The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  The commander would have preferred more altitude. A properly planned air strike would have allowed time for pilots to locate holes in the squalls and plot their attack routes amid cloud-blinds and rain. Altitude gave a pilot options and flexibility. Over the radio came an order from the Fanshaw Bay’s air officer: “Attack immediately.” No reminder of the urgency was needed. Joined by Wildcats from VC-10, which heeled over into steep dives, strafing the enemy ships ahead of the torpedo bombers, Huxtable directed his Avengers to line up and move in behind them.

  Lt. Burt Bassett watched Commander Huxtable dive left, heading for the second ship in column. Without ordnance Huxtable would make a decoy run. Its deterrent effect on the target ship would be no less pronounced; to a Japanese skipper, there was no telling what Huxtable’s turkey carried in its weapons bay.

  Bassett lined up on the lead cruiser. As he nosed over from 2,800 feet and emerged from the clouds, he felt the full intensity of the flak. Tracers etched burning paths in every direction. Every so often a larger shell burst nearby, releasing an invisible spray of shrapnel through a small sphere in the sky. Bassett bore in steeply and released his first bomb from 2,000 feet. Almost immediately his aircraft shuddered from a hit to his starboard horizontal stabilizer. He released the second bomb right away, while he still could, pulling out at 1,500 feet. At about 200 knots, it took about twenty endless seconds for Bassett to reach the safety of a cloud bank ahead of the cruiser.

  Since he had no bombs, Ens. Robert Crocker, third in the formation, was ordered to stay out of Huxtable’s first run. The fourth pilot in line, Ens. William Shroyer, went next. Angling his Avenger downward toward a battleship, Shroyer released short bursts from his two wing-mounted machine guns to sight his rockets. He fired them, and they shot ahead on coils of white smoke. Then Shroyer pulled the lever to open his bomb bay doors.

  But something didn’t work. The doors stayed shut, trapping two five-hundred-pound bombs in his plane’s belly. Shroyer skimmed the water so low that his radioman, Louis Vilmer, Jr., looking out his small plate window in the TBM’s fuselage, had to look up to see the sailors on the Japanese ship’s deck. Shroyer climbed and circled for another pass, then followed a dozen Wildcats diving down to strafe. On the way in Shroyer instructed Vilmer to use the hand crank in the radio compartment to get the doors open. By the time Shroyer emerged from the clouds over a column of six large ships, Vilmer had succeeded.

  Running up on a Tone-class cruiser from astern, Shroyer dropped his payload, and Vilmer watched the two bombs hit the water just a few feet behind the fantail, disrupting the ribbon of the cruiser’s wake with their detonation. The two pilots coming in behind Shroyer, Lt. Paul Garrison from the Kitkun Bay and Ens. J. F. Lischer from the Gambier Bay, reported that the cruiser had slowed and seemed to lose steering.

  When Harvey Lively nosed over to attack, he didn’t say anything over the intercom. There was no “tallyho” or anything else kids heard in the movies. His first sortie against ships began without fanfare. Royce Hall just felt the plane push over into a shallow dive as flak bursts began appearing around them. When the nose of the plane pushed over, the tail swung up, the ocean dropped out of view, and Hall was left with a 180-degree view of the sky and squalls. As they approached the Japanese cruiser column from the rear, tracer bullets whizzed past him like angry fireflies to port and starboard. Lively pressed home the attack, engine at full power, the pin on the airspeed indicator trembling at 280 knots.

  Lively closed on a cruiser from behind and released his four five-hundred-pound bombs. The pilot didn’t have the luxury of seeing the results for himself. He leveled off fifty feet above the wave tops, having traded altitude for airspeed and aiming to preserve every bit of it for his escape. From the tiny window in his radio compartment, Willie Haskins saw the bombs hit. One landed under the fantail of the cruiser and exploded. It might have been close enough, Haskins hoped, to damage the propellers. Lively sped low along the water, parallel to a line of ships. Royce Hall had been watching the skies for enemy planes to shoot at. Nothing came. But here now were ships. He recognized the opportunity for some improvisation.

