Gathering by the life raft that kept the group together, Dick Rohde heard someone wondering whether the depth charges had been set on safe. It was Vince Goodrich’s job, and God knew there had been precious little time to stick to procedure in the midst of the hellish fusillades that tore the seas around them. The question, however, was of more than procedural significance. A depth charge that burst under water produced a wave of blast pressure that could blow a man apart from the inside out. Sailors were trained to cover their buttocks, or lift them out of the water, to avoid the potentially fatal enema that an underwater explosion could give them. Once more Rohde was on the move, paddling and kicking to get away from the ship.
Wearing khaki pants and a T-shirt, drifting with a group of survivors scattered across the water on the other side of the ship, Tom Stevenson watched Japanese vessels shooting at his sinking ship from all sides. Occasionally, an errant shell would land nearby and kick up a splash, sometimes disconcertingly close. He prayed for the Roberts to sink quickly, if only to deprive the Japanese of the pleasure and the practice.
* * *
SEAMAN FIRST CLASS BUD Comet floated off the port quarter of the ship, right below Gun 52, where a gigantic shell from the Kongo had struck, gutting that side of the ship and opening its mechanical entrails to the sea. The huge cave mouth opened into an even larger void inside, a gray steel cavern whose unseen corners reached deep into the ship. From its size Comet figured the hole was the product of a Japanese shell that had detonated on contact. Nearby he saw evidence of another shell hit, much more benign: a neatly drilled hole that an armor-piercing round had made as it passed through the ship without exploding. The contrast was remarkable. Here was the difference between life and death, determined solely by the choice of ordnance on the part of a Japanese handling room crewman be-lowdecks on a ship many miles away. Backlit by flames licking at a far bulkhead, two objects inside that cavern commanded Comet’s attention: a life raft, and the huddled form of a man inside of it.
Comet swam closer and recognized the Roberts’s chief boatswain’s mate, Cullen Wallace. He was still conscious, kneeling inside the raft. Probably he had come down a ladder and found the raft and settled into it, hoping somehow that he could paddle his way out of the ship. But he was stuck there, evidently trapped by the inrush of seawater, arms braced on the sides of the raft. Watching Comet swim his way, the chief hollered at him a few times to come help him. The oil-soaked sailor swam back to the ship, gingerly moving past the jagged threshold of the torn hull, and grabbed the raft. Then he pulled it clear of some wreckage into the pool of water that had filled that part of the Roberts and that rose slowly and serenely as the ship began to sink by the stern. Comet got the impression that the chief, like his captain, could not swim. He eased the raft across the splintered opening in the hull and watched as Edward Wheaton, a radio technician, swam up and climbed in.
Comet paddled the raft around to the stern of the ship. The depth charge racks, lying over the fantail, were submerged already. The name SAMUEL B. ROBERTS, stenciled on the transom, was under water too. Blown apart like an apple on a tree stump were the remnants of the steel shell of Gun 52, Paul Carr’s mount, turned defiantly out to port, its barrel still aglow. There was a tangle of metal piled into it from the side—the remains of the deckhouse beneath Johnny LeClercq’s disintegrated forty-millimeter mount. From the stern Comet heard a shout. It was from an officer, hollering for help. When Comet saw him and started paddling the raft in his direction, Wallace told him to leave him be: “Let him swim.” The chief didn’t want the burden of bringing anybody else aboard the raft.
But if Bud Comet remembered anything that his father had told him at the West Virginia train station six months earlier, he showed it by his actions now. Don’t dishonor your mother…. This country is worth dying for…. A coward dies a thousand times…. Defying his chief’s command, he paddled toward the fantail and picked up Ens. Jack Moore.
Once the crew had decided to abandon the Roberts, it was unbearable to watch the enemy continue to have its way with her. For all they had done, some could not escape thinking: If only we had stayed on and fought a little longer, we might have prevented this final indignity. “We were the proudest ship in the fleet. We really were,” Tom Stevenson said. “We thought we were the cat’s meow.”
