The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  Torpedoman first class Thomas Sullivan mistook the sound of splashing water for dolphins at play. When he turned and saw the geysers, Sullivan knew that what he was seeing was the handiwork of a more warlike species of mammal.

  In the chief’s quarters, chief boatswain’s mate Clyde Burnett was lying in his bunk awaiting breakfast when a ship’s talker came on the PA and announced that a Japanese fleet was some fifteen miles away. “I thought someone was joking until I got topside and looked aft. The whole horizon seemed to light up from the gunfire,” he said.

  * * *

  ABOARD THE HOEL, LT John C. W Dix knew something peculiar was in the air when he went belowdecks, cup of coffee and cigarette in hand, and ducked into the low-ceilinged compartment that housed the destroyer’s combat information center. Lt. Fred Green was at the plotting board, listening intently to voices on his headset and transcribing numbers with a grease pencil on the Plexiglas: 4, 6, 10. “Our Combat Air Patrol reports strange ships,” Green said, “four battleships, six cruisers, ten tin cans. Listen, the pilot’s coming in again.”

  A burst of static washed through the speakers, bringing a distant voice: “I’m drawing fire.” Another wave of noise: “The bastards have pagoda masts.” Dix checked the radar scope. In the upper left corner was a cluster of small green blips. Dix counted seventeen of them. Their range was less than forty thousand yards—about twenty-two miles.

  Waiting in line for breakfast near the starboard hatch leading to his general quarters station in the forward fire room, water tender second class Chuck Sampson saw Dix come running down the ladder from the CIC shouting something about enemy ships closing with them. Sampson abandoned his place in line and dropped through the hatch and down the ladder to his battle station. Standing on the grating that divided the cavernous chamber into a split-level power station, Sampson shouted above the boilers’ din, telling his fellows on the black gang what was happening.

  Lt. Cdr. John Plumb, the engineering officer, arrived from the bridge to make sure the Hoel’s four boilers were lit. His snipes had already turned the wheels and thrown the switches that cut the boilers onto the main steam line. In the engine room someone threw open the main steam stop. Within minutes the ship had full power, its exhaust stacks unfurling large black clouds of boiler smoke.

  As quartermaster Clarence Hood took the helm with Herbert Doubrava, the fighting tops of foreign warships became visible on the horizon, a scattered but growing forest of angry steel. An alarmed voice was heard coming over the TBS: “Where the hell is Halsey?”

  The Hoel’s general quarters alarm began ringing now, a pulsing, synthesized minor-key gonging “designed to jar the brain, to wake you, speed the senses, make you feel the pitch of keen excitement in the air, the urge to reach your battle station fast,” as Lieutenant Dix put it. For the second time that morning the ship came alive with the percussion of soles on steel decks. The galley emptied. Earlier risers gulped down the last of their scrambled eggs, navy beans, and cinnamon rolls, then sprinted through narrow passageways, ducked through hatches, raced up and down ladders.

  When GQ sounded, there was never any question where to go or what to do. But when the alert was unscheduled, a degree of mystery surrounded why exactly you were doing it. According to Lieutenant Dix:

  Maybe it’s just a false alarm. You run. You don’t know what it’s for, and so you run. Torpedoes could be heading for the ship or bombers diving in. You never know. Nobody tells you what it’s for. You run. You take your station first and then you ask. Nobody seems to know. The bell still rings. It’s hardest on the guys who stay below. You’ve reached your station—forward magazine. The other fellow’s there. He grabs the phone and calls up to the handling room to ask what’s up. They’re telling him the word. You watch his face, and now he’s telling you and watching yours. You hear him say, “The Japs have opened fire.” He’s talking numbers. Twenty ships! A fleet! You don’t believe it’s true because you can’t get out on deck and see it for yourself.

  Aboard the Samuel B. Roberts, Bob Copeland and everyone else who had spent the night listening to the Surigao Strait fighting on the TBS frequency knew that somewhere a Japanese fleet was in fast retreat. They had heard it with their own ears: the sighting reports, the heavy blasts, the satisfied chuckling of gunnery officers, and the plain-language chatter of Oldendorf’s skippers, exuberant as they ran down the stragglers of the Southern Force. The Japanese were fleeing, but in which direction? The question was of more than academic significance, for Taffy 3 steamed about a hundred miles north of where the Seventh Fleet’s big boys had routed Nishimura the night before. If the Japanese were fleeing north, there might be something to see.

