The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  Whitney returned to the starboard bridge wing and called the shocking development to Amos Hathaway’s attention, recommending that he order the Heermann’s machine-gunners to engage the intruder at point-blank range. Unfazed, the skipper said to his talker, “I can’t shoot at them now. We’re busy with these cruisers over here.” Evidently the imperial tin can had other priorities as well. After several tense minutes the ship peeled off to port and disappeared through the smoke and squalls that had covered its arrival.

  * * *

  ZIGGY SPRAGUE’S FLATTOPS SHOULD have been run down and butchered like antelope on the steppe, but they continued to elude that seemingly predestined fate. At 8:10 A.M. Sprague’s carriers were on a southwesterly heading, fleeing with the wind. The cruiser column led by the Tone, followed by the Chikuma, the Haguro, and the Chokai, was to Sprague’s northeast, running south, working a clockwise circular course toward the southwest. The aggression of the screening ships and the doggedness of the pilots were making their mark. Eighty minutes into the pursuit, the Japanese still had not overtaken them for slaughter, their thirteen-knot speed advantage notwithstanding. Every time a pursuing cruiser had to veer from course to avoid a TBM approaching with torpedo bay doors open, Sprague won valuable time. Every time a Wildcat pilot rattled a cruiser’s pilothouse, sending officers diving to the deck, it delayed course-change orders and frustrated the concentration of spotters peering through their binoculars.

  As his carriers plodded along on a course of 205 degrees to the south-southwest, Sprague could scarcely believe his luck up to this point. At 8:14 Felix Stump heard him on the radio saying, “We have been straddled for the last half hour. We have not been hit yet. Their shooting is very bad.”

  Admiral Kurita tended to see another reason for his inability to close for the kill—his opponents were swift fleet carriers and cruisers, able to outrun him on their own. Kurita watched his ships fail to close the range and knew he could not afford to chase them forever. He had his own fuel shortages to worry about. For all Kurita knew, this was the U.S. Third Fleet. Just fifteen hours ago Halsey’s and Mitscher’s planes had sunk one of Japan’s two greatest battleships, the Musashi. Aboard her sister ship, the Yamato, there was disagreement about where the Third Fleet was. The Japanese had heard Kinkaid’s pleas for help from heavy American ships. Though Admiral Shiraishi on the Kumano had reason to know otherwise, having sighted “light carriers” and recorded that fact in his log, he failed to report it to superiors. And so Kurita continued to believe that his opponents were larger, faster, and more capable than they actually were. He had no idea how desperate his enemy was.

  Though neither Ziggy Sprague nor his captains had any reason to know it, the best way to turn back the Japanese onslaught was for their torpedoless tin cans and their weaponless airplanes to keep the bluff going.

  Thirty-one

  Following its near collision with the Heermann, the Johnston’s protracted streak of astonishing luck seemed simply to run out. The ship was taking hits regularly now. Shells struck in deep syncopated rhythms, each slightly less momentous and terrifying to the crew than the one before, an undifferentiated cadence that seemed to diminish in effect as shell shock set in. An armor-piercing round passed through the thin metal of an exhaust stack without exploding. Another shell rained metal shards all over the bridge, knocked crew to the deck, and showered them with asbestos insulation. Robert Billie felt something strike his communications headset, and somehow his mouth was full of blood and broken teeth. Down in the engine room the hits jarred asbestos lagging from the steam pipes and blinked the lights. According to Charles Landreth, “the ship felt like it was shaking apart…. There was a noise on the earphones, and it felt like it blew my eardrums out. Then for a short time the phones were dead…. Then someone got on the phones and said we had been hit and everyone on the bridge had been killed.”

  Quartermaster Neil Dethlefs could see a large ship on the northern horizon, bright flashes leaping from its two forward turrets. The silent yellow strobes of light were followed, after a delay of several dozen seconds, by a rising, freight-train roar as the large shells ripped into the sea. He saw three hit to port and three more to starboard. “I was sure the next salvo was coming into the pilothouse,” he wrote later. “I prayed that if it did, I would get the full package and not be left with an arm or leg missing.”

