The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  Vieweg felt his way aft, looking for the ladder down to the starboard catwalk. In the smoke and steam he missed the ladder altogether and plummeted into a void. The smoke was so black and the heat so intense that the captain, thoroughly disoriented, feared he had fallen right into the main exhaust stack. On a CVE its yawning black chasm was nearly flush with the flight deck. Panicked, Vieweg grabbed the rim of the steel enclosure he lay in and hauled himself out of it. Then he was falling again. He broke into clear air, fell about forty feet to the water, and was nearly choked by the strap on his battle helmet when he plunged in. He surfaced to find the carrier’s ten-thousand-ton bulk rolling to starboard, threatening to come down on top of him. He swam madly toward the stern and cleared the ship by the time it finally turned turtle, exhaled the last of the stale air from its compartments, and entered the formidable depths of the Philippine Sea.

  From the cockpit of his Wildcat, Larry Budnick of the St. Lo’s VC-65 saw a carrier lying there, its keel bared to the sky. Wallowing upside down, the flat-bottomed carrier looked to the aviator like a brand-new flight deck. Strangely, the Japanese ships were still firing into the ruined ship. He had never imagined that this could happen. Carriers, no matter their size, were the queen bees of the fleet. In nearly three years of warfare all across the Pacific, not one had fallen to a hostile surface force’s guns. Budnick watched the Gambier Bay in her final moments and wondered: How many more are going to go? We’re going to lose the whole group.

  Thirty-nine

  Having apparently repelled the Yahagi and her four destroyer consorts only to see them double back and reengage, the Johnston was surrounded by enemy ships. Evans’s hobbled destroyer faced two cruisers to port, two more straight ahead, and several destroyers loitering in the smoke to starboard. Shells from Kimura’s destroyers had demolished the coding room, the chart storage compartment, and radio control. Under the renewed bombardment the forty-millimeter ready service magazine started exploding. Then Gun 52, captained by gunner’s mate third class Donald A. Coleman, took a hit right by the pointer’s seat. Everyone in the mount was either killed or critically wounded. Fires broke out in the magazine below, filling the upper handling room with smoke and making the bridge all but untenable. Inside Gun 55 Clint Carter didn’t know what had happened, but through the sight door he could see damage-control crews struggling to get around the rolling pile of empty brass powder casings around his gun mount.

  Below the port bridge wing, empty shell casings from Gun 52 had piled up so thickly that it could hardly turn without sending the brass cylinders rolling and clattering all over the deck. Men on the antiaircraft guns, having nothing to shoot at, occupied themselves with this minor hazard, slinging the spent shells, still hot to the touch, over the side, when the shell hit. Several of the gun crew were blown out the hatch on the starboard side of the mount. Bill Mercer laid seaman first class Glenn Heriford on the deck along the bulkhead under the wing. “Merc, straighten my leg out,” Heriford said. There was nothing to straighten out. His leg was practically blown off.

  The smoke from the fires forward flowed upward and engulfed the gun director. “The place was full of smoke,” Bob Hagen wrote, “our eyes were streaming, and we were coughing and choking as we carried out our duties. We were now in a position where all the guts and gallantry in the world couldn’t save us…. We knew we could not survive, but we figured that help for the carriers must be on the way, and every minute’s delay might count.”

  Where had everybody gone? Ellsworth Welch wondered as his ship drove under reddened washes of water that hissed into steam on decks made hot by fires raging below. The lieutenant returned to the bridge and found no one there. He noticed that the classified publications were gone. He jogged back to the fantail and found Captain Evans there, relaying his course changes through his talker, Joe Woolf, who shouted down a hatch to the men in the steering engine room. Evans’s only problem seemed to be a shortage of rested crew to keep up with his rapid pace. The work of turning the wheel that drove the rudder pump was backbreaking. Gunners from useless gun mounts and other displaced crew gathered astern to take their turns at the pump wheel. But no sooner would they have the rudder turning one way than Evans would shout “Shift your rudder!” and they would swing it back around.

  Chief boatswain’s mate Clyde Burnett took turns with another big man, John Scheindele, cranking the rudder, then went back topside to help the captain pass orders. Some credit their survival to the erratic course that the manually steered destroyer made. But now the Japanese pressed in close, six to ten thousand yards away, delivering innumerable hits in the long minutes after 9:10 A.M.

