Tin Can Titans

by John Wukovits

  Halsey wrote Ainsworth that it was “a grand night’s record for an aggressive leader backed by indomitable officers and men. We will miss the Helena but she took many times her weight in Jap meat. You paved many miles of the Tokyo Road last night.” Turning his attention to McInerney and his Desron 21 destroyers, Halsey wrote that their actions in Kula Gulf had added “further laurels to the combat team which struck thorns in the Jap. Well done.” Nimitz jumped in, praising the “high leadership, stout heart, and fine ships.”24

  People in the United States, already aware of O’Bannon and the vital work performed in the Solomons by Halsey’s destroyers, gained additional appreciation for the nation’s tin cans that held the line in the South Pacific. A nationally broadcast radio program called The First Line turned the spotlight on Romoser and his Radford crew, calling Romoser “the commanding officer of a crew of men who haven’t the faintest idea of the meaning of the word ‘impossible.’” Terming the sailors “real destroyer men,” the program, which included Romoser as a guest, included Romoser’s comment, “Old Squadron Two-one has given the Japs the one-two, eh, gentlemen?” After taking listeners through the battle, the radio interview ended with the narrator explaining that the program “has brought you a story of courage and loyalty typical of the men of your Navy as they fight in the First Line.”25

  The drama back in Kula Gulf, however, had not ended.

  “A One-Man Army”

  Alone in the gulf with the departure of O’Bannon and Chevalier, the men on Miller’s raft and accompanying net took stock of their situation. Only five of the more than twenty survivors were unharmed, and when Miller, the senior officer present, could not at first take over due to his injuries, Lieutenant Hackett stepped up. He figured the best bet to reach friendly forces was to try for Rice Anchorage, but the five made little headway paddling in the gulf. One close call occurred when a Japanese powerboat sped out from Kolombangara and directed fire in their vicinity, but in the darkness the Japanese failed to locate Miller’s group. The boat circled the area a few times, concluded the water was free of Americans, and returned to shore.

  The next morning Miller was clearheaded enough to take over. When a rubber landing raft floated near, a few able men swam out and retrieved it. Miller told Lieutenant Hackett to take some men and use the bigger boat to reach shore, now about ten miles distant. Hackett’s exhausted group succeeded later that afternoon, and they found a small shelter where they rested and cut open coconuts with Hackett’s sheath knife.

  The men soon began to explore the area, but under the boiling sun they began stripping off all their clothing until, except for shoes, they were completely naked. They devoured a cache of eggs found at a deserted village and eventually, with the help of friendly natives, safely reached the Marines at Rice Anchorage.

  The next day Miller ordered a second group shoreward in the remaining raft, hoping that one of the two groups would survive and tell rescue teams about those remaining in the water. Floating in the middle of Kula Gulf, Miller and six other survivors battled an oppressive sun, hunger, and thirst. Pain from the pressure against Miller’s diaphragm bolted through his chest with each breath, and several other men in the netting died from similar internal injuries caused by the sinking Strong.

  Over the next two days Miller’s group drifted with the tides. When Miller awoke on the morning of July 8, he found that the net had floated to within one hundred yards of shore. The abler among them paddled with their hands to land the group on a tiny islet off the end of Arundel Island across from Vila. Miller stumbled ashore with five other men, including one officer, Lieutenant Oberg, and there they rested for two days, draining the juice from the few coconuts they could crack open.

  On July 10 Lieutenant Oberg succumbed to his injuries. Knowing they could not remain on an island lacking fresh water, Miller and his four companions paddled across the half mile of water separating the little island from Arundel. After two hours, with Miller sitting in the back and kicking to aid the healthier men, the group crawled out of the netting and collapsed on Arundel’s shore.

  They remained a few more days at an abandoned Japanese lean-to that adjoined freshwater springs and coconut trees. When one of the men died on July 13, only four of the original twenty-three who had made it to the life net and rafts were alive. The next day Miller started bleeding profusely from his internal injuries, and he thought his chances of survival dimmed further.

