The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Finest Hour

by James D. Hornfischer

Dread. It was precisely what Ziggy Sprague now felt. Brooks’s report of the pagoda masts was the clincher. And he grasped fully its meaning: against battleships and heavy cruisers, Taffy 3 didn’t have a prayer. Among his thirteen ships there wasn’t a gun heavier than a five-incher. The fifty-four-pound shells they fired, readily loadable by hand, could not penetrate cruiser or battleship armor. They had a surface range of about seven miles. Even the smallest of the four Japanese battleships facing him fired shells that were fourteen inches in diameter and some fourteen hundred pounds in weight. Each armed with an eight- or nine-gun main battery with a range of more than twenty miles, and with speeds approaching thirty knots, the Japanese battlewagons could easily run down and destroy Sprague’s plodding escort carriers. There were four battleships. And the heavy cruisers were arguably even more dangerous. Each one of them—with a treaty-busting displacement of thirteen to fifteen thousand tons fully loaded—carried not only an eight-inch main battery but torpedo tubes as well. And they were swift, capable of thirty-five knots. The Japanese destroyers themselves—eleven of them to Sprague’s three—were together probably more than a match for his entire force. What chance did Sprague have? His destroyers carried torpedoes. But using them required charging into a range that would be suicidal against capital ships in broad daylight—ten thousand yards at most. They would never make ...