  Copeland was leaving the bridge to get a cup of coffee in the officers’ mess when Ens. Dudley Moylan, the officer of the deck on the morning watch, said, “Surface radar reports that they have a contact, sir, bearing three-three-zero approximately thirty or forty miles away.” Edward Wheaton, a radar technician second class, said the image was kind of fuzzy, but yes, there was a dense pattern of echoes on the surface radar’s A-scope. Like the radar returns observed by monitors on the island of Oahu on December 7, 1941, they were easy to dismiss. Just as likely they were echoes of rainsqualls or nearby land masses.

  Peering out of a porthole from the pilothouse, Copeland spied a mass of gray clouds looming on the horizon. He told Wheaton, “Well, there’s a storm over there, but there could be something inside of it, so keep an eye on it.” Copeland was halfway down the ladder to the mess when a lookout called to Moylan, “Object on the horizon. Looks like the mast of a ship.”

  With dozens of others George Bray thought he’d go out on deck and get himself an eyeful. He heard a voice come over the ship’s loudspeaker. It was the executive officer, Bob Roberts: “If you’re interested, come up on deck. Remnants of the Japanese fleet are fleeing over the horizon.” Here was something out of the routine. Bray, who was belowdecks turning in his laundry at the time, ran topside in time to see a white phosphorescent fireball illuminate the predawn morning with a phony brilliance, its smoky fingers falling in shallow arcs into the sea. The realization sickened him: somebody was taking a range on them. Sight-seeing hell, they had gone and gotten themselves into a fight. As the general quarters alarm sounded, Bray ran to his battle station in the after living quarters, grabbed the steel helmet out of his footlocker, and hustled to the stairwell where repair party number two was supposed to report.

  Gunnery officer Lt. Bill Burton, who had an especially sharp eye for ship silhouettes, confirmed for his captain that the mystery ships on the horizon belonged to Imperial Japan. Battleships. Heavy cruisers. They were big ones. Bob Copeland never got his coffee. He got on the TBS radio and raised Admiral Sprague aboard the Fanshaw Bay. Copeland didn’t tell Sprague anything the admiral hadn’t already heard from Ensign Brooks, whose Avenger was at that moment being buffeted by flak from Kurita’s ships.

  The revelation that the enemy was not fleeing but advancing had the surreal quality of a dream. In everyone’s mind the far-fetched possibility of disaster had hitherto been shouted down by the certainty that any Japanese force approaching from the north would have to confront the thoroughbreds of the Third Fleet. Just the day before, the crews of Taffy 3’s ships had lined the decks to watch the carriers Franklin and Enterprise, accompanied by the fast battleships Alabama and Washington and an assortment of lesser ships, steam northward to join the rest of Halsey’s huge force. In the wake of that parade of dreadnoughts, reports that Japanese fleets were on the move inspired little fear. Oldendorf was to their south, Halsey to their north. There was nothing to fear from Japanese surface raiders.

  On the bridge of the Samuel B. Roberts Lt. Tom Stevenson, in his slippers, chinos, and a T-shirt, and the assistant gunnery officer, Lt. (jg) John LeClercq, watched the towering mainmasts of Japanese battleships rise on the horizon and felt their sense of safety dissolve. Now and then the distant silhouettes were obscured by silent flashes of light from the
ir cannonade. Although neither acknowledged as much to the other, Stevenson and LeClercq both knew they had little chance to survive. Heavy shells were inbound, and their own tiny ship was much too far away to strike back. As they prepared to head for their battle stations—Stevenson below to the CIC, LeClercq to supervise the aft forty-millimeter gun mount—the two officers shook hands and wished each other luck.

  Captain Copeland picked up the intercom mike and addressed the Roberts’s crew. That he was speaking for himself struck Ens. Jack Moore as unusual and urgent. Normally seaman Jack Roberts was the public address voice of his namesake warship. His southern drawl was all but unintelligible to anyone not acquainted with Dixie’s rhythms and diphthongs. But the skipper’s diction was as crisp as a litigator’s. He was talking fast and sounding more than a little nervous.

  “A large Japanese fleet has been contacted. They are fifteen miles away and headed in our direction. They are believed to have four battleships, eight cruisers, and a number of destroyers.

