A Sailor's History of the U.S. Navy

by Thomas J. Cutler

  From his vantage point in the gun director, Lieutenant Robert C. Hagen, the ship’s gunnery officer, could see three other escort ships—destroyers Hoel and Heerman and destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts—racing by at full speed to take on the giant Japanese force. It seemed apparent to Hagen that Johnston was out of the fight. With her speed reduced to barely seventeen knots, she had no hope of keeping up with the other escorts. But Evans had other ideas. In his booming voice he ordered his ship to fall in astern of the other escorts to provide gunfire support. As he prepared to direct Johnston’s gunfire, Hagen said to himself, “Oh, dear Lord, I’m in for a swim.”

  As the four American escorts charged boldly at their formidable Japanese adversaries, the two sides were firing at one another at a furious rate. Tiny 5-inch shells bounced off the thick hides of the Japanese ships, while heavy-caliber rounds roared through the air and peppered the water all around the Taffy 3 escorts, some of them slamming into the already wounded Johnston. Generating smoke and still armed with torpedoes, the three escorts charged in to deliver these more potent weapons, while the limping Johnston valiantly struggled to keep up, firing her remaining guns with amazing persistence.

  Mercer had been driven from his battle station by a raging fire that engulfed his gun mount. He and seven or eight other men were huddled under a gun tub as the relentless pounding of Japanese shells continued. Suddenly, without really knowing why, Mercer headed forward, leaving the other men still huddled beneath the gun tub. When he was a few yards away, he heard and felt a tremendous explosion behind him. When the smoke cleared sufficiently, he saw that a Japanese round had landed directly beneath the gun tub, killing all of the men who had just seconds before been his companions. Turning away from the awful sight, he again started forward. But another round detonated close aboard, this one forward of Mercer’s location. He immediately felt a searing heat on his face as he saw cascades of water pouring over Johnston’s gray superstructure.

  The tenacious courage displayed by the American escorts was not wasted. The cruiser Kumano was out of the battle, licking the wounds inflicted by Johnston’s earlier torpedo attack. The cruiser Suzuya also withdrew from the battle so she could transfer the commander of Heavy Cruiser Division Seven and his staff from the crippled Kumano. And this latest torpedo run by the other escorts had scored several hits and forced the world’s largest battleship, Yamato, to turn away and temporarily head north, taking with her the longest-range guns in the force and losing about seven miles in her pursuit of the carriers.

  Meanwhile, Hoel had been scampering about for quite some time, engaging Japanese ships without sustaining any major damage to herself. But her nine lives eventually expired when she found herself surrounded by a battleship and several heavy cruisers who began to chew at her mercilessly. Firing more than five hundred rounds in defiance, Hoel eventually succumbed to the more than forty hits she received over a period of about twenty minutes. Listing heavily to port with one magazine on fire and her engines completely knocked out, her captain ordered abandon ship at approximately 0830.

  Roberts had hit one of the Japanese ships with several torpedoes and had been dealing with this vengeful cruiser ever since. Both she and Johnston had managed to get so close to this Japanese ship that the latter had been unable to lower her guns far enough to get a proper bead on her tiny adversaries. Roberts’s gun crews had been firing so long and so continuously that they had given up worrying about what type of ammunition to use. The men in the ammunition handling rooms beneath her two 5-inch gun mounts had been grabbing whatever was closest at hand and feeding it to the blazing guns above. As a result, the Japanese cruiser was being hit with all sorts of strange rounds, including some designed as illumination projectiles and even some dummy practice rounds loaded merely with sand.

  After several minutes of this relentless firing, one of the lookouts yelled, “Captain, 14-inch splashes coming up astern!” From the pattern he saw astern, Lieutenant Commander Robert Copeland knew that the next rounds would hit his ship if he didn’t do something fast. He immediately ordered, “All engines back full,” and the little destroyer escort began to tremble violently as alert engineers down below answered the astern bell. The ship shuddered to a halt so quickly that her fantail was nearly engulfed by her own wake wave. A second later, a 14-inch round roared overhead and struck the sea just ahead of the ship.

