The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  Standing on the bridge wing, Captain Kintberger conned his ship through the boiling whirlpools of the enemy’s misses. Chasing salvos, he steered the Hoel through the cauldron, testing his luck, keeping his ship from falling under the arc of the shellfire. His voice was steady and sure. Dix was impressed with his skipper.

  “Right full rudder. Meet her. Steady up.

  “Now left full rudder. Give it all you’ve got.”

  He never once lets up. He’s calm and firm.

  Damn but that guy’s magnificent today

  The Hoel’s luck held, but it was not at all clear how much longer Taffy 3’s would. With every passing second the Japanese cruiser line closed with the carriers, their eight-inch salvos straddling and shaking the fragile hulls of the CVEs.

  Like their fellows in the screen, Captain Kintberger and his men felt like a short-armed boxer enduring blows that couldn’t be returned. Admiral Sprague’s 7:16 order to make a torpedo run on the behemoths confronting them had had a bracing effect. They knew their best chance to survive required them to attack, not flee, to press within range of the enemy and take their shot. The last towering miss landed nearly close enough to pierce their tin can’s hull. No one saw any point in standing there.

  At 7:18, as Ernest Evans, miles to the north, was preparing to launch the Johnston’s torpedoes, Leon Kintberger ordered a hard turn to port. Quartermaster Clarence Hood swung the wheel and didn’t bring it back until his ship was headed straight west, toward the advancing Japanese force.

  * * *

  TORPEDOES WERE A DESTROYER’S most powerful offensive weapon. The night before, at Surigao Strait, Jesse Oldendorf’s tin cans had demonstrated their giant-slaying qualities with expert aplomb. In Taffy 3’s desperate straits a torpedo attack had a purpose collateral to but no less important than actually hitting and sinking ships: forcing a superior fleet to break off its lethal pursuit. A destroyer skipper didn’t need to actually hit anything, so long as he brandished the threat of doing so.

  An attacking column of ships had to stay together to maximize its fighting effectiveness. Ordering Taffy 3’s destroyers to attack separately from the slower destroyer escorts was the right way to do it. By staying together at flank speed and coordinating their torpedo spreads, they could make it hard for the enemy to escape their overlapping fields of fire. Speed was a destroyer’s best protection. It would have been foolish to rein in the swift Heermann and the Hoel for the sake of keeping them in column with the slower DEs. So thought Captain Copeland on the Samuel B. Roberts, in any event. But when Commander Thomas relayed Sprague’s torpedo-attack order to the screen, all Copeland heard was, “Little fellows, make a torpedo attack.”

  “He didn’t designate a target or anything of that kind,” Copeland would write, “and so we didn’t know just exactly what was what. What did he mean by ‘little fellows’?” Not fully grasping his commander’s lingo, Copeland was concerned that Thomas wanted the destroyer escorts to accompany the faster destroyers. “It just didn’t seem right to me. So I got on the air and called Commander Thomas. I coined a little phraseology of my own to distinguish DEs from the DDs, or destroyers. I said, “Taffy 33 [denoting Commander Thomas], this is Juggernaut. Do you want the little little fellows to go with the big little fellows?”

  Thomas replied, “Juggernaut, this is Taffy 33. Your last transmission negative—negative. The big fellows form up for the first attack, and the little fellows make the second attack.”

  Well, that’s a problem too, Copeland thought. If the screen idled about much longer, they might well have no carriers left to protect. If the Roberts was going to launch its torpedoes, there was but a small passing window of opportunity. Certainly there was no time to form into a column with the other three DEs ringing the wide circle of fleeing escort carriers.

  Beyond questions of geometry, time, and distance was the matter of command protocol. Because the captain of the Dennis, Lt. Cdr. Sig Hansen, was the senior skipper among the destroyer escorts, and Copeland the junior, by all rights the Dennis should have led the DEs to the attack. Yet the Roberts, stationed astern the Hoel on the northwest edge of the carrier formation, was best positioned to peel off and attack the Japanese cruiser line. In the absence of orders specifying how, with whom, and when the destroyer escorts might form up, and what targets they would engage, what was the skipper of the Samuel B. Roberts to do?

