The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

It was about nine A.M. on Navy Day, October 27.

  Fifty-three

  The vessels that rescued them were part of a seven-ship task group organized by the commander of the Leyte amphibious landing force, Rear Adm. Daniel E. Barbey. Under Lt. Cdr. James A. Baxter, skipper of PC-623, the group had left Leyte’s San Pedro Bay at 4:06 P.M. on the day of the battle. Picking their way through the sea at ten knots, aligned in a sweeping, mile-wide search formation that Baxter led west from a designated starting point, moving with the current, toward the island of Samar, Baxter’s ships had only empty oil slicks and a single Japanese survivor to show for their efforts when, at 10:29 P.M., Lt. Allison M. Levy, PC-623’s officer of the deck, saw red, white, and green Very flares about twenty miles ahead to port.

  Risking shelling from a nearby Japanese-held island, which was said to boast eight-inch shore batteries, Levy ordered Captain Baxter awakened and asked his skipper for permission to break formation and investigate the contact. Twice denied, Levy took matters into his own hands, turning to the helmsman and ordering “All ahead flank” and “Left full rudder.” Baxter ran topside, hollered at Levy that he had disobeyed orders, and ordered the helmsman to resume the original course.

  “I informed the skipper and the helmsman that I had not been properly relieved of the deck,” Levy wrote, “and that I would not accept Captain Baxter’s order to relieve me for another fifteen minutes so that his eyes could become adjusted to the total darkness.”

  As the ship continued toward the flares, Baxter’s eyes adjusted, he saw the flares, and the argument became moot. Baxter set aside any issue of insubordination and agreed that the flares were probably American. Spotting a raft, he ordered the rest of his ships to investigate with him. They hit a Samaritan’s jackpot. From midnight to 3:35 A.M. on October 27, the crews of the seven rescue ships busied themselves retrieving survivors of the Gambier Bay from the sea. Its decks crowded with almost two hundred exhausted and wounded sailors, PC-1119 was ordered back to Leyte while the others continued searching. At 7:45 A.M. another raft was found, and men from the Roberts were brought aboard. About forty-five minutes later they were joined in safety by survivors from the Johnston and the Hoel as well.

  No one could have guessed how close to one another the four ships’ survivors had drifted. The southwesterly currents and their own feeble movements over the water had swept them into the same quadrant of ocean. When James Baxter’s flotilla arrived, pulling them out of the water was quick, concentrated work.

  By 10:19 A.M. on the twenty-seventh, when the rescuers set course to return to Leyte, Captain Baxter’s task group had saved about 1,150 survivors of the Gambier Bay, the Hoel, the Johnston, and the Samuel B. Roberts. Because of the delay in rescue, some 116 men had died at sea. The task group’s flagship, PC-623, carried so many Taffy 3 survivors that Baxter had to order five thousand gallons of fuel pumped into the sea to keep his ship from foundering on the way back to Leyte.

  * * *

  CREWMEN FROM THE PATROL craft cut George Bray’s blue jeans from his brine-softened legs, removed his denim jacket, and lathered his skin with rags soaked in diesel fuel to dissolve the residue of black oil that clung to him. The PC’s narrow deck, covered in a brown-black ooze of blood and fuel oil, was so crowded with survivors that a man could scarcely walk across it. Bray was given a shot of whiskey, then taken to the chow hall for a few bites of oatmeal, which he promptly vomited up.

  Needing a place to collapse but having seen the tight real-estate market topside, Bray walked forward from the mess hall and descended a ladder through a hatch to the crew’s sleeping quarters. He poked his head into the first compartment he found and saw a sailor reclined on a bunk. The sailor asked Bray, “What are you looking for?”

  “Just a place to lay down,” he said.

  The sailor, registering Bray’s weathered condition, got up from his bunk, patted it down, and said, “Here, take mine.”

  The Roberts survivor hit the sack and was asleep for what seemed about seventeen seconds when the clatter of gunfire roused him. Several waves of Japanese planes had swooped over the small ship, strafing, drawing vigorous fire in return. The cacophony was enough to interrupt his sleep, but it did not bring him fully to his senses. He had endured forty-eight hours at sea, surrounded by sharks, barracuda, and creeping madness. No punk Jap pilot was going to come between George Bray of Montgomery, Alabama, and some hard-won rest.

