The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  It was plain, however, that the Gambier Bay was in deep trouble. When the engine room was abandoned five minutes after its boilers were secured, Lt. (jg) Hank Pyzdrowski, an Avenger pilot who had been stranded when his ship turned out of the headwind in favor of its own survival, felt the intensity of the deck vibrations slacken. He looked up at the ship’s tiny island superstructure and saw the battle ensign droop. With a boiler gone, the eighteen-knot ship could do only eleven knots. She began listing to port.

  The volume of ordnance flying the ship’s way was so great as to register on the ship’s surface-search radar. In the Gambier Bay’s CIC, Lt. (jg) Bill Cuming was watching the surface radar’s A-scope, taking ranges on the Japanese ships. Every now and then a quick stray blip would appear on the graph—the echo return from an inbound Japanese shell. Cuming could do nothing with that information except appreciate how long the odds were against the ship surviving much longer.

  Every minute, it seemed, a salvo landed near the ship. Usually at least one shell in each salvo inflicted some damage. The vibrations were so severe, the men had trouble staying on their feet. A shell went off behind him, and aviation machinist’s mate third class Tony Potochniak was knocked to the catwalk on the port side of the ship. He stood and moved forward, preoccupied with thoughts of what the inscription on his gravestone might say: Lost at sea, age 19 years. Potochniak found bodies laid flat across the bloodied wooden flight deck. He entered a compartment that had been turned into a first-aid station. Lt. Cdr. Wayne Stewart, VC-10’s flight surgeon, shooed him aside so he could get at a severely wounded sailor lying on a stretcher. Just then another shell hit. The blast showered shrapnel into Potochniak’s hand and legs and cut down Commander Stewart as he was tending to the man. The doctor fell dead on top of his patient.

  Photographer’s mate second class Allen Johnson was crossing a catwalk when he came upon a sailor crumpled against a bulkhead, clutching his arms in front of him and weeping softly. “I’m ruined, I’m ruined,” the kid was saying. Looking down, Johnson saw that his abdomen had been torn wide open. He walked forward, past a fortymillimeter gun mount, and encountered a crewman he had once heard griping about the boredom of life on a CVE. “When are we gonna see some real action?” this kid had wanted to know. Johnson looked at him now—he was glassy-eyed, gazing into the distance—and couldn’t resist a dig. “Well, buddy, is this enough action for you?” No answer came from his lips but a stream of little saliva bubbles.

  * * *

  AMOS HATHAWAY HEARD HIS admiral, Ziggy Sprague, cut in on the TBS circuit at 8:26: “Small boys on my starboard quarter, intercept enemy cruiser coming in on my port quarter.” Each carrier had its own gun, a single-mounted five-inch/38-caliber on its fantail, and its crew knew how to use it. But to fend off cruisers, Sprague would need the help of a real surface combatant.

  Hathaway saw the Johnston limping southward, trying to comply with Sprague’s order. It was quite evident, as Captain Evans’s stricken ship moved to interdict, that it wasn’t getting anywhere fast on one screw. A signal light blinkered the message “ONLY ONE ENGINE X NO GYRO X NO RADARS.” The destroyer was in trouble. But the Heermann still had her legs. Hathaway swung his destroyer into a tight turn to port and tore across the rear of the carrier formation toward the enemy.

  There remained the question of exactly how a destroyer bereft of torpedoes would turn away an armored ship of the line. Using double-talk on the open circuit, which he thought the enemy was surely monitoring, Hathaway tried to tell Sprague that he had no more torpedoes aboard. He heard other skippers doing the same. “As I listened,” he later recounted, “it became evident that there wasn’t a torpedo among us. Anything we could do from now on would have to be mostly bluff.”

  The Heermann broke from the smoke to find the squat bulk of an escort carrier bearing down on her off the port bow. It was the Fanshaw Bay. Hathaway backed down to a stop to avoid a collision; then, when the ship was out of the way, he had a clear view of what Sprague was anxious about. Ahead lay the Gambier Bay, afire amidships, listing twenty degrees to port, and taking a ceaseless battering from a Tone-class cruiser to her east. The wounded carrier obscured most of the Japanese ship, so Hathaway maneuvered to gain a clearer line of sight. As his viewing geometry improved, he made out the silhouettes of three more cruisers in the haze. He thought he could see two larger ships looming to the rear.

