The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  No captain ever wants to report that he has run his ship aground—certainly no captain with hopes for a bigger command. But what other conclusion should be drawn from the dented bow, the bent keel, and the broken screw? Captains customarily made up stories to cover for their negligence. “It is legendary in the Navy,” Bob Copeland later wrote, “that unless she sticks fast, no ship admittedly runs aground, all groundings being laid to collisions with submerged logs and the like.” But this was no phony sea story, and Copeland didn’t want a stench of suspicion hanging around him or his ship. The exec, Lt. Bob Roberts, took a fix on the ship’s position, documenting its location well clear of shallow waters where a grounding could take place. Meanwhile, Captain Copeland, ever the lawyer, ordered his crew to gather up the exonerating physical evidence. Several chunks of whale hide and flesh were recovered from the ship’s hull and preserved in medicinal alcohol by Dr. Erwin, the division medical officer.

  Copeland continued on to Norfolk to have the broken propeller repaired in dry dock. No question ever arose as to the origins of the Samuel B. Roberts’s inaugural bruising. It was an incident that grew in comic magnitude as time went by. But just as surely could it be said that the Sammy B.’s voyage to the Philippine Sea had begun with a very poor omen. Such dramatics—and the small vessel had yet to enter a combat zone.

  * * *

  WHILE THEIR SHIP WAS convalescing in Norfolk, Lieutenant Roberts and Captain Copeland made final adjustments to the crew roster, weeding out a few ne’er-do-wells from the ship’s complement of 219. Among the 217 keepers, Copeland could sense a coming together that boded well for the upcoming journey to the Pacific. The skipper gave his crew leave and instructed them to report back to the ship in time for its departure a few days later.

  Bud Comet, a nineteen-year-old seaman, took the opportunity to visit his family in their coal-mining settlement on the Guyandot River in northern West Virginia, where they lived in a home owned by the coal company. So long as Mr. Comet showed up reliably at the mine and obeyed his superiors and called his boss “Mister,” he would have a place to live and get the hours he needed to bring home a living wage to his family. Mostly he fed his family out of his vegetable garden—after he gave the best produce to neighbors. “My dad figured there were people there poorer than us, he gave the best stuff to them, and we got what was left. If he killed a hog, he gave most of the hog away,” Comet said. When the visit was over and Bud was due to rejoin the Samuel B. Roberts, he saw his father off to work, then left to catch the train to Norfolk. He found a seat aboard the train and looked up to see a familiar face sitting across from him. “I want to talk to you,” his father said.

  Bud knew that the foreman at the coal mine didn’t grant time off lightly. From the look in his father’s eye, he could see that what his father was about to say was likely going to be important.

  Mr. Comet was concerned for his son’s future. It was 1944. The world was at war. He told the teenager he was worried that he would get out to the front and be overwhelmed or afraid and wouldn’t do his job. If he screwed up and went over the hill and if the MPs had to track him down and haul him to the brig, he would bring upon his family the worst of sins: dishonor. If there was one thing he needed to avoid, his dad said, it was dishonoring his mother.

  He reminded his son of his own beginnings. Born in Italy, the senior Comet was raised under the worst of political systems. He had come to this country and managed to make a living and provide for his family. What this meant, he said, was that America was worth dying for. Death would be acceptable, so long as it was honorable. “An honorable man dies once,” he told Bud. “A coward dies a thousand times.” Comet thought he had heard that line somewhere before, maybe from Shakespeare. His father didn’t mention anything about the Bard. Bud Comet was pretty sure his father had never read Shakespeare. He said, “I think he got that out of his heart.”

  But Bud Comet’s heart was already spoken for. He had fallen hard in love. The object of his affection was the Samuel B. Roberts. “I had confidence in the ship. I had confidence in the people who I had met on the ship. I had confidence in the officers who I saw on that ship. Mr. Roberts, our executive officer, was Annapolis—very strict, strictly Navy. I felt that he would be more strict than anybody else. There was Stevenson and Moylan. I had a lot of respect for them.”

