The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  Around eight P.M. all hands were ordered to stand down for the night. The following morning the initiation resumed. The crews aboard the five other ships in the convoy’s screen were holding their own crossing-the-line ceremonies. To ensure that at least a few of the ships had a full watch at any given time—this was, after all, wartime and Japanese submarines were about—the ships started their ceremonies thirty minutes apart.

  On the Roberts the pollywogs were ordered to the fantail, stripped down to their shorts, and faced prosecution for their offenses. Fire hoses were turned on them—all warships had firefighting gear that would make most municipalities proud. Bob Copeland was duly soaked; then the royal devil, wielding a pitchfork whose copper tines were wired to a high-voltage, low-amp electricity source, stuck him a few times, delivering a bracing jolt. Ushered before the King, charged by Lieutenant Trowbridge, the royal judge, Copeland produced the soaked piece of paper containing a poem he had written in his defense. His alibi went, in part:

  I hit the whale, that much is true

  But I pray, my Lord, what could I do?

  My ship was on a mission bound

  When the royal whale did choose to sound.

  My ship, it never had a chance.

  Your whale came rushing like a lance,

  Straight up at us from depths below

  We were attacked by an unseen foe.

  The whale we hit, death was his fate;

  But not in malice, rage or hate.

  No other course was left to me

  So self defense is now my plea.

  After considering the plea, the court handed down a verdict requiring the skipper to visit the royal dentist and the royal barber, kiss the royal baby, then run the royal gauntlet. By the time the captain, now a shellback, returned to his cabin to clean up, he had had his hair smeared with fuel oil paste and his mouth washed by a valve sprayer filled with diesel oil, vinegar, paprika, and other imponderable ingredients; he had planted a kiss on royal baby Serafini’s grease-loaded navel, and he had run the gauntlet, crawling through a fifteen-foot canvas ventilation tunnel filled with a two-day-old compost of eggshells, coffee grounds, potato peels, and other unmentionables, while shellbacks pounded him through the canvas with large wooden paddles.

  Copeland cleaned up as best he could, then returned to the fantail in time to see the four mess stewards, Washington, First, Butler, and Lillard—the only black men on the ship—get theirs. “Those mess men were good fellows and they took the initiation in stride. If I ever had any race prejudice in me, the war knocked it out of me.” The system of segregation that kept the black sailors in the mess could not withstand the bonding effects of the crossing-the-line ceremony.

  The only thing worse than participating in the ceremony was sitting it out. Watching his shipmates run the gauntlet, one crewman became squeamish and asked to quit. Lieutenant Roberts didn’t miss a beat: “We’ll dismiss him; he’s out of it.” Indeed, the ceremony was purely voluntary. This sailor was free to go. About two hours later, once it sank in that he was now the only pollywog aboard the ship, he returned and begged to be “given the works.”

  According to Copeland, “I suppose we were mean, but we wouldn’t let him have it…. He had had his chance and he flubbed the dub. I still can’t help but feel sorry for the poor boy. I know what he missed. He really missed the feeling of something you can’t put into words, a feeling of belonging.”

  * * *

  COPELAND’S CREW BELONGED. There was no more practical preparation for war than the fraternal coming together of the young men who gave the Samuel B. Roberts life. At Manus, the ship itself found new associations too. On October 12, after Bob Copeland and the other skippers had been briefed on the planning for Operation King Musketeer II, as the Philippines invasion was known, the destroyer escort joined her cousins in the Seventh Fleet: the old battleships of Admiral Oldendorf’s Task Group 77.2, the escort carriers of Task Group 77.4, and most of the other tin cans that would join her under the call sign Taffy 3 for the long journey to Leyte.

  Four

  The three destroyers of Taffy 3—the Hoel, the Heermann, and the Johnston— were the only ships in the Seventh Fleet task unit that were not conceived as lesser versions of a more capable vessel. Escort carriers were bargain-basement aircraft carriers. Destroyer escorts did the work of destroyers with less than half the main weaponry and one-third less speed. But the trio of Fletcher-class tin cans were deep-sea thoroughbreds, members of the finest class of U.S. destroyers produced during World War II.

