The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  At a critical juncture in his young life, he had been offered the chance to attend Annapolis. Every Fourth of July young Bob Copeland watched the fleet weigh anchor in Tacoma’s Commencement Bay to help the city celebrate Independence Day. Destroyers, cruisers, and battleships, and the Admiral. The Admiral was there. The opportunity was not lost on Bob Copeland. He aimed to see the Admiral, if only he could buck up his courage to make the trip. Every day he went down to the docks where small boats ferried townsfolk out to see the ships. But each day Copeland’s nerve failed him. Finally, on the last day the fleet was to be there in July 1927, he mustered the will to amble aboard the small harbor ferry and go see the Admiral. Tucked in his pocket was a letter of introduction from the mayor of Tacoma. He approached the flagship, climbed aboard, and handed the envelope to the officer of the deck. The letter was passed to the executive officer, then to the Admiral himself.

  Before Copeland could grasp what was happening, an invitation was extended to him. He would see the Admiral in his flag quarters. A kid who commanded a world-beating fleet on paper was permitted to sit down and talk to a man who earned his living doing the real thing. They talked for hours. Copeland’s knowledge of naval history, his appreciation for fleet organization and command, won him an unexpected prize: the Admiral told him he should go to Annapolis.

  Better than that, the Admiral wrote a letter. To Copeland’s congressional representative. Who wrote a letter. To the commandant of Annapolis. An appointment to the Naval Academy was there for the taking.

  But his mother, who had an extreme, unreasoning fear of water, could not abide the idea of her only child going to sea. So the family doctor was summoned. He mustered his most ominous tone of voice and said to the seventeen-year-old something like this: “Robert, your mother’s health concerns me deeply. She might very well have a heart attack if you decide to enter the service. Please don’t cause her this stress.” Born to his parents ten years into their marriage, Copeland knew that he was a long-wished-for and only child. He decided that he could not inflict such pain on his mother. Bob Copeland, the dutiful only son, declined his appointment to the breeding ground of admirals.

  He would settle for living in smaller worlds. In 1929, Copeland enlisted in the naval reserve and, six years later, was commissioned as a naval reserve officer, coincident with his completion of law school. Having fulfilled his commitment to the service, he returned to civilian life in 1935 to practice law in Tacoma until 1940. Ordered back to active duty during the Navy’s prewar expansion, he commanded two auxiliary ships and the destroyer escort USS Wyman before reporting to Houston as skipper of DE-413. He liked the men he found there. In Houston, standing on the bridge of the protean warship, watching the workers of the day shift scramble down the gangway and into the safety of their civilian lives, Copeland noticed two officers looking up at him from the dock. His instinct told him he would come to know them well. He ambled down and asked them if they belonged to his ship. They did. One was Lt. William S. Burton. The other was Lt. Lloyd Gurnett.

  In Burton, Copeland found a kindred soul, for Burton had previously been a lawyer too. But the attorney from Cleveland had the edge on his captain in family prominence: Burton’s father, Harold Burton, a World War I Army captain and the former mayor of Cleveland, was a member of the U.S. Senate. (He would become, after the war, a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.) Copeland was relieved to find that Burton did not let it go to his head. “He stood on his own and successfully lived down his family fame. Bill by his own abilities and his own personality won his way completely with both the officers and the enlisted men.”

  Lieutenant Gurnett was a mustang, a sailor who had climbed the enlisted ratings—in Gurnett’s case, to chief quartermaster—and finally achieved a commission at sea. “Lloyd knew his navy, knew his job, and didn’t know when to quit working. No man on board worked harder or loved the ship more than he,” Copeland would write. Because Gurnett’s dedication was so readily apparent, Copeland gave him the post of first lieutenant, making him responsible for the construction department, which handled damage control, shipkeeping, messing, berthing, and repairs. The officers were joined by their so-called nucleus crew: thirty-odd chief and first-class petty officers who had the experience to whip a green crew into shape, as well as other key officers, including Tom Stevenson, the communications department boss, and Bob Roberts, the ship’s executive officer.

