Tin Can Titans

by John Wukovits

  Although sailors aboard the three Desron 21 ships smiled at Halsey’s directive that his aviators were to “investigate and shoot down all snoopers—not vindictively, but in a friendly sort of way,” no wild celebration marked the occasion. “There was no cheering, no clapping or back slapping,” wrote McCarthy of the reaction aboard Taylor. “No hand shaking. Just stunned silence. Then one voice spoke for all: ‘I can’t believe it. But if it’s true, what’s next? Do we go home now?’”

  The emotions of the moment engulfed McCarthy. He wanted to be alone to process the news that the long, grueling war, one that had so often placed him and Desron 21 in tight predicaments, had at last ended. “Instead, I unexpectedly sank to my knees by my bunk to thank God—something I had seldom done before in the Navy,” he wrote. “Was the killing really over? Nobody knew for sure. But there was an overwhelming feeling of relief that there would be no invasion of Japan.”11

  Nicholas’s final war-related action of that day was to retrieve a downed aviator, Ensign Olen D. Glaize, who upon returning from the canceled air strikes crashed in the water alongside the carrier USS Shangri-La (CV-38). On a day that saw hostilities cease, the Nicholas crew appropriately saved a life instead of taking one.

  Commander James A. Pridmore requested permission for his O’Bannon to display the ship’s Presidential Unit Citation. Thompson wrote his parents that when Halsey replied, “Affirmative. Pat her on the cheek for me,” Pridmore ordered the pennant hoisted from the foremast.

  Crews still went to general quarters at sunrise and sunset in case a disgruntled Japanese aviator staged an attack. Even though eight planes were shot down in the hours after Halsey’s announcements, conditions gradually calmed. Sporadic calls to man stations interrupted routine ship maintenance, but officers and enlisted operated more like a peacetime crew. “Most of us spent hours topside during this period nearly awestruck by the tremendous strength displayed by this mighty fleet,” wrote Thompson. “As far as the eye could see were our first line carriers, battleships, heavy, light and antiaircraft cruisers, screened by some seventy destroyers.”12

  The O’Bannon crew again had the opportunity to see the admiral with whom Desron 21 had been linked since those dark days off Guadalcanal when, on August 19, Admiral Halsey boarded to be taken to HMS Duke of York preparatory to the surrender proceedings. Halsey’s bulldog approach to war perfectly matched the disposition of destroyer crews, and Halsey did not disappoint. “The ‘Bull’ lived up to his reputation as a gruff congenial seadog with a good sense of humor,” George Thompson wrote to his parents. “It’s a great day, isn’t it, lad?” Halsey said to Seaman Whisler, who was at the helm when Halsey boarded. All the young sailor could think of was, “Yes, sir.”13

  Men strained their necks to catch a glimpse of the admiral, whose love of destroyers shone in the comfortable way he moved about O’Bannon’s decks. “Having aboard, even for such a short period, Admiral Halsey and his staff, was a real pleasure,” recorded the ship’s war diary. “Since this crew had served immediately under Admiral Halsey in the days of Guadalcanal and the ‘Slot’ in 1942, they felt keen pleasure and sincere pride in having him aboard for the second time.”14

  In Halsey, the enlisted had not simply a skilled leader but a man they considered a friend. No one could imagine walking up to Douglas MacArthur to say hello, but they could visualize such a scene with Halsey, maybe even share a beer with the weathered leader. “He was a great guy,” said Seaman Whisler, who remained at the helm while Halsey sat on the wing of the bridge. “Everyone admired Halsey because he was a front line admiral, right there, not always back at headquarters.”15 The crew’s esteem for Halsey deepened when men learned that as O’Bannon and Nicholas pulled alongside his flagship, Missouri, to pick up the admiral, Halsey announced to the battleship’s crew that if they wanted to get a look at a pair of fighting ships, all they needed to do was glance over the side at O’Bannon and Nicholas.

