by Brett Ashton
“Great, Jake; you’re hired,” he replied.
“Hired? For what, exactly?”
“There is going to be a ship waiting for us in Pearl Harbor called the USS Buffalo; she is a new ship on her way to support the campaign in the Philippines, from what I understand. Her skipper, Captain Albert Beck, is getting a promotion and going to work in the navy yard in Washington. The North Carolina is the taxi that is going to take him there.”
“What exactly does that have to do with me?” I asked, having some idea but still not completely expecting or understanding what was about to happen.
“You,” he said with a dramatic pause, which almost drove me crazy, “are going to take his place as the commanding officer of the Buffalo.”
I’m sure my jaw dropped at that point. I stared at him in disbelief, not knowing what to say. It wasn’t the first time I commanded a ship. Prior to my service on the Oklahoma, I had commanded a small “tin can” destroyer and a submarine. Normally, command of a ship the likes of a cruiser would be reserved for an officer holding the rank of captain, or at least someone who had been a commander for more than two years. But this was wartime, and things like this happen very rapidly.
“As CO?” I finally repeated, still not believing it fully.
“Yep.”
“Shouldn’t that post require a captain?”
“Normally, yes,” he replied, “but this is war and the navy, the captain, Admiral Halsey, and I all think you are capable enough to do it. Apparently, Bull Halsey pushed for this himself and convinced Vice Admiral Kinkaid of the Seventh Fleet you could do this, so the job is yours if you want it.”
Now, when you are a lifetime officer in the navy, and an admiral named “Halsey” is pulling for you, there really is only one answer to a question like that. You either accept the job offered and eventually get promoted to admiral or learn to become content, never getting promoted past your current rank and being stationed somewhere in Alaska for the rest of your life.
But goddamn it, there was still Susan and the kids! When would be the next time I would get to see them? I was really beginning to hate this war and what it was doing to my family. I felt it was just not fair to be so close to seeing them and yet not really having the chance to.
I was sure the orders for me to take command of the Buffalo were already written, and normally, I would have been very honored by the offer to command a new cruiser. Still, the urge to say no weighed heavily on my mind. Because of the war, I was trapped with no way out. Because of the Japanese, I couldn’t go home to see my wife and children, and I hated the Japs so very much more because of it.
“Damn, Joe,” I said shaking my head. “We both know I have to accept. But still, I wish our ships were heading in the other directions.”
“Family?”
“Yeah, I haven’t seen them since a month after the attack on Pearl.”
“Hmm… I understand Jake, and I wish I could help you.”
“You can, Joe,” I said.
“How?” he asked.
“Kill as many Nips as you can so we can all go home.”
“You got it, Jake. Happy hunting.”
So as the next several days passed, the Showboat turned east and steered a course toward home via Pearl Harbor. I began to gather together the very few things I kept on the ship with me and changed from studying the ship I was on to teaching the machine gun officer to replace me at air defense.
As we pulled into Pearl Harbor, I immediately noticed how well the area had been cleaned up. There was still the hulk of the Arizona, stripped of most of her superstructure, and the Utah had been rolled out of the navigation channel. All the rest of the destroyed ships were gone completely except for the Oklahoma, which had been refloated and pushed aside to one of the piers close to where we moored up.
I tried not to look at my old ship too much, but at the same time, for some reason, I couldn’t resist looking at the place where the war had started for me. Yard workers covered the main deck, evidently stripping off any excess weight they could remove. Haphazard patchwork had been installed over the torpedo damage along the port side to keep her afloat. I could tell she was being fixed up for a long tow to somewhere; the only reason I could guess was to cut her up for scrap.
I would have liked to go aboard to see if anything was left of my possessions, but time would not allow it. I had to spend all of my time in port transferring off of the North Carolina and taking command of the Buffalo.
The Buffalo was a brand-new ship. She was clean; everything was freshly painted and modern. The crew was new as well, and not unlike the crew of the North Carolina several years before—eager to fight yet untested by combat.
Captain Beck assured me all that could be done to ready the ship for combat had been done, but at nearly the same time he told me that, he also told me he had not been in combat himself. I had to guess this was the reason he was being moved to the shipyards in Bremerton, and I was being put in command of this ship. Not that he was an incompetent officer, just that he was accustomed to doing things by the navy’s book. The book has a tendency to mean less when people are shooting at you or trying to blow you up. Not because the rules are bad; it’s just that the one thing in combat you can count on is it won’t go the way you think it will. The rules in the book are written around what the engineers think will happen. One of the primary factors in combat is to bring about the unexpected; thus, the rules can rather quickly become obsolete. And I was relatively sure the Japanese didn’t check with the engineers who designed the ship to find out where and where not to shoot.
The change of command went smoothly and quite quickly because of the rapid departure of Captain Beck. My executive officer, recently promoted Commander Ward Thompson, had been well prepared to brief me on the operations of the ship. It was a pleasant surprise to find one of my old shipmates from the Oklahoma, Chuck Lewis, who had been promoted to Lieutenant Commander and was the air defense officer. Also I had a marine detachment on board, which was being commanded by a Guadalcanal veteran, Major Alex Johnson. It was a good thing to know at least several of my key officers had prior combat experience. And the major came with an extra bonus. He was an expert in the Japanese language and culture.
