The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  A large group that included Bob Hagen, Ellsworth Welch, Ed Di-Gardi, Jack Bechdel, Jesse Cochran, Milt Pehl, and Hank Wilson was clustered around two rafts and a pair of floater nets strung together with manila line. Wilson had gotten badly burned by boiler steam when the fireroom was hit. Pharmacist’s mate Clayton Schmuff swam about making his rounds, putting sulfa powder on burns and giving morphine to the most seriously wounded. Jack Bechdel, missing most of a leg, was so benumbed by morphine that he found it within himself to sing. With a voice mellifluous and strong, he sang as if they were gathered around a campfire.

  As the afternoon dragged on, Ellsworth Welch reflected on the ordeal that they had all just experienced, thinking their circumstances could only get better. “Our thoughts were, 3,000 ships, 200,000 men, thousands of airplanes…. It won’t be long now…. We were just a couple of hundred miles from the greatest naval armada ever assembled on earth.” To a man they were convinced that the proximity of powerful friendly fleets all but ensured their rescue. Their admiral knew they were out there. Pilots had sighted them. Rescue would be the simple product of time, patience, and fortitude.

  While they waited for America’s overwhelming military power to come to their assistance, they passed the time struggling to keep their spirits up, wondering aloud about the outcome of the battle and the fates of particular shipmates, telling stories, passing cigarettes, and munching on hardtack biscuits and salty water.

  By midafternoon their submerged doubts began to surface, along with the first sharks. Bill Mercer watched a particularly large one work its way toward them in a widely meandering zigzag, finally cruising by close enough that the men could extend their legs and kick at it. Faced with splashing and kicking life-forms, it elected not to harm them. The men scanned the horizon through 360 degrees, watching their hopes for a speedy rescue diminish and vanish.

  * * *

  WHEN DARKNESS FELL, THE sharks grew more assertive. In the pitch-black Pacific night, they revealed themselves by proxy. Moving through the plankton-rich waters, disturbing the photosensitive plant life, the sharks ignited an eerie phosphorescence that formed a faint glowing path toward the men in the rafts. There was splashing and cursing. Shrill voices rose and then were gone. Someone said something about spotting a ship. Someone else produced a Very pistol, and several flares lofted skyward—red, white, and green—burning arcs of colorful brilliance through the night. When there was no response in kind from the rescuer, the men feared they had alerted a Japanese ship. Their panic became quieter if no less desperate.

  Drifting toward a fatal sleep, the men decided to fasten themselves together with their CO2 inflatable life belts, assigned each other numbers, and counted off at intervals to indicate their physical and mental presence. Clint Carter had just finished securing himself to Chuck Campbell when someone yelled “Shark!” and the men started climbing atop one another toward the stars. In the zero-sum equation of saltwater buoyancy, one man’s success was another man’s sudden dunking. Something bumped Carter heavily in the back, and he felt a wrenching force. He screamed, put both hands on Campbell’s shoulders, and lifted himself out of the water as a shark’s bear-trap jaws tore away a chunk of his kapok, along with a small bloody piece of his side. As Carter rose up, his weight plunged Campbell under. The shark let go of Carter, Carter let go of Campbell, and Campbell surfaced sputtering and gasping. Then the shark tasted Carter again, and once more he dunked Campbell in his bid for the raft. The shark let go of Carter, Campbell surfaced, and regaining his breath, he helped lay Carter, bleeding badly, into the raft.

  Chief gunner’s mate Harry Henson got bitten in the thigh hard enough to crush bone. Joe Taromino took bites in the left arm and shoulder, Vince Scafoglio in the area of his left kidney.

  In the night, despite the ministrations of their shipmate with the slashed throat, Cooper and Walker passed away. Someone offered a few solemn words, their life jackets and life belts were removed for someone else’s benefit, their dog tags were collected, and their bodies were released and allowed to sink. Watching them go under, Bill Mercer felt like “an eighteen-year-old boy going on forty.”

