Downs pressed the intercom button and said, “Thank God they’re on our side.”
Brooks felt a tinge of doubt. There were no carriers among them. If this was Halsey, where were his carriers? And the ships: to the extent that their contours could be distinguished from his perch in the clouds, they didn’t look like American ships. In ship identification training, Brooks, Downs, and Travers had been shown, over and over, the silhouettes of ships flashed for a fraction of a second on a projection screen. The men of VC-65 drilled constantly in the St. Lo’s darkened ready room, training to recognize in an instant not only the silhouettes but their telltale wakes as well.
Were these American ships? Looking down as the armada filed by below him, Brooks made out the tall pagoda towers of Japanese battleships and cruisers. The doubt evaporated into a stunning realization: they are Japanese.
As if to punctuate the thought, black clouds of cordite smoke began to appear around his plane as the Japanese gunners drew a bead on the lone Avenger. “The sky just turned black,” Downs said. “They had our course and altitude. They were really popping them in there.” The enveloping drone of the Avenger’s Wright engine behind the firewall at Brooks’s leather-booted feet drowned out the bark of their blasts. But he could feel them. The detonations buffeted the heavy torpedo bomber in violent staccato. Every so often a spectacular blossom of pyrotechnics would bloom in their immediate vicinity. The air burst would leave behind a smokeless, shimmering circle, some hundred feet in diameter. It looked to Downs like a burning ring of white tinfoil. It sparked and burned for twenty, thirty seconds, then dissipated. As mysterious and hypnotically beautiful as it was, Downs wanted no part of it. Brooks was less concerned for his own aircraft than for his task unit. The Japanese battleships were no more than twenty miles away from Taffy 3—already in long-gun range. Their wakes trailed behind them like long white tails. These ships were hauling ass.
We’re never going to see daylight, Brooks thought. These guys will blow all our ships out of the water. He pulled his plane up out of the thicket of flak bursts and took inventory of the mass of warships arrayed beneath him.
It was 6:43 A.M. Brooks tuned his transmitter to the frequency used by the St. Lo, code-named Derby Base for purposes of radio communication, and delivered the news: “Enemy surface force of four battleships, four heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and ten to twelve destroyers sighted twenty miles northwest of your task group and closing in on you at thirty knots.”
Though the pilot had estimated the makeup of the enemy fleet nearly to a T, Ziggy Sprague, overhearing the report, was incredulous and not a little bit annoyed. Now there’s some screwy young aviator reporting part of our own forces, the admiral thought. Sprague considered the report preposterous, if not flatly irresponsible: Brooks had spotted nothing other than Task Force 34, the battleship group under Admiral Lee that Halsey had left behind to guard San Bernardino Strait while he took his carriers north. The excitable ensign had only magnified his error by breaking radio silence, potentially revealing the presence of U.S. carriers to Japanese radio snoopers. And this to report his stunning discovery of an American surface force.
Sprague hailed the Fanshaw Bay’s executive officer in the CIC, where the movements of nearby aircraft were tracked: “Air plot, tell him to check his identification.” Though evidence of the unthinkable was continuing to mount—radiomen were starting to get some strange transmissions: a chatter of Japanese voices as Bill Brooks’s Avenger came under fire—Sprague wanted proof. Brooks would have to convince him.
An angry voice on the other end of the frequency laced into Brooks with some choice Navy language. Whether it was Sprague or a controller in the CIC was impossible for the pilot to know. He didn’t much care whether the abuse came from a rear admiral or a mere ensign. He didn’t enjoy being doubted. Brooks knew a thing or two about his mission. In advanced flight training he had paid close attention when instructors discussed the way the sea looks under different wind conditions, when they trained him to judge a ship’s speed from the size and shape of its wake, and when they repeated, time and again, the flash-card drill for ship recognition. Seated in the Avenger’s gun turret, Joe Downs heard his pilot vent a few epithets of his own. If confirmation was what the admiral needed, that’s what he would get. Ensign Brooks would go down and verify his report.
Suitably awed by the heavy if inaccurate volume of antiaircraft fire rising up to them from the Japanese fleet, Downs was less sure it was necessary to prove anything. But he was not flying the plane. As VC-65’s junior pilot rogered the order to confirm and pushed his stick forward, putting the Avenger into a thirty-degree dive, Downs, seated facing to the rear, watched the plane of the sea pivot down out of sight and the clouds above him swing into view. The plane dropped down to two thousand feet, back into the bramble of flak.
