The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  Whoever was out on the advance flank was taking a terrific beating. The others would be fairly well protected in her smoke and the smoke they were laying for the protection of the carriers. So every few minutes, when it got too heavy going on the outboard flank, whoever was up there would cut in to the right, fall in, and come down on the inside of the formation; and the next one would push out. We … just played leapfrog and kept peeling off.

  Looming to port was the Chikuma, so close that everyone topside on the Roberts watched in fascination. Her eight big guns flashed and smoked, launching eight-inch shells at the carriers. Copeland headed toward her, closing the range between them until the heavy cruiser was almost directly off the Roberts’s port beam. The destroyer escort’s torpedoes were gone. Guns were all she had left. But in gunnery as in every other line of business aboard a destroyer escort, the Roberts’s crew made do with what they had. “I came a little bit left,” Copeland recalled, “and when the range was closed down some more, I said, ‘Mr. Burton, you may open fire.’”

  Even as his guns blazed defiantly at the Japanese cruiser, the skipper of the Roberts could not help but be taken with the imperial warship’s sleek lines: “It was a beautiful ship. It had quite a flare on its bow and had four turrets all forward, a long fo’c’sle and the turrets alternated—a low one, a high one, a low one, and a high one—right up the fo’c’sle.” As the Roberts approached, two of those turrets trained slowly to starboard to engage the Roberts, while the other two continued shelling the carriers.

  So began the 1,250-ton destroyer escort’s duel with a heavy cruiser twelve times her weight. The necessity of the engagement did nothing to squelch the crew’s fear. Most everyone felt it. Some were well-nigh paralyzed by it, cowering in passageways and behind bulkheads as if the ship’s thin metal plate would do anything more than block their view of the incoming projectiles. “Anybody who says that he didn’t get scared in a situation like this is either a liar or a damn fool,” Copeland wrote. “The point is, though, that you didn’t stay scared.”

  Naval combat offered nowhere to run, no foxholes to dive into. You had no way to know whether the next round would fall ahead of you, behind you, to the left or right, or come burning straight in, right down Lucifer’s pike. No degree of personal cleverness could defuse or deflect a shell bound in a particular sailor’s direction. Against a faster, more powerful opponent, a sailor had neither the hope to vanquish him nor the possibility to flee. The Roberts had no way out but through this enemy cruiser. There thus remained only the duty to engage it. No one shirked from that duty. “[A]s soon as the splashes had settled back, practically everyone was over it; from then on, for the most part, we were just too busy operating and fighting the ship to think about being scared.” And no one in Taffy 3 fought more resolutely than the man who led the crew of the aft gun turret on the Samuel B. Roberts, Paul Henry Carr.

  All through the Roberts’s wartime service, Carr kept his aft five-inch gun—designated Gun 52 or gun number two on a destroyer escort—clean, primed, and ready for action. His skipper considered the gunner’s mate third class valuable not merely for his ability to keep his weapon mechanically fit but for his leadership skills as well. “Gun number two had a crew just out of this world,” Copeland wrote. “It had been outstanding from the time we shook down.”

  As the captain of gun number two, Carr was responsible for maintaining the delicate machinery of his mount in the midst of an inhospitable saltwater environment, and he was the catalyst to the odd mix of seamen and petty officers who manned his gun at general quarters. Carr was its full-time caretaker. “He kept that gun the way a very meticulous housewife keeps her kitchen and kitchen utensils,” Copeland wrote. “It was absolutely spotless. It is not an exaggeration to say you could have eaten off the deck of that gun mount at any time.”

  Back home in Checotah, Oklahoma, Carr had painted a bull’s-eye on the barn and practiced long-snapping a football at it for hours on end. He was no less fastidious aboard the Roberts. His best qualities had a way of rubbing off on his crewmen. Seaman second class Bill Stovall, a teenage enlistee, was the pointer on Carr’s crew. “I doubt if [Stovall] weighed more than 115 pounds dripping wet,” Copeland wrote. “He was just a little shaver, but he was cool as a cucumber.” Gilbert Stansbury, the loader, and James Gregory, the trainer, were two more good men. Their counterparts on the forecastle in Gun 51 were well drilled and adept. But the gang in Gun 52 surpassed them. “It just happens that his crew on our number-two gun was the best I have ever seen and I imagine one of the best that has ever existed,” Copeland wrote. “That crew was, in fact, so good that another very good gun crew, namely number one, looked more or less mediocre by comparison.”