  “This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can.”

  Jack Moore was already at his GQ station in Sammy B.’s decoding room. The ensign had been late getting there, having stayed awake till the close of midwatch reading a novel in his bunk. When Moore arrived in the small windowless compartment containing the coding machine, the chief radioman, Tullio Serafini, was already at work. Moore offered a sleepy “good morning” and Serafini acknowledged it. The portly Italian chief never talked much. Though he had played the royal baby at the crossing-the-line ceremony, he was the oldest man on the ship at forty-three and had little in common with boys twenty and more years his junior. Serafini was an immigrant from the Old Country whose Navy service dated to World War I. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, he had left a well-paying job in the Philadelphia Navy Yard and reenlisted despite both exceeding the age limit and his status as father of two. Serafini felt that he owed a debt of gratitude to the United States. Moore sensed that Tullio Serafini was the sort of guy who always made good on his debts. Captain Copeland was only too glad to accept payment on behalf of the nation. Recognizing Serafini’s talents, he waived the time requirements to make chief.

  As a mail censor, Moore had gleaned some of Serafini’s personal history from a birthday letter the chief had written to his son. “Be a good, stout boy and mind your mommy all of the time, even when you think she might be wrong, so that your daddy can be proud of his eight-year-old man when he comes home again. [Signed] Your loving Daddy. P.S. Keep up the good grades in school.” The way Moore saw it, “Serafini’s entrance into the war was analogous to our country’s entrance…. They had worked and developed what they had until now it was worth protecting, even if it meant sacrificing their very being.”

  A pronounced click on the intercom punctuated the end of Copeland’s announcement to his crew and left the young ensign and the old chief sitting in disbelieving silence. Serafini turned to Moore, cocked his head to the side, and puckered his lips in comic sadness. The communicator had nothing to say.

  Through the Samuel B. Roberts’s tour of the Pacific, Moore had learned to calm his men’s fears by reciting the betting odds that stood in their favor. En route to the Philippines, he had posted odds of ninety to one favoring their safe return. During the big typhoon at Leyte, he put them at fifty to one. “What are the odds, Mr. Moore?” The question from an enlisted man took him aback. For the first time Moore could remember, the odds were not with them. He figured them at more like one to one—a fifty-fifty chance. Not fifty-fifty the Roberts and her band would win the battle, but fifty-fifty that any given man would live to see the next day’s sunrise. The enemy was too close, too big, too fast. One to one; that was about right.

  Some other numbers helped tell that story. If the Japanese cruisers and destroyers could make thirty knots, they would gain about a mile on the fleeing eighteen-knot American carriers every five minutes. Any group of ships, no matter how swift, was effectively hostage to its slowest member. Moore avoided dwelling on where this arithmetic would put them in an hour or so. He occupied himself with the decoding machine, numbly punching in the five-character sequences he got from the radiomen.

  The five-character code blocks came from the radio department next door, where a row of enlisted men were busily transcribing encrypted radio traffic transmitted in Morse code over their earphones. The six exchangeable wheels inside the coding machine took Moore’s keyed input and spun and lined up and printed a thin white ribbon of plain-English prose. One of the messages that spooled out onto the ticker tape was important but brief. It was from Admiral Nimitz, addressed to all ships. According to Moore, “It read something like this: DUE TO THE SPLENDID AIRMANSHIP SHOWN IN YESTERDAY’S ENGAGEMENTS, AND WITH A CONTINUING OF SUCH COORDINATED ACTION, I CAN ASSURE A DEFEAT OF THE JAPANESE NAVY FROM WHICH IT WILL NEVER RECOVER.” Ensign Moore threw the message to the floor in disgust. He didn’t know much about Kurita’s Center Force. Nor, as it happened, did Admirals Halsey and Nimitz. Whatever might be said of Admiral Kurita’s group, it had surely recovered from its beating by Third Fleet aviators the previous afternoon. It was bearing down now on Taffy 3, aiming to prove it.

