The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  The battle was nearly two hours old when the Roberts took her first hits. With the destruction of her forward boiler, the Roberts slowed from nearly thirty knots to seventeen. Lieutenant Trow-bridge’s snipes cross-connected the number-two fireroom to both engine rooms to keep the screws turning, but the ship no longer had the power to maneuver aggressively enough to chase salvos. At the helm quartermaster third class Elbert Gentry seemed unable to process Bob Copeland’s commands. “Mr. Roberts,” Copeland asked, “would you please take the wheel and get this ship out on the heading that I am trying to get to?” The exec took the helm from the shell-shocked quartermaster as Copeland tried gamely to take the ship south toward the carrier formation.

  The shells from the heavy cruiser cut the power to many stations on the ship—Paul Carr’s five-inch gun among them. Gun 52 still fired, but with the power out, certain systems critical to the mount’s safe operation no longer worked, including the automatic gas ejection system that puffed air into the breech after each shell fired, clearing it of hot gases. When that system failed, the gases stayed inside and gun number two’s breech grew hotter with every salvo. George Bray, assigned to repair party number three, relieved a man in Gun 52’s handling room who had dropped from the exhaustion and the heat. Bray’s football prowess kept him in good shape, and he and the five other men in the compartment kept a steady supply of fifty-four-pound, twenty-one-inch-long projectiles loaded into the hoist. The men from the magazine one deck below passed ammunition up to him, and Bray dropped each shell into the hoist, nose down into its funnel-shaped housing. He’d close the hatch on the hoist, and there followed an electrohydraulic shriek as one hoist carried the live round up and the empty one cycled back down to the handling room.

  Carr and his superb crew in Gun 52 were in their rhythm, grabbing powder cases out of the slot, laying them in the breech, picking the projectiles off the hoist, sliding them in ahead of the powder case, ramming shut the breech, firing the gun, kicking the spent case out the hole down onto the deck, and starting the sequence again. When the power went out, they rammed the tray into the breech by hand. When the air ejection system broke down a few minutes after that, Carr and his men got off seven or eight more shots before the inevitable happened.

  In the lower handling room two decks below the gun, George Bray heard a deep, percussive bfff, like a big paddle smacking a mattress. There was shouting and sounds of men in pain. A shell had cooked off in the breech, detonated by contact with the overheated tray in which it sat. Burning gunpowder sprayed out of the barrel, setting part of the fantail afire. But most of the damage stayed inside the mount. The blast killed most of Carr’s gun mount team immediately with a pressure wave that blew a tongue of flame down into the handling room beneath the turret.

  In the gun mount itself, there were some lucky souls. When the shell cooked off, seaman second class Sam Blue had been standing by the mount’s open side door, half inside and half out. The explosion propelled him, unconscious, a fair distance out into the water. He hit the surface hard enough to trigger the CO2 cartridge on his inflatable life belt. Bill Stovall was blasted off the ship too, but not before inhaling a lungful of flames and superheated air that left him screaming in the water.

  Little Sammy—the fifteen-pound, short-haired, mixed-breed mascot of the Roberts, the Norfolk mutt turned honorary water tender—had grown smart in the ways of ships. He could run up and down the steep ladders and find safe places to ride out the long rolls in typhoons. He was afraid of the roar down in the fireroom and had an uneasy relationship with the ship’s two five-inch gun turrets. But the dog had never before seen the likes of the pulverizing rain of shellfire now smashing his ship all around him. The explosions and their bloody effects sent Sammy into a fit. “I felt sorry for him,” Copeland wrote. “He was running up and down the deck with all the guns firing and the men he knew lying dead in blood and gore. He actually went off his beam.”

  On the bridge, Copeland felt the ship shake hard as another shell struck the heavy base of the forty-millimeter mount astern. Another tore into the deckhouse to which the mount was bolted. Looking back, the skipper caught a glimpse of the bodies of men from the gun and the Mark 51 director mount hurtling through the air. As the wind shoved aside a cloud of white smoke, which drifted heavily across the fantail, Copeland discovered that the explosion had blown away the entire machine-gun mount and with it assistant gunnery officer Lt. (jg) John LeClercq and twelve crewmen. No traces of the men or the large steel mount were ever seen again.

