The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  The sound of water lapping at the raft,

  The voices of the others talking low,

  The strange unwelcome stillness of the scene,

  Brought home the dreadful loneliness and loss

  Because their ship was the first to go under, the battle passed them by, the American ships disappearing over the southern horizon. Their solitude lasted only for a few minutes. Soon enough elements of the pursuing Japanese fleet appeared. John Dix heard the deep thrum of large diesel engines and saw the low form of an approaching column of destroyers. Good God, haven’t they done enough to us today? he thought. He assumed he and his men would be butchered where they swam. The Japs would do to them precisely what the gunners and Marines aboard the Hoel had done to some Japanese seven months ago, at Emirau. Most everybody remembered the canoe incident at Emirau, though no one was eager to speak the name.

  In March, during the drive to bypass and isolate the Japanese stronghold at Rabaul, the Fourth Marine Division had taken the island in the St. Matthias Group. The troops had met little resistance, and the Hoel and other destroyers patrolling the surrounding waters aimed to keep it that way. They were guarding against covert reinforcement by sea when they got their first up-close glimpse of Japanese fighting men. The destroyer came upon a native war canoe and found that it was filled with local kids, boys. It was strange, everyone thought. What were they doing in a combat zone? At least they took them for kids—until they got closer, and a man stood up in the canoe and started shooting them, one by one. They were Japanese soldiers. Their leader was not about to let them get taken prisoner.

  Their audience aboard the Hoel didn’t cotton to enemy gunfire opening up so close to them. They finished what the Japanese commander started. The forward forties were the first to open up—poo-poom, poo-poom. As the destroyer circled the skiff, the Marine detachment added their rifle fire to the fray. No one was left alive on that canoe.

  Would the Japanese return the favor now?

  Dix expected the sound of machine guns to rip the air. There was no hiding in the raft, yet there Commander Thomas and others were, crouching down inside as if they could conceal themselves. Seeing the futility of possum-playing and more than a little curious to see the men who had done in his proud ship, Dix watched the four destroyers approach. The first one struck him as absurdly huge. The Hoel must have looked that way to the soldiers on that canoe.

  And see the men, how tall they seem, how clean And neatly dressed, not like we’ve heard they look. They’re not at battle stations anymore, But khaki uniforms—must be marines. They’ve got a landing force aboard these ships. Look at ’em grin and point—they’re wavin’ now. Duck down, duck down—Okay—she’s passed on by. But there’s the second. Look! Her fish are gone. They fired the fish all right. Damn, here’s the third. Wait, she’s been hit. There, by the bridge. But she’s The only one. The others all seem clean, Well-painted. Hell, these ships are smart.

  As the last enemy tin can approached, Dix feared he had pressed his luck too far with his rubbernecking. He ducked under water again and hid under the raft. Something must have told him this ship would have the killer crew. The ship steamed by, and as the raft rocked on the swells above his head, he raged at his powerlessness. Then, lungs burning, heart thumping in his chest, he went up again for air.

  Myles Barrett saw them lined up by the rail. Japanese sailors, whooping it up, having a grand old time as their destroyer steamed triumphantly by. The close-up encounter with the enemy was like a throwback to another era, when sailing ships grappled and boarded one another. Even gunnery had once been conducted at such close range, yardarm to yardarm, that one ship’s men could hear the other’s shouts, prayers, songs, and pleas. The killing was more personal, but there also existed the possibility of surrender, capture, and mercy. By the middle of the twentieth century the reach of new weapons had made combat a cold, long-distance business. Warships didn’t surrender to one another any longer. Commanders were insulated from their counterparts in closed bridges, communicating by secret codes and radio frequencies. Sea warfare became thoroughly depersonalized.

  This was personal. Myles Barrett could see that the Japanese were holding objects in their hands. They were lobbing them into the water. Barrett thought he was a goner. The Japs are throwing grenades at us. Then the absurd reality settled in.

  They were potatoes. Just potatoes.

  In time, the Japanese ships were gone. No, just the destroyers were gone.