  Fifteen

  At 6:35 A.M., as sunrise revealed a grayed-out and hazy dawn, the most powerful concentration of naval gun power the Japanese empire had ever assembled reordered its geometry in preparation for daylight operations. Twenty-five miles to Taffy 3’s north, lookouts on the heavy cruiser Chokai and light cruiser Noshiro reported aircraft approaching. So Halsey’s planes were coming after all, Takeo Kurita must have thought. Almost simultaneously, cat-eyed lookouts on the battleship Nagato spied masts on the horizon visible here and there through the rainsqualls that dropped down from the heavens like gauzy shrouds. An eight-knot easterly wind roused low swells from the sea. From the Yamato’s gunnery platform high above the bridge, Cdr. Tonosuke Otani, Kurita’s operations officer, squinted through a range-finding telescope and spotted the flat-topped silhouettes of American aircraft carriers.

  The presence of carriers meant this was not Nishimura’s squadron. Kurita could not believe his luck. Here, within gun range at last, were the fast, first-line Essex-class fleet carriers that constituted the heart of the American fleet. There looked to be six or seven of them, accompanied by what lookouts took for Baltimore-class heavy cruisers, powerful combatants only six feet shorter than South Dakota-class battleships. The imagination of Admiral Koyanagi, Kurita’s chief of staff, ran wild. He believed they faced not an escort carrier group, but four or five big carriers escorted by one or two battleships and ten or more heavy cruisers.

  As Ziggy Sprague’s task unit flees eastward into the wind, its six jeep carriers scrambling their pilots and aircrews, Kurita’s Center Force begins its high-speed pursuit, its battleships firing heavy salvos at extended range.

  At 6:59, loaded with rounds designed to penetrate heavy armor, the great 18.1-inch rifles of the battleship Yamato trained to starboard and opened fire on Taffy 3 at a range of nearly twenty miles. One minute later Kurita issued a fleet-wide order for a “general attack.” The Kongo turned out to the east, in fast but independent pursuit. Ahead of the Yamato to port, the six heavy cruisers of Cruiser Divisions 5 and 7 formed into a single column, trying to take the lead in the chase. Angling to the southwest, the Nagato turned her sixteen-inch rifles twenty-five degrees to port and opened fire at a range of more than twenty miles. The swift Haruna loosed fourteen-inch salvos using its crude radar set.

  Apparently unaware of the speed advantage his ships held over their American prey, Kurita seemed eager for his heavy cruisers to press the fight before the Americans could escape. A more disciplined (or better-informed) commander might have drawn his ships into a single line of battle, with destroyers in the forward van to scout the enemy and maneuver for a deadly torpedo attack.

  For all the strength the Japanese Center Force brought into play, its commanders were unsettled about the
manner in which the battle began. In the midst of the shift to a daytime antiaircraft formation, with each captain operating at his own freewheeling discretion, confusion took command of the Center Force. Vice Adm. Matome Ugaki, commanding Kurita’s First Battleship Division, composed of the Yamato and the Nagato, observed, “each unit seemed very slow in starting actions due to uncertainty about the enemy condition.” “I feared the spirit of all-out attack at short range was lacking,” Admiral Ugaki would write.

  The heavy cruisers led the Japanese charge on Taffy 3. Cruiser Division 7’s commander, Vice Adm. Kazutaka Shiraishi, was a fifty-two-year-old Nagasaki native who had not had a seagoing command since 1940. Shiraishi received Kurita’s order, “Cruiser divisions attack!” and turned his ships to the southeast, steaming at their maximum speed of thirty-five knots. Aiming to flank the American ships from the east, he radioed each of his captains in succession: “We are closing the enemy. Intend to engage to starboard.” Then—bizarrely—though a general attack had been ordered, the vanguard of any such attack, the Center Force’s two divisions of hard-hitting destroyers, led by the light cruisers Noshiro and Yahagi, were ordered to the rear. Though there were doubters in his midst, Kurita was overjoyed by his perceived good fortune in encountering American carriers. At seven o’clock the Center Force commander dispatched a message that delighted Combined Fleet Headquarters: “WE ARE ENGAGING ENEMY IN GUN BATTLE” … and then “BY HEAVEN-SENT OPPORTUNITY WE ARE DASHING TO ATTACK THE ENEMY CARRIERS. The emperor’s fleet had been handed a dreamed-for chance. Carriers were queens of the seas, mobile and lethally armed with ship-killing planes. Now it was the Imperial Japanese Navy’s turn to move on the Philippine chessboard. Its rooks had America’s queens, so Kurita thought, lined up for slaughter.