The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  Archer kept his course toward the battleship. He opened his bomb bay doors for show, hoping to persuade the dreadnought to veer from its course. Then, as he began to pull up over the ship, Archer rolled his Avenger over on its back and took his .38-caliber service revolver from its holster.

  Running on anger born of pain and not a little adrenaline, he squeezed the trigger repeatedly, sending six rounds into the dark superstructure of the battleship. As he flew over the warship, Archer noticed that the Japanese gunners had stopped firing at him. The Arkansan swears he saw the faces of Japanese bridge personnel staring up at him in bewilderment. He surmised then, and believes to this day, that the Japanese saw him and, seeing his narrow facial lines, goatee, and squinting appearance, took him for a Japanese pilot flying a captured plane and mistook his pistol shots for signals of some kind.

  Archer loitered over the enemy fleet for thirty more minutes, reporting their movements over the open frequency to the air officer on the Kalinin Bay before flying to Tacloban and landing at Lieutenant Worrad’s airstrip.

  Thirty

  For Captain Hathaway, conning the Heermann through the cantering herd of CVEs amid heavy smoke, spray, and fog en route to joining the torpedo run had been no minor adventure. The Heermann had nearly collided with the Roberts and the Hoel on the way to attack. Now that his destroyer was clear of the carriers, navigation was the least of his troubles. The sea all around the ship boiled with enemy salvos.

  When the nearest Japanese ship, a Tone-class heavy cruiser, was just nine thousand yards away, Hathaway ordered a half salvo of five torpedoes fired at her. With the tubes trained per executive officer Lt. Bill Carver’s coordinates, chief torpedoman Arthur Owens ordered mount number one to fire her five fish. But when the command went out—“Fire one … Fire two”— the tube trainer on the second torpedo mount got excited and fired two of the five torpedoes he was supposed to be reserving for a second attack. Before the mount captain could stop him, they jumped out and ran parallel to their counterparts, leaving only three torpedoes for the second launch. The Heermann’s seven torpedoes left the ship cleanly, hot, straight, and normal.

  Though Bill Carver reported over the sound-powered phones four large contacts, giving their range off the port bow, Harold Whitney, the Heermann’s chief yeoman, couldn’t see them. No one could as yet: “It was an odd day—one moment the sun was shining and the sky seemed clear as a bell, and the next moment you were in a rain-squall and it was dark as night. The rain blotted out our radar, and we had no way of knowing how close we were to the battleships.” Suddenly the Heermann emerged from a squall, and all too clearly, dead ahead, lay the four largest ships Kurita had. Lt. Bill Meadors, the gunnery officer, could see two Kongo-class battleships advancing in column. Beyond them, looming in the haze, were two ships that looked even bigger. Whitney figured the Heermann would be sunk on the spot. The bigger ships, however, seemed to be having trouble targeting the small destroyer at close range.

  Lieutenant Meadors had the Haruna square in the sights of his director scope. He could see the battleship’s four double-barrel fourteen-inch main turrets, housing rifles fifty-four feet long, turned out to starboard in a frightening array. Flashes and smoke seemed to swallow the ship each time it fired. First the front and back turrets fired, and four shells screamed overhead at mast level, hitting the ocean a thousand yards beyond the destroyer. Then the two high-mounted turrets let go. The Heermann madly returned fire all along. Lieutenant Meadors had the firing key closed, which caused the guns to discharge as soon as their projectile trays were rammed into the breech. Another roar came from the Haruna, a full broadside, and the battleship’s four turrets, flashing as one, “illuminated the entire ocean on our starboard hand,” Meadors wrote. The eight heavy rounds screamed overhead and missed.

  Salvos from the Haruna and three other battleships raised walls of water all around the ship. The colorful towers blotted out the blue and gray skies. Watching the near misses bracketing his ship and cascading over his superstructure made Amos Hathaway “wish [he] had a periscope with which to see over the wall of water.” “Everything looked rosy,” he would write, “but only because the splashes were colored red by the dye loads.”