  Tin cans. Destroyers wore the nickname proudly, for none better suited these ships whose three-eighths-inch steel decks creaked and bent in wave troughs but rode out storms like corks. The destroyers’ forerunners were the torpedo boats that had shown their offensive value as early as the Civil War. Their successes spurred U.S. naval planners to carry their design forward as the industrializing nation mobilized to defend the far reaches of the hemisphere as required by the Monroe Doctrine. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt championed the construction of “torpedo boat destroyers” seaworthy enough to sail with the oceangoing battle line and protect it from an enemy’s torpedo boats. In the years leading up to World War II, as the Navy experimented within the strict zero-sum environment bounded by the variables of size, speed, offensive power, survivability, and cost, the modern concept of the destroyer evolved.

  By 1944 the Fletcher-class destroyers that rode with Taffy 3 represented the state of the art. They were the first class of U.S. warship to be designed free of treaty limitations. Because their design coincided with the massive ramp-up in production during the early years of the war, more Fletchers were produced than any other class of combatant vessel. From the February 1942 launching of the Nicholas at Bath Iron Works in Maine to the June 1944 launching of the Rooks at Seattle-Tacoma, 175 Fletcher-class destroyers would be built by the time World War II ended. Most of them served in the Pacific. Because the absence of treaty restraint enabled the Navy’s General Board to tailor the new destroyers to their mission rather than to the requirements of diplomats, the Fletchers were large ships. Overstretching a football field at 376 ½ feet in length, they were far more imposing than the nickname “tin cans” might have suggested. It would have taken Ted Williams’s best swing to hit a baseball from a Fletcher’s fantail all the way to its graceful bow. With a displacement of 2,050 tons (2,700 with a full fuel load), they were swift, seaworthy, and stout, with considerable firepower. Though rated at a top speed of thirty-six knots, the Fletchers carried enough weaponry to make the biggest enemy feel their punch—ten Mark 15 torpedoes, five single-mounted five-inch/38-caliber guns, a formidable thicket of twenty- and forty-millimeter machine guns, two roller racks of depth charges, and the sophisticated sensing equipment to land them on their targets. That ships so swift could span the distance from home plate in Fenway Park to the Green Monster in deep left-center field was impressive testament to the power of the Navy’s industry and technology. Yet in the taxonomy of U.S. warships of the 1940s, destroyers were mere dust mites compared with the new battleships named for states and roaming the seas on behalf of their federal union.

  Individual warships draw much of their personality from two sources: their mission, and the personalities of their most prominent officers and chiefs. With destroyers, a certain tension existed between their mission and their mind-set. Their mission had long been defined by the Navy’s expectation that any war against Japan would involve refighting World War I’s Battle of Jutland: heavy ships trading salvos at long range; destroyers standing faithfully by the battle line, interposing—screening—as needed to protect the higher-value ships. The destroyers’ offensive value was largely an afterthought.

  Destroyer commanders tended to have a more expansive view of their combat potential. Recognizing the power of their principal armament—torpedoes—to turn the tide of a battle, they chafed at their role as auxiliaries. But even as the Japanese were ravaging American fleets in the Solomon Is
lands with torpedoes and aggressive tactical doctrine that made their destroyers giant-killers, and even as carrier aircraft were proving decisive at Midway and elsewhere, American tacticians insisted on the supremacy of the heavy gun and refused to free destroyers to operate in an offensive role.

  As the war proceeded, the big ships won followings back home with front-page headlines and photos. But the less glamorous grunt work performed by the destroyers helped make their larger cousins’ iconic status possible. They worked the outer perimeter of their task forces, pinging the deep for submarines and watching the skies for planes. “Tin cans” may have been the moniker that stuck to them, but a Heermann sailor appreciated their true nature: “the hunting dogs of the fleet.” Their vigilant work allowed their more regal principals to maintain the illusion of invulnerability. Though battleship guns were often decisive wherever they engaged, as often as not the bigger ships asserted themselves by their mere presence. Destroyers and destroyer escorts asserted themselves with their weapons or did not assert themselves at all.

  If battleships and carriers were corporations, with payrolls of thousands managed by a bevy of mid-level managers who wore the gold stripes of lieutenants and lieutenant commanders, destroyers and destroyer escorts were mom-and-pop shops. Where the capital ships carried themselves with a certain institutional hubris that existed apart from the men who ran them, the DDs and DEs were steel-plated extensions of their most prominent individual officers and chiefs. In this respect, the standard persona of a fleet destroyer was made unique by the shaping and molding of human hands. Bob Copeland shaped the identity of the Samuel B. Roberts. But in that respect, among the skippers of Taffy 3’s screen, he was not unique.

  The leader of the seven ships that screened the six escort carriers of Taffy 3 was the USS Hoel. Commissioned on July 29, 1943, at the Bethlehem Steel shipyard in San Francisco, the Hoel had the luxury of two competent, popular skippers: the current boss, Cdr. Leon Kintberger, and the former captain in whose shadow he worked: his predecessor, Cdr. William Dow Thomas, who stayed aboard as Taffy 3’s screen commander.

  Barrel-chested and good-humored, Thomas had been a popular captain. His popularity and knack for command earned him the just desserts of the skipper who does his job a bit too well—he got promoted straight out of it. Newly promoted and awaiting reassignment, he was not able to get off the Hoel before the Leyte operation began. So he chose to remain aboard his old ship as commander of Taffy 3’s seven-ship screen. He could be found in the wardroom every night, playing cribbage over coffee. Kintberger, cheerful and pleasant, handled the inevitable benign pressure of Thomas’s continued presence with aplomb and grace. Alfred Thayer Mahan had written of the “Nelson touch,” a personal style of command favoring cordial social relations with officers, professional appreciation, and confidence. The Nelson touch was “rarely the result of careful calculation, but bespeaks rather the inner graciousness of the heart that [Nelson] abundantly possessed.” The Hoel’s wardroom seemed to operate by Nelson’s principle. Not every ship was so fortunate.

  Cdr. Amos T. Hathaway, age thirty, had once been the Hoel’s executive officer. As exec, he was effectively the ship’s general manager, Commander Thomas’s right hand in all matters. He imposed discipline. He maintained the good order of the crew, the upkeep of equipment, set the daily schedule, and oversaw its fulfillment by the senior petty officers. As boss of the CIC, he was the ship’s eyes and ears. But the way he interpreted and acted upon the things he saw and heard was seldom to the liking of the Hoel’s crew.

  Hathaway was a martinet, as disliked by his men as Thomas was admired. As martinets are wont to do, he disposed of his duties with an exacting severity. That trait served him well, for executive officers seldom advance by gaining the affections of underlings. Shortly before the Hoel joined Taffy 3, Hathaway got a promotion and command of his own ship.

  The men of the Hoel who had the closest acquaintance with his predations and mind games quietly cheered his departure. But that departure took him only as far as the other side of the formation. When Amos T Hathaway took command of the Heermann, one destroyer’s relief became another one’s pain.

  As the new skipper of the Heermann, Hathaway made his mark quickly enough. The day before he was to inspect his crew at a full muster, he asked his chief yeoman and captain’s talker, Harold Whitney, to bring him the service records of the full crew. He spent the night with the records and the next day demonstrated the power of his photographic memory by walking down the ranks, stopping at every fifth or sixth man, and asking about his wife, family, and hometown, by name and with nary a mistake.

  Though he stood six foot four, he weighed around 130 pounds. With sunken cheeks, protruding ears, and eyes that naturally bugged, he was wiry not only in physical bearing but in voice and attitude too. He was reflexively peevish and relished keeping his officers off balance and on their guard. His memory made him a marvelous stickler for “Rocks and Shoals,” as the Navy regulations, Articles for the Government of the Navy, were known. He would reject written reports without comment—“This is wrong. Fix it.” But he was just as likely to upbraid someone for slavishly following the rules when they didn’t suit him.

  The patrician collegiality that marked many Navy wardrooms was altogether missing from the Heermann. The native Coloradoan’s shrill voice could often be heard chastising someone over one or another point of order. “He was a son of a bitch,” said a former Heermann officer fifty-six years after the fact. “He made Captain Queeg look like a sissy.” That officer wasn’t alone in his ill sentiments. The Heermann’s physician, Dr. Edwin Bebb, was required to keep a monthly medical record on each of the ship’s officers. Though he knew he was shielded by his medical credentials, Bebb feared his skipper would resent his adverse assessment of his psychology and seek a pretext to court-martial him.