  Practice, practice, practice. The answer to the question “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” was drilled into Navy gunners from day one. In fact, the training pamphlets supplied to air gunners by the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics played on a musical metaphor:

  The concert violinist sets considerable store by his instrument … So it had better be with you and your guns. Learn to handle them, naturally and firmly, with all the precision and skill of a great musician … At first, all good gunners looked upon their weapons as cumbersome things that crash and vibrate, feel awkward and unwieldy. They also had the inward feelings that the guns, and not they themselves, were in charge. But as they learned to give their guns close personal attention and firm handling, their guns gradually turned into useful friends and allies.

  Royce Hall had never given thought to the parallels between gunnery triangulation and the musical arts. He had devoted what few idle hours he enjoyed aboard the Fanshaw Bay to fleecing his squadronmates at the poker table. He had never imagined that he would have the occasion to pepper a heavy cruiser with his very own machine gun. The strikes he had flown over Leyte’s jungles and cane fields involved firing rockets and dropping bombs on Japanese troop concentrations. Shooting at a by-God heavy cruiser—this was something else.

  There were few things more terrifying to a sailor than strafing. Heavy machine-gun bullets could make a mess out of the exposed positions on a ship, ripping through gun shields, breaking glass, and splintering wood. They destroyed electrical connections, shattered steam pipes, and tore flesh. In that light, Hall and every other gunner in Taffy 3’s six composite squadrons had a mission akin to that of the destroyer screen as a whole: to distract and delay the enemy’s pursuit of the carriers. Any weapon that could be brought to bear might contribute to their escape. Only a couple hundred feet of water lay between Hall and the cream of the Imperial Japanese Navy. He cranked his turret out to port and went hunting.

  Hall could see Japanese gunners depressing their guns and blazing away wildly at his plane. Shooting at an unpracticed close range and at an angle nearly perpendicular to the target’s path of flight, the enemy would have needed considerable skill to knock the Avenger from the sky. It was a difficult matter of timing—like bird hunting, but with the weapons and prey inflated to giant size. As with shooting quail, the challenge was to place your lead not where the target was now, but where it would be in a second or two. Firing from the side at a fast-moving target required that the shooter lead it so that the target flew into the path of his bullets. In the panic of battle, undisciplined gunners attempting a deflection shot tended to shoot behind their targets. That was the case now with the Japanese. Lively’s plane was untouched.

  The same principles operated as Hall returned fire, except that his target was slow and his plane was fast. The net effect of the geometry was as if the cruiser were speeding past him, away to the rear. And the ship was so large in comparison to Hall’s usual prey as to induce a sort of vertigo. Nonetheless, a target that big was hard to miss. From Pensacola Naval Air Station, where he had been a gunnery-range instructor, to the fields around Yemassee, South Carolina, where he had hunted quail and doves with his older brother, Hall was well practiced in the difficult craft of deflection shooting. Hall led the ship aft, pressing short bursts into its grayblack bulk, raking gun emplacements and gunwales. He could see the tracers spark and ricochet off the superstructure and rip through the metal shields protecting the Japanese machine-gun crews.

  As Lieutenant Lively roared past the forward part of the ship, Hall raised his gun and sprayed the glass of the bridge structure. In return, originating from places tucked away throughout the steely rabbit warren of the cruiser’s superstructure, tracers flew past the Avenger’s wings. It was over before it had really started. The 280-knot plane overtook and passed the thirty-five-knot cruiser in just a few secon
ds. Lively zoomed past the last man-of-war in the column, then passed the next three cruisers ahead of her, allowing Hall a two-or three-second window in which to fire at each one. Hall emptied a two-hundred-round drum of .50-caliber ammunition, then yelled down at Haskins to send up another. Lively took his plane around for another pass while Hall changed ammo drums for the next run through the shooting gallery. Hall was beyond being scared. The poker shark of VC-68 had never felt calmer in all his life.

  * * *

  FROM TEN THOUSAND FEET, Larry Budnick picked his way through the cloud heads, looking for targets. The clouds were a nuisance to reconnaissance but ideal for stealth. Spotting a large ship below, the fighter pilot winged over into as steep a dive as possible. The roar of the FM-2 Wildcat’s engine and the rushing sensation of acceleration was relief from the circling and the thinking and the worrying.

