Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  At 7:50 a.m., the Hoel, Hermann, and Raymond made a tight starboard turn at flank speed and charged the enemy. The destroyers worked up to thirty knots, their sterns pushing down as their screws bit into the sea and their bows rising, and steered directly for the middle column of the Japanese fleet—the battleships. The wounded Johnston, on emergency steering, managed to fall in behind the attacking destroyers and fired her 5-inch main batteries at the closest Japanese cruisers. The Japanese were also making close to thirty knots, so the range closed quickly. When the lead destroyer Hoel passed through 18,000 yards range, her torpedomen prepared to launch. They set the weapons to intermediate speed. One-half of the salvo was aimed head-on, at the battleships; the other half was aimed to starboard, at the cruisers. The Hoel launched her fish at a range of 9,000 yards, then turned hard starboard to retire.88

  The Japanese made this bold little destroyer pay for her temerity. As the Hoel showed her broadside to the enemy, a rain of shells smashed through her port side and laid waste to her bridge. The helmsman and several officers were killed, and all voice radio communications cut out. Her after fire-room and after turbine took direct hits, killing her port engine. A stern hit jammed the rudder in place, keeping the Hoel locked in a clockwise turn. A quick shift to emergency manual steering kept her on course, away from the enemy.89

  Meanwhile, the Hoel’s torpedoes ran north in a spreading fan. At 7:54, the Yamato’s lookouts sang out and pointed to incoming tracks off the starboard bow, and the giant battlewagon turned hard to port to evade the threat. Now she was running north, away from the enemy. Four torpedo wakes ran roughly parallel on her starboard beam, two more to port. The Yamato was traveling at 26 knots, about the same speed as the torpedoes: she was trapped on this course until the weapons ran out of steam and sank. Admiral Ugaki recorded that the Yamato was forced north for about ten minutes, “but it felt like a month to me. After the traces disappeared we finally could turn to starboard and put all our power into the chase.”90

  The Hoel still had hot torpedoes loaded in her tubes, but the torpedo crews had been decimated by shellfire. An officer on one of the bow mounts made his way aft and took over, aiming the tubes by sight, and fired five torpedoes at the Japanese heavy cruiser column, which was closing on the port quarter at a range of 6,000 yards. “With our ten fish fired we decided that it was time to get the hell out of there,” said a surviving member of the Hoel’s crew.91 But with one engine out of action, her speed was cut to 17 knots. With battleships closing on her starboard quarter, and cruisers closing on her port quarter, the Hoel was out of options. The ship fishtailed and “chased salvos,” but the incoming fire was heavy on both quarters, then on both beams. The Hoel crumpled under a rain of hits along her length. The torpedo shack, the signal bridge, the sick bay, and two 20mm antiaircraft mounts were demolished. She was hit several times at or below the waterline on the port side, causing her lower regions to flood quickly; she listed heavily to port with fires blazing out of control. The bridge ordered abandon ship, and runners were dispatched to pass the word to crewmen at their posts below. Men came up the ladders, coughing, eyes shut against the smoke. They stumbled over the bodies of dead and dying shipmates, then stepped into the sea. The Hoel’s forward turrets continued firing gamely even as her stern was awash, and a messenger was sent forward to tell the gunners to cease fire and get to safety.92 At 8:55 the Hoel rolled onto her beams ends and her stern went under. Her bow lifted up and then slid gradually into the sea, taking 253 of her crew of 300 down with her.

  Survivors treaded water and clung to a floater net, helping their wounded as best they could. The Japanese fleet passed at pistol shot range, but no one fired on the men in the water. Americans looked up and made eye contact with Japanese sailors watching silently from the rails of the passing warships. Four battleships went by, and eight cruisers: one giant ship after another, all flying red and white “Sun and Rays” battle ensigns. Admiral Ugaki, staring down at the Hoel’s castaways from the Yamato’s bridge, wondered: “What did they think of the magnificent sight of our fleet in pursuit?”93 The American sailors were awed by the sight of the colossal Yamato and her soaring gray pagoda. One shouted, “My God, look at that thing!” They were even more enchanted when an American fighter descended through the cloud ceiling and strafed the passing fleet. “We were so close to the ships that we could hear the .50 caliber bullets hit the hard wood decks,” said Glenn Parkin, survivor of the Hoel. “The Japanese were shooting about every small gun they had. The F6F came down, strafed and was back into the clouds in less than 30 seconds. My God what a sight—with a front row seat.”94

  Now the Taffy 3 carriers were out of the rainsquall and fleeing on a south-southwesterly course. Sprague’s flagship Fanshaw Bay led the formation, with White Plains and Kalinin Bay following astern, St. Lo to starboard, and Kitkun Bay and Gambier Bay to port.

