The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  Fifty-six

  Rear Adm. Clifton Sprague, the unconquered hero, returned to Philadelphia to rejoin his family after the war. His daughter Patricia was shocked when she saw him get out of the car. He stood there in his khaki-green uniform, looking as if he had come straight from a street fight. In a manner of speaking, of course, he had. “He had two black eyes. He looked as tired as I’ve ever seen him,” she said. “Remarkably enough, he did not talk much about the battle. It was just his duty, he did it, and that was all he expected.”

  With his retirement in 1951, Ziggy Sprague ended his thirty-seven-year career in naval aviation. With the exception of an article he wrote for the April 1945 issue of American magazine and a few scribbled marginal notes in his copy of C. Vann Woodward’s book on Leyte Gulf, Clifton Sprague never wrote about the events off Samar; nor did he ever share with his wife, Annabel, or their two girls his memories of the fateful battle. “The Navy years were over for the Sprague daughters as well,” Patricia wrote, “and busy with growing families, we did not think to ask him to reminisce.” The retired admiral threw himself into home improvement projects, followed the stock market, and watched boxing matches and baseball games on TV. From the time World War II ended until his death from heart failure on April 11, 1955, Clifton A. F. Sprague, pioneer of naval aviation, never flew in an airplane again.

  Like their commander, the ships of Taffy 3 did not seem to meet the challenge of ending life as dramatically as they had lived it. Most of the escort carriers were decommissioned, placed in reserve status, and sold as scrap metal after the war. Although their veterans like to joke today that their ships were cut to pieces, sent to the smelter, and reincarnated as Toyotas, that seems unlikely, insofar as Sprague’s four surviving carriers were sold, in the late forties and fifties, to U.S.-based machinery and steel concerns. Of all the Taffy 3 ships, only the Heermann met the ironic end of steaming under a foreign flag. After serving with distinction through the end of the Pacific war, Amos Hathaway’s patched-up tin can was decommissioned in 1946, moth-balled in the reserves, and sold to the Argentine navy in 1961, where it served as the Brown.

  That a gaudily decorated ship such as the Heermann could be traded away to a foreign fleet may suggest the degree of institutional amnesia or ennui that gripped the Navy as memories of the war dulled and gathered dust. For years afterward the veterans of Taffy 3 were content to leave those memories buried. Many survivors seethed in quiet rage at the way they or others were treated during their time stranded on the rafts. Some blamed Admiral Sprague for failing to rescue them. Most were angry at Admiral Halsey for leaving them vulnerable in the first place. They generally kept such emotions pent up, seldom if ever speaking of them with their spouses or children.

  They corresponded with shipmates they had grown closest to. Johnny LeClercq’s mother was the recipient, at her home on Live Oak Street in Dallas, of a series of moving letters from Samuel B. Roberts survivors. Dudley Moylan, Tom Stevenson, and others wrote to her, at first to give personal testimony to the circumstances of Johnny’s death, and later to assure her that his memory was still with them. “No one suffered pain, nor were there any mangled bodies; they were all killed by the terrible blast,” Stevenson wrote her on December 1, 1944. “John died a hero’s death…. Yes, you can rightly be proud of your son. I know that I am proud to have had him as a friend.”

  The details must have been hard to take. But with John’s official status as missing in action, most likely Mrs. LeClercq was glad to have the uncertainty of his fate dispelled. It must have brought a degree of closure to be informed by shipmate J. M. Reid, “I hold no hope that he is alive, none at all.”

  On the tenth anniversary of the battle, on October 25, 1954, long after the shock of the Western Union telegram had subsided, Dudley Moylan wrote Mrs. LeClercq to say:

  It is very easy for me to think of the Roberts and her men as still sailing somewhere, only I am rudely not with them. I miss them both, the living and the dead, and sometimes I can’t remember in which group a friend belongs. They stay alive and they stay young while I grow old. Young and carefree, young all over, young and smiling like Johnny. It is a good way to remember them.

