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

Back in Alabama he had made the high school varsity football team as a seventh grader.

Returning to the States to convalesce, he decided that he would rather pursue his career in gunnery than in communications. “The gun boss could fire a hundred shots and hit once and he’s a hero,” he said. “In communications, if you screw up [in transcribing] one letter, all hell breaks loose, and you’ve committed a mortal sin. I said to myself, ‘I’d rather be a hero.’”

In 1925 Sprague married Annabel Fitzgerald, whom he had met at a naval officers’ party on Christmas Day, 1924. Their wedding was notable for the absence of her brother, a wanderer whose migrations seemed to intensify whenever important family occasions loomed. She was not close to F. Scott Fitzgerald; she did not approve of the author’s fast lifestyle.

Though distrust of the Japanese was widespread in the Navy, Sprague was among the first to appreciate exactly what the Japanese might do. In June 1928 the Lexington participated in a mock surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. By night the ship crept to within 250 miles of the great Pacific base and launched its planes at dawn. As the American planes flew close overhead, interrupting innumerable breakfasts with the rattling reverberations of their piston-driven engines and an onslaught of flour-filled sacks dropped from their bomb bays, the defenders on Oahu received a bracing glimpse of the future. To Sprague and others in naval aviation, it was proof enough of the hitting power of their new weapon. The following year the Lexington took part in a successful air raid drill on the Panama Canal. Slowly but steadily aircraft carriers were breaking the battleship’s monopoly in the business of projecting offensive power at sea. Sprague spent fourteen months aboard the Lexington before doing a tour on shore duty in May 1929. He was in the vanguard of the new wave. But if any lessons were distilled from those early mock assaults on the Pacific Fleet Headquarters, the Navy had all but forgotten them come December 7, 1941. That day, as captain of the seaplane tender Tangier, Sprague watched every ship tied up to Ford Island except his get hit during the Japanese attack. Loaded with torpedoes, an inferno awaiting its spark, the Tangier early in the battle became shrouded in smoke from the...

The Fanshaw Bay’s skipper, Capt. Douglass P. Johnson, was a gentlemanly Cincinnatian who had graduated in the Annapolis class of 1920 and earned his wings during the genesis of naval aviation. Johnson had endeared himself to his crew on the Fanny B.’s maiden voyage, ferrying aircraft to Australia. Fleeing an enemy sub, Johnson was informed that the carrier’s boilers were reaching their temperature limit. In the fine rhetorical tradition of Farragut, Dewey, and Nelson, Captain Johnson shouted into the voice tube, “Piss on them then. We need more speed.”

His predecessor in command of Carrier Division 25 was Rear Adm. Gerald F. Bogan, who was promoted to command one of Halsey’s Third Fleet carrier groups. During his tenure aboard the Fanny B., Bogan could not seem to bear the perceived indignity of flying his flag from the cramped quarters of an escort carrier. He made sure his officers and crew participated in his misery. Though most were new enlistees and reservists who had never before been to sea, Bogan demanded perfection of them, or at least perfect compliance with “Rocks and Shoals,” which began with the declaration: “The commanders of all fleets, squadrons, naval stations, and vessels belonging to the Navy are required to show in themselves a good example of virtue, honor, patriotism, and subordination.” The indelicate assessment of one senior Fanshaw Bay enlisted man was that Bogan was a “first-class horse’s rear end.” And the disdain was decidedly mutual. With only one officer excepted, Bogan later wrote, “the entire crew [of the Fanshaw Bay] was incompetent.” Years after the war he would harbor bitterness toward the carrier, decrying it as “the worst ship I’d ever seen in any Navy.”

ESCORT CARRIERS HAD MANY nicknames, only a few tinged with anything resembling affection: jeep carriers, Woolworth flattops, Kaiser coffins, one-torpedo ships. Wags in the fleet deadpanned that the acronym CVE stood for the escort carrier’s three most salient characteristics: combustible, vulnerable, expendable. That most everyone seemed to get the joke—laughing in that grim, nervous way—was probably the surest sign that it was rooted in truth.

In 1944 a journalist traveling with the Taffy 3 escort carrier White Plains wrote, “A jeep carrier bears the same relation to a normal naval vessel that is borne to a district of fine homes by a respectable, but struggling, working-class suburb. There is a desperate effort to keep up appearances with somewhat inadequate materials and not wholly successful results.”