  The Haruna’s gunnery officer, Cdr. Masao Gondaira, saw the sleek lines of his antagonist and believed he was dueling a heavy cruiser. Harold Whitney had fewer illusions as he played a pointless game of hide-and-seek with the inbound bombardment: “The guns of the leading Jap blazed, and I could see three little dots, looking like rusty spots in the sky, coming directly at me. The little rusty spots came on, and I ducked behind the wing of the bridge, a little thin piece of metal that wouldn’t stop a. 45-caliber pistol slug.” The first salvos missed, slapping the sea in a ladder pattern three hundred yards long. Whitney looked up and saw that the ship’s signal halyards had been cut in two and the rangefinder had been lopped off. As he was looking up, something smaller hit them—a small shell or maybe some shrapnel—and wooden splinters flew, the remnants of the motor whaleboat blown from its davits.

  Lieutenant Meadors’s five main battery crews fired some 260 shells at the battleship. From close range, four to eight thousand yards away, Meadors watched his shells explode all along the ship’s menacing form. It was anyone’s guess what damage the fifty-four-pound rounds did to the armored giant. Judging by the smoke and flame that wreathed the battlewagon’s towering superstructure, it was reasonable to think the destroyer was giving back a little bit of the hell that had engulfed the bridges of the Johnston and the Hoel shortly before. From what Meadors could see, the effect was considerable. About four minutes went by during which the Haruna lay broadside to the destroyer but did not fire at all.

  While all this was happening, the Heermann’s seven torpedoes bubbled on their course. The last three had been fired without the aid of mechanical rangefinding. Whitney took ranges from the surface radar and relayed them to Owens, who calmly turned the dials on the torpedo mount. With a sudden release of compressed air, the torpedoes were on their way.

  It took less than ten minutes for Hathaway’s destroyer to fire seven torpedoes at a heavy cruiser, change course toward the battleship line, engage the lead vessel with main batteries, fire three more torpedoes, and turn to speed away. Few warships in history had ever spent ten minutes more productively. At 8:03 Hathaway returned to the pilothouse from the open-air bridge and raised Ziggy Sprague on the TBS radio. His message was remarkable for its professional nonchalance: “My exercise is completed. Over.” Hathaway wondered at his own choice of words until he recognized his instinct that the Japanese might be eavesdropping on the circuit, in which event there was no need to inform them that his ship had fired the last of its torpedoes.

  Shortly thereafter, as if to reward Amos Townsend Hathaway for his brio and dash—the only destroyer captain in history to engage directly four battleships supported by heavy cruisers and live to tell the tale—a cloud of black smoke boiled up near the stern of the Haruna, beneath its hindmost fourteen-inch turret. The visual evidence was followed closely by a deep blast rumbling across the water. A torpedo from the Heermann’s final spread of three appeared to have scored.

  Ironically, however, it may have been the first fan of torpedoes, all seven of which seemed to miss, that did Ziggy Sprague the most good. They sizzled off to the north, missing their intended target, the cruiser. Continuing on, they approached the battleship Yamato. At 7:56 a lookout on Kurita’s flagship signaled the warning, “WATCH OUT FOR TORPEDO TRACKS.” Then the Nagato spotted three tracks approaching to starboard. Duly warned, the vessel’s commander, Adm. Yuji Kobe, ordered a hard turn to port. As the wakes of the torpedoes passed alongside the Nagato to starboard, the battleship opened fire on a “cruiser”—probably the Heermann— at a close range of 9,400 yards.

  All of a sudden two more torpedoes were seen approaching the Yamato to port. The helmsman turned her rudder hard over to port, putting the superbattleship on a northward course, away from its quarry, so as
to present the smallest possible profile to the torpedoes. It was a panicked decision. Admiral Ugaki should have turned toward the torpedoes, combing their tracks in pursuit rather than in retreat. For ten decisive minutes—“it felt like a month to me,” wrote Ugaki—the parallel spreads hemmed in the great ship, pinning her into an outbound course.

  The instinct for survival demonstrated by the Yamato’s commander seemed to put the lie to any notion that the Center Force was on a one-way mission, driven by the “heavenly guidance” that Admiral Toyoda had invoked from Combined Fleet Headquarters. At the moment of decision the officers of the Yamato succumbed to the universal impulse to save their ship. They held the course north until the torpedoes’ alcohol reservoirs burned dry. By the time the undersea missiles ceased their pursuit, disappearing into the four-thousand-fathom depths of the Philippine Trench, Ugaki had taken the Yamato’s sixty-nine-foot-long guns, and the Center Force’s brain trust, clear out of the battle. In the engagement’s first minute, Kurita had forfeited control of his fleet by ordering a hurried general attack. Now, having fallen back more than thirty thousand yards from the fleeing escort carriers, he lost what limited ability he retained to command and direct his force.

