The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  Up in the gun director over the pilothouse, Bob Hagen felt powerless. “All this time I had been completely, sickeningly impotent. I had checked my gun stations, seen that everything was in order, but after that there was nothing I could do but wait.” Evans had ordered him to fire on any enemy target that came into range. At a range of 25,000 yards, the ship still had not been hit. Was someone looking out for them?

  At 7:10 the distance from the Johnston to the nearest Japanese heavy cruiser closed to the five-inch/38-caliber’s maximum range of eighteen thousand yards, or about ten statute miles. Evans directed Hagen to target the leading heavy cruiser in the column to starboard. Hagen’s fire-controlmen, George Himelright and James Buzbee, fixed the ship in the director’s sights and fire-controlman Tony Gringheri entered ranges using his stereoscopic rangefinder on the mainmast. The data passed down into the ship’s Mark 1A fire-control computer. Developed by the Ford Instrument Company in the 1930s, the intricate but sturdy array of gears, cams, shafts, and dials was an analog device with no memory as we understand it today. Rather, it was designed only to predict the position of its target and align each of the five turrets to place its shell at the coordinates that the computer calculated the target would occupy at impact. Just as a football quarterback pedaling back in the pocket must place extra zip on his throw to compensate for his own rearward movement, the computer removed the imparted effect of the ship’s own motion from the firing solution. A gyroscopic stable element corrected for the pitching and rolling of the ship. Other critical inputs included the initial muzzle velocity of the ship’s five-inch shells—adjusted for bore wear and current weather conditions; the ship’s current latitude and the relation of its heading to true magnetic north, in order to compensate for the effect of the earth’s rotation and the “english” that it imparted to the shell’s trajectory; and the range to the target, which amplified the effects of all the variables.

  It took the computer about thirty seconds to calculate a firing solution for a new target. Running adjustments on an existing target took only a few seconds. The computer transmitted electrical signals to the turret motors to aim the guns accordingly. Then Bob Hagen closed the firing key. With a flash of flame and smoke, the Johnston’s main battery came barking and cracking to life. Improbably, the Battle off Samar was joined by American guns.

  Through his sighting telescope, Hagen could see his target return fire. It was the Kumano, the sleek 13,440-ton flagship of Admiral Shiraishi’s Cruiser Division 7. An eight-inch shell from a Japanese cruiser struck the water off the Johnston’s bow and sent up a wave of red-dyed water that washed down the entire forward superstructure. Bob Hagen wiped his eyes clear of the redness and said to the five men in the gun director with him, “Looks like somebody’s mad at us.” But the Japanese did not prove to be the shots that Hagen’s radar-directed gun system was. Hagen’s crews had lighter weaponry but far better aim. The humans were novices to surface combat, but the computer, like the radar and gyro that aided it, knew no fear.

  The Johnston loosed a continuous ladder of shells over a two-hundred-yard stretch of ocean centered on the projected path of the heavy cruiser Kumano. During the five-minute sprint into torpedo range, the destroyer’s guns let fly with hundreds of fifty-four-pound five-inch rounds. When Hagen began to see his shells hitting the ship—flames and puffs of smoke obscuring the division flagship’s upper superstructure—he tightened the ladder to a hundred yards, concentrating the barrage. He landed some forty hits on the Kumano with his five-inch shells. Through his scope Hagen could see the smoky flashes tearing up the metalwork on the cruiser’s decks and gun galleries. They blew out portholes and killed men in exposed positions. Although this pummeling was not enough to sink the Japanese cruiser, the waves of shock, sheets of flame, and storms of shrapnel that buffeted the Kumano’s superstructure played havoc with its crew’s ability to return accurate fire. The Japanese gunners did not land a single hit in return on their bantamweight assailant.

  With each gun mount firing seventeen to twenty rounds per minute, two mounts forward and three more aft, it didn’t take long for the hot empty shell canisters, discarded through a hole in the floor of each mount, to pile up and roll and clatter across the Johnston’s steel decks. Jesse Cochran, leading a repair party, was grateful that he had nothing better to do at the moment than toss them over the side.