  As Copeland pondered this question, a sleek dark form slid into view out of the smoke and squalls, swinging across the Roberts’s bow. There was no mistaking a Fletcher’s clean lines. It was the Heermann, racing to form up with the Hoel. At the battle’s outset Sprague had ordered Amos Hathaway’s destroyer to stay with the carriers, and so the Heermann stayed on the far side of the formation, making smoke. When Sprague’s 7:16 order went out to prepare a torpedo attack, Captain Hathaway had to cut clear across the middle of Taffy 3.

  At full boiler steam, Hathaway conned his ship through the thicket of smoke and rain—right into the path of the Samuel B. Roberts. Faced with a collision, Bob Copeland ordered his helm to back down, as Hathaway steered clear. Both ships quickly rebuilt steam, but the Heermann could not quite keep pace with the Hoel running in.

  Copeland stood at the captain’s conning station on the bridge of his ship, waiting to get his speed back, studying the evolving picture of the pursuit. Forming up with the other destroyer escorts would be impractical, if not entirely impossible. He thought, My God, how are we going to work this? You didn’t take a destroyer escort in alone against heavy ships. But Copeland was starting to think he should just do precisely that. Why not join up with the “big boys”? He estimated the course he would need to take to put the Roberts in position to fire torpedoes at the approaching heavy cruisers: sixty degrees off the bow of the target ship, range five to seven thousand yards. As it happened, the Japanese men-of-war were accommodating him beautifully. With a minor course change, he would be in an optimum firing position. Waiting to link up with the other DEs would forfeit the opportunity. Copeland reached over and grabbed the handle of his squawk box, twisted it down, and threw aside his concerns about staying with the faster destroyers. “Well, Sis on you, pister. Let’s go!” he said. When the order passed nearly twenty minutes later for the destroyer escorts to execute their own torpedo attack, the Samuel B. Roberts was long gone, already grappling with the Japanese.

  Copeland called Bob Roberts, his executive officer in the CIC: “Bob, give me a course to put me sixty degrees on the bow of the leading ship in that cruiser column.” The computer clicked and whirred and produced a heading just six degrees to the left of the one Copeland had figured by dead reckoning. Then Copeland grabbed the JV phone and called his chief engineering officer. In formal duty settings officers addressed each another by surname. Casually, in the wardroom, most of them trafficked in nicknames. Lt. Bill Trow-bridge was known in private quarters as “Lucky.” In desperate straits, Copeland opted for informality. “Lucky, this is the captain. Lucky, we are going on a torpedo attack and I have rung up full speed; we are going in at twenty knots. As soon as we fire our fish, I will ring up flank speed and I want you to hook on everything you’ve got. Don’t worry about your reduction gears or your boilers or anything, because there’s all hell being thrown at us up here, and we’re just fortunate we haven’t been hit yet.”

  Lucky pushed their good fortune a bit farther. The boilers on the Roberts were designed to carry 440 pounds of steam pressure. Lieutenant Trowbridge ordered water tender third class Wilfred Labbe to turn off the boilers’ safety valves and build up to 660 pounds of steam. Trowbridge would need every roaring ounce of it if he aimed to live up to his nickname and get the ship through its torpedo run. The Roberts fell in well astern of her larger cousins the Hoel and the Heermann. In the engine room the needle on the steam gauge broke new territory.

  The destroyer Johnston, having struck the lead Japanese cruiser Kumano with her torpedoes, wheels around and returns to formation. The destroyer Hoel, already hit ha
rd, leads the Heermann and the Samuel B. Roberts in for a torpedo attack. Hidden by rainsqualls, Ziggy Sprague gambles and turns his carriers to the south-southwest, momentarily outdistancing his pursuers.

  Twenty-three

  It had to be only a matter of time before Japanese shells broke not water but steel and drew men’s blood. Ernest Evans and the officers of the Johnston had scarcely stolen a moment to celebrate their torpedo hits when the destroyer walked into a double salvo of enemy shells. Running through her own smoke to return to station with the carriers, the destroyer was rocked by a dizzying series of blasts.

  Bob Hagen saw and felt the impact from the gun director. On the highest point on the ship, movements were amplified. The impact seemed to shove the destroyer sideways. All across the Johnston’s 376 ½-foot length, men were knocked off their feet. “It was like a puppy being smacked by a truck.”