Normally, I would have been happy and proud to assume command of a vessel like this. As a career officer, it was a wonderful opportunity to prove myself, but I could not help resenting her somewhat. Finally, I assumed the attitude that it wasn’t the ship itself; it was simply pointed in the wrong direction. I wanted to go home, even for a short time, to my wife and kids. This ship, pointed west toward the Japanese, and standing in Pearl Harbor, where it all began, brought the sting of it to me more than anything else. And I thought to myself it was the Japanese that brought all of this to me, and I hated them even more for it as I looked across the harbor to the dead and rusted hulk of the Oklahoma. The only thing I could do about it was kill all of them as fast as I could in the hope that eventually I would be able to go home.
After a few days of filling the ship to capacity with ammunition, supplies, and fuel, we pulled out and set course, along with the rest of the ships in our task force, for the Philippine islands. The Japanese were about to be run over by an angry Buffalo.
Along the way, I got permission from the admiral to do a kind of mini-shakedown on the Buffalo. How fast would she go from full speed to full stop or from full stop to full speed? How quickly would she turn at different speeds? How far would she roll in sharp turns at different speeds? And for the crew: how quickly could we get to battle stations, and how would they perform when they got there? I would give the orders when the crew least expected it. I needed to see what she and the crew could do.
When people talk of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, they often bring up the special significance of the battleships that were at Pearl Harbor. History often mentions five of the six battleships that participated in the action at Surigao Straight were either damaged or sunk at Pearl, and now those ships had a chance to
pay the Japs back in spades. The same meaning applied to me, the commanding officer of the light cruiser Buffalo. And pay them back we did.
We knew they were coming. We knew there would be a big fight there. We didn’t know exactly when, but a large force of the Japs had to come through Surigao Straight if they wanted to disrupt the landings at Leyte Gulf. We had time to set up, so nothing could possibly get through and live to tell about it.
On one end of the narrow straight was the moderate force of Japanese battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, pretty much in single file. On the other end was the almost-perfect death trap set by the Seventh Fleet waiting for them: six battleships, nine cruisers, twenty-eight destroyers and several torpedo-equipped PT boat squadrons.
It should have been, and in a lot of ways was, a classic battle-line surface-to-surface engagement, at least as far as the actual naval battle was concerned. But the Japanese had a new trick up their sleeve.
The battle happened on the night of the twenty-fifth of October of ’44. We were part of a large formation of ships in the battle line just aft of the Shropshire and on the side of the battleships closest to the Japanese.
Messages of contacts with the enemy had begun coming in from the patrol boat squadrons earlier in the evening and increased as the night wore on. The PT boats and destroyers continued to do their jobs, harassing the enemy until the enemy got within firing range of the American cruisers and battleships. Then all hell broke loose.
We picked a target in the Japanese formation, using our radar, and I gave the order to commence firing after the obligatory check to make sure my forty-five was ready. At about the same time, the battleships began to fire as well. Flashes of fire lit up the horizon all around us as large shells from the battle wagons whistled in the air directly above our heads and landed on the enemy formation.
They could only fire half as much back at us because they were on the approach and could only use their forward guns, whereas we were almost stationary and could deliver full broadsides from all of our guns.
And it was, for me, an awesome sight to see, remembering a morning several years earlier being in the water of Pearl Harbor, watching five of these very same battleships sinking or in flames around me. And I knew a lot of Japs were dying. I could just feel in my mind their horror as their lives slipped away into the darkness of the night in the waters of Surigao Straight.
It was great, as far as I was concerned, and I reveled in it.
After the attack, the fleet that ambushed the Japanese at Surigao Straight began to break up into smaller units. We still had to be sure the marines of the invasion force were covered, as well as be sure the Japanese didn’t have some other unknown force for us to deal with, but a lot of the smaller ships were sweeping for mines, submarines, and aircraft and picking up survivors of the ships that got sunk.
When you are picking up survivors from an enemy ship, you are basically on an intelligence-gathering mission. Sometimes, you might even get a Japanese captain or admiral; you never know.
The man put in charge of our particular task force, which consisted of two cruisers and three screening destroyers, was Rear Admiral Kriston, who put his flag on the Buffalo.
One of the things nobody expected was what happened the day after the battle when we started picking up the survivors from the ships we sunk.
“Sir,” the major said, “we’ve gotten several out of the water but most are refusing rescue and trying to swim away.”
Just then, there was a small explosion near where the rescue operation was happening. I turned to the bridge phone talker and said, “Report!”
“Repeat your last?” he said into the phone then listened to the answer.
After a few seconds, he turned to me and told me, “Sir, it seems one of the Nips they just pulled out of the water was rigged with a grenade and blew himself up.” There were five men down, not counting the one that just blew himself up. Medics were already on the scene to patch up the injured Japs that were being pulled out of the water, so help for the injured marines was right there.
It seemed like a waste of perfectly good medical supplies to take care of injured Japanese, but orders are orders.
“How badly are they hurt?” I asked, noticing the major’s concerned expression.
“Two marines dead, three injured and being taken to medical,” was the report.
“Fine,” I said to the major. “If they don’t want to experience the excellent hospitality of the Buffalo, then screw them. Shoot them in the water and let the sharks clean up the mess. It’s better than having them fight us again later or kill more of us trying to save them.”
“Shoot them in the water, sir?” he asked.
“You heard me, major. Those are your men that just got killed trying to rescue those slant-eyed bastards. If they are enemy combatants refusing to surrender, we are going to treat them as such and shoot them.”
I walked out onto the open bridge on the port side, pulling out my forty-five, recalling how the Japs had strafed me while I was swimming away from the Oklahoma during the Pearl Harbor attack and started to shoot at some of the Japs in the water. I’m sure I had hit at least one of the closer ones (mostly because of the screaming) before the first magazine went empty. I reloaded and put my gun in its holster and turned to the major. “Tell any of the Nips we come to, if they want to be rescued, they are to strip off all of their clothes. From here on out, if they try to swim away or if they approach this ship with anything big or small, shoot them without a second chance. If they want to try to smuggle another grenade on board, they’ll have to hide it by putting it up their ass.”
The major smiled a little bit and said, “Yes, sir!” as he turned around to walk away.
Another thing that worried me was the slowness of the rescue. The longer we took to pick these sons of bitches up, the less we were moving, and the more of a target we became for more air attacks or, even worse, submarine attacks. I kind of suspected, rightly or wrongly, the Japs in the water knew that and were swimming away from us as a stalling tactic to keep us here and moving slow while a submarine maneuvered into position for the kill.
“CIC,” I said to the talker, “I want to know everything that shows on the radar the second you see it. Tell all lookouts to be sharp. Radio, I want all action reports on enemy submarines from the fleet sent to me via Lieutenant Disalle in CIC immediately. Also, send a report of this incident to Admiral Oldendorf and Rear Admiral Kriston. Priority urgent.” The talker went about his business as I went out to watch the sky and the water myself.
As the day progressed, we would come across more Japanese in the water. Some stripped as requested and were brought aboard, but many got shot trying to swim away.
“It serves them right after Pearl,” I thought to myself as I watched from the open bridge. “It was me they were trying to shoot as I was defenseless in the water just a few years ago. If that’s the way they want to play it, that’s the way we will play it. I don’t care if I have to personally shoot every single Nip in the Japanese navy myself; I am not losing another of my crew to these suicidal freaks if I can help it.”
And at that point, I still could never have guessed what was going to happen next. Nobody could have.
“Sir,” the bridge talker said “CIC is reporting incoming bogies.”
“Battle stations,” I replied. And for the third time that day, the Buffalo prepared for an air attack.
I think sometimes they would do this kind of thing on purpose to try to wear us out. I personally called it “Crying Wolf.” They would let us spot them while they were far out so we would brace ourselves, and then they would turn the other way. Sometimes they would appear and disappear on our radar like ghosts. It was kind of nerve-wracking because you could never really tell which one was going to be the real attack. And if you were in an area of sparse air cover like we were that afternoon, it was outright maddening.
We changed course to get the most of the ship’s guns pointed toward the oncoming
aircraft and accelerated to flank speed.
There was a formation of aircraft at an extremely high altitude coming in straight and fast. I had the talker give off the ranges as they came in and instructed the gun boss to open fire as soon as they came within range. There were a lot of them, so I decided to engage them with the ship’s six-inch guns as well.
I began to see the guns turn toward the targets as the ship prepared for battle. I pulled out my forty-five and checked it again. It was loaded and ready, as was the Buffalo.
I grabbed my binoculars to try and spot the incoming formation, and when I couldn’t see them, I asked the talker what altitude they were at. Something felt wrong. They were staying very high, whereas normally, they would have dropped down to a more adequate level for a dive-bomb attack with a simultaneous torpedo attack.
I passed the word for the watches and CIC to watch for another formation of aircraft, suspecting this one was going to be a distraction.
A very short time later, several things happened almost all at once.
The talker shouted, “Bogies bearing one eight zero, closing fast!” Just about then, the aft starboard side five-inch gun opened fire, seeing incoming aircraft and not waiting for any other order to open fire. And realization occurred about what the Japs were doing. They were keeping our attention up high to the port side where most of our guns were currently pointed, and they also had some aircraft coming in low, under the radar, so we couldn’t see them. And by spreading the attack out over ninety degrees, either way I turned the ship, I would have to divide the ship’s guns between the two formations. It was a very well executed attack.
I had to make a call quickly, so I ordered “Hard starboard rudder!”
The ship rapidly turned to meet the two formations of attackers and the appropriate guns swung around to greet them as well. Tracer fire rapidly began to erupt from the starboard guns as the ship came about, but something still wasn’t right. These Japs were coming in low, two of them almost right on the water, and very, very fast, much too fast and low for a torpedo attack. “What are they doing?” I said out loud, my senses telling me something was dreadfully wrong.