  MOSTLY THEY GOT ON with their lives. The fleet commanders had been quick to send words of congratulations and praise, and official citations and awards came their way too. Chester Nimitz greeted the four surviving Taffy 3 carriers on their return to Pearl Harbor with a message that read in part, “Your successful fight against great odds will live as one of the most stirring tales of naval history.… As long as our country has men with your heart, courage, skill, and strength, she need not fear for her future.” Ziggy Sprague lobbied successfully to get all thirteen ships of Task Unit 77.4.3 awarded a Presidential Unit Citation. Ernest Evans was Taffy 3’s sole recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Sprague received the Navy Cross, as did Bob Copeland, Leon Kintberger, Amos Hathaway, and several pilots, including Bill Brooks, Tom Van Brunt, Tex Waldrop, Richard Fowler, and Edward Huxtable. Sprague’s Navy Cross citation read like the rest of them, in part:

  For distinguishing himself by extraordinary heroism in action against an enemy of the United States…. Admiral Sprague’s personal courage and determination in the face of overwhelming enemy surface gunfire and air attack were in keeping with the highest traditions of the Navy of the United States.

  But strangely, for all the honors handed out, the Battle off Samar was for a time the victory whose name the Navy dared not speak. To celebrate it too vigorously, Admiral Nimitz felt, would unavoidably be to criticize the Navy’s most spectacular old lion. After the war Nimitz tried to quash official criticism of Admiral Halsey, fearing the public relations damage it might do to the Navy. The wartime public was in the thrall of Bull Halsey’s spark-plug persona and quotable wit. With budget battles to be fought in the postwar period, it risked too much to allow his reputation to suffer. Though Nimitz believed Halsey had blundered at Leyte—“It never occurred to me that Halsey, knowing the composition of the ships in the Sibuyan Sea, would leave San Bernardino Strait unguarded,” he wrote in a personal letter to Adm. Ernest J. King, who was himself outraged by Halsey’s decision—he suppressed open criticism of Halsey.

  When one of Nimitz’s staffers included a pointed rebuke of Halsey in a draft of the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet’s official report on Leyte, Nimitz ordered a rewrite, scrawling on the report, “What are you trying to do … start another Sampson-Schley controversy? Tone this down.” Evoking the memory of the morale-shattering feud between two admirals during the Spanish-American War, Nimitz held true to an early career vow he’d made, never to let public controversy cloud the Navy’s achievements again.

  Halsey himself seemed less sheepish, maneuvering to receive credit for as much of the Leyte victory as possible while deflecting fallout from the near disaster at Samar. As Taffy 3’s survivors were hunkering down for their first night at sea, Halsey radioed Nimitz, “It can be announced with assurance that the Japanese Navy has been beaten, routed, and broken by the Third and Seventh fleets.” As Halsey must have anticipated, President Roosevelt read the dispatch to the Washington press corps, at six P.M. EST on October 25. A naval historian observed, “Though he participated in only portions of the far-flung battle, Halsey upstaged his fellow commanders and announced the victorious news as though his had been the directing hand.” In his 1947 autobiography Halsey sustained his defensive stance, torpedoing his close friendship with Kinkaid with a single sentence: “I wondered how Kinkaid had let ‘Ziggy’ Sprague get caught like this.”

  For his part, Ziggy Sprague had faith that Taffy 3’s exploits would one day receive their due. “Our Navy, for reasons that are clear to me and possibly to you too, has never played up this action to any extent,” he wrote in a personal letter to the superintendent of Annapolis, Vice Adm. Aubrey Fitch, in 1947, “but I am convinced that history will accord the proper place for it in the decisive actions of the war, probably a half a century or more after I have p
assed on.”

  After the Leyte contretemps Halsey dulled his five stars still further when he chose to steam his fleet through major typhoons in December 1944 and July 1945, with significant loss of life. Halsey became a polarizing figure. Most sailors loved him, as did the public. But by the end of the war a powerful undercurrent of disenchantment began to emerge. As a possible indicator of the Navy’s ambivalence about Halsey’s legacy, no class of ship was named for him. A class of supercarriers was named for Admiral Nimitz. A sleek new breed of destroyer honored Halsey’s less-famous contemporary, Adm. Raymond Spruance. Halsey’s name would grace only individual ships. The guided missile cruiser USS Halsey (CG-23) was commissioned in 1963 and deactivated in 1994. A new Arleigh Burke-class destroyer of the same name (DDG-97) will be completed in 2005.