  After almost being discovered by enemy patrols scouting the island, Miller moved the men off the beach. The quartet inched along the southern edge of Hathorn Sound, but after three miles they made camp when Miller, who appeared to be on the verge of collapsing, began passing clotted blood from his rectum. That night, as the other three slept, Miller decided that if he was too weak to continue the next morning, he would order the trio to leave him on the beach and strike out for friendly forces.

  When dawn brought no improvement, Miller told the men to save themselves. They objected to leaving their officer behind, but he gave them a direct order and told them to take their equipment with them. Miller kept for himself a small pocketknife with broken blades and a parka, which the three supplemented with some opened coconuts, two Japanese beer bottles filled with fresh water, and extra tins for drinking. Miller, certain he was making his final stand, handed his shoes to one of the barefoot men. “When they finally left me late in the morning, he was crying like a baby,” Miller said of the man to whom he gave his shoes. “They felt they were deserting me and hated to go, but they had to obey orders.” Once the three left, Miller, thinking he would soon be dead, drank almost the entire supply of water. Somewhat refreshed and at peace with his decision, Miller “lay down there to die.”

  As the hours passed, the competitiveness to succeed that had made Miller excel at Alabama returned, and he regained the desire to live. Late in the afternoon of July 17, in pain from his injuries, thirsty, and famished, the former quarterback “held a little conversation with the Lord.”26 He promised that if God granted rain and delivered fresh water to him, he would do everything in his power to live. That night the skies opened in a four-hour deluge, enabling Miller to refill the two bottles and drink his fill.

  After a decent night’s sleep Miller, leaning on a staff and with a blanket draped over his arm, set out for a spring one mile away at the northern tip of Arundel. Hampered by his injuries and in a weakened condition, Miller needed half a day to cover two-thirds of the distance across an open salt flat uncovered by the low tide, much of it consisting of coral rocks that cut deep into his feet. Before Miller reached the spring, an aircraft flew his way, giving him momentary hope for rescue, but bullets from a Japanese fighter dissuaded him of the delusion. Miller was able to extricate from his neck and left wrist the fragments from bullets that shattered against rocks, and then he resumed his trek, which ended later that afternoon at the spring and its welcome waters.

  The next morning Miller cracked open a coconut by hammering it against a rock. He gulped the refreshing juice, and for the first time since his ship sank, Miller swallowed solid food, the coconut meat. Bolstered with the abundance of fresh water and coconuts, Miller began regaining his strength.

  After a few days of evading Japanese patrols, Miller decided that if he was to survive, he would have to locate a more sheltered hiding spot. Each day for the next five days he ignored the pain from his injured feet to scout the area around the spring. On the fifth day he found a good location deep in the jungle, a spot nestled amid large mangrove trees and shielded on all sides by thickets and branches. Miller fashioned a bunk from palm fronds and shaped a lookout position thirty feet high in the trunk of a mangrove tree. Until he was either captured, killed, or rescued, thought Miller, this camp would be home to him and the collection of lizards that reduced the mosquitoes and red bugs that afflicted Miller.

  On July 26 Miller hobbled to the beach when he saw a low-flying American plane. Waving and shouting, Miller enticed the pilot to drop lower and circle s
everal times, during which the pilot “looked me over very carefully, often being so close that I could see the plane crew so well that I could almost identify them if I saw them again.”27 The plane veered away, making an energized Miller believe that a rescue craft might soon follow, but nothing arrived.

  Miller continued to operate from his hiding spot, eluding patrols and working on a raft after the Japanese left. He worried that his foot wounds, which had begun to fester, would prevent him from gathering coconuts or running to the beach whenever an American plane flew over, but his greatest fear was being spotted by Japanese soldiers in the troop barges and supply boats that nightly ran down Hathorn Sound from Vila and passed by his camp on their way to Munda.