  * * *

  THE OFFICERS AND TWO dozen sailors on the boat that had hauled aboard Copeland’s four dozen men were overwhelmed by the work of caring for them. But they didn’t mind it a bit. Most of them were already bare-chested, having given their shirts to Gambier Bay survivors. Weeks ago, en route to Leyte with Sixth Army troops aboard, their ship had been filled with men. Now its hull brimmed with life again, in a mission of mercy instead of assault.

  Like the rest of his officers, Bob Copeland did not wear insignia on his shirt, the better to avoid torture in the event of their capture. Amid the sprawl of gaunt humanity on the ship’s decks, it was all the harder to discern Copeland’s rank. Covered in oil, mostly naked, he looked like any of the other half-wasted Taffy 3 survivors. The boys on the landing craft gave him a rag and a bucket of diesel oil and encouraged him to wipe himself clean. “I took about three swipes and fainted—fell right off the bench on the deck,” Copeland wrote. He felt someone lift him up and plant him in a seated position. It was Earle “Pop” Stewart, a radarman third class, giving his captain a bath. Stewart had his exhausted skipper about half clean when the ship’s general alarm began tolling. Japanese planes had found them too. As the LCI’s crew scrambled for their machine guns, the Gambier Bay and Roberts survivors scurried for cover. The Zero fighter planes made several passes, reduced in number each time, Copeland thought, owing to the sharp aim of the crew.

  A young sailor dragging a heavy canister of forty-millimeter ammunition found Bob Copeland lying across the portside passageway he needed to cross. The kid kicked the skipper in the butt, saying, “Get the hell out of the way.” Copeland rolled into the scuppers and let the gunner proceed. The gunners were Dead-Eye Dicks, downing three Zeros. Miraculously, no one on the LCI was hit by the angry rain of shells spitting the other way.

  When the remaining Japanese planes flew off, the survivors were taken below, forty squeezed into a compartment meant for half that number. Men who were healthy enough to hustle got a pipe berth suspended in threes from the ceiling. The rest flopped on the deck. “The place was like the Black Hole of Calcutta,” Copeland wrote. “We were all stark naked and utterly exhausted. We resembled reptiles far more than human beings.”

  The crew stripped the Gambier Bay survivors to the minimum in order to accommodate the bedraggled newcomers from the Samuel B. Roberts. Lying on the steel deck, Copeland was given some worn khaki trousers and an old dungaree jumper without buttons. One of his men offered him a bunk, and Copeland took it. Two hours later, desperately thirsty, he awoke. Too weak to get up, he rolled over and fell sharply to the deck, landing on knees and elbows. Too exhausted to rise, he crawled over his men, getting cussed as he pressed his elbows into their stomachs and faces. He made it to a ladder, climbed upward in search of a cold drink, and found a grating to the engine room, out of which wafted comforting warm air. Beside the grating was a white porcelain bowl from the crew’s mess filled with freshwater. He gulped it down, lay there for a while, then crawled back down the ladder and got back into his bunk. Twice more during the night, after stretches of fitful sleep, Copeland struggled topside, finding each time the same white bowl filled with clean water, which he eagerly guzzled. After his third long drink that night, around four A.M., Copeland was easing himself down the ladder to his sleeping quarters when he heard one of the LCI’s crew enter the compartment behind him. “My God,” he said, “that dog has drank a lot of water tonight.”

  Fifty-four

  Captain Baxter’s ships didn’t rescue everybody.

  On his second day in the water Neil
Dethlefs of the Johnston was stung by jellyfish severely enough to scramble his mind. The quartermaster hallucinated, fading out of awareness and then back into it again. He was adrift with another sailor, radarman third class Joseph Dotson, who evidently had enough strength to keep Dethlefs from drowning, though Dotson himself did not survive. Swimming and drifting, wearing nothing but his dungarees, Dethlefs was conscious of islands nearby. He did not know how far away they were, but he had the notion to wait till dark and then try swimming for the beach. If he could make it, he might rest on dry land, then swim by morning south along the shore and be rescued in Leyte Gulf, though he could not be sure his wild plan—or the island itself—wasn’t just another phantasm brought on by exhaustion, salt water, and the seeping toxins from the jellyfish.