  The Samuel B. Roberts was christened in posthumous honor of a twenty-one-year-old naval reservist from Portland, Oregon, Samuel Booker Roberts, Jr., killed on Guadalcanal when, at the height of fighting on September 28, 1942, he took the landing craft he commanded and motored in to draw fire away from ships trying to rescue Marines trapped in a Japanese crossfire. When the secretary of the Navy informed Roberts’s bereaved mother that DE-413 would be named in her late son’s honor, she planned to come down from St. Louis to attend the ceremony. Her husband was an engineer working for Mississippi River Flood Control, but even he couldn’t stop the great river from rampaging as the big day, April 28, 1944, approached. Floodwaters washed out the southbound rail lines, and travel became impossible. The wife of the flood controller had no choice but to yield to high water. She wrote Bob Copeland with her regrets and enclosed a photo of coxswain Roberts, which the captain placed in the wardroom.

  She also made a request: would he find a place on his crew roster for Jack Roberts, her youngest son, who was finishing basic training at Great Lakes Naval Training Station? The younger Roberts badly wanted the assignment. From Galveston, Copeland wrote the Navy Department with a request to bring Jack Roberts aboard.

  Commissioning is a signature moment in the life of a warship. An authority on naval history has observed, “If launching may be likened to birth, and christening the endowment of individuality, then at commissioning the ship is at the threshold of a productive and rewarding maturity.” It constitutes its formal transfer to the care of its commanding officer. Its officers and crew assemble on the quarterdeck as the fleet’s district commandant or his representative reads the directive that assigns the vessel to the fleet. The Navy band plays the national anthem, the ensign is hoisted, and the commissioning pennant is broken out. The new commanding officer reads his orders and assumes command, and the first watch is set.

  A productive and rewarding maturity—close though it was for the Samuel B. Roberts— lay far in the future for Bob Copeland’s two small children. His wife of four and a half years, Harriet, had been there when all three of his previous ships had been commissioned, from his first command aboard the coal-burning tug, the Pawtucket, to his most recent tour aboard an older destroyer escort, the Wyman. He wanted her there in Houston for the commissioning of the Roberts, and he let her know it, cajoling her in letter after letter to make the long trip from Tacoma. But his efforts at persuasion could not overcome the imperatives of new motherhood. Though she wanted to be there for her husband, Harriet Copeland had an infant daughter and toddler son to care for. And so on the day the Samuel B. Roberts became a Navy warship, Bob Copeland took command of her without the comfort of family. Copeland would continue to chide his wife for missing the commissioning. “I think I overdid it,” he later acknowledged. He finally relented when Harriet wrote him, saying, “There’s an old saying that one picture is worth ten thousand words, and the enclosed picture will perhaps explain why I wasn’t there.” Tucked inside the envelope was the front cover of the Saturday Evening Post. It depicted the inside of a firehouse, firemen clambering aboard an engine as it raced out of the station. Their mascot, a Dalmatian, was left sitting on a large red pillow, suckling a litter of puppies as the pumper zoomed off to battle the flames. As Copeland raced off to his own four-alarm fire in the Pacific, he could not be sure he would ever see Harriet and their children again.

  After the commissioning ceremony on April 28, the Roberts departed for Bermuda with a group of other destroyer escorts for an extended shakedown cruise to test and break in the ship’s physical plant. But as a
n experienced commander like Bob Copeland well knew, the successful operation of a warship would depend as much on his ability to forge the character of the ship’s crew as on the Texans’ skill in forging the curve of the ship’s keel.

  After shakedown was complete, the Roberts escorted a paddle steamer up the East Coast to Norfolk, then continued northward to Boston for a final fitting out and inspection prior to going to war. In Boston seaman second class Jack Roberts reported for duty. The only people on the ship who knew his connection to the Mr. Samuel B. Roberts were the skipper and his executive officer, Lt. Bob Roberts. No one suspected a thing, for the surname Roberts didn’t stand out: the ship already had two of them. By the time the fact of young Jack Roberts’s relation to the heroic landing craft skipper of Guadalcanal slipped out a few months later, his captain wrote, “Jack Roberts had made his own way, and his place in the ship’s company was secure for him in his own right.”

