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

But Kurita did not yet enjoy the clear vision of hindsight. He had seen his proudest ships battered and sunk by an American air assault. By continuing south, he would only beg for more of it. His staff had intercepted a message from Capt. Richard F. Whitehead, the Seventh Fleet’s Commander of Support Aircraft, inviting all orphaned jeep carrier pilots to land at Tacloban. Kurita was worried about steaming too close to the aerial striking power that was surely now gathering ashore. His own pleas for air support had gone unanswered. The help he expected from the Imperial Army’s First and Second Air Fleets on Luzon—so central to the planning of the Sho-1 plan to begin with—never came.

Beneath unguarded skies the mighty Musashi had become a glorified target barge. Lack of air cover had cost Kurita several valuable heavy cruisers, the fastest blades in his rack of swords. He had left Brunei with ten of them, and he was down to six before he ever turned the corner coming out of San Bernardino Strait. Now he had only two. The Chokai, the Chikuma, and the Suzuya had succumbed to the audacious American air attacks. The Kumano was unfit for pursuit after the torpedo hit from the Johnston. Though the morning’s assaults did not come in well-organized waves like those that ha...

Kurita wasn’t sure how he would re-form and enter Leyte Gulf in any event. The Center Force was strung out and scattered across some thirty miles of ocean. Reassembling into battle formation would take time that he probably did not have. From his expansive flag quarters aboard the Yamato, he did not know what his cruiser skippers knew: that they opposed mere escort carriers, and that they had nearly succeeded in cutting off Sprague’s flight, forcing the Americans toward shore, where they could be encircled and destroyed in passing by the rest of the Center Force. Th...

Kurita was in no position to know these things for himself. The Yamato’s emergency turn to avoid the Heermann’s torpedoes had taken the flagship northward and largely out of the battle at a critical juncture. The floatplanes he had catapulted to reconnoiter the American force had never been heard from again. Since he did not know what his own task force faced, it is unsurprising that he also did not know that Ozawa’s decoy force had thoroughly succeeded in fooling Halsey. For all Kurita knew, Halsey was right here under his guns. His apparent inability to overtake the American carriers owed itself, he thought, to the fact that they were none other than those of the swift Third Fleet. What other explanation could there be? He had loosed his...

These anxieties preyed upon a mind that was thoroughly battle-fatigued. Kurita hadn’t slept in three days, ever since the Atago had been torpedoed out from under him in the Palawan Passage on October 23. Fished from the sea and relocated to the Yamato, he had witnessed on the following afternoon the destruction of Japan’s proudest dreadnought, the Musashi. He had struggled with the decision to withdraw before sunset on the twenty-fourth, then turned around again and by night threaded his large formation through the perilous San Bernardino Strait. The next morning the unexpected windfall of American aircraft carriers coming under his guns further taxed his powers of analysis and command. Now even that coveted prize threatened to elude him, though he had gotten reports claiming that several U.S. flattops, including one of the “Enterprise class,” had been sunk along with two heavy cruisers and some destroyers. But truth was cruelly at variance ...

He calculated that the transports he was to sink were, in all likelihood, empty of their valuable cargoes. On the radio he had heard Admiral Kinkaid’s plain-language calls for help. The Seventh Fleet commander’s 8:29 plea—“My situation is critical. Fast battleships and support by air strike may be able prevent enemy from destroying [escort carriers] and entering Leyte”— had been retransmitted by Allied radio units in the Admiralty Islands and intercepted by the Japanese on Formosa at 9:05. But Kurita did not see this as the signal of opportunity that it was. Like a defeated man, he perceived his enemy’s every act as evidence of its strength a...

“Anxieties,” wrote Alfred Thayer Mahan, “are the test and penalty of greatness.” On the cusp of a smashing victory, a commander must keep his nerve or fail altogether. According to that great American naval strategist, who had found an attentive readership in Japan: Strenuous, unrelaxing pursuit is therefore as imperative after a battle as courage is during it. Great political results often flow from correct military action; a fact which no military commander is at liberty to ignore. He may very well not know of those results; it is enough to know that they may happen, and nothing can excuse his losing a point, which by exertion he might have scored. But further exertion was beyond Takeo Kurita. The Japanese admiral had been pressed to his physical and e...

