War Stories II: Heroism in the Pacific

by Oliver North

  Kinkaid relied on more than logic, however. He’d received reports earlier in the day that the Southern Force had been sighted in the Sulu Sea—due west and opposite the invasion’s landing beaches. By having Oldendorf cover the southern entrance to the Surigao Strait, and with Task Force 34 supposedly covering the waters north of the landing site, the U.S. invasion of Leyte could continue until completed without interference by the Japanese. All Kinkaid had to do was keep the Japanese Southern Force from getting through. Kinkaid and Oldendorf both reasoned that Task Force 34 would surely take care of Kurita’s Center Force if and when it returned.

  At 1900 hours on 24 October, Nishimura was already at the southern end of Surigao Strait and sailing north toward the American transports. At 2230, one of Oldendorf’s thirty-nine torpedo boats sighted Nishimura’s force in the strait and radioed its presence to Oldendorf and Kinkaid.

  At fifteen minutes past midnight on 25 October, another U.S. torpedo boat encountered Nishimura’s force and launched its torpedoes. Others joined in the fray; altogether they launched thirty-four torpedoes during the three-hour attack, but scored only one hit. Emboldened, Nishimura charged in. He thought he had somehow successfully maneuvered through the gauntlet of American torpedo boats on both sides of his line of ships.

  But then Nishimura’s luck ran out. He was confronted by Oldendorf’s main force, positioned at the top of the strait. Waiting for the Japanese ships were six U.S. Navy battleships, four heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, and twenty-one destroyers. Oldendorf had positioned his ships to trap the Japanese force. It was a traditional old-fashioned naval battle, with extensive use of big guns and torpedoes.

  At exactly 0300, Oldendorf’s twenty-one destroyers caught the enemy from both sides near the southern tip of Leyte. The gauntlet began to close as Nishimura’s ships moved closer to the transports.

  In less than an hour Nishimura was confronted first by the destroyers, then by Oldendorf’s cruisers and battleships, which proceeded to unleash their big guns. The brutal shelling took a terrible toll.

  By the time the engagement was over, the U.S. 7th Fleet had put every one of Nishimura’s ships out of commission. He and his crew perished when the Americans sank his flagship, the battleship Yamashiro.

  Meanwhile Admiral Shima, with his half of the Southern Force, had entered the bottom end of the Surigao Strait. He’d arrived just in time to see the results of Oldendorf’s awful destruction of Nishimura’s flotilla.

  Shima’s flagship, Nachi, collided with the retreating and blazing Mogami of Nishimura’s force, and Nachi was damaged in the incident. U.S. torpedo boats had already attacked Shima’s force on the way in, knocking one of his light cruisers out of formation. Now Shima had a paltry force of three cruisers and four destroyers, and he could see that they didn’t stand a chance. His ships made a quick U-turn and headed back to the safety of the Mindanao Sea.

  As the battle of the Surigao Strait developed, Lieutenant (jg) Jim Halloway, a twenty-two-year-old gunnery officer from Charleston, South Carolina, was aboard the destroyer Bennion. Through his binoculars, he could see the approaching enemy vessels.

  LIEUTENANT (JG) JAMES HALLOWAY, USN

  Aboard USS Bennion

  Surigao Strait

  24 October 1944

  0004 Hours Local

  I remember thinking at the time, “That looks just like a Japanese battleship!” We’d gotten reports from submarines that had seen this group coming into Surigao Strait. They first reported a battleship, then a second, and a third. Then they submerged and came up and reported, “Now we see a cruiser.”

  Their battleships turned out to be the Fuso, which had nine fourteen-inch guns, and each projectile is as tall as I am. That’s a big hunk of explosive. And the Yamashiro had nine or maybe twelve sixteen-inch guns. The Yamashiro was followed by the Mogami. She was very heavily armed with eight-inch guns, torpedo tubes, and six-inch guns. And I think there were four or five destroyers with torpedoes. We had, in our group, nine destroyers that would be taking on this group as they came through.

  The Japanese were coming in a column. And we were coming down on their bow. Our destroyers were at 300-foot intervals, and we were making thirty-two knots.

