The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  The Battle off Samar was a battle of firsts: the first time a U.S. aircraft carrier was destroyed by surface gunfire; the first time a ship was sunk by a suicide plane; the first time the mightiest battleship afloat fired on enemy warships. And it was a battle of lasts: the last massed ship-versus-ship action in naval history; the last time a battleship fired its main batteries at an enemy; the last time small destroyers charged an opposing battle line.

  If Samar had never happened—if Halsey had left behind Task Force 34 to butcher the Center Force as it sailed through San Bernardino Strait—Leyte Gulf would probably have gone down in naval history as a major mop-up operation and a bloody one-way slaughter. As catastrophic as it was, Taffy 3’s historic last stand at Samar conferred to the bloody campaign an aspect of transcendence. The victory at Leyte Gulf was the product of Allied planning, savvy, and panache, to be sure. But only Samar showed the world something else: how Americans handle having their backs pushed to the wall. As Herman Wouk wrote in War and Remembrance, “The vision of Sprague’s three destroyers—the Johnston, the Hoel, and the Heermann— charging out of the smoke and the rain straight toward the main batteries of Kurita’s battleships and cruisers, can endure as a picture of the way Americans fight when they don’t have superiority. Our schoolchildren should know about that incident, and our enemies should ponder it.”

  According to Admiral Nimitz, “The history of the United States Navy records no more glorious two hours of resolution, sacrifice, and success.” Though in the six months immediately ahead American troops, sailors, and airmen would suffer bloodily in the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the Japanese, with their naval and air-power broken, would never again truly challenge the U.S. advance toward Tokyo. Accompanied by another veteran of Samar, the light cruiser Yahagi, the Yamato would make a final desperate sortie against the Americans during the Okinawa invasion. But just like her sister ship, the Musashi, sunk by Halsey’s swarming fliers on October 24, the Yamato would be destroyed by American carrier planes before she reached her goal.

  The judgments of historians and strategists were far removed from the immediate concerns of Taffy 3’s survivors as they rode slow boats to rear areas for rest, replenishment, and recovery. Like most veterans, they would continue their lives saying that the truest heroes were the men who did not come back. Of the dead there were far too many. Among Taffy 3’s ships the Hoel had suffered worst, with 267 dead out of a crew of 325. The Johnston lost 184 out of 329, the Samuel B. Roberts had 90 dead out of 224, and the Gambier Bay lost 131 men out of about 900. The St. Lo’s losses of 114 out of a 900-man complement seem disproportionate to the horror the ship experienced, erupting into a towering thunderhead of smoke and flame after the kamikaze hit.

  The prompt rescue of the St. Lo’s survivors was the fruit of Ziggy Sprague’s risky decision to detach the Heermann and his three remaining destroyer escorts from screening his carriers, even though his four jeeps had all been damaged by kamikaze attacks and stood to suffer more. None too eager to strip his CVEs of their protection, Sprague didn’t mind, in his official action report, taking an indirect shot at Admiral Kinkaid for the predicament: “This desperate expedient which left the Task Unit without any screen for the next eight hours was made necessary by the absence of any rescue effort from other sources.”

  Sprague’s gamble paid off: that afternoon nearly eight hundred men of the St. Lo and its air group, VC-65, were saved. The Dennis, the Heermann, the John C. Butler, and the Raymond stayed behind retrieving swimmers from the lost carrier well past dark, as Sprague retired to the southeast to rendezvous with Taffy 1 and ultimately set course for rear areas. The Dennis alone hauled aboard more than four hundred St. Lo survivors, a soaked and wounded mob nearly twice as numerous as the destroyer escort’s own crew.

