The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  Even had the Center Force commander not recalled his ships on the brink of triumph, they still would have had to survive this angry swarm of American planes. Indeed, with such a surprising gathering of strength arrayed against him, it remains unclear what Kurita could have accomplished had he pressed south toward Leyte Gulf. First, he would have done so alone. He had learned while withdrawing that Nishimura’s Southern Force had been wiped out the night before. And he strongly (and correctly) suspected that MacArthur’s transports had long since unloaded the last of their troops, weapons, food, and supplies. The heavy cruisers Tone and Haguro, having gotten within five and a half miles (a short ten thousand yards) of Sprague when Kurita’s order went out, might have sunk a few more CVEs, but they wouldn’t have gotten far against aerial opposition such as this: fifty-six well-armed planes, and another strike arming on the Taffy 2 carriers behind them. Admiral Stump had ordered his planes to cripple as many Japanese ships as possible—there was no sense administering overkill with Halsey coming back south to clean up any messes they made. The American aviators made as many of them as they could. Kurita had more than he could handle keeping his fleet together in the face of the blue hornets from the escort carriers.

  Overtaking the withdrawing ships swiftly, the pilots circled at eight thousand feet, the radio frequencies ababel with pilots excitedly reporting their contacts. If radio communication was strained, the pilots now enjoyed the relative luxury of unpressured time in which to choose their targets. As Commander Dale’s section took the starboard side of the formation and Fowler’s the port, Bill Brooks, Ensign McCormick, and Commander Murray passed the Japanese squadron and made a wide looping turn. When the signal went out to strike, they came in from the north, starting eight miles out and bearing down on the enemy. According to Commander Murray’s after-action report, “In a beautifully coordinated attack, strafers led glide bombers followed by torpedo planes which made their drops as the last bombs hit.” The Japanese ships turned hard to port as the Americans swooped in. Murray pushed over into a steep right turn, following the ships, with McCormick behind him and Brooks bringing up the rear. When flak began to pepper the sky, the planes split formation, with Brooks and McCormick swinging to Murray’s right, lining up a Nagato-class battleship while McCormick lined up an Atogo-class heavy cruiser straight ahead.

  ∗ The Chokai was the only Atago-class heavy cruiser in this battle. “Now you’re on your own,” Murray said. But when McCormick opened his weapons bay doors, his torpedo fell out and plummeted to the sea.

  With the battleship in view, Brooks flew down to 900 feet, lining up fifteen degrees off the ship’s starboard bow and entering the critical “needle-ball and airspeed” phase of his run. If he had figured right, he would glide down to 500 feet and drop, and the battleship’s counterclockwise turn, extrapolated to that point, would put it broadside to his torpedo in the last seconds of its bubbling approach. Ray Travers, hunched over his radar console’s A-scope, hollered out the range to the target, first in miles, then in yards as the range closed. Joe Downs was itching for something to shoot at. He looked to starboard, and there lay a big Japanese cruiser.

  “I’m gonna take on this cruiser, okay? It won’t spoil your air-flight, will it?” Downs asked Brooks over the intercom. Cranking the flat-sided spherical greenhouse-glass turret out to the side changed the plane’s aerodynamics, which was not always helpful to a pilot concentrating on making a delicate torpedo run. The pilot told him not to worry about it, so Downs went hunting. The gunner cut loose, sending a hot spray of tracers, ball, and armor-piercing rounds popping and ricocheting across the ship’s superstructure.

  Joe Downs had nearly exhausted his ammo can when, abruptly, the plane lifted straight up with a jerk. He thought the plane had been hit. In the excitement he had all but forgotten the two-thousand-pound torpedo payload that Brooks had just released, creating quite a change in inertia.

  An endless series of seconds passed—twenty or thirty of them—while the torpedo cruised the thousand-yard path to the ship. Seated rearward in the gunner’s seat, Downs watched the ship shrink in the distance, then get swallowed in a flash of flame. Their torpedo struck forward of the bridge, producing a dirty geyser of water. The Nagato’s bulky mass heaved and shuddered, seeming to lift slightly, then drop back into the sea.

