The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  The quartermaster told Captain McKenna, “Sir, that’s a Jap.” No sooner had McKenna thrown the ship into a sharp evasive turn to starboard than the Zero fighter, a bomb under each wing, rose up, nosed over, and plunged into the flight deck. In a burst of flames and smoke, the engine tore loose, bounced the length of the flight deck, and skidded off the bow. One or both bombs went off. The mangled fuselage penetrated the four-inch wooden flight deck and exploded belowdecks. Captain McKenna’s first impression was that the St. Lo had suffered no serious damage. A few minutes passed, then the bulkheads began to collapse.

  Ordnanceman John Getas was muscling a TBM off the port-side elevator and into the cavernous hangar deck when he heard a terrific crash. A ball of fire smashed down through the flight deck, fell through thirty feet of space between the underside of the flight deck and the steel decking of the hangar, and landed amid eight planes that chief petty officer Earl Roberts and his ordnance gang were arming for action. Piled around the space where their aircraft were being worked on was enough weaponry to blow a small town out of existence: eight torpedoes, six depth charges, fifteen 500-pound bombs, forty 100-pounders, and some 1,400 rounds of .50-caliber ammunition. Almost at once this orderly, carefully orchestrated world of ordnance turned into a hellish, flaming maelstrom.

  Oh my God, Getas thought as the ammo went up. The first explosion shattered several planes, spilling burning aviation fuel onto the deck. It flowed into a large pool that covered a quarter of the cavernous hangar with flames two feet high. The plane that Getas was pushing jumped forward six feet from the pressure wave of the blast. Another aircraft blew up, mowing down a firefighting team and knocking the bodies of the dead and the living across the deck. Getas scrambled up a ladder and found that the flight deck had buckled horribly, black smoke pouring upward into the sky. A chief petty officer lurched by him in a daze. Everything but his shorts had been blown off. One arm hung by strips of skin. Below, at the inferno’s ground zero, men shambled about, wreathed in flames. Firefighters tried to gather, dragging big hoses, only to be scattered to the spon-sons and catwalks by the pops and zings of baking machine-gun rounds. In the short half hour between the enemy plane’s insane plunge through the flight deck and the ship’s final surrender, the crew marked time by a sequence of grievous secondary explosions that shook the ship.

  The third and fourth explosions blew a hangar door from its hinges, launched a one-hundred-foot span of the flight deck high into the air, and rolled back another swath of flight deck like the top of a sardine can. The ship began listing to port.

  After the fifth explosion, Tex Waldrop, the torpedo-busting TBM pilot, lit a cigar, wrapped his hands in rags to insulate them against friction, and rode a line down into the sea. In the water he broke his cigar in two and gave half to another survivor. Then the two men watched their home tear itself to pieces.

  The sixth and seventh blasts followed in merciless sequence, ripping the ship apart, one fifty-foot stretch of steel at a time. Some of them sailed as high as a thousand feet into the air. John Getas saw the seventh blast from the water, some two hundred feet from the ship. As debris slapped the surface all around him, he stripped himself naked for buoyancy and backstroked away from the inferno.

  Cool and collected, Captain McKenna directed the orderly abandonment from the forward part of the flight deck and the forecastle. Having seen to the evacuation of as many crew as possible, he left the ship after the seventh explosion. The skipper was the last man to ride a line down to the sea.

  The eighth blast was a heavy one; McKenna thought it might have been the main bomb stowage going up. It finished the St. Lo, tearing her so severely below the waterline that her port list abruptly reversed itself. The ship reeled back to starboard, rolled over completely, lifted her bow from the water, and backed herself under. She stood that way for a moment, then seemed to accept her fate and went down fast. The St. Lo’s final protest was the detonation of her boilers, a muffled thump that created a pressure wave that hit John Getas and created the sensation of a broom handle being shoved up his rear.

  * * *

  HEARTSICK, TOM VAN BRUNT watched from the air as his ruined ship disappeared. He knew pilots who had landed on the ship. Now they were very possibly dead. Gone too was the air operations crew he had trusted with his life. He didn’t want to try his luck landing on another carrier—you never knew how good its landing signal officer would be. Van Brunt had seen LSOs on other carriers who had to take their cues from the bridge. He didn’t need that now. He turned his damaged Avenger toward Dulag, twenty miles south of Tacloban, which by all accounts was a mess of mud and wrecked airplanes.

