Steaming northwest in Manila Bay, three destroyer escorts were screening an American carrier on a sunny January afternoon in 1945. Suddenly eight Japanese suicide planes came in low and out of the sun, racing toward the convoy. Sailors on board the DEs rushed to their battle stations, manning their antiaircraft guns, firing at the kamikazes headed for a collision course with the American ships.
Once the DEs started firing, four of the planes quickly scurried away, but four others kept strafing the convoy with gunfire as they flew directly toward it in their suicide mission. While the DEs splashed three of the planes, one continued to evade the sailors. Heading directly for the USS Stafford, the kamikaze plowed into the destroyer escort’s starboard side amidships, lodging between the engine room and fire room. The crash opened up a twelve-by-sixteen-foot hole in the hull of the ship, which started to lose its way and take on water at an alarming rate.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., skipper of one of the DEs, the Ulvert M. Moore, immediately realized that the Stafford needed help, its engine room flooded and fires erupting on its deck. Captain Roosevelt radioed the group commander, “443 is dead in the water. We’re going to assist her.” He quickly broke formation and dashed to the aid of his sister ship while calling for help over his radio.
The escort group commander barked back, “442, I don’t give a damn if your father is president of the United States, get back in formation as ordered immediately!” Captain Roosevelt did not answer and instead proceeded to the Stafford, where he started to pull survivors from the water. Later Roosevelt was reprimanded for leaving the formation by the superior officer, who warned the young skipper, “Just because your father is president of the United States you will still obey my orders!” FDR Jr. reportedly told his superior, “No, I’m going to save my buddies.” And he did just that. Roosevelt’s ship was able to rescue fifty-four men and three officers, assisted by the destroyer USS Halligan, which rescued additional men. Two sailors on board the Stafford died and twelve were wounded. The ship survived.1
Dale Anderson, torpedoman on board the Ulvert M. Moore, was stationed on the torpedo tube during the attack on the Stafford when three kamikazes headed straight toward his ship. “They were flying real low and close to the water,” Anderson said, adding that one of the suicide planes was heading directly for his position on board the Ulvert M. Moore. “I could see him [the Japanese pilot] sitting in the plane with his goggles on. He was coming right at me, there wasn’t anything I could do.” Reciting the Lord’s Prayer, the nineteen-year-old country boy, who had never spent any time on the water before being assigned to the DE, knew what was about to happen as the plane banked for a direct collision with his ship. But the ocean intervened. Much to Anderson’s surprise, one of the kamikaze’s wings hit a rising wave, tumbling the plane into the water. Plane and pilot disappeared below the churning ocean waters.2
“Captain Roosevelt was a very good skipper,” Ulvert M. Moore torpedoman George Lawson said. Lawson, a Missouri boy drafted into the Navy right out of high school, also had never been on the water before boarding the Moore. “As long as all the ship work was completed, he got us a lot of leave,” he said, adding that FDR Jr. took good care of his men and would allow them R&R time when the ship lay over on one of the Pacific islands. “They let us go over on the beach and let each of us have one or two cans of beer,” which was stored in an undisclosed location somewhere on the ship. “We never knew where it was stored,” Lawson recalled—not that sailors didn’t try to find the alcoholic stash.
Lawson and fellow torpedoman Anderson agree that although he was well liked by his men, Roosevelt ran a tight ship. Lawson said that Captain Roosevelt held a captain’s mast for dozens of sailors who failed to wear their life jackets on deck as required. Many of the sailors tried to hide when officers started to collect names, but Anderson did not. He acknowledged that he had neglected to wear his life jacket and, as a result, received a more lenient sentence when Roosevelt convened the mast. “I got off pretty easy, just a couple hours extra duty,” he recalled.3 Roosevelt was “good at maneuvering,” unlike the Kendall C. Campbell’s Captain Johnson, who Richard Warner, the ship’s executive officer, said ran their ship into the stern of a tanker tied up at the dock in Panama, opening up the tanker “like a can of tuna.” Meanwhile, he said, “young Roosevelt just slides right in ahead of us.”4
Fifth-born child of Franklin and Eleanor, FDR Jr. also was known among the men for gallantry and loyalty to his shipmates as well as to his sister ships. Prior to his service on board the destroyer escort, Roosevelt was on board the destroyer USS Mayrant, where he served as executive officer when, on 1 August 1943, while moored at the dock in Palermo Harbor, Sicily, the ship came under heavy aerial attack. Several bombs landed close to the ships and others struck a trainload of ammunition and nearby gasoline and explosives storage facilities. As flying bomb fragments and shrapnel wounded two men on the bridge, partially amputating the leg of one, Roosevelt grabbed a wounded mess attendant and hauled him down an outside ladder to a field dressing area below. Shrapnel hit Roosevelt’s shoulder as he carried the man, but he still managed to slide down the rest of the ladder to get his shipmate to safety.
When Roosevelt returned to the bridge and started to light a cigarette, he noticed something that he would never forget. Pulling out his old Zippo lighter from the shirt pocket near his heart, Roosevelt noticed a large dent on the lighter, apparently made from a fighter plane bullet. He always believed the lighter saved his life. FDR Jr. was awarded a Silver Star and Purple Heart for the 1943 incident.5
Theodore Barnhart, signalman on board the USS Seiverling, one of Roosevelt’s sister DEs, revealed a story about Captain Roosevelt that appears to have gone unnoticed in the history books. Although it was known that Roosevelt did not attend the funeral of his father, who died on 12 April 1945, few appear to know the specific details as to why he refused to be with his mother and siblings for funeral services in Washington, D.C., and Hyde Park, New York, where the president later was buried in the rose garden of his estate. On the day the president died, Barnhart was standing watch on the bridge in the early morning hours when the radio shack sent up a message that President Roosevelt had died. “I put the heading on it, read it, and read it again,” Barnhart remembered. The stunned signalman went down to the radio shack and asked them, “What the hell are you trying to do, get me in trouble?” Once the authenticity of the message was confirmed, Barnhart returned to the bridge and relayed the message by flashing light to the Ulvert M. Moore, notifying the DE captain that his father—the president of the United States—had died.
Lt. William H. Bell had the deck watch on board the Moore when he received the message from the radioman about 2:00 AM. Bell immediately called for his relief watch officer and headed to Captain Roosevelt’s cabin to relay the news of his father’s passing. “I proceeded to Frank’s cabin, and as gently as I could, I awakened him from a deep sleep. When he was awake I sat on the side of his bunk and handed him the message, the news of the death of his father, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Frank read and reacted by slumping forward as he sat, head in hands. I put a hand on his shoulder, and we silently grieved together. Finally, the president’s son turned his head toward me and calmly said, ‘Thank you, Bill. I’ll be all right. Get back on watch.’”
The Seiverling then relayed another message to Barnhart from the task force commander: Roosevelt’s ship was to come alongside the carrier where an airplane was waiting on the catapult to take him to the Philippines, where he would be rushed to Hawaii and then to Washington, D.C., for his father’s funeral. Barnhart relayed the task force commander’s order to Roosevelt’s ship.
