The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  Taking a sustained battering from the Johnston’s five-inch gun crews, the second Japanese ship in column, a destroyer, also turned west and fled with the Yahagi. The next three destroyers did the same. Hagen was dumbstruck with joy at the Japanese withdrawal. Evans was too. According to Hagen, “Commander Evans, feeling like the skipper of a battleship, was so elated he could hardly talk. He strutted across his bridge and chortled, ‘Now I’ve seen everything!’”

  Evans and Hagen might have been less amazed had they known the real reason the Japanese column withdrew. It was not the Johnston’s gunnery that drove them off, but the fact that they had finished launching their torpedo attack at the carriers and were turning to reform.

  Still, Captain Evans’s audacious interception of Kimura’s squadron probably encouraged the Japanese skippers to release their famed Long Lance torpedoes at extreme range and from an unfavorable angle astern their fleeing targets. Either Kimura didn’t have the stomach, faced with the Johnston’s tireless gunnery, to close to killing range, or he, like other Japanese commanders, believed his quarry were fast fleet carriers that could not be run down in any event.

  The fog of war was so thick that neither side knew exactly what was happening at any given moment. But it was only the Japanese who were moved to pure fantasy. Somehow Admiral Ugaki on the Yamato acquired the hyperbolic notion that the Tenth Destroyer Squadron’s halfhearted attack had “accomplished the great feat of sinking three carriers, one cruiser, and one destroyer.”

  Thirty-three

  While the Johnston was engaged in her shorthanded duel with the Japanese destroyer squadron, Leon Kintberger, his ship dead in the water far to the north, concluded that the Hoel was finished. The destroyer’s graceful lines had been broken and bent beyond ready recognition. Boxed in by the enemy on three sides, the Hoel had no propulsive power to escape through the box’s open bottom.

  The Kongo lofted ash-can-sized fourteen-inch rounds toward her without thrift or restraint. Having passed the stricken American tin can to the south, the Tone, the Chikuma, the Haguro, and the Chokai blasted salvo after eight-inch salvo toward her. Even the Yamato had caught up to the fight. Recovering from her ten-minute torpedo-bracketed sprint northward, the Center Force flagship lumbered steadily south. When the Hoel appeared, like a sitting duck, at a range of ten thousand yards, Cdr. Toshio Nakagawa opened fire with the Yamato’s 6.1-inch secondary battery. The Japanese battleship’s quartermaster paid the U.S. destroyer a high compliment when he noted at 8:40 A.M., “Cruiser blows up and sinks.”

  The Japanese observer’s perception was somewhat ahead of events. The sea was only now starting to wash over the Hoel’s stern. Rushing into the damaged port side, the water caused a progressively worsening port-side list. The ship had taken more than forty hits of every caliber. Now Kintberger had no choice. At 8:35 he ordered the crew of the Hoel to prepare to abandon ship. Quartermaster Clarence Hood tried to call the order over the PA system, but the circuit was dead. Kintberger told his bridge personnel to descend to the main deck and pass the word to the men.

  Willard Frenn was lucky to be alive. For most of the battle the gunner’s mate first class had stayed at his station in the chief’s mess, awaiting calls for gun repair. When none came, he made himself a few sandwiches, none too confident that the lack of demand for his services meant all was well topside. Having survived the blast of two armor-piercing shells that penetrated his compartment and blew him into a stack of bedding, he climbed topside and was running by the forward deckhouse below Gun 52 to find a lifeboat when he looked up and saw Lt. Bill Sanders. Though his gun director had been blasted out of action long ago, the gunnery officer was still alive, tangled up in the rigging with both of his legs shot off at the knees. Frenn asked if he could help him, and Sanders said no. “The word was to abandon ship,” Frenn recalled.

  Someone finally helped Dick Santos, his feet scalded beyond use, down from his amidships quad-forty mount to the port-side main deck. He saw men filing out of a hatch leading to the engineering space belowdecks. “They were burned beyond belief! God, I remember that so well because when they tried to get out of the hatch, we tried to help lift them out, and their flesh would fall off. It was a blessing that they died almost immediately,” Santos wrote.