  A quartet of Japanese cruisers—Chikuma, Chokai, Haguro, and Tone—was gaining steadily on Taffy 3’s port quarter. These powerful warships had peak speeds surpassing 30 knots. As the race entered its second hour, they had closed the range to about 14,000 yards, and the carriers were frequently straddled by 6-inch and 8-inch salvos. The fragile little ships shuddered violently at the impacts of close detonations—throwing crew members off their feet, shorting out electrical systems, and opening fissures between the hull plates. The Fanshaw Bay took four direct hits, and may have been saved by her light construction, because at least two armor-piercing projectiles passed “through and through” multiple decks and bulkheads and exploded outside the ship.

  Destroyers continued zigzagging astern and laying as much smoke as they could muster. Michael Bak Jr. of the destroyer Franks recalled, “We were going right full rudder, left full rudder, right full rudder, left full rudder, and the shells were coming all around us.”95 The flamboyantly colorful splashes fell steadily closer to the Franks as the pursuers gained. During one close barrage, Bak crawled under the chart table and kept his head down. He wondered how the enemy had managed to sneak up on the American fleet without being detected by air patrols: “I couldn’t believe you could see these ships so close. I made out a flag on one of the ships, it was so close. I couldn’t believe they got so close to us without our admirals knowing about it. And it was just one of those things that during war everybody is looking the other way, and they come in from the rear.”96

  Sprague was repeatedly obliged to turn away from his speedy pursuers, gradually altering course to the southwest, and eventually steering almost dead west, toward the green mountains of Samar. The long turn disrupted the American formation, leaving the six carriers arrayed in a long, ragged column. The Kalinin Bay and Gambier Bay trailed behind their sisters, leaving them most exposed to the enemy’s guns. They fired their 5-inch “peashooters” back at the nearest Japanese cruisers, which now crept up on their port beams. The Kalinin Bay was hit more than a dozen times, and suffered perhaps twice that number of destructive near-misses; her skipper thought it a miracle that the ship was not overtaken and destroyed.

  The Gambier Bay, trailing astern of the others, took the worst of it. For the better part of an hour, the carrier had avoided direct hits by “chasing salvos.” But at 8:20 a.m., she took a bad hit on the port side amidships, at the waterline. Tons of seawater rushed into the ship, flooding the forward port engine room. She lost an engine, which cut her speed to 11 knots. Since the Japanese were already nipping at her heels, that left no possibility of escape. Captain Walter V. R. Vieweg informed Admiral Sprague that his ship was dropping out of formation. She was quickly overtaken by the Japanese cruisers, which commenced pouring fire into her at close range. At the same time, the battleships Yamato and Kongo found the range from astern and sent a rain of large-caliber salvos down upon the luckless Gambier Bay.

  The Johnston, having already suffered the wrath of the Yamato’s 18-inch guns, was still underway at reduced speed. Her steering machinery had been smashed beyond repair, so the rudder was handled manually (as
in bygone eras) by four strong sailors who had to be relieved in ten-minute shifts. Evans at first ordered course changes by telephone, but he was soon forced to quit the ruined bridge and move back to the fantail, where he could shout directly down to the helmsmen. The ship’s fire control equipment was out of action, so the guns could fire only “in local control,” but the Johnston kept up the fight as best she could.