  In the afternoon Dethlefs found a standard-issue Navy peacoat drifting on the swells. He collected it and held it until nightfall, then put it on, enjoying its heavy, wet embrace. Passing in and out of consciousness, he awoke once to find that the peacoat had disappeared. And he was standing on the bridge of a vessel; the abandon ship order had been given. His perceptions cleared, and he realized he was pulling off his dungarees as if preparing to jump from the deck into the water. He saw that he was already in the water, though he couldn’t remember jumping, and so he pulled them back on. When he realized that his life belt was losing its buoyancy, he removed his dungarees again, tying the legs in order to use them for flotation. But a long rip in the seat kept them from holding air. Dethlefs resumed swimming for the island. He thought he heard the distant sound of a diesel engine, like those used on PT boats.

  Next he was aware of a dizzying vertigo. He was standing on his head, spinning in the water. He righted himself, felt something sharp and rough under his feet, then it was gone as another breaker twisted him back around toward the beach. He gasped for air, and water washed into his mouth again as another wave shoved him sideways and upside down. He grabbed for a hold, finding it on the sharp coral. Then blackness descended as he passed out, waking only when he perceived voices shouting at him. He sat waist deep in water, naked, disoriented. “I thought the whole Japanese Navy was coming down on me,” Dethlefs recalled.

  “I was sitting on a coral reef, and I could see a crowd of Filipinos on the beach yelling at me.” One of the group came running across the coral, picked Dethlefs up, and headed back to shore. The American protested, “Put me down. I can walk.” So his carrier obliged. Dethlefs slumped to the ground, realizing that his behind had been chopped up like hamburger from sitting on coral. Large saltwater sores covered his groin. He could not walk. So they carried him. The rest of the day was a blur of motion and voices. He was aware that people were taking him somewhere, but there was no telling where.

  He perceived that he was inside a cabin in the jungle. Hands rubbed a soft substance on his sores—cocoa butter. He awoke once to drops of water falling on his face. Looking up, he saw the wide brown face of a Filipino woman, crying, the tears falling down onto his face. “Hello, Mama,” he said to her. The Filipino woman had once been married to an American military man. “She adopted me on the spot,” Dethlefs recalled.

  They told him he was on the island of Andeau, about three miles off Samar. He did not know how long he was there. The days bled together. He was lifted and carried to the beach and placed in a dugout canoe. Men covered him with mats to conceal him, they said, from Japanese patrolling a bridge nearby. That night Dethlefs was taken to a settlement of some kind.

  “It was like a scene from Terry and the Pirates,” he wrote. Natives in loincloths and head-wraps, torches in hand and submachine guns strapped to their backs, took Dethlefs from the canoe and into a three-room house in the jungle. Five families seemed to be living there. They gave him a chaise longue to sleep in, fitted him with a pair of shorts, and generally treated him like a guest of honor. “The Filipino natives came from miles around to see me. Some would stand outside my window and play guitar and sing for my entertainment. I watched one man sit beside an open fire turning a pig on a spit for most of the day,” Dethlefs recalled. But he couldn’t eat the delectable native cuisine. Baked raw by sunburn and salt water, the skin around his mouth cracked whenever he opened it to chew, smile, or speak. His hosts fixed him a glass of warm cane-sugared water mixed with lime juice. When a large sunburn blister burst on his back, they bathed him and treated the wound. They summoned a doctor to apply tincture of pomegranate to his cuts.

  As Dethlefs regained his strength, a tall figure came to the house. It was an American who went by the name Captain Smith. He was in fact an Army Air Force sergeant who had fled to the hills and joined the Filipino resistance when the Japanese had seized the airfield to which he had been stationed. Evidently he had promoted himself to captain in the reassignment. Smith berated the Filipinos for hauling Dethlefs “through every carabao wallow in the area,” then asked the wounded American if he carried a gun. The sailor said no, and so Smith produced a revolver that looked to Dethlefs like a naval rifle—probably a. 44 Magnum, he thought—and gave it to him.

  Dethlefs’s odyssey had brought him to the jungle home of Juan Bocar, a Manila attorney and former Samar national representative who became a leader in the Filipino guerrilla resistance. Bocar’s guerrilla headquarters was apparently a nexus for American military personnel separated from their units in the forbidding terrain of Samar. In his care Dethlefs was introduced to a Navy dive-bomber gunner, Joe Tropp, from the Third Fleet carrier USS Hancock. His plane had been downed by a Japanese ship, killing his pilot.

