The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  I would watch for belches of fire from the cruiser’s guns and time the salvos so I could duck under the water before the shells hit. But wearing the life belt, I was only able to get the upper part of my body below the water. I must have looked like a duck feeding on food below.

  Others saw the column of destroyers approach again. The ships that the Johnston had forced into premature torpedo launches were circling her like raiders hunting settlers on the prairie. They fired directly into her wrecked hull, no longer deterred by the spirited work of Bob Hollenbaugh or Lieutenant Hagen or anybody else in the gunnery department.

  This was the Johnston’s final service to Sprague’s fleeing carriers: providing a static target for frustrated Japanese gunners who doubtlessly longed to sink something, anything, with an American flag on it. Though they had straddled the carriers repeatedly, Japanese gunners had claimed only the Gambier Bay. The five others seemed to possess luck worthy of ancient Japan’s Seven Lucky Gods themselves—the legendary Shichifukujin. The Kalinin Bay had taken fifteen hits from heavy cruiser main battery rounds and steamed on in defiance.

  But the Johnston’s defiance was at an end. She would not get away. The decisions of her captain had ensured that she wouldn’t. It was not a pointless death wish. The Johnston, like the Hoel and the Samuel B. Roberts before her, had fulfilled her mission so thoroughly—had parried and riposted so well—that there was nothing left for the ship to do but pay the final price.

  What fate befell the Johnston’s legendary captain is the subject of continuing conjecture among the ship’s survivors. Bob Sochor was among the last to see him. The motor machinist’s mate, having gone aft to take his turn cranking the rudder pump, returned forward to fight a fire. As he walked toward the bow, “there was a terrible, blinding yellow flash” from a shell that struck the port side near the cook’s galley. Knocked unconscious, Sochor regained his senses to find himself covered in blood from his own wounds and his dead shipmates surrounding him. Realizing that the abandon ship order had been passed, Sochor headed for the fantail, where the jump into the water was easier. “Everyone who was able to abandon ship had done so,” he wrote. “They were in rafts and nets and swimming approximately a quarter of a mile away. I went aft as Captain Evans went forward. With neither one saying a word to the other, we passed by staring blankly at one another.”

  Some claim to have seen the Johnston’s skipper climbing into the motor whaleboat that he had ordered released. Others were less confident he ever made it into the boat. Obeying the order to release the small craft, Allen Johnson found that its pulley mechanism didn’t work. The electrician’s mate reached for a knife he kept in his pocket, meaning to cut the lines that kept the boat suspended from its davits, but his pants pocket had been torn away. An officer produced a blade from his boot and cut the lines. When the gig hit the water, Johnson thought it was in good condition. He saw someone wearing a khaki uniform, an officer or a chief, jump into the water, climb in, start the engine, and haul a wounded sailor aboard. Around that time, according to Johnson, Captain Evans began walking toward the fan-tail. As if beckoning him to safety, the gig drifted with him, down the length of the ship. But by the time Johnson abandoned ship, diving into the water under heavy fire, he, like the rest of the crew on record, had not seen whether the skipper got into the whaleboat. If he did, in all likelihood he didn’t go far. The craft’s bottom, badly holed in the Japanese bombardment, was not close to being seaworthy.

  It has been written that so much of life is preparation, so much is routine, and so much is retrospect that the purest essence of anyone’s genius contracts itself to a precious few hours. The window opened by circumstance on the genius of Cdr. Ernest E. Evans for two and a half hours on the morning of October 25, 1944, so brilliantly lit from within, was once again closed. The “Chief” of Annapolis, the Cherokee warrior unhorsed by enemy gunfire, was lost to the whirlwind, taken to a private oblivion that to this day burnishes his mystique and deepens the legend of his late, great destroyer and its magnificent crew.

  Forty-four

  On orders from Admiral Kinkaid, Jesse Oldendorf’s old battleships had been standing by in Leyte Gulf awaiting their next move in a desperate but uncertain naval chess game. Mindful of his duty to guard MacArthur’s troops ashore, Kinkaid had been keeping a wary eye on Admiral Shima all morning as the remnants of the Southern Force withdrew. Admiral Sprague’s plea for help was compelling. Still, Kinkaid could not be sure that Shima would not reverse course and try again to break through into Leyte Gulf. From Kinkaid’s flagship, the Wasatch, Sprague nevertheless received a voice message assuring him that help was on the way.