  When the abandon ship order reached Gun 51’s ammunition handling room, the crew exited through the chief’s quarters, sloshed through the flooded mess hall, and climbed a ladder to the starboard side. Seaman Paul Miranda opened the hatch to the main deck and felt the heavy slump of a body falling against his shoulder. It was the ship’s doctor, Lt. Louis Streuter. The body slid down the slippery deck and stopped against the port-side rail. Miranda stepped aside to let the crew behind him file out. Looking up, he saw Donald Heinritz, known locally as “Tiny” for his line-of-scrimmage bulk and expansive jocularity. He had given up a football scholarship to the University of Wisconsin and enlisted in the Navy, figuring he’d go help win the war and be home in six months. Now Tiny stood there, like Paul Bunyan incarnate, balancing a load of timbers and mattresses on his lumberman’s back. He was yelling at Miranda to help him shore up the hole in the port side of the hull.

  A fourteen-inch battleship shell, probably from the Kongo, had opened a hole in the waterline big enough to drive a pair of sedans through, one beside the other. Seawater was rushing through it, filling the mess hall. Paul Miranda stood on the ladder getting ready to accompany Tiny belowdecks when another shell struck. It killed most of the men from the handling room and blew Miranda off the ladder. When he got to his feet again, Tiny was gone.

  The flooding mess hall was in flames. Miranda climbed back up the ladder through the smoke and found the hatch to the main deck jammed. Fear gripped him. He pulled at the dogs on the hatch, wrenching the small steel handles until, blessedly, they turned. He walked out on the deck, and when he got there, it occurred to him that he could not swim. He had never before considered the possibility that his home might sink, leaving him alone with the ocean. An eighteen-year-old was right to wonder: on a proven ship like the Hoel, and with a pair of skippers like Commander Thomas and Captain Kintberger in charge, why would a man ever have to swim?

  Miranda stood on the rail of the ship, working up the nerve to jump. The ship shuddered as another Japanese shell hit somewhere, knocking him to the deck. “The next thing I knew, I was lying beside gun number one, and the deck was very hot under me. In one leap I was in the water, scared as hell.”

  Radioman John Oracz exited the radio shack, following another radioman out the hatch. The sharp flash and blast of a shell propelled Oracz into unconsciousness. When he awoke, he was back in the radio compartment, bloody but only slightly wounded. The other radioman was gone. In the silence that followed the blast, he realized he was disoriented, lost in a labyrinth of smoke. He felt himself struggling to breathe as he rose to his feet and groped his way to the interior ladder leading from the bridge to the deck. The ladder was twisted away from the bulkhead, dangling. Looking forward, Oracz could see that the bow of the ship had risen slightly out of the water. Astern, the port side of the quarterdeck was awash. He saw the ship’s doctor come out of a hatch on deck just ahead of him. “I could see that he was seriously wounded in his right side and right leg, and he was bleeding severely. He could just barely walk, and as he did, he lost footing and slid down the deck to the port side.… I never saw him again.”

  As planes from Taffy 2 and Taffy 3 strafe and bomb Kurita, the end nears for the Hoel, dead in the water as the Japanese close in. The escort carrier Gambier Bay is hit too, loses steam, and drops out of formation. Sprague orders his destroyer screen to intercept cruisers looming on his port quarter. The Haruna, ranging out to the southeast, opens fire on Taffy 2.

  Bud Walton, the chief radio technician, was vaguely aware that the crowd of sailors that had gathered with him on the bridge was gone. The men—the plotting room crew and assorted gunners and fire-controlmen and men from the CIC—were cut down and scattered by the major-ca
liber explosion. A large piece of metal had hit him; he felt as if he had been stomped in the chest by a mule. “The ship was listing severely to port and it became impossible, due to the accumulation of debris and dead and injured, to walk.” He moved to the starboard side, where the smoke from the burning magazines was so dense that he could not see the water. “I dove over the side. It seemed to be ages before I hit the water.”

  Working the plotting table when the abandon ship order came, Everett Lindorff was the last man to get out of the Hoel’s CIC. That meant he would live. The explosion that killed all the men ahead of him only knocked him cold.