  The ordeal of the survivors from Taffy 3’s four other sunken ships was the bitterest and saddest of memories, not much less so for Sprague than for the men themselves. The mistakes of the naval high command had started the events of October 25, and the mistakes of the naval high command influenced how they ended. Though it was not his way to air dirty laundry, Sprague privately blamed the delayed rescue effort on the commander of the Seventh Fleet, Admiral Kinkaid. Sprague had a good track record of taking care of his men. Having seen to the prompt rescue of the closest victims at hand when the fighting wound down, he had relied on his fleet commander to pick up his task unit’s remaining pieces. The pickup happened, but not before an estimated 116 men died during the three-day, two-night ordeal at sea. In the margins of his copy of C. Vann Woodward’s 1947 book The Battle of Leyte Gulf, Sprague wrote, “This was a disgrace, and I blame Kinkaid who promised rescue ships upon my demand.”

  That Kinkaid initially received incorrect rescue coordinates might be due to the inevitability of error amid the confusion of war. That several hours passed between the Seventh Fleet commander’s discovery of the inaccurate coordinates and his ordering a new search, which was based on coordinates nearly as far astray as the first ones were, seems attributable to communications breakdowns within the Seventh Fleet. Pilots had been wagging their wings at Taffy 3 survivors throughout the first afternoon. Whether they broke radio silence and called in sighting reports, and what became of the reports if they were made, is unknown.

  * * *

  AT SAN PEDRO BAY in Leyte Gulf, Bob Copeland and the survivors of the Samuel B. Roberts were parceled out to different ships depending on their health status. The worst off were taken to the evacuation transport Tryon, the moderately wounded were loaded aboard an LST, and the mostly healthy were transferred to a PC. Though the men were well cared for, mistakes happened. Somehow Tullio Serafini got loaded aboard a PC along with his skipper and other lightly injured survivors. Shortly after being taken aboard, a Roberts survivor crawled over to Copeland’s bunk—even the uninjured were too exhausted to walk—and informed him that Serafini was dying. Lying on a cot near the fantail, the chief radioman, who even his captain said was “the kind of man I would have been proud to call my father,” passed away with his tearful shipmates gathered around him.

  The survivors of Taffy 3 made their meandering ways to rear areas for rest and recuperation. After attending a somber memorial for the four Fanshaw Bay men killed during the battle, Ziggy Sprague took his carriers to Woendi, New Guinea, for refueling, then on to Manus for six days of rest. On November 7 Sprague’s carrier group set course for San Diego, arriving on November 27. The Heermann and the Dennis, flooded forward from shell hits, limped to Kossol Passage for repairs, then to Pearl Harbor.

  Bob Copeland and survivors from the Roberts and other ships were taken aboard the hospital ship Comfort, which took a zigzagging course to the U.S. anchorage at Hollandia, arriving there on November 3. Copeland pulled some strings and arranged for the available Roberts survivors to return stateside aboard the SS Lurline, a passenger liner commandeered for wartime transport. In the unexpected luxury of passenger-ship staterooms, and with long hours to spend staring at the sea, the survivors had time to reflect on their experiences, to take account of the loved ones they missed, and to ponder the changes they might make to their lives now that God had entered them.

  Aboard the Heermann, during its long trip from Kossol Passage to Pearl Harbor, Lt. Jules Steinberg engaged in a lively theological discussion with his fellows in the CIC. Someone noted that throughout the two and a half hours of battle, the twelve-man crew assigned to watch the surface radar had kept intensely busy, fixed to their scopes, plots, and voice tubes, relaying critical data to the bridge and the torpedo crew. Meanwhile, the twelve men in the air-search section, with no air attacks threatening, had nothing to do. An argument developed as to who deserved credit for the ship’s excellent performance: the surface-search team and others aboard the ship for efficiently doing their jobs, or their air-search counterparts and other idlers for sitting quietly and praying with such spectacular results. “I had to admit that I didn’t know the answer,” Steinberg wrote. “If I were asked today, thoug
h, I’d say that God helps those who help themselves.”

  Ziggy Sprague had no trouble giving credit where it was due. In his official action report he wrote, “In summation, the failure of the enemy main body and encircling light forces to completely wipe out all vessels of this Task Unit can be attributed to our successful smoke screen, our torpedo counterattack, continuous harassment of enemy by bomb, torpedo, and strafing air attacks, timely maneuvers, and the definite partiality of Almighty God.”

