Tin Can Sailor

by Charles R. Calhoun

  The tactical situation became utterly confused; my observations during the rest of the engagement were oriented relative to the bearing on which our gun director was trained. Before long both the Cushing and the Laffey were out of action, putting the Sterett at the head of the formation. The Atlanta was on fire on our starboard quarter, but so were several Japanese ships—including our first target. Suddenly there came an impossibly bright flash, and shell fragments flooded the gun director. Once I ascertained that no one in the director was seriously hurt, I looked up and discovered that the steel mast above our heads had been hit—probably by two 5- or 6-inch shells. Our recognition lights and part of the rigging dangled there in a helpless mess. Had those shells struck just ten feet lower, no one in the gun director would have lived to describe the event.

  The dim outline of a destroyer now appeared close on our starboard bow—a two-stacker, crossing from right to left. We prepared to let her have it with our two forward guns. I thought I recognized her as one of our own 1,630-ton class and reported that fact to the bridge telephone talker. But apparently my report was not received: the commence-fire order came up from the bridge. We were at murderously close range, and I concluded that the skipper knew what he was doing and that I was mistaken. There was no time to argue. I repeated the order. We were on a five-second salvo interval, and just in the nick of time Shelton yelled, “Sir, that’s a friendly ship!” I knew from experience that Shelton’s ship recognition skills were infallible. I yanked frantically at the handle of the ceasefire gong and shouted into my sound-powered telephone, “Cease firing! Cease firing!” The director pointer immediately elevated the guns so that if they went off the shells would fly harmlessly over the target. We did not fire. In a moment, the skipper backed full to avoid a collision with the target, which he now recognized as our companion the Aaron Ward. In the gun director we breathed a long sigh of relief and had just started to relax from that crisis when we spotted the prize. There, only two thousand yards away on our port bow, was a battleship.

  She had absorbed all that our cruisers could dish out and was on fire from her bridge aft. She was making very little headway; I estimated her speed to be under 5 knots as she steamed in front of us. She was a perfect target. Beautifully illuminated by her own fires, her superstructure towered high above us, and I instructed Byers to train his sights on her “pagoda,” or bridge structure. Before he had even trained around that far, the word came from the bridge to open fire. The instant that Byers reported, “On target,” I repeated the commence-fire order to the gun and director crews. We poured nine salvoes (thirty-six projectiles) into that bridge structure, and I could see them explode against it. At that range every shot hit its mark, and those thirty-six 5-inch shells raised plenty of hell over there with any officers or men who were exposed. By this time we were less than a thousand yards away, and we could see several Japanese sailors dive overboard with their clothes on fire. I told the gun crews what their work had accomplished, and over my telephone I could hear their cheers as the news was relayed to them by their captains.

  Tom McWhorter fired a full salvo of four torpedoes at the target. I saw two red explosions in the water a couple of minutes after hearing the “fish” leave their tubes; other Sterett observers also reported seeing them. It appeared that we had scored two hits in the engineering spaces (although subsequent assessments did not give the Sterett credit for them). The fires topside seemed to flare up, and once more I saw crew members running along her main deck and jumping overboard. She was dead in the water and burning fiercely when we left her. We crossed her bow no more than five hundred yards ahead of her—so close that she could not lower her guns far enough to hit us.

  The action now reminded me of a no-holds-barred barroom brawl, in which someone turned out the lights and everyone started swinging in every direction—only this was ten thousand times worse. Shells continued to drop all around us, star shells and flares hung overhead, tracers whizzed past from various directions, and everywhere we looked ships burned and exploded against the backdrop of the night sky. I could not tell where our forces were. We seemed to be in the midst of about ten Japanese ships without a friend in sight. But we were the Sterett, and most of us believed that we were invincible. To my mind our skipper was the best in the fleet—I knew we would find a way out somehow. But my reverie was short-lived. I could not believe what I now saw. It was nearly a perfect setup.

