Princeton was adrift, broadside to the wind, seemingly helpless to contain her fires. The captain ordered all crew except damage control parties to evacuate. Her faithful escorts—light cruiser Birmingham, destroyers Morrison and Irwin—drew in close and began taking men off the ship. The Birmingham’s fire hoses poured water and Foamite on the Princeton’s fires, in high-arching streams from one ship to the other—and several dozen brave volunteers of the Birmingham’s firefighting team boarded the Princeton and joined the fight to save her. The Irwin nosed up against the Princeton’s bow and began taking men directly off her flight deck. Badly wounded men were tossed from one ship to waiting hands on the other, with the tosses timed to the rise and fall of the two decks. Others went down lines and swam across to the Morrison’s and Irwin’s cargo nets, but the sea chop was rising and several dozen men drowned. For a time, the Morrison’s superstructure became fouled in the Princeton’s overhanging air intakes and was fastened in that position, unable to pull free. A gasoline vapor explosion on the Princeton hurled one of her plane-pulling tractors into the air—the vehicle fell end-over-end and struck a glancing blow on the Morrison’s bridge, then came to rest on the destroyer’s forecastle. Later, her skipper dryly remarked that this was something he had never expected to witness during his naval career.
Buracker remained on the bridge of the Princeton, stepping out onto the veranda when the ambient heat became unbearable. He was accompanied by John Hoskins, another captain who had come aboard as his prospective replacement. Buracker had one serious concern, which he shared with Hoskins. A load of 100-pound aerial bombs had been stored in a ready stowage compartment under the aft part of the hangar. The compartment was roasting in the flames. Would it go up? There was no way to be certain, but Buracker reasoned that if the bombs were going to cook off, they would have done so at the time of the earlier explosion. He still hoped to quench the fires and save the carrier.
Between noon and 1:00 p.m., the situation seemed better. The blaze was again corralled in the aft part of the ship, and several screening ships were providing firefighting support. But at half past one came the first of several untimely submarine sonar contacts and air warnings, and all ships were ordered to pull clear and maneuver evasively. For about an hour the Princeton lost the benefit of her escorts’ hoses. When they returned, the wind had risen to 20 knots and the flames were gaining. The Birmingham nudged up against the Princeton’s weather (port) quarter and passed spring lines across to make the two ships fast. The cruiser’s hoses again began working on the carrier’s fires, and stretchers on the Princeton were carefully transferred across. Topside, the Birmingham was now teeming with men, including firefighters, sailors handling lines, medical corpsmen, antiaircraft gunners, and officers directing these various operations.
That was the scene at 3:23 p.m., when the Princeton’s ready bomb stowage detonated, just as Buracker had feared. According to the war damage report, the monster explosion was caused by the simultaneous “mass detonation of four hundred 100-pound GP bombs. . . . which blew off the entire stern aft of frame 120 and the structure above.”36 The aftermost quarter of the Princeton was simply gone. Debris and chunks of steel, some very large, soared above the ship in high-arching parabolas. Bodies and parts of bodies rained down in every direction. “I saw the explosion and remember seeing ten or fifteen bodies fly through the air,” recalled John Sheehan, a sailor on the destroyer Porterfield. Some soared over the destroyer Casson Young and splashed down into the sea on the far side. “We went to see if there were any survivors, but couldn’t find any. I guess they were just blown to pieces.”37
Later, when talking to a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Buracker choked up. “It was as surprising as it was terrifying, that explosion,” he said. “It was the worst I’ve ever heard in my life. I can’t describe it to you.”38
Shrapnel cut across the Birmingham’s exposed forecastle like a scythe, killing or wounding 229 of her crew. According to the ship’s war diary, “the spectacle which greeted the human eye was horrible to behold. . . . Dead, dying and wounded, many of them badly and horribly, cover the decks.” A surviving officer recalled, “Blood ran freely down our waterways.” Many of the ship’s crewmen were burned so badly that it seemed unlikely that they could survive, or would even want to survive. Some declined medical treatment, urging that aid be redirected to shipmates with better odds of survival. A petty officer said to the Birmingham’s executive officer, “Don’t waste morphine on me, commander; just hit me over the head.”39
