As Douglas MacArthur continued his assault on Japanese forces in the Philippines, additional ships were on their way to provide fuel and supplies for the battle-weary American troops. Unknown to this collection of American destroyer escorts, destroyers, carriers, cruisers, and oilers, they were about to face a relentless and savage foe ready to show the young sailors there was more to fear in the Pacific than just the Japanese.
Sailors on board seven destroyer escorts, part of the convoy sailing westward toward the Philippines, would be battling an enemy for which they were no match, despite their training and, for many, experience battling the ruthless Nazi U-boats in the Atlantic. Unsuspecting of the danger that lay just over the horizon, the destroyer escorts USS Bangust, Waterman, Sesson, Swearer, Lamons, Tabberer, and Weaver continued their westward advance as the skies turned dark and brooding, the ocean churned up, and the winds began to howl.
Mother Nature was their new foe, and she was about to deliver a deadly blow to the American forces, unleashing a violent typhoon that would cause more damage and loss of American lives than occurred in the Battle of Midway, a turning point in the Pacific war. Faced with an enemy far more devastating than any Japanese torpedo, there was very little these teenage sailors or their young skippers could do about it.
“We had no warning of this storm, and all of a sudden the barometer started going down,” Capt. Henry Lee Plage of the destroyer escort USS Tabberer said. “It was every man for himself, practically, after that.” The tiny destroyer escort, struggling to stay afloat, lost steerage a couple of times as the ship’s mast, which towered ninety-three feet above the water line, cracked and buckled. Crawling across the deck on their bellies, sailors held on to the deck as the ship pitched and rolled more than 70 degrees, lying nearly on its side in the raging seas. The twenty-nine-year-old skipper, respected and loved by his teenage crew, could no longer keep sailors stationed on any of the weather decks for fear they would be injured by the falling mast and other debris or swept overboard by the mountainous ninety-foot waves and to a certain death in the shark-infested waters. Visibility was zero and torrential rain drenched the sailors as 150-mph winds howled, tossing the small ships around as though they were nothing more than balsa-wood models.
“I was on the helm trying to decide if we got hit should I go over the side with my shoes on or off,” said Walter Roberge of the USS Swearer, then sixteen years old. “It was a horrendous thing,” said the sailor, whose mother had forged his birth certificate a year earlier so he could enlist before he was of age. As he held on to keep from being thrown overboard, Roberge may have wondered in retrospect whether he had made a good decision back then. “I was thrown across the CIC and into the plot board, severely bruising my ribs.”1
Forty-five-thousand-ton battleships were rolling as though they were tiny canoes running a series of white water rapids. Some of the American vessels would not survive. “I can tell you, it’s one hell of a feeling to hear over the TBS when you are in a terrible typhoon that three destroyers, slightly larger than the ship you are on, have floundered and sunk by turning broadside,” said Richard B. Hillyer, then a seventeen-year-old sailor on board the USS George. “It was the longest night of my life.”2
“A check of the inclinometer shows our rolls were up to 73 degrees, both starboard and port,” only 2 degrees short of the maximum roll the gauge can record, Roberge said. “Eating was next to impossible. The cooks fixed us some sandwiches and coffee and we did the best we could under the circumstances.” Roberge recalled that he feared leaving the bridge since he knew below decks would not be the best place to spend the night. A veteran of the North Atlantic, Roberge said the hurricanes in that ocean were like a “stroll in the park” compared to the Pacific typhoons.
Some of the destroyers were riding high in the water when the storm hit since they had pumped out their bilges in preparation for fueling, which had to be aborted. The ships lay on their sides, stacks flat against the mountainous swells on the ocean’s surface. Trying to make its way through a confused mass of vessels, in the driving rain and zero visibility, the Swearer came face-to-face with a carrier directly in its path.
“The captain orders full right rudder full ahead of the port screw, and full reverse of the starboard, and out of the carrier’s way,” Roberge recorded in the diary he secretly kept while on board. “It is to no avail! We are locked in irons. We just keep going on the same course. We just cannot steer clear.” As the little ship moved on a collision course with the carrier, the larger ship suddenly spotted the little DE in the heavy fog and rapidly turned to port, just missing the Swearer. “Had they not,” Roberge said, “we surely would have been cut in half.”3
Although destroyer escorts were found to be relatively good at staying afloat, Captain Plage said the ships did roll—“like the very devil.” Plage recorded a 72-degree roll on the Tabberer. Once the ship’s mast toppled, its radio, radar, and electronic identification equipment ended up on the bottom of the ocean. They had no communication with the other ships or with Admiral Halsey, who feared the destroyer escort had been lost in the violent storm.4
As bad as conditions were for the Swearer and Tabberer, things were even worse for several other American vessels battling the fury unleashed by the ferocious storm, said to be the worst to hit the Pacific in fifty years. Bulkheads creaked and groaned as they struggled to stay afloat. Airplanes, securely lashed with rope and wire to the steel decks of their carriers, were ripped loose and tossed about the deck. Air intakes ruptured and fires erupted as the monstrous waves continued to pound the ships.
