The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  Electrical fires in the after engine room burned stubbornly but eventually succumbed to the cool gusts of rescuers’ CO2 bottles. Three feet of water covered the deck. Rescuers rigged a submersible pump, but the cord didn’t reach the power supply. When a longer lead was spliced and linked to the engine room distribution board, still no power came. They would have to make do.

  Sochor led West and several other wounded to the officers’ wardroom, which was used as an operating room in combat. “It was an awful sight to see,” Sochor said. “All those pathetic men sitting and lying on the crowded deck waiting to be treated by the doctor and pharmacists.”

  Joe Worling, the engineering officer, ordered Sochor and water tender third class Fielden Critz to come with him to the after fire-room. The ship was running on a single screw, the starboard propeller shaft working over capacity at 350 RPM just to maintain the limp-along speed of seventeen knots. Driven by the turbine and reduction gears in the forward engine room, the shaft was squealing loudly, a sign of possible—and doubtless fatal—engine failure. Worling gave Sochor a pail of lube oil and told him to go pour it over the shaft and the spring bearings. Wearing gas masks and holding battle lanterns, Sochor and Critz climbed down through the hatch from which West had just escaped. Experienced snipes, as engine-room and fireroom personnel were called, could descend the fifteen-foot ladders to their stations with their feet never touching the steps. Saddled with the protective suit and moving sightlessly through smoke and darkness, Sochor’s progress was slower now. The fireroom was smoky, filled with steam from the shattered boilers. Cracks of sunlight shone between bent deck plates, but there was not enough light to penetrate the smoke. “With little help from our battle lantern,” he recalled, “we inched our way behind the blown boiler along the narrow catwalk, up and over piping, to the top of the shaft. We poured the oil all over the shaft bearing box, which stopped the squealing sound.” The ship continued creeping back to Sprague’s besieged carriers.

  The interlude in the squall meant that the Japanese cruisers were blind and could not fire on the Americans. A Mark 37 gun director had no such blinders—it was as sharp-eyed in the fog or the dark as it was in the clear of midday. While the ship was enshrouded by rain, the gun director’s radar spied the column of Japanese cruisers closing on the escort carrier formation. As Bob Hagen and his gunners fired some 100 five-inch rounds at the nearest Japanese cruiser, the squall’s only impact on the efficiency of the Johnston’s gunnery department was the rude manner in which it soaked Hagen’s smokes. “It was the first time in my life I didn’t mind having a package of cigarettes ruined,” he wrote.

  Time, however, was not on Taffy 3’s side. Though two Japanese cruisers, the Suzuya, damaged by aerial attack, and the Kumano, hit by the Johnston, were out of the battle, the four others still had their legs, and their captains were determined to draw blood. Through nearly three years of war, no aircraft carrier had fallen to Japanese guns. Admiral Kurita credited heavenly intervention for the opportunity. He would soon be in position to make use of it.

  * * *

  LARGELY ON THE INDEPENDENT initiative of its different division commanders, the Japanese fleet was fanned out and advancing in roughly parallel columns: four heavy cruisers steaming southward, out to the east; the Yamato and the Nagato looming a step behind them to Taffy 3’s north; the Haruna and the Kongo making independent tracks ahead of their slower heavies; and two destroyer squadrons bringing up the rear.

  Against them came the Hoel, the Heermann, and the Samuel B. Roberts, formed into a loose semblance of a column and steaming into the open maw of the armored behemoths arrayed before them. Like the Roberts before her, the Hoel had narrowly avoided a collision with the Heermann as Hathaway’s destroyer made its dash across the Taffy 3 formation to line up for the attack. Now the three steamed north at flank speed, while Sprague’s jeep carriers ran southward. With each turn of their screws, the gulf between the destroyers and the carriers widened. Their exposure, their utter vulnerability, grew starker with every passing minute.

  Destroyers were hit-and-run ships. As the Japanese had demonstrated time and time again with their own tin cans, and as Oldendorf’s destroyers had shown at Surigao Strait, torpedo attacks were best executed under the cover of night. This would be no replay of Surigao Strait. Though their stacks billowed smoke amid sheltering rainsqualls, Ziggy Sprague’s screening ships attacked in daylight. Their opponents had roughly three times the gun power of Nishimura’s group. The Americans were unsupported by a powerful battle line whose large guns offered a sheltering canopy to hide under upon withdrawal and a devastating deterrent to enemy pursuit.