  But Roberts’s luck had run out. In avoiding the approaching battleship rounds, she had made herself vulnerable to the cruiser who had been her particular nemesis for the better part of two hours. Three 8-inch armor-piercing shells struck her on the port side forward. Because her hull contained no armor, the Japanese shells did not detonate but instead passed completely through the ship, entering the port side and exiting the starboard, leaving neat, round holes at each location.

  While preferable to the terrible destruction that would have occurred upon internal detonation, these holes in the hull were not without serious consequences. Two of the shells exited below the waterline, which caused flooding in both the forward ammunition handling room and the compartment containing the ship’s master gyro. The latter was the more serious because it shorted out all electrical power to the radios, radars, and gun mounts. It also took the lives of two electricians who were trapped in the small compartment and drowned. But the third round, which cut right through the ship’s main steam line in the forward fire room, did the most serious damage. High-pressure steam roared into the fire room instead of the turbines where it was meant to be, instantly killing three of the five men on station there. The other two men were badly scalded—one of them doomed to a more lingering and extremely painful death, the other, an eighteen-year-old named Jackson McKaskill, destined to survive as a hero.

  Although already burned by the ferocious steam, McKaskill made his way through the intense heat and confusing darkness to shut off the air and fuel supplies to the offending boiler. He then removed the sound-powered phones from one of his dead shipmates and reported the damage and casualties. By the time he had completed these level-headed actions, all the flesh had been seared from the bottoms of both of his feet.

  With half her engine power gone, Roberts had lost much of the agility that had kept her alive for so long. Almost simultaneously, four rounds smashed into the wounded destroyer escort. Another round sapped still more of her power and her speed was further reduced. Then round after round crashed into the hapless ship, piercing her flimsy hull, ripping into her inner compartments, smashing her vital equipment, and tearing apart her human components.

  Captain Copeland was trying to assess his damage when out of the swirling bands of smoke came the spectral image of USS Johnston. By now, her bridge was a total shambles, smoke and flames adorned her almost everywhere, her mast was bent double, and her large radar antenna dangled loosely, banging against her superstructure with every roll of the ship. One of her gun mounts had been completely obliterated, and there was just a hole where one of the torpedo mounts had once resided. But to Copeland’s utter amazement, Johnston was still under way, still firing at the enemy.

  As the mangled destroyer passed close by, Copeland could see her skipper standing on the fantail, calmly calling conning orders down through the hatch leading to the after steering compartment. The only way she could be steered was by nearly exhausted Sailors laboring in the after steering compartment to operate the heavy rudder by hand. Evans was stripped to the waist and covered with blood. As Johnston steamed by, Evans looked up at Copeland and casually waved.

  As Johnston disappeared into the veils of smoke as hauntingly as she had appeared, Copeland began receiving his damage assessments. Both 5-inch gun mounts were finished. The after mount had gone out in a particularly tragic and awe-inspiring manner. During most of the long engagement the after mount had lost power, and the Sailors had manually crewed the gun. This required not only that pointing and training had to be laboriously done by hand, but also that the 28-pound powder cases and 54-pound projectiles had to b
e lifted up from below decks to be loaded. Despite this handicap, the gun crew had kept the gun firing at an incredible rate.

  With the relentless firing, however, the gun had become quite hot. When the crew was down to their last seven rounds, they suddenly lost the compressed air supply to the gun. Used to clear the barrel of dangerously hot gases between rounds, this air was essential to the safe firing of the weapon. To fire such a hot gun without the ejecting air was a hazardous undertaking, but shunning the danger, the men continued to fire the weapon. As they were loading the final powder charge, it “cooked off” before they could close the breech, blowing the mount apart and killing or fatally wounding all but one of the ten-man crew.

  When a member of the repair party entered what was left of the shattered mount, he found the gun captain, Gunner’s Mate Third Class Paul Henry Carr, torn open from neck to crotch with most of his internal organs exposed to view. Carr, still alive, was holding the last projectile, begging for someone to load it in the gun and fire it. He died a short while later lying next to the gun he had served so well.