  Torpedoes from the destroyer Heermann chase the battleship Yamato northward, taking Admiral Kurita’s flagship out of the battle at a critical moment. Meanwhile, Japanese heavy cruisers, led by the Tone and the Chikuma, press down on the escort carrier formation. The Samuel B. Roberts fires her torpedoes. Cdr. Amos Hathaway’s Heermann, still not hit, engages enemy battleships and heavy cruisers at close range.

  * * *

  AT 7:50 A.M., AS Admiral Stump’s Taffy 2 carriers were launching the last of their first air strike in support of Taffy 3—a raid comprising fifteen Avengers and twenty Wildcats—Admiral Sprague radioed to his destroyer escorts, “All small boys go in and launch torpedo attack.” The Johnston and the Hoel had already passed into harm’s way and launched their fish; the Roberts and the Heermann were at that moment only minutes away from releasing theirs. The new order sprang the Dennis and the Raymond into action. The John C. Butler, laying smoke on the far southern side of the formation, was out of position to intercept the speeding enemy cruisers.

  It was preposterous to send a destroyer escort against an enemy’s main surface fleet. They didn’t do it on paper at the Naval War College, and it had not happened in the whole course of the war leading up to October 25. As the Dennis and the Raymond sortied, Bob Copeland’s ship was fighting like a true hunter-killer, bidding to take down a heavy cruiser on the open sea. The Hoel had fired two salvos of five torpedoes each. The Heermann had fired seven, then three. If Copeland was lucky, the Samuel B. Roberts would soon be in position to fire her single salvo of three.

  In a quieter time, in Hawaii, before the ship’s departure for the far reaches of the western Pacific combat zone, the admiral who commanded U.S. destroyer forces in the Pacific had informed Copeland that he had recommended replacing the Roberts’s torpedo tubes with a new forty-millimeter gun mount. Copeland had surprised even himself with the tenor of his refusal: “Admiral, someday somebody is going to forget we’re boys and send us over to do a man’s work. If I’m ever sent to do a man’s work, I want a man’s weapons.” Then Copeland smiled a little. “Admiral, as far as my ship is concerned, the torpedo tubes will be removed over my dead body.” Due either to Copeland’s persuasive skills or to lack of follow-through by the bureaucracy, the Samuel B. Roberts left Pearl Harbor with her one triple torpedo mount in place.

  Now her captain had a chance to do what no destroyer escort had done before and actually use them against an enemy heavy.

  Copeland was glad he hadn’t wasted precious time trying to form up with the other DEs on the far side of Taffy 3’s ring formation. Like Captains Evans, Kintberger, and Hathaway before him, Copeland knew that his first and only chance to stagger a larger foe depended on his performance now.

  As the Roberts closed on the cruiser line, Lt. Bill Burton, Copeland’s gun boss, was anxious to open fire with his two five-inch guns. Burton’s two gun crews were primed and ready. But there were still about thirteen thousand yards of ocean between the Roberts and her target, a sleek heavy cruiser, probably the Chokai, steaming off the starboard bow. Every few minutes he asked, “Captain, may I open fire?” His skipper thought he had “ants in his pants.” Copeland didn’t want to waste valuable five-inch ammunition at extended range, where aim was dicey and hitting power diminished. He wanted to get closer, and so far, so good. He doubted the Japanese ship had yet spotted him. The sea through which the little ship charged was wreathed in smoke from the destroyers that had attacked ahead of her. Though numerous targets presented themselves, Copeland denied Burton’s request to open fire. The gunnery officer kept the requests coming until finally Copeland shouted, “God damn it, Mr. Burton, I’ll let you know when you may open fire!”

  Through smoke that was thick but intermittent, Copeland’s visibility alternated between about five miles and zero. On the radar scope’s PPI screen, he could see the two green-white slivers of the American destroyers running south toward him. Aided by the scope, he had little risk of a collision, poor visibility or none. The torpedo attack was in excellent hands; Bob Roberts was lining it up. The exec wanted to close to five thousand yards and launch the three fish on a high-speed, forty-five-knot setting. At that speed, and from that range, the torpedoes would be difficult for the target cruiser to spot and avoid. Seated on the triple torpedo mount, chief torpedoman Rudy Skau had his speed-setting wrench in hand, preparing to match his aiming pointers to the coordinates relayed by the exec.