  A week later he heard a craft coming up the channel in a different direction from that normally used by the Japanese. He climbed a tree to see an American PT boat quietly moving along the shore while the troop barges churned toward the boat from the opposite direction. When the Japanese neared the PT boat, the American vessel sprayed the enemy troop barges with its machine guns and killed the soldiers. The boat then turned the guns toward the jungle in case any Japanese lurked there, requiring Miller to seek cover. As the boat left, Miller tried to draw their attention. Rather than shouting that he was an American, which often drew fire because the Japanese had used that ploy to trick Americans into stopping their fire, Miller climbed to the tree lookout post and started singing the Marine Hymn. Unable to hear Miller over the boat’s engines, though, the American vessel departed, leaving the officer stranded for a second time.

  The next morning Miller ransacked the Japanese bodies and retrieved shoes, socks, a bayonet, two hand grenades, and five tins of beef. Although the meat tasted horrible, Miller consumed one every other day to rebuild his strength. That afternoon he again ran to the beach when an American aircraft flew over. Like the first, this plane circled several times to determine whether the man was American or Japanese before dropping a package with a compress bandage, a small bottle of iodine, and a chocolate ration bar. Miller quickly applied the iodine to his lacerated feet but, just as had happened earlier, no rescue craft came after the plane left.

  Before long the Japanese came across the pilfered bodies; the discovery caused them to increase the frequency and strength of their patrols. The next night Miller spied five enemy soldiers moving along the beach toward his hiding spot. He waited until the group was thirty yards away, then rose and, as if he were the quarterback in front of the home crowd at Alabama, “lobbed a nice thirty-yard pass with one of the grenades.”28

  The following morning he retrieved from the bodies official records, photographs, additional hand grenades, uniforms, raincoats, pup tents, haversacks, bayonets, ammunition, five tins of meat, and soap. This time he buried the group and hid the location with plants. Then he used the soap to remove some of the remnants of oil that still covered portions of his body.

  Each night after the PT boat attack, the Japanese posted hidden machine gun squads along the Sound in hopes of ambushing any subsequent vessels. Three times Miller crept from his camp until he was within tossing distance and destroyed the machine gun squads by hurling grenades into their midst.

  On the morning of August 16, the drone of another American torpedo bomber, piloted by Marine 1st Lieutenant James R. Turner, awakened Miller, who ran to the salt flat and waved a towel at the plane. Turner was prepared to shoot until he spotted Miller’s red beard, which he concluded identified the figure as an American. Turner reversed course and flew to Munda to report the sighting to his superior officer.

  Given that the earlier two sightings had not resulted in rescue, a dispirited Miller expected more of the same this time. An hour later, however, a seaplane piloted by Major Goodwin R. Luck lifted him out of his doldrums. “My emotions were beyond description,” Miller wrote of seeing the rescue plane.

  To land near his beach, Luck had to fly within 2,000 yards of Vila on Kolombangara and circle within range of Japanese guns. When Luck landed on Hathorn Sound, Miller started to wade to the plane, but Major Vernon A. Peterson, in charge of the attempt, waved him off. He told Miller to wait until he could inflate a rubber boat and move closer to the weakened officer. While Peterson inflated the boat, Miller returned to camp and collected the Japanese documents, then walked back the short distance to the reef where Peterson waited with the rubber boat. Luck flew Miller to Munda, where doctors inspected the lieutenant and where Miller enjoyed “my first real meal since the night of July 4. I had lost forty pounds during the forty-three days I was missing.”29 The former quarterback remained at Munda for two days before being flown first to Guadalcanal and then to Espiritu Santo before arriving in Noumea.

