The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  “This is 81 Georgia. Are there any other Georgia planes in the area?”

  A low, slow southern drawl came in reply. “This is 84 Georgia. I have you in sight. I’ll join up.”

  “This is 81 Georgia. What kind of arms do you have?”

  “I’m loaded with hundred-pound antipersonnel bombs. What do you have?”

  “I have the same loading. What kind of target do you think we should take, 84 Georgia?”

  “We better try one of them destroyers.”

  “This is 81 Georgia. I’m senior to you, and I think we ought to attack a battleship.”

  “This is 84 Georgia,” the voice drawled. “Won’t do no good.”

  Now 81 Georgia drew on a source of motivation far more powerful than mere rank: “84 Georgia, if you’re scared, go back to the carrier.”

  “This is 84 Georgia. I’ll go anywhere you go, God damn it!”

  The Japanese cruisers endured a savage strafing attack by the fighter pilots of Taffy 3. Lt. Jim Murphy of the Kalinin Bay’s VC-3 found the Japanese fleet almost immediately upon clearing the rain-squall that was drenching the carrier’s decks.

  He owed the honor of flying that day to his fleetness of foot: he had beaten his executive officer Gil Halliday by a few steps to the last plane on the flight deck. “Little Murph” was prepared to yield to superior rank, but Halliday yielded to speed. Murphy had gotten there first—“Go ahead,” Halliday said, “and good luck.” Murphy took off at 7:25, the last plane off the ship.

  He joined Lt. Ken Hippe and Ens. George Heinmiller in strafing a heavy cruiser. Over Leyte the day before, Lieutenant Hippe had become an ace in seven minutes, shooting down five twin-engine Lily bombers that were headed for MacArthur’s troops. Hippe’s targets now were considerably larger, if less prone to disintegrating under his guns. Pushing over and diving down as if riding an invisible waterfall, the pilots made three runs before becoming separated. Murphy then formed up with Lt. Leonard Porterfield and dove on another cruiser. Porterfield told Murphy he was out of bullets and headed for Tacloban. Little Murph’s next dance partner was Ens. Paul Hopfner, who formed up on his wing and helped him ruin a Japanese destroyer’s day.

  The fire that met the pilots over the fleet was considerable. “How those Japs could shoot so many guns and still not hit anyone really had me fooled,” wrote Murphy. But there was little doubt as to the effectiveness of the pilots’ own shooting. After his second pass on the cruisers, Murphy noted with satisfaction that the Japanese ships were maneuvering to avoid them.

  The Kalinin Bay took her first hits at 7:50, just as Blue Archer was firing his rockets at the heavy cruiser. Steaming on the windward side of the formation, exposed to view as the smoke screen was blown west, the carrier absorbed Japanese cruiser shells at the rate of about one a minute. Some skipped like rocks over her deck, gouging the wooden flight deck and showering splinters into the air. In total the fragile CVE took fifteen hits from the cruisers’ eight-inch main batteries.

  One shell breached the port side of the hull just above the machine shop, angled down through the machine shop, and burst in the freshwater tank and the fuel oil settling tanks. While investigating the extent of the damage to the critical oil tanks, engineering officer Lt. George H. Keeler could hear loud crashes and other novel sounds of material fracture and stress, “but above all others we could hear men screaming.”

  The shells’ screeching impacts scrapped the innards of the Kalinin Bay right before the crew’s horrified eyes. Armor-piercing shells penetrated the thin hull and flight deck without exploding, turning the ship into an oversized colander. Shells hitting below the waterline let torrents of ocean water rush in.

  In a narrow wedge of a compartment at the very bow of the ship, seaman first class Morris Turner was up to his waist in water pouring in through two holes left by a shell that had punched clean through both sides of the hull, right at the waterline. Mattresses and large corks and pillows floated all around him as he struggled to keep the debris clear of the intake of the submersible pump he was operating. Other sailors in the compartment pressed mattresses up against the shell holes. But every time the ship moved out of a wave trough and plunged into another swell, the sudden increase in water pressure shoved aside the mattresses and forced more water in.