  Since there was no telling how many runs he would be called upon to make, Budnick tried to conserve his ammunition. On each run he set two of his four machine guns on safe. Gone from his mind now was anything not immediately related to putting his tracers into the armored leviathan wheeling beneath him. At three thousand feet or so, he opened fire. To avoid burning out the delicate rifling of his gun barrels—the inevitable symptom of which was an erratic corkscrewing path of bullets flying everywhere except where his crosshairs were fixed—Budnick kept the bursts short, two or three seconds at a pull. Their curving bright trails disappeared into the ship’s encompassing mass. The rattling he gave the ship’s decks was three times as deadly as it appeared, for only one round in three had a tracer load. But really there was no telling what the effect was. It was over too quickly for fastidious observation. Budnick knew one thing. This Catholic, converted to the faith on his wedding day, considered it a miracle worthy of Mary that he was never hit. As the flak rose at him in sheets, he was glad he had made time for Lt. Chris Maino’s thirty-minute services, held on the St. Lo’s hangar deck on most Sundays. Maino would become a priest after the war. But right now, in October 1944, he likely had in his lay ministry of aviators and airedales a flock as devout as any man of the cloth could hope to have.

  Ens. Foster Dillard, a VC-10 Wildcat pilot from the Gambier Bay, found a hole in the clouds at 9,500 feet and began a dive on the lead cruiser. The next thing he knew he was recovering from that dive 800 feet above the sea. A large antiaircraft shell had struck his plummeting Wildcat, blowing out his glass canopy. The rushing wind carried off Dillard’s helmet and goggles, and his Wildcat fell out of control through nearly two miles of sky before the ensign at last regained his senses and pulled out just a few hundred feet above the water. Suffering from a concussion and barely able to control his aircraft, Dillard headed for the Tacloban airfield on Leyte, escorted by a plane from the Fanshaw Bay.

  * * *

  WITHOUT A TORPEDO, ALL that VC-10 commander Edward Huxtable could do was bluff. Having done it once, now he did it again, turning back to the west above a thin cloud layer at two thousand feet. Though the skipper no longer saw any Wildcats around, he decided this wasn’t the time to insist on by-the-book tactics. About two and a half miles out, the cruisers opened up a terrific barrage of antiaircraft fire. Huxtable bore in on the trailing ship’s starboard bow, hoping to draw its fire from the other planes of his flight. Ensign Crocker, armed with two light rockets, followed him in. On the intercom Huxtable told the others to concentrate on the lead cruisers. Finishing his run, he pulled out to the left and patrolled ahead of the cruiser line, tracking their movements. The ships turned to the northeast, and Huxtable relayed that information to Admiral Sprague. So much smoke and rain covered the waters between the antagonists that Huxtable thought for a moment that the Japanese had lost sight of their quarry.

  Commander Huxtable had lost track of his fighter escorts after the first run, but VC-10’s Wildcat jocks found useful employment long after the Avengers dropped their ordnance. Starting at eight thousand feet, Ens. Joseph McGraw began a series of steep strafing runs at a battleship. He made eleven in all, then three more on a Tone-class heavy cruiser. Ensign Lischer and seven others from the Gambier Bay spotted a pair of destroyers and winged over to strafe. Lt. Richard Roby made a pair of runs on the tin cans before getting separated from the other fighters amid the squalls. Lischer and Roby made their separate ways to joining a northbound flight of Avengers and Wildcats led by the Kitkun Bay’s Lt. Cdr. Richard L. Fowler. Roby knew the Japanese were to the east, but Fowler evidently didn’t have radio contact. Roby pulled alongside Fowler’s Avenger and gestured as if to say, They’re over there. Fowler swung off to the east and found Japanese cruisers almost immediately.

  After making his runs on the destroyers, Dick Roby found that two of his four .50-caliber guns were either jammed or empty. He made several runs at the cruisers until his ammunition ran out. Thereafter he continued diving on the ships without ammunition. Roby didn’t try to stay with Fowler. The Gambier Bay lieutenant lost him after the first pass as the planes continued their mad whirling dance over the Japanese fleet.

