The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  At 3:10, barely ten minutes after Coward’s three tin cans launched their torpedoes and just a few minutes after the Fuso was hit, the McDermut and the Monssen fired their own spreads, wheeled around, and made good their escape. The wait for the torpedoes to reach their targets ended in pyrotechnics at 3:20, when torpedoes from the McDermut hit no fewer than three of Nishimura’s four destroyers. The Yamagumo disappeared in a succession of great explosions, sinking with a sizzling noise like a “huge, red-hot iron plunged into the water.” The Michishio, shattered at the waterline, was left behind, crippled and burning. The Asagumo, her bow blown off by the blast, controlled her flooding well enough to retire to the south.

  The Monssen’s shooting was almost as good as the McDermufs. A torpedo from that ship struck the hull of the Yamashiro on the port side to the rear. The blast forced the big battleship to slow to ten knots as damage-control parties flooded two magazines as a precaution against a massive secondary explosion. But the Yamashiro’s captain, Katsukiyo Shinoda, soon returned his ship to eighteen knots.

  Nishimura and Shinoda were unaware that the Fuso had fallen out of line. At 3:52 the Japanese admiral radioed the Fuso stating, “Notify your maximum speed.” Clearly he thought the Fuso was behind him as he rushed toward the American fleet. Little did he know that unimaginable catastrophe had befallen his most formidable ally.

  After taking the torpedo hit from the Melvin at about 3:08 A.M., Admiral Ban had sheered the Fuso to the right so as to prevent the cruiser Mogami behind him from colliding with his rapidly decelerating battleship. As the Mogami steamed past on her port quarter at 3:13, the Fuso began listing to starboard. True to the Japanese Navy’s stubborn form, she continued for a few minutes to advance, at a north-by-northeasterly course, toward the American battle line. But at 3:18 the ship reversed course back to the south, the advancing deterioration of the Fuso’s starboard list likely having tempered Admiral Ban’s fortitude. Shadowed by two PT boats, the Fuso retired to the south as damage-control parties struggled to stanch the inrush of seawater into her starboard-side torpedo wounds. Twenty minutes later, at 3:44, all hands topside on the destroyer Daly observed three large blasts. “Each explosion was a round ball of dull orange flame which subsided and disappeared almost immediately,” the ship’s skipper wrote. They took these for their own ship’s torpedoes. “The ship which was hit by these torpedoes immediately opened fire with major and minor caliber guns, frantically throwing steel through 360 degrees, and initiating general gun action between both forces,” wrote the commander of the Daly.

  But within seconds the nighttime heavens flashed into daylight as a great explosion shook the Fuso. The Hutchins, eight miles away, reported “two faint [explosions] and a loud snap.” The Fuso’s immolation could be seen as far away as Oldendorf’s battle line some twenty-five nautical miles to the north. Lookouts aboard the Mississippi reported “flames reaching above the mastheads.” It must have been a magazine explosion, for nothing else could explain its terrifying power—or its lurid result. American radar operators watched their scopes in wonderment as the Fuso’s single large radar signature split apart. Her keel and armored hull shattered by the force of the blast, the great 39,154-ton ship broke in two.

  Consumed by flames as hot as a steel mill’s forge and bright enough to illuminate warships nearby, the Fuso’s innards were revealed in cross-section. The pieces refused to sink. Burning and smoking furiously but seemingly animated by defiant spirits, they remained stubbornly afloat. The bow and the stern of the Fuso had acquired separate lives. Each piece clung bizarrely to life, populated by crewmen who refused to concede their ship’s destruction by doing the prudent thing and abandoning her. The lazy two-and-a-half-knot current carried them back down the strait, to the south whence they had come.

  Nishimura was reeling, and the U.S. battleships had yet to open fire on the faltering Japanese fleet.

  * * *

  THE FIRE-CONTROL OFFICERS IN the combat information center of the West Virginia, their big turrets rotated out to starboard, had been chafing for an opportunity to open fire ever since they had first spotted the enemy column on their scopes. Admiral Weyler had ordered them to open fire when the range to the approaching Japanese targets had closed to 26,000 yards (14 ¾ statute miles). At 3:53 A.M. the “Wee Vee” opened the major gunfire phase of the battle, the onetime gunnery champ of the fleet unleashing the power of her sixteen-inch guns for the first time at an enemy ship. Two minutes later the Tennessee and the California joined the barrage with their fourteen-inch rifles.