  The Heermann’s wake boiled as Amos Hathaway’s ship regained steam. Soon she was making top speed toward the Japanese cruisers. So many Japanese ships were firing on the Heermann that the ship was like a chameleon. Each time a new salvo landed near, she was doused in a different color. Each time the destroyer’s bow bit into a wave, the water rinsed the decks and gunwales clean until a shell bearing a different hue crashed a column of seawater across her decks again. Green, yellow, red, and undyed splashes rose near the ship, one after another. Chief yeoman Harold Whitney looked at his skipper and noticed that Hathaway had been dyed red from head to foot.

  The gun boss, Lieutenant Meadors, kept up a steady cadence of fire all the way in. His five gun crews kept their breech trays loaded while below them the shell hoists cycled continuously, drawing ammunition up from the handling rooms as the men down there pushed powder cases through the scuttles in the bases of the turrets. His nostrils stung by the smell of cordite and burning cork and human sweat, seaman first class Stanley Urbanski was down in Gun 52’s handling room.

  Round after round I take from [Ralph] Sacco, placing it in the scuttle. As the previous round is removed, I push up a new one and secure it in its seat. Forty, fifty rounds, then the violent action of the ship, a brief pause. Just enough time to bring up more shells from the lower handling room. Many times more, rapid fire, no time for thought. Keep a powder charge in the scuttle. No talk, only Sacco’s orders to keep the lower hoist moving. The human machine works flawlessly. We still know nothing of the happenings around us. No feelings, no interruptions, just keep a powder in the scuttle.

  James Boulton’s crew in Gun 52 made good use of Sacco’s and Urbanski’s efficiency. Spent shell cases rattled and rolled across the deck as the Heermann blazed away, firing some five hundred shells in a twenty-minute duel with a Tone-class cruiser. Meadors counted fifty hits. The destroyer’s bombardment started several fires aboard her foe. From his lookout’s position on the bridge, Wallace Hock could see Japanese sailors being blown into the air from the ship’s deck. There appeared to be internal explosions. A large fire raged astern, where the Tone-class ships had their big seaplane hangars.

  The men in Gun 52, directly forward of and below the bridge, did their jobs too well. The concussion from their fire rang in Hath-away’s ears, so he climbed to the fire-control platform to escape the cacophony, outside Lieutenant Meadors’s gun director mount. The extra elevation improved his view of the seascape. He shouted course changes into the voice tube leading down into the pilothouse, running an eastward zigzag course, chasing roiling shell splashes to keep his ship alive. The enemy’s salvos were landing closer and closer to the ship, the Japanese correcting their fire in hundred-yard steps. Hathaway could see the tight triple sets of splashes moving in his direction. The ones closest to him were red.

  Destroyers did not sortie alone against columns of superior warships without paying the price. Captain Hathaway’s ship had no more business surviving this approach than Captain Evans’s Johnston had had coming through its solo run. Now a salvo found the Heermann. An eight-inch shot from a cruiser ripped through the ship’s bow, blowing a five-foot hole in the hull and flooding the forward magazines.

  Another shell struck Hathaway’s destroyer amidships. It tore through an exhaust uptake leading from the boilers to the stack and exploded in a supply locker. Lt. Bob Rutter, the ship’s supply officer and paymaster, was standing on a spotting platform that girdled the after stack. The explosion knocked him down against the stack, and a hot blast washed over him, covering him with a sticky substance. The new father—he had become a dad i
n January 1944, while the Heermann was at sea—prayed, “God, let me see my wife and son.” He wiped a hand across his face, expecting to find blood and gore. After a terrified pause, Rutter realized he was all right, and lucky too. The mess that covered him was navy beans, cooked in storage by the blast of the shell, steamed by the sudden heat, and blown through the uptake, washing him in a blast of paste. According to Harold Whitney, Rutter “scraped the beans from his eyes and looked around with a gaze that wouldn’t believe the things it saw. He was still here.” Captain Hathaway later speculated that after this incident Rutter wouldn’t mind if he never ate another serving of beans.

  With the hits forward, Gun 52’s handling room was plunged into darkness. According to Stanley Urbanski, “Suddenly all thought was lost in an explosion, total darkness, the ear-shattering hiss of a broken air ejection line. Bright red flecks scattered around our closed and dark cubicle, red-hot shrapnel. Fear sets in, I pray to my God.” Urbanski heard the sounds and felt the tremors, and his imagination filled in the rest. “Heermann is smashing through the sea. The firing starts again. Then the most violent tremor of all, a great explosion, and our Lady is wounded. She seems to have started her way to her grave. Down, down by the bow, what seems like eternity.”