  For half an hour, the Johnston had alternated firing between the destroyers to starboard and then the cruisers to port in a futile effort to prevent both from overtaking the carriers. But now the American ship could no longer slow them. Already the Haguro and the Tone, the swiftest heavy cruisers left to the Center Force, were pinching off Taffy 3’s southward flight and threatening to push Sprague’s ships toward the rocky coastline of Samar. The carriers fled west with their smoke screen, helped along by the light northeasterly breeze.

  * * *

  With the Johnston out of the way, Kurita faced a clear path to his mission objective in Leyte Gulf. Having weathered the gallant assault by Admiral Sprague’s screen—having absorbed and mostly shrugged off the thirty-nine torpedoes they had put into the water ahead of him—he was ready to make his long-planned assault on San Pedro Bay. The Heermann was still around somewhere but wouldn’t make much trouble with its ten torpedoes gone. The destroyer escort John C. Butler, unable to form up with its fellow DEs when Sprague ordered them to attack at 7:50, remained on station making smoke astern the carriers. Its three fish would not have done much to stop Kurita in any event. Admiral Stump’s Taffy 2, having already been the target of ranging salvos from the Haruna, would be next on the Center Force’s list of targets: six jeep carriers with their own seven-ship screen of destroyers and destroyer escorts. With Taffy 3’s carriers sunk and unable to help Taffy 2, Stump’s task unit would be all the easier to brush aside.

  But Kurita did not yet enjoy the clear vision of hindsight. He had seen his proudest ships battered and sunk by an American air assault. By continuing south, he would only beg for more of it. His staff had intercepted a message from Capt. Richard F. Whitehead, the Seventh Fleet’s Commander of Support Aircraft, inviting all orphaned jeep carrier pilots to land at Tacloban. Kurita was worried about steaming too close to the aerial striking power that was surely now gathering ashore. His own pleas for air support had gone unanswered. The help he expected from the Imperial Army’s First and Second Air Fleets on Luzon—so central to the planning of the Sho-1 plan to begin with—never came.

  Beneath unguarded skies the mighty Musashi had become a glorified target barge. Lack of air cover had cost Kurita several valuable heavy cruisers, the fastest blades in his rack of swords. He had left Brunei with ten of them, and he was down to six before he ever turned the corner coming out of San Bernardino Strait. Now he had only two. The Chokai, the Chikuma, and the Suzuya had succumbed to the audacious American air attacks. The Kumano was unfit for pursuit after the torpedo hit from the Johnston. Though the morning’s assaults did not come in well-organized waves like those that had struck him the previous afternoon, they were incessant and persistent, like angry hornets. He did not cherish the idea of moving closer to their hive.

  Kurita wasn’t sure how he would re-form and enter Leyte Gulf in any event. The Center Force was strung out and scattered across some thirty miles of ocean. Reassembling into battle formation would take time that he probably did not have. From his expansive flag quarters aboard the Yamato, he did not know what his cruiser skippers knew: that they opposed mere escort carriers, and that they had nearly succeeded in cutting off Sprague’s flight, forcing the Americans toward shore, where they could be encircled and destroyed in passing by the rest of the Center Force. Their transmissions to him had been short and crypt
ic. Wisps of partial knowledge, they had offered little on which to base a well-informed decision.

  Kurita was in no position to know these things for himself. The Yamato’s emergency turn to avoid the Heermann’s torpedoes had taken the flagship northward and largely out of the battle at a critical juncture. The floatplanes he had catapulted to reconnoiter the American force had never been heard from again. Since he did not know what his own task force faced, it is unsurprising that he also did not know that Ozawa’s decoy force had thoroughly succeeded in fooling Halsey. For all Kurita knew, Halsey was right here under his guns. His apparent inability to overtake the American carriers owed itself, he thought, to the fact that they were none other than those of the swift Third Fleet. What other explanation could there be? He had loosed his ships into a general attack, an oceangoing foxhunt rolling over the Pacific swells. He had sought to destroy their flight decks and prevent them from launching planes. In that he had failed.