  Though the Seventh Fleet battleships’ magazines had spent much of their high-explosive ammunition during the shore bombardment, and a significant quantity of their armor-piercing rounds in the destruction of Nishimura’s force, their armor-piercing ammunition stocks were more than sufficient to deal with another Japanese fleet. The most serious deficiency of the Seventh Fleet Bombardment and Fire Support Group was its destroyers, which had spent their torpedoes at Surigao Strait and would not be reloaded until they could tie up to a tender again. Despite Taffy 3’s perilous straits, Kinkaid saw no alternative but to wait and see.

  Shortly before ten A.M. the waiting ended. Satisfied that the Southern Force wanted no further part of him and fortified by the arrival of two fresh squadrons of destroyers, Kinkaid finally ordered Oldendorf to take half his force and rally to the aid of Ziggy Sprague’s beleaguered northern Taffy group. If Kurita continued charging southward, the American battle line would greet him memorably. But Kurita was already in full flight north. No sooner had Oldendorf relayed word to his commanders to prepare for a northward sprint than Kinkaid countermanded the order upon learning that Kurita’s fleet was in retreat.

  * * *

  ABOARD THE JOHNSTON, ALL was quiet except for the flames. High above the wreckage of her silent decks, forty-eight stars still flew. Harold Beresonsky thought the ship, flying Old Glory, looked proud and defiant.

  In the water, Bill Mercer and J. B. Strickland found themselves sandwiched between their beaten ship and a Japanese destroyer standing off the Johnston’s port quarter firing into the ship’s hull. “I told Strick that I was sticking close to him because he owed me a hundred dollars. Strick said, ‘If we make it, you’ll sure get your hundred.’ I was only joking because neither of us thought we would make it.” Strickland had survived the Battle of Savo Island, a disastrous American defeat under the guns of a Japanese flotilla led by none other than the Chokai, late of the same day. Mercer asked Strickland how their present predicament compared to Savo Island. Strick said, “Kid, I have never seen anything like this.”

  At about 10:10 the Johnston went down. “We all watched as our home for the past year slowly slid below the surface,” Mercer wrote. Orin Vadnais swam away from the ship, then turned around to see destroyers and cruisers running in their half circle around the Johnston, blazing away with all guns. “As I watched, she started to sink. First one end went down, and she slipped below the sea.”

  As the ship rolled over and went down by the bow, Neil Dethlefs wondered whether he would be home in time for Christmas. Drifting along, he came upon two seamen. One was his friend, soundman first class Wally Weigand. The other sailor was holding Weigand’s head above water. Dethlefs could see that Weigand had been scalded badly. “The skin was hanging from his arms and hands like a pair of long gloves.” Weigand asked Dethlefs if he was burned too. Dethlefs said no. Weigand said, “Boy, I sure am.”

  Checking his wounds, Bob Sochor found that much of the blood staining his skin probably belonged to other men. During his swim out to the life rafts, Sochor had met up with a young pharmacist’s mate, Ken Bowers. “He was very young and religious and always carried a small Bible. He had on a life jacket,” Sochor said, “so I hung on to him to rest for a few minutes. We were now about halfway between the sinking ship and the rafts and nets. He said he could not swim and he thou
ght his life jacket would not hold the two of us. I told him I just wanted to rest a minute or so and then I would leave. We were about one-eighth of a mile from the sinking ship when I turned to him and said, ‘Take your last look at the Johnston,’ as it disappeared into the sea.”

  Ellsworth Welch watched the destroyer turn over slowly and settle by the bow until only the fantail was above water. “Seeing my home go down, I felt my eyes welling with tears. But I thought, Welch, you might need the liquid, so I ceased this unseamanly display of emotion.” Bobby Chastain felt similarly. “I still remember that helpless feeling one gets while watching your home burn down.”

  Bowers and another pharmacist’s mate, Clayton Schmuff, ministered to the wounded, injected morphine, tied tourniquets. As the survivors of the Johnston gathered themselves into groups, a rare sight seized their attention: the direct approach of an enemy warship. For more than three hours the ships had maneuvered under each other’s fire, shooting by haphazard sight through smoke and squalls or by the blind omniscience of radar. The range between the foes had never been short enough to see the individuals who operated them. Point-blank range in a modern naval battle was anything less than three miles. Now the enemy approached so closely that men could finally look upon other men.