“About fifteen minutes later I got a call from Roosevelt’s ship with a message for the carrier,” Barnhart said. “Roosevelt refused to come along side the carrier because he had shipmates who also had lost their parents, and they were not allowed to leave the ship, and he didn’t feel he should be treated any different than his shipmates,” said Barnhart, who along with Roosevelt was part of a task force on its way to the invasion of Okinawa. “I always thought his family should know why he refused to attend his father’s funeral,” the signalman noted, adding that “he was a great enough man not to take advantage of his position.” Roosevelt’s group was ordered to delay flying their flags at half staff in honor of the president until the battle was over so FDR Jr. would not be distracted from his responsibility of running his ship.6
In June, once both destroyer escorts had been relieved of duty in Okinawa, they proceeded to Guam for refueling before departing for Ulithi. No liberty was to be allowed while in the harbor—unless, of course, your name was Roosevelt. FDR Jr., along with another officer and a Navy or Red Cross nurse, piled into a Jeep and wandered into a portion of the island called “no man’s land,” an area not yet cleared of Japanese soldiers. The three reportedly were held down by gunfire for several hours.
Meanwhile, once the ships were fueled and ready to leave, a vigorous debate ensued about whether they should depart the area without Captain Roosevelt. “The brass wanted the exec officer to take 442 to sea because they wanted to get the carrier out of the harbor,” Richard Warner of the Kendall C. Campbell remembered. “But somebody thought better of the situation. So instead of leaving in darkness, it was well into the morning when Frank returned and off we went.”
Barnhart met Roosevelt a few times when their ships were in port and he was assigned to deliver messages from his captain. He regarded FDR Jr. as “a fine gentleman, an all-around Navy man. He was a good officer who took good care of his men.” Barnhart said that if Roosevelt’s shipmates wanted a can of beer after dinner, the skipper likely would have provided one for them. Because the Navy was dry, Roosevelt once was asked what he would do if someone complained that he was providing beer to his men in defiance of Navy regulation. Barnhart said Roosevelt replied, “I’d tell them to talk to my father.”7
Barnhart said Roosevelt had a good sense of humor. He remembered the first message he ever received from FDR Jr.’s ship. “We were in Pearl Harbor,” Barnhart recalled, when a “PVT,” or private message, was relayed from Roosevelt to the Seiverling’s captain, Francis Adams Jr., a descendant of the same Adams family that had produced two American presidents. At first Barnhart did not see the message, but then he noticed the signal light was being bounced off a cloud. The message to Captain Adams: “Meet you on the beach for a short snort 15 minutes. Roosevelt.” Barnhart said the two captains were close friends in spite of Adams being the son of Charles F. Adams, secretary of the navy under former president Herbert Hoover. When Roosevelt’s ship was having some mechanical troubles, Barnhart flashed a message from Captain Adams to Roosevelt: “Do you need a good Republican sailmaker? Adams.”
Daniel Sutelle, a twenty-two-year-old native of the little town of Ambridge, Pennsylvania, was a pharmacist’s mate on board the Seiverling and recalled when his ship was docked alongside the Moore and Yosemite, a destroyer tender in Pearl Harbor. Son of a steel-mill worker in the community of about five hundred people, Sutelle always liked the water and was interested in medicine, so he was pleased to be handling medical matters on board the ship.
Once, while Sutelle was talking to one of Roosevelt’s officers who had come on board the Seiverling, the Moore’s PA system sounded: “All hands now hear this, lay back to the fantail the skipper wants to speak to you.” Sutelle and the other officer went up to the torpedo deck, where they could peer over the 5-inch gun to see what was happening on the fantail. “We went up there and here comes FDR. He was about six two, a big handsome guy,” Sutelle remembered.
“Men,” Roosevelt began, “I had to go over to the Pearl on business, and I was only gone about two hours, and I had left a bottle of scotch in my quarters.” Roosevelt continued: “When I came back, it was gone. I’m going to give whoever took that bottle fifteen minutes to put it back, and if he does, nothing untoward will happen.” A crusty old fireroom chief, with a greasy hat and rumpled uniform, called out to Roosevelt, “Ah for Christ’s sake, cap’n, give ’em a break. We could all use a drink about now.” Sutelle said the captain did not hear the chief’s remarks. Roosevelt’s bottle of scotch was never returned.8
Roosevelt’s ship, the Ulvert M. Moore, saw plenty of other action in the Pacific. The day before the attack on the Stafford, Torpedoman Dale Anderson, who was drafted into the Navy “the minute I turned eighteen,” recalled the kamikaze attack on the Ommaney Bay in the predawn hours of 4 January, when the convoy was steaming through Sulu Sea. A twin-engine kamikaze, which had not been detected by radar or even by the lookouts on deck, crashed into the escort aircraft carrier only a thousand yards from the Ulvert M. Moore’s starboard bow. A heavy explosion rocked the Ommaney Bay, and large fires broke out on its starboard side. Fully gassed airplanes on the flight deck exploded. Water pressure, power, and bridge communications were lost as sailors fought the raging flames in heavy black smoke while dodging ricocheting ammunition from the 50-mm guns.
Seriously wounded sailors were strapped to cots and covered with kapok life jackets before being lowered into the white-capped seas, where two swimmers were assigned to take care of each sailor. As another explosion rocked the carrier, two sailors from the destroyer escort USS Eichenberger picking up survivors were killed by flying debris. Because of the flames and debris, it was difficult for the rescuing ships to get too close to the burning vessel. As flames soared high into the dark skies, Roosevelt’s ship rushed to the aid of the burning vessel, and the Moore’s crewmen were able to rescue fifty sailors, with ninety-five lost. Many others suffered flash burns and shock. The water was red with blood and black with oil as the bodies of scores of corpses of American sailors bobbed up and down in the debris-littered sea. “There were plenty of bodies floating in the water,” Anderson said. “We couldn’t do much with them.”9
William Bell, the officer on board the Ulvert M. Moore who delivered the news to Captain Roosevelt of his father’s death, grew up in Schenectady, New York, and went on to Princeton University following graduation from high school. He majored in economics and worked as an apprentice with J. P. Morgan in New York City following college graduation in 1939. The next year he enlisted in the Navy and, on Pearl Harbor day, received the call to report for duty in two days. Although Bell had failed the eye test, he was found to be a good candidate for naval intelligence. His first duty was taking applications from prospective naval officers. Later he got his wish and was assigned to sea duty for two months with the Canadian navy on board a corvette near Halifax. Eventually, in spite his eyesight, he was reassigned to the sub-chaser school in Miami before boarding the Ulvert M. Moore as a junior lieutenant in 1944. It had become obvious that the Navy needed all the men they could recruit to fight America’s enemies on the high seas.
“I was impressed and bewildered,” is how Bell remembered the day he boarded the destroyer escort. “I had a lot of responsibilities and wasn’t sure I was trained enough.” He met Captain Roosevelt, whom he recalled as “a big man with a great deal of naval experience. He had a grand personality and we just hit it off right away. His courage and ability were of the highest.” Bell said that Roosevelt spoke often of his family, noting that “he adored his mother” and was “very proud of his father.” He stated that FDR Jr. felt that his older brothers, Jimmy and Eliott, had taken “cushy” jobs in the war effort with a high rank and “he and his brother John were out to vindicate the Roosevelt name.” Bell recalled that FDR Jr. wanted to get out and fight and, at times, some of the officers on the ship wished their captain wouldn’t volunteer so quickly for so many dangerous missions.
“We had an Ivy League ship,” Bell said, noting that he was a Princeton graduate, Roosevelt was a Harvard graduate, and the executive officer, Bobby Whitney, was the son of the president of J. P. Morgan, where Bell had worked prior to the Navy. Other officers hailed from Princeton and Yale University, Bell said. “We had a grand time.”10
“While we were off Manila Bay, our radarman detected a surfaced ship coming out of the bay,” Bell said, noting that it turned out to be a Japanese submarine. The vessel, which was believed to have senior Japanese military officers on board, quickly submerged, and Captain Roosevelt was ordered to go after the submarine and destroy it.