  Captain Kintberger gave a shout, Dix turned, and a warship that made the destroyers look like bathtub toys was approaching them now. Its girth and height—all its dimensions—were on another scale altogether. Steel was piled and layered and cantilevered atop steel, capped by a wide-armed rangefinder seated atop the towering pagoda superstructure. Huge triple turrets aimed out over them at some distant point on the horizon. The sight of the battleship charging south in pursuit of Taffy 3 took Dix’s breath away. They had no business being in the same ocean with this leviathan.

  The sound of an airplane, a TBM Avenger, broke the spell. It bore down on that outsize superstructure’s starboard side, diving like a hornet against an ox as black puffs of flak littered the sky all around it. The pilot released a bomb. As he streaked overhead and away, the weapon struck the water beside the armored hull, raising a tall column of water short of the ship. The huge ship sliced past the survivors of the Hoel, seeming to gloat in the pilot’s failure. There went her turrets, her giant mast, her bristling secondary guns. “My God, look at that thing!” someone said. “That must be the Yamato.”

  The Japanese too watched their enemy with no small degree of interest. “Passing a fairly big dark red slick,” wrote Admiral Ugaki, “we came to an area where enemy survivors were clinging to cutters and strewn all over. What did they think of the magnificent sight of our fleet in pursuit? As we were the enemies, they made no signs asking for help, though they must have wanted to.”

  The survivors of the Hoel had the first and last up-close glimpse any American sailor ever got of the IJNS Yamato, the largest battleship on the high seas. All across her fighting tops, crewmen stood erect at battle stations, the very image of readiness and invincibility. Dix and the others watched the superstructure and stacks loom by, the signal flags and pennants flying past, then the huge rear turret followed by an endless stretch of quarterdeck. The roaring wash of her wake seemed to cleanse the sea of her overwhelming presence.

  Astern of the Yamato, less than a thousand feet from the bobbing American destroyermen, followed the Nagato, slightly less imposing, older, but no less majestic. There came the sound of another aircraft engine, then a high-pitched scream as it entered into its dive. Through the clouds appeared a Navy F6F Hellcat—the four jeeps of Taffy 1 carried a few of the late-model Grumman fighters. As the plane fell toward the Japanese ship, seaman first class Glenn Parkin could see its six wing-mounted guns winking. He was close enough to hear the rattle of the bullets hitting the battleship’s metal superstructure and hardwood decks. The Japanese fired back, to no result. In about thirty seconds, the show was over. The Hellcat disappeared into the gray wash of clouds. The Japanese battleship steamed on, unperturbed.

  It made us bitter then to watch that strength,

  To feel our weakness in this awful hour,

  To see their flag so boldly flying still,

  To know we hadn’t done a thing to them

  Nor held them back, nor even slowed them down.

  They’ve sunk the carriers, the other cans!

  Now they’re re-forming, getting set to go

  To Leyte Gulf and strike our transport ships.

  What’s happened? Lord, what’s happened to our fleet?

  Thirty-eight

  By the time the Hoel went down, four heavy cruisers, the Tone, the Chikuma, the Haguro, and the Chokai, damaged but hungrily in pursuit, had turned the corner from a southerly to a southwesterly course, following Sprague’s carriers in their clockwise evasive path. Having destroye
d the Hoel, crippled the Gambier Bay, ravaged the Johnston, and blasted the Samuel B. Roberts in a mismatched duel, there was little else for the Japanese to do but polish off Sprague’s resilient jeeps, then charge toward Leyte Gulf, crushing whatever else lay in the way.

  Shortly before nine o’clock the tail-end Charlie in the Japanese heavy cruiser column, the Chokai, absorbed a hard blow. There was no telling who fired the lucky shot. It is not easy to determine whether it came from a Taffy 3 ship or a plane. Indeed, for students of the Pacific war, the exact circumstances of the Chokai’s demise remain largely a mystery. Sometime during the wild running fight a five-inch shell exploded near the cruiser’s after torpedo tubes. Torpedoes were foreign to U.S. heavy cruisers. While the naval treaties prohibited cruisers from carrying torpedoes in any event, American designers considered the powerful weapons too volatile and dangerous to install on ships meant to stand and fight in a battle line. In breaking the Washington Naval Treaty, Japan accepted the risks, both political and tactical. The Chokai now paid the price.