  The deck leading forward to the ship’s triple-torpedo mount lay torn away, twisted and sagging. Another concussion came as Lieutenant Trowbridge’s number-one engine room took a direct hit. Normally the eight-inch armor-piercing rounds punched through the hull spaces without detonating. This one hit an I-beam supporting a large switchboard panel and exploded. The ensuing fireball left only one survivor there, a fireman named Herman Metzger.

  With one screw disabled, the Roberts had no more speed than an escort carrier and a lot less maneuverability. Lt. Bob Roberts did his best to carry the ship through the deadly gauntlet, but its miraculous dry sprint through a driving rain had come to an end. The gunners on the Kongo never relented. Now they took advantage of the wounded ship’s critical loss of speed. Three massive shells from the Japanese battleship screamed downward, struck aft, and exploded.

  A thunderous blast knocked down everyone on the bridge except Charles Cronin, a yeoman second class who happened to be holding on to the levers of the engine order telegraph. To Copeland, “it seemed as if the whole ship went out from under us.” From the force involved he guessed that the Japanese had finally wised up and loaded high-explosive rounds. Thrown from the steps leading from the open-air bridge to the pilothouse, the skipper slammed into a pile with Lieutenant Roberts and Elbert Gentry. The quartermaster lifted himself up, bleeding from the mouth, missing a tooth. As Copeland dusted himself off, he looked around and felt an insane impulse to laugh at the sight of several of his talkers sprawled across the grating of the bridge wing with their big headsets knocked askew and entangled in a ludicrous mess of wires. Amazingly, no one there was hurt. But Copeland’s mood sobered when it dawned on him that his ship was no longer moving. Looking forward from the bridge, he might have wondered why.

  As far as I could see, the ship was as nice as the day she left the shipyard because the damage had been down below deck, but from the stack aft she was a pretty sorry-looking sight. There were two twenty-millimeter gun tubs, number six and number eight, with parts of human bodies hanging out of them; and there was the deck of the deckhouse warped back like a piece of linoleum ripped up and from there on aft nothing but a yawning mass of blackened metal as the various thwartships and fore and aft bulkheads had been twisted together and the deck ripped off where that gun had disappeared.

  There was no denying the mortal wound the Roberts had taken. At the waterline, about two-thirds of the way to the stern on the port side, gaped a cavernous hole seven to ten feet high and some fifty feet long. The massive opening would have neatly garaged a semitrailer parked sideways. The number-two engine room was completely demolished. When the after fuel-oil tanks ruptured, they threw flaming oil everywhere. The starboard “K-gun” depth-charge launcher was hanging over the side, and tar was oozing onto the deck from ruptured depth charges.

  As if to remind the skipper that life could get worse, a torpedo wake came bubbling in to starboard. There was no way to avoid it. As the faint white wake came straight on amidships, Copeland gripped the edge of the bridge wing and screamed, his voice cracking, “Stand by for tor—!” But one last miracle remained, it seemed. The torpedo passed just under the destroyer escort’s keel, missing, by the captain’s estimation, by no more than a foot.

  Belowdecks the men still had a chance. In the aft lower handling room, George Bray’s world had gone dark. He fumbled through the void, looking for a way out. He circled back through the after steering room and heard water rushing in from som
ewhere. Suddenly, through an open hatch forward, water came swirling all around him. In the torrent, mattresses floated by, like rafts on the inflow, and empty shell cases too. The flow was strong enough to carry away Bray’s life belt and left shoe. He hung on to some cables to steady himself.

  Around this time Bob Copeland got his last look at the USS Johnston. When Ernest Evans’s destroyer passed close by the Roberts, and in the midst of his own ruin, Copeland was heartbroken to see up close what had become of the proud tin can. The image of the battered ship stayed with him for the rest of his life.

  I can see her right now. She had taken a terrific beating. Her bridge was battered and had been abandoned. Her foremast, a steel tubular mast, coming up just abaft of the bridge superstructure, had been split from shellfre and then bent down over itself….