The destroyer edged closer and closer. It made a slight course change that left Clint Carter drifting off her starboard beam. He was taken with the ship’s gold-tasseled battle pennant emblazoned with a red rising sun. Bobby Chastain, swimming no more than fifty feet from the ship’s port side, could see the sailors lined up by the rail, dressed sharply in khakis and brightly polished brown boots. “They were watching us as we watched them.” It was then that Carter realized what was going on. “It appeared to me that every man on her deck was standing at attention, like a muster, giving us one big salute.” As the Japanese warship slid by them, a smartly dressed officer was on the wing of the bridge, standing erect and, indeed, saluting. “As she eased by us,” Carter wrote, “I’m sure of one thing … she appreciated a fighting lady … USS Johnston.” Another Japanese crewman was filming them with a handheld movie camera. Another flipped his thumb to his nose and delivered a raspberry. As the ship passed on by, a sailor standing on the fantail tossed an object in Carter’s direction. The canister was too big to be a grenade and far too small to be a depth charge. It was a large can of tomatoes. Carter retrieved the offering, examined it, and noticed the label indicating it had been packed in Arkansas. “Three years of war and they were still eating USA canned tomatoes.”

WHEN THE ROBERTS SURVIVORS got their first glimpse of the dim gray triangles cutting the water’s surface around them, the stinking oil that fouled their hair, faces, and eyes began to seem more a blessing than a curse. The high-grade American fuel—distinctive by smell from Japan’s cruder Malaysian distillate—coated them completely, masking their identities from one another. Though their eyes stung from it and they couldn’t see much, the oil proved to be an effective shark repellent. The men noticed the way it seemed to keep the tall fins at a distance. George Bray scooped up a handful of black foam and smeared it all over his shoeless left foot. The last thing a guy needed was a shark mistaking a white sock for an appetizer. The oil was an efficient sunscreen too. Most of the squalls had been warmed away by the rising South Pacific sun. It baked their skin and reflected off the sea to burn their undersides as well. But the oil protected their skin.

Intermingling orphaned pilots from Ziggy Sprague’s task unit with the squadrons of his own six carriers, Taffy 2 commander Admiral Stump’s carriers mustered a total of 204 sorties against Kurita, 117 by Avengers and 87 by Wildcats, dropping 49 torpedoes and 286 500-pound bombs, and firing 276 rockets and untold thousands of rounds of machine-gun ammunition. By the time the last of his pilots returned to Taffy 2 at 6:25 P.M., just before nightfall made carrier operations doubly hazardous, Kurita’s force had been smashed down to size. Limping north toward San Bernardino Strait went a battered and broken Center Force, reportedly consisting of four battleships, just three heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and seven destroyers. Two of the battleships trailed broad slicks of oil; three destroyers and one of the light cruisers lagged behind the main group; and one heavy cruiser appeared heavily damaged. Impossible to catalog but probably significant nonetheless were the assorted lesser catastrophes inflicted by the ceaseless strafing, bombing, and battering by American five-inch shells. Twenty-four aircraft from the jeep carriers had fallen to Japanese antiaircraft fire, with forty-three pilots and aircrewmen lost or missing in action.

The vessels that rescued them were part of a seven-ship task group organized by the commander of the Leyte amphibious landing force, Rear Adm. Daniel E. Barbey. Under Lt. Cdr. James A. Baxter, skipper of PC-623, the group had left Leyte’s San Pedro Bay at 4:06 P.M. on the day of the battle. Picking their way through the sea at ten knots, aligned in a sweeping, mile-wide search formation that Baxter led west from a designated starting point, moving with the current, toward the island of Samar, Baxter’s ships had only empty oil slicks and a single Japanese survivor to show for their efforts when, at 10:29 P.M., Lt. Allison M. Levy, PC-623’s officer of the deck, saw red, white, and green Very flares about twenty miles ahead to port. Risking shelling from a nearby Japanese-held island, which was said to boast eight-inch shore batteries, Levy ordered Captain Baxter awakened and asked his skipper for permission to break formation and investigate the contact. Twice denied, Levy took matters into his own hands, turning to the helmsman and ordering “All ahead flank” and “Left full rudder.” Baxter ran topside, hollered at Levy that he had disobeyed orders, and ordered the helmsman to resume the original course. “I informed the skipper and the helmsman that I had not been properly relieved of the deck,” Levy wrote, “and that I would not accept Captain Baxter’s order to relieve me for another fifteen minutes so that his eyes could become adjusted to the total darkness.” As the ship co...

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.

The three-day series of melees around the Philippines in October 1944 was by multiple measures the most sprawling, spectacular, and horrible naval battle in history. If it was not as decisive, in the word’s purest sense, as the victory at Midway, it was the greatest naval battle ever fought for the distances it spanned, for the tonnage of ships sunk, for the duration of the duels between surface ships, and for the terrible losses of human life—some 13,000 sailors, airmen, and officers, including perhaps 10,000 on the Japanese side alone, and about 850 from Taffy 3. “Our defeat at Leyte was tantamount to the loss of the Philippines,” said Japan’s navy minister, Adm. Mitsumasa Yonai. “When you took the Philippines, that was the end of our resources.”