Shortly after ten o’clock the Samuel B. Roberts rolled over on her beam ends and sank by the stern. No explosion followed the ship’s disappearance beneath the waves. The only reaction was a swell of sadness among the crewmen who watched her go. Floating a quarter mile away, Dick Rohde watched the Roberts sink. It took about an hour, but it seemed to take forever. She went down gracefully, seeming not to make a sound. Before she had fully committed herself to the deep, the Roberts stood nearly vertical. Stenciled with the number 413 on each side, the bow held high in the air for a moment, standing like an oblique headstone. Then the ship slowly retracted into the sea. “Boys, take off your hats. There goes a good ship,” said boatswain’s mate first class Red Harrington.
The sight of it moved Lloyd Gurnett to open sobbing. “As first lieutenant he knew every welded seam in her,” Copeland wrote, “he knew where every fitting was attached. Love of the ship was very deep in his heart.”
Once the ship was gone, the culture of cynical jocularity that had characterized the wardroom seemed to disappear. Among the men on Copeland’s raft, “It seemed as if the bottom had dropped out of things…. Now that she was gone, everyone felt low.” The white-caps kicked up a bit now. Then Staubach, the grievously wounded chief electrician’s mate, lost his mind, raving and yelling deliriously.
Scanning the oil-slicked waters for other survivors to join, Dick Rohde found his way to the raft with Jack Moore, Cullen Wallace, Jack Yusen, Bud Comet, and others. The men had fastened together their life raft and floater net into a self-contained survival pod that kept everybody together. Wallace didn’t want to do it. He said he was concerned about air attack and did not want to concentrate the men in one big vulnerable group. He also felt that such a large group would consume the raft’s limited provisions too quickly. As the officer in charge of this group, Moore overrode him, feeling that the priority should be rescue rather than avoidance of air attack.
The wooden-latticed bottom of the raft had been shot up pretty well. A pharmacist’s mate approached Rohde, who was sitting inside the raft, and tried to pour sulfa powder into his gaping leg wound. The radioman wondered what the point was. When he got back into the water, it would just wash the powder away.
Not considering himself too badly hurt, Rohde vaulted himself overboard. Later, looking up at a dozen or so men perched comfortably on the side of the raft, including Lieutenant West and Ensign Moore, though both officers seemed uninjured, he decided to hoist himself up and take a break from treading water. But when he tried to climb up, one of the men wound up and slugged him hard in the head, knocking him back down. Rohde was stunned at his first taste of the Darwinian imperative. With nerves running hot on a makeshift floating wagon train loaded with twice as many men as it was built to carry, Jack Moore decided, “There was going to have to be rationing with disciplinary backing. Everyone was already at each other’s throat.”
Forty-three
The Hoel had sunk first. The Gambier Bay went down at 9:07. The Roberts followed an hour later. Now came the Johnston’s turn. The first ship into the fight was the last to go down. Her luck had been the improbable stuff of dime novels or Hollywood fantasies: the solo charge in the battle’s opening minutes, firing guns and torpedoes into the teeth of multiple enemy broadsides, wheeling under fire to escape, taking devastating hits from battleship shells, withdrawing, returning to action against the destroyer column, and fending off the last Japanese effort to sink Clifton Sprague’s carriers. Her final destruction was not ensured until after the foe she had suicidally charged had turned and run for cover.
Bob Deal knew the ship was a goner. “Water columns were substantially higher and shells overhead had
a distinctly different resonance. Came then an impact so severe I thought we might have struck a marine obstruction. The ship shuddered, rolled hard port and starboard, resuming course at a reduced speed. Going forward on the starboard side, I learned we had taken a hit in the engine room.”
