot of the infantryman.

  Not that Bray was a shrinking violet. Back in Alabama he had made the high school varsity football team as a seventh grader. He was a hard-nosed halfback, adept at catching passes out of a Notre Dame-style T formation, which had come into fashion in 1943 when Fighting Irish quarterback Angelo Bertelli brought it to South Bend and won the national championship and the Heisman Trophy along the way. Halfway through his senior year Bertelli had joined the Marines. If military service was good enough for one magician of the T formation, it was good enough for another. And so Bray found himself aboard the U.S. Navy’s smallest man-of-war, a destroyer escort.

  In Houston the men came aboard the Roberts as it was undergoing a final fitting out prior to the commissioning ceremony that would convert it from the private property of the Brown Shipbuilding Company to a public asset as a United States Ship. Those who came by train found that their Spartan accommodations had been good preparation for shipboard life. Their bunks on the Roberts were three-high, with forty or fifty men to a compartment. There was little venting, let alone air-conditioning. But comfort is an afterthought for a teenager on the cusp of adventure. Dick Rohde swooned at the thought of what was in store for him in the Pacific. “There was always something new, always something exciting,” he said. “We weren’t homesick at all. It was just ‘Wow, what’s going to happen next?’”

  Two

  What happened next would be up to Bob Copeland. It was his world—the enlisted men just lived in it. The commander of three previous ships, Captain Copeland, a naval reservist from Tacoma who had left behind a budding legal career to assume his fourth command, arrived in Houston on March 4, 1944, and instantly liked what he saw in the Roberts. Holed up at the Rice Hotel while the ship neared completion, he and his officers spent each day at the shipyard, watching the nondescript slab of metal become a warship.

  Fair-minded, firm, and shrewd, Copeland, at the advanced age of thirty-three years
, had a rare gift: the ability to assert his authority and make his men like it, both at the same time. No one on the Samuel B. Roberts was ever heard bellyaching that they had gotten a raw deal from Bob Copeland. He wasn’t above turning to an enlisted man and asking, “So, how’s your family?” If he saw a picture of a sailor’s girlfriend on a desk, he would be likely to ask, “You still hearing from her?” He led his crew from a position of trust. And they trusted him for his ability to lead.

  The skipper of the Roberts had been a lawyer exactly as long as he had been an officer. Commissioned as an ensign the same day he was admitted to the Washington State Bar Association, he had maintained a trial law practice in Tacoma while fulfilling his commitment to the naval reserve, with meetings one night a week. The fact that Bob Copeland was not “regular Navy”—an Annapolis graduate with a full commission and a full-time job in the fleet—owed more to his sense of family duty than to a lack of devotion to naval service.

  Like the rest of his generation who grew up amid the patriotism and Wilsonian high-mindedness of World War I, Copeland had come of age aspiring to be a warrior. Eight years old when the Great War ended, he had spent his childhood infused with enthusiasm for playtime war, prancing around in doughboy getup, tin hat cocked over his forehead, stockings pulled up over his calves, wooden rifle at the ready. In his teenage years, when his peers had moved on to playing sports, Bob Copeland was up in his room running his own private navy. He kept his fleet on paper, order of battle formed up, a command hierarchy drawn. Though his devotion to naval strategy might have led him to neglect certain skills that would be useful at sea—such as the ability to swim—it filled his imagination and prepared him for the managerial reality of command.