  With so much damage, no weapons left with which to fight, enemy shells still raining in, and his ship sinking beneath him, there seemed no alternative for Copeland but to order, “Abandon ship.” Copeland gave the onerous order and men began helping their wounded shipmates over the side.

  As Roberts slowly gave up the ghost, it was clear that Johnston, too, was mortally wounded. Like hungry wolves, a pack of Japanese cruisers and destroyers had closed in on the gallant destroyer and were pounding her into submission. She had fought long and hard, several times interposing herself between the attackers and the helpless CVEs still fleeing for their lives. She had endured the intense barrage much longer than anyone ever could have imagined. But her time had run out, and Captain Evans at last gave the order for her crew to leave her.

  By this time Robert Billie had regained consciousness. Barely able to move and unable to talk, he lay helpless as several men passed by him, apparently assuming him dead. With only his left arm still functioning, he pulled himself slowly across the deck. Each pull was agonizing, and his many shrapnel wounds oozed blood with each exertion, leaving a red smear behind to mark his path. At last he reached the rail, but he was too weak to pull himself over. Struggling at the rail, he suddenly got help from an unexpected source. A close salvo hit lifted him over the side and threw him into the sea.

  Bill Mercer had left the ship in a more conventional manner, jumping off the port side amidships and swimming quickly away, where he joined up with a friend who, supported by his kapok life jacket, was neatly combing his hair. When the Sailor finished the task, he tossed the comb into the water, saying, “I don’t guess I’ll ever need that again.”

  As Johnston’s survivors floundered about in their new environment, watching their ship slowly being swallowed by the sea, they were horrified to see a Japanese destroyer bearing down on them. Fearing they were about to be strafed, many slipped out of their life jackets and dove beneath the water for protection. Others feared being depth charged and tried to float on their backs, believing they would sustain less injury this way. Still others watched in fatalistic terror as the Japanese vessel loomed very large above them.

  But the Japanese ship neither strafed nor depth-charged these men. Instead, some of the crew tossed cans of food to their enemies now floating helplessly in the water. And then many of Johnston’s survivors witnessed something they would never forget. There on the bridge wing of the Japanese destroyer, an officer stood watching as Johnston, his mortal enemy of just moments before, slipped beneath the waves. As the noble ship went down, this Japanese officer lifted a hand to the visor of his cap and stood motionless for a moment . . . saluting.

  The crews of the Taffy 3 escorts saved the day. Just one of the CVEs failed to escape—USS Gambier Bay succumbed to the Japanese gunfire and was lost. The Japanese commander of the powerful surface force eventually broke off his attack and retired from the scene, allowing all three Taffy groups to survive and leaving the vulnerable amphibious area unmolested.

  Bill Mercer, Robert Billie, Ed Digardi, Robert Hagen, Robert Copeland, and Jackson McKaskill all survived this incredible battle. Captain Ernest Evans and several hundred more men did not.

  The actions of the Sailors in those hopelessly outclassed destroyers are among the most courageous acts in the whole of the U.S. Navy’s history. Together, as crews, they accomplished the seemingly impossible. As individuals, they leave us images that most of us can barely imagine, much less firmly comprehend: Paul Henry Carr with his body mortally wounded, holding up the last projectile to be fired; laundryman Bill Mercer running onto the exposed forecastle to clear away empty shell casings; Jackson McKaskill enduring terrible burns to secure steam valves; Ernest Evans refusing treatment for his wounds as time and again he took his ship into harm’s way; the hundreds of Sailors who carried out a thousand duties while their ships were being torn apart around them. This is courage of the highest order and is fitting to the high ideals of a great nation.

  Salvage

  When they rolled Chief Boatswain’s Mate Carl Brashear into the emergency room at Torrejon Air Force Base in Spain, he had no discernible pulse and barely the faintest of heartbeats. He had lost massive amounts of blood despite the two tourniquets that had been applied to his leg, and when the bandages that had been applied at the scene of the accident were removed, his foot fell off.