Electrician’s mate first class Allen Johnson understood the fragile extent to which the Johnston held on to life. His battle station was the emergency generator room, tucked away on the starboard side of the ship between the forward fireroom and the galley. Before enlisting in 1942, the twenty-five-year-old petty officer had worked for four and a half years at the Birmingham Electric Company, running substations that brought steam and power into Dixie’s industrial center. The Johnston derived its vital electrical power from generators located in the engine rooms. The generators, like the engines, were run by steam from the boiler room attached to them. With one boiler room already out and Lt. Jesse Cochran and his men struggling in vain to gain power from the other, the only source of power on the Johnston was the emergency generator, powered not with steam but by a diesel motor. If the engine room generators were knocked out, a pilot light went off, a relay opened, and the emergency generator kicked on automatically.
When the Johnston was first hit, Johnson had the terrible sensation of being lifted from the ground and shaken violently. The hit to the after engine room knocked its electrical switchboard dead. Instantly the emergency generator in the electrician’s mate’s cramped compartment filled the void, its three-cylinder diesel motor coughing to life. But the motor bled too. The shock of the multiple blasts be-lowdecks broke the lubrication pipe that ran to the motor. Oil ran down into the corner of Johnson’s compartment. With motor machinist’s mate second class Roger Gougeon, he scooped the oil from the floor by hand and slathered it back into the diesel motor. Johnson ran to the CIC and grabbed a roll of three-quarter-inch friction tape. It didn’t stick well to the oily metal, but he used enough of it to slow if not stop the diesel motor’s bleeding. His emergency station would turn out some electricity, but only for so long. The oil leaked everywhere. They were able to return only a portion of it to the engine.
From such mundane mechanical causes do gallant ships die. Without power, Bob Hollenbaugh would fire his state-of-the-art five-inch gun like a nineteenth-century artilleryman; the men in the ammunition handling room would do the work of their electro-hydraulic hoists, passing shells by hand; light would come from battle lanterns if at all; and volunteers would turn the big wheel on the rudder’s steering pumps, struggling to keep up with Captain Evans’s course changes, shouted down from above. They would do all these things, taking the place of their equipment, or they would die along with everyone else the next time a salvo found its mark.
The endless salvos of incoming shells passing overhead, astern, off the bow, all around the ship. Now Allen Johnson felt one land close by. When the large shell struck near his emergency generator compartment, “it felt like a freight train’s coal box was dropped on top of me.” The bulkhead between his compartment and the galley was blown down flat. The only source of light he had was a small sparking electrical fire that filled the compartment with flickering shadows. With a three-quarter-inch brass bolt head having ripped through his back between the shoulder blade and spine, Johnson pulled himself to his feet and called out to Gougeon. Johnson couldn’t see him, and there came no answer to his call. Groping through the compartment, he felt Gougeon’s head and shoulders, but his torso was pinned under something—a large mass of hot metal. It was the diesel engine. It was too heavy to move, and having run steadily for well over an hour, it was too hot even to touch. With the bolt head throbbing in his right chest cavity, Johnson was becoming numb with shock. He was sure, however, of at least two things: his friend was dead, and the time had finally come to get the hell off his dying ship.
* * *
AT 9:40, WHEN“AN avalanche of shells” struck the ship, inflicting her final meaningful damage, the Johnston’s two-and-a-half-hour sprint through hell ended. The shell that sealed the destroyer’s fate struck the number-one boiler room, cutting steam to the forward turbine and stopping the starboard screw. The ship, powerless, began coasting to its final resting place. As the Pacific currents took over the work of the Johnston’s engines, Captain Evans passed the order to abandon ship.
She was a vehicle now suitable only for the dead. On the destroyer’s main deck, on the port side amidships, lay what Jesse Cochran described as “a pile of people—bodies—half alive, half dead.” Many survivors saw it, but none seemed to fathom quite how this stack of human cordwood could have formed. In part, it was the inscrutable arrangement chosen by the shock waves from heavy shells that had propelled men and parts of men out of interior compartments and into their final poses. Some sailors had been carried out and laid there by their buddies in the hope that, out in the open, they might get medical attention. Others had struggled out under their own power and lain down, exhausted beyond exhaustion, desperate for cooler air to breathe.
