The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  From his flag bridge on the Yamashiro, Nishimura evaluated the odds facing him and knew that the success of the Sho-1 plan depended on his commitment to it. Even if executing it meant his own death, his effort was likely to lock down a sizable American fleet committed to his destruction and spare Admiral Kurita’s Center Force that many more opponents in its own bid for Leyte Gulf.

  Nishimura rested his fortunes on the strong keels of the Fuso and the Yamashiro. The battleships had spent most of the war in Japan’s Inland Sea on training missions, because, like Oldendorf’s old bat-tlewagons, time was passing them by. They were no longer fast enough for the demands of the carrier war. But now heavy-gunned ships such as the Fuso and the Yamashiro were the best Japan had left. The late Admiral Yamamoto, who had first championed naval airpower in 1915, had once derided the big ships as “like elaborate religious scrolls which old people hang up in their homes.” “These battleships,” he once said, “will be as useful to Japan in modern warfare as a samurai sword.” Perhaps. But perhaps too the stark reality that no alternative remained would allow the old swords to be unsheathed to fight as their designers had intended. Under Kurita and Nishimura, they might flash in the air once again.

  The Japanese high command had debated the merits of employing the last of Japan’s naval strength on what many commanders saw as a useless sacrifice. Kurita’s chief of staff, Rear Adm. Tomiji Ko-yanagi, thought it beneath the navy’s ancient dignity to send its proudest ships gunning for transports in a harbor. He considered it preferable from a military standpoint, and infinitely better from the standpoint of pride, to seek a decisive battle with the enemy’s carrier forces. Koyanagi argued that a successful disruption of MacArthur’s invasion force would only delay the inevitable. The invasion would regroup, supported by the powerful American carrier force. On the other hand, if Halsey’s carrier groups could be somehow destroyed, the Americans would be unable to sustain their drive toward the shores of Japan. Some officers felt that if the navy was going to risk its existence on the Sho-1 plan, at the very least it should be led personally by the Combined Fleet commander in chief himself, Admiral Toyoda.

  It was clear to all that with the outcome of the war hanging in the balance, reserving the empire’s strength was no longer feasible. A decisive battle was needed. This was not a sudden realization. The doctrine of Decisive Battle had driven the Japanese Navy’s strategy and planning since at least 1930. Shaped by the inevitability of fighting a larger American fleet—a situation imposed upon Japan by the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty—the doctrine rested on ensuring local superiority in the western Pacific. It envisioned fighting a war of attrition against the westward-bound foe. In home waters a powerful Japanese battleship force would finish off an American fleet that had been worn out and whittled down by the need to sustain the fight across long distances in the Pacific. Decisive Battle depended upon seizing America’s forward bases and forcing the U.S. Navy to pick its way across the Pacific, where it would be susceptible to attrition by hit-and-run attacks from a mobile advance force comprised of submarines and torpedo-armed destroyers and cruisers.

  On August 1, 1944, Combined Fleet Top Secret Operations Order Number 83 directed Japanese forces “to intercept and destroy the invading enemy at sea in a Decisive Battle.” Land-based aircraft would sink the American aircraft carriers while the battleships concentrated on penetrating Leyte Gulf and attacking MacArthur. That mission would be pursued at any cost. At a combined meeting in Tokyo of Japan’s army and navy staffs, Adm. Tasuku Nakazawa, chief of the navy’s operations section, observed tearfully that the defense of the Philippines could be the Japanese Navy’s final opportunity to meet with an honorable end. “Please give the Combined Fleet the chance to bloom as flowers of death,” he told his compatriots. “This is the navy’s earnest request.” It was a request that Shoji Nishimura was fully prepared to honor. Jesse Oldendorf was ready to indulge it too.

  * * *

  LIKE THE OTHER JAPANESE admirals who sailed in fuel-hogging battleships, Nishimura was forced to operate far from the comfortable embrace of the Japanese home islands, out of Borneo and Singapore, closer to what remained of his empire’s meager fuel reserves. Notwithstanding that logistical handicap, the mission was going well thus far. He had been remarkably lucky since leaving Brunei Bay, in Borneo, on October 22, his two battleships accompanied by the heavy cruiser Mogami and four destroyers. First, though the harbor was closely watched by U.S. search planes, he slipped past the web of reconnaissance patrols that Seventh Fleet intelligence had cast all around the Brunei port.