  While making dry runs, Roby’s practice was to look for an Avenger with its torpedo bay doors open. Roby would line up ahead of the TBM, hoping its pilot really had a torpedo. As often as not, the Avenger pilot was bluffing as doggedly as Roby was. Even if both planes ran in and pulled out without shooting or dropping anything, they might draw fire from other planes and force their targets into sharp turns to avoid the apparent threat. As far as Ziggy Sprague was concerned, slowing the enemy’s pursuit was nearly as good as planting an actual torpedo into his ships. Owing to the frequency with which they turned to avoid air attacks both phantom and real, the cruisers’ angle of chase was ajar to Taffy 3’s line of retreat. The distance was not closing as fast as Kurita would have liked.

  From the bridge of the Yamato, Admiral Ugaki was impressed by the courage of the U.S. pilots, who had been pestering and bluffing the Japanese task group since they first found them roughly twenty minutes after the fleets spotted each other. Ugaki counted airplanes taking off from the American carriers in the distance—he figured at least thirty planes attacked his battleship while he was closing with his enemy. “The rate of hits was quite good and most of the damages our cruisers sustained were due to them,” he would later write.

  Admiral Kurita was doubtless frustrated by the imperative his ships faced to separate and scatter when confronted with such a persistent air attack. Their flak was perhaps more effective as a spectacle than as a defense. Each time Dick Roby emerged from the clouds, he was treated to a variety show of antiaircraft ordnance. “They were shooting the craziest combinations at us you’ve ever seen.” Star shells burst into white clouds and spat phosphorus chunks in every direction. When they peppered the wings and fuselage, the sizzling pieces made sharp snapping sounds, like the little firecrackers wrapped in white paper that kids throw on pavement. Main battery rounds were considerably more kinetic, exploding in a rainbow of colors and a blizzard of metal. Some of them left hanging in the sky snarled coils of steel mesh that radiated whipping wires at the U.S. planes. As impressed as he was by the innovation, Roby saw no planes fall to the strange killing contraption.

  Like so many other Wildcat pilots, Roby lost track of how many dry runs he made before his gas tanks grew light. Without ammunition, he could still make himself useful. But without fuel, his morning was over. Roby too headed for Tacloban.

  Twenty-two

  The Hoel held her screening station on the northern edge of Taffy 3’s ring, zigzagging an eastward course, making smoke to cover the flight of the carriers. The smoke she generated, and that of the destroyer escort Raymond ahead, off her starboard bow, was carried to the west and south by the eight- to thirteen-knot wind. Though the smoke shielded the jeep carriers like a protective shroud, no one was making smoke to cover the Hoel. The wind whipped it behind her, keeping her exposed to enemy sight. The ships to her south churned out their own semicumulus wall of blackness and gray. It provided a high-contrast backdrop that framed the
Hoel’s sleek lines for Japanese gunners.

  Seaman first class Sam Lucas had a clear view of Japanese ships off the stern. He could see the flashes of their big guns and the smoke billow out. Light came first, followed by horrific sound. “It seemed to take a long time before I heard the crack of the guns and the projectiles as they passed overhead. They sounded like boxcars going through the air, end over end.” A salvo raised a wall of water dead ahead. There was another roar of freight trains, and three more shells struck close by to port, just thirty feet abeam the forward gun turret. Another salvo bracketed them to starboard, missing by just sixty feet.

  Lieutenant Dix expected the next salvo to split the difference between the last two misses to either side and cut the air directly into the bridge. He tensed himself for it.

  You stand there waiting—clutch the rail—and watch.

  The bow swings back to starboard as we turn.

  You’re hanging on to wait—and scared to death.

  And then you hear the whistling sound again.

  You freeze, you flinch, you wait to hear them, hit.

  The seconds pass and nothing comes, no jolt.

  Your hand’s there on the rail—you’re still alive,

  But still just standing there. So then you turn

  And look back aft and see the splashes leap

  Well back beyond the stern—they’ve missed again.

  The ship’s still safe, but you’re not quite the same.

  You’re moving through the motions of your job,

  Yet all the time you’re thinking of the odds

  The Hoel came through unhit, entered a squall, and enjoyed a moment’s respite as rain pelted the decks. But the speeding ship passed through it in a few short minutes, entered the sunlight once again, and endured a new round of gunfire.