  The rank and file of Taffy 3 would content themselves with quieter accolades. When Bud Comet, discharged in Seattle, arrived back at his parents’ coal company-owned house in West Virginia, an envelope awaited him. Bearing a return address to the White House, it contained a letter from Harry Truman, a Presidential Unit Citation, a Bronze Star, and a letter of commendation for meritorious conduct. His dad asked Bud what the decorations meant. All the Samuel B. Roberts survivor could say in reply was they meant that he had not dishonored his mother. The elder Comet looked at him intently and nodded his head, then asked whether the awards had any monetary value. Bud said no, he didn’t think so. His father said that if they didn’t have any monetary value, then what Bud had done was for his own satisfaction. “You’ve done well. But don’t dwell on it. You can throw this stuff in the fireplace and burn it. It has no value from this point on. Knowing in your heart that you did well is all the satisfaction that you need.”

  “His logic was good,” Bud said. “But my wife didn’t throw nothing in the fireplace. She kept it.”

  Over the years Bud Comet has kept quiet about a lot of things. There are certain aspects of his ship’s final hours and their horrible aftermath that he just does not want to discuss. But for others the ice began to break, and the memories began to thaw, when the survivors’ reunions began in the 1970s. Though Ziggy Sprague, Cdr. William Thomas, and a gathering of men from individual ships had held small “Taffy 3 reunions” for several years beginning in October 1946, the survivors of the Gambier Bay were the first to organize, in 1969. Eight years later the group sponsored a “Philippines pilgrimage” that would enable them to keep their vow to honor their dead, to acknowledge and dignify their sacrifice with a proper burial ceremony at the site of the sinking. Led by their onetime executive officer, Rear Adm. Richard Ballinger, and their chaplain, Rev. Verner Carlsen, the Gambier Bay group set out on an adventure of remembrance.

  They took a Philippines Airlines flight to Honolulu, leapfrogged to Guam, then flew over Saipan and Tinian and through a rainsquall that told them it was October in the southwestern Pacific again. They landed in Manila, greeted by VIPs from the U.S. and Philippine navies; visited the U.S. naval base at Subic Bay; stood by the shrine to Douglas MacArthur at Red Beach on Leyte; and toured the sacred ground where GIs fell at Bataan and Corregidor.

  On October 24, 1977, they boarded a Philippine navy ship out of Manila. Screened by leaping porpoises, the RPS Mt. Samat navigated San Bernardino Strait and steamed into the waters off Samar where the Gambier Bay had gone down. A typhoon loomed somewhere over the horizon, raising whitecaps and long, rolling swells. “They’re telling us that they know we’re here,” a shipmate said. “They’re kicking up the sea from below.”

  As Chaplain Carlsen began reading the eulogy, their voices hushed, and all that could be heard was the slap of swells against the ship’s cold hull. The historian of the Gambier Bay/VC-10 Association, Tony Potochniak, tossed overboard a cylindrical capsule stenciled with the name of the ship and containing the personal effects of the dead and American and Philippine flags. “We now commit this capsule to the deep, in loving memory of you, our killed in action and deceased shipmates,” he said. As the names of the dead were called out, wives of the survivors took turns tossing a red carnation into the sea as the Filipino honor guard fired a single rifle shot.

  * * *

  A TREMENDOUS AMOUNT OF unwritten and untranslated history remains to be unearthed on the Japanese side. One wonders how or whether their veterans commemorate the battle. Certainly not many of them remain. The Japanese losses during the Sho-1 operation can only be guessed at, but they are sure to have been disastrous. Of the ten heavy cruisers that left Brunei, only three, the Tone, the Haguro, and the Kumano, made it back through San Bernardino Strait. Total Japanese losses are estimated to be around eleven thousand men.

  Admiral Kurita’s reputation lay in tatters following his timid performance on the brink of victory off Samar. Owing in part to the endless inscrutability of his motives—he was exhausted and confused in his thinking; he was unclear that his objective could be achieved; he feared too many U.S. planes were gathering at Tacloban; Kinkaid’s pleas had spooked him into believing powerful reinforcements were on the way; he was low on fuel; he was regrouping to attack another American fleet—he has never been given the benefit of the doubt. In the novel War and Remembrance, which features an extensive and vivid narration of the Battle off Samar, Herman Wouk put a particularly harsh assessment in the mouth of one of his characters: “Kurita’s role at Leyte had elements of the noble and the pathetic, before his collapse into imbecility.”