  Unlike the guns on the larger destroyers, the gunnery system on the Roberts was relatively rudimentary, with no centralized fire-control system to direct it. A gunner on a destroyer escort could get a range from the CIC, where the exec oversaw the use of the ship’s Fox Dog surface radar. In a pinch the Mark 51 director that guided the forty-millimeter antiaircraft guns could fill in. But destroyer escort gunnery was largely a nineteenth-century affair. Their pointers and trainers were busy men.

  Copeland thought he might have inadvertently discovered a weakness of the vaunted Japanese ship: its inability to hit targets too close to it. The Chikuma was so close to the low-lying DE that her gunners seemed to have trouble depressing their guns sufficiently to take the Roberts under fire. At that depressed angle the gunners couldn’t reload. Each time the Japanese cruiser let loose with a flaming, windy blast, the guns would rise up and the turrets would turn inboard as the crew reloaded. Silently then the guns would train out again. “We’d see the flash of fire; then we’d hear the blast, and seemingly much later but actually at about the same time—whoosh— they’d go right over our heads.”

  Copeland’s two gun crews had no such trouble. Though it was debatable what damage the Roberts’s battery could do to a heavy cruiser, there was no doubting that Paul Carr, Bill Stovall, James Gregory, Sammy Blue, Gilbert Stansbury, and the rest of Gun 52’s crew had found their groove.

  The boys took the ammunition just the way it came up the hoist—nobody cared what it was. They just took it as it came. Five-inch blind loaded and plugged, five-inch AA, five-inch common, five-inch AP, five-inch star shells, five-inch proximity fuse: just whatever came up the ammunition hoist. It was all fodder for the guns. They threw it in as fast as they could get it. It was very odd to see those star shells banging off over there in the daylight.

  The Roberts couldn’t match the output of Bob Hagen’s teams on the Johnston, Bill Sanders’s on the Hoel, or Bill Meadors’s on the Heermann, but they did well enough. In thirty-five minutes of shooting, Carr’s squad in Gun 52 popped off 324 rounds at the enemy. Gun 51 on the forecastle fired 284 more.

  Five-inch guns were useless shooting at a heavily armored hull, but they made a fair mess out of an exposed position. Each hit produced sheets of flame and choking gusts of metallic and asbestos dust. The star shells unloosed furiously sizzling showers of phosphorus that ate metal and flesh alike. One such hit in the right place could be debilitating; several score of them concentrated over the compact topside decks of a heavy cruiser and delivered in a short space of time could re-create purgatory itself. From what Copeland and other observers on the Roberts could see, the result of their shooting was devastating to the Chikuma: “We had the Jap cruiser on fire from the start of her bridge superstructure, just above the main deck, clear up to the fighting tops—absolutely an inferno of flames.” The cruiser’s number-three gun turret was knocked out, the bridge battered repeatedly, fires set aft, underneath the secondary control tower.

  But while fires raged seventy-five feet above the Chikuma’s mainmast, the cruiser didn’t falter. Capt. Saiji Norimitsu’s determined gunners kept up a steady rate of fire at her two targets, the Samuel B. Roberts and the stricken Gambier Bay. Though the carrier made an easy target, amazingly, an hour and forty-five minutes
into the battle the Roberts hadn’t been touched. Now, fighting beam to beam with a ship twelve times her displacement, she seemed to be getting the better of it. As for the opposing Goliath, there was no mistaking the fact that the Chikuma was in some serious trouble. Her number-three gun, the third one back from the bow, was no longer firing. Her bridge was a crudely holed wreck of scorched and twisted steel. Several small fires could be seen feeding on the superstructure behind the bridge.

  Thirty-five

  Despite the dauntless work of its screening ships, by 8:40 the Gambier Bay’s fate was sealed. A salvo from a Japanese cruiser knocked out its steering hydraulics, sliced off the starboard propeller, and quenched the ship’s last source of steam power, the number-three boiler. On the flight deck of the Gambier Bay, Lt. (jg) Hank Pyzdrowski, stranded when his ship turned out of the wind, had nothing else to do but watch the silhouettes of Japanese ships grow steadily larger. As a reader of fiction set during the age of fighting sail, he wondered whether the enemy cruisers might approach and try to board the stricken CVE. The pilot massaged his .38-caliber service revolver and the survival knife on his belt.