An escort carrier was built on a cargo ship’s hull. Shipbuilding magnate Henry J. Kaiser was the Lee Iacocca of his day, a visionary industrialist whose name was a household word. Among his innovations was the Liberty ship, a cargo vessel that could be mass-produced virtually like an oceangoing Model T. Using a breakthrough welding technique, submerged arc welding, that could stitch steel plate with molten rivets up to twenty times faster than existing methods, Kaiser’s shipbuilders produced a Liberty ship in an average of only forty-two days. Seeing that he was in a position to bolster not only America’s merchant marine but also the Navy’s offensive capability, Kaiser’s next brainstorm was to reconfigure his merchantmen as aircraft carriers. However brilliant their means of construction, Kaiser took shortcuts on components and materials. Escort carriers did not have many watertight compartments, a standard damage-control feature on American combatants. The ships were driven by inexpensive, idiosyncratic Skinner Uniflow steam engines, peculiar in design and nonconforming with Navy specs for cylinder lubrication, filtering, and quality of fittings, and foreign to the young mechanics coming out of America’s wartime technical schools. In combat conditions breakdowns were common. The hull of a CVE was no better than its engines. High in sulfur and phosphorus content, the thin steel was brittle, a deficiency that worsened when all the hatches, vents, and other structural discon...

The escort carrier’s most essential variation from the design of the Liberty ship was the addition of a 477-foot flight deck. It was made of wood, inlaid with steel fittings for tying down planes. The expense of the cross-deck wood planking could not be avoided. A carrier spent much of its day enveloped in an invisible cloud of aviation-fuel vapors. A dropped wrench, a bomb dolly unloaded too hard onto a metal flight deck, could create a spark that could well be disastrous. A wooden flight deck reduced the frequency of sparks that could ignite a carrier’s tinder. If fire was a concern, heat wasn’t. Temperatures belowdecks on warships cruising the equatorial latitudes were sweltering. In his campaign to cut costs, Kaiser did not install blower systems to ventilate the lower compartments. Crews sweated miserably.

In a one-year sprint of production from July 8, 1943, to July 8, 1944, Kaiser’s shipyards launched fifty Casablanca-class escort carriers.

Two days later the American invasion force came under attack by some seventy Japanese bombers and torpedo planes. Leonard Moser, an aviation machinist’s mate first class, was standing on a catwalk near the after elevator. Leaning on the rag mop he had forgotten he was holding, he watched the Japanese planes bear down on the Fanshaw Bay. Intense fire from her gunners and the surrounding destroyers knocked three Japanese planes into the sea. A sleek Tony fighter plane survived the barrage, flew over the ship, puffs of smoke reaching back from its fuselage into its slipstream as the shells struck home. Moser thought the plane would explode in midair, right above the ship. But then he saw the bomb. It fell from the plane’s wing, arced downward, and struck the Fanshaw Bay smack on the after elevator. The bomb penetrated the elevator and exploded in midair above the hangar deck below, where plane handlers were fueling and arming their aircraft for battle. The bomb’s detonation burst Leonard Moser’s eardrums and set aflame the business end of his mop. But the most serious damage was belowdecks. When the bomb exploded, Lt. (jg) Tommy Lupo, a TBM Avenger pilot from New Orleans, and his roommate were running across the hangar deck to the ladder that led up to the flight deck. Lupo and his buddy were talking as they ran, and when Lupo turned to say something to him, his roommate was headless. The pilot ran at least five steps without his head. Fire consumed the aft part of the hangar...

A torpedo attack, uniquely dangerous, required a pilot to fly low, slow, and perfectly straight. The mantra, drummed into every torpedo bomber pilot during flight training, was “needle-ball and airspeed.” The challenge was to keep his eyes focused on two instruments, the needle-ball, which indicated the plane’s orientation on the horizontal plane, and the airspeed indicator. If the pilot could keep both instruments within the narrow parameters needed for a successful drop, the torpedo would enter the water like a free-style swimmer hitting the water from a racing podium: flat, straight, and true. A pilot who flew too fast, or with any degree of pitch, yaw, or bounce, or at an altitude that caused the torpedo to enter the ocean with excessive force, was likely to see his torpedo veer off course or “porpoise.” The cruelty of the torpedo pilot’s trade was that the greater his proficiency at straight, slow, and exquisitely stable flight, the greater his chances of being blown from the sky.

And there was always paint to chip. That was an all-purpose time-filler, but crucially important. The Navy had learned the hard way, at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere, that handsomely painted surfaces burned furiously, producing clouds of poisonous smoke.

At night, pilots could enjoy the daily ounce-and-a-half ration of brandy authorized by Navy regulations. But it was rotgut, and enterprising pilots found better use for it hidden inside their pillows, where the steward’s mates would find it and be induced to perform a more thorough cleaning of the quarters. The squadron medical officer could be counted on to keep a secret stash of medicinal alcohol. Sweetened with iodine and burnished with caramel coloring, it could pass, after the third or fourth shot perhaps, for actual sour mash. The enlisted men distilled their own liquor from raisins and yeast. Empty five-inch shell canisters made useful brewing vats for the raisinjack. Ten days of fermentation in the South Pacific sun turned it into palatable moonshine.