  He got there, landed, inspected his aircraft, and found, as he expected, that his left rudder cable had been severed completely. What he was less prepared to see was the condition of his elevator cable. Only three of its sixteen strands were intact. One false pull on his stick would have snapped it, plummeting him and his two crewmen into the sea. He also found that his landing hook had been shot off, without which he would have careened across a carrier flight deck right into the forward barrier, nearly as recklessly as the kamikaze that had hit the St. Lo.

  Dulag had its own attractions. Van Brunt, along with Larry Bud-nick and two other pilots, spent that night with the Army. The weary pilots were given carbines, told to dig a foxhole, and instructed to watch out for the Japanese counterattack that was expected at any moment. They slept soundly in spite of everything, and the assault never came.

  Part III

  A VANISHING GRAVEYARD

  When great men blunder, they count their losses in pride and reputation and glory. The underlings count their losses in blood.

  —Theodore C. Mason, Battleship Sailor (1982)

  Forty-six

  When a ship sinks, the battlefield goes away. Currents move, thermal layers mix, and by the time the surveyors and rescuers arrive, the water that bore witness to the slaughter is nowhere to be found. The dead disappear, carried under with their ruined vehicles. No wreckage remains for tacticians to study. There are no corpses for stretcher-bearers to spirit away, no remains to shovel, bag, and bury. On the sea there is no place to anchor a memorial flagpole or a headstone. It is a vanishing graveyard.

  The sudden silence was the first thing many survivors of the Hoel, the Gambier Bay, the Samuel B. Roberts, and the Johnston noticed after their ships had been smashed and swallowed. To many, the quiet was unwelcome. The noise of battle—the roar of machinery, the shrieks and blasts of shells incoming and outbound, the shouts and screams of their buddies—had anesthetized fear. Now the noise lifted like a curtain, unveiling the hidden inner vistas of their grief and shock. When their ships sank, their duties went down with them. Permanently discharged, the survivors were left without the distraction of work to do. The things they had seen could now be contemplated. The wounds they had suffered began to ache, sting, and burn.

  The four groups of men were scattered over roughly thirty miles of ocean. Survivors of the Hoel, sunk first at 8:55, constituted the northernmost group. The Japanese had been in the heat of pursuit when the destroyer went down. The men of the Hoel were then treated to a full fleet review as the Center Force’s leviathans paraded past them to the south. After that, the survivors had no idea what had become of the enemy—or of the rest of Taffy 3 for that matter. South of where the Hoel’s men swam were the survivors of the Gambier Bay. They had the distinction of serving on the only American aircraft carrier in history ever sunk by enemy naval gunfire. Like the destroyermen, they had seen the enemy up close, had felt the heat of his muzzles firing. Finally, farther south still, floated the men from the Johnston and the Samuel B. Roberts, whose ships, having fought to the last, sank within a few minutes and a few thousand yards of each other.

  Such descriptions of the groups’ proximities, given with the benefit of a backward-looking bird’s eye, were unavailable to the men in that terrible moment. The currents and wind took hold of them, and from their initial entry into th
e water, there was no telling how they moved relative to one another. A thousand men dotted the ocean’s swells, cast about by the waters. For small groups and individuals alike, however, the experience of survival was one of sudden, sinking aloneness.

  The lazy swells of the Philippine Sea raised and lowered the men at regular intervals. At the top of a swell, if he was inclined, a man could take in his wide surroundings and look for other survivors to merge his fortunes with. In the bottoms, surrounded by gentle slopes of seawater like the sides of a shallow bowl, he would be left to contemplate his private misery. Land was but an abstraction; though the peaks of Samar were visible where the squalls and clouds permitted, reaching up from beneath the horizon, the beaches that lay beneath them were out of sight, some thirty miles away. For a wounded, exhausted swimmer, it might as well have been a whole ocean.

