The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  Sprague’s moves in the crucible of imminent combat were swift but not rash. One trait of good commanders is that they make simple decisions at the right times and without delay. Sprague was an instinctive and forceful decision maker. He played golf in a hurry. He didn’t line up his putts. He just walked up to the ball and hit it. When he met his future wife, Annabel, he knew immediately he would marry her. At Pearl Harbor he knew right away what to do with the few weapons he had on the Tangier. On the morning of October 25, with an overwhelming Japanese task force pressing down on him, he saw instantly the surest route to his slim hope of survival. If he did not completely resign himself to dying, he at least accepted the reasonable certainty of an imminent swim. If no assistance came from other ships, Sprague would settle for the intervention of a heavenly being of whom during quieter periods of his life he had asked, and to whom he had given, relatively little.

  Eighteen

  In the ready room of the St. Lo, VC-65’s skipper, Ralph Jones, pulled on his Mae West, a parachute harness, helmet, and goggles as fast as he could. The pilots and aircrews of VC-65 followed suit, the boom boom rummp of the enemy ships’ near misses urging them on as they scrambled to the flight deck and climbed into their planes. Kurita had found their range. Pink, red, and blue columns of water rose up around them. Something crazy was happening—they were under attack, but by whom? There was no cause to question it, but how the hell was this possible? Takeoff would have to be quick, or it might not be done at all.

  Ens. Ed Breeding had been up half the night, listening on the combat frequency to the fractured transmissions of the fighting down in Surigao Strait. Strapped into the cockpit of his FM-2 Wildcat fighter, engine started and idling, in queue for takeoff, the twenty-three-year-old watched as colorful spouts of water climbed into the air to starboard and port, then collapsed in rings of sea foam. A teenage plane handler jumped onto his wing, gestured toward the maelstrom, and asked, “Sir, what’s that?” The other pilots had nicknamed Breeding, a farmer’s son from Hill County, Texas, “Speedy” for the pace of his Texas drawl. He said, “Well, it looks like somebody’s shooting at us. You better put me on that catapult so I can go shoot back.”

  Until he saw with his own eyes the big shells inbound from the battleships and heard with his own ears the crackling whistle of their descent, Holly Crawforth, a St. Lo radio technician, thought it was all some kind of sick joke. Confronted with a sudden vision of his capture and torture at Japanese hands, he took his dog tags and threw them away. On the sound-powered phones he could hear the guys in the engine room getting panicky. Belowdecks men fretted about the possibility of a torpedo hit swallowing them from below. “Tell us what the hell is happening!” they shouted.

  The St. Lo’s skipper, Capt. Francis J. McKenna, called course changes to his helmsman, zigzagging hard, trying to throw off the aim of the Japanese gunners. As vital as his evasive maneuvering was, it complicated matters for pilots aiming to get airborne. With the flow of wind over the deck shifting with each turn, aviators never quite knew how crosswinds and engine torque would affect their takeoff. The catapult crews preferred to fire when the ship was facing the wind, so the rhythm of the launch was disrupted and the planes started their missions widely separated.

  As ever, Lt. Cdr. Ralph Jones was first in line for takeoff. The catapult whipped him airborne, and the catapult crews raced to gather the harness and string it to the next plane rolling forward. Jones turned sharply to the left, fifty feet off the water, and headed for the Japanese fleet. Inching ahead in his Wildcat, Breeding’s squadron-mate, Lt. (jg) Larry Budnick, far from his Superior, Wisconsin, home, thought to himself, Let me the hell off this thing. Smoke from the carrier’s exhaust stacks, which rose barely above the flight deck, stung his nose with its acridity. One by one the planes ahead of him whipped aloft—Avengers using the catapult, Wildcats making deck runs. At last it was Budnick’s turn. He opened his throttle, rolled down the deck, and roared aloft after his commander.

  The usual strike plan called for the Wildcats to escort the Avengers to the target and coordinate their attacks. En route the pilots of the swift Wildcats kept their throttles back, weaving and circling to stay with the lumbering torpedo bombers. At the target the fighters winged over to strafe while the Avengers lined up their excruciating low-altitude runs. That kind of teamwork was impossible now. There was no time to fly by the book. Larry Budnick had a hard time finding other fighter pilots to form up with. He found his radio frequency congested with confused transmissions: “I’m over here, where are you?” “If you can’t find me, go in by yourself” There was no rhyme to the babel, and no structure to the minuet. In the rush to get airborne, Commander Jones had had no time to give his pilots rendezvous instructions. It was going to be every pilot for himself.