  Broad on the starboard bow and only about one thousand yards away was a large Japanese destroyer of the Fubuki class. With two twin gun mounts aft, the four guns on her stern were a match for all of ours. But both the ship and her guns were pointed away from us. She was on a heading almost opposite ours, and she still had not seen us. I estimated her target angle (our relative bearing from her) at about 150 degrees. She had her after guns trained on the centerline and was making very little headway.

  With a single roar our four guns spoke together. Four tracers sped straight and true to the target and exploded in her bridge structure. Five seconds later we fired our second salvo, and four more tracers leapt across the intervening eight hundred yards. We could not miss, and we did not. I noted with admiration how beautifully the tracers, which were probably some three hundred feet apart when they started out from our gun muzzles, converged into a grouping no more than ten feet apart when they struck their target. Those four shells disappeared directly into the housings of the ship’s after gun mounts. With a sudden, tremendous roar, she blew up. Her stern came completely out of the water, explosions obscured her after gun mounts, and a tremendous fireball burst skyward. As she settled back into the water, it looked as if the whole after section of her hull was cherry red. Involuntarily I cried out, “Oh, you poor son of a bitch!” The water around her seemed to boil, and her hull threw off steam with a hiss that we could hear aboard the Sterett. I described the scene to the gun captains and told them to send their powder monkeys up the ladder to the main deck so they could see what they had just done. A few seconds later I heard their shouts and cheers as they viewed their vanquished foe. She burned brilliantly for a few minutes while we steamed past her; then there was total darkness. Frank Gould remarked in a recent letter that he “saw our destroyer target with her well-deck awash after we fired torpedoes and steamed past her, distant about two hundred feet on our starboard hand.” It appeared to many eyewitnesses that she had gone down. There was little doubt about that in my mind. I did not know until later that Tom had also fired two fish into her. They must have struck at the same moment as our second salvo of gunfire.

  Soon I learned that the shell hits we had absorbed in the vicinity of the after gun mounts had done considerable damage. I heard confused background noises on my telephone, and someone who did not identify himself reported, “Sir, there’s a bad fire in gun number four.” I ordered him to use the sprinkling and flooding systems wherever necessary and received an acknowledgment; then I lost communication with both of the after guns. I looked aft and saw that there was indeed a bad fire back there. It appeared to be in both of the after guns and perhaps in the ammunition rooms as well. I called the bridge and repeated the report of fires in the two after gun mounts. As I spoke I saw two men dive overboard from the top of the after deckhouse, their clothes ablaze.

  Still unaware of the magnitude of our damage and personnel losses, I took advantage of the lull to send Byers, Shelton, and J. D. down to the battle dressing station for treatment. They returned in only a few minutes, solemn and subdued. When I asked Byers if he had gotten his neck dressed, he said, “No, sir. There’s guys down there with their legs off, and a lot of people are dead. Doc’s got too much to do without us bothering him.” That was the first indication we had of the heavy toll the men of the Sterett had already paid.

  Tom McWhorter described our next encounter with an old Japanese three-stack cruiser on our port bow: “It was steaming at right angles to us and going from starboard to port. I have never been quite so furious as I was when I saw that ship for an
instant and realized that I had no torpedoes that would bear on him. The captain asked me if I could give him one, but I had to tell him that I could not unless we changed our course about 100 degrees. By this time the cruiser had disappeared.” We also saw this target in the director, but because we had only two 5-inch mounts in commission and no port torpedoes left I concluded that the skipper had thought it wisest not to fire on her. It appeared she had not seen us.

  From my vantage point in the gun director I again looked aft, wondering how things were in the gun batteries. As I watched we were struck by a shell in the vicinity of the after deckhouse. In seconds an explosion ripped out of the top of gun number three. There appeared to be several fires in that vicinity now, all illuminating the Stars and Stripes as it waved defiantly twenty feet above the gun mount. Our brilliantly lighted colors, coupled with the fact that we were the only single-stack destroyer in the action, left little doubt as to our identity. And the Japanese had taken note of it.