  Taking the Heermann to rear areas for rest and replenishment after the battle, Captain Hathaway, who had been as tough on his crew as any commander ever had been, got on the PA and declared, “You are a wonderful crew, and I am happy to have served with you. By God, you all did something. Maybe what you did was right, and maybe it was wrong, but we came through because by God you all did something.”

  Regardless of the improbable sequence of cause and effect that brought the survivors home, their families patiently awaited news of their fate. Harriet Copeland, at home in Tacoma, knew something had gone wrong when her husband’s letters abruptly stopped arriving. For three weeks the postman was empty-handed. Despite the work of Navy censors, Bob Copeland had up until then slipped enough subtle hints into his correspondence to tell Harriet roughly where the Roberts had been operating. When the fighting in the Philippines began to dominate the headlines, she had a fair idea he was there. “I knew there were some big battles going on, and I knew if he had his way he’d be in the middle of it,” she said. Growing more apprehensive by the day—“It’s the long silences that you worry about”—she heard a knock at the door one evening, well after the mailman had made his last delivery. He was back again, holding an envelope that had arrived at the station while he was on his afternoon route. He said, “I found this letter for you after I went back to the post office. I think it’s from your husband. I knew you’d be anxious to have it.”

  The letter, probably written aboard the Comfort, contained a brief, matter-of-fact recounting of the battle, along with the news that he would be coming home, to San Francisco, to be hospitalized for exposure and wounds. He stayed in the naval hospital there for nearly three weeks, finally getting his release on December 19. Harriet picked him up, and the couple retreated to the St. Francis Hotel, where he had proposed to her.

  “It was a sort of homecoming,” Harriet said. “We just sat down together, and I said, ‘Well now, what happened?’ And he just started to tell me.

  “He wasn’t emotional about it. He was pretty pragmatic. He just told me the story in great detail. And he told me all the things that happened to them when they were hanging on to the nets—not the life raft, but the nets—and somebody would swim out and stretch the nets out and they lost some men to sharks. And Bob didn’t swim a stroke.… It was a thrilling time and a scary time and everything. I was awfully relieved to have him back after I heard what they went through.”

  Bob Copeland spent Christmas in Tacoma, where he would ultimately resume his legal career, before reporting to the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Tacticians were doubtlessly eager to meet the skipper of the redoubtable Samuel B. Roberts. Perhaps he found it easier to share his experiences with them than with his own family. Copeland’s children, Suzanne and Rob, heard stories from their mother about how the war had affected their dad. Copeland’s daughter, Suzanne Hartley, said, “I know things were different when he came home from the war. I think they were for so many people. I know that [Mother] said he was just not the same person. And I don’t see how you could be. I think there was a certain amount of reclusiveness. It’s probably a very private thing.… I don’t know if it’s the pain of loss, or the anxiety of the stage on which they fought. It would have to change people.”

  Without doubt it did. Some wounds were physical. As often as not, those were borne in silence. One of the estimated forty shells that struck the USS Hoel peppered Myles Barrett’s back with pieces of shrapnel the diameter of pencil lead. After the war, whenever one of the small wounds began to fester, his wife Elizabeth would take a pair of tweezers and extract the tiny steel fleck. Barrett never saw a doctor. It was about two years before Elizabeth picked his back clean.

  Earl “Blue” Archer, the Kalinin Bay VC-3 Avenger pilot who suffered a serious back injury amid the brambles of flak over Kurita’s fleet, went home and kept quiet about his infirmity. He soon realized he had a choice to make: he could take an eighty or ninety percent disability benefit from Uncle Sam and begin a life of inactivity, or he could take three or four aspirin twice a day and continue flying planes in the naval reserve. “I said forget it. I can make a living. I don’t need your disability.” Bragging about being the only pilot to get six hits on a Japanese battleship with a .38-caliber revolver was not enough for Archer. He continued flying in the reserves, got a desk job as a stockbroker, and had to forgo bowling or playing golf. His back bothers him to this day, but not much else seems to, so long as Louisiana State has a winning football team.