  “It didn’t appear we would be alive much longer,” said Charles Landreth. “Up to this time the thought of us not making it hadn’t bothered me much. I still had not seen with my eyes people getting killed. But that was soon to come. Fear was written on everyone’s face in the engine room.” The senior engineering officer, Lt. Joe Worling, was coming and going, moving back and forth between the engine room and the fireroom that energized his turbines with steam. From the expression in their lieutenant’s eyes, the men understood their chances. “I could tell by looking at him that our ship was in its first and last surface engagement,” Landreth said.

  * * *

  IF SHEER HUMAN WILL could have propelled the USS Hoel on a southwesterly course back toward the carriers, she would have made thirty-six knots. As it was, on only one good engine, steered manually, and confronted with an unceasing rain of fire from multiple enemy ships, the destroyer had no chance to escape. As the rainsqualls began to yield to the morning sun, the Japanese had a clear view of the stricken tin can, which now paid the price for Leon Kintberger’s gallant headlong run into the enemy’s midst.

  The wounded vessel was trapped in a savage crossfire. A cruiser was close by, so close at some four thousand yards that even the forty-millimeter guns could hit her. Their rhythmic thumping was in syncopation with the blasts of the two forward five-inchers. Targets were in oversupply, but so were Japanese shells. They came from both sides, whistling and roaring and crashing to starboard and port; exploding overhead, filling the air with candy colors and showering the decks with shrapnel, drilling straight through the hull. Lieutenant Dix:

  You heard the whistling whine and grinding thud,

  The iron rumble following the blast,

  The rattle of the instruments and gear.

  You felt the shudder running through the hull.

  The shaking of the deck beneath your feet.

  The quiver in your limbs as each one struck.

  The masts and radars toppled down on deck,

  Main Radio and Charthouse took a hit,

  Boats, life rafts, stacks, were riddled with the spray

  Of lead and steel from air bursts crashing high.

  The decks were a killing field. Bob Prater sought refuge in the aft torpedo room, but it was full of corpses. He moved to the port side and saw steam coming out of the fireroom. “The men were coming out mortally scalded…. There was blood and bodies everywhere.”

  Around this time the skipper of the Raymond, Lt. Cdr. A. F. Beyer, Jr., spotted an American ship taking a terrific beating. He thought it was the Samuel B. Roberts, but Copeland’s ship had yet to be hit—it was more likely the Hoel. That he apparently mistook the destroyer for a destroyer escort may have been testimony to the battering Kintberger’s ship had taken. Her silhouette was scarcely even recognizable anymore. Her mast had fallen over the superstructure. She had only two working five-inch guns. Captain Beyer could see her rapid-fire salvos going out at the enemy. The bombardment that came in return was horrifying. It appeared to overwhelm her, swallowing the ship in a “curtain of flashes.”

  A salvo struck the Hoel below the waterline, bulling through the forward engine room and letting in the sea. Lt. Cdr. John Plumb got many of his men out before they were drowned at their stations and secured the boilers before they could blow. But this hit sealed the Hoel’s fate. Her last engine was gone. Slowly, and ever more slowly, the Hoel drifted, her list worsening by the minute.

  Japanese heavy cruisers and battleships were firing point-blank into her hull. Bobby DeSpain took cover on the deck beside the depth charge racks. “Lying on the deck,” he recalled, “I lo
oked down at myself and thought I’d been hit. My body was covered with blood and gore that had flowed aft down the gutters onto me.”

  The Hoel’s two forward guns fired back, crudely aimed, in the absence of a working Fox Dog set and Mark 37 gun director, by the surface-search SG radar. The Tone-class cruiser looming just two thousand yards to port had slowed down. Whether it did so from battle damage or to steady its gun platform for a final, killing fusillade is not known. It presented an excellent target for gunners who were not ready to quit. The top hatch of Gun 52 was open, and Chester Fay, the gun captain, was standing up out of it, congratulating his crew in the mount whenever they scored a hit. On the bridge Lieutenant Dix saw him and was moved: “He looked up toward the bridge as if to say, ‘We’re still not licked—we’ve got a few rounds left. We’ll sink the bastard if she stays that close.’”