Brooks lingered over the Japanese fleet for a few long minutes as Ray Travers snapped some pictures with the big K-20 camera mounted in the bomb bay. Brooks slid a metal-framed plotting board out of his control panel and checked his briefing and navigation notes. It didn’t take long to confirm his location. And from this altitude there was no mistaking the distinctive architecture of the battleships and cruisers below. He radioed the Taffy 3 flagship with the bad news: “I can see the pagoda masts, and I see the biggest red meatball flag I ever saw flying on the biggest battleship I ever saw.”
The pagoda masts were unmistakably Japanese. Though the Kongo happened to be the creation of a British shipyard and British ship designers, the ubiquitous xenophobia of the day credited its ungainly profile to the imagined idiocy of the bucktoothed, bespectacled Japanese. The ships had once been the laughingstock of the U.S. Navy. The belief circulated among American officers that they would capsize in heavy seas, toppled by their lofty centers of gravity. But chauvinism about Japanese engineering and naval architecture had been as ill-founded as chauvinism about Japanese tactical skill and bravery. Early battles in the Java Sea and off Savo Island, among others—disasters all for Allied fleets—had revealed both Japan’s deadly mastery of surface combat and the lethal design of her warships. The contours of these seagoing towers of Pisa—impossible to confuse with the sleeker lines of America’s new fighting ships—had become a dreaded sight.
Dread. It was precisely what Ziggy Sprague now felt. Brooks’s report of the pagoda masts was the clincher. And he grasped fully its meaning: against battleships and heavy cruisers, Taffy 3 didn’t have a prayer. Among his thirteen ships there wasn’t a gun heavier than a five-incher. The fifty-four-pound shells they fired, readily loadable by hand, could not penetrate cruiser or battleship armor. They had a surface range of about seven miles. Even the smallest of the four Japanese battleships facing him fired shells that were fourteen inches in diameter and some fourteen hundred pounds in weight. Each armed with an eight- or nine-gun main battery with a range of more than twenty miles, and with speeds approaching thirty knots, the Japanese battlewagons could easily run down and destroy Sprague’s plodding escort carriers. There were four battleships. And the heavy cruisers were arguably even more dangerous. Each one of them—with a treaty-busting displacement of thirteen to fifteen thousand tons fully loaded—carried not only an eight-inch main battery but torpedo tubes as well. And they were swift, capable of thirty-five knots. The Japanese destroyers themselves—eleven of them to Sprague’s three—were together probably more than a match for his entire force.
What chance did Sprague have? His destroyers carried torpedoes. But using them required charging into a range that would be suicidal against capital ships in broad daylight—ten thousand yards at most. They would never make it. The Avengers aboard the CVEs carried some ship-killing weapons: torpedoes and semi-armor-piercing bombs. But there were precious few of them, and most of the bombs were of the light antipersonnel variety, useful for killing troops on the ground and overturning jeeps but useless for stopping a large warship.
Sprague tried to think like his enemy. His first thought was that
the Japanese would detach a few heavy cruisers to deal with Taffy 3’s ships and send the rest of the force straight down the coast to Leyte Gulf. With or without the help of the Yamato and the other battleships, the heavy cruisers, Sprague figured, would mop up and wring out most of Taffy 3 in fifteen minutes.
* * *
IT WAS 6:47 A.M. when Ensign Brooks confirmed his sighting of the Japanese fleet and relayed it to Ziggy Sprague. At precisely the same moment, Admiral Halsey, on the flag bridge of the battleship New Jersey, received a radio message from Admiral Kinkaid:
“Question: Is TF 34 guarding San Bernardino Strait?”
What the hell was this? Halsey wondered. Why was Kinkaid bothering him now? Sent by the Seventh Fleet commander at 4:12 A.M., two and a half hours before Halsey got it, Kinkaid’s inquiry had traveled from Leyte Gulf two thousand miles east to Manus, languished for a few hours amid a pile of other communiqués, then been routed to the Third Fleet commander. At MacArthur’s insistence, all messages between the Third and Seventh Fleets were routed through his Admiralty Islands headquarters. The communications staff there was deluged with transmissions, the urgent ones all but indistinguishable from the merely important.
