The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  If Ernest Evans was not destined to be a Marine, he would settle, seventeen years after his enlistment, for running a warship like one. That meant simply that he would take care of his men. He would also, soon enough, take care of Marines. In February 1944, during the invasion of the Marshall Islands, the Johnston drew shore bombardment duty to support Marines advancing against stiff enemy opposition on the islands of Kwajalein and Eniwetok. For Evans, it was not just another assignment. Beyond his generalized desire to grapple with an enemy, he had empathy for the mud-slogging grunts moving into the Japanese killing fields ashore. He knew this: he could well have been one of them. The Johnston got in close, sometimes so close as to pierce the veil of distance that usually stood between Navy men and conditions ashore.

  For many of the crew it was their first sight of blood. According to Edward Block, a coxswain, “a landing craft came alongside with young kids who had been wounded on the islands. They were brought to our ship because we were close in to the beach and we had a doctor on board. To see those young kids lying there all shot up brought tears to my eyes and I cried. There but for the grace of God …”

  The crew of the Johnston witnessed more of it during the Marianas campaign, during the bombardment of Guam. Broadside to the beach, pounding the caves in the cliffs above with a full battery of five-inch fire, the Johnston fired so furiously that the guns glowed red. Bob Hagen had to take the occasional break, just to let the barrels cool. During a lull boatswain’s mate first class Bob Hollenbaugh went below to check on Gun 54’s handling room, when he encountered a young Marine in the care of the Johnston’s medical division. Hollenbaugh approached the Marine, who held fast to consciousness despite the gruesome fact that he had had an arm shot off, and asked him how he felt. “I’m fine, sir.” The kid told the boatswain’s mate that he had entered the Marines just nine weeks ago. “That kid looked like he was about fourteen years old,” Hollenbaugh said. “My God. What is this world coming to? I’ll never forget the expression on that kid’s face. And he still had the presence of mind to look up at me and call me sir.”

  Evans cared about the kids fighting ashore. Time after time he took the Johnston closer to shore than the Navy’s bombardment plan specified. When his allotted number of shells were fired into the island—such quantifiables being carefully managed by higher command—he beseeched his superiors for more. “Damn it, they need fire support, and we’re going to give it to them,” he said. Twice during the shelling of Guam, Evans boarded his wooden captain’s gig, was lowered into the water, and motored over to the task group’s flagship to ask for more ammunition. He got it.

  “We would pull away from our positions near the shore and reload with ammo and then pull back in to resume firing,” fireman third class Milt Pehl said. “At times we were so close to shore that we were actually hit by small arms fire.” In the first year since her commissioning, through six invasions, the Johnston never suffered a hit worse than that.

  The full-court-press gunnery duty placed a lot of pressure on the men directing the shooting. In Bob Hagen, one of the destroyer’s senior lieutenants, Evans had the kind of gunnery officer the skipper of a fighting ship had to have. Of the seventy men in his gunnery department—which included not only the men who manned and loaded the guns but also the fire-controlmen in the gun director and the radar-men in the combat information center, the crews on the two quintuple torpedo mounts, and the “ping jockeys” on the sonar stack—only seven had ever been to sea before coming aboard the Johnston.

  Hagen had pushed them hard in training, teaching them the job by rote and repetition. Training a green deck force, never a small task, was made more difficult still when the man responsible for that job on the Johnston, the chief boatswain’s mate, went “over the hill” the day before the Johnston was scheduled to go to sea. A ship had to have a chief bosun. If Captain Evans did nothing else to impress his crew, he would still have ensured their eternal gratitude for securing as a replacement chief boatswain’s mate Clyde Burnett.

  Burnett was a child of the fleet. An orphan reared in south Texas by four different families, the Johnston’s chief boatswain’s mate began his life of service in the Civilian Conservation Corps before enlisting in the Navy more than two years before the Pearl Harbor attack. Burnett had just returned from a tour of duty in the Pacific when Evans found him ashore at a Navy receiving station in San Diego. “The captain put the make on him,” Bob Hagen said. “The guy didn’t have a chance.”