  The noise of the general quarters alarm had stopped some time ago, and on the bridge no one had a whole lot to say. Only the ship really spoke: the grinding vibration of the twin propeller shafts, the rumble of the gun director rotating on its mount atop the bridge, and the shock of the five-inch guns that bucked the deck and rattled crewmen’s helmets with their reports. As for the men, their emotions stayed under the skin. They were trained to deal only in facts, orders, data. The officers masked their desperation with the cool demeanor that disciplined leadership instills. The facts, the data, spoke for themselves, one more loudly perhaps than all the others combined, though it was not explicitly discussed: not one of them would get decent betting odds of surviving the gauntlet their skipper had steered them into.

  The destroyer’s zigzagging inbound course was not entirely random. Evans deliberately turned toward and steamed through the roiling cauldrons of the enemy’s misses. Known as “chasing shell splashes,” the tactic relied on the diligence of the Japanese gunners to correct their aim. Because they continuously adjusted their range and train, naval salvos were like proverbial lightning, seldom striking twice in the same place. If the Japanese had caught on to the game, they might have fired successive salvos to the same range and bearing. But they did not. They had their training too. And so the Johnston pressed audaciously in, closing the range.

  Clint Carter’s crew loaded and shot at such a brisk pace that the paint on Gun 55’s barrel blistered and burned. After each shot a blast of pressured air cleared the barrel of hot gases. Even so it was dangerous to let a live round sit too long in the breech. If you cooked it too long, it would cook you right back. Carter got a scare when a sudden course change forced his loaded gun mount to pivot and strike the cam stops that kept it from discharging. It was a precaution to keep the gun, when swiveled all the way forward, from hitting its own superstructure. But for agonizing seconds the safety device imperiled its operators. The round sat cooking in the breech, waiting for the computer to release it. “I was never as scared as I was in those few seconds,” Carter said.

  Expecting a disastrous internal explosion at any moment, Carter raised Hagen and asked permission to fire the gun manually to prevent a detonation in the breech. But before the lieutenant could answer, the ship turned sharply again. When the director-controlled gun swung out automatically abeam to stay on target, it came off its stops and fired, ridding the breech of its time bomb.

  The men assigned to train and point the gun had nothing to do as long as their weapon was on automatic director control. In Gun 54, forward of Carter’s mount and above it, atop the aft deckhouse, Bobby Chastain, the trainer, was responsible for swiveling the gun mount toward its targets in the event the automatic system failed. If the mechanisms that aimed their gun were knocked out but the mount still received train and elevation data from the director or from the CIC, crews could go to “modified director control,” aiming their gun manually by matching the dial pointer indicating the director’s orientation.

  With Bob Hagen controlling his mount, Chastain’s telescope was useful only for sightseeing. Peering through the gun sight protruding through a small door positioned at eye level in front of his seat, he found that he couldn’t bear the sight of the larger ships. So long as Lt. Hagen didn’t need him to turn the gun, Chastain figured he’d spare himself some panic. He closed the gun sight door and pretended hard that he was safe.

  Bob Hagen got information about targets from the executive officer and his radar-watchers in the CIC, or directly from the captain himself. Captain Evans was within shouting distance below, on the open-air bridge outside the pilothouse
. Whenever Hagen felt the ship taking a new course, he could yell down to Evans, “What are you up to now?” Evans would look up at him and say, “Hey, take that ship over there.” After a target was chosen, Hagen slewed his director toward it, and as soon as his pointer and trainer hollered “On target!” Hagen closed his firing key, and the Johnston’s main battery resumed the bombardment.

  Twenty

  Clyde Burnett had been around the fleet long enough to know a hopeless situation when he saw one. The hourglass that measured the reasonable life expectancy of a lone destroyer charging a hostile squadron of battleships and cruisers had run out and emptied long ago. As the distance between the Johnston and her target closed, the chief boatswain’s mate took in the sight of shell splashes from enemy battleships all around his destroyer and told the members of his repair party to lie down on deck. He felt sure they were about to take a hit.