As the Ulvert M. Moore raced through the rough seas to intercept the submarine in the darkness of a moonless night, sonar picked up the submerged vessel and Bell ordered firing of the hedgehogs. A second firing of hedgehogs ensued, followed by a third, which was followed by a distinct “crack” and bubbling and hissing noises, indicating the submarine had been hit. “There was a terrible explosion, right at our stern,” Bell said, and oil came to the surface, followed by a “geyser of flames” reaching fifty feet into the dark night skies. Sailors noticed the strong odor of diesel oil, what appeared to be a life jacket, small boxes, pieces of deck planking, and a considerable amount of paper appearing on the water’s surface—all strong indications that they had hit their mark. Sailors on board said Roosevelt had hoped to sink the submarine on 30 January so he could present the “kill” to his father as a birthday gift. Unfortunately for FDR Jr., the sinking came two days too late.11
While the role of destroyer escorts in World War II has largely been overlooked, the part they played in the Pacific war is even less well understood, with most DE accounts instead focused on the essential role the little ships played in defeating German U-boats in the North Atlantic. Although they were critical in helping to turn the tide of the war for the Allies in the Atlantic theater, destroyer escorts in the Pacific performed roles far and above what their original designers envisioned. In addition to escorting convoys and antisubmarine work they performed in both the Atlantic and Pacific, they also protected the Pacific fleet’s replenishment forces, served on picket duty battling the Japanese kamikazes, and even fought head to head against Japanese warships during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. To be sure, destroyer escorts participated in every major Pacific battle, fending off Japanese submarines and relentless kamikaze suicide squads and valiantly fighting against the world’s largest battleship.
The USS Day was escorting a collection of fifteen tugs, including the large Whippoorwill, and fifty-five tows from San Pedro Bay in the Philippines to Lingayen, where the equipment on the tows would be used to build a torpedo boat base. Jim Larner, a farm boy who quit school to join the Navy, was on board the destroyer escort and was asleep at the range-finder deck that morning because it was too hot to sleep below. A Japanese bomber suddenly appeared over the ship’s fantail and flew right over the tow. Two bombs were released, missing the destroyer escort by about fifty feet. The explosion of the bombs jarred awake Larner, the fire-control striker, and he rushed to his battle station on the aft director.
“By the time I had the cover off and swung around on target, the Jap had turned around to make another bombing run,” Larner wrote in his shipboard diary. “The forward 5-inch mount was manned and was turned onto automatic. When I pressed the firing key we got off one shot, way off target, but it at least told the Jap that his sneak attack had not worked and we were ready. He immediately cut off his second attack run and left us.” The ship safely escorted its charges to their destination, although Tokyo Rose, the Japanese radio propagandist announced, “USS Day was sunk today.”
In the greatest naval battle in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf, destroyer escorts once again had their mettle tested and emerged victoriously proud fighters just as they had in battling the Nazi U-boats and German fighter planes in the Atlantic theater. Their heroic story unfolds just before dawn on 25 October 1944 off the island of Samar in the western Philippine Sea.
A mighty force of four Japanese battleships, nine heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, and ten destroyers steamed from the northwest out of the San Bernardino Strait and circled around the eastern side of Samar, surprising both themselves as well as a small fleet of three American destroyers and four destroyer escorts—the USS Samuel B. Roberts, Raymond, Dennis, and John C. Butler—in place to screen six escort carriers providing air support for General MacArthur’s troops fighting to liberate the Philippines. None of the American vessels carried anything larger than a 5-inch gun compared to the imposing Japanese warships, some of which carried 18.1-inch guns. A true David versus Goliath engagement—described by the New York Times as one of the most heroic episodes in American history—was about to begin.12
Robert Copeland, commanding officer of the six-month-old destroyer escort USS Samuel B. Roberts, affectionately known as “Sammy-B,” was on his way to the wardroom for a cup of coffee when a lookout called out to Ens. Dudley Moylan: “Surface radar reports that they have a contact, Sir, bearing about three-three-zero approximately thirty or forty miles away.” The ship’s radar, which had been having some problems, showed a fuzzy, dense area on the screen. Copeland looked toward the area of the sighting and noticed a dark storm cloud or thunder head in the distance. “Well, there’s a storm over there,” Copeland said, “but there could be something inside of it, so keep an eye on it.”13
As Copeland started to descend the ladder toward the wardroom and some hot coffee, a lookout shouted, “Object on the horizon. Looks like the mast of a ship.” And over the misty horizon came not one ship but an enormous armada of Japanese warships, including the 68,000-ton Yamoto, the world’s largest battleship, closing in at thirty knots on the American fleet. At first it was thought the Japanese ships were fleeing following the battle at Surigao Strait the previous evening. The captain and his officers had listened intently to the garbled TBS radio chatter the night before, which stretched well into the early morning hours, and they were certain the Americans had vanquished the Japanese fleet.
Sonarman Whitney Felt recalled hearing over the loudspeaker that morning that they could see the “remnants” of the Japanese navy in the distance. Felt looked astern and saw the ships, which appeared as tiny dots on the horizon. But the dots started to get larger and larger. “Why, I wondered, if the ships were fleeing, were they getting larger?” Felt said. “Suddenly,” he recalled, “there were white puffs of smoke visible from the enemy ships, and moments later I could hear a whistling sound I’d never heard before, and almost immediately there were huge splashes nearby in the water, strangely colored green and blue and yellow.” Outnumbered and outgunned, the tiny American fleet was under attack—and odds were they would not survive.
Clearly not designed to battle these mighty warships, the DEs and their carriers were ordered to change course and head away from the mainland and the fast-approaching mammoth Japanese vessels. Combat air patrol planes from the carriers flew directly over the warships, which opened fire on the American aircraft. By changing course, the American carriers hoped to launch their bombers, the only way they—staggeringly unmatched in firepower and speed—could hope to fend off the powerful enemy warships. The airplanes, though, were not outfitted with the armor-piercing weapons to fight ships and instead were armed with general-purpose, light bombs for use on the mainland in their support of MacArthur.14
The overwhelming Japanese force commenced firing, the first salvo splashing between the Roberts and Fanshaw Bay, the escort carrier serving as the flagship of the fleet with Adm. Clifton “Ziggy” Sprague on board. Geysers of rainbow-colored water shot high in the blue sky as the Japanese shells, dyed a different color for each specific ship, rained down on the American fleet. “We took off on the new course,” Copeland said. With orders to scramble all planes on the carriers, many of the aircraft needed to be refueled and rearmed in order to battle the Japanese warships. Sailors frantically rushed to get the planes ready. “Any plane that couldn’t be made operational right away was pushed over the side to make room,” Copeland recalled.
The fleet started making smoke in order to hide from the Japanese. White smoke, a chemical concoction generated on the fantail, swept around the ships while heavy black smoke poured out of the big burners in the boiler fire boxes. The escorts sped away but could only go as fast as the slowest carriers, which shook and trembled as they cranked their engines up to nineteen knots. With their giant guns roaring, the Japanese warships raced in hot pursuit toward the American fleet at speeds of twenty-six to thirty-five knots. The Japanese continued pounding the ships with high-caliber shelling, some of the missiles getting a little too close for comfort. It wouldn’t be too long before they would catch and annihilate the Americans.
Running through a heavy rain squall, the destroyer escorts were hidden briefly by the driving rain and smoke still pouring out of the ships, but not before some of the carriers were hit by Japanese shells. The USS Gambier Bay took direct hits from the cruiser Tone and became the first casualty of the battle, reportedly the only American carrier sunk by surface gunfire. Next the enemy made direct hits on the destroyers USS Hoel and Johnson, both of which sank, along with the carriers Gambier Bay and St. Lo, the latter having lost its previous name, USS Midway, only two weeks earlier when the name was taken for a giant new attack carrier.
Armor-piercing shells went right through the thin-skinned DEs, flooding compartments and causing minor damage. Sailors on board would not fare as well as their ship. Percell Worley, a machinist’s mate on board the USS Dennis, which had earned praise for splashing two Japanese aircraft in the battle at Morotai, was at his battle station in the forward mess hall, manning the battle phone circuit for the ship. Suddenly an 8-inch armor-piercing shell from the Tone burst through the port side of his compartment, barely missing him as it whizzed through the chief’s quarters, exiting just above the waterline on the starboard side. Two more shells hit the ship, knocking out one of the Dennis’ two 5-inch guns and a 40-mm gun director.
A shell ripped through the leg of fire controlman William Curtis, a professional hockey player from Boston stationed in the 40-mm gun tub. He bled to death despite valiant efforts by the pharmacist’s mate to save him. This direct hit also took the lives of two Pennsylvania natives, both in fire control— John Sambo, who left the Scranton–Wilkes-Barre area to join the Navy, and George Grater of Philadelphia.
Charles Davis, another fire controlman, was in the shower room on the main deck when the battle heated up. A small piece of shrapnel came through the deck and entered his chest, collapsing his lung. He later died. Boston native Maynard Emery, in the damage-control unit near the forward mess hall, was just getting a drink of water when an 8-inch shell pierced the ship on the port side near the forward bulkhead, just above the waterline, passing right through the passageway and out the starboard hull. A small piece of shrapnel hit him in the right temple, instantly killing the young sailor.
“Grazi, get up on the 40-mm,” an officer yelled at nineteen-year-old Fred Graziano, the torpedoman striker who was “scared stiff” but followed orders. He served as a third loader, passing ammunition. Graziano believes that his 1,500-ton ship actually sunk a 10,000-ton Japanese cruiser, although official credit was not awarded the Dennis. Quitting school in the tenth grade, he had always wanted to join the Coast Guard but was too young and his parents wouldn’t sign for him. Once the Nyack, New York, native received his draft notice, however, he quickly signed up for the Navy, and his parents sadly watched their only son go off to war.
A mailman on board the Dennis, nineteen-year-old Charles W. Touzell had just settled into his bunk for some shuteye when the PA crackled calling all hands to battle stations. He raced to the 20-mm gun, but the carrier Gambier Bay already had been hit and was dead in the water. The Dennis made two torpedo runs on the Japanese ships. “We missed on the first run at 2,400 yards. We broke through the smoke again and closed on the cruiser to 1,800 yards and fired our two remaining torpedoes,” said Touzell, who also had quit high school in Philadelphia and joined the Navy.
Before the DE could take cover again in the smoke, the Japanese would unleash another, even more deadly barrage against the small ship. “The cruiser hit us four times with 8-inch armor-piercing shells. We lost five shipmates in the attack, but managed to stay afloat,” Touzell said. “After our second torpedo attack I believe one of our fish had struck the cruiser as I heard a real large explosion and saw a fire ball through the smoke.” Touzell, like his shipmate Graziano, believes they sunk that cruiser.
Nineteen-year-old Syracuse, New York, native Donald Derwoyed, serving on board the destroyer escort USS Raymond, had just finished the midnight to 4:00 AM watch as a water tender in the number two fireroom. After a couple of hours sleep he heard the call for chow. Returning from breakfast to his bunk area for a little more rest, Derwoyed soon would be called topside, where he would be fighting for his life against a massive Japanese armada. “I was sitting on my foot locker when I heard Capt. [Erin] Beyer announce over the ship loudspeaker, ‘The whole Jap fleet is fifteen miles astern of us. Anyone off watch can go topside and watch the show. We won’t engage any of them. Admiral Halsey’s going to take them on.’” But before the sailor could head topside, a more-urgent sounding message came over the loudspeaker: “Man your battle stations! They are firing on us! You are all a good bunch of boys— God bless you all!”
Derwoyed dashed up the ladder to the fantail and his battle station on the 20-mm gun, where he served as a loader. He looked to the rear and saw the Japanese warships firing on the Gambier Bay as he rushed to his station. Shells were splashing in the water all around his ship. “I could see the cruisers and battleships firing on us and all the shells were landing in the water, but not one shell hit us.” A startled Derwoyed then looked over the side and noticed a wake heading for his ship. He understood its significance: A torpedo was on its way. “I was between the 5-inch gun and the bulkhead and watched the torpedo go right underneath us,” he recalled. “If the torpedo had been set about three feet higher, we would have been blown to smithereens.”
Shipmate Vern Kimmell, a fire controlman, was as shocked as anyone on board when the unsuspecting Japanese fleet stumbled upon the equally unsuspecting American fleet. “It was a total surprise,” said Kimmell, who was then twenty years old and had joined the Navy while still in high school in Vincenes, Indiana, determined once he graduated to follow in the footsteps of his father, a sailor during World War I. As the lead fire controlman on the 5-inch gun, Kimmell believes the Raymond scored at least forty-eight hits on one of the Japanese cruisers. He credited his captain’s skillful ship handling for keeping the Raymond safe as the ship zigzagged through the water in a mad dash to avoid being hit by the Japanese torpedoes. “We were one lucky bunch,” he noted, adding that during the attack no one showed any fear: “We had a role to play and we were just thinking of getting our job done.”
“I was washing my hands and thinking about eating breakfast,” recalled Howard W. Fortney, chief electrician’s mate on board the Raymond, when the alarm sounded. “My battle station was midship repair. I remember closing the watertight door on the starboard side of the ship, just past the wardroom, and I looked out and saw the lineup of Japanese battleships on the horizon.” As he witnessed the shelling of the aircraft carriers, Fortney said he was certain the entire American fleet would be wiped out within a half hour. “I didn’t see how we could escape.”
Firing was fast and furious. The destroyer escorts were pitted against an enemy that was bigger, faster, and more powerful—defying all odds of survival. Firing more than 1,413 rounds at the Japanese fleet, the barrel of the 5-inch gun got so hot that the paint on it bubbled up, turned brown, and peeled off. “It was really a miracle that we were able to make the torpedo runs and not get hit,” Fortney said. “I did pick up two or three pieces of shrapnel on deck but nobody was injured at all. The Raymond was not damaged.”
“The picture of a DE making a run on a cruiser or a battleship was pretty pathetic,” the Raymond’s Lt. Robert L. Johnson Jr. later wrote in a letter to his wife. “I was pretty scared anyway, I guess; my knees didn’t seem to [be] acting quite right, and there was a cold, tight feeling in my stomach. I didn’t see— none of us did—how we could come out of this spot alive. It was a foregone conclusion that they’d sink everyone of us inside of a half hour. . . . I thought about you, darling, and wanted very much to live; but I didn’t see how it could be arranged.”
With the Gambier Bay mortally wounded, the order was given to make a torpedo run on the Japanese fleet. The die had been cast and there was no turning back. The Raymond followed orders, making a beeline for the Japanese cruiser. “We cut back through our own smoke, heading for one of the cruisers on our starboard quarter,” Johnson wrote. “Our after-gun was masked now but the forward gun kept pounding. George and I looked at each other, smiled and shrugged. The smile said, ‘so long, fella!’; the shrug said, ‘It can’t be helped.’ It’s funny how quickly you get used to the idea of dying, and how, once you’ve made up your mind to it, it seems very impersonal.”