  On August 27 the two destroyers, accompanied by Taylor, became the first American surface ships to enter Japanese waters since before the war when the Third Fleet anchored in Sagami Wan, a body of water adjoining the entrance to Tokyo Bay. According to instructions, the Japanese were to have trained their coastal batteries inland, opened the gun breeches, and removed all gun crews, but aboard Taylor, Lieutenant Commander DeLaureal took no chances. He asked Ensign McCarthy to survey the coast with his binoculars and alert him if he saw anything suspicious. The Taylor crew had been through enough, and the last thing DeLaureal wanted was to be harmed by a surprise bombardment. As Taylor and the group of ships slowly steamed along the coastline toward Sagami Wan, McCarthy scrutinized the shore, but he detected nothing alarming. Navy fighter aircraft confirmed his assessment by reporting over voice radio that the shore batteries were, as instructed, trained away from the ships.

  McCarthy kept his attention shoreward anyway. When majestic Mount Fuji appeared in the background McCarthy, an avid stamp collector as a child, was pleased that it looked just like the images on his Japanese postage stamps. McCarthy’s delight increased when an aviator radioed that he had just passed over a building whose rooftop announced in huge white letters, “Pappy is here!” Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, the top Marine ace of the war, had been shot down in the South Pacific in early 1944. Until that point no one had been certain whether he had survived the action, but the good news that Pappy was alive shot through the fleet.

  Shortly after 7:00 a.m. Nicholas lookouts spotted the Japanese destroyer Hatsuzakura coming over the horizon. As previously ordered, Nicholas moved out ahead of the formation to meet the ship, closed to within two hundred yards, and lowered a boat containing a group of men led by Lieutenant (jg) Ernest G. Fanning and interpreter Lieutenant (jg) Donald K. Anderson. They were to pick up two Japanese naval officers—Captain Takasaki Yoshihito from the Yokosuka Naval Base and Captain Inaho Ontani of the Tokyo Navy Department—thirteen pilots, and six interpreters who would help the Third Fleet navigate home waters. The Desron 21 officers and sailors had been combating the Japanese for three years, and other than a few floating bodies or failed rescue attempts of enemy aviators, they had not seen their enemy up close. Now the young officers and their men were about to be in the same whaleboat with foes who had been trying to kill them. Both officers figured the transfer of the Japanese from Hatsuzakura to Halsey’s Missouri and other ships would progress peacefully, but they took no unnecessary risks. When the whaleboat brought the Japanese to Nicholas the skipper, Commander Dennis C. Lyndon, had his men at general quarters, and sailors with sidearms escorted the group to the wardroom, where the Japanese were relieved of their swords and searched for weapons.

  Every hand on O’Bannon packed the ship’s superstructure to get a look at Hatsuzakura. Some were shocked at the dilapidated condition of the enemy destroyer, which lacked the martial splendor of the Japanese vessels O’Bannon had so bitterly fought in the Solomons.

  While Nicholas transferred her guests to Halsey, O’Bannon and Taylor steamed to their anchorage in Sagami Wan. In the early evening, after an exciting day, they dropped anchor about one mile offshore. “The entry was uneventful,” stated the war diary, “but very interesting and most gratifying.”16

  Halsey’s assent to lighting up the ships at night concerned some aboard. Crews had become so accustomed to darkened conditions that the illumination made them uneasy during those first nights, when they could not be certain every Japanese pilot had followed orders to surrender. “Nothing untoward happened,” wrote Starr. “Emperor Hirohito—God, to the Japanese—had told all Japanese people that the war was over, and that they should treat Americans as visitors, not as enemy.”17

  George Thompson and his buddies discussed what the day’s events meant for a crew whose experiences could have been the template for the Navy’s role in the Pacific war. They had witnessed the bombings and the island landings and the kamikazes, but now their silent guns were mute testimony to the triumph O’Bannon and her Desron 21 companions had hel
ped fashion.

  “The O’Bannon had fought the Japs from Guadalcanal through New Guinea and the Philippines to the threshold of the ‘unconquerable invincible’ Japanese homeland,” Thompson wrote his parents, “and now a dream long cherished by all who had served on her would soon become a reality when the ship steamed victoriously into Nipponese waters.”18

  They celebrated the next evening. Commander Pridmore posted sentries to guard against suicide boats or swimmers, while the rest of the crew gathered topside to enjoy a movie. It was not the same as strolling into the Rialto or Summit Theater back home with a girlfriend, but under the circumstances, it was not a bad way to spend an evening in the Pacific.