  The West Virginia’s gunnery officer laughed aloud as he announced a first-salvo hit to his captain. The older ships in the battle line, equipped with the older Mark 3 fire-control set, were still blind to the enemy at this extended range. But the enterprising gunnery department aboard the Maryland managed to defeat the inadequacy of its radar by locking in on the towering columns of water raised by her three sisters’ falling shells. By ranging on the big splashes, which registered momentarily on the antiquated Mark 3, the Maryland’s gunners fired four dozen sixteen-inch rounds at the enemy. The Ya-mashiro, struck all around her towering pagoda mast, was quickly enveloped in flames.

  Meanwhile, Admiral Berkey’s cruisers had found the range themselves. The light cruisers Denver, Columbia, Boise, and Phoenix made up for their thin skin with offensive firepower that was simply vicious. The Boise’s gunnery officer, Lt. Cdr. William F. Cassidy, wasn’t even pausing to spot the fall of his six-inch salvos on radar. He had them locked in continuous rapid fire.

  Captain Smoot, commanding Destroyer Squadron 56 farther down the strait, had a front-row seat:

  The devastating accuracy of this gunfire was the most beautiful sight I have ever witnessed. The arched line of tracers in the darkness looked like a continual stream of lighted railroad cars going over a hill. No target could be observed at first; then shortly there would be fires and explosions, and another ship would be accounted for.

  In just eighteen minutes of shooting, Oldendorf’s left-flank cruisers fired 3,100 rounds at the Japanese column: “It seemed as if every ship on the flank forces of the battle line opened at once, and there was a semicircle of fire which landed squarely on one point, the leading battleship.”

  That hapless ship was the Yamashiro. From the bridge of the besieged dreadnought, Nishimura looked for help. He radioed in vain to the Fuso, which he believed to be to his rear, encouraging Admiral Ban to make full speed in his support. The destroyer Shigure hailed the battleship repeatedly as well. It seems that the Shigure’s skipper mistook Nishimura’s own ship for the Fuso. Nishimura probably heard the Shigure’s misdirected broadcasts to “Fuso” and falsely took heart, thinking the battlewagon was in line behind him, accompanied by the destroyer.

  In reality the Fuso was drifting with the current away from Nishimura’s onrushing force, its two halves ghoulishly still afloat. Nishimura’s southern pincer of the Sho-1 plan was all but destroyed, his largest ships foundering, his destroyers either sunk or sinking, consumed with the imperatives of their own survival. Nishimura did not bother to radio a status report to his compatriot Shima, following behind. He would be left to discover the extent of the catastrophe for himself.

  At 4:08 A.M. Shima arrived on the scene. Nishimura’s flagship Yamashiro, steaming northward at twelve knots, was firing blindly into the darkness with her two forward turrets. Silhouetted by her own fires raging amidships, the Yamashiro straddled the light cruiser Denver and hit the destroyer Albert W. Grant with her 5.5-inch secondary battery. But Oldendorf’s ships were too powerful and too numerous, as the cold eyes of their radar gazed through the darkness upon the dying ship. The American gunners were on their game now, their adrenaline overflowing as the pneumatic hoists whisked shells from the magazines up to the gun crews, who placed them onto loading trays, slid the trays into breech blocks, discharged the shells at the enemy, and ejected the empty casings through the bottoms of the turrets to the decks below as the cycle began again and again. A
projec-tileman in one of the Boise’s forward turrets broke his left hand while laying shells in the breech tray but missed hardly a beat loading his gun.

  Flames appeared to consume the Yamashiro’s entire length. At 4:11, having swung out to the west in an effort to unmask and fire her amidships gun turret, the battleship absorbed two more destroyer torpedoes. Listing heavily to port, the Yamashiro capsized and sank at 4:19, taking with her Admiral Nishimura, Captain Shinoda, and the vast majority of her fourteen hundred men. As the Yamashiro was in her death throes, turning over onto her side, Shima blandly radioed Nishimura, “We have arrived at battle site.”