Lee Robinson, below when the explosion occurred, worked for two days straight to help his wounded shipmates. “I can get on a crying jag real easy talking about that,” he said in an oral history recorded decades later. “So many people died so fast, and the blood was just running off the sides of the ship. We had to spread sand around on the decks to keep from slipping on it.” He and his unwounded shipmates ran the ship’s laundry continuously for days to provide clean bandages for the wounded. Robinson recalled of the Birmingham’s sick bay, “None of us would go in there alone. We went in in pairs because of what we had to look at when we went in.”40
Captains Buracker and Hoskins were on the Princeton’s flight deck when the bomb compartment went up. Buracker suffered only superficial wounds in the blast, but Hoskins was struck in the leg by a piece of shrapnel, and the limb was almost entirely severed below the knee. He told Buracker to attend to the other wounded. When the skipper returned a few minutes later, he saw that Hoskins had cut away the remaining flesh with his own knife, completing an auto-amputation, and applied his own tourniquet. Realizing that his tenacious bid to save the Princeton had come at a dreadful cost, Buracker ordered abandon ship. At 4:40 p.m., he was the last of her crew to go down the line.
KURITA HAD BEEN TOLD to expect air cover while passing through the seaways of the central Philippines, but he and his men saw only five or six Japanese airplanes during the entire three-day battle. He radioed the Philippine air commanders repeatedly and plaintively, but to no avail. Admiral Fukudome, interrogated after the war, admitted that he had “turned a deaf ear to those requests, and decided that the best protection I could give to Kurita’s force would be to concentrate my entire air force in attacking your Task Force which was waiting outside beyond the channel.”41
The Center Force was continually set upon by U.S. carrier bombers and torpedo planes throughout the afternoon of October 24. The crews fought back with the only weapons they could muster against this onslaught—their antiaircraft guns—and advanced across the Sibuyan Sea expecting that the attacks would only grow worse as they closed the range. Task Force 38 made a total of 259 aerial sorties against Kurita, including airplanes from no fewer than seven different carriers: the Intrepid, Essex, Lexington, Franklin, Enterprise, San Jacinto, and Belleau Wood. The Americans lost only eighteen planes in this “Battle of the Sibuyan Sea,” a mercifully low cost considering the volume of flak thrown up by the Japanese ships.
The second wave of attackers arrived shortly after noon: about one hundred bomb-armed F6Fs and torpedo-armed TBMs from the Intrepid. The Avengers scored again on the Musashi, sending three (possibly four) torpedoes into her port side; at the same time, Hellcats performing as dive bombers hit the ship with two bombs. One put the No. 1 main battery turret out of action, and another penetrated into her outer port-side engine compartment, destroying steam lines and forcing one of her boilers off line. Deprived of one of her four propellers, and with a hole gouged into her port-side torpedo blister, Musashi could do no more than 22 knots. At that speed, she threw up an unnaturally large bow wave on her port side, caused by the torpedo damage below the waterline. Kurita slowed the rest of the fleet so that the injured supership could stay in company, but a slower speed would make her more vulnerable to dive bombers and especially torpedo bombers.
The third wave was devastating. Planes from the Essex and Lexington again targeted the Musashi, planting two bombs near the No. 3 turret and sending four more to
rpedoes into her starboard side. The bombs spread carnage among her antiaircraft gunners and other topside crew, and the torpedoes cut critical power lines and flooded many of her engineering spaces. The impacts caused the length of the great ship to shake intensely: sailors were thrown off their feet, and cascades of seawater carried dead and wounded men through her scuppers. Below, the sick bay was filled to capacity with bleeding and burned men, and stretchers lined the bulkheads of adjoining corridors. Bomb damage released toxic gases into that part of the ship, requiring an emergency evacuation of the medical staff and wounded. Damage control efforts were hindered by the death or injury of personnel, the flooding of critical regions of the ship, and the frequent arrival of new airstrikes. As compartments housing the ship’s hydraulic pumping units were flooded or damaged by bombs, it grew increasingly difficult to keep her on an even keel. As the Lexington and Essex planes headed back over the eastern horizon at 1:50 p.m., the Musashi was listing noticeably to port and riding 13 feet deeper than she had been before the day’s first attack. Full of seawater and unable to remain in company with the rest of the Center Force, she fell behind, accompanied by a lone heavy cruiser, the Tone.