  I was standing up with the binoculars. And there it was, clearly a Japanese battleship. At that point-blank range, we were given our target from the squadron commander of the destroyers. He said, “Your division will attack the second ship, the Yamashiro.”

  We could see two battleships now. And we cranked the director around, put the crosshairs right on the second battleship, and lowered the crosshairs to the waterline. I told the people in the plotting room, tracking Yamashiro by radar, to get her course and speed.

  We received the orders to make the run in. That’s when we increased speed to thirty-two knots, made smoke, and headed for our launch point for the best torpedo shot, 1,000 yards from the Yamashiro.

  It sort of gave us comfort when our battleships started firing, six in a row, with their tracers. Looking through the lens, I could see them impacting on both the Fuso and the Yamashiro. Guns were being torn off and the superstructure began to collapse, and fires started. But the Japanese guns didn’t slow down a bit.

  One torpedo would not sink it. It would take three or four. We could launch ten, but were told to only launch five—our division would launch fifteen—so there would be fifteen torpedoes going against the Yamashiro.

  We fired a spread to take care of the ship’s maneuvering area. That way, between three and six torpedoes hit Yamashiro. And then she’s in trouble.

  We could also see where the projectiles from our ship were striking the Japanese ships. When one of those large armor-piercing shells hits, the first thing that happens is that the whole area of the armor where the shell hits turns pink. I guess it’s just all that energy being dissipated, and then comes the explosion. It was quite a Fourth of July show because when it hit, the shell exploded, and then it set off ready ammunition topside, and that would also explode, and it was a pretty wild scene.

  We were sent south again to sink the rest of the Japanese ships that were trying to escape. As we went again into the strait, it was really a scene out of Dante’s Inferno. The seas were covered with oil, there was wreckage all over the place, and there were Japanese sailors hanging onto the wreckage as we went by.

  That’s when Bennion encountered the Asagumo, a Japanese destroyer about five miles away. It looked like it was badly hit and was limping away. But the commander of the 7th Fleet ordered us to destroy it.

  ”One of our destroyers, the Grant, was badly shot up and dead in the water, but she was able to get steam up and get under way again. I think Grant lost something like sixty people.

  Early in the melee, just as we were beginning to withdraw, we saw a large shape on our starboard side. It started firing toward the Grant. We were only about 2,000 yards away but the cruiser hadn’t seen us—it was shooting over us. The plotting room said, “We have her course and speed, and she looks like she’s in a turn.” The captain said, “Fire five torpedoes!” So we swung the tubes out, ready to fire, hit the switch, and away they went. We sank the cruiser Asagumo.

  We listened to the TBS, the VHF radio to “talk between ships.” Normally, it wouldn’t range that far, but we were getting some skip distance and we heard this voice say, “This is Taffy 2. I’m under fire by some sixteen-inch guns, and two battleships and three cruisers are bearing down on me.”

  Here we’d just finished this night action, and thought we’d destroyed the Japanese threat to the Leyte beachhead. Now, suddenly we find that aircraft carriers providing our air cover are under attack from Japanese surface ships in the vicinity.

  I went from the elation of great victory to a feeling of, “This can’t be happening.” It was a tremendous reversal for all of us.

  The only advantage we had was that, for a while, the Japanese ships were firing armor-piercing shells and they went in one side of the carrier and out the other before e
xploding. But then the Japanese caught on and began using 2,000-pound bombs.

  TASK UNIT TAFFY 3

  BATTLE OFF SAMAR ISLAND

  25 OCTOBER 1944

  0815 HOURS LOCAL

  Admiral Oldendorf’s destroyers, cruisers, and battleships had set a trap for the Japanese Southern Force and it had worked. The crossing of the “T”—a classic maneuver taught at naval schools for centuries—had caught Admiral Nishimura off guard. His flagship, the Yamashiro, was sunk, taking its skipper to the bottom of the bloody, oily, fiery waters of the Surigao Strait.

  For Oldendorf and his men, victory had been complete. But Halsey’s move north was having devastating consequences. Admiral Kurita, having changed his mind about retreating, entered the San Bernardino Strait just after midnight and was surprised that the 3rd Fleet was nowhere in the vicinity. Four hours later, Kurita’s ships slid unnoticed through the strait and headed south to Leyte Gulf.