  Shima’s force too should have been eaten alive, except that at 4:09, ten minutes before Shima radioed his counterpart aboard the foundering Yamashiro, Admiral Oldendorf gave him a reprieve, ordering all American ships to cease fire. It was a necessary decision, to be sure. A minute before, Oldendorf had received an emergency message from Captain Smoot’s Destroyer Squadron 56 saying that his valiant tin cans were taking fire from friendly ships. The Grant was hit by seven rounds from the Yamashiro and the Mogami. But eleven more came from the merciless barrage of the American light cruisers, whose errant salvos contributed to the carnage that killed thirty-four men and wounded ninety-four more. The destroyer captains who had so courageously pressed the attack when the enemy was at full strength were now caught in a terrible crossfire.

  The ten-minute pause in shooting brought an eerie silence to the strait. The smoke-shrouded surface of the water was still lit by the white glare of star shells overhead, drifting downward on parachutes. Occasionally through the smoke, wrecks of warships smoldered. The cruiser Mogami, brightest of them all, could be seen from the bridge of the cruiser Louisville, “burning like a city block.”

  The captain of the cruiser Nachi, under Shima, spotted the Mogami and, believing the ship dead in the water, attempted to move ahead of her to make a torpedo attack. But the Mogami was still making eight knots, which meant that the Nachi’s navigator had miscalculated badly. At 4:30 the two ships collided, the Nachi’s sharp stem glancing heavily off the Mogami’s starboard bow.

  Shima had gotten no direct report on what had befallen his Eta-jima classmate’s force. On entering the strait, the retreating Shigure blinkered to Shima, “I HAVE RUDDER DIFFICULTIES.” But the Shigure’s skipper offered Shima nothing further regarding Nishimura’s fate. He would later explain, “I had no connection with [Shima] and was not under his command.” The blazing Japanese wrecks that lit the waters told Shima all he needed to know. “If we continued dashing further north,” Shima wrote later, “it was quite clear that we should only fall into a ready trap.”

  At 4:32, having spied a trio of fleeing Japanese ships on the radar fourteen miles away, Admiral Oldendorf took his cruiser the Louisville, the Portland, the Denver, and several destroyers to pursue Shima’s retreating force. “In the pale pre-dawn twilight the scene in Surigao Strait was appalling,” Lt. James L. Holloway III, gunnery officer on the destroyer Bennion, later wrote. “I counted eight distinct fires, and the oily surface of the gulf was littered with debris and groups of Japanese sailors who were clinging to bits of wreckage and calling out to us as we raced past.”

  After forty-five minutes of pursuit Oldendorf had the Japanese in gun range again. In one of the most bizarre gunnery engagements of any naval war, the Louisville closed with the forward half of the battleship Fuso and opened fire at a range of nearly eleven statute miles (18,900 yards). Into that hulk the flag cruiser fired eighteen rounds of eight-inch armor-piercing ammunition. Within minutes whatever spirits were keeping the blackened, smoking wreck afloat were dispelled. At 5:36 it disappeared from the American radar screens.

  About a mile away, in waters steadily burning from a long slick of bunker oil, the Fuso’s stern section remained miraculously afloat, drifting southward at the speed of a slow walk. Sometime before 6:30, as the sun began to warm the eastern horizon, the destroyer Asagumo, her own bow blown off during Captain Coward’s torpedo attack, had pulled close to the floating pyre to take on survivors. It was only then that the Fuso’s after-section crew decided to abandon ship.

  As survivors of the Fuso’s nightmarish ordeal quit the burning hulk and swam for the safety of the Asagumo’s decks, an American PT boat was watching them. At 6:30 Lt. (jg) H. Stadler, commanding PT-323, saw opportunity and sped to the attack. While the stern section of the Fuso went bubbling into the depths of Surigao Strait, Stadler pounced on her would-be rescuer like a cat on a wounded pigeon. He closed range and fired his torpedoes. One of them struck the Asagumo, wounding her mortally. Then at 7:07 the Japanese destroyer was caught by the light cruisers Denver and Columbia and three U.S. destroyers. The Asagumo returned fire, her after turret barking long after her bow was awash. By 7:21 the ship was gone.

  At dawn the remainder of Oldendorf’s task group formed into a circular antiaircraft disposition and steamed southward down the strait. According to the skipper of the Daly,

  At daylight seven heavy pillars of billowing black smoke could be seen on the horizon ahead. One by one these pillars of smoke disappeared as the ships from which they originated sank under the gunfire of our ships. Hundreds of survivors were reported in the water, almost all of whom refused to be rescued and were left to their fate.