  When he finished boot camp, Jack Yusen was ordered to join the Samuel B. Roberts at Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston. On June 7, 1944, as the U.S. Army was consolidating its hold on the Normandy beachhead, Yusen loaded his seabag aboard a truck with eleven other recruits and was driven to the docks to meet his new ship. When he saw the big turrets and bristling guns, his first thought was, What a ship! Then a petty officer approached the New Yorker and his buddies and asked, “What are you guys looking at?” The petty officer told them that the object of their admiration was in fact a British heavy cruiser. He then pointed to the dry dock on the other side of the pier. “You’re going on that one over there.”

  The large waterless enclosure appeared to be empty, save for a single mast that stuck up out of it, a radar antenna affixed to its top. “That’s your ship,” the petty officer said. Yusen and his friends were crestfallen. “We looked down the dock at the little ship—306 feet long—and then looked at the big cruiser, and said, ‘Oh my God!’”

  How quickly disappointment turned to pride. Destroyer escort sailors tended toward an intensity of pride that was out of all proportion to their undersized ships. Four days into his new life as a Samuel B. Roberts sailor, Yusen walked with his buddies on liberty into a Boston pub. When Navy men meet in barrooms or dance halls, or wherever women are nearby, they seldom pass up the opportunity to boast about their ship. Yusen said, “They’d ask you what ship you were on. We’d say, ‘We’re from the Samuel B. Roberts— the USS Samuel B. Roberts, DE-413.’ You’d say that with pride. You might be talking to someone on a heavy cruiser. So you’re just telling him that we’re as good as you. We had that pride already. We had been on the ship for four days. So much pride, and it had been only four days.”

  The feeling that destroyer escorts were special manifested itself in surprising places. In a stained-glass window that adorned the Norfolk yard’s nondenominational chapel, someone had glued an image of a destroyer escort, cradled like a baby in the arms of Jesus Christ. The image struck somebody as sacrilegious and was removed. But the sentiment was surely genuine enough.

  Pride would take the Sammy B. far. But the fact remained that the destroyers that the Roberts would join in Taffy 3’s screen—the Hoel, the Heermann, and the Johnston— carried two and a half times the gun power and more than three times as many torpedoes as their smaller cousins. Sailors who possessed the detachment of distance—for instance, the men on the escort carriers who relied on the tin cans for protection—grasped the practical significance of entrusting their well-being to the more diminutive ships. When they looked out and saw DEs skirting the perimeter of the formation in lieu of destroyers, they would just shake their heads. Could they be trusted to protect them?

  Bob Copeland of the Samuel B. Roberts readily validated their concern: “We were short of destroyers—we were always short of destroyers—and actually this was a destroyer’s job. So they used a lot of DEs to finish out the screens. In all we had three destroyers and four DEs that made up the screen ships. We actually should have had eight or ten in the screen. We were overextended and trying to carry on a big operation.”

  Destroyer escorts were not built to ride high in the battle line and trade salvos with an enemy fleet. The Roberts’s designed displacement—the weight of the seawater that her hull displaced—was 1,250 tons. Fully loaded for battle, she displaced about 2,000 tons. She went to war with 228 men: 217 enlisted and eleven officers. But by the standards of the fleet she was a pipsqueak. The battleship Missouri, with a complement of 1,921, was nearly three times the Roberts’s length and almost thirty times her weight. Unlike the Mighty Mo, the Roberts had not been built for engaging armored dreadnoughts at 28,000 yards. Destroyer escorts were runabouts. In port, they delivered mail to the larger ships. At sea, they rode the outer edge of a formation, keeping watchful eyes, sonar stacks, and radar scopes to the ocean and the sky.