  Pyzdrowski went down to his stateroom and discovered that his locker had been rifled and his stash of scotch raided. He sat down to collect his thoughts, and Lt. George Bisbee popped in. “Need a drink?” the pilot asked, holding forth a half-drained bottle. Pyzdrowski followed his squadronmate into the adjoining room, where mattresses taken from nearby staterooms had been gathered and stacked into a large teepee, as if the layers of foam padding could stop or even slow down the cutting arc of a shrapnel burst. From within the teepee, Pyzdrowski could hear drunken voices of some of the other VC-10 pilots who had also been stranded aboard the ship.

  Empty bottles were scattered all about its base. When the after engine room was hit, the ship went dead in the water, and Capt. Walter Vieweg gave the order to abandon ship. As the emergency alarm began to sound, Pyzdrowski said to Bisbee, “Better get these guys ready to go.”

  * * *

  ONE OF THE JAPANESE officers responsible for the Gambier Bay’s destruction, Capt. Haruo Mayuzumi, the skipper of the Tone, was among his nation’s foremost experts on battleship gunnery. As the executive officer on the Yamato when that great ship was put into commission, he had overseen the installation of her massive 18.1-inch guns, whose bore size was so secret that even Admiral Kurita did not know it. As a tactical instructor at the naval gunnery school at Yokusuka in the years leading up to Pearl Harbor, Mayuzumi had studied intercepts of the radio chatter exchanged between U.S. battleship commanders and seaplane spotters during gunnery drills off the California coast. Japanese submarines and merchant ships readily eavesdropped on the plain-language play-by-play, and the Imperial Japanese Navy tallied the statistics as diligently as their counterparts did.

  At a range of 22,000 yards, the Japanese learned, American battleships hit their targets just seven percent of the time. Japanese heavies scored at a rate three times that. Mayuzumi led the effort to open that performance gap still further. He knew that if the shells were fired at flat enough angles to the water, they need not actually “hit” a ship at all. A near miss that struck the water close aboard, continuing on an underwater path, could land the most devastating blow of all: a hit below the waterline. Fired from 22,000 yards, a sixteen-inch battleship shell entering the water at a seventeen-degree angle to the surface could penetrate seventy-six millimeters of face-hardened armor even if it “missed” by twenty-five meters. The shells retained a velocity of 1,650 feet per second at the time when they reached their targets. The key was making sure that the angle of entry was flat enough. If it was, the so-called “danger zone”—the surface area in which a shell might land and still cause major damage to the ship—extended 143 meters from the target’s hull. Mayuzumi did not anticipate that American innovations in radar would make his work seem primitive in comparison. But his findings influenced Japanese gunnery doctrine, which may have been why some Taffy 3 sailors witnessed shells skipping off flight decks like slices of shale across a calm pond.

  As a connoisseur of gunnery but not bloodthirsty in the art of war, Mayuzumi watched a midshipman by his side meticulously guide the fire of the Tone’s secondary battery into the hindquarter of the Gambier Bay, gunning for an engine room. Suddenly he saw U.S. sailors gathering astern near some lifeboats, preparing to abandon ship. The Japanese skipper ordered, “Ceasefire,” and directed his midshipman to aim at the forecastle, where no people could be seen.

  At roughly that time, around nine A.M., ten minutes after the abandon ship order circulated on the Gambier Bay, a flight of Wildcats fell from above and rattled the gunwales around the Tone’s bridge with squirts from their machine guns. A round struck Mayuzumi in the thigh, ricocheting off bone and ripping away an eight-by-ten-centimeter chunk of muscle. The captain fell to the deck but never left the bridge. As the ship’s surgeon tended to him, he sat there in his own blood, unable to take his eyes off the Gambier Bay’s crew calmly gathering and dropping rope ladders down into the water. He could not help but admire the Americans’ evident bravery. His devotion to gunnery had borne fruit for the empire. He had helped sink the only U.S. carrier of the war to succumb to surface gunfire. But he and his compatriots would soon assess the cost of Taffy 3’s audacious resistance, the effectiveness of which no tactician could ever have foreseen and no statistician could have measured.