  She had been closing on the carriers for nearly two hours now, opening fire at 7:05 and advancing implacably on Taffy 3’s port quarter, chasing Sprague around a circle that she could never quite seem to close, owing to the unrelenting air attacks and the stout resistance of Taffy 3’s screen. Now, running nearly due west under spirited fire from assailants hidden in smoke, the Chokai took a shell amidships on the starboard side. A larger blast followed it, a fiery secondary explosion likely caused by one of her own torpedoes.

  At the time lookouts on the Haguro reported that the Chokai was “under concentrated shellfire from enemy main strength, receiving hits on starboard side amidships.” Which American ships the Haguro observers considered “enemy main strength” is far from clear. Most likely it was not the Samuel B. Roberts. At the time Captain Copeland’s ship was in the last moments of its desperate duel with a cruiser positively identified by her skipper as a Tone-class ship, probably the Chikuma. The Heermann too was engaged with the Tone or the Chikuma when the Chokai received the fateful blow before nine A.M. At that time the Johnston was intercepting Admiral Kimura’s destroyer line; only after nine did Captain Evans’s ship begin alternating fire between the Japanese destroyers and cruisers. And it couldn’t have been the Hoel either—Captain Kintberger’s destroyer was by then a ruin, her guns silent, her men leaping over the rail.

  Evidence suggests that the Chokai was knocked out of action by the enterprising peashooter crew on the escort carrier White Plains. If it was the White Plains’s gun crew that earned the accolade “main enemy strength,” it was a fine tribute to them—and not the only time during the battle that the Japanese misestimated their opponent. As likely as not, it was the White Plains’s marksmanship that signaled the beginning of the end for the proud imperial cruiser and a man-bites-dog shift in the momentum of the battle.

  From 11,700 yards the jeep carrier’s gun crew put six shells into the Chokai. The deadly Long Lance torpedoes that had littered the Pacific Ocean floor with the hulks of American ships now backfired on one of their own. There was a large explosion. Lookouts on the Haguro saw the Chokai signal, “ENGINE OUT OF COMMISSION.” The crippled cruiser sheered out of line to port and limped away to the east, slowing and settling fast.

  * * *

  THROUGHOUT THE MORNING AMERICAN pilots swarmed Kurita’s ships in ever greater numbers. The first planes to strike from Taffy 3’s squadrons, armed for other missions, were suited only for harassment. Now the fliers from the other two Taffy groups weighed in. Taffy 1, farthest from Sprague, about fifty miles south, was largely occupied with the question of its own survival as Japanese Army bombers swarmed from bases on Luzon. Still, a number of planes from the Natoma Bay and other Taffy 1 carriers got into the fray off Samar. Meanwhile, mostly free of the immediate danger of air attack and surface gunfire, Taffy 2’s carriers had more time in which to arm their planes for killing ships. Plane handlers and ordnancemen worked themselves to exhaustion arming and launching planes throughout the morning.

  Stump’s group had launched one well-armed strike at 7:45. Now its second strike—consisting of eight Wildcats and sixteen Avengers—aloft by 8:44, vectored itself into the fray. Led by Cdr. Richard L. Fowler, commander of the Kitkun Bay’s VC-5, these pilots had the right weapons for the job—torpedoes and five-hundred-pound semi-armor-piercing bombs. A three-plane element of TBM Avengers packed as much punch as a destroyer escort; a full squadron of the torpedo bombers matched the hitting power of a Fletcher-class destroyer. Their well-orchestrated arrival marked a new phase of the battle. The tin cans of Taffy 3 had held the line; now the planes were coming to turn the tide. Taffy 3 would not have to carry the hopeless fight alone any longer.

  Four Avengers approached the Chikuma from nearly head-on, two planes coming in at a fifteen-degree angle off either side of the cruiser’s bow. It was a textbook anvil attack. If the targeted ship turned to starboard, the torpedoes off the port bow would hit her. A course change to port would expose the starboard side as the proverbial broad side of the barn. Capt. Saiji Norimitsu turned his ship to starboard, giving the planes on the port side a large broadside to hit. At 8:53 a torpedo from one of these TBMs struck the Chikuma on the port side near the stern. According to observers on her sister ship, the Tone, “there was a burst of flame and simultaneously a column of water almost as high as the length of the ship shot up into the air. [The Chikuma’s] afterdeck single-mount machine gun and other gear were seen blown into the air. The after half of the afterdeck was apparently heavily damaged, and settled in the water.” Indeed, the damage was very heavy. The torpedo explosion appears to have severed a sixty-foot section of the Chikuma’s stern. Under fire from the Samuel B. Roberts and the peashooter crews of several CVEs, the cruiser burned fiercely. Now, with the jagged remains of her truncated quarterdeck cracked and sagging, the Chikuma veered to the left, running eastward on one propeller and signaling “RUDDER DISABLED” to her compeers. While his engineers struggled to restore navigability, Captain Norimitsu signaled Admiral Kurita at 9:20, “ONE PROPELLER, SPEED EIGHTEEN KNOTS, UNABLE TO STEER.”

  The Gambier Bay is abandoned, the Hoel sunk, the Samuel B. Roberts dead in the water. The battered Johnston, caught in a crossfire between enemy destroyers and heavy cruisers, fights gamely on. The heavy cruisers Tone and Haguro bear down on Sprague’s carriers. But air attacks on the Japanese pursuers intensify: the heavy cruisers Chikuma and Chokai take crippling blows.

  The Chokai too was nearing her end. Already damaged by the induced explosion of one of her own torpedoes, she took her hardest blow yet from the sky. Commander Fowler had been airborne for more than two hours guiding the improvised aerial assault on the Center Force. At 9:05 he began maneuvering in order to attack with the sun at his back to blind the enemy antiaircraft gunners. Orbiting the Japanese fleet three times before the path of his flight was aligned to his liking, he led three other Avengers and a dozen Wildcats through the clouds. Surprise was complete. No flak came his way. Already limping, the cruiser, which Fowler identified as Mogami-class but more than likely was the Chokai, ∗ The only two Mogami-class cruisers in the battle, the Kumano and the Suzuya, were huddled far to the north, out of the fight. Didn’t have a chance. In thirty-five seconds the VC-5 skipper, flying an unarmed plane, led Lieutenant Issitt, Lieutenant (junior grade) Globokar, and Lieutenant (junior grade) Turner down upon the unsuspecting ship. The blows they landed were staggering. Fowler reported that five five-hundred-pound bombs struck the Chokai amidships, three more blasted the bow, and another hit astern. Whether Fowler was overly optimistic or not, the cruiser was a shambles. According to Fowler, “heavy steam and black smoke rose to five hundred feet or more during a series of three heavy explosions.” The pilot watched the ship reel out of control for five hundred yards or so, then shake again from an internal blast.

  Capt. Kosaku Ariga, the Chokai’s skipper, turned his cruiser sharply to the right. At 9:18 observers on the Yamato logged the the Chokai s
ignaling, “DIRECT BOMB HIT IN FORWARD MACHINERY SPACES. ATTEMPTING TO REPAIR SAME.” Although Commander Fowler claimed the ship blew up and sank within five minutes of this strike, triumphantly calling out over the radio, “Scratch one CA,”

  ∗ In Navy parlance, “CA” indicates a heavy cruiser. it seems the foundering ship survived for the moment. Pilots from the Taffy 2 jeep Marcus Island reported that “the cruiser was seen to smoke heavily, stop, and then get under way slowly.” Japanese records too suggest that the Chokai got moving again. The ship reportedly limped northward until 9:40 P.M., when, finally unnavigable and settling, she was scuttled by torpedoes from the destroyer Fujinami.

  His lethal work done, Fowler rendezvoused with his fellow fliers and headed for Taffy 2 to land. En route, he could see two battleships headed at high speed to the southeast—the Kongo and the Haruna— firing at extreme range at Taffy 2, thirty miles to Taffy 3’s south. Fowler radioed Admiral Stump on the Natoma Bay, informing him what was headed his way. His timing was perfect. At that moment the Taffy 2 commander was readying yet another air strike. The battleships would get some of it.

  * * *

  BUT THE TIDE OF battle would not turn without cost. At 9:07 the stricken Gambier Bay, abandoned twenty minutes before, alone and mercilessly battered by the heavy cruisers, finally sank. Captain Vieweg was among the last to leave the ship. He stayed on the bridge until he was satisfied of the crew’s progress, then descended the superstructure. He couldn’t see a thing. Smoke and hot gases were pouring upward from an unseen conflagration below, blinding him.