  LACHING A SUITABLE TARGET for their short-range 20-mm gun, Red Hammack, Peter Grimm, and Robert Priest stood near the centerline of the ship and watched the furious action. They could clearly see a battleship on the port side, seemingly on top of us. The explosion of the Japanese destroyer placed the Sterett in silhouette against a fiery background, and the huge enemy ship chose not to ignore the target. In Red Hammack’s words:

  We were looking right down those 14-inch gun barrels. They fired a split second later, and at that same instant Peter dove headfirst behind the trunnion of the starboard 20-mm and Priest ducked down in front of me, while I had turned my back to the battleship. I caught three pieces of shrapnel (in my left elbow, about a half-inch below my butt in my left leg, and in the right cheek of my fanny). I was really scared, and it occurred to me that I had just had my butt shot off. You can believe this or not, but suddenly I wasn’t scared anymore. I was mad enough to whip the whole Jap Navy all by myself. Peter said, “You OK, Red?” and I said, “Hell, no. Those bastards just shot me in the ass!”

  As we drew away from the battleship, there still appeared to be Japanese ships in every direction. Tracers continued to thunder over our heads, and every once in a while they hit us. We took two more shell hits in the vicinity of the after deckhouse, and the fires became more intense. In the gun director there was not much chitchat. I suppose all of us wanted to know what we could do to help.

  Down in the engineering spaces Hugh Sanders and his outstanding team of senior petty officers, supported by a gang of nonrated firemen, performed flawlessly and courageously. Unable to see the action but aware that their ship was taking terrific punishment, they confronted one crisis after another: They maintained steam and fire-main pressure, coped with repeated electrical outages caused by severed wires, and expertly handled a succession of radical orders to the engines. By doing all these things they enabled the commanding officer to maneuver the ship and so to bring her safely through one of the fiercest surface actions ever fought by the U.S. Navy. Jess Coward took full advantage of the expert support rendered by his engineers. Throughout the battle he had called for radical speed changes to avoid collisions and to steer the ship when the rudder proved useless. When he retired from the melee he utilized the Sterett’s best speed to get away, and on at least one occasion he had to call for “all back full” to avoid running aground. That dauntless “black gang” never failed to deliver what he requested.

  When Tom McWhorter tried to communicate with his torpedomen after the encounter with the destroyer, he was unable to get any reply over the telephone. Now he asked the captain for permission to go below to ascertain the status of the torpedo battery. Permission was granted, and Tom climbed down to the main deck. He later wrote:

  When I got down to the tubes—on the main deck amidships—the first thing I noticed was a complete lack of activity. There was a pungent stench about the area; my feet slipped on the deck, and I almost lost my footing. As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I could make out two or three bodies on the deck—prone and silent. Then I realized that the entire deck was slippery with human blood and pieces of human flesh.

  But no time for that now. They [the torpedo tubes] were not manned. I got up on the starboard tube, the one with the two remaining torpedoes, and trained it out. It trained out a few degrees and then grated to a stop; it was damaged and useless. Then I returned to the bridge and reported to the captain that the remaining torpedoes could not be fired. In addition to this, both of the after guns were disabled—leaving only the two forward guns as our total offensive armament and protection. I heard the captain say, “We will fight her until we sink!” This captain of ours was a fighter, no mistake about it, and as long as we could contribute any appreciable amount of firepower to the melee, in which every gun counted, we would fight. Actually, it amounted to just that: the odds were so heavy against us that one torpedo or one gun was of unprecedented importance.