  As the night deepened, hopelessness set in for the wounded who could no longer endure the glacial passage of time. Before Ed Haubrich died of his severe leg wounds, he asked Dusty Rhodes, the cook in the chief’s mess, for a sandwich. A Johnston sailor who had suffered a deep shark bite to the abdomen asked to be put out of his misery. For nearly an hour he begged for his shipmates’ mercy, moaning, screaming, and crying. He finally received it when someone pulled out a revolver, misfired it, then produced a knife and cut his throat.

  * * *

  “WHY DON’T WE ALL sing?” The survivors in Jack Moore’s group made a halfhearted attempt to render a familiar tune. “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” “The Swanee River.” “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” But they had suffered too much to indulge in musical reverie. Their hearts weren’t in it. “I remember a few people started singing,” Dick Rohde said, “and then it just sort of died out. Nobody really wanted to sing. It didn’t go over too well.”

  Though they stayed mostly quiet, the arrival of sharks triggered their survival instincts, and desperate spasms of fighting broke out, the men climbing one another like ladders, frantic to leave the water. They pushed one another down, clutching and grabbing with death-grip strength. They swallowed seawater, gagged, and lunged upward, coughing and swinging fists. George Bray and Chalmer Goheen tried to quell the panic, but it had a life of its own. Finally, after the men had worn themselves out, it stopped by itself.

  When quiet settled in again, the men laid their heads on the sides of the raft and on the coarse rope mesh of the floater net. George Bray struggled to remain alert. He was starting to think the sharks might be toying with them. He had seen them swimming in slow circles below. Though it was hard to gauge precisely how large they were, he knew they weren’t small. The last rays of daylight had revealed some big ones down there: ten, twelve feet long, he thought. There had been smaller fish present with them—hundreds of them hovering together in stationary schools. Possibly barracuda. In months past Bray and the others had occasionally seen sharks following the Roberts near dusk, gorging themselves as the garbage was thrown overboard. The sharks patrolling the waters off Samar on October 25, having endured the cacophony of the bloody morning, would find richer fare in the ensuing days.

  Eventually George Bray stopped worrying too much about what might be in the waters beneath him. By the time the sun was dipping out of sight to the west, fear of the big predators yielded to wary acceptance. Mostly he just stopped looking down. Mostly he started worrying about what might—or might not—be coming for them from over the horizon.

  Fifty

  When no ship came to rescue the survivors of the Samuel B. Roberts during the night, Tom Stevenson feared the Japanese had won the battle. The big force of Jap cruisers and battleships, he thought, had incinerated the other ships of Taffy 3 and pressed on to the Leyte beachhead. What other conclusion could be drawn? If any of the American ships had survived, wouldn’t they be combing the oceans where the Roberts and the others had gone down, pulling alongside and hauling them aboard to safety? The Sammy B.’s sacrifice, it seemed, had been in vain.

  Untold hours into the deepening night, Stevenson heard a shout. The voice sounded American. With others, he called hoarsely in reply, and echoing one another, ranging by sound, the source of the shouting finally found them. It was a man, swimming alone.

  Soundman Howard Cayo, the former circus acrobat, had been with the men on the scaffolding. He was one of just a few there to survive the shark attacks—saved, it seemed, by his litheness and strength. Cayo joined the group, relating the horrible story of what had happened on the scaffolding.

  The fear was with them already, but now it worsened. They kicked and splashed at phantoms. Clutching the floater net hitched to Copeland’s raft, kicking futilely in the direction of land while Cope
land and Bob Roberts paddled from the raft, Stevenson prayed silently, God, if you get me out of this, I’m going to become the best husband and raise a great family. That’s all I’m going to ask.

  * * *

  THE NIGHTTIME SKY, IMPASSIVE and immobile, betrayed no sign of the passage of time. To Jack Moore “it seemed very much like an entire week of darkness.” The first indication of change that touched George Bray’s senses came to him after midnight: the rich scent of land. The pure ocean air cleansed the nasal cavities so thoroughly that there was no mistaking the sweet effluvium of the Samar jungle. Its rich, warm smell came wafting over the waters, borne to them on shifting winds.