Halsey read the late-arriving message from his Seventh Fleet counterpart and thought him out of touch, if not entirely delinquent. Task Force 34, the heart of Willis Lee’s battle line, sailed with him. In the earlier dispatch Halsey had meant that Task Force 34 “will be formed” only on his further command. He was shocked that Kinkaid had assumed the actuality of a mere contingency. Wasn’t it plain enough that Halsey had not detached the four battleships? And why was the Seventh Fleet relying on him in any event? Conceived as a defensive force, it had more than enough firepower. With Oldendorf’s heavies at his disposal, Kinkaid could watch his own back. As Halsey’s assumptions began colliding with Kinkaid’s in the unforgiving light of day, Kurita curled around Samar with his whole Center Force.
The black puffs of flak grasping at Bill Brooks’s Avenger were now visible to the crews on the decks of the thirteen ships of Taffy 3. Above a gray rainsquall to their northwest, they could see the dense pattern of black clouds hanging like layers of charcoal in the sky. Then came their first view of something more frightening still: from below the northwestern horizon, beyond the curve of the earth, rose dark gray towers: the fighting tops of Japanese men-of-war.
As it was dawning on Taffy 3’s commanders that something had gone inexplicably, disastrously wrong, the big triple turrets of the Yamato, and the only slightly smaller guns of her brutal consorts, were drawing a bead on the Kaiser coffins of General MacArthur’s Navy.
* * *
BILL BROOKS WAS SOBER with fear. Against the drone of his plane’s radial engine in front of him, he, Ray Travers, and Joe Downs were as quiet as mice. “My gut feeling was we were never going to see the afternoon,” Brooks said. It was of course academic whether death arrived in the form of a shard of shrapnel from an exploding antiaircraft round or from a hard landing in the sea with his carrier sunk. There was nothing to be done against such a powerful Japanese force. Brooks figured the best thing he could do now was use what few tools were at the ready to take some of the bastards down with him.
What tools did he have? He was armed for antisub patrol, not an air strike. In the weapons bay down in the belly of Brooks’s Avenger—behind him, below Downs in the ball turret, and forward of Travers in the radio compartment—sat four 250-pound depth charges. They couldn’t do much to a surface warship. With fuses sensitive to water pressure, not impact, they wouldn’t explode even with a direct hit. Dropped like bombs on the deck of an enemy ship, the best that could happen was that their metal cases might shatter and give crewmen standing in the open a few splinters and cuts. Or he might get really lucky and hit an officer in the head. But it was hardly the kind of attack that had given American naval aviation its world-beating reputation.
Feeling more than a little useless, Brooks looked down at a column of four heavy cruisers below and had a desperate brainstorm. Perhaps he could improvise a new use for his submarine-killing ordnance. With their hydrostatic fuses set to detonate at a certain depth, the depth charges might be useful after all. Perhaps if he dropped them not onto a ship but forward of it, into the water directly in its path, the underwater explosion might rupture it from below. He might shake it up, slow it down, create a leak or something. Who knew?
Brooks swung around and lined up on the tail of the cruiser column. When attacking a submarine, doctrine called for a pilot to dive and drop his weapons at an altitude of 300 feet. Brooks thought better of it here. He didn’t want to get that close to the bristling heavy cruiser. Nor did Downs: 1,500 feet was much too close for his liking. He would have preferred an altitude about ten times that high. Flying directly over the ship at 1,500 feet, black puffs of flak jarring his plane and vibrating his rib cage, Brooks ran down the last heavy cruiser in line from the rear. At 180 knots, the Avenger rapidly overtook the thirty-three-knot ship. As he passed ahead of the target, Brooks jerked his ordnance release lever, letting go his four depth bombs. As they dropped down and behind his plane, the Avenger lurched as if cut from a tether.