  Moreover, Kurita’s Center Force was not confined to a strait. Roaming free in open ocean, his ships had both room to maneuver and speed sufficient to overtake and encircle the jeep carriers and destroy them from all sides.

  For the destroyer screen, the risk of encirclement was moot, for they were offering themselves for slaughter, throwing themselves willingly into it in the hope of delaying the inevitable for the carriers. Perhaps they would harry the Japanese enough to let Sprague’s CVEs slip away. “I had heard all along that destroyers were expendable but never quite believed. Now I knew it was true,” Everett Lindorff of the Hoel would write.

  From the gun deck on the fantail of the Fanshaw Bay, situated on the northwest edge of the circular pod of fleeing escort carriers, ship’s cook Harold Kight had a front-row seat from which to observe the destroyer screen forming into line for their torpedo run. His battle station was in the handling room below the ship’s lone five-inch gun. When the gun was firing, he, Jack Frisch, and Warren Whitaker fed projectiles and powder cases into the hoist that supplied the crew on the open-mounted “stinger” or “peashooter.” Until the enemy got closer, the crew that Kight supplied did not have anything to shoot at. But with a clear 180-degree vista off the stern, there was certainly a lot to watch.

  Kight looked on awestruck as the destroyers fell into line, lit off their boilers, and left their stations by the carriers to race off toward the Japanese battle line. The little ships seemed to possess a spirit all their own. And they reminded him of something—horses. On his family’s 250-acre farm in central Oklahoma, Kight worked with the Percheron draft horses that hauled his dad’s plows and pulled his wagons. They were powerful animals, stalwart and dependable. He knew the habits of the big black and gray beasts. Whenever a thunderstorm loomed across the plains, the broad-shouldered workhorses became as skittish as stallions. Their eyes bulged. Their nostrils flared. Spurred by the drop in barometric pressure, they sprinted and dashed around the pasture. When they accelerated from a standstill, their hindquarters dropped down, legs jackhammering the earth, heads pulled high, manes waving in the wind.

  Harold Kight thought the two destroyers and the destroyer escort, sprinting in to attack, looked like that now, like horses sprinting exuberantly across a watery pasture. At flank speed, the Fletchers tossed up a flaring bow wave like a mane and their sterns sat low, digging their screws into the sea, sprinting like Percherons madly energized by a low-pressure front. As the flagship of Commander Thomas’s screen, the Hoel led the loose column, followed by the Heermann. Then went that determined pony, the Samuel B. Roberts. Kight figured this would be the last he would see of these ships and their vaguely equine nobility. He felt a lump rise in his throat at the realization that, most likely, none of them would survive to run under the thunder again.

  Twenty-six

  Seaman first class Sam Lucas could feel the Hoel’s deck vibrating from the exertions of the turbines. Their deep steam-driven hum resonated in his sternum. Lucas, a torpedoman striker, and torpedoman third class Earl Tompkins busied themselves setting the depth charges on the starboard and port-side racks on safe. There would soon likely be plenty of exploding going on. No need to contribute to the fireworks.

  Painted with sharply angled camouflage patterns to confuse enemy lookouts, the Hoel was nevertheless inescapably framed against the veil of
smoke and squalls behind her. The Japanese gunners walked splashes up and down and back along the American ship’s line of advance.

  Jack Creamer, the Hoel’s assistant gunnery officer, could see the problem the impromptu torpedo line faced: time and distance were not on their side. While the Hoel was laying smoke for the carriers, the Japanese had closed the range rapidly with the formation. Because Captain Kintberger’s destroyer was closest to the enemy, she had the least room to maneuver to prepare her attack. The column was too long, the enemy too close, and the visibility too spotty for the U.S. ships to coordinate effectively.

  The Americans and Japanese closed at a combined rate of more than fifty knots. Zigzagging to avoid shellfire and simultaneously calculating his own best approach to fire the Hoel’s ten torpedoes at the proper angle to the enemy ships, Kintberger was forced to seize his chance when it presented itself. The Hoel’s skipper elected to pass between the columns of battleships and cruisers. His ship would be exposed to fire from all sides, but at least there would be no shortage of targets. The steel decks were slick with rain. Despite the embrace of the laden tropical air, Hugh Coffelt, a gunner on one of the amidships forty-millimeter mounts, realized that he was shivering.