  * * *

  ON THE FANSHAW BAY, Royce Hall rose early, ready for another day’s dull routine. The aviation ordnanceman first class from Emanuel County, Georgia, was the turret gunner on the TBM flown by Lt. Harvey Lively. Their aircraft, last in line for takeoff, was perched on the aft end of the flight deck. Hall climbed into the torpedo bomber through the small radio compartment hatch in the belly, twisted his torso around, stepped up, and squeezed into the flat-sided sphere of the Avenger’s ball turret. Hall sat down in the turret’s metal bucket seat, fingered his trigger, and peered through his illuminated gun sight. When he saw the great towering splashes around the ship, he craned his neck and looked skyward through the Plexiglas, expecting to spot enemy bombers. But Hall could not see above the low ceiling of clouds. Then he noticed the yellow-orange flashes of light breaking through the curtain of squalls on the northwestern horizon. The light bloomed and faded but never seemed completely to disappear. At first he took it for something burning—maybe a ship in its death throes. But when large splashes began bracketing the Fanshaw Bay, walking the water around her in tight three- and four-shell patterns and dousing the flight deck with dye-stained seawater, Hall knew that what he was looking at were blasts from the muzzles of some very large ships.

  “Hey, Guns, what’s going on?” asked radioman Willie Haskins, seated below in the radio compartment, looking up at the soles of Hall’s leather-booted feet. “Oh hell, some SOB is shooting at us from way over yonder somewhere,” the Georgian replied. As the plane handlers muscled the Avenger forward toward the catapult, Lively, Hall, and Haskins, as the last crew to leave Sprague’s flagship, never thought they would make it airborne. The Fanshaw Bay was bracketed by at least fifteen shells before their TBM ever got into launch position. Finally the plane handlers hooked the catapult cable to hooks underneath the wings and looped it around the hook buried in the flight deck’s catapult track.

  Without ceremony, the catapult fired. Hall reflexively tucked his chin between his knees to keep inertia from jamming his face back into his gun sight, and suddenly they were airborne—or nearly so. As the heavy plane clawed its way heavenward, Hall was treated to the turret gunner’s backseat view of the flight deck rising up above him as the aircraft dropped toward the water, the towering bow of the ship cutting the sea in pursuit of the plane until the Avenger’s fourteen cylinders finally caught air, gained the sky, and outraced its host vessel. Looking back at the thirteen ships of Taffy 3, Hall said a quiet good-bye. “My first thought,” he later recalled, “was that I would never see any of the task force above the water again.”

  On the flight decks of the five other escort carriers of Taffy 3, a similar dance was taking place: pilots jogging to their aircraft, radial engines turning over, a queue to the catapult forming up, and planes flinging skyward. They left their ships carrying whatever ordnance they happened to have. The aviation ordnancemen, meanwhile, pushed their wheelbarrows to the edge of the deck and dumped overboard all bombs, rockets, and other armaments that were not already loaded onto an aircraft. From the Fanshaw Bay’s plane captain’s shack, VC-68 aviation machinist’s mate Dave Lewis awoke to the sound of commotion, looked up, and saw an ordnanceman named Bob Kenny
running down the flight deck shoving a two-wheeled bomb cart loaded with a hundred-pound bomb that hadn’t found a taker. Kenny was a big man, built like a football player, but Lewis had never seen him move so fast. “He was not inclined to exert himself. If he was running, I knew this was really serious.” Lt. Verling Pierson, watching the bombs going overboard, was impressed with the crew’s initiative if not entirely hopeful about its benefits. “A futile gesture, but it gave them something to do.”

  As the pilots readily appreciated, it was probably more dangerous to remain aboard the fuel- and explosive-laden jeep carrier than to take off and glide-bomb a Japanese capital ship. As Leonard Moser, a plane captain on the Fanshaw Bay, was changing a carburetor on a VC-68 aircraft, half a dozen pilots hovered nearby, coveting a chance to climb into that cockpit and get their tails off the ship. The aviation machinist’s mate finished the job, then climbed up into the cockpit. “What are you doing?” one of the pilots asked.