  It gave me a hurt feeling to look at it. Her searchlights had been knocked off. One torpedo mount was gone, and her number-three gun had completely disappeared. As she went by—limping along at a pretty slow speed—I saw her captain. He was a very big man with coal-black hair; his name was Evans. I had met him at some of those conferences. He was standing on the fantail conning his ship by calling down through an open scuttle hatch into the steering engine room. I can see him now. He was stripped to the waist and was covered with blood. His left hand was wrapped in a handkerchief….

  As he went by—he wasn’t over a hundred feet from us as he passed us on our starboard side—he turned a little and waved his hand at me. That’s the last I saw of him.

  * * *

  BOB COPELAND WAS STRUGGLING with a decision he had not wanted to make until the grotesque reality of his warship’s condition thrust it upon him: should he give the order to abandon ship? He was frankly in awe of the Sammy B.’s ruggedness under duress. The Bureau of Ships and the folks at Brown Shipyard really knew their trade. Lloyd Gurnett showed up on the bridge covered in the remains of shell-blasted asbestos lagging. As first lieutenant, he knew his ship’s compartments and passageways and ladders and bulkheads intimately. On those raw scores, the Samuel B. Roberts had little left to offer the U.S. Navy. Gurnett told Copeland that the ship was settling by the stern. The starboard list was tipping the inclinometer at eleven degrees, he said. Both engine rooms were out of action, all communications and power gone. The only unanswered question pertained to the condition of the ship’s main gun batteries. Could they still shoot at the enemy, and was there anything left in the magazines to shoot at them? Jack Moore was ordered forward to check on Gun 51, and Tom Stevenson was sent aft to appraise Paul Carr’s group.

  Stevenson didn’t want to do it. He wasn’t sure he could. Ever since the aft forty-millimeter gun was carried off, Tom Stevenson had been terribly shaken up. The young officer in command back there, John LeClercq, had been one of his best friends. Stevenson had spoken with him over the phones during the battle. He was impressed by LeClercq’s calm as the young officer directed the firing of the after guns. He was a good kid and a good destroyerman for the same reason: he was always looking out for someone else. At one point LeClercq had had the presence of mind to train his forty-millimeter mount on a spread of torpedoes bubbling toward Sprague’s carriers. Johnny LeClercq was the very picture of wholesome blond American innocence, considerate of the enlisted men, devoted to the Navy, and meticulous in his duties. He wrote home regularly to his parents in Dallas, signing the letters “Sonny.” Even from a hemisphere away, he never forgot his younger brother’s rites of passage—Bobby’s birthdays, the first days of school. Though the twenty-three-year-old cultivated a superstitious side—he carried a carved wooden skunk for good luck—he kept a realistic attitude toward death. Informed by his mother of the passing of a friend in another theater of battle, he sat down at his desk sixteen days before the destruction of the USS Samuel B. Roberts and wrote this: “I am sorry to hear about H. P. Inge. He was a swell boy, and I guess that war is where brains alone won’t save you, as he would still be going now if it would…. Tell his family—chin up and don’t worry. Everything will be all right in the end.”

  Because he took this latter assertion as an article of faith, death never preoccupied him. He was too busy enjoying life. He seemed to walk through his days on the Samuel B. Roberts as if lit by a sunrise within. “The few things you saw him do and say made you want to know him better,” a friend observed. Two short hours ago Tom Stevenson had shaken LeClercq’s hand, wishing him luck as the general quarters gong scattered the crew to battle stations. Now Johnny, along with so many others, was gone, truly gone, the explosions so powerful as to erase them from the air. Others had died too, but their bodies remained to be counted.

  The communications department boss had encountered death at sea before. Before the war his family earned their keep operating Norwegian-licensed cargo ships out of New York Harbor. The chartered merchantmen of T. J. Stevenson & Co. took a variety of cargoes on their plodding nine-knot cruises up and down the eastern seaboard. They took lumber from St. John, New Brunswick, carried it to Jamaica, and brought sugar cane on the return leg. When he was sixteen Tom Stevenson went to sea, entering the family business as a deckboy. When he left on his first voyage, his mother stuck a big bottle of aftershave lotion in his duffel. On his first night at sea his cabinmate, a fortysomething Norwegian steward who seemed drunk all the time, stole the bottle and drank it. While Stevenson slept, the man rigged a makeshift gallows and hung himself beneath the teenager’s bunk. The following morning the captain gave Stevenson one of his first shipboard duties, ordering him to gather wood from the hold and make a coffin.