Ellsworth Welch went forward repeating the abandon ship order. Under the abandon ship plan—rehearsed many times but without much belief in its utility—Welch was supposed to report to a life raft stored on the ship’s port side by the wardroom. By the time Welch got there, sailors had already released the raft and jumped into the water. Welch found coxswain Ed Block struggling in vain to put on a life jacket. The morphine Welch had given him when the bridge was first hit had made him sluggish. So the officer helped him slide into the life jacket and eased him into the water. Welch then tried to help another sailor, but the severity of his wounds made the effort moot.
Dusty Rhodes and Warren Williams climbed up on the deckhouse by Bob Hollenbaugh’s Gun 54 and tossed a nylon mesh floater net into the water. “When I jumped over,” Rhodes recalled, “I had two thoughts enter my mind, both silly. One, how deep is this water, I wonder if I’ll hit bottom? Number two, how far is it to land?” Robert Billie dragged himself to the edge of the gunwale, crawling and rolling with his good left arm, then dropped down to the main deck amid bodies, body parts, and blood. On their way down from the gun director, Bob Hagen and several fire-controlmen passed Billie without a second look. Billie couldn’t speak—he could scarcely move. He didn’t blame them for consigning him to the dead. With only one good arm, he finally hauled himself to the rail. Though he wasn’t able to lift himself over and into the water, the enemy obliged him. A salvo of shells struck the ship near where he lay, and the impact—the third blast he absorbed that day—propelled him overboard. He had twenty shrapnel wounds and three useless limbs. He didn’t particularly like his chances in the water.
Captain Evans left the fantail and walked forward to the wardroom, where Lt. Robert Browne was busy doing what he could for the living. Evans tried to persuade the doctor to abandon ship, but Browne wouldn’t hear of it. There were wounded who needed to be tended to before they were given over to Neptune’s mercy in the water. The doctor could do that work better aboard ship. He would use what time he had left.
Bob Hagen, consumed with coordinating the ship’s gunfire from the director mount, was slow to get the news that Evans had passed word to abandon ship.
I peered out and couldn’t see a living soul on the fo’c’sle. “What the hell are we doing here?” I said. “Let’s abandon ship.” The last word hardly was out of my mouth when the five crewmen in the gun director with me dashed out and ran for the rail. I was so surprised that I stood stock-still a moment, then lit out myself. I made my way to the fo’c’sle—I couldn’t get aft without walking over piles of bodies—and, like a man in a dream, very carefully and leisurely took off my shoes and dived in.
In the water Hagen looked back at the ship and spotted his friend, Doc Browne, carrying wounded from the wardroom to the deck. Browne had just left the rail and headed back inside when there was a whistling rush of wind and an explosion, right where Browne had entered. Hagen broke down and cried.
The enormity of the moment was lost on ma
ny of the men who had survived to this point by attending to the myriad rote details of their assigned duties. The ship was gone and their duties with it. But men still found trivialities to occupy their minds. Leaving the ship from the port side amidships, Bill Mercer swam about a hundred yards off the port quarter with another sailor. “I recall Marquard took his comb from his pocket, neatly combed his hair, and then threw his comb away saying, ‘I don’t guess I’ll ever need that again.’” With the same habitual fastidiousness that others had exhibited, Ellsworth Welch took off his shoes and set them neatly together on deck before diving into the sea.
One of the first survivors Bob Hagen encountered in the water was torpedoman first class Jim O’Gorek. Cast afloat in four thousand fathoms of shark-infested waters, defeated in battle with friends lost forever, O’Gorek swam over to Hagen and said cheerfully, “Mr. Hagen, we got off all ten of them torpedoes, and they ran hot, straight, and normal!” Those torpedoes had made a real difference, knocking the Kumano out of the fight early in the battle, before it could close to effective gun range of the carriers.
Ellsworth Welch looked up and saw a Japanese cruiser firing shells into the destroyer’s ruined hulk.
The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors Page 37