  Next, Nishimura passed unseen and unheard through the tripwire of American submarines cruising the Sulu Sea between Borneo and the Philippines to the east. Finally, on the morning of October 24, southwest of the island of Negros, he came under attack by twenty-eight planes from the Enterprise and the Franklin of Halsey’s Third Fleet. A bomb struck the quarterdeck of the Fuso, causing a raging fire that destroyed her complement of float planes. The destroyer Shigure was hit too, losing her forward gun turret. But Nishimura’s striking power, modest though it was in comparison to what the Seventh Fleet was marshaling to meet him in Surigao Strait, was intact.

  * * *

  TIPPED TO THE JAPANESE approach that morning, Admiral Oldendorf used the late afternoon of October 24 to plan his welcoming party for Nishimura’s force. He had more than enough firepower to handle whatever the enemy might send at him.

  Entering the bramble of the Philippine archipelago from the west, through the Sulu Sea and into the crease of ocean between the islands of Negros and Mindanao, Nishimura would first face successive swarms of American PT boats, charging him three by three, thirteen waves in all, firing their deck-mounted torpedoes, then withdrawing under cover of darkness and lurking nearby to report his position to Oldendorf throughout the engagement.

  As he took a northeasterly course and headed for the confines of Surigao Strait itself, he would next face Oldendorf’s hard-hitting destroyers. The “tin cans”—a name that belied the destroyers’ potent offensive hitting power—would come at him in three squadrons, ranging down both the eastern and western sides of the narrow strait to launch torpedoes at him from the flanks. Each destroyer carried ten of them; the crossfire, Oldendorf and his commanders hoped, would be devastating.

  Oldendorf’s six battleships, under the tactical command of Rear Adm. George L. Weyler, would cruise single file across a fifteen-nautical-mile stretch of water at the northern outlet of the strait. Steaming parallel to them, five miles to their south, would be eight cruisers under Rear Adm. Russell S. Berkey, three to Weyler’s right flank and five to his left. Straddling the exit of the strait, the battle line would be poised to finish off any of Nishimura’s ships that survived the smaller ships’ onslaught.

  Oldendorf’s five wounded veterans of Pearl Harbor were joined by the battleship Mississippi, which had escaped the treacherous enemy blow on December 7. It had taken nearly three years for the damaged ships to recover and return to a place where they might do their builders’ terrible bidding. Civilian engineers and Navy technicians came from the West Coast to join Pearl Harbor’s yard workers. The army of gathered electricians, mechanics, burners, divers, and pumpers worked around the clock, as often laboring under water in diving suits as under the scintillant Pacific sun. They were the seed of a salvage organization that would boast 27,000 civilian workers in addition to 3,000 Pearl Harbor Navy Yard personnel.

  The great ships were patched, pumped, and lifted from the muck, righted with winches, and set upon by the yardbirds at Pearl before being taken to shipyards along the West Coast for repairs and refitting. Shipyard craftsmen replaced their torn hull plates, burst bulkheads, silted boilers, and melted electrical wiring. Naval architects and engineers took down their great cage masts and installed more prosaic-looking structures that housed the latest fire-control radars.

  Admiral Yamamoto had morosely foreseen that the sneak attack would provoke America to just the sort of industrial and
human mobilization that returned the old battleships to the line. They had taken varied paths to the waters of Leyte Gulf, climbing the curve of the earth across the Pacific, their massive steam-powered screws pushing them along at the speed of a swift bicycle rider. They had visited a series of islands en route, supporting American troops as they went ashore on island after island, from Peleliu to Morotai to the current operation in the Philippines. They escorted convoys along lengthening supply lines across the southern and central Pacific. Their gun turrets, housing rifles that fired shells fourteen to sixteen inches wide and as tall as a man, had been built a generation ago to fight other battleships. But that battle had thus far eluded them. Enemy dreadnoughts had yet to fall within their reach.