  Kurita planned to reposition his ships from a search and patrol night formation to the circle formation used for anti-aircraft defense. It was just about the time that the Battle of Surigao Strait was ending to his south. At 0415 Admiral Kinkaid radioed Halsey and asked about Task Force 34, inquiring whether it was still guarding San Bernardino Strait. Halsey didn’t get the message until two and a half hours later.

  At about 0720, Oldendorf recalled his ships from the Surigao Strait, and about that time, Halsey—a few hundred miles north of Leyte Gulf—was composing a radio message in response to Kinkaid’s earlier query. This message should have informed Kinkaid that Task Force 34 had not been deployed and was not guarding the San Bernardino Strait. Instead, it merely informed the 7th Fleet commander that Task Force 38 was heading north in its entirety.

  Ten minutes later, Oldendorf received an urgent radio message from an carrier escort with one of the 7th Fleet’s task units. The 7th Fleet had eighteen carrier escorts, divided into three task units of six small carriers each, code-named “Taffy” 1, 2, and 3.

  Task Units Taffy 1 and 2 were 120 miles out from Leyte on submarine and anti-aircraft patrol. Taffy 3’s commander, Admiral Clifton Sprague, had launched twelve fighters and six planes of an anti-submarine patrol just after 0600 to provide cover for the ships in Leyte Gulf, to combat air patrol over the invasion beachhead, and to execute ground attacks on the enemy troops on Leyte. The Taffy task units and their aircraft weren’t trained, or even equipped, to fight an enemy fleet.

  Then, just after dawn on 25 October, Kurita’s Center Force off Samar Island surprised the carrier escorts of Taffy 3. About 0700, a recon plane from Taffy 3 located the Japanese ships but Kurita reacted first, ordering a “general attack.”

  Kurita’s order meant that each Japanese skipper would initiate independent action. When the shells from Kurita’s battleships and cruisers began splashing in the ocean near his carriers, Sprague sent Kinkaid an urgent radio message that they were under heavy attack from Kurita’s fleet, and that their own small force was no match for the Japanese. Sprague asked for immediate help from Task Force 34, which he assumed to be nearby, or from the rest of the 3rd Fleet somewhere north of his position.

  The terrible news that the enemy fleet was already halfway into Leyte Gulf was passed up the line. The entire Leyte invasion operation was now in jeopardy.

  When Halsey finally replied to Kinkaid’s earlier radio inquiry, Kurita’s big guns were already shelling the small escort carriers of Taffy 3. Admiral Sprague radioed that he was under fire from four battleships, eight heavy cruisers, and eight destroyers. All of his carriers were well within range of the big Japanese guns and the enemy ships were all out of range of his much smaller five-inch guns.

  Suddenly, Sprague saw an avenue of delay, if not delivery: a bank of fog and rain. He ordered his carriers and destroyer escorts to enter the nearby rainsquall. It bought them about fifteen minutes of cover. As Sprague lay hidden, both he and Kinkaid were wondering what had happened. Where was Halsey’s Task Force 34? Where was the rest of the 3rd Fleet?

  Once the rainsquall no longer protected them from visual contact, Admiral Sprague knew he couldn’t outrun or outgun the Japanese battlewagons or cruisers. Having already sent all his planes out on patrol, and desperate to save his carriers, at 0715 Sprague ordered his three escorts, USS Hoel, USS Heermann, and USS Johnston, to counter-attack the Japanese formation.

  If the carriers were going to survive, the little destroyers were going to have to go up against battleships and cruisers four times their size, many with fourteen- to eighteen-inch guns. It was like a dog chasing a truck—the entire Taffy task unit was smaller than the Yamamoto.

  The destroyer’s confrontation with Kurita’s powerful First Attack Force seemed like a suicide mission. Yet Sprague’s order was carried out with extraordinary courage and determination. The gamble paid off and most of the carriers survived the first and only encounter between carriers and surface combatants.

  Thirty-five minutes into the lopsided fight, Sprague sent his only remaining surface combatants, little destroyer escorts, to engage the battleship Yamamoto, Kurita’s flagship. After several exchanges, the Yamamoto fled to escape the American torpedoes. For the rest of the naval skirmish, Kurita remained off-balance and was unable to get back into action.