  As a superior chief bosun should be, Burnett was right hand to the captain. Ernest Evans relied on him as a liaison to his enlisted force. In turn, Burnett delegated their supervision and discipline to his capable first-class boatswain’s mates. Harry Longacre ran the First Division, the hundred-odd sailors who comprised the deck force on the forward half of the ship. His counterpart aft, boss of the Second Division, was Bob Hollenbaugh, a sharp, no-nonsense Indianan whose father, a machinist’s mate in the Dantesque boiler rooms of a World War I-era battleship, had counseled Bob to get a topside rating at all costs. Hollenbaugh performed his duties cleanly and professionally and with not a little relish. On a crew made up mostly of first-time seagoers, his, Longacre’s, and Burnett’s most vital contribution was their experience.

  Burnett proved to be a popular chief. The boyish twenty-four-year-old with the lantern jaw and quiet manner watched over the kids on the Johnston’s deck force like a father. The kids who swabbed and painted and scraped and loaded supplies and took on fuel loved him like one.

  But forging a crew into a hardened fighting unit mostly required, not love, but discipline and ruthless, repetitive drill. In that respect Evans prized Lieutenant Hagen’s tough, stickler’s nature. He let his gun boss draw up the general quarters or battle stations assignments and gave him the discretion to call the crew to GQ most anytime he liked. Hagen used that freedom liberally, so much so that the Johnston acquired its own inevitable nickname, long before it reached a combat zone, “GQ Johnny.” When the claxon sounded, the men raced to their guns and searched for targets. For antiaircraft gunners, there were long nylon target sleeves towed by pilots—very brave pilots—from the nearby air station. Crews on the five-inch mounts fired on sleds pulled behind tugboats—very brave tugboats—at varying ranges on the surface.

  It took a lot of drill for the crew’s proficiency to live up to the precision of their equipment. Each of the Johnston’s five-inch gun mounts was engineered with the precision of an outsize Swiss watch. The turret assemblies were three stories tall, running deep into the bowels of the ship. Each gun mount sat atop an ammunition handling room, where crew loaded shells onto hydraulic hoists—dumbwaiters—that whisked the shells upward. Below the handling room was a magazine that fed all the handling rooms.

  Among the greatest innovations of the 1940s-era Navy were the radar fire-control systems with which all new surface combatants were equipped. Unlike the weapons on the smaller destroyer escorts, the guns of a Fletcher-class destroyer were controlled centrally by its gunnery officer. Seated in the enclosed gun director platform high above the bridge, Hagen operated a two-handled steering mechanism that controlled the aiming of the Johnston’s five main gun mounts. When Hagen ordered the gun crews in the mounts to “match pointers,” the guns came into alignment with the director, and the gun captains relinquished control of their mounts to Hagen. At that point the two men beside him in the gun director, the pointer and trainer—teenage enlisted men named George Himelright and James Buzbee—took over. They kept whatever they were shooting at fixed in the crosshairs of their telescopes, one for gauging bearing (or direction), the other gauging elevation (or distance).

  In heavy seas, the sight of a destroyer’s five director-controlled guns swaying in unison to stay on target as the ship pitched, yawed, and rolled could be unsettling. This synchro-gyroscopic wizardry relegated the men manning the guns to auxiliary backups whose duties went beyond simple loading only if the system broke down. As long as range and target data kept feeding t
he fire-control computer, they had no aiming to do and little discretion to exercise. Gun crews had only to pull rounds off the hydraulic shell hoist and lay them in front of the powder canisters in the sliding breech tray. Their most immediate challenge was to keep their fingers and hands from getting crushed between a heavy shell and the breech mechanism.

  In another day, eyesight was essential to gunnery. Optical rangefinders were useful to a point, but the critical work of spotting shell splashes and correcting aim belonged to those with the sharpest eyes. By 1944, even in its first generation, American fire-control technology was so good that it could make a top performer out of a man who would probably have been unsuited to the job not long before.

  At age seventeen, having beaten out sixty applicants in competition for the honor, Bob Hagen arrived at Annapolis as an aspiring plebe—only to get sent home that same day for flunking a routine eye exam. He opted for the enlisted route, scraped paint for two years aboard the battleship Texas, then returned to the States to attend junior college and finish his bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas. In his second bid for an officer’s commission, Hagen attended the reserve officer “ninety-day wonder” program at Northwestern University. In September 1941 in Chicago, Bob Hagen at last got his ensign’s gold stripe.