  These anxieties preyed upon a mind that was thoroughly battle-fatigued. Kurita hadn’t slept in three days, ever since the Atago had been torpedoed out from under him in the Palawan Passage on October 23. Fished from the sea and relocated to the Yamato, he had witnessed on the following afternoon the destruction of Japan’s proudest dreadnought, the Musashi. He had struggled with the decision to withdraw before sunset on the twenty-fourth, then turned around again and by night threaded his large formation through the perilous San Bernardino Strait. The next morning the unexpected windfall of American aircraft carriers coming under his guns further taxed his powers of analysis and command. Now even that coveted prize threatened to elude him, though he had gotten reports claiming that several U.S. flattops, including one of the “Enterprise class,” had been sunk along with two heavy cruisers and some destroyers. But truth was cruelly at variance with Kurita’s weary senses. As an American historian would wryly note, “Outfought by pygmies, he yet thought he had conquered giants.” Now Kurita had to decide whether he should press his luck, gather his scattered force, and enter Leyte Gulf.

  He calculated that the transports he was to sink were, in all likelihood, empty of their valuable cargoes. On the radio he had heard Admiral Kinkaid’s plain-language calls for help. The Seventh Fleet commander’s 8:29 plea—“My situation is critical. Fast battleships and support by air strike may be able prevent enemy from destroying [escort carriers] and entering Leyte”— had been retransmitted by Allied radio units in the Admiralty Islands and intercepted by the Japanese on Formosa at 9:05. But Kurita did not see this as the signal of opportunity that it was. Like a defeated man, he perceived his enemy’s every act as evidence of its strength and ingenuity. Nishimura’s group had been destroyed. Was his next? He grew anxious, expecting powerful American reinforcements to rally to Kinkaid’s call at any moment.

  “Anxieties,” wrote Alfred Thayer Mahan, “are the test and penalty of greatness.” On the cusp of a smashing victory, a commander must keep his nerve or fail altogether. According to that great American naval strategist, who had found an attentive readership in Japan:

  Strenuous, unrelaxing pursuit is therefore as imperative after a battle as courage is during it. Great political results often flow from correct military action; a fact which no military commander is at liberty to ignore. He may very well not know of those results; it is enough to know that they may happen, and nothing can excuse his losing a point, which by exertion he might have scored.

  But further exertion was beyond Takeo Kurita. The Japanese admiral had been pressed to his physical and emotional limits. At 9:11 on the morning of October 25, he took stock of everything he knew and did not know and issued this order to his far-flung squadron:

  Rendezvous, my course north, speed 20.

  The commander of Cruiser Division 7 logged the message as “All ships reassemble.” The Haguro’s signal department heard “Gradually reassemble.” Semantics aside, there was no mistaking the intent to withdraw.

  The Yamato turned to port and headed north. Admiral Kimura received the withdrawal order just as his Yahagi and accompanying destroyers were again bearing down on the enemy carriers. Though the Johnston’s interdiction was gallant, it was Kurita who finally spared the jeeps. For a second time Kimura’s destroyers heeled around and headed north. At 9:20 the Tone and the Haguro, nearly in position to eviscerate Taffy 3 from point-blank range, turned in column and followed suit. At 9:25 the Kongo stopped the hunt and took her smoking fourteen-inch guns out of the battle. Five minutes later the Haruna broke off her freelancing assault on Taffy 2’s northernmost elements.

  Rendezvous, my course north.

  The mighty Center Force was going home.

  On the verge of victory, with the Samuel B. Roberts sinking and the Johnston dead in the water, Admiral Kurita loses his nerve and orders his ships to reassemble and withdraw. The threat to the U.S. beachhead in the Philippines ends.

  Forty

  The torpedo attack by Kimura’s destroyers was the halfhearted last gasp of Kurita’s beleaguered fleet. The torpedoes, fired at long range from an angle well abaft their targets’ beam, had barely enough fuel to reach the carriers. Still, the Americans took no chances with them. Tex Waldrop of VC-65 was returning to his carrier after a busy morning of glide-bombing and strafing runs when he noticed a big spread of torpedoes foaming toward Taffy 3. His radioman, Roy McAnally, raised the carriers to warn them of the approaching fish. Though his plane had a three-foot hole in its port wing from Japanese flak, Waldrop swooped down and opened up with his two wing-mounted fifties on the bubbling wakes, while his eighteen-year-old gunner, aviation ordnanceman second class John Ciolek, opened fire from the ball turret. One torpedo detonated in the Kalinin Bay’s wake. Another exploded off the port quarter of Waldrop’s own home ship, the St. Lo, whose peashooter crew claimed a third fish. The dramatic sight of the torpedo exploding in midocean spurred the crew to vigorous cheering. Machine-gunners on the two carriers blazed away at the remaining torpedoes, very possibly preventing a catastrophic replay of the Liscome Bay disaster.