  For them, the world existed only in two dimensions. With their eyes at sea level, they had no vertical parallax by which to gauge distance. The physical fact of the round earth made height a telling advantage at sea. Lookouts on the ships with the tallest masts could see farthest and spot the enemy soonest. The Yamato was the first Japanese ship to fire not only because of her powerful guns but because her lookouts enjoyed the loftiest aerie in the flotilla. When the survivors entered the water, however, the circumference of their world shrank like a contracted camera aperture. Even on the clearest day the Hoel’s survivors would have been out of sight of the Roberts’s survivors. Any imaginary line connecting them would have arced over the face of the earth far enough that the curve of the world blocked their view.

  By sweeping his arms together, George Bray gathered up a foamy pile of fuel oil and tried to splash it all away from him. But the stuff seemed to have a mind of its own. It floated back at him, sticking to everything. It would not go away. Here and there the slick was burning in the lazy manner in which oil is prone to burn.

  Bud Comet paddled his raft to Bray’s group and tied up fast to the small flotilla of survivors. This group was sixty-odd strong, gathered on and around a life raft whose wooden lattice bottom, suspended by ropes from the raft’s hard foam ring, had been mostly shot out. Some seven feet long and four or five feet wide, the raft was more like an oversized doughnut float than a proper inflatable boat. Tied up to the raft to form a little archipelago was a floater net, a twenty-by-twenty-foot expanse of mesh netting made buoyant by hard rubber disks linked together in strings of eight. Jack Moore, Lt. Luther West, and chief Cullen Wallace were its ranking members.

  Most of the men in this group were in fair health. About half of them had no injuries at all. The majority of the rest had wounds that were not immediately life threatening—holes through flesh, gashes to limbs, odd burns and scrapes, blood leaking from the ears. A few were far worse off, and these men, en route to what would probably be a slow death, were laid inside the ring of the raft. Jerry Osborne, a water tender in the Roberts’s demolished forward boiler room, had been scalded so severely that he had third-degree burns all over his body. He lapsed in and out of consciousness. The midocean silence was now and then cut through with his and others’ long groans, at unpredictable intervals swelling into screams.

  A few hundred yards away from them, on their own raft-and-floater-net assemblage, drifted another group of about fifty men, among them Bob Copeland, Bob Roberts, Bill Burton, Dudley Moy-lan, Tom Stevenson, Lloyd Gurnett, and two of the ship’s four surviving chiefs, Rudy Skau and Frank Cantrell.

  Some distance away on the current, another group of about seventeen or so Roberts survivors clung to a far less sturdy contraption: a pair of fourteen-foot-long wooden planks that the deck division had once used as a scaffolding for scraping and painting the side of the hull. The structure wasn’t seaworthy, and a lot of the men clinging to it were in very bad shape.

  It was clear to Stevenson and others that the wounded would be better off with them. Only seven could fit inside the raft, so the captain and pharmacist’s mate Oscar King evaluated their wounded and decided who would gain tenancy to this prime real estate. Everyone else floated in the water around the raft, clutching the manila lines of the floater net tied up to it.

  Tom Stevenson, Lloyd Gurnett, soundman third class Louis Gould, and Charles Natter, who was a particularly strong swimmer, spent a few hours on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth trying to unite the stragglers on the scaffolding with their group. They swam to it and struggled to move the bulky structure toward their own raft and net. When they tired of the impossible task of propelling the sagging mass of wood through the water, they tried to cajole the healthier survivors to swim with them. To their frustration, most of them refused to leave the scaffolding—a bird in the hand and all that. Staying put beat swimming an Olympic distance through waters well populated by large sharks. Ultimately, they settled for ferrying back to the raft men who were too weak to make it themselves and too shell-shocked to resist rescue.

  Yelling deliriously, Bill Stovall, Gun 52’s pointer, was among several men pulled into Copeland’s raft. He had been blown from the mount’s steel enclosure, his lungs scorched in the fiery blowback from the breech. He had lived long enough to see the ship sink, but as he hollered on, it was clear that the only humane thing to do was to avoid prolonging his agony. Exchanging pained, knowing glances and solemn nods, the men eased Stovall into the water and allowed it to swallow him.