  Hagen saw action almost immediately off Guadalcanal, as assistant communications officer and radar officer aboard the destroyer Aaron Ward. In a ferocious nighttime surface engagement against superior Japanese forces in November 1942, he took shrapnel to his left biceps, nearly bled to death from his wounds, and won a Silver Star for gallantry. Returning to the States to convalesce, he decided that he would rather pursue his career in gunnery than in communications. “The gun boss could fire a hundred shots and hit once and he’s a hero,” he said. “In communications, if you screw up [in transcribing] one letter, all hell breaks loose, and you’ve committed a mortal sin. I said to myself, ‘I’d rather be a hero.’”

  * * *

  HAGEN FINISHED GUNNERY and fire-control school in Washington, D.C., learning to use the gyroscopes and servo motors that ensured that imperfect eyesight would not impede his advancement. For certain specialized purposes, the Johnston’s Mark 1A fire-control computer and Mark 37 radar were better than any pair of spectacles, if rather more expensive to clean.

  Following her commissioning at Seattle-Tacoma, during the Johnston’s shakedown cruise off San Diego, Hagen tackled the challenge of training his crew of inexperienced pollywogs to operate the sophisticated gunnery system. “We were all so green. The gun crews didn’t know what they were doing, and I wasn’t so sure what I was doing either,” he said. In the first days of shakedown, when drills were going poorly, Hagen wrote a friend aboard another ship, “Stay out of our gun range—anything can happen.” He was in Captain Evans’s thrall, eager to please his charismatic skipper. But the captain made it plain that Hagen was on his own in bringing his gunners to proficiency. This freedom to hang himself with his own hawser was nearly as bad as suffering under an ill-tempered micromanager. The pressure began to get to him.

  Bob Hagen was “a nervous wreck” during shakedown. Well groomed and intense, a compulsive smoker, disdainful of repose, Hagen had an intellect as sharp as his personality. Intelligence and initiative were de rigueur for a destroyer officer. On a small ship the performance of a few key individuals could make or break her. Hagen had little patience for those who struck him as slow or stupid. In drawing up general quarters station assignments, he distinguished the thinking men from rote operators, installing the latter in the sweaty jobs in the handling rooms and magazines and the former in sonar, CIC, and fire control, where human discretion could make a decisive difference.

  Unlike his captain, Lieutenant Hagen didn’t hesitate to dress down an underperformer in front of his shipmates. Aware of their growing resentment, he became cautious among the crew. When possible, he avoided walking the decks alone at night, for fear an embittered sailor might “accidentally” knock him overboard.

  But many men were firmly convinced that Bob Hagen, like Clyde Burnett, was one of the best things that could have happened to the Johnston. In six weeks of drill his program of training turned the gunnery department into a competent working team. Boatswain’s mate first class Bob Hollenbaugh was especially sharp. The captain of Gun 54, mounted on the stern of the ship, had the initiative and savoir faire to lead young enlisted men effectively. Hagen also had confidence in Lt. Jack Bechdel, his torpedo officer, and in Julian Owen, a resourceful gunner’s mate with a knack for repairing broken machinery.

  The crews in the five main gun mounts—numbered 51, 52, 53, 54, and 55 from bow to stern—competed for bragging rights as the ship’s fastest gun gang. An average rate of fire for a five-inch/38-caliber crew was fifteen rounds per minute. Gun 55, the rearwardmost mount on the ship, got off eighty-four rounds in one four-minute firing drill, an average of twenty-one per minute. With results like that, Hagen dared to begin feeling his oats. Writing again to the same friend he had warned several weeks before to stay clear of his scattershot batteries, the lieutenant discarded all modesty: “You may now bring on the Japanese fleet.” Before an opposing fleet appeared in his sighting telescope, however, the apprentice gun boss would first have to prove his proficiency in action against enemy shore targets.