The Navy did not fully appreciate it at the time, but with Japanese naval airpower virtually wiped away in the Marianas Turkey Shoot, it really no longer mattered where the Japanese carriers were. Japan didn’t have enough trained pilots to make them a threat. That the hopes of the Sho-1 plan were vested in battleships was a sure sign that Japan knew its tenure as a carrier power was at an end.

He would crush the Japanese—if only he could get out of babysitting MacArthur. The general and his Army planners expected the Third Fleet to guard their northern flank, protecting the troop transports and the beachhead at Leyte. Nimitz and the Navy, on the other hand, felt pressure to let Halsey go hunting. In the Leyte battle plan, these two prerogatives collided in a way that allowed the second to defeat the first. On one hand, the Third Fleet was charged to “COVER AND SUPPORT FORCES OF THE [SEVENTH FLEET] IN ORDER TO ASSIST IN THE SEIZURE AND OCCUPATION IN THE CENTRAL PHILIPPINES.” It was to “DESTROY ENEMY NAVAL AND AIR FORCES IN OR THREATENING THE PHILIPPINE AREA.” So far so good: Halsey would attack only if a Japanese fleet threatened the Philippines. But at the final hour Nimitz had given Halsey the wiggle room the aggressive commander craved, permitting his standing orders to be modified by means of Operations Plan 8–44. It read: IN CASE OPPORTUNITY FOR DESTRUCTION OF A MAJOR PORTION OF THE ENEMY FLEET IS OFFERED OR CAN BE CREATED, SUCH DESTRUCTION BECOMES THE PRIMARY TASK. This new mandate was broad enough to erase Halsey’s duty to MacArthur and Kinkaid. He was free to abandon guard duty. He had the discretion to chase the Japanese Navy regardless of the Seventh Fleet’s needs or expectations. Indeed, Halsey now enjoyed not only the liberty to pursue an enemy fleet, his “primary task,” but the operational flexibility to “create” such an opportunity in the first plac...

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 ...

With or without the help of the Yamato and the other battleships, the heavy cruisers, Sprague figured, would mop up and wring out most of Taffy 3 in fifteen minutes.

IT WAS 6:47 A.M. when Ensign Brooks confirmed his sighting of the Japanese fleet and relayed it to Ziggy Sprague. At precisely the same moment, Admiral Halsey, on the flag bridge of the battleship New Jersey, received a radio message from Admiral Kinkaid: “Question: Is TF 34 guarding San Bernardino Strait?” What the hell was this? Halsey wondered. Why was Kinkaid bothering him now? Sent by the Seventh Fleet commander at 4:12 A.M., two and a half hours before Halsey got it, Kinkaid’s inquiry had traveled from Leyte Gulf two thousand miles east to Manus, languished for a few hours amid a pile of other communiqués, then been routed to the Third Fleet commander. At MacArthur’s insistence, all messages between the Third and Seventh Fleets were routed through his Admiralty Islands headquarters. The communications staff there was deluged with transmissions, the urgent ones all but indistinguishable from the merely important. Halsey read the late-arriving message from his Seventh Fleet counterpart and thought him out of touch, if not entirely delinquent. Task Force 34, the heart of Willis Lee’s battle line, sailed with him. In the earlier dispatch Halsey had meant that Task Force 34 “will be formed” only on his further command. He was shocked that Kinkaid had assumed the actuality of a mere contingency. Wasn’t it plain enough that Halsey had not detached the four battleships? And why was the Seventh Fleet relying on him in any event? Conceived as a defensive force, it had more tha...

A fighting force cannot be reduced to its order of battle any more than a ship’s value can be reduced to the number of guns she carries or the shaft horsepower her turbines can generate. A vessel draws life from the spirit of her crew, which derives in large part from the leadership qualities of her chiefs and officers. Morale defies quantification—and yet it weighs significantly on the ultimate lethality of the tools of war. A ship’s effectiveness is the product of thousands of bonds that develop between individual officers and crew. The bonds form and break in a chain reaction, the power of which is determined by drill, by relationships, by fortitude, faith, and values. Task force commanders can be only abstractly aware of these uncountable qualities as they exist on the particular ships under their command. The officers of the ships themselves see these qualities more clearly but still can only guess how the chemical reactions will coalesce when the real shooting starts and men begin to die. And so orders of battle are drawn up to focus on the tangibles: speed, displacement, armament, and sensors.