But Lieutenant Johnson and the crew of the Raymond would not be dying that day. Dashing through the churning waters alive with Japanese torpedoes and enemy gunfire hammering the American ships, the Raymond closed fast on the target looming ahead. The DE was pounded with incessant gunfire as the Japanese tried to force the Raymond to retreat, spraying its forecastle with shrapnel and chunks of twisted steel. But the DE kept coming. “The cruiser ahead seemed huge and close.” Johnson said. “Stand by torpedoes,” the captain ordered. “Left full rudder.”
The little destroyer escort heeled over sharply and turned to unmask the torpedo tubes. “Fire when ready!” the captain exclaimed. With binoculars trained on the cruiser, Johnson saw a “big flash forward on him and a geyser of water. Somebody’s fish connected; maybe ours, maybe not.” The Raymond sped back and rejoined the formation. “Somehow, unbelievably, we made our run, fired our fish, and came back! We had steamed into the teeth of the enemy’s guns and we were still afloat!”
Nineteen-year-old AG Kessinger, machinist’s mate on board the Raymond, missed seeing a lot of the action since he was in the engine room making sure the bilges were not leaking as the shelling continued. Kessinger, whose parents gave him the first name AG, hailed from the small town of Ewing, Texas, where his father operated the steam equipment in a saw mill. One of seven children, Kessinger quit Biboll High School to join the Navy in 1942. Because of the critical need for personnel, he spent only twenty-eight days in boot camp before being assigned to the USS Temptress, a 206-foot patrol gun boat operating along the East Coast, where he didn’t see much action. A few months later Kessinger was assigned to the Raymond, after a brief stint in destroyer escort school in Norfolk, Virginia. Now this Texas farm boy would be smack in the middle of the greatest naval battle in history.
“I was in the after engine room and walked out on deck and just as I got out the captain announced that there was a Japanese fleet back of us and they were firing on us,” Kessinger said. “His next words were ‘Man your battle stations.’” Kessinger said that in the first hour some two hundred Japanese shell bursts splashed in the vicinity of his ship. Although the battle seemed to last forever, it was less than three hours before it ended. Like many of his shipmates, Kessinger credited his captain’s ability as a good ship handler for keeping the vessel safe. “He knew how to chase splashes,” the sailor said.
When the order was given for the destroyers and destroyer escorts to turn around and fight, most of the sailors shared the view of the Raymond’s Lieutenant Johnson: They would not be going home to their families. “Little fellows, make a torpedo attack,” Admiral Sprague told the DEs. “My God, how are we going to do this?” Copeland, commander of the Roberts, recalled thinking. He understood that the firepower of the destroyer escorts or even the American destroyers would be no match for the giant Japanese warships. But he had his orders.15
“My hands were ice cold from fear,” recalled Lt. Everett “Bob” Roberts, the Roberts’ executive officer, as Copeland gave the command to launch a torpedo attack against the mighty Japanese fleet. “I computed the course to bring us within launch range. . . . I wished he had ordered me to find a course that would be an escape route,” Roberts said. “We launched the torpedoes and fired our 5-inch guns at a very close range.” In fact, the destroyer escort was said to be so close—only 2,500 yards away from the enemy vessel—that the Japanese cruiser’s 8-inch gun could not be aimed low enough to hit the little ship. The Roberts scored some decisive hits with its 5-inch guns against the towering enemy vessels.16
Jack Yusen, the eighteen-year-old son of a New York City garment worker whose battle station was the 40-mm forward gun, continued firing as the Japanese rapidly closed in on the American fleet. “I could see the [Japanese] shells,” Yusen said, adding that the enemy at first was too far away for the reach of the DE shells. But he recalled dozens of Japanese shells exploding nearby with the plumes of colored water swamping his little ship, which rolled and shuttered with each exploding round.
Thoughts of home and life swirled through the young sailor’s mind as he did the job he was trained to do, even though he and his shipmates believed they were fated for disaster. “This will be the last time I will be around,” Yusen recalled thinking as the massive Japanese fleet bombarded the Americans. He said that 275 rounds were fired from the 5-inch gun forward and another 300 rounds from the 5-inch gun aft. “The 5-inch shells would bounce off the Japanese hulls,” he said, but the shells were able to cause some damage topside on the enemy cruisers, two of which reportedly were knocked out of commission by the American fighters.
Radioman Richard Rohde’s battle station was the windowless radio shack where, hunched over the desk with headphones on, he was transcribing messages coming in over the TBS radio. The nineteen year old from Staten Island whose father had lost everything in the Great Depression always received messages in code. On that day he was startled to get his first “plain language” message simply stating, without using the typical secret code, that the American fleet was under attack by a massive Japanese force and needed help from any ship that could provide it.
Although Rohde could not see the action from the dark radio room, he didn’t need his eyes to know what was happening. “My other senses worked fine,” he said. He could hear the unmistakable sounds of battle, feel the little ship as it shuttered and shook with each incoming shell, and smell the gunfire and the smoke as the Sammy B and the other destroyer escorts tried to hide from the massive Japanese force while gallantly pounding them with their 5-inch guns. But the Japanese warships were not ready turn tail and run from these diminutive American ships and started to score hits of their own with their armor-piercing shells, which, although they passed through the destroyer escort’s thin hull, found their way to the ship’s engineering spaces. Air in the combat information center fouled, filled with asbestos from insulation jarred off the piping. Steam lines ruptured, scalding several firemen to death as a shell pierced the number one engine room. Another shell at the water line opened a huge hole in the port side and ocean water started pouring in. Faced with a vessel that was about to sink, Captain Copeland gave the order to abandon ship.
Gunner’s Mate Paul Henry Carr, captain of the aft 5-inch gun, ordered his crew to fire every available shell at the oncoming Japanese ships. The barrel of the gun overheated and, when a Japanese shell knocked out power on the ship, combustion gases could not be discharged from Carr’s weapon. Carr fired six more shell even though he knew that, at any moment, the shell might explode because of the accumulation of dangerous combustion gases. It didn’t matter to Carr—he had a job to do, and his job was to keep firing at the enemy.
Then the unthinkable happened. The seventh shell “cooked off” and blew the mount apart, catapulting Sam Blue, the fuel setter, overboard. Carr, standing right next to the exploding mount, was ripped open in a wound stretching from his neck all the way down to his groin. Rushing across the deck, which was covered with burning oil, rescuers arrived at the gun and found Carr on his knees holding a 45-pound projectile in his arms, still trying to load it into the mangled breech. “Although he was ripped open from his neck to his spleen, his mind was still saying, ‘Load, fire, load, fire,’” Yusen said of the Oklahoma boy who was devoted to doing his job. His shipmates gently removed the shell from his bloody arms, and Carr died a hero a few minutes later.
Sailors were thoroughly trained on what to do with confidential documents to keep the information from falling into enemy hands. Care must be taken to either destroy or throw overboard all special decoding equipment, even as sailors are frantically trying to get to lifeboats before their vessel sinks below the waves. The main deck of the Roberts was scattered with dead and dying American sailors. “I ran up to the bridge, which was crowded with refugees from the lower deck,” Tom Stevenson, then a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant, said. “A shell hit just aft of the area and we were knocked down by the concussion; the flags bags were on fire. . . . By the time we were operating at half power and it appeared we were going to be ok.” But that would not prove to be the case. The ship, just six months old, was about to begin its final minutes of life.