  “Oh man, you got her, you got her!” Downs shouted. McCormick saw it too. Brooks circled to watch, then settled on a course that would take him back toward his adoptive home, the Taffy 3 flagship, the Fanshaw Bay. He was by no means unique in this regard, but it would be the third flight deck Brooks’s wheels touched during that long day.

  At 12:40, about twenty minutes after Murray’s and Brooks’s attack, the Kitkun Bay’s Richard Fowler led his group around a big cumulus cloud and dove down out of the sun. The loose enemy formation was looping around to the left, exposing its starboard flanks to Fowler’s vengeful blue angels. The skipper dropped his bombs over a battleship, hitting it just aft of the bridge. His wing-man’s bombs struck near the mainmast, while two more pilots scored near-misses astern. Another Avenger pilot reported hitting the Nagato with a torpedo amidships. A heavy cruiser just inboard of the battleship was struck by two bombs.

  Just before touching down on the Fanshaw Bay, Fowler picked up a transmission from the Wasp air group, one of Halsey’s squadrons, reporting the sighting of the retiring enemy fleet. Ziggy Sprague’s old ship, with the rest of Adm. John S. McCain’s Task Group 38.2, was closing fast. The Third Fleet’s contribution to the Battle off Samar was far too little, far too late. Because McCain’s strike was launched at extended range, the pilots’ fuel reserves were too low to permit deliberate target selection and preparatory maneuver. But their arrival did tend to underscore the point that had Kurita not withdrawn, he would have run smack into yet another powerful air group.

  At about 2:15 P.M. the Chikuma, crippled earlier by White Plains fliers, her topside charred by salvos from the Samuel B. Roberts, was finished off by planes from the Taffy 2 jeep Ommaney Bay. Preceded by four Wildcat fighters that spat two thousand .50-caliber slugs into the cruiser, three TBM Avengers, led by the VC-75 commander, Lt. Allen W. Smith, swooped in low and lay a spread of torpedoes into her port side, just forward of amidships. Seawater rushed in, and the cruiser heeled and rocked a few times, then rolled onto its port side and sank in about fifteen minutes.

  Farther to the north, Taffy 3 pilots were in hot pursuit of any other Japanese ships that could still make steam. Tommy Lupo of the Fanshaw Bay’s VC-68, having reholstered his pistol and reloaded with bombs commandeered from the Army, had taken off from the airfield at Tacloban sometime before. Heading north, he found a Mogami-class cruiser, probably the stubborn Kumano, limping toward San Bernardino Strait, her bow broken in the battle’s early minutes. Gliding down alone, Lupo overtook the cruiser, dove on her from her starboard quarter, rode the bright rails of the ship’s tracer bullets down to his bomb-release point, and walked a brace of bombs right up her back. One of his 250-pounders appeared to drop right down the ship’s exhaust stack. A fountain of smoke and crud shot skyward from amidships, and as he flew away, orange tongues of flame could be seen licking through the smoke.

  Intermingling orphaned pilots from Ziggy Sprague’s task unit with the squadrons of his own six carriers, Taffy 2 commander Admiral Stump’s carriers mustered a total of 204 sorties against Kurita, 117 by Avengers and 87 by Wildcats, dropping 49 torpedoes and 286 500-pound bombs, and firing 276 rockets and untold thousands of rounds of machine-gun ammunition. By the time the last of his pilots returned to Taffy 2 at 6:25 P.M., just before nightfall made carrier operations doubly hazardous, Kurita’s force had been smashed down to size. Limping north toward San Bernardino Strait went a battered and broken Center Force, reportedly consisting of four battleships, just three heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and seven destroyers.

  Two of the battleships trailed broad slicks of oil; three destroyers and one of the light cruisers lagged behind the main grou
p; and one heavy cruiser appeared heavily damaged. Impossible to catalog but probably significant nonetheless were the assorted lesser catastrophes inflicted by the ceaseless strafing, bombing, and battering by American five-inch shells. Twenty-four aircraft from the jeep carriers had fallen to Japanese antiaircraft fire, with forty-three pilots and aircrewmen lost or missing in action.

  Some pilots survived by the slimmest of margins. Richard Roby, the Gambier Bay Wildcat pilot, escorted Foster Dillard back to Tacloban after a strike on the Japanese fleet. Seeing Dillard’s plane swerving on an unsteady course, its pilot without a helmet and no hatch, bareheaded to the rushing wind, Roby suspected immediately that his VC-10 squadronmate was “punchier than a three-dollar bill.” He couldn’t keep a level heading, and if the young pilot could scarcely manage level flight, how would he handle a landing on a muddy, pitted airstrip?

  Somehow Dillard reached Tacloban, made a reasonably steady approach, and eased his Wildcat onto the muddy runway. The plane taxied down the tarmac, hit a soft spot, and flipped forward, driving its propeller hub into the ground. Roby pulled around for another pass, giving the men on the ground time to push the wrecked fighter plane out of the way. Then Roby made another approach and landed. When he found Dillard, the wounded pilot had taken so much shrapnel to the face that he looked like a smallpox patient. For the pilots of VC-10, as for all the pilots of Taffy 3, the morning of October 25 had been a long one.

  The aviators from the Seventh Fleet’s escort carriers finished the Battle off Samar on their terms because Kurita had declined to finish it on his.

  On whose terms the survivors in the water would end their ongoing struggle remained very much an open question.

  Forty-eight

  The impossible horror of the war’s first kamikaze sinking had come upon them suddenly and without warning. Murderously effective, the attack on the St. Lo and the other CVEs set the lookouts on Taffy 3’s remaining ships on high alert. Though Ziggy Sprague worried about the possibility of submarine attack—there had been enough odd sightings of torpedo wakes coming at his ships during the morning’s fighting to alert him to the threat—he detached what remained of his screen, the Heermann, the Dennis, the Raymond, and the John C. Butler, from escort duty and ordered them to recover the survivors of the St. Lo dotting the sea where the carrier had gone down. Expertly conned by her skipper, Sig Hansen, her narrow hull draped in cargo nets for survivors to climb, the Dennis moved through the St. Lo’s debris field retrieving survivors. The healthiest among them clambered aboard asking, “Hey, what’s for chow?” “What’s the movie tonight?” or “Where the hell is haul-ass Halsey?” The worse-off were pulled from the sea and given morphine and a soft place to lie down. The Dennis’s rescue effort, led by first lieutenant Frank Tyrrell and chief boatswain’s mate Joe Barry, saved more than four hundred survivors from the St. Lo and thirty-five pilots.

  Retrieving the other survivors would be a much taller order. The Avenger pilot who sighted Tom Stevenson and the rest of the Roberts survivors, under strict radio silence, made a mental note of their coordinates to pass along to the Seventh Fleet after he landed. It seems his mission lasted longer than his memory. The coordinates that were given to Admiral Kinkaid were off by a wide margin. An attempted correction offered little more help. Admiral Stump informed the Seventh Fleet commander around 12:30 P.M. that hundreds of survivors were adrift at 11°12′N, 126°30′E, which was twenty to forty miles south of the various sites where the Taffy 3 ships had gone down.

  Though Ziggy Sprague was prompt in asking Admiral Kinkaid to launch a rescue operation to save the survivors of Taffy 3, owing to the desperate nature of the fight against the continuing kamikaze attacks and the preoccupation of the PBY Catalina patrol planes with rescuing downed fliers, it wasn’t until 3:30 P.M. that a serious rescue attempt was made. At that time Admiral Kinkaid ordered Tommy Sprague to detach all available screening ships and begin a search close to the original erroneous position. Because it consisted of ships unassisted by planes, the rescue mission had a margin for error much slimmer than the error itself. The destroyer escorts Eversole and Richard S. Bull steamed northeast and arrived at the specified coordinates at 11:30 P.M. Finding nothing, they returned to Taffy 1 empty-handed that night.

  When Admiral Halsey finally returned from chasing Admiral Ozawa’s goose, he detached several destroyers to sweep the area, looking for Japanese stragglers. Though they passed close to where some Taffy 3 survivors floated, they were looking for things considerably larger than heads bobbing on the waves. They failed to locate them as well.

  * * *

  AS THE AFTERNOON WORE on, Tom Stevenson, Charles Natter, and Lloyd Gurnett had just about given up their attempts to bring back the men floating on the planks. The survivors who clung to them, many badly hurt, were exhibiting a dangerous combination of recalcitrance and resignation. They refused to leave. The scaffolding must have been just seaworthy enough to make the reward of setting out for another precarious refuge seem dubious and theoretical, even if their captain was supposedly in charge there.

  Natter did his best to help them. He was a capable swimmer, athletic and strong. Adrenaline made up what strength he had lost from the shrapnel peppered through his shoulders. But there were limits to what the stout signalman could do. Men were not made to outswim sharks.

  The predators were gathering in growing numbers. For a time the pool of fuel oil that surrounded them seemed to keep the sharks at bay. But by late afternoon enough blood had leached into the water to attract a crowd.

  Charles Natter was catching a breather on the scaffolding when the sharks ended the tease and acted on their nature. One of them came up and pulled Thomas Mazura, one of his friends from the Sammy B.’s signal division, from his plank. Natter had little time to mourn. Like an inverted fang, another big fin glided toward him, and he was hauled under too. Seeing it all happen, John Conway was at last persuaded to take his chances swimming for Copeland’s raft. The coxswain tried to talk others into joining him, but hurt and exhausted, they wanted no part of it. Conway was the only man from the scaffolding to reach Bob Copeland’s raft and floater net that afternoon.

  At one point Copeland counted as many as fifty shark fins cutting the surface near him. Thanks to the oil that bathed the survivors in his group, these predators were all swim and no bite. But because no one could be too confident of that, the men feared the worst whenever a fin moved closer and then disappeared under water. The captain of the Roberts didn’t want to think about what might have happened to his signalman and the men he had gallantly tried to save.

  Whether through exhaustion, wounds, or willpower, the men stayed quiet. Their stoicism impressed Bob Copeland.

  I’ve read a lot of stories about how men on life rafts behave; they either curse—curse their luck and curse everybody—or they get a big shot of religion and pray and sing songs. Our men didn’t do that at all…. They were a very quiet group…. They bore their suffering in almost total silence…. We were just beaten to a pulp, that’s all.

  The only outbursts on Copeland’s raft were the final thrashes of the dying. Charles Staubach, the grievously wounded chief electrician’s mate, lay motionless inside the raft, tended to by healthy survivors.

  But around three that afternoon he went out of his head, ranting and raving deliriously before succumbing to death.

  As the sun fell in the western sky, optimism about a quick rescue was turning to discouragement. Copeland noticed that Bob Roberts’s stoutly girded calm was giving way to a very evident despair. “I tried to bargain with God,” Roberts later wrote. “I explained to Him that my wife had just had a baby boy whom I had never seen, and that though I was ready and willing to die, if He would allow it I would take care of them as long as I lived.” Copeland huddled privately with his exec until Roberts regained his composure. “He was a tower of strength from there on in,” Copeland wrote.

  Copeland asked Roberts, “Where do you think we are?” Roberts said, “Well, Capta
in, I don’t know exactly where we are, but I’d say we’re roughly thirty miles east of the island of Samar and about thirty miles north of its southern tip. That’s as close as I can give you from the last navigational fix I had before we went into battle. That’s close. We are within five miles one way or another.”

  Thirty miles off Samar. If they were high enough above the water, in the crow’s nest of a battleship using binoculars, they might have seen its shores. But from sea level, where they floated, the line of sight to the horizon was just fourteen miles. When the clouds and rain permitted, all they could see were its peaks.

  “Well,” Copeland said to Roberts, “you and I are the senior officers, and we better set a good example.” They each took a paddle and climbed up on the side of the raft and began stroking a course west into the setting sun.

  Forty-nine

  The survivors from the Johnston were greater in number than the Roberts group but were situated similarly to the other survivors from Taffy 3’s sunken ships. Well over a hundred men drifted the ravaged waters on lengths of plank and timber, on floater nets and life rafts, or were held afloat only by kapok vests or life preservers. Organized and calmed by their officers and senior petty officers, they decided to let their large group disperse on the currents, each group centered on a life raft/floater net ensemble, in order to maximize their chances of detection.

  The most seriously wounded were gathered inside the rafts. Howard Craven, from the electrical department, had his throat slashed clear around the neck by a large shard of shrapnel. Though few expected him to survive, he surprised them all not only by surviving but by summoning the energy and Samaritan will to tend to James Cooper and Jack Walker, who had been badly burned and lay shivering in the raft.