Sprague’s moves in the crucible of imminent combat were swift but not rash. One trait of good commanders is that they make simple decisions at the right times and without delay. Sprague was an instinctive and forceful decision maker. He played golf in a hurry. He didn’t line up his putts. He just walked up to the ball and hit it. When he met his future wife, Annabel, he knew immediately he would marry her. At Pearl Harbor he knew right away what to do with the few weapons he had on the Tangier. On the morning of October 25, with an overwhelming Japanese task force pressing down on him, he saw instantly the surest route to his slim hope of survival. If he did not completely resign himself to dying, he at least accepted the reasonable certainty of an imminent swim. If no assistance came from other ships, Sprague would settle for the intervention of a heavenly being of whom during quieter periods of his life he had asked, and to whom he had given, relatively little.

In flight training at the naval air station at Lake Pontchartrain, Archer never missed a chance to go into town for a little nightlife. Tall and thin, eyes hooded by drooping lids that made him look sleepy all the time, he was improbably adept at getting girls. He told them his eyes looked that way because of an injury from shrapnel. The line worked so well on the girls at New Orleans’s Copa Cabana Review that Archer became a semiregular patron of the Roosevelt Hotel, convenient for high-style rendezvous. So notorious was he among his fellow cadets for his stays in that hotel’s Blue Room that “Blue Room” became his nickname. Soon it was shortened to just “Blue.”

Even when they had a clear line of sight, the Japanese still did not know what they faced. From the elegant proportions of their superstructures to their twin stacks to the graceful rise of their forecastles, Fletcher-class destroyers had silhouettes similar to those of Baltimore-class heavy cruisers. Japanese recognition books did not include Henry Kaiser’s new-fangled flattops. At 7:16 lookouts on the Kumano spotted an aircraft carrier afire. Satisfied with the presumed kill, they changed targets two minutes later and threw their next salvos at the St. Lo. By this time Vice Adm. Kazutaka Shiraishi had realized something vital: his quarry were not Essex-class fleet carriers after all but light carriers. But the cruiser commander apparently never relayed that information up the line. About that essential fact, Kurita would remain thoroughly in the dark.

At 7:10 the distance from the Johnston to the nearest Japanese heavy cruiser closed to the five-inch/38-caliber’s maximum range of eighteen thousand yards, or about ten statute miles. Evans directed Hagen to target the leading heavy cruiser in the column to starboard. Hagen’s fire-controlmen, George Himelright and James Buzbee, fixed the ship in the director’s sights and fire-controlman Tony Gringheri entered ranges using his stereoscopic rangefinder on the mainmast. The data passed down into the ship’s Mark 1A fire-control computer. Developed by the Ford Instrument Company in the 1930s, the intricate but sturdy array of gears, cams, shafts, and dials was an analog device with no memory as we understand it today. Rather, it was designed only to predict the position of its target and align each of the five turrets to place its shell at the coordinates that the computer calculated the target would occupy at impact. Just as a football quarterback pedaling back in the pocket must place extra zip on his throw to compensate for his own rearward movement, the computer removed the imparted effect of the ship’s own motion from the firing solution. A gyroscopic stable element corrected for the pitching and rolling of the ship. Other critical inputs included the initial muzzle velocity of the ship’s five-inch shells—adjusted for bore wear and current weather conditions; the ship’s current latitude and the relation of its heading to true magnetic north, in order to compensate for the ...

The Johnston loosed a continuous ladder of shells over a two-hundred-yard stretch of ocean centered on the projected path of the heavy cruiser Kumano. During the five-minute sprint into torpedo range, the destroyer’s guns let fly with hundreds of fifty-four-pound five-inch rounds. When Hagen began to see his shells hitting the ship—flames and puffs of smoke obscuring the division flagship’s upper superstructure—he tightened the ladder to a hundred yards, concentrating the barrage. He landed some forty hits on the Kumano with his five-inch shells. Through his scope Hagen could see the smoky flashes tearing up the metalwork on the cruiser’s decks and gun galleries. They blew out portholes and killed men in exposed positions. Although this pummeling was not enough to sink the Japanese cruiser, the waves of shock, sheets of flame, and storms of shrapnel that buffeted the Kumano’s superstructure played havoc with its crew’s ability to return accurate fire. The Japanese gunners did not land a single hit in return on their bantamweight assailant.

The first three rounds to hit the destroyer came from a battleship, probably the Kongo. The first one, a fourteen-inch shell, nearly fifteen hundred pounds, fell in a ripping arc and struck, opening a three-by-six-foot hole in the main deck, blowing out the plumbing and main drain from the ship’s head, tearing up the machine shop, penetrating down into the after engine room, and exploding against the bulky iron housing of the port-side propeller shaft’s main reduction gears—one of the few pieces of hardware on a destroyer substantial enough to detonate a hard-headed armor-piercing round. The second shell punched through the deck and slashed critical electrical cables and steam lines before detonating against the main steam turbine in the after engine room. Belowdecks aft the Johnston was plunged into darkness. The third large shell demolished the source of the heat itself, striking a boiler in the after fireroom and extinguishing by concussion its oil-burning flames. With that hit the port-side screw stopped spinning, and the Johnston’s thirty-six-knot speed was cut in half. What the shell failed to do instantly, high-pressure superheated steam from shattered boiler pipes did with substantially less mercy. Not a man in the after fireroom survived the 840-degree bath that followed.