Stevenson, whose father ran the T. J. Stevenson steamship company in New York City, was the ship’s communications officer and, unlike the majority of the “green” crew, had some seagoing experience, having served eight months as a deck boy on a Norwegian merchant ship, earning an expert helmsman certificate. But none of that experience prepared him for what was to come. Although he was stationed in the combat information center, the blast had driven him from his battle station as scalding steam and asbestos fibers poured through the air vent.17
Once Captain Copeland gave the order to abandon ship, Stevenson quickly began his sad but necessary duty. “I went down into the radio shack and tried to destroy the electric coding machine,” Stevenson said. Unfortunately he had failed to previously attached a hand grenade to the side of the machine as he was supposed to do in the event destruction was ordered. He never thought he would need it, and now had no way to destroy the equipment.
But Soundman Howard Cayo happened by with a Thompson submachine gun and sprayed the machine with .45-caliber slugs, rendering it useless. “I took the [metal decoding machine] wheels and threw them overboard,” Stevenson said. As the crippled ship continued its death throes, Stevenson next had to climb down through the hatch and head through a dimly lit passageway to the ship’s safe to remove the secret documents. Joseph Nabors, a signalman, went along to assist. “But I had trouble opening the safe because my hands were shaking,” Stevenson said. Finally able to dial the right combination, they removed all of the secret documents, including the Leyte Gulf invasion plans, placed them in weighted bags, went topside, and threw them overboard. There were still more bags of documents to retrieve, but Stevenson made the last trip below by himself since Nabors decided he had better get himself overboard before it was too late.18
In his great haste to grab the last bags and haul them topside, Stevenson not only forgot his wallet and college ring, in his room adjacent to the area where the safe was located, but also neglected to weigh down one of the bags of secret documents. The captain was on deck when Stevenson threw the last bag over the side. The unweighted bag of secret documents floated to the surface. “You better get that bag,” Copeland told Stevenson, who jumped over the side, grabbed the bag, and, instead of returning to the sinking ship, swam toward one of the floater nets where some of his shipmates were struggling to hold on. Stevenson, whose legs were bleeding from shrapnel, held onto the bag and collected knives and other heavy materials from the sailors to weigh it down before letting it drop to the ocean’s bottom.19
Tullio J. Serafini at forty-four was the oldest man on the ship and served as a first-class radioman. He was an Italian immigrant who, along with his family, came to America and settled in coal-mining country near Carbondale, Pennsylvania. The burly 220-pound no-nonsense sailor had served in World War I, after lying about his age in order to join, and left his family and a good job to reenlist in order to again serve his adopted country. He said America had been good to him and his family and he wanted to return the favor.
This time, however, returning the favor would carry a hefty cost. When the “abandon ship” order was issued, Richard Rohde, the nineteen-year-old radioman who traded a blue uniform with silver buttons he wore as a page at the Guarantee Trust Company in Manhattan for the chambray shirt and dungarees of the U.S. Navy, was more than happy to leave the radio room filling with scalding steam and asbestos.
“As I stepped out of the radio shack standing next to my chief radioman, Tullio Serafini, all of a sudden there was a big explosion,” Rohde said. “We both got hit. I looked at him. He had no shirt on and all I could see was blood. He was hit in the shoulder and stomach and all down the one side. I thought, no way is this man going to live.” As Rohde looked at his own leg he saw a gaping hole in his dungarees and what resembled hamburger meat oozing out of the hole. He looked away and quickly made his way down the ladder and over to the rail. Rohde removed his shoes and, being a disciplined Navy man, set them neatly side by side on the deck of the sinking ship before climbing over the rail and jumping into the water, ablaze with patches of burning oil.
“I started to swim away from the ship as quickly as I could, and my life belt had been hit by shrapnel and would not work,” Rohde said. He noticed a tiny life jacket floating on the surface. The miniature kapok life vest had been sewn by shipmate Sam Blue for the ship’s mascot, a mixed breed dog named Sammy B, who perished in the explosion. “I grabbed it and put it under one arm, and it provided a little bit of buoyancy.” Rohde, who was swimming with great haste, stopped for a moment to catch his breath. He lifted his head out of the water and was startled to see a Japanese destroyer towering right in front of him, still firing at the Roberts. Realizing he was in a very bad location, Rohde quickly changed course and swam around to the other side of the ship and found a life raft with eight men on top, along with a floater net, which had been fastened in a makeshift fashion to the raft. Some forty or fifty men were clinging to the net.20
“I’ll never forget that sinking feeling when the ship went down. All of a sudden we were alone,” Rohde said—no food, except for a few malted milk tablets, and no American ships in the vicinity to rescue the injured sailors. With most of the water casks hit by shrapnel and contaminated, the sailors had little to drink. Rohde had always liked his food salty, so he made the mistake of taking a few swigs of sea water. The next thing he knew he was swimming away from the net heading toward a “tunnel” he believed would lead him to a drinking fountain under the sea. Finally, his shipmates brought the hallucinating sailor back and tied him to the net to keep him from swimming off again.
Drifting in two separate groups, the exhausted survivors used a buddy system to watch one another so they could grab some sleep. “It was horrible at night,” Rohde said. “It wasn’t cold but there were big seas running with big swells. We couldn’t see anything.” The sailors were all covered with fuel oil, which Rohde believes saved them from serious sunburn and, perhaps, sharks, which might not find the smell of fuel oil too inviting. “When you looked at us all you saw was our white eyeballs and teeth,” Rohde said. “You couldn’t wipe it off.”
Everyone seemed to have a different idea on how to keep the sharks away. Some said kicking their dangling legs and making noise would keep them away. Others said such activity instead would attract the hungry creatures. In hopes that it would repel the sharks, a few sailors wanted to spread a yellow dye on the water, stored in an emergency kit on the raft and to be used as a rescue signal for planes. But if they used it up they wouldn’t have it to signal rescuers. The tired and demoralized men debated and argued. No one was certain what to do.
As the Sammy B’s stern sunk below the waves, Jack Yussen looked up to see a Japanese cruiser suddenly appear, doing about twenty knots and headed right for the American sailors clinging to the net. “All you could see was that giant bow wave, and we were yelling and screaming, sure he was going to run us down.” But the big cruiser made three passes around the life net, with the swells from each pass swamping the net, dumping the men into the water. The ship did not hit the survivors. A crewman on board had a motion picture camera and was filming the sailors struggling to stay on the raft. Then, much to the surprise of the sailors, as the ship made its final lap, the Japanese captain was standing on port wing saluting the American sailors. That would be the last human being the DE sailors would see for more than fifty hours.
“The next morning, when the sharks came around, that was a horrible, horrible thing,” Yusen said. “They hit one our boys right off the bat, and we had to cut him loose.” Once the sailor’s body floated away from the raft, the sharks followed and gave the sailors a short reprieve from any further attacks. Night fell once again. Men started to hallucinate. Some sailors, hallucinating from drinking salt water, swam or drifted away from the group never to be seen again.
