The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  That possibility loomed large in his mind. He knew that once he was locked into a torpedo run, evasive action was out of the question. Limitations on speed and altitude and maneuverability made the chances of returning not terribly good. The men on the ships of Taffy 3 were bound to their fate. Jumping overboard was pointless—there was nowhere to go in the water—so they just went along and did their jobs. Aviators always retained the option of escape. But the impulse to escape seized few if any of the CVE pilots in action that day. The thought never entered Van Brunt’s mind.

  Forty-one

  The Samuel B. Roberts was finished. Bob Copeland knew it when Lloyd Gurnett declared the ship a goner—no one would have wanted to hold on longer than the first lieutenant. “I would advise the captain to abandon ship,” he called up to the bridge. Copeland then passed on the word. “Abandon ship, men. Well done.” Copeland next ordered the ship destruction bill carried out. Shell-shocked and half conscious but eager to comply with the order to destroy sensitive equipment and documents that might fall into enemy hands, Elbert Gentry beat the lenses out of a pair of ordinary 7×50 binoculars, then smashed the glass face of a gyro repeater display. Howard Cayo, a soundman, was in better condition to discern what was top secret from what was not. A trained acrobat, Cayo took a sledgehammer and gave the sonar machine a few well-aimed blows. Then he took a Tommy gun and peppered the contraption liberally with. 45-caliber slugs, nearly hitting his skipper, Bob Roberts, and Gentry with the ricochets. Tom Stevenson and a signalman third class named Charles Natter ran belowdecks on the steadily settling ship. The communications officer was responsible for destroying the codebooks and other sensitive publications. Stevenson did his duty, though the urgency was largely lost on him. “Under fire, you’re thinking about your family. You’re thinking, This is the end. There was nothing else to do.”

  Stevenson ran to the small closet adjacent to the radio shack and bagged up the metal wheels from the decoding machine, which he would throw overboard. Then he went to destroy the coding machine itself. Not finding the grenade that was supposed to be on hand for this sad contingency, Natter used a submachine gun to similar effect.

  That job done, Stevenson and Natter headed below to find the safe that contained secret documents and publications, including the Leyte Gulf invasion plans. With his way lit by battery-powered battle lanterns, Stevenson climbed through a hatch scuttle and found the safe. Though the ship was shaking from hits and the list seemed to increase, he remembered the combination, and the safe door swung open. He loaded what papers he could into several weighted cloth sacks. He and Natter hauled the sacks topside and tossed them overboard. Then Stevenson went down again, alone. He fetched some more bags and ascended to the main deck.

  Dick Rohde had been only too happy to hear the abandon ship order. Sitting at his desk wearing an inflatable life belt instead of a bulky kapok life vest, the radioman could feel the deck plating under his feet growing frighteningly warm. Smoke stung his nostrils. When he tried to stand, he found that his headset was still jacked into his radio console.

  Rohde came out on deck and found himself standing next to his chief radioman, Tullio Serafini. “All of a sudden there was another big blast. I felt something hit me in the leg. And I looked at Serafini, and there was just blood all over the place. It was awful.” He couldn’t see how Serafini was ever going to make it. Half his left shoulder had been blown away, and he was bleeding severely. Rohde looked down at his own leg and saw a big hole in his dungarees. Underneath, the flesh looked like so much gristled hamburger. He had seen enough; no need to stare at that awful mess, he thought. Numb, he put it out of his mind and somehow climbed down the ladder from the radio shack to the main deck. Walking up to the rail, he removed his shoes and laid them neatly by the gunwale alongside another pair that belonged to another swimmer. Then Rohde lifted his good leg over the line and jumped in.

  When he hit the water, he bobbed up and down a few times in the fuel oil and discovered that his life belt had been torn by shrapnel and did not hold him. Then, remembering his training to swim away from a sinking ship in order to avoid getting sucked under with it, he struck out. In the direction in which he swam, however, a Japanese warship loomed. Rohde was close enough to see crewmen staring at the stricken American ship. I’m swimming the wrong way, he thought, realizing that no one else was around him.

  Floating nearby was the miniature life vest that Sam Blue had fashioned for Sammy, the ship’s celebrated mascot. Rohde tucked it under his arm for a little extra buoyancy, then swam back around the stern of the ship and joined a cluster of survivors.