  “We Have Fought a Long Time for It”

  No sailor present in Tokyo Bay on August 29 had ever witnessed such a spectacle. Any task force with which they had served during the war, however immense, shrank before the vast assemblage of almost four hundred warships—victory ensigns fluttering from their highest mast—that entered the bay that morning. The collection represented the naval might assembled by the United States to defeat Japan. Majestic carriers lingered at sea, their air squadrons ready to pounce should diehards decide to mount a last, desperate attack. Massive battleships and sleek cruisers, their powerful guns gleaming in the daylight, dwarfed the nimble destroyers that sliced through the waters.

  “Admiral William F. Halsey triumphantly entered Tokyo Bay today aboard his flagship, the mighty battleship Missouri, as thousands of American and British bluejackets and marines stood by to make the first seaborne occupation of prostrate Japan,” wrote the New York Times.19 Halsey had his choice of any ship to lead in that impressive collection. His flagship, Missouri, or any of the battleships resurrected from Pearl Harbor to rejoin the fleet would have been apt selections, just as would any of those cruisers that had so frequently pulverized Japanese possessions during the many island assaults. One of the aircraft carriers that Nimitz and Halsey had relied on in the war’s latter half to vanquish the Japanese could have been given the honor. Instead, without hesitation, Halsey turned to Desron 21, the destroyer crews that had held a frayed line off Guadalcanal when battleships and cruisers were lacking, moved from the Solomons to support New Guinea and Philippine landings, helped return revered Corregidor to US hands, and battled kamikazes as they approached Japan.

  Nicholas, O’Bannon, and Taylor led the way, a trio of destroyers that, along with their absent Desron 21 comrades, were the smaller, faithful companions to the sleek aircraft carriers and the lumbering battleships, operating in the shadows while their larger brethren garnered much of the home front’s attention. They represented the sacrifices made by the thousands of sailors to make this day possible, while in their van steamed the formidable collection sent to the battle areas by a nation united.

  Once the ships anchored in Tokyo Bay, they tended to routine matters until September 2 and the surrender ceremony. O’Bannon transferred a prize crew and interpreter from the Yokosuka Naval Base to a surrendered Japanese submarine in Sagami Wan, and Nicholas took aboard eighty-six officers and enlisted for eventual transfer to the United States.

  The only remaining vessels of Desron 21 operating in those waters shrank by one when, on the final day of August, Halsey designated O’Bannon to be the first to return. The ship and crew of the most honored destroyer of the war had earned that right, gained from accumulating a Presidential Unit Citation and seventeen battle stars, each star denoting meritorious service in battle. Commander Pridmore announced that the men had a choice of either remaining for the surrender ceremony or immediately heading home. “The crew,” according to Seaman Whisler, “one hundred percent said United States.” The next afternoon, one day before the surrender ceremony, Pridmore gave the order to lift anchor and took the ship out of Tokyo Bay, and, as George Thompson related, “we set sail for the good old U.S.”20

  Thirteen days later, with her decks jammed with excited officers and sailors who had not seen their homeland since early in 1944, O’Bannon arrived in California. People lined the Golden Gate Bridge as the fabled destroyer passed beneath. Ships in the harbor sounded their whistles, and crews lined their decks to honor the arrival of a warship that had so honorably served the nation for almost the entire Pacific conflict. “Passed under the Golden Gate Bridge,” stated O’Bannon’s war diary, “and stood into San Francisco Bay, a thrill anticipated for twenty months.”21

  Only two destroyers from Desron 21 remained in Japan. Their crews would have loved to join O’Bannon for the trip home, but they took comfort that they could at least be part of the surrender ceremony, a once-in-a-lifetime event. Shortly after dawn on September 2, a Japanese delegation crossed Nicholas’s deck and boarded another ship to be taken to Missouri, followed by eighty-eight Allied notables that Commander Dennis C. Lyndon would transport to the battleship. Nicholas crew were thrilled to see Lieutenant General James “Jimmy” Doolittle, the Army officer who had commanded the bombers in the daring 1942 air attack on Tokyo; Lieutenant General J. W. Wainwright, who had languished in Japanese prison camps since his surrender at Corregidor early in the war; and the other renowned military figures from the United States and seven other nations.