  Fay and his counterparts in Gun 51 swung their mounts to starboard and engaged three destroyers closing in to the point that machine guns could have opened fire to good effect had they been working. Someone on the bridge shouted the command to open fire, but power was gone and most of the men on the forties just forward of the superstructure were dead or wounded. Aft, the prospects were still worse. The light weaponry back there had been ripped to pieces and smashed, bent down and wrenched from the deck plates. Dix saw the crews of some destroyed guns hunkered behind their shields. A shell from the Tone-class cruiser passed through a bulkhead and through a forward magazine, starting a fire that raged below Gun 51. But its crew blasted away at one of the Japanese destroyers, which continued to press in, undaunted. Off the Hoel’s starboard bow, the stubby blue form of a Wildcat fighter plane appeared. The aircraft fell on a Japanese destroyer, coming in low and fast, a rain of spent shell cases cascading from its wings. The storm of .50-caliber lead rattled the Japanese destroyer so hard that the sound of the ricochets and penetrations could be heard on the decks of Kintberger’s ship.

  As the Hoel drifted, a shell struck the forward stack. Lt. (jg) Myles Barrett, the supply officer, was standing on the catwalk by the forty-millimeter remote control console, filming the battle with the ship’s sixteen-millimeter movie camera. The hit set the ship’s whistle shrieking. Some of the crew thought it was the abandon ship signal. From the bridge, Lieutenant Dix looked down on the decks and watched men dragging wounded to the rails and leaping into the sea. “They took no life jackets, left rafts and nets, nothing to hold them up but their arms. More than a hundred must have gone this way. They couldn’t hear us yelling from the bridge.”

  Roy Lozano was climbing the ladder from the forward fireroom when the blast wave from the hit struck him. Whoever was above him on the ladder was blown to pieces. “The force of the explosion was so great that it ripped the seam right out of my pants,” he recalled. “But we continued to climb up only to walk over dead bodies.

  When we arrived topside, we went to the port side of the ship to try to get one of the lifeboats down. I don’t know why we were trying to get it down, as it was shot full of holes.”

  The explosion in the fireroom collapsed the bulkhead that separated it from the emergency generator room, a compartment be-lowdecks that housed the electrical generator that kicked in if main power boards failed. Glen Foster, an interior communications electrician, was knocked to the floor as the generator toppled down on him. As hot steam poured into his space, he pushed open the hatch leading forward from his small compartment but found only smoke and fire. He tried going up to the next deck, but the escape hatch was jammed. Foster panicked when he discovered that he’d been turning the hatch the wrong way. He opened it finally, made his way through an escape hatch that led through the internal communications room, and found that it had become a charnel house, piled to a sickening depth with bodies and body parts.

  One of the hits the Hoel took destroyed the ship’s safe. As supply officer, Myles Barrett was responsible for disbursing cash to the crew on payday. With the shattering of the large iron deposit box, suddenly it was payday. “Money was fluttering everywhere. Bills came blasting out of a hole in the bulkhead,” Barrett said. The fifty-dollar bills settled and stuck fast on the deck, the gruesome windfall drifting with the flow of blood down into the bilges.

  * * *

  THE SHIPS OF TAFFY 3’s screen fired the last of their torpedoes when Captains Beyer of the Raymond and Sig Hansen of the Dennis answered Sprague’s call, releasing their three torpedoes at a Japanese heavy cruiser not long after the Roberts did, and observing, but claiming no credit for, at least one hit. After his torpedoes were gone, Beyer wheeled the Raymond around to a 110-degree course, swiftly crossing four miles of sea, barking away with her main batteries until the range to the Japanese heavy cruiser was just 5,700 yards. The Raymond acquitted herself well enough in her ensuing gunnery duel with the Haguro to brag in any company. The crew in the handling room below Gun 52 worked so hard that several men collapsed from heat exhaustion. The aft repair party relieved them, with only slightly less impressive results, although some time-delay-fused antiaircraft rounds found their way into the hoist, resulting in a few shells exploding prematurely en route to the target. The Raymond fired 414 rounds of five-inch ammunition at the Haguro, landing numerous hits all across her superstructure. Then, improbably, the Haguro turned and headed away to the east, and Beyer checked the Raymond’s fire.

  * * *

  THE SMOKE FLOATING OVER the seas in the vicinity of the Johnston was so thick that Captain Evans ordered Bob Hagen not to fire his battery unless he could actually see what he intended to shoot. He had no idea what had become of his sister ships in the screen. No sense adding to their misery by hitting them with friendly fire.