  On September 15 Miller received the Navy’s highest honor, the Navy Cross, from none other than the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who was then in the middle of a lengthy tour of Pacific military installations. While visiting the base hospital, at Admiral Halsey’s request Mrs. Roosevelt pinned the Navy Cross and Purple Heart with Gold Star on Miller, whom the New York Times identified as “a one-man army who attacked three Japanese machine-gun nests and one patrol, killing at least a dozen Japanese, while marooned for thirty-nine days on Arundel Island, northwest of New Georgia.”30

  The Navy Cross cited Miller’s actions while abandoning ship, his freeing two shipmates who had become entangled in lines, his actions in guiding the survivors to land, and his exploits in destroying Japanese machine gun positions after he ordered the healthy men to leave. Newspapers trumpeted his achievements, magazines added to the accolades, and comic books issued accounts of Miller’s deeds. The result of the adulation was further notice on the home front for Miller’s ship, Strong, as well as for O’Bannon, Nicholas, and the other destroyer crews who had stepped in for the battleships and cruisers and performed so admirably as a crucial ingredient in Admiral Halsey’s efforts to stem the Japanese advance. Their comrades in the South Pacific had already recognized their daring exploits; now people back home were taking notice as well.

  “A Great Mass of Flames and Explosions”

  Over the next four months Desron 21 was involved in three other major surface engagements with the Japanese, all brought about by efforts to halt the Tokyo Express from rushing in more reinforcements. Senior commanders continued to frustrate destroyer skippers by keeping their ships tied closely to the cruisers, but some tactical alterations gave hope that one day destroyers could display the offensive wallop they packed.

  On July 12, another sweltering afternoon, Nicholas, O’Bannon, Taylor, Jenkins, and Radford joined other ships to steam up the Slot and intercept the Japanese. MacDonald’s raw crew had earlier been unnerved by the ferocity of surface engagements, “but by this time my boys were getting over the great fear of the battle of Guadalcanal and as I used to tell them not all battles are as terrible as that one.”31

  When the next morning reconnaissance aircraft spotted the Japanese, to MacDonald’s dismay Ainsworth formed the usual one-column battle disposition, with his cruisers nestled protectively between two groups of destroyers. Instead of immediately opening with a torpedo launch, he delayed firing until he closed the range to seven thousand yards. Rear Admiral Shunji Izaki, who had swept down from Rabaul with the light cruiser Jintsu, five destroyers, and four destroyer-transports, now carried a radar-detecting device that picked up the electric impulses from US radar. He launched his torpedoes at 1:08 a.m., one minute before Ainsworth gave his belated order to attack. Those sixty seconds made all the difference.

  Japanese torpedoes hit the Australian cruiser Leander, killing twenty-eight and knocking her out of the battle, but American salvos ripped into Jintsu, disabling her steering gear, followed by two Desron 21 torpedoes smacking into Jintsu’s after engine room and Number Two stack. The cruiser split in half and sent Izaki and most of the 483 officers and men to the bottom.

  At that point Ainsworth decided to pursue the fleeing enemy. When radar picked up an unidentified group of ships closing on the area, Ainswor
th wasted seven minutes trying to determine whether they were Japanese or part of his destroyer screen. By the time he gave the order to fire, another wave of torpedoes had struck his two cruisers and the destroyer Gwin. The cruisers were able to steam away, but Gwin had to be scuttled.

  Izaki’s Japanese destroyer-transports successfully unloaded their reinforcements. In giving his life and losing a cruiser, Izaki succeeded in his main mission and knocked three American cruisers out of the war, one permanently. Combined with Kula Gulf a week earlier, the battle again revealed shortcomings in American surface tactics. In both actions Japanese torpedoes churned toward their targets with Ainsworth’s guns still silent.

  The Long Lance torpedoes continued to confound Halsey and Nimitz. Fleet intelligence examined a retrieved Long Lance in early 1943 but failed to disseminate the results to Halsey. The commander of the stricken Helena warned Ainsworth to draw no closer to his foe than ten thousand yards, a distance that would offer a better chance to evade the weapons, but Ainsworth, believing no torpedo could accurately strike at such long range, disregarded the caution.

  MacDonald and other destroyer commanders wondered if they would ever be freed to operate on their own. The next surface engagement proved the validity of their arguments, even though Desron 21 destroyers were not a part of it.