  Standing in the rising water, Turner had trouble gaining leverage against the incoming flow. After hours of work, struggling to keep the pumps operating and the inflow down, he and the other sailors brought the water down to a manageable level. In so doing they very likely saved their ship. If the compartment had failed, the Kalinin Bay’s bow would have plowed under the sea, the swamped ship would have lost her speed and seaworthiness, and in all probability the Japanese would have caught her. She would have met that fate no matter the heroics of her crew. Escort carriers were not built to take fifteen major-caliber hits and survive. But the Kalinin Bay did just that. Shells damaged her degaussing cables and tore shelving and ruptured bulkheads and opened the hull to flooding. They ripped six holes in the flight deck and wrecked support beams below it. They punctured lube oil tanks, contaminating the ship’s freshwater system, ruined radio and radar gear, sprayed compartments with metal splinters, filled passageways with noxious fumes and gases, ignited acetylene bottles, started electrical fires, and rendered bunkrooms uninhabitable. The extent of the ship’s luck was truly staggering.

  The day before one well-placed Japanese bomb had sunk Halsey’s light carrier, the Princeton; a single torpedo had once filled the skies with the remains of the Liscome Bay. Somehow now, however, the CVE known as the Lucky K. took fifteen hard blows from heavy cruiser shells—at least five of which exploded—and sailed on with just five dead and fifty-five wounded. It is astounding that her losses were not far, far higher.

  * * *

  AT 7:50 ADMIRAL KURITA’S force was spread out over fifteen miles of ocean as it pursued Sprague’s fleeing carriers. The crippled Kumano, assisted by the Suzuya, lagged behind as the westernmost Japanese ship as she completed the transfer of Admiral Shiraishi’s flag. The light cruiser Noshiro, heading a column of seven destroyers, passed the two crippled heavy cruisers to their north but, forced to circle by vicious strafing attacks by Wildcat fighters, came onto a southward course that carried her away from the eastward-charging Yamato, the Nagato, and the Haruna. Northeast of the three other battleships, the Kongo was running southeast and turning a wide clockwise circle as she traced the course of the four heavy cruisers in line ahead of her. Those four ships—the Tone, the Chikuma, the Haguro, and the Chokai— on the other side of a large rainsquall from the Yamato, ran south by southeast, turning an arc through the compass toward the south, matching Ziggy Sprague’s circular course.

  As the Japanese cruisers bore down on the jeep carriers, the American pilots stepped up the tempo of their attacks, buzzing the ships with the ferocity of hornets, determined to drive them back at whatever cost. According to Ziggy Sprague:

  The Wildcat pilots were given a free hand to strafe, with the hope that their strafing would kill personnel on the Japanese ships, silence automatic weapons, and, most important, draw attention from the struggling escort carriers. Sometimes two, or four, Wildcats would join up for a strafing run. Again, a Wildcat would join up and run interference for an Avenger. Then, likely as not, it would turn out that the Avenger had no torpedo or bomb and was simply making a dummy run. When their ammunition gave out, the fighters also made dry runs to turn the pursuers. Lt. Paul Garrison, of Seaside, Oregon, made twenty strafing runs, ten of them dry.

  “The attack was almost incessant,” Kurita’s operations officer, Cdr. Tonosuke Otani, would write, “but the number of planes at any one instant was few. The bombers and torpedo planes were very aggressive and skillful, and the coordination was impressive; even in comparison with the great experience of American attack that we had already had, this was the most skillful work of your planes.”

  Twenty-nine

  Lt. (jg) Thomas J. Lupo, an Avenger pilot fr
om the Fanshaw Bay, was one of the first pilots to reach Tacloban once the initial wave of attacks by Taffy 3’s pilots had crested and broken and scattered in search of a place to land. The VC-68 flier had made run after run with his squadronmates, dropping his bomb load, exhausting his ammunition, and capping off his morning by throwing assorted loose items from his cockpit at the Japanese fleet: a Coke bottle, a navigation board, and other vaguely ballistic miscellany.

  He was a wild sort of kid, with a dangerous look and a reckless demeanor. His father, a New Orleans real estate developer, had tried to keep his son on a productive track, paying an architectural firm to hire him during his summers off from Tulane. But ultimately he was not optimistic about Tommy’s future. The kid was given to crazy stunts: driving his convertible from the backseat with his feet on the steering wheel, drinking all night, playing pranks, chasing girls. Once his dad had tried to warn off Tommy’s bride-to-be, declaring to her father, “Don’t you let that girl get involved with my son. That boy will never amount to anything.”