  Clint Carter saw the ship coming before most of his shipmates did. It was bearing down on them fast. Judging by the size of the bow wake the destroyer was throwing, it was at flank speed. Then, when the ship was just half a mile or so away, it slowed, its bow fell, its wake dissipated, and it approached them slowly, warily, ominously.

  The Americans weren’t sure what to expect. Joseph Check, fearing the enemy gunners would spray them with bullets where they swam, took a hard breath and ducked under the surface. Clint Carter thought that for the Japanese killing the Americans with bullets would be too labor intensive when another tool stood at their disposal. His first thought was: They’re going to give us a giant enema. A single depth charge laid into their midst would have produced a shallow underwater explosion strong enough to blow their bowels out. Watching the crew play their automatic weapons over the waters, others braced for machine-gun fire. Neil Dethlefs started to untie Wally Weigand’s kapok so he could drag him under water when the murderous rain finally fell.

  The destroyer edged closer and closer. It made a slight course change that left Clint Carter drifting off her starboard beam. He was taken with the ship’s gold-tasseled battle pennant emblazoned with a red rising sun. Bobby Chastain, swimming no more than fifty feet from the ship’s port side, could see the sailors lined up by the rail, dressed sharply in khakis and brightly polished brown boots. “They were watching us as we watched them.”

  It was then that Carter realized what was going on. “It appeared to me that every man on her deck was standing at attention, like a muster, giving us one big salute.” As the Japanese warship slid by them, a smartly dressed officer was on the wing of the bridge, standing erect and, indeed, saluting. “As she eased by us,” Carter wrote, “I’m sure of one thing … she appreciated a fighting lady … USS Johnston.”

  Another Japanese crewman was filming them with a handheld movie camera. Another flipped his thumb to his nose and delivered a raspberry. As the ship passed on by, a sailor standing on the fantail tossed an object in Carter’s direction. The canister was too big to be a grenade and far too small to be a depth charge. It was a large can of tomatoes. Carter retrieved the offering, examined it, and noticed the label indicating it had been packed in Arkansas. “Three years of war and they were still eating USA canned tomatoes.”

  The Japanese destroyer disappeared, and the Johnston did too. A few minutes later the underwater hulk of the Johnston did to her crew what they feared its Japanese counterpart would do. There were two great explosions in the deep. Speculation flew that the ship’s boilers had blown. Others doubted the shattered machinery retained enough pressure to explode and assigned blame to unsecured depth charges. Whatever the cause, the effect was breathtaking. The first sensation the men felt was a concussion to their stomach and abdomen, and a sickening thrust of pressure into their rectums. “I thought my body had been blown in half,” wrote Charles Landreth. “What a wonderful feeling it was when I found out my body was still intact.”

  * * *

  WITHDRAWING NORTHWARD WITH HIS harried task group, Takeo Kurita was enjoying considerably less peace of mind. He toyed with the idea of turning around again and attempting to reenter Leyte Gulf. But late in the morning he received a radio dispatch sent at 10:18 by the skipper of one of the Southern Force destroyers, the lucky Shigure: “All ships except Shigure went down under gunfire and torpedo attack.”

  So Nishimura was dead. Kurita could see no purpose in turning around and trying again to reach Leyte Gulf. The Sho-1 plan had become a jaw with one mandible.

  Forty-five

  For two and a half hours Takeo Kurita had been the hunter. Now, in flight northward, he became the hunted.

  Tom Van Brunt and four Avengers from the Marcus Island climbed above the clouds to eight thousand feet, joined with another group of Wildcats and Avengers, and turned north in pursuit of Kurita’s withdrawing fleet. It was the third major strike that the Taffy 2 carrier group would marshal against the Center Force that morning.

  They needed less than thirty minutes to find the withdrawing Japanese force. Against flak that reminded Van Brunt of the light-show one gets on an express subway train roaring through a local station, the St. Lo aviator flew to within twelve hundred feet of his target, a Kongo-class battleship, jerked the release lever, and felt his plane heave from the change in gravity as the torpedo plunged into the water.