He harbored no lofty expectations. He didn’t linger to see the result. His mind was occupied with the imperative of escape. Brooks was an avid quail hunter back home. He knew that the hardest bird to shoot was the one that was flying straight away from you, dipping and veering over the brush. So he followed the game bird’s example. He pushed his Avenger down to the water, building speed for his exit, just fifty feet above the wave tops. Downs, facing to the rear, watched the four depth charges plunge down toward the ship. He saw two of them strike the forward deck of the ship, and two land in the water forward of the bow. Very likely no damage was done. But at least the St. Lo and VC-65 had delivered a little calling card to the Japanese fleet. Ensign Jensen from the Kadashan Bay had done just the same.
Pulling away from the cruiser column, Brooks tapped the intercom button and checked in with Downs and Travers. “Anybody hurt back there? What’s going on?” They chatted gamely, trying to settle their nerves. Aside from a piece of shrapnel that had caught Downs in the hand, the crew was fine. Brooks tried to raise Bendix Base—the Fanshaw Bay— but the radio gave him only silence. Either Admiral Sprague was no longer speaking to him or a chunk of flak had knocked out his transmitter. From the deadness on his headphones he knew it was the latter. Brooks thought over his options. He knew that the St. Lo and the other Taffy 3 escort carriers would not be landing planes. They would be fleeing under fire, probably to the south, zigzagging to dodge shells, out of the wind. Possibly their flight decks had already been shredded by shellfire. Many of them might already be sinking.
From his briefings Brooks knew that a second group of jeep carriers, Taffy 2, was operating south of his task unit. He knew their general direction and was confident he could find them in the open ocean. With fuel running low, he cut back his RPMs and reduced his engine manifold pressure to a minimum. Preferring to be “a live pilot rather than a dead hero,” he ruled out further futile heroics against the Japanese fleet. He decided that his best contribution to the coming one-sided slaughter would be to get himself to a place where he could load a torpedo or a rack of heavy bombs and return to the Japanese fleet, this time meaning business. He set his course for Taffy 2. He would find a friendly carrier, land, rearm, and get back in the air just as soon as he could.
It was 7:15 and shaping up to be a very long morning.
Part II
LAST STAND
In no engagement in its entire history has the United States Navy shown more gallantry, guts and gumption than in those two morning hours between 0730 and 0930 off Samar.
—Samuel Eliot Morison
Fourteen
The seas rolled calmly, stirred by a gentle easterly wind, when the early risers of the morning watch rose for breakfast at three A.M. to relieve the midwatch at four. Aboard the destroyer Johnston, washrooms filled with boisterous
morning energy, lockers slammed, and the galley came alive with the hissing of steam, the banter of cooks, the sizzle of eggs and bacon. Quartermaster striker Robert Billie went to the mess, poured himself a cup of coffee, and decided to forget going back to bed. There were only two hours until morning general quarters would be called at six. Any teasing hints of sleep he might get would only deepen his fatigue. Until he could sleep in earnest, he might as well fill the remaining time with useful work. He went to the chart room to update his charts.
In previous campaigns, from the Marshalls to the Solomons to the Carolines, the Johnston’s crew had long ago proven their ability to function on a fractured sleep pattern. At six, per the daily routine, the claxons sounded, setting the steel decks and ladders vibrating with the concussion of quick footsteps. The dawn-dusk call to battle stations was part of the daily regimen of structure and discipline designed to keep minds sharp and equipment ready. The Johnston stood down after a few minutes on alert.
Then, unexpectedly, the general quarters claxon sounded again.
After a midwatch in the Johnston’s laundry, seaman first class Bill Mercer was fast asleep in his bunk when the GQ alarm began shrieking for a second time. He was at first slow to rise. But word that enemy ships were near shot life into him. Mercer sprang to his feet and sprinted toward his battle station on the port side forward forty-millimeter mount. He ran past Lee Burton, a ship’s cook who was busy setting up the breakfast chow line, and said, “How about some bacon? It may be the last I ever get.” Burton told Mercer to help himself, and he did, gladly and generously. Then Mercer saw the tall shell splashes straddling the escort carrier Gambier Bay off the Johnston’s port bow and immediately lost his appetite.
Ellsworth Welch, the Johnston’s junior officer of the deck, was leaning over the rail on the port side of the bridge taking in the warm aromas of breakfast when he first saw the columns of water towering over the decks of an escort carrier. Instinctively he looked skyward, expecting to see enemy bombers overhead. But then he realized that their air-search radar would have long since spotted any planes.
The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors Page 17