  When Bob Hagen first opened fire, the range was eighteen thousand yards. As the range closed—fifteen thousand, then twelve—with Japanese shells straddling the destroyer, Captain Evans ordered, “Stand by for torpedo attack.”

  The twelve-man surface search team in the fishtailing destroyer’s CIC, under executive officer Lt. Elton Stirling, relayed the range, bearing, course, and speed of targets to the bridge and the torpedo crew, while the other twelve-man section, the air search team, watched and waited. Closing to ten thousand yards under a crossfire this heavy was as unlikely as a man staying dry while sprinting through a driving rain. Miraculously, the ship made it. Impossibly, she was not hit. The target cruiser was steaming forty degrees off the Johnston’s starboard bow. At ten thousand yards the Johnston was within the outer limit of torpedo range.

  To maximize their reach, Lt. Jack Bechdel, the torpedo officer, ordered the fish set on their slowest speed setting, just twenty-seven knots. As torpedoman first class Jim O’Gorek supervised the mount crews and stood by with a wooden mallet that could be used to fire the torpedoes if their igniters failed, two torpedomen, Thomas Sullivan and John Moran, cranked mount number one to starboard and trained it to 110 degrees relative to the ship’s heading, just abaft of the beam. Mount two, manned by Red Benjamin and Frank Gillis, was rotated out to 125 degrees relative. As soon as the range was good, Captain Evans shouted, “Fire torpedoes!”

  With sharp rushes of compressed air, the Johnston’s ten torpedoes leaped from their tubes, one following the preceding at three-second intervals. They flew out over Burnett’s crew huddled on deck, their motors whirring wildly as they fell toward the waves. Hitting the water, their propellers found the resistance they craved and clawed into the sea. Carrying warheads tipped with three hundred pounds of torpex explosive, the Mark 15 torpedoes were about twenty-five feet long, nearly two feet in diameter. Adjusting to their set depth of six feet, the torpedoes turned to the right per the gyro settings that Lieutenant Bechdel had given them and accelerated to twenty-seven knots, running “hot, straight, and normal” toward the leader of the four-cruiser column.

  With the torpedoes away, his ship blessedly untouched, Evans ordered Lieutenant DiGardi, his officer of the deck at the helm, to bring the Johnston into a hard turn to port. The beauty of the maneuver was that the ship now entered her own spreading smoke screen, blotted from the view of enemy gunners. As Bechdel counted down to the torpedoes’ calculated time of impact, the twin screws of the Johnston dug into the sea—driven by the combined sixty thousand shaft horsepower of her steam turbine engines—and drove her at top speed back toward the carriers of Taffy 3 that so desperately needed assistance.

  At flank speed a Fletcher-class destroyer could outpace a Japanese heavy cruiser by a couple of knots. Speeding to rejoin Taffy 3 as her ten torpedoes ran the other way, the destroyer made the best possible use of that small margin, opening the range with the enemy while obscuring the interval with smoke. The flashes from the Japanese guns, and the concussion of their blast, eased only slightly as the distance opened. Whenever the squalls between the combatants thickened, the fire fell off measurably. But there was not enough rain to spare the Johnston entirely. It was daylight. The rising sun favored the fleet that flew its pennant from their fantails.

  Destroyermen have this in common with submariners: they experience no greater suspense than while counting the seconds to their torpedoes’ time of impact. Jack Bechdel’s calculations were seldom wrong. Captain Evans and everyone else in the pilothouse listened to the countdown. They had shot their one spread; the ship carried ten torpedoes and no more. Bob Hagen’s good work in the gun director notwithstanding, this was their best and only chance to sink an enemy ship.

  At 7:24 lookouts on the Kumano reported three torpedo tracks close off the starboard bow. Knifing through the water at more than thirty knots, the ship was traveling too fast to evade. The Kumano could not make the turn.

  Between squalls and smoke Ellsworth Welch saw a bright flash and the long, dark form of a ship lift out of the water slightly, as if punched from below by an enormous fist. Torpedo explosions sounded different than gun blasts. Five-inch guns stung the eardrums with their sharp, concussive bark, throwing out shock waves that patted the clothes. Torpedo explosions were deeper and heavier—basso reverberations that could be felt in the sternum as readily as heard with the ears. The men of the Johnston felt a deep thrummp— some felt a second one, and then a third. The Johnston whipped through thickets of smoke, emerging long enough for Lieutenant Welch and others on deck to see a tall column of water rising beside the Japanese heavy cruiser, which appeared to be burning furiously astern. One torpedo from the Johnston struck the Kumano in the bow, ripping it clear away. The crippled cruiser fell out of line, limping along at fourteen knots.

  The Kumano could still stand and jab, but with a broken bow she could not hold her place in column in a rapid running fight. Admiral Shiraishi ordered the Suzuya to come alongside, and he transferred his flag to her. The Suzuya was not fit to resume pursuit either. Near misses from aircraft bombs had ruptured her after fuel tanks, contaminating some eight hundred tons of precious fuel with seawater, starting fires that would burn into the afternoon, and restricting the cruiser’s speed to just twenty-four knots, no faster than the lumbering battleship Nagato. With his transfer to the crippled ship, Shiraishi took himself out of the battle. He may have had no other choice. He did not wish to hold back the two ships of Cruiser Division 7 that could still make chase. The Tone and the Chikuma sped past, joining Cruiser Division 5’s Haguro and Chokai in pursuit of Sprague’s carriers.

  Twenty-one

  The first thing Harvey Lively and Royce Hall of VC-68 saw upon breaking the surface of the cloud layer was a large formation of Avengers closing their position. As the planes drew near, Hall made out the distinctive tail markings of aircraft from another jeep, the Gambier Bay. Hall had flown with that ship’s squadron, VC-10, before. He knew its skipper, Lt. Cdr. Edward J. Huxtable, Jr.—or knew his reputation anyway. He toggled the intercom and told Lieutenant Lively that Huxtable could be counted upon to find whatever they were going after. The lone Avenger from the Fanshaw Bay tagged along with its sister squadron.

  Huxtable would find the targets, but there remained the question of what he would hit them with when he got there. Before taking off, VC-10’s skipper had climbed into his Avenger only to find that his weapons bay was empty. He asked his plane captain to ask Buzz Borries, the air officer, for a bomb load. Huxtable watched as Borries brought the question to Capt. Walter Vieweg, standing on the Gambier Bay’s island superstructure. The skipper made a broad sweeping gesture with his arm as if to say, “Get these planes off my carrier.” Word came back to Huxtable that he would lead his flight without a load. The absence of a heavy torpedo or bomb load meant his plane would be able to stay airborne longer. Huxtable launched immediately, turned right, climbed to two thousand feet, and joined the other Avengers from his squadron.

  It took just ten to twelve minutes to find the enemy ships bearing down on their carriers. Beneath the cloud ceiling at a thousand f
eet, it was hard to miss them. There were clear skies to the south, but the skies over the seas where the enemy fleet lay were roofed by gray clouds. Somewhere beneath that shroud of gray were the destroyers of Taffy 3’s screen. Edward Huxtable was stunned to learn that at least one American destroyer had turned to face the monstrous opponent.

  Breaking through the clouds, the VC-10 skipper spotted the tin can running alone, returning to formation on a southeasterly course. He could see puffs of smoke coming from her batteries, and heavy splashes rising all around her as the Japanese fired in return. It was the Johnston. Transfixed by the sight, Huxtable then spied, farther to the west, the lethal slender forms of Japanese heavy cruisers giving chase. Beyond the cruisers, heading due east, he could just make out the thicker silhouettes of imperial battleships.

  Huxtable decided that the heavy cruisers, faster than the battleships and better suited for pursuit, posed the most immediate threat to Taffy 3. Climbing through a cloud break to 2,500 feet, the VC-10 commander could see the cruisers firing rapidly at targets to their south. The battleships seemed not to be firing at all. Huxtable turned his formation from north to east, spreading his planes out in a wide front, and climbed to three thousand feet, above which the sky was solid overcast. Out to the east, flak dotted the skies. Apparently other planes were about. They would need all the help they could get.