  * * *

  WHEN THE ROBERTS SURVIVORS got their first glimpse of the dim gray triangles cutting the water’s surface around them, the stinking oil that fouled their hair, faces, and eyes began to seem more a blessing than a curse. The high-grade American fuel—distinctive by smell from Japan’s cruder Malaysian distillate—coated them completely, masking their identities from one another. Though their eyes stung from it and they couldn’t see much, the oil proved to be an effective shark repellent. The men noticed the way it seemed to keep the tall fins at a distance. George Bray scooped up a handful of black foam and smeared it all over his shoeless left foot. The last thing a guy needed was a shark mistaking a white sock for an appetizer.

  The oil was an efficient sunscreen too. Most of the squalls had been warmed away by the rising South Pacific sun. It baked their skin and reflected off the sea to burn their undersides as well. But the oil protected their skin. Exposure to the ocean’s elements didn’t seem like much of a threat at the time. They knew help was on the way.

  Looking up, Tom Stevenson could see a swarm of specks against the ceiling of the blue sky—planes outbound on strike missions of some kind. The aircraft—could they be from the Taffies?—were probably too high for their pilots to spot the survivors. Optimism reigned nonetheless. Figuring on a prompt rescue, Copeland had doled out most of the raft’s provisions. Each man got two malted milk tablets, a piece of Spam, and a few ounces of water.

  Sure enough, a good omen soon came. Around three P.M., out of the blue, came the low-throated growl of a Wright radial engine, drowning out the sound of seawater lapping against the raft. A TBM Avenger roared by. Low over the wave tops, the pilot banked hard, circling the group and flashing a thumbs-up sign through the long greenhouse canopy. As the plane zoomed away, its engine fading with the down Doppler, everyone was jubilant. That was it, Stevenson thought. They were all but rescued. The pilot would call in their position, and a ship or a submarine would be sent to get them.

  Forty-seven

  Swimming in the bloodied waters that had swallowed their ships, none of the survivors of the late, great screening vessels of Taffy 3 were in a position to distinguish victory from defeat. The Japanese men-of-war that had sunk them had charged blithely past, presumably to sweep away the remains of Taffy 3 and to charge through Taffies 2 and 1 on the way into Leyte Gulf itself.

  Who was going to tell them what had really happened? And would they even have believed it? The men of the destroyers and destroyer escorts had helped win a victory of the most impossibly resounding kind. Their dashing skippers had put themselves on the line first and started an improbable
rout. Now Bill Brooks and friends, the avenging angels from the escort carrier squadrons, would help finish it.

  Launching from the Marcus Island at 11:15 A.M., Brooks, the first Taffy 3 pilot to spot the Japanese fleet on its way south, was now among the last to watch it flee. He was in the vanguard of the Taffies’ latest parting gift to the Japanese Center Force: a fifty-six-plane strike whose savagery and efficiency tended to support Kurita’s decision to withdraw. Pilots from the sixteen CVEs of the three Taffies formed pickup squads on the wing. Brooks flew with Ens. William Mc-Cormick of the Fanshaw Bay’s VC-68 and Lt. Cdr. T O. Murray, skipper of the Marcus Island’s resident squadron, VC-21. That group of fourteen Avengers and eight Wildcats merged with a group led by the Kadashan Bay’s skipper, Lt. Cdr. John Dale, which in turn joined planes led by Lt. Cdr. Richard Fowler, the resourceful Kitkun Bay air group commander who had taken a breather aboard the Taffy 2 jeep Manila Bay after his morning exploits. They required no navigation data to find their targets. Raging fires from the stricken Chokai and the Chikuma produced twin columns of smoke that were visible from the flight deck of Taffy 2’s carriers. This gathering of planes, which rendezvoused as green-dyed shell splashes from the Haruna were walking the seas around Taffy 2’s destroyer screen, was the fourth of six air strikes that Taffy 2 would send against Kurita that day. They found the Japanese fleet about fifteen miles east of Samar Island, off Cebu Bay.

  The CVE pilots learned on the wing to do what Halsey’s and Mitscher’s aviators prided themselves on doing. In the days leading up to the Battle off Samar, several jeep-carrier fighter pilots had distinguished themselves in air-to-air combat against bombers swarming the Leyte invasion beachhead. Overall on the day, Wildcat pilots from the three Taffy groups downed fifty-four Japanese planes and claimed twenty more as probables. Now, with an enemy fleet within their grasp, it was the Avenger pilots’ turn to work in the big leagues.