The violent storm would take its toll. Three American destroyers and more than one hundred aircraft were lost, and nearly eight hundred men were swept into the angry seas. Most would never be seen again. Twenty-eight ships were damaged, some heavily, as the little DEs were tossed around like corks on the roiling seas. Adm. William “Bull” Halsey, on board the USS New Jersey, either misread or failed to heed the weather warnings, and to this day his actions remain controversial. In his autobiography, however, he makes it clear that he understood how dangerous such a storm is for small Navy vessels.
“What it was like on a destroyer one-twentieth the New Jersey’s size, I can only imagine,” Halsey said. “I was told that some of them were knocked down until their stacks were almost horizontal and were pinned there by the gale, while water rushed into their ventilators and intakes, shorting the circuits, killing their power, steering, lights and communications, and leaving them to drift helplessly.” Certainly the sailors on board the tiny destroyer escorts could have provided the admiral with ungarnished eyewitness accounts of just what it was like on board those vessels tossed around during the storm, later named “Halsey’s typhoon” or Typhoon Cobra.
Once the storm subsided it was time to look for survivors. In what Halsey described as the “most exhaustive search in Navy history,” more than one hundred ships spanned out across the heavy seas looking for American sailors, most of whom were suffering from exhaustion, dehydration, and shock and were confronting the mortal danger of an ever-expanding collection of hungry sharks lured to the area by the smell of blood from injured sailors.
Chief Radioman Ralph E. Tucker, ordered by Plage to rig an emergency antenna on the ship so he could communicate with the other vessels in the fleet, suddenly heard a cry and noticed a pinpoint of light off the ship’s starboard bow. “Man overboard,” Tucker shouted, and the skipper swung the ship around and headed for the light. “It was quite close to us,” Plage said, “and as we approached it, we heard voices out of the water. . . . We came around, the seas of course still very rough . . . [and] we put our search light on him and came alongside to pick him up.”5
The rescued sailor had been swept off the USS Hull, a destroyer that, along with the USS Spence and USS Monaghan, was overcome by the storm. The Hull toppled on its side, and as seawater rushed into the pilothouse, the destroyer sunk below the raging seas. The Spence broke in half and drifted away. The Monaghan, which had hosted President Roosevelt during a Caribbean cruise in 1936, imploded on itself. Sailors on the destroyer were praying out loud that they might live as the crippled ship groaned and then sunk beneath the waves, taking 90 percent of its crew to their graves.
William Fairlee was a twenty-one-year-old milk truck driver from Schenectady, New York, when he decided to enlist as a machinist in the Navy. Assigned to the USS Bangust, Fairlee said his ship, alongside the Monaghan when the destroyer imploded and sunk, was shaken to its very core during the storm. Fairlee, in the aft crew quarters that morning, heard something rolling around the fantail of his ship. “I looked out and saw it was a depth charge,” he said, and although it was not armed, the machinist felt uncomfortable letting it roll about the deck. Fairlee and some of his shipmates hurried topside and tried to stay standing on the swaying vessel while they pinned the depth charge against the life line, cut the line, and shoved the charge overboard.
Henry Eugene Davis, a fire controlman on board Bangust who had left school in the tenth grade to enlist in the Navy, was on the bridge as eighty-foot waves of green water poured over his station, swamping the ship. Although his vessel suffered some minor damage during the storm, Davis was shocked by the degree of rolling experienced by the ship. The decks were painted red and the red paint extended about six inches up the bulkhead, after which the color was changed to white. “I remember seeing footprints on the white paint. The men were walking on the walls,” he said, adding that he and many of his shipmates doubted they would survive the ferocious storm. “I sort of got religion during that period.”
“Like babes in the woods” was how one sailor on board the USS Melvin H. Nawman described his shipmates since they never suspected that the building seas foretold what would be one of the worst typhoons in Pacific Ocean history. Despite the weather, sailors did have to eat in order to keep up their strength, often standing up gripping the ship while gulping down their meal before the next wave knocked them over. “You hooked a leg around something, the messboy handed you a piece of bread which you buttered from a dish he had in his free hand,” the Nawman sailor wrote to his mother. “Next you picked up a piece of unpleasant looking boloney that was skidding around the pantry table and slapped it on the bread.”6
As the storm started to subside and radio communications were reestablished, Captain Plage was ordered to speed to the rendezvous point but ignored those orders and stayed in the area searching for survivors. “To hell with that,” he said, “we are going to stay here.” When he picked up the survivor from the Hull, he was not aware that two other destroyers had sunk as well. The next day the Tabberer picked up the Hull’s commanding officer, Capt. James Marks, described by Plage as “pretty far gone, very weak, he couldn’t help himself at all. We had to drag him aboard.”