  The wounded and the healthy alike turned away their American rescuers. A flustered destroyer commander radioed to Oldendorf, “All survivors in water are Nips and refuse a line. What do you want done with them?” Seconds later came the task group commander’s cold reply: “Let them sink.” Some of the defiant Japanese, those with sufficient muscle or will to survive, managed to swim ashore on Leyte or Dinagat Island, only to be set upon by Filipino guerrillas who relished the spectacle of their sinking and welcomed the opportunity to hack them to pieces with their bolo blades.

  Ten

  Naval combat is nothing like ground war, but that does not make it any less terrifying. Death comes suddenly, shrieking down with little warning from the sky. If a two-thousand-pound projectile fired from long range has your number—if the lazy, decaying parabola of its trajectory terminates on or near your ship—you are finished, no matter how fine your reflexes or how assiduous your training. In size and explosive power, naval gunfire in this war dwarfed anything in the Army’s arsenal. The biggest howitzer that MacArthur’s troops used fired a 155-millimeter shell, about the same size as the six-inch rounds of light cruisers. Battleship shells were several orders of magnitude heavier. When they struck, they shredded armor, burned steel, and vaporized flesh. They killed any number of ways: by flame, by shock, or by storm of flying shrapnel.

  As in ground combat, chance is often decisive to the outcome. Eight of the nine ships of Captain Smoot’s DesRon 56 made daring sorties against Nishimura’s battleships and executed a clean escape. But the Albert W. Grant was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Blasted by friendly fire, she steamed away with thirty-four dead, thirty-four families soon to receive dreaded telegrams from the Navy. And even when the order of battle appeared to doom a ship to destruction, death was no foregone conclusion. The Japanese destroyer Shigure, lucky to the end, had escaped destruction not only at Suri-gao Strait but earlier in the war as well. One of her skippers, Tameichi Hara, grandson of a samurai, would write a widely acclaimed memoir and become celebrated worldwide as the “unsinkable captain.” But even he admitted, “The fact that I survived was entirely a matter of luck.”

  The night was illuminated by two sources of light: the flash of American guns and the flames consuming Japanese ships. The crewmen of the Samuel B. Roberts, cruising off Samar about a hundred miles north of the action, were not alone in watching the distant pyrotechnics. The men aboard the invasion ships in San Pedro Bay lay awake all night watching the fireworks, though the sounds did not reach them. Only combatant vessels with TBS sets tuned to the right frequency enjoyed the full experience.

  “Large target has disappeared from sight. Target referred to bearing 205 distance 11.” />
  “Keep track of enemy and make reports on course and speed—we are going to make chase for them.”

  “We have one dead in the water—we are going to present him with five fish.”

  “We have quite a few survivors in the water. Do you desire we pick them up?”

  “Pick them up. Do not overload your ships with survivors. Search each man well to see that he does not have any weapons. Anyone offering resistance—shoot him.”

  “Take three destroyers, polish off cripples.”

  The men standing the midwatch in the Samuel B. Roberts’s combat information center had begun celebrating as soon as they determined that a rout was on. They pumped their fists, clapped, and cheered. The exec, Bob Roberts, was uncharacteristically ebullient. Hearing the sounds of victory coming over the radio from Surigao Strait moved the tough twenty-eight-year-old to pink-cheeked reverie. He turned to his skipper and said, “By God, I think we finally got ’em.”

  Proximity to combat was what a warship commander, or a litigator, lived for. Listening to rogue transmissions of the fighting in Surigao Strait, Captain Copeland and the other men in the Roberts CIC knew that the stakes of their innocuous support operation had been dramatically raised. The enemy had been spotted, met, and routed.

  Suddenly the work of baby-sitting a bunch of escort carriers was getting a whole lot more interesting.

  * * *

  AS THE SOUTHERN FORCE was meeting its end in Surigao Strait—the Fuso shattered, the Yamashiro capsized, Oldendorf’s battle line sending salvo after salvo after the stragglers—Kurita’s massive Center Force had an entirely different reception in waters far to the north. Plunging by night through the darkened narrows of San Bernardino Strait, his Center Force was the most powerful gathering of surface combatants the imperial fleet had ever sent into battle. That fact alone should have ensured it a vigorous greeting by American naval forces in the strait.