  The ocean currents or tides or whatever other inscrutable forces pushed them through the waters were shifting too. When the survivors tried to swim toward shore, the currents defied them. With a man straddling the ring of the raft on each side, they paddled to exhaustion but made little apparent headway. But once the men surrendered to the current, the tides seemed to relent and even to cooperate.

  When Bray heard the sound of breakers hissing on the unseen beach, he guessed that his group couldn’t have been more than a mile from land. They resumed paddling. But a nagging thought made them hesitate. Samar was Japanese held. You didn’t just go ashore by night without doing a little reconnoitering. The dark island was famous for danger. Discovered by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521, Samar was five thousand square miles of oozing malarial swamps fringing majestic forested mountains. The terrain was liberally soaked with the blood of insurgents, saturated with a myth of violence. From the 1901 Balangiga massacre, in which fifty-nine U.S. troops were ambushed and killed by Filipino guerrillas, provoking Brig. Gen. Jacob Smith to declare that all Filipinos over the age of ten must be killed and “the interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness,” to the nightmare campaign waged by the pulajan insurgency against the Manila Constabulary in 1904-05, in which rebels burned fifty-three villages in a two-month period, it had fairly earned the nickname “the bloody island.” Samar had seldom known peace, even less now that its foreign occupiers were as brutal as its native insurgents.

  The clouds shrouded the moon; where squalls fell to the sea, they looked like forests of trees on land. Without knowing their geographical bearings, the men could not know what to do. In the pitch dark, in the safe distance, Jack Moore spotted a patrol boat of some kind, its searchlight playing over the dark waters in their vicinity but failing to discover them.

  George Bray and the others stopped paddling and lay to rest, trying to orient themselves by the position of the moon. But like the tides, that too was a shifting variable. It lay hidden behind thick clouds. They fell asleep one by one, and when they awoke again and found their bearings by the early light of daybreak, they discovered that they had drifted farther out to sea.

  * * *

  A SHIP STEAMED TOWARD them in the night, its head-on silhouette materializing tall and black against the backlighting moon. A few survivors of the Johnston shouted out, desperate that the ship not miss them. But when it came closer and then turned broadside to them, everyone suddenly went quiet. Its pagoda-shaped mast was all too apparent. Ellsworth Welch identified it as a Terutsuki-class destroyer. It was probably searching for survivors from one of the imperial cruisers sunk in the battle. The presence of a larger predator compelled men who were kicking at sharks to float motionless, loath to break the surface with an out-of-place splash that might reveal their presence. Men who were singing abruptly stopped. “What had been a very noisy group became as silent as a graveyard,” Harold Bereson-sky recalled. When the ship’s searchlight beam swept the seas near them, the silence was broken by soft prayers.

  The random strikes of the sharks terrified the men through the night. One moment a kid was there, quietly treading water. The next moment he was screaming, and seconds later he was gone. Quiet. Then screaming. Then gone. Just like that. Ellsworth Welch felt something grab the back of his life belt, rip it off, and tear his pants and shorts. “This was a situation for which I wasn’t prepared,” he wrote. “My contract with the Navy was to fight the enemy, not sharks.” Robert Billie, wounded by the first Japanese salvo that struck the Johnston’s bridge, swung in and out of consciousness through much of the night. Someone tied him up to an unwounded shipmate who helped keep his face out of the water. Thanks to his shipmate’s kindness, Billie would survive. Before the night was over, though, his unhurt benefactor would himself be grabbed and hauled under by a shark.

  Fifty-one

  At about ten A.M. on the second day at sea, the reappearance of Samar’s mountain peaks boosted the spirits of Bob Copeland’s men. In celebration, the skipper broke out the last of the emergency rations. Hoisting himself up to sit on the doughnut raft’s ring, Copeland rubbed his fingers on his trousers to clean them of oil and ordered each man to swim up to him, whereupon he dispensed the last of the malted milk tablets, three apiece, and the last remnants of Spam and some stale fresh water.