  During the battle between Kurita’s Center Force battleships and Sprague’s Taffy units, Lieutenant Tom Stevenson, a twenty-two-year-old communications officer, had a ringside seat on the deck of one of Taffy 3’s destroyer escorts, the USS Samuel B. Roberts.

  LIEUTENANT THOMAS (TOM)

  STEVENSON, USN

  Aboard USS Samuel B. Roberts

  25 October 1944

  As the communications officer and a deck officer, I stood eight hours of deck watch a day and decoded all the messages that came in. We were aboard the smallest of the major war vessels and I would have to prepare the messages for the appropriate officers on the ship and supervise the general operations of the radio room and the signal apparatus.

  Taffy 3 screened for anti-submarine and for anti-aircraft purposes.

  Planes were taking off from the carriers of Taffy 3 and were supposed to put up combat air patrol to protect the ships from air attack, and to launch strikes at the beach every morning at dawn to support the troops with bombing and strafing.

  The planes would come back and re-arm, go back, and make a second strike during the day, and sometimes a third strike. Meanwhile, we’d keep a combat air patrol of six fighters above our own formation to try to ward off any attacking Japanese planes.

  At night the radio for TBS signal skips, and you can hear it sometimes many miles away. So I heard the reports of the Battle of Surigao Strait during the night. We were aware that we had won a terrific victory.

  Suddenly, the “general quarters” alarm rang for everybody to report to their battle stations. The Japanese ships had spotted us. We could only see the tops of the masts of the Yamato, the Kongo, and big battleships. They were over fourteen miles away. We didn’t know they were coming after us until they opened fire.

  Evidently, they were on their way to Leyte Gulf, where the troop transports were. They just stumbled on us.

  Well, against the battleships, there was no defense because they were so far away and their guns could reach us, while we couldn’t even shoot a quarter of the way at them. So our only defense was to lay smoke around the carriers

  As they closed on us, we had hoped that we’d be able to fire on them, but it took a long time before they came within range. Then we could use our five-inch guns, which we did. But our main weapons to really cause some damage were our torpedoes. But unfortunately the destroyer escorts only carried three each, whereas the destroyers had ten. So as things got worse, the admiral ordered the “small boys” to form up for a torpedo attack. The “small boys” were the destroyers, and the “small, small boys” were the destroyer escorts.

  The destroyers were the Hoel, the Johnston, and the Heermann. We saw the Hoel and the Johnston form up for a torpedo attack,
but the Heermann had not yet shown up, so we just fell in behind the Johnston and the Hoel.

  We saw the Johnston starting to get hit pretty badly. We were able to go all the way in to fire at about 6,000 yards. We were tracking a heavy cruiser. I don’t know whether it was the Tone or the Chikuma, but we felt that we made a hit.

  I was up on the signal bridge when we saw the Johnston the last time. She was really shot up, but she was still firing and still steaming along pretty well. But all of a sudden she got into the smoke and I never saw her again.

  The captain came on the squawk box and indicated that our chances of surviving were not great, but we were going to do a lot of damage to the enemy. John McClair and I were good friends, so we were up on deck together, and we shook hands and said good luck to each other.

  The first real hit that I could feel was when a cruiser shell went through the main deck and through the side of the CIC where we were and into the fire room, below the bridge structure.

  It was a panic, because everything went out and you could hardly breathe. Everyone ran to get out. I had a talker’s helmet and a voice megaphone in front of me. I had a hard job getting them to get out, so I got out there a little late myself. Thank God that I did, because as I looked down on the main deck I saw a lot of bodies strewn around.

  First thing I had to do was to go back down into the radio room where the decoding machine was and get the decoding wheels and throw them overboard.

  Then I was supposed to blow up the ECM, which was a top-secret coding machine. I didn’t put the hand grenade in the side of it, as I was supposed to do, because I was afraid I’d set it off too soon and kill myself. One of the enlisted men had a submachine gun, and he shot the thing up for me. It was just as good a job as having the hand grenade do it, I guess.