  The first three rounds to hit the destroyer came from a battleship, probably the Kongo. The first one, a fourteen-inch shell, nearly fifteen hundred pounds, fell in a ripping arc and struck, opening a three-by-six-foot hole in the main deck, blowing out the plumbing and main drain from the ship’s head, tearing up the machine shop, penetrating down into the after engine room, and exploding against the bulky iron housing of the port-side propeller shaft’s main reduction gears—one of the few pieces of hardware on a destroyer substantial enough to detonate a hard-headed armor-piercing round. The second shell punched through the deck and slashed critical electrical cables and steam lines before detonating against the main steam turbine in the after engine room.

  Belowdecks aft the Johnston was plunged into darkness. The third large shell demolished the source of the heat itself, striking a boiler in the after fireroom and extinguishing by concussion its oil-burning flames. With that hit the port-side screw stopped spinning, and the Johnston’s thirty-six-knot speed was cut in half. What the shell failed to do instantly, high-pressure superheated steam from shattered boiler pipes did with substantially less mercy. Not a man in the after fireroom survived the 840-degree bath that followed.

  A moment later there came a sound like a whole load of sheet metal dropping onto a hard floor as the destroyer absorbed the blast of a smaller salvo. The first six-inch shell—from the Yamato’s secondary battery, or perhaps a light cruiser—holed the number-two exhaust stack, detonating underneath the director platform and twisting it upward on both sides of the uptake. Two other shells slammed into the port bridge wing, igniting a forty-millimeter magazine, which burned and popped smokily with the runaway bursts of antiaircraft shells.

  Just seconds before impact Lieutenants DiGardi and Welch had left the bridge wing and entered the pilothouse to carry out Captain Evans’s most recent course-change order. They were just in time. An explosion propelled Welch forward into a pile of the wounded and the dead. He picked himself up, dazed, and tended to the injured. Ed Block was in shock, missing a large chunk of his right shoulder. The coxswain’s left shoulder was dislocated, an eardrum punctured. With small pieces of shrapnel lodged between his eyes, under his chin, and in his right eye, Block stumbled through the pilothouse hatch, past DiGardi, and crumpled against a gray metal bulkhead. Welch, standing over him, stated what was not altogether obvious—“Block is alive”—then grabbed his wrist and stuck him with a morphine syrette. As the drug permeated his bloodstream, Block regained his bearings. He made it down to the main deck on his own power, then joined the pharmacist’s mates who were escorting the wounded down to Lt. Robert Browne’s medical triage in the officers’ ward.

  The blast to the bridge all but undressed Ernest Evans. It blew the cap from his head and tore the shirt from his chest. Shrapnel lodged in his face, neck, hand, and torso. Lieutenant Browne came to his captain’s aid. “Don’t bother me now,” Evans said. “Help some of those guys who are hurt.” Evans was still in charge—coolly so, seemingly unbothered at having two fingers sliced from his left hand. He ordered the survivors to clear the bridge.

  Ellsworth Welch was transfixed by the grisly sights all around him. The well-kept and orderly pilothouse had been transformed into what might be mistaken for a dirty meat locker. Body parts were strewn throughout the compartment; limbs and fingers and indeterminate remnants of flesh filled the humid air with the rich, metallic odor of blood. Fearing the sight of the carnage would hurt morale, Welch gathered up what of the mess he could and tossed it overboard.

  Time seemed to stop, though events surely rushed forward. Welch found Jack Bechdel, the torpedo and assistant gunnery officer, propped up against the wheelhouse, complaining that his arms were hurt, unaware that he had lost a leg at the knee. Bechdel asked for a drink of water. Welch pulled out a syrette and gave him a shot of morphine. Something large and sharp and moving too fast for the eye had cleanly severed the head of Lt. (jg) Joe Pliska, a ship and aircraft recognition specialist who had joined the Johnston at Manus to train its officers. Ens. Gordon Fox died in the blast too. Signalman Joel Dixon was blown apart at his battle station.

  Outside, below the bridge, at his post on the starboard forty-millimeter gun, Clarence Trader looked up and saw blood flowing like water from a hole in the steel bulkhead. Maybe it was blood. Maybe it was the residue of the crimson tower of seawater that a Japanese round had sent breaking over the Johnston’s superstructure. Possibly it was a swirled mixture of both. Trader heard Captain Evans ask for help removing bodies from the bridge. Clyde Burnett, the chief boatswain’s mate, responded to the call, coming forward to shepherd Bechdel to the officers’ ward, where the pharmacist’s mates could attend to him, stick him with more morphine, and tie a tourniquet to his leg stump. Hearing someone call, “Stand by below,” Bill Mercer glanced up and saw a human form being lowered from the bridge wing to the main deck. The body descended—feet, khaki trousers, torso—and stopped, seeming to hover next to him. It had no head.