  As the inrushing water dragged down the bow, Hathaway momentarily thought his ship might run itself beneath the waves: “We were so far down by the head that our anchors were dragging in the bow wave, throwing torrents of water on the deck.” He considered slowing the ship to reduce pressure on the critical forward bulkheads, which crewmen belowdecks had raced to buttress with odd lengths of timber. The first lieutenant, Bill Sefton, reached Harold Whitney over the phones and pleaded with him to ask the captain to slow down. The damage to the belowdecks compartments was evident in the voluminous litter of cigarette cartons and toilet paper bobbing on the edge of the ship’s bow wake. Having weighed the risks of slowing down to stem the progressive flooding, Hathaway chose to stay at speed. He was well aware of what had happened to the Johnston and the Hoel after they slowed down. Speed was his only real defense. Whitney relayed the skipper’s refusal to Sefton, saying, “Just put more shoring in there and hope it holds.”

  Another shell, a smaller one, probably from a destroyer, struck the bridge below Hathaway, scattering shrapnel in every direction. The navigator took a spray of steel full in the face, which was left pockmarked by metal fragments, as if he had been maimed with a shotgun blast from a nonlethal distance. Its impact was dampened by the man standing beside him, who crumpled to the deck. An aviator from the Gambier Bay whom the Heermann had pulled out of the sea the previous day, Lt. (jg) Walter “Bucky” Dahlen, was cut down too. He had dodged fate the day before when he tried to land his Avenger on the carrier with his bomb load still slung aboard. Caught in a slipstream flying an overloaded plane, he was short on his approach. Mac McClendon, the Gambier Bay’s veteran landing signal officer, tried to wave him off, but it was too late. Dahlen’s plane bounced hard, lost power, and plowed into the sea ahead of the carrier. Hathaway’s ship, which had plane guard duty on October 24, picked Dahlen out of the sea. The skipper put the flier to immediate use on the bridge, assigning him to help spot and identify incoming aircraft. Dahlen was supposed to transfer back to VC-10 that morning. He never got the chance.

  Harold Whitney saw the carnage in the pilothouse, saw blood running across the deck, and knew in an instant that everyone had been killed. With chief quartermaster John P. Milley lying apparently dead on deck, the wheel was abandoned, and the Heermann was running headlong toward the column of Japanese battleships, range point-blank—2,500 yards—and closing. Whitney seized the wheel and spun it around, away from the enemy leviathans, then called the executive officer, saying the bridge watch had been killed and he didn’t know where the captain was. When Whitney suggested that the exec probably ought to be conning the ship, the officer insisted that his radar-assisted view of the battle from the CIC was probably better than what he would have on the bridge. “Continue what you’re doing,” the exec said. “If I want you to change course, I’ll tell you.”

  Whitney steered the ship as he had seen the skipper do it so many times, chasing shell splashes and hoping for the best. Then he felt a hand pulling at his pant leg. It was Milley. “I’ll take it,” the quartermaster told Whitney. He was bleeding, barely conscious. “I’ll take it,” he insisted. Harold Whitney helped Milley to his feet, searching him for wounds and asking if he was all right. “I’ll take it.” That was all Milley would say. Satisfied that the chief was fit for his old job, Whitney went in search of Captain Hathaway, finding him on the flying bridge, shouting steering orders into the voice tube. Whitney hadn’t heard a single one of them. He never let on that his captain’s orders had been for naught, and Hathaway didn’t seem to suspect anything was awry. Regardless of who had been doing the conning, there was no arguing with the outcome. The Heermann had survived her impossible run against the main Japanese strength.

  * * *

  THE STRICKEN GAMBIER BAY had fallen into the enveloping advance of the Japanese formation. There was nothing anyone in Taffy 3 could do about it. A heavy cruiser was blasting away at the CVE at an alarmingly close range. Observing the carrier’s plight, Captain Evans of the Johnston issued what Bob Hagen considered “the most courageous order I’ve ever heard.” The skipper said, “Commence firing on that cruiser, Hagen. Draw her fire on us and away from the Gambier Bay.” Hagen could see that all four turrets of the cruiser, with its distinctive flared prow, were swung out toward the carrier.