  Fred Green was on his game in the CIC, lining up the torpedo attack and plotting the progress of the overwhelming Japanese force.

  Bridge, this is Combat. Range one six five double oh. Give us a sight bearing on the battleships…. Three four two? That checks with ours by radar. Where is the cruiser column? Three five eight? Destroyers, two nine one and three three nine. That leaves the big ships unprotected then. Captain, suggest a course of three five three.

  Then Green gave the gunnery officer, Lt. Bill Sanders, the benefit of the data flowing in from his radar.

  Gunnery Control, this is Combat. Stand by to open fire. Range one four five double oh. Stand by. I’ll give a mark on fourteen thousand yards. Stand by to open fire. Stand by… stand by … mark—one four oh double oh.

  On cue, the Hoel’s two forward guns opened up, crashing out at a large gray form looming off her bow. Sanders had a heavy cruiser in his sights. On the bridge, everyone’s ears rang from the concussion of Guns 51 and 52. Lieutenant Dix didn’t mind the roar.

  Damn it was good to hear them speaking out….

  The whole ship trembled with their rapid bursts

  And Sanders up above us grinning there

  Was giving out gun orders to his crews

  Making them keep a steady, even pace,

  “Just like your drills—forget about the Japs.”

  Fourteen thousand yards was close enough for the guns. But to launch torpedoes, they needed to get a bit closer. Sanders slewed his gun director mount and trained his batteries on a battleship. The three after turrets joined in now, bucking the ship with their stiff report. The destroyer plunged ahead, fishtailing through shell splashes as the decks rattled from the exertions of her power plant. They haven’t hit us yet, Lieutenant Dix thought as the Hoel closed to torpedo-launching range. We’re almost there…. We’re all together now—let’s make it good. It all happened in the space of a hundred seconds, the events coming too fast for even the most meticulous quartermaster to record in his log.

  ∗ The sequence of events during the battle is obscured by some doubt. There is ambiguity in official documents whether the Hoel was hit before or after Sprague issued his order to the destroyers, the “big boys,” to make their torpedo attack. The TBS logs of several Taffy 3 warships record Sprague’s order going out at 7:35 or 7:40, ten to fifteen minutes after the Hoel was hit, on her way in to attack, at 7:25. The log of the destroyer escort Raymond, relied upon by Samuel Eliot Morison and John Toland, places the order at 7:16, which makes more sense, since the Hoel survivors consistently assert that their ship got hit on the way in and that Kintberger did not act ahead of orders. Admiral Sprague’s own published account of the battle suggests that he may have issued the order even earlier. Despite the twenty-nine minutes of ambiguity—and twenty-nine minutes is an eternity in a running battle—we do know with near certainty that the Hoel was first hit at 7:25. At 7:25 A.M. the Hoel’s impossible luck ran out.

  Leon Kintberger had been chasing salvos in a desperate bid to keep the Hoel alive. Battleships and cruisers had the ship’s range, and so the splashes were not hard to find. The closer the ship got, however, the more futile the concept of “dodging” salvos became. It was mostly a pretense in any event, for no ship could actually dodge a high-velocity inbound shell. The first one that hit them was small in caliber—small at least relative to the fourteen-, sixteen-, and eighteen-inch battleship rounds that were splitting the air with palpable roars and, at the end of their twenty-mile trajectories, losing their grip on the sky and falling downward like tumbling trash cans. This one came in fast and unseen, striking the bridge high on the port side. Lieutenant Dix thought, Oh, Jesus, this is it!

  The ship rocked and staggered. There was a flash and a crrrump and a whistling hail of metal that killed most of the men in the wheel-house immediately. Lt. Earle Nason, quartermaster Herbert Doubrava, fire-controlman Marcellino Dilello, and soundman Otto Kumpunen were gone in an instant. A surreal cloud of green-dyed mist settled over the carnage.

  Sitting in the pilothouse lookout’s chair overlooking Gun 52, seaman first class Keith McKay felt a rush of wind around his left calf, looked down, and saw that shrapnel had shredded his dungarees. Blood was running down into his shoe, so he tied a red bandanna around his ankle. He looked down at the water sloshing around the deck of the bridge and saw that it ran not green but red. The reassuring rumble and grind of Bill Sanders’s rotating Mark 37 gun director stopped, leaving only ominous silence from the shattered battle station above.