  Eighteen pints of blood later, Brashear began to come back from the threshold of death. For most people, surviving would have been enough. But Carl Brashear had just begun to fight.

  Hours before, Chief Brashear had been the picture of health. A Navy diver, he was among the most physically fit people in the world. It was March 1966, and Brashear and his shipmates were diving off the coast of Spain, trying to locate a nuclear bomb that had been lost at sea when two U.S. Air Force planes suffered a midair collision. It was a mission of vital importance, and Brashear and the other divers had been diving around the clock for two months, investigating every possible sonar contact that might prove to be the lost weapon.

  When they at last located the bomb, a salvage operation began, and Brashear was in the thick of it. After the weapon was brought to the surface from 2,600 feet of water, Brashear was supervising the final operation of getting it aboard when a line parted. Every experienced Sailor knows that a parting line can be as lethal as a bullet, and Chief Brashear grabbed a nearby Sailor to yank him out of the deadly path of the whipping line. At that same moment, a pipe to which another line had been secured tore loose and flew across the deck, striking Brashear in the leg.

  First aid was immediately administered, but it was clear that Brashear was in very bad shape. He was bleeding profusely, and his muscle-bound leg would not accept tourniquets well. The small salvage vessel was not equipped to handle an accident of this severity, so the mangled boatswain’s mate was evacuated to the hospital in Torrejon.

  Despite the best efforts of the hospital personnel, infection and then gangrene set in. Brashear was flown to a hospital in the United States, but things did not improve much, and doctors decided that amputation was the prudent answer.

  Chief Brashear lost his leg. To all around him, and to the Bureau of Naval Personnel, it was apparent that this Sailor’s career was over; he would have to retire on disability.

  But Carl Brashear had other ideas. He was no stranger to challenges—as an African-American in a nation still adjusting to full integration and equal rights, he had overcome numerous obstacles to achieve what he had. He made up his mind not only to stay in the Navy but also to continue serving as a deep-sea diver.

  He began reading about other people who continued to do amazing things after losing limbs. He studied how prostheses worked. As he recovered his strength, it soon became obvious to the hospital personnel that they had no ordinary case on their hands. Before his doctors thought it prudent, Brashear was working out to stay in shape. One session was so rigorous, in fact, he
broke off the temporary cast that had been rigged to shrink the stump of his leg. He refused to use crutches and worked around the hospital, doing chores to help out and prove that he was capable. A few people began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, this crazy man was going to achieve the comeback he kept promising. But convincing hospital personnel and convincing a Navy medical board were two different things, and Chief Brashear knew it.

  Through his persistence, he managed to get himself transferred to Portsmouth Naval Hospital so he could be nearer to the diving school there in Virginia. At the first opportunity, he went to the school and told the officer in charge, Chief Warrant Officer Clair Axtell, that he wanted to dive. He also wanted to get some photographs taken to prove that he could do it. Axtell knew that if anything went wrong, it would be the end of his own career. But there was no getting around the look of determination in Brashear’s eyes, and Axtell decided that, if this man had the courage to fight these tremendous odds, he would have the courage to risk his career.

  Soon the one-legged man was diving in a deep-sea rig. Then in a shallow-water rig. Then in scuba gear. All the while, he had an underwater photographer snapping pictures as proof, which he then sent to the Bureau of Medicine along with the paperwork for his medical board.

  Carl Brashear eventually convinced the Navy to give him the chance to prove himself. A captain and a commander were assigned to dive with and observe him in underwater action during a number of arduous tests, and every morning they watched as he ran around the building and then led the other divers in calisthenics.

  The day finally came that decided Brashear’s future. He appeared before a medical board tasked with deciding what to do with this man who had fewer limbs than the average, but who had mountains more courage and determination. The captain heading the board began with this observation: “Most of the people in your position want to get a medical disability, to get out of the Navy, and do the least they can and draw as much pay as they can. But then you’re asking for full duty!” He then asked, “Suppose you were diving and tore your leg off?”