  When Hathaway had been the Hoel’s exec, his underlings could take refuge in the kindness of their skipper, William Thomas. But on the Heermann, where he stood atop the chain of command, Hath-away’s will was law, and officers who flouted it by coddling persecuted crew members risked drawing his fury. The Heermann’s wardroom buzzed with half-cocked fantasies about doing the skipper in. Something had to be done, the thinking went. This was not His Majesty’s Navy circa 1835. This was America. Someone suggested that it might be arranged for Captain Hathaway tragically to lose his footing out on deck during a storm. But regicide was beyond them. Ultimately they settled on less capital forms of aggression.

  One day when Hathaway was gone from his quarters, someone found a way to insert a handful of marbles into the compartment above his sea cabin. Every time the Heermann rolled—and like any destroyer it rolled often and deeply—the captain was serenaded by the clangorous lullaby of the little spheres rolling across the thin steel plating over his bunk.

  Such petty conspiracy-mongering bound the Heermann’s crew together against a common enemy. At least Hathaway served in that role until a real foe could be engaged. Perhaps when the shooting started, the crew would see their skipper’s malign will as a weapon in its own right. What force might it have when joined with theirs and turned upon an actual enemy?

  The Hoel was run by the popular duo of Kintberger and Thomas, the Heermann by the white-knuckled autocracy of Amos Hathaway. The fighting culture of Taffy 3’s third destroyer, the Johnston, was the product of one man’s inspired leadership: that of its first and only captain, Cdr. Ernest E. Evans.

  When Evans arrived at the Seattle-Tacoma shipyard to oversee the fitting out of the brand-new USS Johnston, DD-557, he impressed his crew immediately with the substance of his will. At the ship’s commissioning ceremony on Navy Day, October 27, 1943, he informed his raptly attentive audience: “This is going to be a fighting ship. I intend to go in harm’s way, and anyone who doesn’t want to go along had better get off right now.” As if to underscore the invitation, he added, “Now that I have a fighting ship, I will never retreat from an enemy force.” Something in the tone of his
voice told his listeners that he was deadly serious. Not one of them accepted his offer to leave the ship ahead of whatever trouble he had in store for them.

  Indeed he was serious. As an officer aboard the World War I-era four-piper destroyer Alden, Evans had witnessed the disaster of the Battle of the Java Sea in February 1942, in which a Japanese heavy cruiser force made short work of an Allied fleet. Two weeks after the battle Evans assumed command of the Alden. But he never expunged from his mind the sting of having to flee from the Japanese. In that sense, he came to the Johnston with a cross to bear.

  Evans had initially pursued military service with the dream of becoming a Marine officer, but an appointment to Annapolis escaped him. So in May 1926, at the age of nineteen, he said farewell to Muskogee, Oklahoma, and enlisted in the Navy. Thirteen months after his enlistment he won entrance to the Naval Academy class of 1931 via fleet competition. His Annapolis midshipman’s moniker, “the Chief,” would prove to be apt for at least two reasons. First, he was by nature always in charge. Anyone who met him could feel the way his charisma naturally filled a room. Then there was the matter of his proud Cherokee heritage. His ancestry was not overwhelmingly evident in his appearance. The set of his dark-browed gaze, the large chest, and the subtle smirk of his lips accented by a neat black mustache made him look like a somewhat stouter incarnation of Clark Gable. It was clear to all who met him that Ernest E. Evans was not a man to trifle with. He bestrode his narrow bridge like a colossus. The fighting spirit of his forebears animated him.

  Evans appreciated the hidden nature of things, the power of the unseen over the tangible. In matters of discipline, he generally preferred to let the idea of his wrath do the work of the actual thing. He never exploded in anger as Hathaway did. He seldom if ever upbraided a subordinate openly for poor performance. But then he seldom smiled either. “He expected every man to do his job without any psychological ploys,” Lt. (jg) Ellsworth Welch, Evans’s antisubmarine warfare officer, remembered. Evans trusted people to do their work. If they failed, he let them—he knew instinctively, as they did, that they wouldn’t fail him twice. He never quite had to spell out the consequences; the very thought that the skipper might become disappointed was enough. The Johnston’s gunnery officer, Lt. Robert C. Hagen, said, “He had great faith in all of us, unbelievably so. I don’t recall him saying a mean word to me the whole time…. The captain was a true, instinctive fighter…. We were on a high-class ship because the captain was high-class.”