When a heavy round from a naval rifle hits a ship and explodes, the energy released pulverizes the hardened steel of the shell and swirls up the shattered remnants of surrounding metal decks and bulkheads. All of this metal rushes outward on the edge of a wave of blast pressure that a typical shipboard compartment cannot hope to contain. The sudden and overwhelming “overpressure” turns the compartment itself into a weapon, its remains churning up into a superheated storm of fragmented or liquified metal. The blast wave’s effect on people is horrific. It collapses body cavities, crushes organs, and blows flesh from bone. The size of the killing zone—the radius within which these effects will occur—depends on the amount of explosive the shell holds. A Japanese eight-inch armor-piercing shell, three feet long and 277 pounds in weight, had a 6.9-pound bursting charge. A fourteen-inch high-explosive shell, 1,425 pounds and five feet long, contained sixty-three pounds of explosives. The Yamato’s giant 18.1-inch armor-piercing shells, six and a half feet long and 3,219 pounds in weight, carried a seventy-five-pound bursting charge.

The men of the Johnston learned in an instant that shrapnel came in many sizes, sometimes large enough to cut limbs and grind flesh, sometimes fine and particulate, filling the air with hot driving mist. They learned that shells tumbling through layers of steel filled compartments with poisonous gases, that exploding shells could kill by shock or with a cascade of flames that doused them like liquid. Gone was the mystery of why Clyde Burnett, Bob Hollenbaugh, and the other senior boatswain’s mates kept them scraping paint for hours on end: it burned fiercely. The lesson had been learned in the shipboard conflagrations at Pearl Harbor and in the Solomon Islands in 1942. Now they saw it firsthand. Yet somehow ships still came off the line full of paint to scrape.

Amid the hissing of steam and the screaming of men, Orin Vadnais peered over the side of his forty-millimeter amidships gun tub and saw chunks of solid explosives from a smashed depth charge scattered across the deck. Up out of the giant hole opened by the falling shell popped Harold Beresonsky’s steel-helmeted head. A lit cigarette dangling from his lips, he started throwing chunks of the explosive overboard, casually, like a weekender cleaning up his patio.

Joseph Check saw three men climbing out of the hatch from the after engineering spaces, emerging through the thick white steam. The effort to escape sapped them of their final energies. Check watched them collapse and slump back against the bulkhead, their skin, white as ivory, covering swollen flesh. The skin fell away here and there, revealing pink patches beneath. The steam had cooked them like so many shrimp. They did not live long.

Gun 54 was worse off than the other two aft five-inch gun mounts. Guns 53 and 55 had no electrical power to rotate the mount but were still getting signals from the gun director. All they had to do to benefit from radar control was to train and elevate their guns to match the dial pointers showing the director’s orientation at any moment in time. But Gun 54 was getting neither electrical power nor indicating signals for training and elevation. Hagen granted Hollenbaugh’s request to fire on local control, and as Hollenbaugh would write, “Gun 54 declared its own war on the Japs.”

The peashooter crews on Taffy 3’s carriers fired to good effect. An old chief on the Fanshaw Bay watched the St. Lo’s gunners popping away and saltily observed, “They oughta fire that thing underwater. We could use a little jet propulsion right now.” But the guns proved to be surprisingly useful in their intended application. They scored three hits on a heavy cruiser at 14,000 yards, starting a raging fire on the forecastle. Meanwhile, the White Plains was doing its own unlikely imitation of a fighting ship of the line. As the enemy cruisers hammered away at shrinking range, a gunnery officer shouted out, “Just hold on a little longer, boys—we’re sucking them into forty-millimeter range!”

The Kalinin Bay took her first hits at 7:50, just as Blue Archer was firing his rockets at the heavy cruiser. Steaming on the windward side of the formation, exposed to view as the smoke screen was blown west, the carrier absorbed Japanese cruiser shells at the rate of about one a minute. Some skipped like rocks over her deck, gouging the wooden flight deck and showering splinters into the air. In total the fragile CVE took fifteen hits from the cruisers’ eight-inch main batteries.