  Taylor ferried 238 war correspondents to the scene, including Richard Tregaskis, whose account of the Solomons fighting, Guadalcanal Diary, became a best-selling book as well as a popular film. As a military band played from a Yokohama dock, trucks and automobiles, displaying signs of wear from the long war, brought the reporters from their quarters to Taylor. According to William L. Worden, a Saturday Evening Post writer covering the surrender, “The destroyer Taylor, alongside the quay, had its crew in whites, and in its wardroom mess stewards struggled to provide coffee for 200 newspapermen who had been without it for a week.” When Worden and the others stepped aboard, one of Taylor’s officers explained that “we’ve never been mentioned in print, for all the battles we’ve seen. You spell the name T-a-y-l-o-r.”22

  Taylor also boarded four Japanese reporters permitted to cover the proceedings. While the crew treated them with cautious respect, Taylor’s mascot, Subic, a small yellowish dog the men had picked up in the Philippines, gave one reporter a rude greeting. Shipboard scuttlebutt held that Subic had been badly abused by the Japanese, and Ensign John McCarthy, assigned to shepherd the Japanese during their time on the ship, watched as “Subic leaped forward and clamped his jaws on the lower leg of one of my charges.” McCarthy pulled Subic off, expecting to be bitten by the snarling little dog, but instead the dog “looked at me with a pained expression,” as if wondering why McCarthy had blocked his attempt at revenge. Worden observed the incident and wrote that Subic’s bite “may well have been the last really overt act in the most terrible war in history.”23

  Nicholas and Taylor delivered their passengers to Missouri an hour before the scheduled 9:00 a.m. ceremony, and then anchored close enough to observe the surrender. Crew marveled at the ships that blanketed Tokyo Bay and at the nonstop stream of aircraft assigned to intercept any Japanese pilot who might try to interrupt the proceedings by smashing his plane into the battleship. When MacArthur arrived, he stepped over to Halsey and, with Nicholas and Taylor alongside, said that “it was grand to see so many of Bill Halsey’s old South Pacific fighting scoundrels in at the kill.” Halsey agreed, adding, “God what a great day this is. We have fought a long time for it.”24

  The two crews lingered on deck while MacArthur conducted the ceremony. After everyone had affixed their signatures to the surrender documents, MacArthur walked to Halsey and whispered, “Start ’em now!” At Halsey’s signal, five hundred carrier aircraft and Army bombers droned above as an apt exclamation point to the war. Masuo Kato, one of the Japanese reporters, recalled Captain Hiraide’s boast earlier in the war that a victorious Japan would one day hold a naval review in New York Harbor, and noted that instead “Japan had bowed to a conqueror in her own home waters”; had there been any doubts, “hundreds of American planes in beautiful formation roared over
head as a final reminder of the power that had destroyed an Empire.”25

  After the ceremony, Nicholas and Taylor returned the dignitaries to Yokohama. As the reporters and military personnel passed by Ensign McCarthy on their way off the ship, Masuo Kato extended his right hand to shake the ensign’s. McCarthy briefly paused as if unsure what to do, then grasped Kato’s hand in a friendly handshake. Kato bowed, thanked McCarthy, and stepped off the Taylor.

  Once the guests had departed, DeLaureal gathered his officers in the wardroom to thank them for their help in what had been a hectic and emotional morning. He mentioned, however, that one of the military dignitaries, General Carl Spaatz, had told DeLaureal that he observed one of his ship’s officers shaking hands with the enemy. Spaatz wanted the man disciplined for the action.

  McCarthy knew that DeLaureal was referring to him, and he waited for his punishment. As the room fell silent, DeLaureal added, “I looked into the incident. It took place after the formal surrender. The war is over. The Japanese was a non-combatant newsman. Now we have to make the peace work. And as Captain of this ship I do not take orders from passengers, even if he is a General of the United States Army Air Corps.” DeLaureal turned to McCarthy, reached across the table, and shook his hand. “You did a fine job today, Mac. Now let’s all have some dinner and write a letter home or see a movie on the fo’c’sle. Then get a good night’s sleep for a change.”26

  Nicholas and Taylor remained in Japan for another month. In mid-September they helped transport 250 Allied prisoners of war from various camps to a hospital ship. When along the way the former captives shared their experiences during those trying years of incarceration, the sailors were both thankful that they had avoided those terrible circumstances and angry over the Japanese cruelty to their countrymen.