  The silhouettes of the Center Force ships, which had been growing steadily larger, darker, and more menacing as the minutes crept by, now began to recede. Aboard the Fanshaw Bay, Ziggy Sprague was occupied with avoiding the incoming Japanese torpedoes when, at 9:25, he heard a signalman shout, “God damn it, boys, they’re getting away!” It was beyond comprehension. Sprague had begun the battle expecting to make history as the commander of the first carriers ever destroyed by naval gunfire. Now he made history as the victor in the most unlikely win in U.S. naval history.

  “I could not believe my eyes, but it looked as if the whole Japanese fleet was indeed retiring.” Sprague didn’t accept the astonishing turn of events until several different pilots circling overhead confirmed it for him. Even then, Sprague wrote afterward, “I could not get the fact to soak into my battle-numbed brain. At best, I had expected to be swimming by this time.”

  * * *

  AT 9:15 A.M., AS Kurita’s ships were forming up to retreat, Bill Brooks, studying the sea through a hole in the cloud cover, spied a small dark speck trailing a thin wake of foam. He turned his Avenger in its direction and bore on in. The speck grew steadily larger, its boxy profile readily recognizable as an American CVE. Brooks closed range with the ship, lining up to pass alongside it with his landing gear down, indicating his request to land. A signal light flashed him a “prep Charlie,” granting his request.

  Wheeling around in a wide counterclockwise circle, lining up on the stern, Brooks entered the landing pattern and, with low fuel, was glad to catch an arrester wire on the first pass. The ship that took him aboard, the USS Marcus Island, was the adopted home of pilots from five different carriers. A mixed bag of aviators had found their way to the Taffy 2 carrier ahead of Brooks. Taken to separate debriefing rooms, they began drafting their action reports, then waited, endlessly waited, while their planes were taken down into the hangar deck for repairs and reloading. In the gathering of strangers, Brooks was happy to
see a familiar face, that of his VC-65 squadronmate, Tom Van Brunt. In light of what they had seen that morning, neither man had much to say.

  As the senior lieutenant in the group, Van Brunt was tapped to lead the next strike. Everyone was in a hyped-up state well before the squadron stewards served the coffee. Brooks took some deep breaths and said a few Hail Marys as he reflected on what he had been through. “I had really done some deep thinking as we were coming back. It was settling in on me what was happening. What can I do? I thought. I came to a realization: I didn’t want to make a suicide run. A pilot was always better off alive than dead.” Still, Brooks wasn’t sure what could be done about the long odds facing them on the next sortie. He had no idea what the status of the Japanese fleet was. He knew only that it was big. The aviator told his crewmen, Joe Downs and Ray Travers, “I don’t expect we’re going to see the sunset. So if you don’t care to join me on this mission, you’ve got my blessing. I don’t think we’re going to get out of this.” The offer was a non-starter. The two aircrewmen wouldn’t hear of it. They were all in this together.

  As the plane handlers, armorers, aviation machinists, and ord-nancemen on the Marcus Island gassed, armed, and spotted the Avengers for launch, Tom Van Brunt diagrammed the plan of attack down in the ready room. In his whole aviation career Van Brunt had dropped just twelve torpedoes in practice. Only two of them had run true. That thought gripped him now. He was going out there for real, against real ships firing real flak that would kill him for real if his number came up and he took a hit. However slight his preparation, however, this was what he was there to do. He found a quiet place to pray for a moment and thought about his family—his older brother aboard the light cruiser Reno; his younger brother Bernard, whom he’d just seen at Seeadler Harbor at Manus, amid the huge gathering of Seventh Fleet ships; and his wife and first child, whose pictures adorned his desk. He prayed that somehow they would be cared for if he didn’t return.