  The experience helped Copeland see a certain egalitarian nobility to his crew and officers. “On that raft we were just forty-nine very wretched human beings, entirely dependent upon ourselves and one another in an effort to sustain life. Under those conditions it made no difference to us whether a man’s parents had been rich or poor; whether he was Catholic, Protestant, or Jew; whether his skin was black, brown, or white; or whether his ancestry was English, Spanish, Italian, or something else.” During their second day at sea, the oil mostly dissolved and washed away from their skin, revealing those things that Copeland no longer felt mattered anymore.

  Paddling gamely toward shore, Howard Cayo and Tom Stevenson straddled the overloaded raft on opposite sides. While they were laboring, straining to push the impossible weight of their craft through the low swells, a seagull began circling overhead. Seeing a potential meal, Cayo stood shakily, gathered his weight behind his paddle, and swung it upward in a wide arc. He missed the bird but caught Tom Stevenson full in the head on the follow-through, knocking the dazed lieutenant into the sea.

  Around midafternoon, while Stevenson was shaking off the effects of the blow, easier pickings came their way. The men on Copeland’s raft spied a wooden crate floating some distance away from them. Cayo and fireman first class John Kudelchuk took off after it and, retrieving it for their captain’s inspection, discovered it to be stamped with Japanese characters. They pulled it open and discovered it was full of dried onions, more than 150 of them. They were passed around, and the men started devouring them, stopping only when they realized the extent to which the onions intensified their thirst. From that point on dehydration and exposure to sun and sea threatened the survivors’ lives as surely as did the sharks.

  Some of the men questioned Copeland’s decision to paddle toward shore. With the possibility of rescue shrinking by the hour, they reasoned, shouldn’t they be conserving their strength rather than expending it? Worn down by the multiple pressures of combat, injury, and the agony of watching so many of his crew die and his ship be smashed down around him, the skipper himself was beginning to lose his edge. There was only so much he could endure. In time Copeland started to feel, as did quite a few others, that they should risk swimming to shore under the cover of darkness and make contact with Filipino guerrillas.

  But as the sun began to set, they were drifting by their best dead reckoning some four miles from the Samar coast—“too far away to make it in by night and too close to paddle very much farther in daylight without the danger of being detected in the morning,” Copeland feared. While the sun set on their second day at sea, they elected to stay put and take their chances with the currents.

  * * *

  AFTER ANOTHER DAY OF riding the gentle swells, exhaustion set in, and men whose lives depended on their alertness began nodding off to sleep. At first, the problem corrected itself; when their faces hit the water, it served as a sort of self-activating wake-up call. But as their fatigue deepened, compounding the stress they had suffered in two and a half hours of
battle, the comfort of the tropical waters was like morphine, a quiet way to a gentle death. The men paired off, taking turns holding each other’s faces out of the water so the other could sleep.

  The water’s evident warmth masked its life-threatening nature. Though its temperature was worthy of the tropics, in the mid-eighty-degree Fahrenheit range, it was well below mean body temperature and thus was cold enough to sap the body of a significant amount of heat. The speed at which a body loses heat depends on the density of the medium surrounding it. Since water is denser than air, it has a correspondingly greater capacity to draw heat from a body. And so over time, the ten- to fifteen-degree differential between body temperature and the temperature of the sea sapped the survivors’ energy, exposing them to hypothermia. In the quiet of the tropical night, teeth could be heard chattering. The men huddled close to gather one another’s warmth.

  At about ten-thirty on the second night, the Roberts survivors in Copeland’s group spied a flashing white light on the water. Aware that other ships of Taffy 3 had gone down too, they were anxious to unite with their survivors and combine resources. But what if they were Japanese? Copeland had no weapon. There had been a. 45-caliber pistol on the raft, but it had been tossed overboard owing to its weight. Their only other tools were a pair of sheath knives and two flashlights. Copeland flipped on the light in the direction of the mysterious flare and flashed Morse code for AA—Navy code for “Who are you?” He then flashed the Samuel B. Roberts’s call sign, VICTORY DOG 1-4-1-3, hoping his correspondent would realize who they were and why they were there. In reply, the light blinked some Morse-like signals that neither Copeland nor anyone else could make sense of. Then the lights stopped altogether. Had he been communicating with the Japanese?