  When I woke up, I was still in the CIC trying to gather my wits as to what had happened. I remembered the ship was sinking, and I didn’t know how long I was lying there. So I crawled out the hatch and down the passageway over many more bodies to the outside main deck. The first thing I saw was more bodies and smoke and fire. I saw about six men trying to lower the motor whaleboat, and I wondered why because I could see holes all the way through it. In the next minute or two there was an explosion, and the men were gone. I started aft, then a shell hit the forty-millimeter ammo and depth charges. I could hear the ammo going off, then a hatch opened and two men from the engine room came out, took a few steps, and were cut down by shrapnel. I backed up against the superstructure and looked up at the bridge. There was the captain leaning on the rail looking back, just as calm as if nothing were happening. Then a large hole opened in the superstructure just a few feet from me, and about the same time I saw someone jump over the side, so I decided it was time for me to go.

  Bob Wilson’s only impressions of the action derived from sound and feel: the bucking of the ship when the Hoel’s guns fired, the change in inertia when the ship turned, the sickening yaw and stutter-step when hits buckled the decks. Stationed in the machine shop belowdecks astern, Wilson had just finished checking the starboard stuffing box, which kept seawater from leaking in around the propeller shaft, and was passing through the after crew’s quarters back to the machine shop when the lights went out. He dogged shut the hatch behind him, and when he turned to continue through the sleeping quarters, there was a flash and the sound of shredding metal. Six feet from where he stood a shell pierced the starboard bulkhead and exited to port. Wilson survived only because the armor-piercing round did not explode. He was knocked flat to the deck, buried in bedding. “The compartment was filled with the smell of burnt gunpowder, and except for a little light from the hatch and some that came through the holes left by the shell, it was quite dark.”

  Lightly wounded by shrapnel, Wilson dug himself out from under the bunks and went topside, where he joined a group of men huddled beside the sheltering hulk of Gun 55, disabled earlier. Off both sides of the Hoel Wilson could see the sleek dark forms of Japanese ships flashing and roaring. Their salvos screamed in fast, ripping the humid air at flat angles to the sea. At this close range, their freight-train roar was more densely pitched than when the shells were dropping lazily down, fired from extended range. All around the ship Wilson saw slicks of varicolored dye spread out in the water where shells had burst. One hit the fantail, destroying a twenty-millimeter gun tub.

  There were quite a few of us by the gun mount, which at that time was out of action. Several were wounded, and some of the gun crews who were killed when the gun was put out of action were lying on the deck by the gun mount. It seemed like I was there only a short time when someone gathered a group of us together to go forward to help out. Just as we reached the vicinity of the galley, some shells hit the ship in that area. I have no idea what happened to the other guys that I was with.

  His skull fractured, Wilson was dimly aware of men running past him. “Somehow I knew they were abandoning the ship and that I had to get myself over the side. I also found that I had no real control of my left arm or leg, and I couldn’t get my feet to walk,” he later wrote.

  “I crawled forward past the passageway between the bridge structure and the deckhouse where a group of guys had been killed and many others severely wounded by a direct hit, and on up to the wardroom area, where I was finally able to get over the side.”

  Lt. Jack Creamer, the assistant gunnery officer, exited the plotting room with a chief petty officer named Hickman, crawling through ventilation ducts part of the way to get topside. He tried to reach the bridge, but the superstructure was such a twisted wreck of metal that there was no clear route up. He and warrant officer Louis Stillwell spent their last moments aboard the Hoel walking down the starboard side, helping survivors get into life jackets and over the side into the water. All around the ship clusters of heads bobbed, survivors riding the slow, rolling swells. Creamer watched numbly as a Japanese salvo struck the sea a few hundred feet to starboard, right in the middle of a big gathering of wounded survivors. “We lost many of our shipmates to that one salvo,” he later recalled. “Mr. Stillwell and I went to the port side, assisted the few still there, and abandoned ship, port-side amidships.”