When the final wave approached the Center Force at 2:55 p.m., Enterprise and Franklin airmen saw that Musashi was trailing a long oil slick and making only about 8 knots. The attacking planes circled high above with impunity, well out of reach of even the battleship’s 18-inch sanshikidan shotgun-type “beehive” antiaircraft shells. The torpedo planes waited patiently, planning their attacks; they would all target the ship’s port side, the direction of her list.
Separated from the rest of the fleet (except Tone), full of seawater, hobbled, down by the bow, the great battleship was a proverbial sitting duck. Her surviving crew, with rising sun (“hachimaki”) bandanas tied around their foreheads, continued the fight with desperate ferocity. Stepping over and around the remains of dead and dying shipmates, they manned the remaining antiaircraft guns. The 18.1-inch main batteries filled the sky with the multicolored bursts of their sanshikidan. American aircrews felt the blast waves emanating from the big weapons. “Even at a distance,” recalled Jack Lawton, an Avenger pilot with VT-13, “I felt the muzzle blast each time they fired. I could swear the wings were ready to fold every time these huge shockwaves hit us.”42 The flak rounds were dye-marked with various bright colors, an expedient to aid the Japanese gunners in spotting fire and correcting aim. As blooming multihued salvos rocked their planes, the pilots had the odd impression of flying through a celestial florist’s ship. “Some of the explosions were blue, some red, some were pink, and some were yellow,” said Lawton. Another VT-13 pilot, Bob Freligh, was reminded of “the sight and sounds of the Fourth of July Celebration at the Lenawee County Fair in my home town of Adrian, Michigan.”43
The torpedo flyers descended in full-powered glides to wavetop altitude, throttles at the firewall, airspeed indicators pinned on the dial’s red line. The best defense against flak was velocity. Lawton felt his machine “shimmer and shudder with every impact of every round.” Red tracers reached up toward his windshield. He jinked his Grumman to avoid the columns of water erupting in his path, because “running into one of these geysers would be like running into a mountain.”44 Main and secondary batteries fired into the sea in the path of the TBMs, sending up 200-foot columns of colored seawater. The Japanese had employed this technique since the early days of the Pacific War—placing shell splashes in the path of low-flying torpedo planes, hoping to knock them down or at least force them to turn away from their attacking runs. Dropping his torpedo at 600 yards, Lawton turned sharply across the Musashi’s bow to make good his escape. Freligh also made a good drop, but “while taking evasive action to get away from the fire of the ship’s guns, I ran into tracer bullets that got my fuel line. Oil started spurting out all over my windshield.” Freligh ditched the plane off a nearby island and got ashore with his two aircrewmen. Taken in by friendly Filipinos, they were rescued several weeks later.45
With the Musashi sluggish and down in the water, she was an easy target. The TBMs hit her with at least seven torpedoes, all striking her vulnerable port side. At the same time came a well-synchronized diving attack by SB2Cs and Hellcats, which rained armor-piercing bombs along her length. A 500-pound bomb struck the ship’s superstructure and destroyed the bridge; a second struck lower on the tower, setting it ablaze. These blows killed many of the ship’s senior officers. Rear Admiral Toshihira Inoguchi, the skipper, was injured in his right shoulder, but could still move on his own feet. He and his executive officer set up a new command post on the lower (flag) bridge, but there was not much more they could do to save the ship. She was ablaze all along her length, her port list increasing, and sea chop was breaking over her bow. At least one and possibly two torpedoes had penetrated the protective outer hull through the jagged holes left by earlier attacks, exploding against the inner hull and flooding the No. 4 engine room. According to the executive officer (XO), “Pumping was hindered due to the cumulative bomb damage above, so it was impossible to check the flooding.”46
The rest of the Center Force had drawn about 30 miles ahead of the Musashi, and was entering the western approaches to the San Bernardino Strait. Kurita radioed several more urgent requests for air cover, and for airstrikes against Task Force 38, but received no encouraging replies.47 After the previous morning’s fiasco in Palawan Passage, he and his staff were mindful of the risk of a crippling submarine ambush in the chokepoint formed by the strait. They had only eleven destroyers remaining as escorts, after sailing from Brunei with fifteen. Commander Tonosuke Otani, the operations officer, predicted that the Center Force would have to fight off three more big airstrikes before nightfall, and he warned Kurita against being caught in confined waters that would make evasive maneuvering difficult. Forcing the strait would be safer after dark. He proposed that they retire temporarily to the westward. The delay might buy more time for air attacks on the American carriers, he reckoned. It might also serve as misdirection, to trick the enemy into concluding that Center Force was in retreat.