  True to form, Lupo’s interest in aviation seemed to grow out of defiance of his parents’ will. In high school he sold enough magazine subscriptions to earn a trip by air to New York, but his parents refused to let him go. When news arrived that the Japanese had struck Pearl Harbor, Lupo was playing poker with his buddies at the house. He seized the chance for an even grander adventure. They broke up the game on the spot and ran down to the New Orleans customs house, looking to enlist. By the time he was in operational flight training at Otay Mesa, California, Tommy Lupo still hadn’t kicked his inclination for derring-do. He was always happy to demonstrate his aileron control by buzzing the marshes low enough to whip up a storm of mud with his propeller wash. But he was also a proficient torpedo pilot. During the Saipan campaign he had had more than a few chances to put his dash into useful service on ground support missions against the dug-in Japanese. Such was the genius of the Navy’s Bureau of Personnel to channel the rowdiness of youth toward productive ends.

  Lupo eased back the throttle of his Avenger and landed on Taclo-ban, weaving across the muddy tarmac pocked with bomb and artillery craters and strewn with wrecked machinery. As a relatively new acquisition for its U.S. Army conquerors, the field was still pitted by the handiwork of American bombers and strewn with the remains of Japanese aircraft. Army engineers and Seabees, as the men of the Navy’s construction battalion were called, were working to rehabilitate the airstrip. They were pouring truckloads of crushed coral into the muddy patches around the strip, laying a base on which to lay steel-mesh Marston runway matting. But the mud was deep, and so the coral vanished “like chunks of vanilla ice cream into a sarsapa-rilla soda.” Lupo brought his torpedo bomber down onto a reasonably solid stretch of runway, cut his engine, and rolled to a stop.

  The first person Lupo saw upon climbing out of the cockpit of the “Bayou Bomber” was an Army bulldozer operator. Knowing that any fighter planes that landed on the field would need more space than he had needed to land safely, Lupo asked the bulldozer driver to clear some more room at the end of the runway. Then, spying crates of ammunition, pyramids of 250-pound bombs, and drums of fuel stockpiled alongside the airfield, Lupo demanded to know who was in charge of the operation. The driver pointed to an Army major.

  The major was already more than a little interested in who had dared park a Navy plane on his airfield, which was still in the care of the Army engineers and their bulldozers, trucks, and roller rigs and would soon be home to a Marine night fighter squadron that was setting up for operations. Lupo told him of the desperate naval battle raging over the horizon to the northeast. “We’ve got six jeep carriers out there under attack, and our planes have nowhere to land and rearm,” Lupo said. “I’d like to get some of this fuel and those bombs and ammunition so we can bring our planes here, load them up, and get back out there.”

  The major took a dim view of the request. “We’ve got a war going on here too. I can’t give you this stuff. I’ve got planes coming here in seven to ten days—P-51s and P-47s—and these bombs are for them.”

  “I have to tell you, Major, if we don’t get these bombs and stop this Jap fleet, they’re gonna come in here and bomb the hell out of this place and maybe recapture it. Then their planes will be dropping these bombs on you. I’ve gotta have these bombs, sir, or we’ll have a disaster on our hands.” Lupo asked who the major’s superior was.

  The Army officer mentioned a colonel who was stationed out toward the front. “He’s out fighting a war, and I’m not going to bother him.”

  “Well,” Lupo said, “that’s just too bad.”

  The pilot pulled out his service revolver and pointed it at the major. Then Lupo handed the pistol to his radioman, Earl Gifford, instructing the flabbergasted aircrewman to hold the Army officer at bay. Lupo climbed into the cockpit of his plane and hailed the Fanshaw Bay on the radio. His fellow pilots from VC-68 and other Taffy 3 squadrons were already inbound.