  Late in the war, as the Navy employed them in shore-bombardment roles, America’s aging thirty-thousand-ton monsters had become little more than massive seagoing artillery platforms. Perhaps it was only appropriate that such machinery, too slow to keep up with the carriers, be placed under the Army’s command.

  But now, at Surigao Strait, thanks to the desperation of a Japanese Navy sailing to stop MacArthur at any cost, the world would learn that the pronouncements of the old ships’ obsolescence were a bit premature, if not wholly exaggerated. Pearl Harbor’s ghost ships were not yet ready to fade into history or legend. The dashing new breed of carrier admirals, smug aboard their graceless floating bird farms, might well have declared the battle line obsolete. The presence of Oldendorf’s six battleships in the strait was a declaration of a different sort, one that should have sent a message to the warlords in Tokyo who had ignored Admiral Yamamoto’s prophecy: if America could raise its old dreadnoughts from the dead, what chance could the U.S. Navy’s enemies possibly have?

  Oldendorf would take no chances throwing the dice in the fog of war. Here, in the narrow waters of Surigao Strait, there would be no pitched battle. Nishimura would have no room to maneuver. Oldendorf’s fleet would hold its position astride the northern end of the strait and devour Nishimura’s column like a log thrust into the business end of a U.S. Navy wood chipper.

  At 2:40 A.M. on the morning of October 25, 1944, the destroyer McGowan radioed Oldendorf, “Skunk 184 degrees, 18 miles.” The beams from the tin can’s radar set had found the enemy in the darkness. All that remained for Oldendorf’s fleet was to close the trap and destroy it.

  Nine

  Blocking Surigao Strait’s twelve-mile-wide opening into Leyte Gulf, the American battle line spanned nearly three miles of ocean. The six ships that formed it plowed the strait’s waters at a leisurely five-knot speed. When the battle line was headed to the east, the West Virginia led the way, followed in half-mile intervals by the Maryland, the Mississippi, the Tennessee, the California, and the Pennsylvania. When on Admiral Weyler’s command the ships turned to the right, they did so in majestic unison, plowing a 180-degree arc and falling back into line on a reversed course and sequence, with the Pennsylvania in the lead and the West Virginia at the rear.

  The battle line, the preferred formation of admirals since 1655, when James, Duke of York, had routed the Dutch at the Battle of Lowestoft, endured for nearly three hundred years on the strength of its irreducible merits: it offered naval commanders both command unity and concentrated firepower. For any naval officer, the dreamed-of scenario was to “cross the T” of his opponent, concentrating their full broadsides on approaching ships that could respond only with their forward batteries. In the narrow waters of Surigao Strait, geography made doing so a much easier proposition. All Jesse Oldendorf had to do was hold his position astride the restricted waters and let the enemy column walk into his crossbar.

  But his battleships would not start the fighting. That honor would fall to the smallest combat vessels the U.S. Navy had ever sent into battle. Lt. Cdr. Robert A. Leeson’s thirty-nine PT boats had come off the assembly line built to deliver high-speed hit-and-run torpedo attacks. Lurking like schools of barracuda along the islands of Bohol, Leyte, and Panaon in the eastern Mindanao Sea, they had a twofold mission: to harass, and to track, the approaching Japanese force. The small boats with their fifteen-man crews were well equipped for both jobs. Their three twelve-cylinder Packard gasoline engines gave them top speeds of forty-one knots. At that clip they could close range quickly with a target, launch four stubby Mark 13 torpedoes, turn on a dime, and escape. They were adept at patrol, and their offensive potential was considerable. But Leeson’s crews hadn’t fired a torpedo in anger since the Guadalcanal campaign in August 1943. And attacking an enemy battleship was not something they had ever done before.

  The weather was so clear as to be threatening—“too beautiful to serve our purpose,” one destroyer commander would write. The quarter moon shone a luminescent path across the sea to its viewer. Wind was soft and the seas were light, with visibility to a good eight thousand yards, about four and a half miles. But as the Japanese approached, the night darkened. The moon fell toward the western horizon, and rainsqualls walked through, laying black clouds across the sky and making the night, here and there, opaque to all light. Flashes of lightning offered fleeting glimpses of what was about to happen in the strait.