In a narrow wedge of a compartment at the very bow of the ship, seaman first class Morris Turner was up to his waist in water pouring in through two holes left by a shell that had punched clean through both sides of the hull, right at the waterline. Mattresses and large corks and pillows floated all around him as he struggled to keep the debris clear of the intake of the submersible pump he was operating. Other sailors in the compartment pressed mattresses up against the shell holes. But every time the ship moved out of a wave trough and plunged into another swell, the sudden increase in water pressure shoved aside the mattresses and forced more water in. Standing in the rising water, Turner had trouble gaining leverage against the incoming flow. After hours of work, struggling to keep the pumps operating and the inflow down, he and the other sailors brought the water down to a manageable level. In so doing they very likely saved their ship. If the compartment had failed, the Kalinin Bay’s bow would have plowed under the sea, the swamped ship would have lost her speed and seaworthiness, and in all probability the Japanese would have caught her. She would have met that fate no matter the heroics of her crew. Escort carriers were not built to take fifteen major-caliber hits and survive. But the Kalinin Bay did just that. Shells damaged her degaussing cables and tore shelving and ruptured bulkheads and opened the hull to flooding. They ripped six holes in the flight deck and ...

Archer kept his course toward the battleship. He opened his bomb bay doors for show, hoping to persuade the dreadnought to veer from its course. Then, as he began to pull up over the ship, Archer rolled his Avenger over on its back and took his .38-caliber service revolver from its holster. Running on anger born of pain and not a little adrenaline, he squeezed the trigger repeatedly, sending six rounds into the dark superstructure of the battleship. As he flew over the warship, Archer noticed that the Japanese gunners had stopped firing at him. The Arkansan swears he saw the faces of Japanese bridge personnel staring up at him in bewilderment.

Suddenly the Heermann emerged from a squall, and all too clearly, dead ahead, lay the four largest ships Kurita had. Lt. Bill Meadors, the gunnery officer, could see two Kongo-class battleships advancing in column. Beyond them, looming in the haze, were two ships that looked even bigger. Whitney figured the Heermann would be sunk on the spot. The bigger ships, however, seemed to be having trouble targeting the small destroyer at close range.

Lieutenant Meadors’s five main battery crews fired some 260 shells at the battleship. From close range, four to eight thousand yards away, Meadors watched his shells explode all along the ship’s menacing form. It was anyone’s guess what damage the fifty-four-pound rounds did to the armored giant. Judging by the smoke and flame that wreathed the battlewagon’s towering superstructure, it was reasonable to think the destroyer was giving back a little bit of the hell that had engulfed the bridges of the Johnston and the Hoel shortly before. From what Meadors could see, the effect was considerable. About four minutes went by during which the Haruna lay broadside to the destroyer but did not fire at all.

It took less than ten minutes for Hathaway’s destroyer to fire seven torpedoes at a heavy cruiser, change course toward the battleship line, engage the lead vessel with main batteries, fire three more torpedoes, and turn to speed away. Few warships in history had ever spent ten minutes more productively. At 8:03 Hathaway returned to the pilothouse from the open-air bridge and raised Ziggy Sprague on the TBS radio. His message was remarkable for its professional nonchalance: “My exercise is completed. Over.” Hathaway wondered at his own choice of words until he recognized his instinct that the Japanese might be eavesdropping on the circuit, in which event there was no need to inform them that his ship had fired the last of its torpedoes. Shortly thereafter, as if to reward Amos Townsend Hathaway for his brio and dash—the only destroyer captain in history to engage directly four battleships supported by heavy cruisers and live to tell the tale—a cloud of black smoke boiled up near the stern of the Haruna, beneath its hindmost fourteen-inch turret. The visual evidence was followed closely by a deep blast rumbling across the water. A torpedo from the Heermann’s final spread of three appeared to have scored. Ironically, however, it may have been the first fan of torpedoes, all seven of which seemed to miss, that did Ziggy Sprague the most good. They sizzled off to the north, missing their intended target, the cruiser. Continuing on, they approached the battleship Yamato. At 7:5...

It was preposterous to send a destroyer escort against an enemy’s main surface fleet. They didn’t do it on paper at the Naval War College, and it had not happened in the whole course of the war leading up to October 25. As the Dennis and the Raymond sortied, Bob Copeland’s ship was fighting like a true hunter-killer, bidding to take down a heavy cruiser on the open sea. The Hoel had fired two salvos of five torpedoes each. The Heermann had fired seven, then three. If Copeland was lucky, the Samuel B. Roberts would soon be in position to fire her single salvo of three. In a quieter time, in Hawaii, before the ship’s departure for the far reaches of the western Pacific combat zone, the admiral who commanded U.S. destroyer forces in the Pacific had informed Copeland that he had recommended replacing the Roberts’s torpedo tubes with a new forty-millimeter gun mount. Copeland had surprised even himself with the tenor of his refusal: “Admiral, someday somebody is going to forget we’re boys and send us over to do a man’s work. If I’m ever sent to do a man’s work, I want a man’s weapons.” Then Copeland smiled a little. “Admiral, as far as my ship is concerned, the torpedo tubes will be removed over my dead body.” Due either to Copeland’s persuasive skills or to lack of follow-through by the bureaucracy, the Samuel B. Roberts left Pearl Harbor with her one triple torpedo mount in place.