  At 8:10 she emerged from a dense smokescreen and discovered her sister the Heermann speeding toward her on a collision course, only 200 yards away. Both skippers ordered “all engines back,” though in the Johnston’s case that meant only one engine. Bob Deal, standing by the Johnston’s deck charge racks astern, was thrown from his feet: “Our stern dug deep into the sea and the ocean boiled over the after deck.”97 The Heermann, backing full on both engines, came to a complete stop, and then pulled away in reverse (sternway) at 15 knots. Even so, the two sisters missed one another by a margin of only 10 feet. Both crews sent up a spontaneous cheer. Then Evans threw his one working engine forward, turned away from the Heermann, and returned to the fight.98

  At 8:20 the Kongo loomed out of the smoke on Johnston’s port beam, 7,000 yards away. The Johnston fired about forty 5-inch rounds at the bigger ship, observing several hits on the pagoda superstructure. “As far as accomplishing anything decisive, it was like bouncing paper wads off a steel helmet,” Hagen admitted, and when the Kongo’s 14-inch guns turned on the Johnston and began shooting back, the American ship again sought refuge in her own smokescreen. When the smoke cleared ten minutes later, the Gambier Bay came into view a few miles ahead. She was dead in the water, taking heavy fire from a Japanese cruiser, probably the Chikuma. Hagen recalled: “Commander Evans then gave me the most courageous order I’ve ever heard. ‘Commence firing on that cruiser, Hagen,’ he said. ‘Draw her fire on us and away from the Gambier Bay.’ ”99

  The Johnston now traded salvos with the cruiser Yahagi, and took several damaging 6-inch hits. A column of five enemy destroyers approached on the opposite beam, apparently headed toward the crippled Gambier Bay. For the moment, the Johnston was the only American destroyer in the vicinity, so she fired on all of the enemy ships in turn, training her guns from one to another as they came into range. Now the Johnston was pounded by 5-inch gunfire from one side and 8-inch gunfire from the other. Her forward mount was silenced; fires broke out throughout the ship; the 40mm ammunition ready locker was engulfed in flames; and the antiaircraft shells began cooking off and exploding. Engineering compartments filled with smoke and forced crewmen up to the main deck, which was painted red with blood and strewn with their dead shipmates.

  Two miles south, the Gambier Bay was a derelict, dead in the water, listing heavily and threatening to capsize. An Avenger in the hangar deck exploded, and fires fed on spilled aviation fuel. Black smoke boiled up from the lower decks and forced men up the ladders to the flight deck. An explosion blew the elevator out of its well. An avalanche of shells tore through the ship, ripping out her bowels and killing scores of her crew. Many penetrated through-and-through, entering the port side and exiting the starboard side of the ship: some of the Japanese ships then switched to high-explosive shells with instantaneous fuses, which blew up at the moment they made contact with the hull. At 8:45 a.m., the captain ordered all codebooks and other classified materials jettisoned, and then told the men to get off the ship. Shortly after 9:00 a.m., the Gambier Bay rolled over and sank quickly. She was the only American aircraft carrier ever destroyed by naval gunfire.

  Japanese destroyers now closed in on the Johnston and pumped salvos into the burning wreck. The wreck’s single remaining operable turret fired back obstinately. At 9:45 a.m., after three hours of savage combat, Commander Evans passed the word to abandon ship. As survivors stepped into the sea or took to the rafts, the enemy destroyers closed to point-blank range and fired into the Johnston until she slipped beneath the waves.

  Tadashi Okuno, a twenty-five-year-old sailor on one of the Japanese destroyers, later recalled the scene. “Men were floating on the water’s surface or sinking beneath it, while half-naked crew members jammed themselves into lifeboats and rowed away, escaping. We were close enough to see their unkempt beards and the tattoos on their arms. One of our machine gunners impulsively pulled his trigger. He must have been overflowing with feelings of animosity toward the enemy. But it was checked by a loud voice from the bridge saying, ‘Don’t shoot at escaping men! Stop shooting, stop!’ ”100 American survivors confirmed that the Japanese held fire, and one witnessed a Japanese skipper salute the Johnston as she went down.