Evidently, many on the Yamato’s bridge agreed with Otani’s reasoning. They cursed the missing-in-action Japanese air forces, and muttered sarcastically about their headquarters colleagues. A Japanese journalist who later interviewed several officers cited “the anger and anguish of every man on the Kurita force . . . it seemed to the men of the fleet that their ships were being offered to the enemy for target practice.”48 That afternoon, Combined Fleet radioed a warning. Enemy submarines were probably lurking in the San Bernardino Strait, and therefore: “Be alert.” This message prompted derisive murmurs on the bridge; it was considered “ludicrous and infuriating.”49 The Center Force had already lost two cruisers to submarine attack, and had spent the past forty-eight hours reacting to periscope sightings. Did the imbeciles at headquarters suppose they were anything less than alert?
Kurita gave the order at 3:30 p.m., and the fleet executed a 180-degree turn. Another thirty minutes elapsed before he advised headquarters. Owing to “the frequency and numerical strength of these enemy attacks,” Kurita told Admiral Toyoda, he was pausing his advance so that land-based air forces would have time to strike a blow against the American flattops. “If we continue our present course our losses will increase incalculably, with little hope of success for our mission.”50 He was retiring westward “temporarily,” he said, and would “return to the action later.”51
For an hour the force steamed westward, returning to within visual range of the stricken Musashi. The Japanese had expected several more rounds of heavy air attacks, so they were pleasantly surprised when none came. A reconnaissance plane was spied circling high above, obviously marking the fleet’s westward progress, but after 4:20 p.m. no more enemy aircraft appeared.
At 5:15 p.m., having not heard from Toyoda in reply to his last message, Kurita decided that his duty lay on the other side of San Bernardino Strait. “All right,” he said simply, “let’s go back.”
52 The order was apparently greeted with surprise and consternation by certain members of the staff. The Yamato, her escorts in formation, made two right angle turns and resumed their eastward course. They were now six or seven hours behind schedule, which meant that a coordinated pincer attack on the amphibious fleet in Leyte Gulf was not going to happen, unless Nishimura’s Southern Force was equally delayed.
Congested radio communications were to blame for the delay in the Combined Fleet’s reply. (The problem was similarly acute on the American side.) Finally, at 7:15 p.m., Kurita heard from Admiral Toyoda. It was a peremptory order, with quasi-religious overtones: “With confidence in divine guidance, all forces resume the attack.” The original Japanese wording of this message, Operations Order No. 372, was: “Tenyu wo kakushin shi zengun totsegeki seyo.” A literal translation was: “Trusting in heaven’s assistance, all forces charge!”53 But it had a between-the-lines meaning that does not translate readily into English. Its author was Toshitane Takata, the Combined Fleet chief of staff, who drafted it for Admiral Toyoda’s signature. Takata later told American interrogators that the order carried a connotation understood by every Japanese officer, to mean that “damage could not be limited or reduced by turning back, so advance even though the fleet should be completely lost. That was my feeling when sending that order; consequently I am safe in saying that the Second Fleet was not restricted in any way as to the damage it might suffer.”54
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