  When Tommy Lupo, the Fanshaw Bay VC-68 Avenger pilot, returned home to New Orleans just before Christmas in 1944, he arrived one day behind a December 22 Western Union telegram from the chief of naval personnel informing his parents that he was missing in action. The flier had been retrieved from Tacloban after the battle and flown safely back to his carrier. But somehow the news did not reach the Bureau of Personnel. His return cured their heartache in an instant. Nothing but the passage of time, however, would heal his own scars. For months after the war, like so many other veterans, he would jump up in bed during the middle of the night, startled awake by subconscious replays of the horrible things he had seen: his roommate on the Fanshaw Bay running decapitated across the hangar deck during the air attack off Saipan.

  Leonard Moser’s postwar life began with an encouraging sign that scarred and broken combatants could be brought back whole. One day during operations off Okinawa, after the Fanshaw Bay had been patched up and returned to action, the aviation machinist’s mate had watched as a Wildcat fighter plane came in too high on its landing approach, missed the last arrester cable, and began an uncontrolled, bouncing skid down the flight deck that ended when it hit the forward emergency barrier, flipped over, and landed with a crunch of metal and glass atop two other planes.

  For the next two weeks, on orders from the engineering officer, Moser’s sole duty was to set up shop on the hangar deck and try to recover at least one working aircraft out of the mess. With a hand-picked assistant, he labored around the clock. Starting with a reasonably intact fuselage, they attached the landing gear from another plane, then cannibalized instruments, guns, wing roots, control surfaces, and so on, struggling, weld by weld, to build something flight-worthy. As they worked, pilots started gathering around the two airedales. Would they be able to get the work done before the next operation began? And would this Frankenstein really fly? Within ten days Moser and his helper had made a plane rise from the ashes. They declared victory.

  But who would flight-test the thing? The plane looked flyable. Mechanics had checked her from propeller hub to rudder and found nothing wrong. Still no pilot volunteered to fly the navy blue phoenix, risen from the hangar deck to the catapult and poised to take to the air again. “I guess they didn’t trust our work,” Moser wrote.

  Finally, a pilot stepped forward and said he would give the plane a whirl. Moser told him it was as good as any other bird the Fanshaw Bay had. Evidently Moser’s word counted. The engine roared to life, and the reconstituted Wildcat, with the large white designation J-5 stenciled on its fuselage, roared into the air.

  “He really rung it out,” Moser wrote to Harold Kight. “He did dives, stalls, rolls, loops, and everything he could think of. He really put on a show for about a half an hour or so, and came in for a perfect landing.” Moser jumped up onto the wing and asked if there had been any squeaks or other irregularities. The pilot told him the only problem with the plane was all the metal screws and shavings that had been left on the floor of the cockpit. When he
rolled the plane, he’d gotten a face full. Otherwise it was a warbird worthy of the Fanshaw Bay’s battle-tested aerie.

  About a year later, promoted to chief and discharged at San Francisco, Moser and his wife were reunited and driving homeward to Nebraska. Eastbound on the freeway, they noticed a freight train cruising on the railroad tracks alongside them. It appeared to have a military cargo. Looking closer, Moser saw that several of the train’s flatcars carried aircraft, Wildcats among them. Moser scanned the line of planes bumping along on their own ride home, and damned if he didn’t see a fuselage stenciled with J-5 and a familiar squadron insignia. It was the same aircraft he had rebuilt aboard the Fanshaw Bay a year or so before. “We drove along beside it for several miles. It sort of gave me a funny but wonderful feeling to tell my wife that there was the plane we rebuilt. She remembers that day. I guess the wonderful feeling was the fact that I wasn’t in the Navy anymore.”

  Not in the Navy anymore. The war was over. The job had been done. And so the reservists went back to their families, searching for new ways to define themselves as citizens of a nation at peace. Leonard Moser’s roadside encounter with Wildcat J-5 seemed to open up the hope that if scarred and broken machines could be patched up and brought home, scarred and broken men could be too.