“The next morning, I was dozing on the net when I felt something on my leg,” Yusen remembered. “There was a shark, pushing my leg with its snout. He went away, and a few seconds later he hit a guy two down from me.” After the attack they pushed that sailor away from the group. Yusen believes he was spared because he had more oil covering his body than some of his other shipmates. Bob Roberts, the ship’s executive officer, described one shipmate as “fastidious and regular,” who decided to swim away from the group—out of the oil patch that covered the water— in order to defecate. “When he lowered his pants a shark nudged him,” Roberts said. “Quickly, he scrambled back to the group in the oil patch.”21
“We did a lot of praying,” said Ernest Glenn Huffman, a nineteen-year-old North Carolina boy who had spent ten years of his life in an orphanage after his mother died when he was only five years old. “I was more afraid in the water than when the battle was going on,” Huffman said, noting that sailors were trained to do their jobs in the heat of battle and with little time to think about other things. Huffman said that he saw one shark during the fifty-hour ordeal but that it didn’t bother the sailor who paired up with Whitney Felt as they took turns watching each other when they slept. Felt, who was a sonarman, remembered the first night as “forbidding” as the tired and injured sailors simply struggled to stay alive. “To many,” he said, “it was the longest night they ever experienced.” The second night did not seem as long or tedious as the first, he said, since the men were “exhausted beyond belief” and slept with their heads held barely above the ocean by their life jackets.22
All of the survivors believed they would be rescued immediately after the Sammy B went down. Spirits were buoyed when a Navy plane flew over and dipped its wings at the sailors struggling to stay afloat in the hot afternoon sun. Captain Copeland, who did not know how to swim, was on the raft and saw the plane come in about forty or fifty feet off the water as the pilot gave the sailors the “thumbs up” signal. “That brought us from the depths right up to the peaks,” Copeland said. “We said, ‘Oh boy, we’ve been sighted and there will be help on the way.’” But help never arrived on that first day, and by early evening the dejected men had become discouraged as they faced the prospect of a lonely night on the open ocean without food and water—and their hope of a rescue dashed.
Realizing that he and the other officers needed to set a good example or the exhausted men would lose all hope, Copeland organized his group into teams of two and they started to paddle due west toward the island of Samar, which they figured was about thirty miles away. “We weren’t in bad shape physically,” Copeland said, “but after fifteen minutes of paddling both he [the ship’s executive officer, Bob Roberts] and I were completely exhausted. The other officers and chiefs took turns and paddled in fifteen minute stints throughout the night. By the next morning the group jubilantly sighted land—the mountaintops of Samar.
“We got close enough to Samar to see palm trees silhouetted against the sun,” said Dudley Moylan, who said the good swimmers moved to the inshore side of the floater net and started swimming. “Two guys on the raft paddled while everyone in the water on the offshore side kicked.” Battling tide and current, the group never made it to shore, although Copeland believes that, at one time, they may have been as close as five hundred to one thousand yards from the beach. They were swept back out to sea—so far back, in fact, that when dawn broke, they could no longer see land.23
Even the best-trained officer has his breaking point, and for Captain Copeland it finally came on that day off Samar. The thirty-five-year-old captain, who had been trained as a lawyer at the University of Washington while enlisted in the Naval Reserve, “just folded up,” in his words, once they failed to reach the beach. “I didn’t go completely out of my head,” Copeland said, “but intermittently my thoughts and mental perceptions got quite vague and befuddled. I lost all muscular control of my head and hands and my muscular coordination was completely gone.”
Copeland felt he was a drag on the men and should be allowed to drown, but Bob Roberts, his executive officer, overruled his captain and made sure he was placed on the raft where he would be safe, watched throughout the night. After several false sightings of white lights during that night, help finally would arrive the next morning.
“On the third day,” radioman Rohde recalled, “we saw a ship.” They wondered whether the ship was friendly or another Japanese vessel. “They spotted us and they came over ever so slowly and they had their guns trained on us.” Someone from the ship yelled at the oil-covered sailors, “Who won the world series?” Rohde said one of the survivors yelled back, “Don’t ask such goddamn fool questions. Pick us up!” Someone else finally answered, and PC-653 proceeded to pick up the bedraggled sailors.
Rohde recalled that the decks of the patrol craft, which had been busy picking up other survivors, were crowded with men. Once on board Rohde was given a bowl of oatmeal. “Nothing ever tasted better than that,” he said, noting that they also gave him a shot of Canadian Club whiskey, which “really warmed me” after more than fifty hours in the water. Rohde, whose oil-soaked clothes were removed, recalled that they laid him out on deck directly over the engine room. “My butt was right on a rivet and it was hot,” he said. Later, when he was treated in a military hospital, he had to lie on a ring because of the painful burn inflicted from the hot rivet, a scar he still carries today.
Too exhausted to climb up the net dropped over the side of the patrol craft, two sailors helped Seaman Glenn Huffman up the net. With nothing to eat or drink for more than fifty hours, Huffman weighed ninety-six pounds. “I laid on the anchor chain and fell sound asleep,” he said. Communications Officer Stevenson was shocked to discover that Tullio Serafini, the radioman from Carbondale, Pennsylvania, whose side was ripped open by the blast, was still alive. Hoisted on board the patrol craft by a wire bucket, Stevenson said, “Tullio, you made it! I gave him his wallet back, but he died the next day and I never saw him again.”24
Vern Kimmell, fire controlman on board the Raymond, was relieved— and surprised—when the Japanese fleet finally started to retreat. “Our rate of fire during the engagement was such that, when the Japanese turned around and headed north, we had 32 rounds of 5-inch ammunition left,” Kimmell said. “At our rate of fire, we would have exhausted all of 5-inch ammunition in another thirty minutes. We would have been defenseless if the Japanese had stayed on scene.” Kimmell said that they had fired every type of ammunition on board, including star shells, antipersonnel shells, dual-purpose ammunition. “Anything that went through that 5-inch barrel we fired.” The other destroyer escorts were in a similar predicament. Franklyn “Jeff” Conley, signalman on board the USS John C. Butler, which continued making smoke to conceal the Americans, said they fired everything they had at the Japanese fleet. Although they never fired their torpedoes, they did pound the battleships and cruisers with their 5-inch guns and even resorted to firing star shells as their ammunition supply dwindled.25
The Japanese left, Kimmell believes, because they became convinced the tiny American fleet was part of Admiral Halsey’s larger group and they didn’t want to tangle with his immense firepower. In Robert Johnson’s letter to his wife, the Raymond officer expresses his bewilderment as to why the Japanese retreated. “For some reason,” he wrote, “the whole Jap task force began to retire. When they got out of range of our guns, they stopped and lobbed a few more salvoes in our general direction, but they seemed pretty half-hearted about it and I think it was more face-saving than anything else.”26
Kimmell appears to have been correct as to why the clearly superior Japanese fleet retreated from a group of American vessels they easily could have defeated. In fact, Admiral Tomiji Koyanagi, chief of staff to Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita on board the Japanese battleship Yamoto, offers some insight about that October day in 1944. Clearly the Japanese fleet was as surprised to encounter the American vessels as the Americans were to see pagodas coming over the misty horizon. “Just as day broke at 0640 on the 25th and we were changing from night search disposition to anti-aircraft alert cruising disposition,” wrote Koyanagi, “enemy carriers were sighted on the horizon. Several masts came in sight about 30 kilometers to the southeast, and presently we could see planes being launched.”
Koyanagi was excited. “This was indeed a miracle,” he said. “Think of a surface fleet coming up on an enemy carrier group! We moved to take advantage of this heaven-sent opportunity. Yamoto increased speed instantly and opened fire at a range of 31 kilometers.” They vastly overestimated the size and power of the American fleet, which they believed included four or five fast carriers guarded by one or two battleships and at least ten heavy cruisers. Little did they suspect that they would be doing battle with a small American fleet comprised of escort carriers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts.