  During Tom’s absence Herb May asked the skipper if he planned to retire, and he had bristled at the suggestion. He replied, “Hell, no. We’ve still got two torpedoes left.” But once Tom reported that those two fish were out of commission, he changed his mind. Turning to Frank Gould, he said, “OK, Frank, let’s get out of here.” That was a tall order. The gyro compass was out of whack, the steering cable was cut on one side (we were steering with the trick wheel and the engines), the ventilation system was damaged, the SC radar antenna was demolished, the emergency recognition lights were destroyed, the emergency power cable to the steering motor was severed, and the after magazines were flooded. Frank pointed us in a generally northerly direction. Our only armaments were the two forward 5-inch guns. There was nothing behind us but blazing ships, and nothing ahead but the dim outline of Florida Island. We had not seen an American ship for a long time, and I began to wonder if we were the only one left.

  I called down to the bridge to ask to be put to use in some way during the lull in the fighting. Word came back that the captain wanted to see me. Turning over what was left of our gun battery to Jeff, I climbed over the side of the director and down the small ladder to the wing of the bridge. The skipper stood with Herb on the starboard side of the bridge, looking calm and unruffled. I walked over to him. “Did you want me to do something, captain?”

  “Yes, Cal. I want you to go back aft. Do whatever you can to help them back there—but don’t stay. Inspect our damage, and then come back up here and let me know what action is necessary to save the ship.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  As I turned to go to the ladder, he put his hand on my shoulder. “Good luck.”

  THE FLAMES THAT HAD BEEN SHOOTING OUT THE TOP OF OUR NUMBER three mount had subsided, and the topside of the ship was dark. I groped my way down to the main deck and went aft along the starboard side. At the torpedo mount I encountered the first evidence of shell damage. The 5-inch hits near our torpedo tubes had done only superficial structural damage, but they had inflicted severe personnel casualties. I was able to recognize “Little Willie” Walker, one of our best-liked mess attendants, George Jackson, the veteran chief torpedoman, and “Smitty,” one of his strikers, still lying where they fell. All were dead. Crossing over to the port side, I continued aft.

  The upper handling room for 5-inch mount number three was a shambles. Three 14-inch shells had struck the port-side bulkhead and detonated on impact. Thousands of shrapnel fragments had made a sieve of the compartment, killing everyone inside; ignited bins of 5-inch ready service powder; and deflected upward through the gun mount itself, killing all but two of the gun’s crew. Hodge and Keenum were removing the remaining cans of powder from the room when I arrived. Hodge entered through one of the holes gouged by the 14-inch projectiles (holes that measured twenty-two inches across and fifteen inches vertically), scooped up the hot powder cans in his arms, and hurried through the washroom door to dump them overboard. Keenum played a fire hose on him during the early part of this procedure but eventually gave this up and joined in the unloading pr
ocess. Several cans of powder actually detonated in the air with low-order explosions after Hodge tossed them overboard. Keenum also operated the magazine’s sprinkler system on his first trip into the compartment.

  A single 5-inch hit had also penetrated the mount of gun number three without detonating. It mortally wounded V.R.E. Martin (GM 2/c), the gun captain, who insisted that the doctor attend to others because he was sure he would die anyway. I found what was left of this crew dead at their battle stations. Grann, the young first shellman of gun number four, had dived overboard with his clothing on fire; no doubt he was one of the two men I had seen from the gun director. He was never recovered.

  Hodge and I moved aft on the main deck, leaving Keenum to fight the fire. Opening the hatch to the ladder, the two of us descended into the number four upper handling room. Here also casualties were heavy. The scene was similar to what we had encountered on the deck above. Shrapnel fragments had ignited ready service powder and started searing fires. The crew’s quarters forward of the handling room were still ablaze. Ens. Perry Hall was single-handedly fighting the fire with a hose and appeared to have the situation under control. He exuded confidence and calmly assured me that he needed no assistance. Electrical, steering, and degaussing cables had been severed by shell hits. Gun mounts, ammunition hoists, bulkheads, and frames were twisted and distorted. But our watertight integrity was intact, and no machinery was damaged other than instruments and electrical steering-control devices. I marveled at the ship’s ability to take punishment. I left Hodge to assist with the fire fighting and made my way back up to the bridge, to make my report to the skipper.