  Tropp gave Dethlefs his shoes, then the pair, escorted by a Filipino guide, embarked on a long walk through the jungle to the shore and to a sheltered cove where another American, a Texan named Colonel Davis, had a small boat. Davis told Dethlefs he would take him offshore by night, where a submarine or PT boat would come for him. For two nights they waited offshore, but neither a boat nor a sub showed itself. When a Japanese floatplane spotted them, Colonel Davis decided not to wait any longer. They would take their chances navigating the shoreline, paddling south for Leyte Gulf. The route would take them past Japanese shore batteries atop a cliff overlooking the channel they had to cross. Davis was a tough customer, but Dethlefs could sense his concern.

  After dark they slipped into the boat and made their way silently past the cliffs. The enemy took no notice. The next morning they were south of Samar, approaching the island of Dinagat. They raised the American flag on their craft and navigated around the island until they spotted an American LCI, then flagged it down, using semaphore to indicate they were survivors in need of help. That night Dethlefs and Joe Tropp were embarked on a troop ship in Leyte harbor. They spent the following day watching air strikes flying out toward an enemy whose time, thanks in part to their efforts, was soon enough to come.

  At least four other sailors from Taffy 3, Bill Shaw and Orin Vad-nais of the Johnston and two survivors from the Hoel, made it ashore and into Juan Bocar’s sanctuary. In the company of two downed fliers and another man, Shaw and Vadnais too missed two planned rendezvous with friendly ships. Like Dethlefs and Tropp, however, they found their way to safety without taking too many chances with the Japanese. An American LCI happened to be delivering supplies to the guerrillas while they were awaiting rescue. The men hopped aboard and rode to Leyte.

  * * *

  TWENTY-SEVEN HOURS AFTER GATHERING in the Taffy 3 survivors at sea, the guardian angels masquerading as the seven ships of James Baxter’s task unit entered San Pedro Bay, delivering the men of the Roberts, the Johnston, the Hoel, and the Gambier Bay to the sanctuary of Leyte Gulf. In the predawn darkness of October 28, solemnly and without fanfare, their crews transferred the survivors onto hospital ships and large transports. With them went the remains of the dead and the personal effects salvaged from men buried at sea. As they finished that delicate job, the morning watch was beginning anew for the ships of the Seventh and Third Fleets.

  The awful aftermath of the Battle off Samar had ended. The catastrophe ha
d run its course. Focused on tomorrow, relieved of the tasks that constituted their daily routine, the survivors took their first steps on the uncertain journey of the rest of their young lives.

  Part IV

  HIGHEST TRADITIONS

  I want you to know I think you wrote the most glorious page in American naval history that day.

  —Fleet Adm. William F. Halsey, comment to Rear Adm. Clifton A. F. Sprague, at Ulithi, May 1945

  Fifty-five

  As the survivors of the Samuel B. Roberts, the Johnston, the Hoel, the Gambier Bay, and the St. Lo were being triaged at Leyte Gulf for transfer to hospital ships and transit to Hollandia in New Guinea, Brisbane, and other points east, the Battle off Samar was receding into history. It was the Battle of Leyte Gulf’s penultimate chapter and the last large-scale engagement between opposing navies that the world would ever see. As it was ending around midmorning on October 25, Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet planes were falling on Admiral Ozawa’s decoy Northern Force in what would become known as the Battle of Cape Engaño, Leyte’s final naval action. With Leyte won, Manila would soon fall. The Navy moved on, preparing to land Marines on Japanese soil for the first time at Iwo Jima. Journalists and historians lingered behind, evaluating the battle whose true dimensions were only beginning to emerge.

  The war correspondent Fletcher Pratt wrote of Leyte in 1946, “this was Trafalgar; it was Tsushima and La Hogue and Aegospotami and Salamis and all the other utterly crushing victories, after which an entire war is changed. Seldom enough in history before had an entire navy been brought to a single battle. Never before had an entire navy lost so great a proportion of its strength as the Japs had done.”

  The three-day series of melees around the Philippines in October 1944 was by multiple measures the most sprawling, spectacular, and horrible naval battle in history. If it was not as decisive, in the word’s purest sense, as the victory at Midway, it was the greatest naval battle ever fought for the distances it spanned, for the tonnage of ships sunk, for the duration of the duels between surface ships, and for the terrible losses of human life—some 13,000 sailors, airmen, and officers, including perhaps 10,000 on the Japanese side alone, and about 850 from Taffy 3. “Our defeat at Leyte was tantamount to the loss of the Philippines,” said Japan’s navy minister, Adm. Mitsumasa Yonai. “When you took the Philippines, that was the end of our resources.”