  Whereas the big ships’ bulk was their best insurance against heavy seas, destroyer escorts lived at nature’s fickle mercy. As the seas went, so went the DEs. In an unpublished 1945 dispatch sent shortly before he was killed by machine-gun fire on Okinawa, Ernie Pyle evoked the precarious seaworthiness of the tiny vessels: “They are rough and tumble little ships. They roll and they plunge. They buck and they twist. They shudder and they fall through space. They are in the air half the time, under water half the time. Their sailors say they should have flight pay and submarine pay both.”

  The Roberts was rated for twenty-four knots but could make nearly thirty when her two six-thousand-horsepower Westinghouse turbines were spinning under full steam pressure. Her armament was light. A Butler-class destroyer escort’s main battery consisted of two single-barreled five-inch/38-caliber naval rifles, one fore and one aft. A triple torpedo mount amidships was her most powerful weapon against enemy surface ships. A well-located torpedo blast could cripple a large capital ship. But with a range of not more than ten thousand yards, the torpedo’s effective use required that the ship maneuver to virtual point-blank range—and survive that approach despite her complete lack of armor or other self-protection beyond the whims of luck.

  Destroyer escorts were every bit the equal of destroyers (DDs) in antisubmarine operations. They used the same sonar equipment, but DEs were more maneuverable, able to turn a circle less than half the diameter of what a destroyer circumscribed. Still, the pilots and crew on the escort carriers (CVEs) would have preferred to see full-fledged Fletcher-class destroyers riding shotgun on the task unit. But it was 1944, the ocean was vast, and the same American heavy industry that raced to fill the oceans with aircraft carriers was hard pressed to turn out enough destroyers to protect the flattops. Destroyer escorts, cheaper and faster to build, filled the bill of necessity. And they did it well.

  * * *

  THROUGH SOME OLD-FASHIONED SHIPYARD horse trading in Boston, Copeland secured certain mechanical improvements—a pair of gyro repeaters for the bridge wing foremost among them. With the new compasses his quartermasters and watch officers would be able to take more accurate bearings. To help turn his mostly teenage crew into a team ready to fight a desperate and savage enemy, Copeland brought aboard key noncommissioned officers and technical specialists through the Navy’s personnel lottery.

  As the Samuel B. Roberts left Boston Harbor and broke into the wide waters off Cape Cod, Captain Copeland set course for Norfolk. Provincetown was coming into view on the starboard bow. Ens. John LeClercq, the officer of the deck, and his captain, seated in his bridge chair, scanned the morning sea and listened to the slow cadence of the sonar system’s echo-ranging machine as it sent its sharp falsetto calls into the deep in search of enemy submarines. Suddenly Copeland noticed that the outbound ping was getting a hard echo in return. “Before I could fully believe my ears, the sonar operator called out, ‘Good contact! Four hundred yards—up Doppler!’” referring to the acoustic signature a bogey made while closing with the ship. Copeland thought to himself, Barely out of port, and a submarine is already stalking us?

  Recognizing the possibility of collision, Copeland leaped f
rom his chair and grabbed the engine order telegraph to ring a stop bell. Before the skipper could send down the order, there came a deep, hollow-toned boom and a reverberating crash that shook the ship. It felt as if a torpedo had hit. Copeland rang a “back full” order to the engine room, but the impact continued to grind along. A few seconds later a second violent seaquake shook the ship.

  “I was belowdecks when there was a great shock, then a grinding sensation along the keel, and finally the stern shook violently,” chief yeoman Gene Wallace recalled. “I rushed to the deck, and there on the sea was evidence that the Roberts had made her first kill. There was blood on the water and bits of flesh—positive evidence of a kill—of a whale.”

  The Roberts’s first underwater kill was a magnificent sixty-foot-long specimen whose backbone had been severed by the ship’s slender bow. The stricken animal spouted a geyser of blood as the officers and crew raced topside, ran to the rail, and looked on aghast. The whale’s immense bulk rolled alongside the starboard side of the ship as a growing blood slick stained the water. The destroyer escort’s churning starboard screw sawed at the whale, cutting clean through its backbone again. The crew watched transfixed as the ruined beast surfaced behind the ship.