  Suddenly there was a windy, ripping rush and a crash of metal as a Japanese shell passed through the Roberts’s rigging. The shell severed the radio antenna, and a large section of it, carrying a mass of dangling wires, fell down across the deck, whipping over Skau’s hand, nearly breaking it, and knocking the wrench into the water before the adjustments could be made. The torpedoes lay in their tubes, still set on intermediate speed. A spare wrench was kept down in the torpedo shack, but Roberts and Skau both knew there was no time to fetch it.

  As the Samuel B. Roberts closed with its target, Bob Roberts reran the firing solution in his head: the enemy’s course and speed, and its range and bearing off the bow, determined the torpedo speed, deflection, and gyro setting. The variables were complex, and over the long course of a three-mile range to target, even a small error could become magnified into a gross inaccuracy. But the exec, quick with calculations, managed his best guess and shouted the tube train settings down to Chief Skau.

  The Chokai was unleashing withering fire from her forward eight-inch batteries. But her gunners were not targeting the Roberts. They either did not see or did not care about the small ship with the low silhouette. No shells landed near her, though the shells arcing high overhead toward the carriers—or perhaps it was the blasts of the gun muzzles themselves—buffeted the destroyer escort with their turbulence.

  Time seemed to stop, yet before Copeland knew it, the Roberts was just four thousand yards from the cruiser line, a little over two miles, and his three torpedoes were waterborne, racing toward the cruisers on Bob Roberts’s improvised firing solution. On the broad ocean’s surface four thousand yards was point-blank range.

  Copeland, his ship as yet unscathed, ordered a hard left rudder, turning the Roberts back through her own smoke and toward the carriers. Down below, Lieutenant Trowbridge brought every pound of steam pressure on line. The deck shook from the twin turbines’ whining, roaring labors. The ship ran past its rated limits, to twenty-eight and a half knots and possibly beyond. As time ran down on the torpedo run—three or four minutes—Copeland indulged himself with a peek astern. Through a gap in the smoke, he was treated to the sight of a steaming column of water and flame rising from below the after mast of what he took for an Ao fez-class cruiser. Possibly it was the Chokai. As the Samuel B. Roberts raced back to her station to lay smoke by the carriers, Copeland he
ard someone yell, “We got her!” A cheer went up from all hands on deck, as if someone had hit a late-inning homer.

  * * *

  FROM HIS GUN DIRECTOR, Bob Hagen looked forward over the Johnston’s starboard bow and was shocked to see an American destroyer on a collision course. It was the Heermann. The destroyer emerged from a smoke screen heading straight at Evans’s ship, just two hundred yards away. Evans shouted, “All engines back full!” Ed DiGardi ran to the pilothouse and pulled “back full” on the engine room telegraph and ordered a left full rudder. The Johnston’s riddled hull shuddered as its one working propeller bit into the water. The Heermann did the same with her twin screws.

  Stationed on the depth charge racks on the Johnston’s fantail, Bob Deal was nearly pitched over the side from the sudden change in momentum: “Our stern dug deep into the sea, and the ocean boiled over the after deck.” As water engulfed the destroyer’s fantail, the Heermann was so close—less than ten feet—that someone could have hurdled over to the other ship’s deck. Crewmen watching let out a roar of celebration as the ships backed down. Several crew on the Johnston’s deck at this point saw the wakes of three torpedoes passing silently below the surface, narrowly missing the ship. The two ships formed up momentarily into column—the Heermann would outrace the damaged Johnston quickly enough—and headed south astern the carriers.

  At some point between 8:08 and 8:24 the Heermann was firing its main batteries at targets to starboard when chief yeoman Harold Whitney, Captain Hathaway’s talker, heard over his headset an excited shout from a port-side lookout. Appearing unexpectedly out of the smoke and haze came a destroyer. From the starboard bridge wing, Whitney looked across his ship’s narrow beam and saw the tin can steaming close alongside to port. Walking over to take a closer look, he saw the sharp rising prow, the blocky superstructure, the twin main gun mount, and the foreign dress of a sailor scurrying around pointing at the American destroyer, and he realized the ship was Japanese. “I could have thrown a potato and hit that kid running around there,” Whitney said.