  Through the smoke, cruising seven thousand yards off the Johnston’s port beam, Hagen spotted the profile of the 36,000-ton British-built monster, the Kongo. The pagoda superstructure and mainmast seemed to crowd the shortened forecastle, where two twin fourteen-inch gun mounts lay. A third main battery mount sat just behind the after mast. Some distance farther aft, set so far astern gun number three as to accentuate her tremendous length, was her fourth main gun. Hagen took in the sight of the battleship and muttered to himself, “Well, I sure as hell can see that.” Once more he slewed his director toward a new target and closed his firing key.

  In just forty seconds the destroyer sent thirty shells at the leviathan, landing by Hagen’s estimation fifteen hits on the superstructure tower. “As far as accomplishing anything decisive, it was like bouncing paper wads off a steel helmet,” Hagen would later write, “but we did kill some Japs and knocked out a few small guns. Then we ran back into our smoke. The BB belched a few fourteen-inchers at us but, thank God, registered only clean misses.”

  Several miles behind the other surviving ships of Taffy 3’s screen, the Johnston headed south at half speed. Overtaking Evans’s ship to port was the cruiser line and the battleships behind them. To her right a line of enemy destroyers advanced to gunnery range. As wicked as the crossfire was, a sight now commanded everyone’s attention on the Johnston’s bridge: an escort carrier, listing to port, dead in the water and taking heavy fire. It was the Gambier Bay.

  Thirty-two

  Given her position on the windward side of the formation, the Gambier Bay rode in nearly plain sight of the cruisers to her east, her own smoke screen, and that of the tailing destroyer screen blown to the west. There was no telling how many ships had drawn a bead on her now. Under fire for nearly ninety minutes, the Gambier Bay, steaming behind the Kalinin Bay, took her first hit at 8:20, when a shell penetrated her forward engine room. The sea flooded in, and even the strenuous exertions of the bilge pumps and two portable submersible pumps could not prevent the burners from being swamped. As machinists secured the flooded boilers, the speed differential between the damaged CVE and her pursuers opened widely. The tight circle of Taffy 3’s six escort carriers stretched and fractured as the Gambier Bay, struggling along at eleven knots, dropped out of the formation and receded toward the cruisers closing
in on her port quarter.

  A signalman on the Gambier Bay’s twenty-four-inch carbon arc searchlight, Don Heric, spotted three ships to the southeast flashing a recognition signal. They were the Taffy 2 destroyers Hailey, Haggard, and Franks, which Admiral Stump had ordered north to intercept any Japanese ships that might pursue his CVEs. Ens. Cole Williams, the Gambier Bay’s signal officer, ordered Heric to acknowledge the challenge and request assistance. The signalman opened the shutters of his lamp and blinkered, “WE ARE UNDER ATTACK, PLEASE HELP.” No sooner had he finished the message than a large shell ripped the air close enough to burn his forearms and knock Williams to the deck. In turn, the Taffy 2 destroyers blinkered Morse for R— standard shorthand for “message received”—then turned and withdrew to the south. Upon learning at 8:17 that Japanese battleship shells were straddling his destroyers, Taffy 2 commander Admiral Stump decided against risking his most capable escorts in a dicey offensive action. If the Japanese destroyed Taffy 3 and continued south, he would need them for his own defense. Chased by salvos of fourteen-inch shells, the Hailey, the Haggard, and the Franks turned and raced south after having closed, unmolested, to within fifteen thousand yards of the Haruna and the Kongo.

  High above, Edward Huxtable, commander of the Gambier Bay’s air group, VC-10, sighted the carrier taking concentrated fire from Japanese cruisers. As the FM-2 Wildcats escorting him winged over into strafing runs, Huxtable turned, descended, and leveled off in a mock torpedo attack. He made four such runs, each time keeping up the ruse, flying level with bomb bay doors open. Each time he did so, he attracted a lot of attention from Japanese antiaircraft gunners. Then Huxtable became aware of reinforcements on the way. “I heard flight leaders from the other CVE group preparing for attacks,” he said, “and decided that the situation was much improved and left for Tacloban at 0915 to bomb up.”