At some point between 8:08 and 8:24 the Heermann was firing its main batteries at targets to starboard when chief yeoman Harold Whitney, Captain Hathaway’s talker, heard over his headset an excited shout from a port-side lookout. Appearing unexpectedly out of the smoke and haze came a destroyer. From the starboard bridge wing, Whitney looked across his ship’s narrow beam and saw the tin can steaming close alongside to port. Walking over to take a closer look, he saw the sharp rising prow, the blocky superstructure, the twin main gun mount, and the foreign dress of a sailor scurrying around pointing at the American destroyer, and he realized the ship was Japanese. “I could have thrown a potato and hit that kid running around there,” Whitney said. Whitney returned to the starboard bridge wing and called the shocking development to Amos Hathaway’s attention, recommending that he order the Heermann’s machine-gunners to engage the intruder at point-blank range. Unfazed, the skipper said to his talker, “I can’t shoot at them now. We’re busy with these cruisers over here.” Evidently the imperial tin can had other priorities as well. After several tense minutes the ship peeled off to port and disappeared through the smoke and squalls that had covered its arrival.

So many Japanese ships were firing on the Heermann that the ship was like a chameleon. Each time a new salvo landed near, she was doused in a different color. Each time the destroyer’s bow bit into a wave, the water rinsed the decks and gunwales clean until a shell bearing a different hue crashed a column of seawater across her decks again. Green, yellow, red, and undyed splashes rose near the ship, one after another. Chief yeoman Harold Whitney looked at his skipper and noticed that Hathaway had been dyed red from head to foot.

THE STRICKEN GAMBIER BAY had fallen into the enveloping advance of the Japanese formation. There was nothing anyone in Taffy 3 could do about it. A heavy cruiser was blasting away at the CVE at an alarmingly close range. Observing the carrier’s plight, Captain Evans of the Johnston issued what Bob Hagen considered “the most courageous order I’ve ever heard.” The skipper said, “Commence firing on that cruiser, Hagen. Draw her fire on us and away from the Gambier Bay.” Hagen could see that all four turrets of the cruiser, with its distinctive flared prow, were swung out toward the carrier. While the Japanese ship bracketed the carrier with its eight-inch salvos, Evans closed to six thousand yards, and Hagen loosed a fusillade that scored repeatedly. The cruiser’s four turrets, however, stayed trained on the carrier. Hagen considered the Japanese captain’s decision to ignore the Johnston foolish; he figured the Japanese ship had more than enough firepower to do in both targets.

The captain of Gun 55 on the fantail, Clint Carter, a Texan from the Sweetwater-Abilene area, was screaming down to the handling room, “More shells! More shells!” One of his gang grumbled, “I’m sure glad there ain’t no Japs from Texas.” Drollery in the face of mortal danger was a common sign of a disciplined combat team, and Carter had a good one. His projectileman, boatswain’s mate first class Harry Longacre, was one of the best. He was strong as a bull and demanded his own space. Nothing seemed to scare him—he had had a warship blown out from under him earlier in the war, so what else was there to fear? Given to wearing gold hoop earrings, one in each ear, Longacre cut a unique profile on the crew. He was a rebel. People referred to him as “Asiatic,” which meant he marched to a different drummer. By some accounts he was a lousy boatswain’s mate who resisted the command hierarchy. Once he went to Captain’s Mast and got busted all the way back down to seaman second for a disciplinary infraction. But at general quarters you didn’t want anybody else handling the projectiles. Harry Longacre was fast, agile, and strong. Eighteen times a minute he pulled a fifty-four-pound projectile off the shell hoist and laid it into the loading tray in sequence with the powderman, who placed a powder case on the tray behind the shell. Then the hydraulic rammer assembly shoved the tray forward, socking the shell firmly into the lands and grooves of the bore. Without electrical power, on part...

The Chikuma was so close to the low-lying DE that her gunners seemed to have trouble depressing their guns sufficiently to take the Roberts under fire. At that depressed angle the gunners couldn’t reload. Each time the Japanese cruiser let loose with a flaming, windy blast, the guns would rise up and the turrets would turn inboard as the crew reloaded. Silently then the guns would train out again. “We’d see the flash of fire; then we’d hear the blast, and seemingly much later but actually at about the same time—whoosh— they’d go right over our heads.”