  Francis Hostrander was the last one up the ladder out of the forward fireroom. One boiler was still working, but steam has no use when it has nowhere to go. Hostrander and his fellow snipes were among the first to know that the ship was dead in the water. They didn’t need reminding to abandon ship. Hostrander shimmied up the ladder to the port side. He walked forward over a deck slippery with blood, through an open-air grave of mangled bodies and body parts. He saw a Japanese heavy cruiser shooting point-blank into the ship. An eight-inch shell struck at the waterline, about ten feet from where Hostrander was standing, bringing a blinding white flash of electric light. Though the engine room was out of action, evidently a generator was still working. It had 440 volts and no place to send it. The cruiser put an end to that problem.

  When Hugh Coffelt’s aft forty-millimeter gun lost power, he and his crew were ordered down to the main deck to look after the wounded. He made it down from the gun tub to the port-side deck in two jumps, then went forward and bandaged a few men injured by shrapnel and the machine guns of a Japanese floatplane that had strafed the ship. Running to sick bay to get a supply of morphine, he looked aft and saw a man jogging down the deck take a direct hit and dissolve into a red mess. Shells were hitting all around Coffelt. He slipped and fell in a blood slick, recovered, turned, and ran aft down the starboard side of the ship. Surviving a running naval battle was all stupid luck anyway; a man might as well do what a man had to do.

  On that side I had a chance to see so many more of the men dead, lying on the deck, some of them only half there. I went back to the fantail. There were more men dead and half dead. I stepped into the water, as it was coming over the deck already, and I swam as quickly as I could away from the ship. I stopped just for a bit, looked back, and saw shells hitting in the place where I had just been standing.

  From the bridge, Captain Kintberger had a hazy view of the battle as it passed him by, running south. The escort carrier closest to the Hoel, the Gambier Bay, intermittently visible through the black and gray smoke, was listing hard to port, with shell splashes striking up the waters all around her. According to Lieutenant Dix, “That was the last we saw of friendly ships.”

  Friendly ships would soon see the last of Captain Kintberger’s hard-charging destroyer. Through the squalls Captain Copeland spotted the Hoel. There wasn’t much left of her. Listing severely to port, motionless in the water, the ship was a pile of wreckage. Her bridge had collapsed on itself, her mast was gone, and the amidships torpedo mounts had been blown off the ship. Fires were raging astern, and smoke and steam were pouring from unseen spaces be-lowdecks. Her stacks were cut through with holes of all sizes. Lifeboats were splintered and dangling from their davits. Guns were twisted down like crazy straws, bent in or pulled from the deck by their wire roots. From his position in Gun 41, one of the Roberts’s forward forties, Jack Yusen, numb from the concussion of the forward five-inch gun right next to him, couldn’t even tell that the Hoel was a Fletcher-class destroyer. Its silhouette had been ma
ngled and reformed into a grotesque approximation of a warship.

  For the Roberts’s skipper, encountering the Hoel in her final minutes was “one of those disheartening things … that puts a lump in your throat.”

  We had to pass her by and leave her lying there dead in the water with a big list on her. She was on fire. We could see men scrambling around launching life rafts. We just had to steam by. In combat you have to leave the wounded behind whether they are men or ships and go on your way and fight. Nevertheless, it was something that made every man on our topside feel the same as I did, and it bothered us to leave those men at the mercy of the Japs, but there was no other choice.

  Thirty-four

  By 8:40 the Samuel B. Roberts was speeding toward the cruisers closing on the carrier formation’s port quarter. When Lt. Verling Pierson on the Fanshaw Bay spied the destroyer escort crossing astern his CVE, racing toward the Japanese ships, he turned to an officer standing next to him and said, “Look at that little DE committing suicide.”

  In a loose column with the Johnston and the Heermann, the Roberts steamed south, the three ships cutting in and out of one another’s smoke. Whenever one rode the port-side flank nearest the enemy, the other two remained concealed in the exposed ship’s smoke, which was generously blown over them by the easterly wind.

  In all likelihood, this apparent tactical improvision was the accidental by-product of their independent zigzag courses. None of the ships’ action reports suggests a coordinated advance. Bob Copeland, however, perceived deliberate maneuvering in the haphazard dance.