  Comet grew to like Dudley Moylan. The ship’s junior officer, with an English degree from Duke and a “ninety-day wonder” commission from Notre Dame’s officer candidate program, was prone to spontaneous kindness. On late watches, once in a while, Ensign Moylan would bring by a pot of coffee and some cups, toss them around, fill them, and sit down in the gun tub with the men and visit and just talk, one man to the next. Junior officers could be that way. John LeClercq was like that too. There was an unshakable goodness to him, with his blond hair and easy, boyish smile. He had a natural empathy for even the greenest sailor. LeClercq and Moylan were the only officers with the group that made the five-day train journey from Norfolk to Houston.

  Enlisted men who talked with Johnny LeClercq weren’t put off by his gold bars. He didn’t put up any of the barriers that other officers did. “I remember LeClercq,” Bud Comet said. “He looked at you always and smiled—like he was in love with the ship too and the people that he was serving with and was very proud.” Somehow the Samuel B. Roberts just seemed to foster that kind of pride. It tended to trickle down from the top.

  Of course, anybody caught up in the fantasy that the Samuel B. Roberts was the Good Ship Lollipop always had Bob Roberts to reckon with. He could be arch and domineering. But in that sense his personality meshed well with the job description for an executive officer. He was remote even from his own officers. Enlisted men lived in another universe altogether.

  Like Lloyd Gurnett, he was a mustang, an officer who had entered the Navy as an enlisted man and performed well enough to win a field appointment to Annapolis. Coming out of high school in Ridgefield, Connecticut, he had been beaten to his congressional district’s Naval Academy appointment by an ambitious Yale University sophomore. So he made his Navy career the old-fashioned way. He jumped into the enlisted ranks with both feet and within two years won entrance to Annapolis by taking competitive examinations at sea.

  He and Copeland were among the few experienced officers on the Samuel B. Roberts. Most of the others were so-called “ninety-day wonders.” There was no small amount of sarcasm behind the title, for veteran petty officers seldom acquiesced to the authority of the young men who swaggered aboard as newly minted ensigns in the naval reserve. In theory a ninety-day wonder was superior even to the seniormost chief. But if a young officer planned to have a long and thriving career in the naval service, he was wise to defer to his chiefs’ experience.

  At the top of the chain of command of enlisted men, the warrants, the chiefs, and the first-class petty officers were the ones who had the experience to get things done at sea, from tying lines to launching boats to bringing on stores to organizing work parties. On the Roberts, Red Harrington, the first-class boatswain’s mate, was the catalyst for most of what the deck force accomplished. The radio department relied on the leadership of Tullio Serafini, a grizzled but popular chief whose naval service dated back to World War I. Chiefs did not wear golden-barred epaulets or cap brims laden with braided “scrambled eggs.” They did not dine with fine silver in the officers’ ward. But they were capable men who had spent their best years at sea. By virtue of seniority, a forty- or fifty-year-old warrant officer, whose half-inch gold stripe gave him the actual privileges of an ensign, earned more money than many an admiral.

  In his two years as an enlisted man, Bob Roberts had painted enough bulkheads and tugged enough lines to acquire a certain saltiness to his personality. But as the only Annapolis graduate aboard the ship—class of 1940—he comported himself with the assured professionalism that only Bancroft Hall and Tecumseh Square could breed. His blend of experience and pedigree made him a respected leader. Beyond those em
otional nuances, the exec’s job was intellectually demanding as well. To handle the considerable responsibility of supervising the CIC, the executive officer of a destroyer or destroyer escort had to have a quick mind. During a torpedo run it fell to him to perform the exacting work of selecting the ship’s course to put it in optimum position to fire its torpedoes. A computer was available to help with the mathematical chore. But computers, even simple durable mechanical-analog devices like the first-generation Mark 1A fire-control computer, could fail. In those cases, the human mind had to step into the void and determine the target’s speed and course, his own best firing course, the torpedo’s optimum speed, and all the difficult geometry that that work involved. Bob Roberts’s mind was among the best. Copeland called him “as fast as a slide rule and as accurate as a micrometer … an A-1 crackerjack boy, as sharp as a phonograph needle.”