  It took a fraction of a second for a heavy shell to spin shrieking through the air and punch through bulkheads and decks and machinery and detonate or fail to detonate, ending lives in seconds and casting teenagers with the hard, dull look of veterans. In that time bold commissioning-day promises to sail into harm’s way acquired human and material consequences. This was naval warfare in the machine age. In 1944 Annapolis was still turning out men possessed by the idea that naval service was, in the words of one historian, “clean and professional, without the complications of civilians, refugees, partisans, looting or pillage.” But in fact, technology made it as brutal and hellish as anything the navy men of imperial Britain and Germany had suffered through a generation ago at Jutland.

  When a heavy round from a naval rifle hits a ship and explodes, the energy released pulverizes the hardened steel of the shell and swirls up the shattered remnants of surrounding metal decks and bulkheads. All of this metal rushes outward on the edge of a wave of blast pressure that a typical shipboard compartment cannot hope to contain. The sudden and overwhelming “overpressure” turns the compartment itself into a weapon, its remains churning up into a superheated storm of fragmented or liquified metal. The blast wave’s effect on people is horrific. It collapses body cavities, crushes organs, and blows flesh from bone.

  The size of the killing zone—the radius within which these effects will occur—depends on the amount of explosive the shell holds. A Japanese eight-inch armor-piercing shell, three feet long and 277 pounds in weight, had a 6.9-pound bursting charge. A fourteen-inch high-explosive shell, 1,425 pounds and five feet long, contained sixty-three pounds of explosives. The Yamato’s giant 18.1-inch armor-piercing shells, six and a half feet long and 3,219 pounds in weight, carried a seventy-five-pound bursting charge.

  The men of the Johnston learned in an instant that shrapnel came in many sizes, sometimes large enough to cut limbs and grind flesh, sometimes fine and particulate, filling the air with hot driving mist. They learned that shells tumbling through layers of steel filled compartments with poisonous gases, that exploding shells could kill by shock or with a cascade of flames that dou
sed them like liquid. Gone was the mystery of why Clyde Burnett, Bob Hollenbaugh, and the other senior boatswain’s mates kept them scraping paint for hours on end: it burned fiercely. The lesson had been learned in the shipboard conflagrations at Pearl Harbor and in the Solomon Islands in 1942. Now they saw it firsthand. Yet somehow ships still came off the line full of paint to scrape. This was harm, and the Johnston was in its way. This was what Captain Evans had promised them.

  Bob Hagen had seen hell once already, from the decks of the destroyer Aaron Ward, damaged during the Solomons campaign. But now the absence of novelty did not diminish the horror. “I was looking out of the director at the time. Everything happened at once,” Hagen wrote. The force of the hits threw him from his stool in the gun director, helmet, headphones, and binoculars torn from his head. He recovered in time to see the mainmast fracture and topple. It housed the ship’s SC radar, the so-called “whirling bedspring,” used for air search. The whole thing came down, seesawed over the bridge tower, and swung back and forth like an off-kilter metronome. The impact tumbled the ship’s gyro stable element off its mount, tripped the internal communications circuit board for a few minutes, and cut the shearing pin that held the FD “Fox Dog” fire-control radar in its vertical position. Unable to slew his radars for elevation until the assembly was reset, Hagen climbed out of the director, grabbed the big antenna, and wrenched it into position toward the horizon.

  Looking down on his ship, Hagen was dumbstruck by what had become of it. “The Johnston was a mess,” he later recalled. “There were dead men on the deck and gaping holes from the fourteen-inch shells through which a fat man could have plummeted.” Shrapnel had gashed metal bulkheads and decks like so much tinfoil.

  Amid the hissing of steam and the screaming of men, Orin Vad-nais peered over the side of his forty-millimeter amidships gun tub and saw chunks of solid explosives from a smashed depth charge scattered across the deck. Up out of the giant hole opened by the falling shell popped Harold Beresonsky’s steel-helmeted head. A lit cigarette dangling from his lips, he started throwing chunks of the explosive overboard, casually, like a weekender cleaning up his patio.