  Thirty-six

  The Samuel B. Roberts was blessed with luck and a low profile to the horizon. Shells whistled by overhead as Copeland steered his ship through the effervescent whirlpools of the enemy’s misses. As he conned the ship, he stayed focused on the ocean ahead of him, paying no mind to what lay behind him. Suddenly he heard a lookout shout, “Captain, there’s fourteen-inch splashes coming up on our stern!” The battleship Kongo lay some ten thousand yards in that direction, shooting with uncanny accuracy through the haze. At 7:22 her rangefinder had been disabled by strafing Wildcats. Now it was restored. As the Cyclops fixed on the Samuel B. Roberts, the Kongo’s guns boomed salvos of 1,485-pound shells Bob Copeland’s way.

  Copeland turned and saw a procession of foaming columns walking up from behind. Gauging the progress of the explosions—the closest of them smacked the sea fifty yards astern—relative to the movement of his speeding ship, he knew what he had to do: hit the brakes. The normal procedure, designed to spare strain on expensive reduction gears, was to ratchet down from flank speed to standard, two-thirds, one-third, and stop. But Copeland’s worries went beyond the condition of Lucky Trowbridge’s precious machinery. Like a driver speeding down the freeway shifting straight into reverse, he shouted into the voice tube, “All engines back full!”

  “That was the one time the old ship really shuddered and shivered and quaked,” Copeland wrote. “She just kind of lay down and pretty nearly backed her stern under water.” The destroyer escort’s bow wave collapsed as her forward movement stopped. Almost immediately there were more sounds like runaway freight trains and an ungodly buffeting of air. Directly over the ship flew another brace of battleship shells. They smacked the ocean a hundred yards ahead, right where the Roberts would have been had Copeland not slammed on the brakes.

  The captain had no time to congratulate himself. No sooner had he called for flank speed again than a salvo from a heavy cruiser found the mark. From the barn-door range of 5,500 yards, the cruiser spat three eight-inch shells into the Roberts’s low-slung broadside. The time was 8:51.

  Seaman first class Bill Katsur “felt as though I were a bedsheet on a clothesline being whipped by a strong wind.” The hit knocked out the electrical distribution board in the internal communications gyro room, and with the loss of auxiliary power, lights throughout many lower compartments went black. Communications throughout the ship went dead too. A second shell punctured the bulkhead of the forward handling room, penetrating without exploding and duly exiting the compartment to starboard. The third hit was the most catastrophic. It struck the main deck be
low the davits that held the motor whaleboat and entered the forward fireroom. Steam lines were torn, and the steam did what steam does when it is released from high-pressure lines. Amid the sudden hissing horror, all but two men died. But Jackson McCaskill, a teenage seaman second class, retained his wits. Two weeks earlier the kid had been reassigned to the black gang in the forward fireroom because he was, according to his skipper, “an absolute flop on the deck force.” The eighteen-year-old outlived that reputation now. He coolly turned off the fires beneath the boilers and spun the valves that cut the flow of steam from the boilers and the supply of fuel into the burners. McCaskill pulled the headphones from the body of Chester Kupidlowsky, a fireman killed by the blast, and called the engine room to ask for help opening the escape hatch to let the live steam escape to the open air. Then, with the flesh on his feet burned down to white bone, McCaskill wedged his 130-pound frame under a deck grating, dropped down into the bilges, and lay prostrate against the last piece of cool steel on the ship, the bottom of the hull where the keel cut the sea.

  In the CIC, right above the punctured number-one boiler room, Tom Stevenson, the communications officer, found himself bathed in steam and choking in a storm of asbestos that was pulverized by the explosion and blown through the ventilation ducts. The shower of insulation turned him white and filled his mouth and nostrils with thick dust. The gyro and radar were out, rendering the CIC useless. Bob Roberts, Stevenson, and the rest of the CIC gang decided to evacuate the compartment and went up to the bridge, but the small enclosure was crowded with other displaced CIC personnel looking to escape the steam. Copeland ordered the bridge cleared—with the after fireroom working and two good engines, he still had a ship that could fight. Stevenson climbed up to the signal bridge. He felt a loud blast and a hot rush of wind. Some cloth sacks full of signal flags burst into flame near him, and Stevenson noticed he had taken shrapnel in his legs, but he was so scared that he didn’t feel a thing.