  Army antiaircraft gunners opened fire on a gaggle of strange planes circling the field. It took them only a few beats to recognize they were Navy aircraft. Gradually awakening to the dire circumstances of Sprague’s fleet and his daring aviators, the men at Tacloban cleared the way for the pilots to land. The strip wasn’t ready. The six inches of loose black sand that covered the field when Taffy 3’s aviators arrived was a lousy surface to land on. Making matters worse, there were as yet no communications facilities in place to guide the planes in; no service squadrons to refuel and rearm them and take the wounded pilots to field hospitals; no airdrome or control tower to coordinate the traffic and determine how the planes would be parked. The result was going to be chaos.

  The first plane from the new group touched down on a solid stretch of runway, sped forward, caught its landing gear in the soft sand, and pitched forward onto its nose. The pilot coming in behind him, seeing the wreck, pulled out of his landing approach and roared away for another pass. At that, the rest of the inbound planes dispersed “like a flight of birds at the first crack of a shotgun,” an observer wrote.

  Unexpectedly, a voice came on the pilots’ radio circuit: “Navy planes, Navy planes. This is Tacloban airstrip, beneath you. Can you hear me? Come in, please.” It was a young Army Air Force officer with Tacloban’s fighter control group, Lt. Edward Worrad. Driving a radio-equipped jeep as the planes were circling, he was accompanied by a Navy fighter director officer, Lt. Russell Forester, in another radio jeep. Stranded ashore, Forester had been champing at the bit for days as battles raged in the waters all around him. Now he was finally in a position to help. As Worrad stayed in touch with the planes in the air, Forester made contact with the Seventh Fleet’s air controller in Leyte Gulf and informed him of Tacloban’s availability. A third man, Sgt. Sam Halpern from Tacloban’s service squadron, joined them, checking out the planes that Worrad guided down.

  Before long the three men had pieced together an out-of-pocket air control and support squad. Hastily mustering a plane-handling gang from members of the 305th Airdrome Squadron, they helped dozens of Navy Wildcats and Avengers land on the Army field as the battle raged off Samar. The Army volunteers righted flipped aircraft, extinguished fires, and loaded bombs onto the unfamiliar Navy planes. The pilots pitched in, helping to arm and service their planes before taking off again. Japanese air raids were sporadic throughout the day. And friendly planes posed hazards too. Some pilots who took off amid the fragilely managed chaos experienced harrowing and unsolicited games of chicken: an Avenger landing and taxiing down the strip south to north, while a Wildcat roared overhead, taking off north to south. It was not by-the-book airfield management, but they got the job done.

  Serviced and flown off with the help of Army personnel and Navy pilots, the pilots hooked up with Navy air control through Lieutenant Forester’s jeep radio and were vectored to strike at the Japanese fleet. Fuel and oil trucks skirted around the edge of the strip, their drivers diving flat onto the black sand whenever strafing Japanese planes cam
e in. At one point a trio of enemy fighters flew in so low that Sam Halpern mistook them for friendlies in the pattern and gave them a green light to land. Incoming planes were waved off while eight big graders and four rollers lumbered across the tarmac, flattening out the little hills and dales of sand made by taxiing aircraft. As soon as they cleared the strip, waves of Navy fliers roared in again. Only eight planes were total losses at Tacloban that day. Not a single pilot trying to land there was killed.

  * * *

  BLUE ARCHER, OUT OF ammo, flew wide circles over and around the Japanese fleet, dropping down to make dry runs on them before passing out of range, climbing again, and wheeling around for another run. Working from three or four thousand feet, he would dive to a few hundred feet over his targets and let his gunner and radioman take potshots at whatever targets were handy. After several such runs his gunner, in the ball turret, and his radioman, on the bilge gun below, both reported they were out of slugs. Archer was ready to call it a day and head for Tacloban. But then he heard a message from the carriers requesting a torpedo attack. This suggested desperate circumstances.

  Whoever sent the message had to have known there were few torpedoes in circulation among Taffy 3’s planes. Archer waved his wings, signaling two other pilots to form up on him. He passed through a squall and got down on the water, running straight for a battleship. Then it happened. The shell exploded no more than twenty yards ahead of him. “It was like running into a brick wall,” he recalled. Slumped in his seat with a concussion and a back injury that made him numb, Archer fought through the pain and looked to his left. Where a second before there had been a pilot flying on his wing, now all he saw was a cloud of indeterminate aircraft parts hurtling in every direction.