  During the bombardment of Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, Hagen wielded the hammer that Evans used to support the Marines. There the strict training regimen and the engineered precision of the radar-controlled gunnery system came together at last. Captain Evans took the ship in close to the beach, dropping anchor to stabilize her as a gun platform on the northern edge of the landing zone, which frogmen from the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams had marked with navigation lights visible only from the open sea. Hagen was “nervous as a cat,” gripping his slewing handles with white knuckles as the destroyer closed with enemy shore gunners. “They could have machine-gunned us to death, and we were trying to figure out how to defend ourselves,” he said. “All of a sudden over the loudspeaker came this song, and the lyrics, ‘A sleepy lagoon …’” Hagen found that well-trained crewmen could bring humor to any situation. Call it the product of confidence.

  * * *

  AT CLOSE RANGE the Johnston’s entire chorus of weaponry came to bear on the island. There was the sharp, earringing bark of the fiveinchers, the rhythmic thumping of the twin-mounted forty-millimeter machine guns, and the faster metallic chatter of the single-barreled twenties. Men from a damage-control party broke out rifles and made like Davy Crockett from the main deck. Lt. (jg) Ellsworth Welch took out his. 45-caliber pistol, outstretched his arm, and enfiladed the distant enemy with the handgun.

  From his perch in the gun director, Hagen spied a Japanese officer on the beach, waving a saber, rallying his troops to the fight, and thought, Why not? He put the officer in the sights of his slewing device. The fire-control computer clicked and whirred and zipped coordinates to the Johnston’s five main gun turrets. When Hagen closed the firing key, they all barked as one. The technology lived up to its brutal promise. The five-shell salvo obliterated the man.

  “Mr. Hagen, that was very good shooting,” called Captain Evans from the bridge. “But in the future, try not to waste so much ammunition on one individual.”

  Five

  The thirteen warships that were gathered under the code name Taffy 3, their crews totaling about 7,200 men, sailed under the command of Rear Adm. Clifton Albert Frederick Sprague. He was one of the new generation of naval officers who had made their careers in naval aviation. A graduate of the Annapolis class of 1918, he had been tagged with the nickname “Ziggy” for the kinetic style of his gait—limbs agangle, “tousled hair swinging fore and aft”—as he shuffled off to class. Though just five feet nine inches tall, he was sturdily built, a skilled and enthusiastic baseball player, and according to a Naval Academy classmate, “clever in nearly every sport.”

  Sprague had heard the call of the sea at an early age, from his f
amily’s oceanfront cottage in Rockport, Massachusetts, thirty-five miles up the coast from Boston. There he had spent his childhood summers fishing from the jetties of the picturesque Headlands with Buster, his Irish setter, and prowling the rocky shoreline of Sandy Bay with his younger sister, Dora, hunting for crabs to use as bait. His attraction to the ocean became so strong as to be physical; he had to be near the sea. To Clif Sprague, traveling even a few miles inland was like entering a vast, arid desert: tolerable for short stretches but leaving him eager to reimmerse himself in the ion-charged salt air.

  For the newly minted ensigns pouring out of Annapolis, naval aviation offered fresh career paths to be blazed, unprecedented opportunities to learn and to lead.

  In 1919, as Lieutenant Sprague was serving on board the USS Wheeling, the General Board of the Navy declared that “fleet aviation must be developed to its fullest extent.” The board, a committee of admirals who counseled the secretary of the Navy, predicted that in future naval battles “the advantage will lie with the fleet which wins in the air.” Embracing the dangers and uncertainty of the field at a time when its preeminence was anything but assured, Ziggy Sprague and the Pensacola class of 1921 were pioneers. When he finished Pensacola’s fledgling aviation program after nine months of flight training, he joined a small cadre of naval officers who were qualified to fly. Sprague knew change was coming, and he positioned himself to contribute to it. His assignments throughout the 1920s exposed him to the latest thinking in carrier operations. Assigned to Philadelphia’s naval aircraft factory in 1923, he helped engineers work out the wrinkles in the catapult systems that launched the heavy aircraft from their carriers. Later, Sprague worked as a test pilot at Hampton Roads Naval Air Station in Virginia, assisting the inventor Carl Norden in devising safe ways to land planes on a carrier deck.