  The dog, too, swam to momentary safety. Somehow Sammy got off the ship and, without the benefit of his custom-tailored canine flotation device, paddled out to a raft. He was there only a short time, however, when he decided that he belonged back on the Samuel B. Roberts, his home. The dog jumped off the raft and swam back toward the sinking ship. No one knew his fate for certain, but that was the last anyone saw of him. Sammy either drowned during the swim or went down with his ship.

  Though he had commanded the Samuel B. Roberts barely half a year, Copeland was bonded strongly enough to his ship to view her as a living thing, a machine with its own soul and persona. Yet he understood too the reality that the source of any ship’s life lay in the lives of those who crewed her. When Tom Stevenson returned with a second sackload of classified publications, Bob Copeland went in search of his wounded to make sure they got off the ship.

  First the skipper ducked into his sea cabin and collected his letters and personal effects—whatever he could sweep together and carry. Then he went to the bridge, where he and Bob Roberts searched for and found the ship’s muster list, watch quarter, station bill, and other administrative documents.

  One of the bags Tom Stevenson had thrown overboard must not have been weighted. There it was, bobbing along on the swells. Copeland told Stevenson he had better jump in and weigh it down, lest its sensitive contents fall into the wrong hands. Still wearing his microphoned talker’s helmet and realizing that this was his skipper’s way of getting another man off the ship, Stevenson leaped off the amidships rail. When he hit the surface, the helmet became a drag brake, jerking his head upward while his body lurched downward. He was weighted down by a. 45-caliber pistol, which he discarded. He threw away the helmet and a standard-issue bandolier of pistol ammunition around his waist too. He kept his supply of morphine syrettes. He and Lloyd Gurnett found an expiring crewman from the engine room, and they each jabbed him with a needleful of the numbing potion.

  Copeland turned to his executive officer and said, “Now Bob, I want you to go down to the main deck and hustle things a little bit, and then I want you to get into the water and be out there to supervise the men.”

  “Captain,” Roberts said, “I’m not leaving until you leave. I don’t want you to be a damn fool and get heroic and go down with the ship.”

  Copeland seemed to appreciate the honor that underlay this particular kind of insubordination. “Now look, Bob,” he said, “I’m not intending to go down with the ship. I don’t know what will happen. We are still under fire. My duty is to stay here until the men are off, and I’m going to do that. As soon as everybody is off, if I’m still alive, you can rest assured that I’m getting off. I haven’t any false sense of glory like those old German naval sea captains who put on their best uniforms and stood up on the bridge and went down with the ship. But I am going to wait until I get my men off.”

  The executive officer remained unmoved.

  “Bob,” the captain said, “I don’t want to get tough with you; you are my exec and my good friend, but remember, this is an order. I want a responsible senior officer to be with the survivors, and I’m ordering you to leave the ship.”

  “If that’s the way you put it, Captain, I’ll go.”

  “That’s just the way I’m putting it. I trust I’ll see you in the water, but in case I don’t, Bob, it’s been swell being with you.” Copeland stuck
out his hand. “You’ve been a swell exec, and I want you to know that.”

  “It’s been wonderful serving with you, Captain. I hope you make it; I’m leaving you with reluctance.”

  The two officers took their. 45s and the bandoliers of extra ammunition from their waists and with a minor ceremonial flourish—“One, two, three”—flung their weapons into the sea from the flying bridge. At that, Roberts left his skipper to go over the side.

  Copeland walked aft to the rear section of the bridge and surveyed what was left of his ship. “It gave me an awfully hurt and crushed feeling to see the men lying there wounded and dead and to see our ship, once as alive as the people on her, battered and lifeless.” But even among the dead there were living. Amid a tangle of human rubble on the boat deck, Copeland saw movement. There, reclined against the ship’s stack in a pool of blood, chief electrician’s mate Charles Staubach was still alive.

  The captain hollered for Frank Cantrell, the chief quartermaster, and a couple of radarmen to go look after him. As the men went up to check on Staubach, Copeland thought to check in on the CIC to make sure the classified radar equipment had been destroyed. The ship’s interior compartments were dark. Copeland found a battle lantern, but it did not light. The nearest flashlight was equally useless. He retrieved from his pocket a cigarette lighter, and it lit, and he looked around the CIC. He was satisfied to see that the machinery had been thoroughly smashed. He found himself compelled to visit his sea cabin again. He went there and looked at the photos of his family that lay beneath a large rectangular section of Plexiglas on his desk. For forty or fifty long seconds he stood there looking at the pictures of Harriet and the kids in the flickering light.

  Copeland went back to the main deck, where pharmacist’s mates first class Oscar King and George Schaffer were tending to a group of wounded. Charles Staubach was there, crying, though Copeland was pretty sure the thirty-five-year-old electrician had no idea how badly he was hurt. “It really made me sick at my stomach and sick at my heart when I saw him because from his backbone clear around on his left side all was gone.” From what Copeland could tell, Staubach was paralyzed. “We ripped blue chambray shirts off six or eight dead men, wadded them up, and stuck them into his lung cavity and wrapped another shirt around him and tied him, but he didn’t know the difference.”

  Staubach didn’t want to get in the water. Sobbing, he asked Copeland, “Captain, do you think I’ll live?”

  “Oh sure, Staubach, get off the ship, and we’ll take care of you.”

  “I don’t want to die, Captain. I’ve never seen my baby yet.”

  Copeland knew that about two weeks before Staubach had learned of the birth of his baby boy. The skipper considered him a fine man and was heartbroken that he would not live to see his newborn son. Staubach tried awfully hard. They got him into the water around 9:30.

  Copeland proceeded alone to look for any remaining survivors on the ship. The passageway between the galley and wardroom section and the main deckhouse was obscured by steam rolling up from the number-one fireroom. Holding his hand over his mouth and nose to avoid the heavy stench of the steam, Copeland plowed through, making his way by memory. He reached the point where he knew a hatch to be, raised his right foot to step over it, and brought it down on top of some kind of obstruction. When he looked more closely, he found his foot planted firmly in the face of a dead radioman. His body didn’t seem to have a scratch, nor did the body of the boy lying next to him, though Copeland figured these sailors had to have been blown a fair distance in order to die where they lay: “I don’t think there was a whole bone in them. They were just lying there as placid and peaceful as could be.”

  Copeland became unhinged at the sight of those boys and the larger picture of destruction all around. So long as there had been a fight to conduct, a captain could occupy himself with any number of details that obscured the essential horror of what was happening to his ship and his men. There was the steady patter of information from the CIC team, the orders from Admiral Sprague over the TBS, sightings from lookouts, and reports from gunnery control, from damage parties, and from the engine rooms. He was freed of all that now, and despaired: “The ship had been a very live thing—the ship herself and the men on her. Now she was a battered piece of junk.”

  In a daze he walked the length of the deck, stopping at the motor whaleboat dangling from its davits. Its wooden bottom had been shot clean out. He stood on the deck looking straight through the whaleboat’s busted hull and shuddered: “That one picture summed up the whole desolate destruction of a living ship with living men coming into an emptiness of nothing.”

  He was alone on that side of the ship. He moved aft, so distraught that he lost his step. His foot slipped out ahead of him, he lurched out of balance, and he found himself sitting on the deck. He put down both of his hands, and when he picked them up, they were covered with blood. It was dripping from above, right on top of him. A headless body was hanging over the edge of a gun tub overhead. The puddle beneath it was large enough that the seat of his khakis and his loafers and socks were wet with blood. He got up and continued down the deck, not really caring what he found or what he did or what would happen. “It had taken all the heart out of me,” he recalled. “As I walked down toward the fantail, I was nearly drowned because when I got back to where the three fourteen-inch shells had ripped into us and taken the side out, the main deck was gone from there on, and I just barely caught myself from dropping right into the water.” Lt. Cdr. Robert W. Copeland could not swim.

  Finding no one in any condition to save, and doubting his ability to do it in any case, Copeland made his way back to the place where Lloyd Gurnett and the other officers had gathered. He and Gurnett used their last minutes on the ship looking for more survivors. They found a man sprawled halfway into the yeoman’s office. He was still alive, though the nature of his wounds made it difficult to recognize him. “He must have had two thousand shrapnel holes in his face. When we touched him, the blood would ooze out like water from a sponge. We raised his eyelids, but he was blind in both eyes. He was unconscious. His eyeballs, his irises, and his pupils had been penetrated by fine shrapnel.”

  After some time they figured out he was the chief machinist’s mate, Charles Smith. “How he ever got up there we’ll never know. But he was still alive though barely so.” Copeland ordered King and Schaffer to put Smith into a life jacket and get him over the side.

  A Japanese destroyer stood nearby, lobbing the occasional shell into the Samuel B. Roberts’s ruined mass. The ship took four more hits while the abandon ship effort was under way. Water was lapping up over the port side of the destroyer escort’s fantail when machinist’s mate second class Chalmer Goheen went to check on Paul Henry Carr’s gang back in Gun 52. The gun had been silent since the muffled thud of the breech explosion. Where the water hadn’t yet reached, the decks were covered with burning oil. Goheen crossed the deck, peered into the gun mount’s ripped hatch, and found a horrific scene. Most of the men inside had been obliterated by the blast. They had gotten off 324 rounds of the 325 the ship carried in its after magazine, firing the last seven or eight shells without a working gas ejection line to clear the breech, until one of the final rounds got them.

  Looking into the mount, Goheen discovered where the magazine’s last round was. It was right there before him, cradled in the arms of Paul Carr himself. The man was alive—though barely, torn from his neck to his groin. Carr was struggling to hold the shell. He begged Goheen to help him load it into the wrecked breech tray.

  Goheen took the shell from Carr’s arms and laid the gunner’s mate on the floor of his mount. Then he took seaman first class James Gregory, whose leg had been severed near the hip, and carried him out and set him on the deck. When Goheen returned to the mount, Carr was on his feet again, shell cradled weakly in his arms. Goheen took the shell from Carr again, lifted him, and carried him out to the deck.

  Paul Henry Carr of Checotah, Oklahoma, proud member of th
e Future Farmers of America, football and baseball letterman, brother to eight sisters, only son of Thomas and Minnie Mae Carr, died there on the deck of his battered, broken warship.

  Forty-two

  The Roberts was going down by the stern. Riding the swells, wearing a kapok life jacket and an inflated rubber belt, Bob Copeland, the skipper who couldn’t swim, turned to Lloyd Gurnett and asked, “How do you go about getting out of here?” Gurnett responded, “Well, the best way, Captain, is to roll over on your back and swim on your back. Just work your arms this way and kick your legs. You’ll get going.” The commanding officer of the Samuel B. Roberts got the rhythm of it and inched his way toward a life raft they had spotted a few hundred yards away.

  Where George Bray was standing on the fantail, the water was already lapping above his knees. Chalmer Goheen had asked him to help get some of the wounded overboard. Goheen brought seaman first class Willard Thurmond to Bray. Bray could tell he was a goner. He helped Thurmond to the rail, and the mortally injured man just held on there, oblivious to his wounds. Bray helped someone else off the ship, then made his way toward the fantail. By the time he reached the depth charge racks, the water was up to his waist. He just sat down and started swimming.

  When they entered the water, the survivors of the Roberts baptized themselves in their ship’s own blood. The surface of the ocean was covered with a three-inch layer of oil. All around the ruined ship bobbed black faces set with glaring white eyes and teeth. The substance was more a slippery kind of foam than a proper form of oil. The sea’s gentle swells animated it like a slowly undulating blacktop.

  Copeland had been among the last to leave—the honor of being the very last man off belonged to George Schaffer—jumping ship and joining a large group of men who had clambered over the port-side rail. Forward, where the deck sloped upward—ever more steeply, as the ship settled by the stern—there was a considerable jump to make. Off the port side, Copeland joined a small group of men on a floater net, a large web of nylon mesh woven throughout with a bunch of black rubber disks that gave it its buoyancy. Spotting a raft some distance away, some survivors formed a human chain, reached out to it, reeled it in, and tied it fast to the net. The raft, designed for twenty-five men, soon wallowed under the weight of fifty. Survivors were attracted to the group as small bits of interstellar flotsam to a star’s gravitational field. They moved the raft on top of the net to increase its buoyancy.