The Battle off Samar was a battle of firsts: the first time a U.S. aircraft carrier was destroyed by surface gunfire; the first time a ship was sunk by a suicide plane; the first time the mightiest battleship afloat fired on enemy warships. And it was a battle of lasts: the last massed ship-versus-ship action in naval history; the last time a battleship fired its main batteries at an enemy; the last time small destroyers charged an opposing battle line.

Among Taffy 3’s ships the Hoel had suffered worst, with 267 dead out of a crew of 325. The Johnston lost 184 out of 329, the Samuel B. Roberts had 90 dead out of 224, and the Gambier Bay lost 131 men out of about 900. The St. Lo’s losses of 114 out of a 900-man complement seem disproportionate to the horror the ship experienced, erupting into a towering thunderhead of smoke and flame after the kamikaze hit.

One of the estimated forty shells that struck the USS Hoel peppered Myles Barrett’s back with pieces of shrapnel the diameter of pencil lead. After the war, whenever one of the small wounds began to fester, his wife Elizabeth would take a pair of tweezers and extract the tiny steel fleck. Barrett never saw a doctor. It was about two years before Elizabeth picked his back clean.

Earl “Blue” Archer, the Kalinin Bay VC-3 Avenger pilot who suffered a serious back injury amid the brambles of flak over Kurita’s fleet, went home and kept quiet about his infirmity. He soon realized he had a choice to make: he could take an eighty or ninety percent disability benefit from Uncle Sam and begin a life of inactivity, or he could take three or four aspirin twice a day and continue flying planes in the naval reserve. “I said forget it. I can make a living. I don’t need your disability.” Bragging about being the only pilot to get six hits on a Japanese battleship with a .38-caliber revolver was not enough for Archer. He continued flying in the reserves, got a desk job as a stockbroker, and had to forgo bowling or playing golf. His back bothers him to this day, but not much else seems to, so long as Louisiana State has a winning football team.

A TREMENDOUS AMOUNT OF unwritten and untranslated history remains to be unearthed on the Japanese side. One wonders how or whether their veterans commemorate the battle. Certainly not many of them remain. The Japanese losses during the Sho-1 operation can only be guessed at, but they are sure to have been disastrous. Of the ten heavy cruisers that left Brunei, only three, the Tone, the Haguro, and the Kumano, made it back through San Bernardino Strait. Total Japanese losses are estimated to be around eleven thousand men.

Admiral Kurita’s reputation lay in tatters following his timid performance on the brink of victory off Samar. Owing in part to the endless inscrutability of his motives—he was exhausted and confused in his thinking; he was unclear that his objective could be achieved; he feared too many U.S. planes were gathering at Tacloban; Kinkaid’s pleas had spooked him into believing powerful reinforcements were on the way; he was low on fuel; he was regrouping to attack another American fleet—he has never been given the benefit of the doubt.

A problem that plagued the Japanese side throughout the battle was fundamental confusion about the nature of the enemy who opposed them. In no small part due to the smoke roiling from the stacks and sterns of the U.S. ships, the Japanese were nearly unanimous in mistaking Ziggy Sprague’s task unit for something considerably more powerful than it really was. Kurita would describe Taffy 3 in his own action report as a “gigantic enemy task force including six or seven carriers accompanied by many cruisers and destroyers.”

After the air raids started, the Japanese perceived “salvos of medium-caliber guns” hitting near the Yamato. That no ship in Sprague’s fleet boasted medium-caliber weaponry—as the six- or eight-inch guns of cruisers were generally called—revealed the extent of Kurita’s bewilderment. In a landscape of tropical squalls and enemy smoke, he was not at all certain what to make of the fleet that had materialized unexpectedly on the southern horizon.

By the time the jeep carriers of Taffy 2 mustered their air groups and began launching big strikes against the Center Force after eight A.M., and once Tacloban’s airstrip had been organized as a makeshift staging ground, Kurita was facing air assaults from more than a dozen escort carriers, or the rough equivalent of four or five fleet carriers. No matter how overmatched the Americans were at Samar, no matter how dashing their screening ships were in intercepting the superior force during the critical first ninety minutes of the unlikely battle, the strength of the U.S. forces that Kurita confronted was more formidable than many analysts have allowed. It does nothing to diminish the valor of the tin can sailors aboard Taffy 3’s destroyers and destroyer escorts, or of the gallant aviators and airedales who flew on that day, to say that Kurita’s ultimate victory was by no means assured, and that withdrawing in the face of continuous and savage air assault was perhaps the prudent thing to do.