  As he flew over the Japanese ship, he felt the aircraft lurch again as a shell exploded near the rear of the fuselage. At once his left rudder cable was limp. There was nothing there. He could not turn left. The exact extent of the damage he could not yet know. His radioman, Les Frederickson, was shaken up by a nearby shell explosion that was dampened only by the TBM’s thin skin. Van Brunt hugged the sea for a mile or two, testing his controls, and found that he could navigate well enough using just right rudder. As he looped back and gained altitude for the return flight, he looked back at his target and saw a wide trail of oil issuing from astern. Van Brunt guided his riddled aircraft toward home: the friendly flight deck of the St. Lo.

  By some impossible concatenation of independent miracles, the carrier had not taken a single hit during the battle, even though she rode the northern fringe of the circular formation of escort carriers, closest to Kurita’s ships. Only three of her crew were injured with superficial wounds from shrapnel. Meanwhile, the gunners on her tail-mounted five-inch gun had acquitted themselves well. The Battle off Samar was nearly over for the St. Lo, as shortly it would be for Tom Van Brunt.

  The naval aviator hailed the St. Lo’s landing signal officer and informed him that his left rudder was out. Normally landing approaches were made in a descending counterclockwise circle, a flight path that allowed planes to avoid the dangerous eddy of air trailing from the carrier’s superstructure. Without a left rudder, Van Brunt could not make the usual approach. He radioed the landing signal officer that he would come in on a clockwise circle. The LSO said, “Okay, we’ll try that, but let’s get everyone else aboard first.”

  Climbing to fifteen hundred feet, he was circling the carrier at a distance, watching other planes land, when a red streak flew past his greenhouse canopy. The startling appearance of a Japanese “meatball” insignia painted on a wide white wing was Van Brunt’s first indication that enemy aircraft were near. He almost collided with the Japanese plane as it descended toward the St. Lo.

  Shortly before eleven A.M. Taffy 3 came under wholesale kamikaze attack. The Japanese Army Air Corps had debuted this horrific new mode of warfare earlier that morning, when six imperial planes took off from bases on Davao and attacked Thomas Sprague’s Taffy 1 task unit. One struck the escort carrier Santee, starting a huge blaze that raged in the hangar deck for about ten
minutes. Only the expert marksmanship of gunners aboard the Suwannee, the Sangamon, and the Petrof Bay let them avoid similar hits.

  At 10:50 five more aircraft flying from airdromes on Luzon arrived over Taffy 3 and plummeted like osprey on ships whose day of fighting should rightly have been over. The Kitkun Bay was the first of Sprague’s jeeps to confront the horrifying new tactic. A Zero fighter plane closed from the port side, crossed her bow, climbed, and dove at the bridge. Firing his machine guns as he came, the pilot guided his plane over the small island superstructure, glanced off a catwalk, and hit the sea.

  Two more kamikazes attacked the Fanshaw Bay. One approaching from astern was knocked off its killing path by a five-inch shell fired by the flagship’s peashooter crew. Though that explosion tore off the plane’s left wing and the aircraft struck the water, where it disintegrated on impact, the bomb slung under its wing exploded fifteen feet from the hull, showering the ship with shrapnel. Van Brunt saw the carrier’s gunners shoot the second plane out of the sky.

  Few men aboard the St. Lo ever saw the plane that hit their ship. After three hours at general quarters, half the crew was still enjoying a breather. Capt. Francis J. McKenna had ordered Condition One Easy, allowing them to secure from general quarters and get a long-awaited cup of coffee. In the CIC the air-search radar’s PPI scope was showing approaching aircraft. Though the planes did not transmit an Identification Friend or Foe beacon, everyone assumed they were friendly. Radio technician Holly Crawforth had other things on his mind—like how he was going to repair the St. Lo’s big whip antennas, shredded by the ship’s own defensive bursts—when the general quarters alarm sounded. Crawforth was startled to hear the twenty-millimeter guns chattering. The crew had learned to dread the sound; whenever the twenties were shooting, it meant the enemy was close. There—they could see it. A plane was approaching from astern. A half-mile downrange, the pilot was coming in straight and level as if lining up to land.