  “I’m going to check this damn engine out,” Moser said, “and then go find a hole to hide in.” The pilot said that he would do his own engine check this time, thank you very much. Moser stepped aside. “He got in, started it up, and took off with a cold motor. My helper didn’t even have all of the cowling on. That pilot was glad to leave.”

  * * *

  SEATED IN HIS TBM Avenger on the deck of the Kalinin Bay, his engine idling as he awaited launch, Lt. (jg) Earl Archer was soaked like a cat in a storm. The crash and splash of the near misses landing near the carrier had drenched him thoroughly. For the first time in his life, he really prayed: Lord, please don’t let me die sitting here on deck. He was number three for takeoff, behind VC-3’s skipper, Lt. Cdr. Bill “Pops” Keighley, and Lt. Patsy Capano. He was among the few TBM pilots with a full weapons load: four five-hundred-pound bombs, eight rockets, and two magazines full of .50-caliber ammo. Finally his turn on the catapult came, and his prayer was answered: he was airborne and outbound.

  On the day Pearl Harbor burned, Earl Archer had driven his Buick from Hope, Arkansas, to Little Rock aiming to enlist in the Army Air Corps. When Archer, a junior at the University of Arkansas, arrived in Little Rock, he had a spiking fever. It might have been pneumonia. “When you get well, we’ll sign you up,” the recruiter said. Archer got home and talked to a friend who told him that naval aviation was where the action was. For a daredevil who came home from college on Friday nights so he could race cars at the fairground on the weekend, action was important. Archer went to New Orleans with his friend and signed on to be a Navy pilot.

  In flight training at the naval air station at Lake Pontchartrain, Archer never missed a chance to go into town for a little nightlife. Tall and thin, eyes hooded by drooping lids that made him look sleepy all the time, he was improbably adept at getting girls. He told them his eyes looked that way because of an injury from shrapnel.

  The line worked so well on the girls at New Orleans’s Copa Cabana Review that Archer became a semiregular patron of the Roosevelt Hotel, convenient for high-style rendezvous. So notorious was he among his fellow cadets for his stays in that hotel’s Blue Room that “Blue Room” became his nickname. Soon it was shortened to just “Blue.”

  Blue Archer was still in training when the Battle of Midway was fought. At the officers’ club one day, an officer told him the Navy needed volunteers for torpedo bomber duty. Archer had heard about the catastrophe of Torpedo 8, the torpedo bomber squadron from the Hornet, butchered nearly to a man on June 4, 1942. But his concerns about danger—“Torpedo training? Are you crazy?”—were nothing that two martinis and the worldview of a race-car driver could not overcome.

  From sinking a cargo ship with depth charges on an antisub patrol to retrieving an American flier from an airfield on Saipan still partially controlled by the enemy, there wasn’t much Blue Archer hadn’t done in his time as a VC-3 Avenger pilot. He was given to crazy stunts and inappropriate exuberance. When he snatched the flier from the airfield, he had landed under fire, stopped just long enough for the stranded aviator to clamber aboard the Avenger, then, gunning the engine, spun his plane around and started back down the runway, strafing the Japanese at the far end of the airstrip, swerving to spread his fire like a scythe as his plane gained the sky. Returning to the Kalinin Bay, Archer felt the urge to celebrate a little. He was already a well-known hot-rodder. Fully trained as a landing signal officer as well as a pilot, he felt that he knew how far to stretch the safety rules. So in he came, low over the waves—and lower still over his carrier’s flight deck. He buzzed his ship, sending flight deck crew ducking from the roar of his big Wright radial engine. When the jeep carrier’s air officer dialed his radio frequency and warned him not to try any such foolishness again, Archer circled back as if to land, flipped his plane over on its back, and buzzed the five-hundred-foot length of his carrier once more. His reward was restriction to the ship during shore leave—lubricated by an ample supply of beer provided by his delighted squadronmates. As far as torpedo pilots went, Blue Archer had seen and done it all—all, that is, except attack the main body of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

  About fifteen minutes had passed since the Japanese had been sighted. The six jeep carriers of Taffy 3 had most of their available planes in the air. The pilots and their aircrew were on their own. They would see what they could do against Kurita’s onrushing leviathans.

  Nineteen

  It took just minutes for the Japanese gunners to demonstrate the horrible potential of their broadsides. At 7:04 the White Plains was straddled on a diagonal. “This salvo measured the carrier as calipers,” the action report noted, with a four-shell salvo from a battleship missing narrowly, two off the port quarter and two off the starboard bow. Even though the shells missed, their underwater blasts twisted and shook the CVE hard enough to throw men from their feet, send loose deck gratings hurtling across the engine room, and knock heavy equipment from its stowages. The ship lost steering, its radar failed, and when a circuit breaker was thrown open by the shock of the blast, its compartments went dark.

  The damaging effects of shells that missed left to the imagination what might happen if others were actually to find their mark. Moments later they did. At 7:10 an eight-inch round from a heavy cruiser hit the White Plains. But because it was an armor-piercing round, fused to penetrate hardened armor plate and ignore lesser impediments such as mere metal sheet, it passed straight through without exploding, like a bullet holing a shoebox.

  To the Japanese gunners, the thick funnel smoke flowing from the stacks of their targets presented the illusion of ships burning fiercely.

  The Yamato’s great guns roared until about 7:05, when the carriers vanished momentarily into a wash of rainsqualls. Even when they had a clear line of sight, the Japanese still did not know what they faced. From the elegant proportions of their superstructures to their twin stacks to the graceful rise of their forecastles, Fletcher-class destroyers had silhouettes similar to those of Baltimore-class heavy cruisers. Japanese recognition books did not include Henry Kaiser’s new-fangled flattops. At 7:16 lookouts on the Kumano spotted an aircraft carrier afire. Satisfied with the presumed kill, they changed targets two minutes later and threw their next salvos at the St. Lo. By this time Vice Adm. Kazutaka Shiraishi had realized something vital: his quarry were not Essex-class fleet carriers after all but light carriers. But the cruiser commander apparently never relayed that information up the line. About that essential fact, Kurita would remain thoroughly in the dark.

  Ziggy Sprague had no idea what the Japanese knew or did not know about his force. Armed with his own good reconnaissance, he could assume only that the Japanese knew what they faced. “At this point,” Sprague would later write, “it did not appear that any of our ships could survive another five minutes. The task unit was surrounded by the ultimate of desperate circumstances.” He knew that the sluggish exertions of his carriers’ Uniflow engines, the copious smoke, and the dauntless efforts of his carrier pilots would not be enough to save his carriers fr
om annihilation.

  At some point Sprague’s screen, as a unit, would have to form up and engage. As soldiers must occupy ground in order to win a land battle, control of the sea is best asserted by ships, not planes. Admiral Kurita had demonstrated that eloquently the previous afternoon when most of his Center Force survived five heavy air strikes from the Third Fleet and continued through San Bernardino Strait. If ever there was a time for America to bring its naval airpower to bear, this was it. Meanwhile, Sprague might yet forestall the onslaught of the Japanese fleet by throwing his destroyers into the breach.

  With salvos from the pursuing Japanese battleships and cruisers landing close around Taffy 3’s carriers in all directions, Sprague got on the TBS circuit at 7:16 A.M. and ordered the screen commander, William Thomas, aboard the Hoel, “Stand by to form two torpedo groups, big boys in one group and little fellas in another group.”

  There was little anguish in the decision to send the small ships to almost certain destruction. Under the impossible circumstances, there was nothing else for them to do.

  * * *

  WHEN CLINT CARTER REACHED the Johnston’s fantail and climbed into position in the left rear corner of Gun 55, assuming his general quarters post as its captain, he dryly informed the other men crowded into the steel enclosure, “Admiral Halsey is shooting at us.” Once the telltale pagodas rose into view on the horizon, they all knew otherwise. But until reality settled in, Carter’s gun crew shared the disbelief of everyone else in Taffy 3: This can’t be the Japs. We’ve got Halsey watching our back. Linked to Bob Hagen in the gun director via headset and sound-powered phones, Carter reported that Gun 55 was manned and ready. As the Johnston ran solo through a forest of shell splashes, swerving through rainsqualls and the back-drafts of her own smoke, all the gun crews could do was wait as the range closed, then feed the gun as rapidly as possible and hang on for the ride as Lieutenant Hagen slewed them from target to target.