As the furious battled raged on, the Japanese became convinced that they were fighting American cruisers when, in fact, they were much smaller destroyers. Admiral Koyanagi praised the Americans’ efficient use of smoke screens and rain squalls making them visible to the Japanese battleship for only short intervals. “We pursued at top speed for over two hours,” he said, “but we could not close the gap, in fact it actually appeared to be lengthening. We estimated that the enemy’s speed was nearly 30 knots, that his carriers were of the regular large type, that pursuit would be an endless sea-saw, and that we would be unable to strike a decisive blow.” The Japanese called off pursuit. “Giving up pursuit when we did amounted to losing a prize already in hand,” the admiral noted. “If we had known the types and number of enemy ships, and their speed, Admiral Kurita would never have suspended the pursuit, and we would have annihilated the enemy.” Fortunately for the Americans, they left before realizing their error.27
When the battle ended, said Jeff Conley, who was on board the John C. Butler, the captain gave each sailor a beer. “I had gotten my bottle of beer and came out on the starboard side, about a mile from the St. Lo, when I saw this airplane coming in.” At first Conley thought it was one of the American planes returning to its “nest” on board the carrier, but he soon would realize his mistake. “It turned out that it was a kamikaze, and it went right into the stern of the St Lo, and there was a tremendous explosion.” Howard Fortney of the Raymond watched in horror the enormous power of the fiery explosion as the suicide plane crashed into the ship, igniting its torpedo and bomb magazines and blowing one of the vessel’s giant aircraft elevators hundreds of feet in the air. The ship, which had scored a direct hit on one of the Japanese destroyers, was engulfed in flames as dense black smoke poured from it. Its slowly turned on its side and sank beneath the waves. One hundred and fourteen men died.
Jumping into the churning, oil-filled water, Conley and shipmate Bob Turner swam out to rescue crew members from the carrier. Sharks were circling the mortally wounded ship and its dead and injured crew, many struggling in the water with others burned beyond recognition. Conley spotted two sailors quite a distance away, frantically waving for help. Neither sailor knew how to swim and their kapok life jackets were torn and filling with water. They were about to drown. Conley convinced the first one to remove his jacket, which was providing no buoyancy because it was filled with water. The sailor climbed on Conley’s back and he swam back to the cargo nets, which had been lowered over the side of the Butler. Conley, exhausted from firing 198 rounds at the Japanese fleet, swam out to assist the other sailor. “He didn’t want to give up his life jacket and I told him, ‘You get rid of the jacket or you’re going to sink. God bless you.’” With great reluctance, the weary sailor unstrapped the life jacket, climbed on Conley’s back, and was carried back to safety. The bodies of dead sailors were piled up on the fantail of the ship, and once their dog tags were removed, the valiant young men were buried at sea. More than four hundred of the St. Lo’s crew were rescued.28
Meanwhile, while the battle at Samar was under way, additional American warships, with troops, planes, tanks, and supplies on board, were moving in support of MacArthur’s return to the Philippines. The USS Coolbaugh, a destroyer escort commissioned only a year earlier in Philadelphia and code-named “Pigsticker” during the invasion, was steaming toward Leyte, battling a fierce typhoon along the way. Once the winds and seas subsided and the invasion got under way, the kamikazes showed up.
“We were attacked by thirty Jap planes,” wrote Robert L. Goggins in the diary he secretly kept while at sea. Goggins grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, where his father drove a bread truck. He quit school at seventeen to join the Navy, and after a cold and snowy eight weeks at boot camp in Great Lakes, he was assigned as a gunner’s mate on board the Coolbaugh. “Twenty-seven were shot down by our planes, and one shot down by the carrier Santee.” One of the kamikazes came out of the clouds and made a dive on the Santee. Loaded with a 1,000-pound bomb, the plane crashed through the flight deck on the port side, coming to rest on the hangar deck. The explosion blew a hole fifteen by thirty feet in the ship. Fires erupted and compartments started to flood. Sixteen men died and twenty-seven were injured, but the ship did not sink. The enemy had more in store for the crippled carrier. Japanese submarine I–56 took aim at the ship, firing a torpedo into its starboard side. No casualties occurred from the torpedo strike, and the Japanese quickly discovered that this converted tanker was one tough customer.29
Within seconds of the attack on the Santee, the kamikazes took aim at another carrier, Suwannee, originally built as an oiler and recommissioned in 1941 as an aircraft carrier. Gunners on board the carrier hit at least three suicide planes, but the third one rolled over and dove eight thousand feet, crashing directly into the ship’s flight deck and opening a ten-foot hole. The carrier exploded in flames when the kamikaze’s bomb detonated in the mess hall, ripping a twenty-five-foot gash in the hangar deck. Dozens of sailors were thrown overboard.
“We picked up ninety-one survivors who were blown off the Suwannee,” Goggins wrote, adding that some had burns the size of a hand on their back and many were injured by shrapnel. “Our pharmacist mate, Robert Wicks, worked all day and night on the burned and wounded sailors.” Goggins rescued one man clinging to an empty ammunition case in the water. He was being held up by three of his shipmates to keep his head out of the water. “When he climbed up the floater net and started to go forward with the rest of the badly injured,” Goggins wrote, “we could see that his whole back had been blown out—just a mass of blood.” He died later that evening and was buried at sea.30 The Coolbaugh and several other ships left the Philippines with injured sailors and the crippled carrier and headed to the island of Palau, where the wounded could be transferred to the USS Bountiful, a hospital ship, for treatment and repairs could be made to the carrier.
Not every destroyer escort struck by a torpedo or hit by a kamikaze succumbed. In fact, sailors on board one little ship, the USS Chaffee, lived to tell about the night in January 1945, when a Japanese bomber launched a torpedo that plowed directly into the destroyer escort’s bow without causing any loss of life and resulting in only minimal damage to the ship. Albert R. Pincus was a twenty-one-year-old electrician’s mate on board the Chaffee when the ship joined a group of escort vessels ordered to protect the battleship USS Pennsylvania during operations in Lingayen Gulf. Pincus, whose Russian immigrant parents ran the Pinky’s Candy store in Brooklyn, New York, skipped school one day and went with two of his classmates, Whitey Robbins and Willie Levine, to the Navy recruiting station in Brooklyn and signed up after being turned down for the Army Air Corps because of a problem with depth perception. After boot camp at Great Lakes, Pincus eventually found himself on board the USS Chaffee.
While Chaffee was anchored in Lingayen that January in 1945, three Japanese torpedo bombers came out of the night sky and headed directly for the battleship. Two of the aircraft were shot down but the third peeled off and disappeared into the darkness. With the threat apparently over, most of the ships secured from battle stations—most, that is, except for Pincus’ ship, whose captain was overly cautious. He felt the third plane would return to finish the job. And he was right. “About ten minutes later the third betty came back, and we could see it silhouetted in the moon,” Pincus said. “Full speed ahead,” shouted the skipper. “The captain swung the fast little ship around and headed right toward the betty, and without our running lights, we were invisible in the black of night.”
Pincus said that the pilot was startled as the DE appeared in his path, dropping his bomb right in front of the ship. “The fish landed so close to us that the spray, when it hit the water, wet the officers and men on the bridge. It then hit us in the bow, right at the boatswain’s locker, but below the water line, going clean through the bow and out the other side.” The forward compartment quickly flooded with seawater and the ship began to list out of control. The ship hit a coral reef, damaging the propeller. But it did not sink. The kamikaze was shot down.
The next morning the fleet commander came on board the damaged destroyer escort to thank the crew and officers for saving the Pennsylvania. The battleship sent over lots of ice cream and cake for the men, as well as some spare parts so repairs could be made to the ship. Pincus said he would never forget that morning when the fleet commander personally thanked the Wiseman’s captain, William F. Jones, for saving the battleship from the kamikaze attacks. With an “Ah shucks, commander, we’re just doing our duty” attitude, the young skipper thanked his superior officer for the praise—but he and his men were a lot more grateful for the ice cream and cake.31