By 10:19 A.M. on the twenty-seventh, when the rescuers set course to return to Leyte, Captain Baxter’s task group had saved about 1,150 survivors of the Gambier Bay, the Hoel, the Johnston, and the Samuel B. Roberts. Because of the delay in rescue, some 116 men had died at sea. The task group’s flagship, PC-623, carried so many Taffy 3 survivors that Baxter had to order five thousand gallons of fuel pumped into the sea to keep his ship from foundering on the way back to Leyte.