Capt. Haruo Mayuzumi, the skipper of the Tone, was among his nation’s foremost experts on battleship gunnery. As the executive officer on the Yamato when that great ship was put into commission, he had overseen the installation of her massive 18.1-inch guns, whose bore size was so secret that even Admiral Kurita did not know it. As a tactical instructor at the naval gunnery school at Yokusuka in the years leading up to Pearl Harbor, Mayuzumi had studied intercepts of the radio chatter exchanged between U.S. battleship commanders and seaplane spotters during gunnery drills off the California coast. Japanese submarines and merchant ships readily eavesdropped on the plain-language play-by-play, and the Imperial Japanese Navy tallied the statistics as diligently as their counterparts did. At a range of 22,000 yards, the Japanese learned, American battleships hit their targets just seven percent of the time. Japanese heavies scored at a rate three times that. Mayuzumi led the effort to open that performance gap still further. He knew that if the shells were fired at flat enough angles to the water, they need not actually “hit” a ship at all. A near miss that struck the water close aboard, continuing on an underwater path, could land the most devastating blow of all: a hit below the waterline. Fired from 22,000 yards, a sixteen-inch battleship shell entering the water at a seventeen-degree angle to the surface could penetrate seventy-six millimeters of face-hardened armor even i...

As a connoisseur of gunnery but not bloodthirsty in the art of war, Mayuzumi watched a midshipman by his side meticulously guide the fire of the Tone’s secondary battery into the hindquarter of the Gambier Bay, gunning for an engine room. Suddenly he saw U.S. sailors gathering astern near some lifeboats, preparing to abandon ship. The Japanese skipper ordered, “Ceasefire,” and directed his midshipman to aim at the forecastle, where no people could be seen.

Suddenly he heard a lookout shout, “Captain, there’s fourteen-inch splashes coming up on our stern!” The battleship Kongo lay some ten thousand yards in that direction, shooting with uncanny accuracy through the haze. At 7:22 her rangefinder had been disabled by strafing Wildcats. Now it was restored. As the Cyclops fixed on the Samuel B. Roberts, the Kongo’s guns boomed salvos of 1,485-pound shells Bob Copeland’s way. Copeland turned and saw a procession of foaming columns walking up from behind. Gauging the progress of the explosions—the closest of them smacked the sea fifty yards astern—relative to the movement of his speeding ship, he knew what he had to do: hit the brakes. The normal procedure, designed to spare strain on expensive reduction gears, was to ratchet down from flank speed to standard, two-thirds, one-third, and stop. But Copeland’s worries went beyond the condition of Lucky Trowbridge’s precious machinery. Like a driver speeding down the freeway shifting straight into reverse, he shouted into the voice tube, “All engines back full!” “That was the one time the old ship really shuddered and shivered and quaked,” Copeland wrote. “She just kind of lay down and pretty nearly backed her stern under water.” The destroyer escort’s bow wave collapsed as her forward movement stopped. Almost immediately there were more sounds like runaway freight trains and an ungodly buffeting of air. Directly over the ship flew another brace of battleship shells. They smacked the ...

Around this time Bob Copeland got his last look at the USS Johnston. When Ernest Evans’s destroyer passed close by the Roberts, and in the midst of his own ruin, Copeland was heartbroken to see up close what had become of the proud tin can. The image of the battered ship stayed with him for the rest of his life. I can see her right now. She had taken a terrific beating. Her bridge was battered and had been abandoned. Her foremast, a steel tubular mast, coming up just abaft of the bridge superstructure, had been split from shellfre and then bent down over itself…. It gave me a hurt feeling to look at it. Her searchlights had been knocked off. One torpedo mount was gone, and her number-three gun had completely disappeared. As she went by—limping along at a pretty slow speed—I saw her captain. He was a very big man with coal-black hair; his name was Evans. I had met him at some of those conferences. He was standing on the fantail conning his ship by calling down through an open scuttle hatch into the steering engine room. I can see him now. He was stripped to the waist and was covered with blood. His left hand was wrapped in a handkerchief…. As he went by—he wasn’t over a hundred feet from us as he passed us on our starboard side—he turned a little and waved his hand at me. That’s the last I saw of him.

With the Johnston out of the way, Kurita faced a clear path to his mission objective in Leyte Gulf. Having weathered the gallant assault by Admiral Sprague’s screen—having absorbed and mostly shrugged off the thirty-nine torpedoes they had put into the water ahead of him—he was ready to make his long-planned assault on San Pedro Bay. The Heermann was still around somewhere but wouldn’t make much trouble with its ten torpedoes gone. The destroyer escort John C. Butler, unable to form up with its fellow DEs when Sprague ordered them to attack at 7:50, remained on station making smoke astern the carriers. Its three fish would not have done much to stop Kurita in any event. Admiral Stump’s Taffy 2, having already been the target of ranging salvos from the Haruna, would be next on the Center Force’s list of targets: six jeep carriers with their own seven-ship screen of destroyers and destroyer escorts. With Taffy 3’s carriers sunk and unable to help Taffy 2, Stump’s task unit would be all the easier to brush aside.