  While the Japanese ship bracketed the carrier with its eight-inch salvos, Evans closed to six thousand yards, and Hagen loosed a fusillade that scored repeatedly. The cruiser’s four turrets, however, stayed trained on the carrier. Hagen considered the Japanese captain’s decision to ignore the Johnston foolish; he figured the Japanese ship had more than enough firepower to do in both targets.

  At about 8:40, before Ernest Evans could press his attack further against the cruisers to Sprague’s port quarter, a column of four destroyers appeared behind the Johnston to starboard, closing rapidly with the carriers. It was Rear Adm. Susumu Kimura’s Tenth Destroyer Squadron, led by the light cruiser Yahagi. At about eight o’clock, as the Yamato was running north to avoid the Heermann’s torpedoes, strafing Wildcats had sent the Yahagi and her consorts into a wide circular evasive maneuver. By the time Kimura’s squadron finally came around and reoriented itself on a southerly course parallel to and four miles west of the Yamato and about ten miles to the northwest of the heavy cruiser column, it had nearly performed, by accident, the maneuver that Ziggy Sprague had earlier feared the whole Japanese fleet would attempt: it was slicing through the arc of his retreat. As Kimura’s squadron bore down on Sprague’s starboard beam, the American admiral was sandwiched between it and the heavy cruisers to the east.

  Had Kurita’s attack been planned more deliberately, Kimura might have been joined in this attack by the Second Destroyer Squadron, which consisted of seven destroyers led by the light cruiser Noshiro. But that unit’s progress had been delayed by relentless aerial strafing. According to Admiral Ugaki, at least twice planes from the Taffies forced the Noshiro and her consorts to turn away to duck eviscerating hails of .50-caliber slugs.

  Ernest Evans, seeing the looming threat to the carriers, ordered Bob Hagen to check his fire against the heavy cruiser and turned westward toward the Yahagi and her four destroyers. Closing to within ten thousand yards of the enemy ships, Evans ordered Hagen to engage the light cruiser leading the column. Hagen scored hits practically from the first salvo. He kept up the fire until the Johnston was just 7,500 yards from the Yahagi. The American tin can took several hits from five-inch shells fired by Kimura’s destroyers in return. But twelve of her own struck the Yahagi.

  Then, Hagen wrote, “a most amazing thing happened. The destroyer leader [the Yahagi] proceeded to turn ninety degrees to the right and break off the action.” The lieutenant watched in astonishment as
the light cruiser began withdrawing to the west. He shifted his aim to the next ship in line, a destroyer. Hagen didn’t know how far the Johnston could push its luck: “they were sleek, streamlined Terutsuki-class vessels, our match in tonnage and weight of guns, but not our match in marksmanship, crippled as we were. We should have been duck soup for them.”

  The captain of Gun 55 on the fantail, Clint Carter, a Texan from the Sweetwater-Abilene area, was screaming down to the handling room, “More shells! More shells!” One of his gang grumbled, “I’m sure glad there ain’t no Japs from Texas.” Drollery in the face of mortal danger was a common sign of a disciplined combat team, and Carter had a good one. His projectileman, boatswain’s mate first class Harry Longacre, was one of the best. He was strong as a bull and demanded his own space. Nothing seemed to scare him—he had had a warship blown out from under him earlier in the war, so what else was there to fear? Given to wearing gold hoop earrings, one in each ear, Longacre cut a unique profile on the crew. He was a rebel. People referred to him as “Asiatic,” which meant he marched to a different drummer. By some accounts he was a lousy boatswain’s mate who resisted the command hierarchy. Once he went to Captain’s Mast and got busted all the way back down to seaman second for a disciplinary infraction. But at general quarters you didn’t want anybody else handling the projectiles. Harry Longacre was fast, agile, and strong. Eighteen times a minute he pulled a fifty-four-pound projectile off the shell hoist and laid it into the loading tray in sequence with the powderman, who placed a powder case on the tray behind the shell. Then the hydraulic rammer assembly shoved the tray forward, socking the shell firmly into the lands and grooves of the bore. Without electrical power, on partial local control, Gun 55 had been firing almost without break from the time of the first torpedo run. Guns 51 and 52 forward kept up a steady pace throughout the fight too.