  A problem that plagued the Japanese side throughout the battle was fundamental confusion about the nature of the enemy who opposed them. In no small part due to the smoke roiling from the stacks and sterns of the U.S. ships, the Japanese were nearly unanimous in mistaking Ziggy Sprague’s task unit for something considerably more powerful than it really was. Kurita would describe Taffy 3 in his own action report as a “gigantic enemy task force including six or seven carriers accompanied by many cruisers and destroyers.”

  Watching his first salvos roar off just before seven A.M.—the first time the mighty Yamato had ever fired on an enemy ship—Battleship Division 1’s Admiral Ugaki saw an American vessel smoking and believed the battleship’s opening broadside had sunk her. After the air raids started, the Japanese perceived “salvos of medium-caliber guns” hitting near the Yamato. That no ship in Sprague’s fleet boasted medium-caliber weaponry—as the six- or eight-inch guns of cruisers were generally called—revealed the extent of Kurita’s bewilderment. In a landscape of tropical squalls and enemy smoke, he was not at all certain what to make of the fleet that had materialized unexpectedly on the southern horizon.

  Clearly by late 1944, however, hard experience had equipped both the Americans and the Japanese to appreciate the new rules of naval combat in the aircraft-carrier age. By the time the jeep carriers of Taffy 2 mustered their air groups and began launching big strikes against the Center Force after eight A.M., and once Tacloban’s airstrip had been organized as a makeshift staging ground, Kurita was facing air assaults from more than a dozen escort carriers, or the rough equivalent of four or five fleet carriers. No matter how overmatched the Americans were at Samar, no matter how dashing their screening ships were in intercepting the superior force during the critical first ninety minutes of the unlikely battle, the strength of the U.S. forces that Kurita confronted was more formidable than many analysts have allowed. It does nothing to diminish the valor of the tin can sailors aboard Taffy 3’s destroyers and destroyer escorts, or of the gallant aviators and airedales who flew on that day, to say that Kurita’s ultimate victory was by no means assured, and that withdrawing in the face of continuous and savage air assault was perhaps the prudent thing to do.

  An assessment offered by Ziggy Sprague has the beauty and inescapable merit of simplicity: of Kurita’s decision to withdraw, he wrote to Admiral Fitch in 1947, “I… stated [to Admiral Nimitz] that the main reason they turned north was that they were receiving too much damage to continue and I am still of that opinion and cold analysis will eventually confirm it.”

 
After postwar interviews with Japanese commanders were completed by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey and by the historian Samuel Eliot Morison and his staff, and after the accounts of Admirals Ugaki, Koyanagi, and others were published, Japanese voices were seldom heard in the history books. In 1984 Hank Pyzdrowski, the VC-10 Avenger pilot and executive director of the Gambier Bay’s Heritage Foundation, received a letter with a Japanese postmark. “Dear Sirs,” it began,

  I have the honor to write the Men of the Gambier Bay as the ex-Commanding Officer of the Tone, heavy cruiser of the Imperial Japanese Navy, who fought against bravest shipmates of the Gambier Bay in the United States Navy, off Samar island in the morning of October 25, 1944.

  The correspondent, Capt. Haruo Mayuzumi, in neat cursive script blocked off on graph paper, recited his naval curriculum vitae, then, rather than discuss the battle from a personal standpoint, launched into a technical discussion of Japanese naval gunnery. It seemed strange, a chilly disquisition that would warm only a gunner’s mate’s heart: after explaining, complete with charts, graphs, and diagrams, how the caps of Japanese shells were engineered to break away so as to maximize their killing effect while traveling under water, he wrote, “I am very grateful when I read The Men of the Gambier Bay [by Edwin P. Hoyt] and knew some effect of 8” 91-A.P. of my ship.”

  But Mayuzumi was more than a technician. He showed flashes of mercy and humanity too. He recalled that while firing on the sinking Gambier Bay,

  my fire control officer did never direct his gun fire to the spot in which many men were waiting to come down by Jacob’s ladders. My young midshipman … was whole-heartedly sending fire to the outside of the engine room. Suddenly many crew and passengers gathered near life boats near engine room. I immediately ordered “Ceasefire.” The midshipman soon ordered to aim [at] the forecastle where no person could be seen…. I saw you brave men, under gunfire and the flame, calmly waited the turn to go down by Jacob’s ladders.… I now eagerly pray good luck to all brave men of the Gambier Bay