  The blast spattered the Hoel’s passageways with the remains of breakfast: pork and beans and cinnamon rolls flew out of the galley and littered the decks. The cloud of vaporized green dye dispersed and seemed to drift down the length of the ship as the Hoel pressed ahead. Some men who saw it wondered what new horror the Japanese now unleashed. Cries of “Gas! Gas!” could be heard from panicked crew. Thrown from his chair at the helm, Clarence Hood regained consciousness on the starboard side of the pilothouse and saw that Lieutenant Dix had taken over the wheel. Commander Thomas and Captain Kintberger were both hurt, but their injuries were minor. Hood’s were too, so he took back his post.

  Miles to the north, Admiral Kurita saw an American ship erupt in smoke and flame, probably the Hoel, and the Yamato’s log recorded, “Cruiser observed blowing up and sinking at 0725.”

  With the fire-control radar gone, control of the Hoel’s guns fell to the CIC team, led by Lieutenants Green and Creamer. They were able to take ranges with the much less finely tuned surface-search radar. The two officers focused on lining up the torpedo attack and relaying range and bearing information to the guns. As the ship groped its way toward the oncoming fleet, Hoyt White, a radarman in the CIC, called out ranges and bearings of the Japanese cruisers to the gunners over the sound-powered phones: 13,000 yards … 12,500 yards … The men winced at every vibration and rattle as the shells struck near the ship.

  Seeing the destruction with one’s own eyes evoked one kind of fear; not being able to see it was perhaps worse. The men in the CIC or the radio shack or the engine room or the gun mounts or in any of the ship’s other enclosed spaces were spared the horrid beauty of the red, green, yellow, and blue waterspouts rising around the ship. Hoyt White felt the Hoel reel and shudder, absorbing the blows. There was no telling how serious any particular hit was, or where the next one would strike. From time to time he found himself staring at the bulkhead that stood between him and the humid, smoky air and wondering when a round might burst through it, bearing his name.

  * * *

  AS THE THREE SMALL ships pressed through the squalls on their run against the Japanese heavy ships—the staggering Hoel in the lead, followed by the Heermann and the Samuel B. Roberts— a sight greeted them unlike any they had seen befor
e: a smoking gray-black wreck of metal, crawling south as they charged north. It was the Johnston.

  Limping along on one engine, with no hydraulic steering, the ship was a ruin. And yet somehow Captain Evans was pulling her through, returning to formation. Though the destroyer remained on a fairly even keel, the battering she had taken was all too evident. The mast had toppled down around the superstructure. The metal shields and bulkheads around the bridge and the stacks were blackened, torn, riddled, and dented like a coffee can on a backyard tree stump. How a ship in that condition could still make steam was for its engineers to explain.

  By any fair measure, the Johnston was entitled to call it a day. Her torpedo tubes were empty. At her hobbled seventeen-knot speed, she couldn’t keep up with the other destroyers on the way in. Sprague’s carriers needed her smoke. Everyone on the Johnston’s bridge had heard the admiral’s order, directing the “small boys” to form up and attack. Few if any believed it applied to their ship. Surely they weren’t expected to turn around and go in again.

  When Captain Evans saw the Hoel and the Heermann, with the Samuel B. Roberts lagging behind in column, he arrived at a different view of his obligation. As long as his ship had guns that worked, the Cherokee figured he could do something in a fight. He told his dumbstruck men on the bridge, “We’ll go in with the destroyers and provide fire support.” Evans ordered Ed DiGardi to bring the Johnston around astern the Roberts and informed his officers of the plan. Owing to steering difficulties, the destroyer made a complete circle before steadying on course. The Johnston fell in line with the three other ships, plying the shell-torn waters between them and the Japanese fleet. Oh, dear Lord, I’m in for a swim, Bob Hagen said to himself.

  Twenty-seven

  On the bridge of the Hoel, Commander Thomas watched the other escorts in the strung-out torpedo line while Captain Kintberger steadied the ship on her own firing course. Torpedo officer Lieutenant Coleman, who had moved from the bridge to torpedo mount number two, owing to the loss of communication with his mounts, took over the helm as ranges and bearings were called out by Green and Creamer in the CIC. The Hoel’s torpedo mounts swung out to starboard. There a battleship loomed, at a range of ten thousand yards.