  Bob Roberts probably looked at a young officer like John LeClercq, so full of niceness and interpersonal engagement, and saw a greenhorn who needed a little toughening. The exec knew how to focus impressionable minds by hitting them where they were strong. Once he pulled LeClercq aside and told him he didn’t like his attitude toward the Navy and thought he didn’t take enough interest in his men. LeClercq rated himself highly on both counts and seethed at the remark for weeks. Later, he exacted an underling’s brand of revenge. When he was scheduled to take the ship’s whaleboat to retrieve the punctilious exec from liberty, LeClercq found a defensible reason to be three and a half hours late. He and his buddy, the juniormost officer on the ship, Dudley Moylan, got a laugh out of the passive insurrection. But LeClercq was dead serious about avenging his honor as a friend of the crew. “As long as I have the confidence and trust of the enlisted men,” Johnny wrote his mother, “Mr. Roberts can go to blazes.”

  * * *

  IN NORFOLK, LLOYD GURNETT pulled some strings (or just as likely, picked some locks) and requisitioned for the crew its very own ice cream maker. The luxury of carrying such a machine typically belonged to aircraft carriers and other larger ships. Usually escort vessels contended for the privilege of rescuing a downed pilot, knowing that their reward in exchange would be five gallons of the frozen treat. Now the Roberts could tend to its own needs in the realm of iced confectionery.

  Before leaving Norfolk, Bob Copeland decided to add one last recruit to the ship’s complement. How the dog first came aboard had less to do with the captain’s preferences than with the drunken enterprise of some Roberts sailors on shore leave. The small black mutt was found on the dock, smuggled aboard, and hidden someplace where officers seldom went. Before too long, in a fit of candor, one of the sailors went to Captain Copeland and asked permission to keep the dog on the ship.

  Copeland and Gurnett took the dog into the wardroom, sat down over coffee and cigarettes, and decided that greater expertise than theirs was required if the dog was to be made a crew member in good standing. It was well after midnight, but they summoned Doc Erwin.

  The sleep-ruffled physician arrived as ordered, standing on the cold floor of the wardroom in slippers, a skivvy shirt, and cotton khaki trousers. As the doctor rubbed his eyes, Copeland said, “We have a new recruit on board, and I want you to give him a physical and make out a health record for him so that we can properly take him up in the ship’s company.” Erwin stared at him. Had he really been called at three A.M. to perform a routine physical exam on a new crew member?

  Gurnett brought Erwin some coffee. “Come on, Doc, sit down,” he said. The physician looked around for his patient. Copeland gestured beneath the large table. Erwin looked down at his feet, saw the puppy, and erupted in anger. He told the captain what he thought of his and the first lieutenant’s little joke. On the verge of stomping off to his bunk, he was stopped in his tracks when Copeland said, “Oh, this dog is going to be the ship’s mascot, and everything has to be just so.” Grudgingly, the doctor pulled out his stethoscope and got to work.

  His skipper was impressed. “He really gave the puppy a thorough going-over. He took the stethoscope and checked the dog’s heart and lungs, and he got the blood pressure thing out and wrapped him up. I don’t think he had any more idea how to take a dog’s blood pressure than I did. He made out a complete medical report on the puppy. He put on a good show for just the two of us, Gurnett and me. Then he sent for the chief yeoman. I think he was as put out as Dr. Erwin had been at being broken out of his bunk. However, he entered into the spirit of it too and made up a service record for the puppy. We forthwith named the mascot Sammy.”

  Given the rating seaman second class, Sammy received a rapid promotion to petty officer during a tour of the boiler room initiated by an obliging fireman who found him peering down a hatch toward the black gang’s wonderland. The noise of the boilers threw the animal into a fit. As he relieved himself onto the hot steel deck, he earned his rating of water tender first class.

  A sailor adept at tailoring, Sam Blue, took a kapok life jacket and, with a few cuts and stitches, fashioned a miniature life jacket for the dog. Sammy made a splash. Speculation flew in The Gismo, the ship newsletter, that he had a canine paramour in Tokyo and saw the DE-413 as his quickest way across the Pacific.

  The teenagers and young men aboard the Samuel B. Roberts acquired a certain degree of affection for the mammals that touched their lives, both the one they had accidentally killed and the one they now saved. With their official mascot now on board, the boys joined by their dog, the ship’s journey to the Pacific was delayed no further.