  By that time, Kurita’s fleet formation had come almost completely unglued. Visibility remained poor, obscured by low-lying clouds, squalls of rain, and tactical smokescreens. The Japanese ships lost sight of one another, and commanders struggled to remain in radio contact because of technical failures and the loss of key personnel. Traveling at various speeds, diverging onto different courses to chase different ships, dodging torpedoes, and repelling air attacks, the Japanese fleet was losing its cohesion and unity of purpose. It was no longer gaining appreciably on the five surviving escort carriers of Taffy 3. “We were making a stern chase on your ships which were zigzagging and that made it difficult to get the range,” Kurita later said. “Also, the major units were separating further all the time because of your destroyer torpedo attacks.”101 The Japanese lookouts had trouble identifying the ships they were chasing, and assumed that they were 30-knot Essex carriers, which could keep ahead of the Japanese guns even in a daylong chase. Chief of staff Koyanagi judged that the “pursuit would be an endless seesaw, and that we would be unable to strike a decisive blow. And running at top speed, we were consuming fuel at an alarming rate.”102 For all of those reasons, Admiral Kurita signaled his ships to break off the chase and follow him north.

  Amazed that the Fanshaw Bay had not already been run down and destroyed, Ziggy Sprague had begun to hope that some part of his force might escape. At 8:15, having run from the enemy for an hour, he turned to his chief quartermaster and said, “By golly, I think we may have a chance.” Then the picture grew darker, as the Gambier Bay was overtaken and gunned down. When the Japanese guns finally fell silent and the enemy turned away to the north, the Americans could scarcely believe their good fortune. A Fanshaw Bay signalman exclaimed in pretended distress, “Goddammit, boys, they’re getting away!”103

  UNTIL THIS MORNING, Admiral Onishi’s new kamikaze suicide unit had met only frustration and failure. On three consecutive days, beginning on October 21, Lieutenant Seki had led sorties from Mabalacat Airfield on Luzon; in each instance, the warplanes had failed to find suitable fleet targets and returned to base in shame. On the twenty-fourth, the weather over the airfield was socked in, and the planes did not even leave the field. The kamikaze observer planes were manned by experienced pilots who could be trusted to fly in thick weather, but most of the designated suicide pilots possessed only rudimentary flying skills, and Onishi did not want them to get lost, or perish in operational accidents. Better to wait for clearer weather, when they would stand at least a puncher’s chance.

  Now and again, since the first days of the war, individual Japanese pilots had spontaneously decided to turn their airplanes into man-guided missiles. The Allied fleet in Leyte Gulf had suffered a few such “unofficial” suicide attacks in the early days of the invasion. The worst fell upon the Royal Navy cruiser Australia on October 21, when a lone Aichi D3A1 bomber approached the starboard bow at wavetop altitude, then banked suddenly toward the ship’s superstructure, its machine guns strafing viciously as the range closed. The plane flew into the Australia’s mainmast just beneath the crow’s nest, disintegrating in a ball of orange fire. The interior spaces of the superstructure were flooded with burning aviation fuel, and shrapnel cut a path through the bridge, killing or badly wounding many of the ship’s senior officers. The captain, struck in the abdomen, was rushed down to sick bay, where he died a painful death. The fires were brought under con
trol and the Australia survived with only moderate damage, but the attack offered a grim sample of what the Japanese might achieve with aerial suicide tactics on an organized scale.

  The first massed suicide attack fell on Thomas Sprague’s Taffy 1, southernmost of the three escort carrier groups, at the most hectic stage of the running battle off Samar. The Taffy 1 carriers were maneuvering into the wind to launch aircraft—which would fly north to attack Kurita’s force—when four Japanese Zeros dropped out of the overcast and dove on the Santee and Suwannee. One crashed the Santee’s flight deck just forward of her after elevator; its bomb penetrated into the hangar deck. The crew had the fires under control when the unlucky Santee took a torpedo hit fired by a Japanese submarine, I-56. In the confusion, the Santee’s officers believed that the ship had been damaged by one of her own depth charges, jettisoned by the damage control team; not until she went into dry dock a month later did the Americans realize that she had been hit by a Japanese torpedo. Meanwhile, several of her sisters suffered near-misses as would-be suicide gods crashed into the sea close alongside. The Suwannee was hit by two kamikazes over the course of twenty-four minutes, the second making a wreck of the hangar deck and shutting down the Suwannee’s flight operations for the rest of the afternoon.