  It was all very unsettling, but Stevenson had stayed aboard ship and in short order become a qualified helmsman. After high school he attended Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. One Sunday afternoon during his junior year Stevenson was watching a Redskins football game at Griffith Stadium when suddenly all of the admirals and generals in the crowd were called out of their seats. A war was on, it seemed, although nobody seemed to know exactly where this place, Pearl Harbor, was. Less than two years later, by which time Stevenson was a commissioned officer and a specialist in naval communications, the Samuel B. Roberts was ready for launching in Houston.

  Though Tom Stevenson had joined the Navy well acquainted with death at sea, it did not prepare him for this. Nothing could have. A man hanging himself was one thing. A seagoing slaughterhouse enabled by industrial-age engines of war was quite another. Unlike the armor-piercing rounds that had penetrated earlier without exploding, the high-explosive shells that hit the Roberts now performed exactly as designed.

  Stevenson looked down the ladder from the bridge wing to the deck at the dead whose bodies remained intact. Some of them appeared completely uninjured. There was no blood, no mess. They just lay there on the deck, unscathed, locked into poses that looked ridiculous, somehow vaguely athletic. Down at the foot of the ladder, corpses littered the deck. Stevenson decided he didn’t need to go down there. There was no viable route aft in any event. He could see the deckhouse back there, blasted all apart. The passageways along the rail on either side of it were obstructed by sheets of twisted, blackened metal and bodies of a similar description. The deck was aflame with burning oil and sizzling chunks of depth charge explosives. It was plain enough that Gun 52 was no longer firing, though its barrel still glowed cherry-red.

  Tom Stevenson went back as far as he could, gave an exploratory shout, and getting no encouraging response, reported the grim news to his captain. Gun 51 wasn’t working either. Jack Moore came back and said there were still forty-two rounds left in the magazine, but the gun had been jarred so severely that it no longer rotated on its base.

  The ship was quiet now. The guns did not fire, and the boilers no longer roared. There were no screams anymore, just a peculiar graveyard calm. The silence revealed no new horrors. If Japanese shells were still rushing by overhead, crashing in columns of colorful brine, they failed to make the same impression that they had made two hours before. They didn’t matter now.
The dead were so promiscuous, the damage so profound, that there was no terror left in the shells’ descent.

  Thirty-seven

  In his final moments aboard the Hoel, Captain Kintberger helped Commander Thomas to the rail. The screen commander was severely wounded, with a large section of one arm torn out, from the biceps to mid-forearm. The skipper guided him overboard and jumped. The two officers hit the water and kicked out to steady themselves. Kintberger found a battered life raft whose wooden latticework had been chipped to pieces in the rain of shrapnel. He pulled several Hoel crew from the surrounding water into the raft’s sanctuary. As he went up, over, and in, Thomas gritted his teeth and tried to grin, keeping up appearances. There was a cry from behind them, and George Driscoll was there. Someone grabbed the mortally wounded chief torpedo-man by the shirt and hauled him aboard. The worst off were placed inside the raft, sheltered from the elements and stabilized so they did not have to move. Those without wounds or slightly hurt treaded water alongside, holding on to the raft’s outer shell. Going overboard, Myles Barrett had lost most of his pants when they snagged on a grappling hook. Now he took off his T-shirt and used it to stop Thomas’s bleeding. With his shirt turned into a tourniquet, he was left wearing only his belt, his boxers, and the back pockets of his pants, flapping in the tide.

  Just minutes after the Japanese drew first blood from the Samuel B. Roberts, the USS Hoel rolled over and sank. As her crew turned and watched, the destroyer got it over with quickly, rolling to port and going down by the stern. Her bow rising, a windy sucking sound was heard as water rushed in and forced air out of the lower compartments. Disappearing below the surface in sequence went the bridge, then Gun 52, then Gun 51, then the neatly trimmed bow. The sea swallowed her whole. Kintberger’s raft moved toward the spot where the ship sank, drawn by the inward tug of seawater displaced as the ship passed into the deep. Lieutenant Dix: