The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  When the big shells hit, the deck jerked up so sharply that Joseph Check rang his helmet on something hard overhead, then collapsed. Lying on the deck in the first-aid station, he could feel the thin steel growing hot to the touch as superheated boiler steam filled the engineering spaces below. Broken boiler lines were bad news for at least three reasons. The loss of steam bled the ship of engine power, slowed the turbines that ran the ship’s electrical generators, and liberated superheated vapors that killed men fast. A needle-sized hole in a steam line could release a cutting spray powerful enough to sever limbs. Battleship shells were less delicate than that. Steam was gushing out of three large holes in the deck where the fourteen-inch rounds had struck.

  Jesse Cochran ran to the steam-stop valves on the main deck above the after fireroom and spun the large wheel to close the lines. It did nothing to stop the lethal hissing of escaping steam, for the detonations ruptured not only the lines but the tubes inside the boilers themselves. Joseph Check saw three men climbing out of the hatch from the after engineering spaces, emerging through the thick white steam. The effort to escape sapped them of their final energies. Check watched them collapse and slump back against the bulkhead, their skin, white as ivory, covering swollen flesh. The skin fell away here and there, revealing pink patches beneath. The steam had cooked them like so many shrimp. They did not live long.

  Bob Hagen was on his sound-powered phones after the first onslaught of shells, polling his gun bosses to see who was with him and who wasn’t: “All stations—Control testing!” The replies came: “Gun One, aye!… Gun Two, aye!… Gun Three, aye!… Gun Five, aye!… Plot, aye!” He was relieved to hear he was not suddenly alone, but wondered after Gun 54. Bob Hollenbaugh did not respond. But the boatswain’s mate first class did not keep his gun boss in the dark for long. Momentarily a messenger came on the line, calling Hagen from a forty-millimeter mount back aft. He said Gun 54 had lost power and communications, and its link to the fire-control computer was dead.

  Gun 54 was worse off than the other two aft five-inch gun mounts. Guns 53 and 55 had no electrical power to rotate the mount but were still getting signals from the gun director. All they had to do to benefit from radar control was to train and elevate their guns to match the dial pointers showing the director’s orientation at any moment in time. But Gun 54 was getting neither electrical power nor indicating signals for training and elevation. Hagen granted Hollenbaugh’s request to fire on local control, and as Hollenbaugh would write, “Gun 54 declared its own war on the Japs.”

  Firing his gun the old-fashioned way—slowly and not terribly accurately—Hollenbaugh was cut off from everybody. He couldn’t talk to Hagen, nor even with the men below him in the ammunition handling room. Because his shell hoist was out, the shell handlers would have to pass ammo to him by hand. Hollenbaugh jumped out of the mount’s portside hatch and slid down the ladder on the aft side of the gun deck. Jumping over unrecognizable bodies, he stuck his head into the handling room, where the men were milling, unsure what to do without a working hoist to feed. He explained the problem to them and told them that their battle performance and probably also their survival would depend on keeping a steady bucket brigade of shells moving up to the gun. They would have to do it manually, the same way Hollenbaugh would be aiming.

  Seated in Gun 54’s trainer’s brass bicycle seat to the left of the five-inch naval rifle, Bobby Chastain could only guess at the horrible extent of the carnage outside his station. The jolts and sudden movements of the ship, the sudden sickening reduction in the intensity of the engine vibrations—none of it made him optimistic. The trainer’s gun sight door remained closed, for he had seen enough Japanese men-of-war for a lifetime. Now, though, with his mount partially disabled and the loud voice of his gun captain saying something about “local control,” his willful ignorance had to end. Local control meant the gun crew would do its own shooting, training and elevating the gun by cranking handwheels in the mount. They had never drilled under local control before.

  Back in the mount, Hollenbaugh stood on the gun captain’s platform, head poking up from the turret, shouting bearings to Bobby Chastain to guide his rotation of the gun, and ranges to Samuel Moody to determine how high to elevate it. The forty-millimeter mount immediately forward of Gun 54 had its own Mark 51 director, adequate for obtaining ranges if not for a complete gyro-aided, computerized firing solution. Walt Howard, one of the crew manning that gun, passed range information to Hollenbaugh, who made do with it what he could. Chastain and Moody turned and elevated their gun by turning brass-handled wheels on either side of the mount. They cranked them furiously back and forth as the ship veered and the guns barked and Hollenbaugh relayed ranges. But for the help they received from the radar operator on the forty behind them, they might as well have been refighting the Battle of Trafalgar.

  Ahead of the stricken Johnston loomed a large rain cloud whose gray-black mass offered sanctuary from the relentless roar and slap of the Japanese salvos. The fury of the bombardment was worthy of Neptune himself. But the rain drifting across the water inspired hope that the god of the oceans knew mercy as well as wrath. The squall’s gray tendrils fell to the sea, dragged to their source by the friction of falling precipitation.

  His crew might enjoy it for only a few brief minutes, for the squall appeared to be moving faster than the ship was: on a single working screw, just seventeen knots. But Evans would take what shelter he could get. Already the squalls were sheltering Ziggy Sprague and his CVEs racing south as fast as their engines could shove them. Ernest Evans steered the Johnston south, running for the rain.

  Twenty-four

  The White House staffers gathered in the Map Room were jolted from their work by the bracing immediacy of the uncoded, plain-language plea. Most of the Navy’s operational communications were routinely copied to them. They scanned them for compelling news and shared it with their higher-ups as it came. As the Battle off Samar was beginning, around dinnertime on October 24, Washington time, the Map Room staff received this message meant for Admiral Halsey:

  ENEMY FORCES ATTACKING OUR FORCES COMPOSED OF FOUR BATTLESHIPS, EIGHT CRUISERS AND X OTHER SHIPS. REQUEST LEE PROCEED TOP SPEED COVER LEYTE. REQUEST IMMEDIATE STRIKE BY FAST CARRIERS.

  A world removed from the fighting, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it wasn’t clear who had sent it. The staffers’ best guess was that it had come from the Seventh Fleet’s amphibious commander, Rear Adm. Daniel Barbey, whose group seemed most prone to needing emergency assistance. No matter who it had come from, they were certain the transmission required the president’s personal attention. The message was typed up in short order and submitted to Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of a briefing on the Philippines situation.

  Though it is not known what he did or said upon receiving the briefing, the president was sufficiently intrigued by the unfolding events off Samar to request updates as the night progressed. The little ships were on a big stage, and now they had the president’s attention.

  The worldwide audience to the drama off Samar included not only the White House but James Forrestal’s Navy Department, the top brass at Pacific Fleet Headquarters at Pearl Harbor, and the Japanese Combined Fleet leadership at Tokyo and Hiyoshi. At the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s new advance headquarters on Guam, radio eavesdroppers manned large battery-powered receivers mounted in the cargo beds of big Marine trucks. One radioman, Albert Fishburn, defying the burning sun and the considerable distraction of nearby Japanese snipers, manned his set all day long. He was captivated by what he picked up on the circuit designated 7910J: “It just operated all day long. It was just one ship after another.”

  Information from the Guam radio intercepts was relayed back to Pearl Harbor, where Cdr. Jasper Holmes, deputy chief of the Navy’s Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific Ocean Area (JICPOA), monitored it. When Holmes saw the report of the developing situation off Samar, he was astounded. He telephoned fleet intelligence officer Capt. Edwin T. Layton to ask about the location of Task Force
34’s battleships. Holmes figured the battlewagons were already guarding San Bernardino Strait. Absent specific confirmation from Halsey, Layton was less willing to assume Lee’s heavies had been detached.

  As it happened, Admiral Nimitz shared Captain Layton’s outlook. He did not know for sure whether TF 34 had been created per Halsey’s earlier battle plan. Though it seemed sensible enough, until now he hadn’t seen fit to ask. The commander in chief hated to be seen as second-guessing his theater commanders.

  At 6:48 that morning Halsey had been stunned to discover that Kinkaid was assuming the actuality of a contingency—the detachment of Task Force 34. Halsey ended the mystery of his battleships’ whereabouts at 7:02, when he responded to the Seventh Fleet commander’s 4:12 A.M. request for confirmation that the battleships were guarding San Bernardino Strait. Halsey told him, “NEGATIVE. TASK

  FORCE 34 IS WITH CARRIER GROUPS ENGAGING ENEMY CARRIER FORCE. That message took the customary two-hour trip around Robin Hood’s barn and the Manus receiving station before reaching Kinkaid. By the time it did, the Seventh Fleet commander had already transmitted a string of desperate messages indicating his own surprise at the impending disaster.

  At 7:07 Kinkaid informed Halsey in uncoded English that Taffy 3 was taking fire from Japanese battleships and cruisers. That message reached Halsey at 8:22. At 7:27 Kinkaid radioed Halsey, “Request Lee proceed at top speed to cover Leyte; request immediate strike by fast carriers.” The tenor of Kinkaid’s pleas grew increasingly shrill. At 7:39: “Fast battleships urgently needed immediately at Leyte Gulf.” At 8:29: “My situation is critical. Fast battleships and support by air strike may be able to prevent enemy from destroying [escort carriers] and entering Leyte.” For Nimitz, that was enough. Bewildered by the evident short-circuiting of communications between the Third and Seventh Fleets, he composed a straightforward inquiry to Halsey: “Where is TF 34?”

  A radioman on Nimitz’s staff saw the implicit emphasis and repeated the interrogatory phrase, “Where is—” Then the message was passed to an ensign responsible for encoding it, a process that involved inserting nonsense phrases at the beginning and end of a dispatch, on either side of a double consonant, so as to confound unauthorized recipients.

  Thus the message that the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, transmitted to Halsey’s radio department aboard the New Jersey read, TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY-FOUR RR THE WORLD WONDERS.

  To this day the world wonders whether the Third Fleet radioman who received this message aboard the New Jersey was scholar enough to know that the phrase “The world wonders” appears in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” commemorating a battle against long odds that was fought that very day, October 25, in a different century. The world wonders too whether he gave Chester Nimitz credit for the same literary acuity, recognizing with a grin CINCPAC’s historical flourish, uncannily suited to the circumstances, and assuming the reference was part of the message intended for Halsey. All the world knows for sure about the formulation and transmission of the query is that Halsey received it with the tail-end padding intact and took it as an armor-piercing broadside of sarcasm.

  Reeling from the thought that his gentlemanly commander in chief had just insulted him, Halsey whipped his baseball cap from his head and chucked it to the deck, cursing bitterly. He had just ordered Ching Lee’s battleships to prepare for action against Ozawa’s aircraft carriers. Now he had no choice but to recall them. As Halsey raged, his chief of staff, Mick Carney, said, “Stop it! What the hell’s the matter with you? Pull yourself together.” Tempers cooled. Orders flew. And slowly, all too slowly, the majestic leviathans that comprised Admiral Lee’s battle line pulled out of formation and swung around to a heading of 180 degrees.

  It was a gesture more than anything else. Fast though they were, the battleships weren’t swift enough to cover the two-hundred-mile distance in time to do Ziggy Sprague any good.

  Twenty-five

  Rain pelted the Johnston’s decks and hissed like droplets on a hot griddle, steaming on the metal above the shattered boilers in the number-two fireroom. Where it didn’t completely evaporate, the rain cleaned the decks of brine and drying blood.

  In Gun 54, Bob Hollenbaugh set down his sighting telescope and hopped down from the gun, allowing his crew a breather. They emerged from the illusory safety of the gun mount’s thin steel walls, taking in their first unshuttered view of the killing field that the ship’s decks had become. “By now the topside of the Johnston looked like a mess of spaghetti,” recalled Robert Billie. So many men were dead, yet the ship itself continued to live, as if animated by its own force of will.

  That too was an illusion. The ship was running now—maneuvering at least—principally on the sweat and pain of its sailors. The shells had knocked out not only half the ship’s steam power but most of its electrical power as well. The hits had severed the cables running aft from the number-two engine room’s distribution board. With the generator knocked out, the aft compartments of the destroyer were without power. The electrical pumps that might have stanched the flood of seawater into the engine rooms could not operate. Worse, there was no power to the steering engine, the motors that powered the ship’s large rudder. Without electricity to move the rudder, the only way to turn the ship was via “Norwegian steam”: the strong backs and shoulders of the enlisted crew.

  When steering was lost, the call went out for able bodies to report aft. Men whose battle stations were redundant—gunners on light antiaircraft mounts, or survivors from crews that had been wiped out—gathered on the fantail. They took turns belowdecks, teaming up in pairs to crank the two-handled wheel attached to the hydraulic pump that turned the rudder. Facing each other and working in concert, two strong sailors could rotate the wheel reasonably well and move the rudder in accordance with orders called to them from the bridge.

  The retreating destroyer was changing course so frequently that even the burliest seaman could handle just fifteen minutes at a time. And even with their best efforts, the ship was still sluggish at the helm. They never really kept up with the course-change orders that Captain Evans was calling over the JV phones from the bridge.

  As leader of the number-three repair party stationed in the aft deckhouse, Lt. Jesse Cochran was in charge of restoring power to the rearmost parts of the ship. With electrician’s mates Alan Cravens and Burton Hoover, gunner’s mate third class Dave Lewis, chief mess cook Dusty Rhodes, and others, Cochran pulled cables from the forward engine room’s distribution board to the steering motors. But struggle as they did to route casualty power aft, they could not quite complete the circuit. The juice did not flow, and there was no telling why. With masses of cables and wires twisted together like ropes and threaded through round holes in bulkheads, one was all but indistinguishable from another. Certain critical lines had been painted red. What the others did was a mystery. Combat allowed little opportunity for protracted investigation. Critical or not, each cable was responsible for some piece of machinery’s proper functioning. They never sorted it out, and the rudder remained powerless.

  During the twenty or thirty minutes in which Cochran and his repair party fought to restore the spark to the Johnston’s work stations aft, the temperature in the engineering spaces had cooled sufficiently to enable a rescue and salvage mission into the riddled bowels of the ship. Motor machinist’s mate Bob Sochor, Jesse Cochran, and other rescuers put on asbestos suits and descended the ladders—slowly, blindly—to search for survivors. In the aft engine room, which was taking on water, Cochran checked the tube packing that kept ocean water from seeping in around the port propeller shaft. It was intact. He then closed the intake valve to the condenser, which turned salt water to fresh for drinking. But still the water rose.

  Cochran was amazed to find several boiler room machinists crawling like oversized rats out of the bilges below the grating. To elude the killing steam, the enterprising survivors had pressed themselves ag
ainst the skin of the ship’s belly down in the bilges until the cauldron cooled and they could make good their escape.

  Light from Sochor’s battle lantern scarcely penetrated the cavernous darkness. He groped around in the stinking, steam-soaked void, found a body, tied a rope around it, and pushed upward while men on deck lifted from above. When Cochran entered the after engine room, he found warrant officer Johnny Merritt, one of the ship’s best machinists and most popular “old men,” lying facedown on the grates where he had fallen at his station. With a heavy wrench in hand, another warrant machinist, Marley Polk, swam beneath the grating in the dark compartment, looking for the source of the in-rushing water. As he was submerged, there was a large vibration from a hit somewhere. A heavy piece of engine room machinery dislodged and splashed into the water, trapping him in the bilges. He struggled to get his head above water and ordered his rescuers to save themselves before the water again closed over his head.

  Bob Sochor shimmied up the ladder to the main deck and removed his asbestos suit. He was looking down at the closed hatch leading to the after fireroom when to his amazement the round wheel started spinning, turned from below, and the hatch swung open: “Trying to climb out was a fireman by the name of West. I ran over to help him up the rest of the way. He had been down in that hot fire-room at least fifteen or twenty minutes after the boilers were hit and exploded. He stood on deck, his clothes wet and steaming, and he was shaking himself off as if to get the hot steaming clothes off his skin.”