  At 10:50 P.M., under a setting moon, Leeson’s first section of PT boats ventured out from the dark corners of the shoreline to attack Nishimura’s force. The ships up the strait heard a tremendous racket as the Packard V-12s roared to life and the torpedo boats raced to the attack. The Japanese ships opened the shutters of their searchlights, illuminated the PT boats, and opened fire. The PTs slashed in in successive trios, loosing torpedoes at the enemy. All missed. The Japanese returned fire, repelling the nuisance but inflicting little real damage. A PT boat skipper grabbed the mike on his TBS radio and exclaimed, “I’ve got a big one in sight…. My God, there are two more big ones, and maybe another.” On Allied ships far to the north, men watched star shells glow like miniature suns and searchlight beams sweep the seas.

  The noisy dance lasted three and a half hours. Ten of the PT boats were hit, but only one of them severely. PT-493 took three hits from the five-inch guns of the destroyer Shigure. The shells blew away her charthouse, holed her wooden bottom, killed two sailors, wounded five, and forced the boat to ground on the rocky shore of Panaon Island. Bravely led by their skipper, Lt. (jg) R. W. Brown, the crew jumped off the stricken boat and formed a defensive perimeter, rifles and machine guns at the ready in case the Japanese came for them. But Admiral Nishimura’s goals were far larger than finishing off a few scrappy PT boat sailors. The Americans were left alone, and when high tide came, the splintered hull of their boat rose from the rocks and disappeared into the sea.

  Shortly before 12:30 A.M. Oldendorf received a dispatch from his PT boats, duly relayed to him by the PT boats’ tender, the USS Wachapreague. It was the first report he had gotten on Nishimura’s exact disposition and location since ten o’clock the previous morning. Oldendorf evaluated it, found no surprises, and had the satisfaction of knowing that his Japanese counterpart would arrive right on time for the fiery reception that the rest of the Seventh Fleet was planning for him.

  * * *

  THE TWENTY-TWO DESTROYERS THAT filled Admiral Oldendorf’s screen carried a total of 111 five-inch guns and 214 torpedoes. Even without the battleships, a destroyer force like that might well have been able to destroy the bulk of Nishimura’s and Shima’s fleets all by itself. Very nearly it did.

  At about 2:30 A.M. Capt. Jesse G. Coward led three ships of Destroyer Squadron 54, the Remey, the McGowan, and the Melvin, down the eastern side of the strait while two more, the McDermut and the Monssen, hugged the western shore. Behind Coward followed six destroyers from Capt. K. M. McManes’s Destroyer Squadron 24, steaming south in two sections: the Hutchins, the Daly, and the Bache were closest to the Leyte Island shore; the HMAS Arunta, an Australian destroyer assigned to the squadron, followed by the Kitten and the Beale, cruised off their port quarter. Finally, Capt. Roland Smoot’s nine-ship Destroyer Squadron 56 would attack in three columns: the Robi
nson, the Halford, and the Bryant ranging down the eastern side; the Newcomb, the Richard P. Leary, and the Albert W. Grant down the middle of the strait, head-on, firing, then looping back; and the Heywood L. Edwards, the Leutze, and the Bennion on the west side of the strait.

  At 2:56 lookouts aboard the Shigure reported three ships at a range of eight kilometers. The large searchlights aboard the battleship Yamashiro switched on, bathing the Remey, at the head of the American line, in hot white light and making her crew feel like “animals in a cage.” She endured the spotlight for three minutes before coming close enough to the enemy to fire her torpedoes. It took little more than a minute for the Remey, the McGowan, and the Melvin to loose their torpex-loaded fish at the enemy. Leaping from their tubes set at an intermediate speed of thirty-three and a half knots, the torpedoes would need eight minutes to reach their targets. Captain Coward turned to port and withdrew to the northeast at flank speed of thirty-five knots. Eight minutes went by, and precisely on cue several large explosions flashed as the battleship Fuso was hit amidships by two torpedoes from the Melvin. With boilers likely shattered, the Fuso slowed from twenty to twelve knots as her skipper, Rear Adm. Masami Ban, swung her out of formation to the right to avoid collisions with the ships cruising in column astern.