  Three

  From Pearl Harbor, transferred from the Third to the Seventh Fleet, the Samuel B. Roberts escorted convoys to the naval base at Eniwetok, a huge coral atoll whose massive lagoon, a circular landscape of coral heads filled with white sand and bright blue water, was cut through with sleek gray warships. The Roberts made the Oahu-to-Eniwetok run twice before continuing south with a convoy toward Manus, at two degrees south latitude, in the Admiralty Islands, where part of the Philippines invasion force was gathering.

  Getting there required that the Roberts cross the equator, an event that is of some significance in Navy tradition. When a ship crosses the equator, it is common for one with a significant complement of newcomers to hold a crossing-the-line ceremony. Apart from usual divisions of rating and rank, men aboard warships fall into two classifications: so-called “shellbacks” have crossed the equator before; “pollywogs” have not. The distinction is treated as important enough to push aside the meritocracy of rank that separates the men. A pollywog lieutenant is still merely a pollywog, and a shellback seaman a shellback.

  On a ship full of reservists and new recruits like the Roberts, the pollywogs vastly outnumbered the shellbacks. Bob Roberts was the senior shellback. Only two other officers, Lt. Herbert W. (“Bill”)

  Trowbridge and Lt. Lloyd Gurnett, had crossed the equator before. They were joined by twenty-five or thirty enlisted initiates of the “charmed circle,” as Bob Copeland called them. The rest of the officers and crew, nearly two hundred men, were pollywogs, Lt. Cdr. Robert Witcher Copeland among them.

  Their initiation was as much theater as ceremony and as much hazing ritual as theater. In preparation, the shellbacks broke out old swabs, manila line, canvas, and bunting from the ship’s stores and fashioned costumes for King Neptune and his “royal family” to wear. The screen commander’s signalman, a man named Price, played Davy Jones, Neptune’s messenger. Bill Trowbridge, garbed in a long-tailed coat, a silk top hat, a golden wig, and a big white mustache, was the royal judge. To Copeland, he “looked like a country circuit judge of Abe Lincoln’s time.” A carpenter’s mate, Dari Schafer, “painted and powdered … until he actually looked pretty delicious,” was Neptune’s wife, dolled up in hula skirt and a brassiere. The royal dentist was there, and the royal barber too. But the best-of-show prize went to Tullio Serafini. The old chief radioman, all 240 pounds of him, made an ideal royal baby. He showed up wearing a big diaper fashioned from a mattress cover or a large sack and held with a big s
afety pin. Aside from that, he didn’t wear a stitch.

  The initiation began when Davy Jones, dressed in a pirate suit made from black bunting, declared that the ship was about to enter the domain of Neptunus Rex and demanded that all shellbacks ensure that the pollywogs pay their due respects. Copeland had his yeoman pass a special order that all crewmen were to wear their undress whites, and officers to wear their dress whites.

  It began with minor indignities. An officer who was particularly unpopular with the crew was forced, in the highest heat of the equatorial day, to sit on the steel deck over the sound hut, above the pilothouse, and don a complete suit of foul-weather clothing, which included multiple layers suitable for the arctic and a rubberized topcoat. Over it they strapped a kapok life jacket and perched a sou’wester hat on his head. As the officer baked from within, he stayed topside as ordered for an hour and a half, keeping the watch with a large pair of binoculars. Pollywog Copeland was sent forward to stand by the jack staff and keep a lookout on the horizon, using a portable foghorn as a long glass. He played along gamely, calling to the bridge a steady stream of lookout’s reports: seahorses drawing carriages, and all manner of other fanciful trappings of Neptune’s realm.

  After the shellbacks lingered over steaks and a rich variety of side dishes, while the pollywogs watched and waited, the pollywogs were given beans, bread, water, and coffee. Then the initiates were ordered to hear the charges against them. The less memorable or colorful crewmen were accused of “being a pollywog.” Most, however, had additional charges to defend. When Bob Copeland’s turn came,

  I found myself charged by King Neptune with the most heinous of crimes. I had killed a whale. A protected whale, of all things, served in Neptune’s royal hunting grounds for Neptune’s exclusive sport and game…. On the face of it I was guilty. The whale was certainly dead. My ship had killed it. And of course, as everyone knows, the captain is responsible for what the ship does, good or bad. It appeared that I was as guilty as Robin Hood for invading Sherwood Forest and shooting the bloody king’s deer.