“Finding the survivors was our first concern, getting them aboard was the next task,” Plage said. “We tried to head into the wind and head right for the man, trying to cut down on our roll, but we found the seas were so high that I was afraid if we got too close to him and tried to bring him alongside, we might have the bow thrown into the man and push him under or crack his head; so the only thing we could do was to come in upwind . . . and let the wind blow us down to him.”7
Sailing his ship into the teeth of the storm, the skipper risked his own life and the lives of his teenage crew in an all-out effort to rescue as many men as possible. Shining the ship’s powerful twenty-four-inch searchlights on the waters, Plage understood that these bright beacons might attract Japanese submarines in the vicinity. But the skipper felt strongly that it was his duty, and the duty of his men, to rescue as many Americans as they could find, regardless of the risk. And he did just that over the next two days. Maneuvering the warship close to sailors struggling in the water, they threw a line over the side with a loop on the end instructing them to place the loop around their torso and under their arms. Sailors could then be pulled on board the ship. Cargo nets were dropped over the side and a couple of sailors, donned in life jackets, were stationed at the water line to assist survivors to climb the nets.
Boatswain’s Mate Louis Purvis, a rugged twenty-two-year-old New Jersey native, was one of the sailors assigned to pluck survivors from the churning waters. Assisting sailors up the net, Purvis noticed a man in the water who seemed to be unconscious some distance away. Swimming out to save the sailor, Purvis discovered that the man actually was dead. Ripping off the sailor’s dog tags he swam back to the ship when, without warning, his lifeline became tangled on the sonar dome beneath the ship, yanking him under the vessel that was pitching and rolling on the raging seas. Pulled under the ship twice and coming up only briefly for a gulp of air, he broke free and swam under the ship, coming up on the other side. Sailors quickly pulled him on board. “Dammit,” he said, “I bet I’m the first sailor to be keelhauled in two hundred years.”8
Sharks circled the injured and bleeding men struggling to stay alive on floater nets and makeshift rafts. The sun burned their skin red as they shivered in shock, delirious from the salt water, praying that help would arrive. Some of them would not make it. Joseph McCrane, an officer from the Monaghan, climbed on board a raft after being swept over the side of his sinking vessel. He found Joe Guio, one of his ship’s gunner’s mates, badly injured, naked, and shivering in shock. McCrane held the West Virginia native in his arms to keep him warm as Guio lapsed into unconsciousness. Darkness fell.
“Guio awoke and asked me if I could see anything, and when I told him I could see the stars, he said that he couldn’t see anything,” McCrane noted. “He then thanked Melroy Harrison, seaman second, for pulling him aboard the raft and then he thanked me for trying to keep him warm. He laid his head back on my shoulder and went to sleep.”
“About a half hour later I had a funny feeling come over me,” McCrane said, “and I tried to wake him up only to find that he was dead. I told the rest of the fellows and we decided to hold him a little longer before we buried him.” Twenty minutes later, McCrane said they had their first burial at sea. “We all said the Lord’s prayer as he was lowered over the side.” More burials would follow that evening as delirious sailors, thinking they saw land, houses, and loved ones, slowly succumbed. One man swam away from the raft and disappeared forever into the night.9
As the Tabberer approached one exhausted man, treading water but unable to reach a life raft, an enormous shark slid down a wave within six feet of the sailor. Men on board ship opened fire with their rifles and the shark retreated. Robert Surdam, who had given up a career in commercial banking in Albany, New York, to become the ship’s executive officer, fearlessly jumped over the side without a life jacket to save the sailor. He fastened a line around the man, now unconscious, and hauled him on board the ship, where he was revived.10
The Tabberer saved fifty-five men, forty-one from the Hull and fourteen from the Spence. The Swearer rescued nine men and the Robert F. Keller picked up another thirteen. The rest of the American sailors would remain at the bottom of the sea. The ships proceeded to Ulithi, arriving on Christmas Day, with little to celebrate except that—thanks to the courage, determination, and seamanship of these valiant DE sailors along with men from several other American ships—ninety-eight men would live to see another Christmas.
For seventeen-year-old Henry Eugene Davis, that Hayward, California, boy who had dropped out of school in the tenth grade to join the Navy, the typhoon was an experience he will never forget. Davis and his ship, the Bangust, were veterans of battling more than just the weather. About six months before the typhoon, the ship was on patrol about seventy miles northeast of the Marshall Islands when a radar contact was made of an unidentified surface object in what would be the first enemy action for the eight-month-old destroyer escort.
A little before midnight on 10 June 1944, radar picked up an unidentified object some twelve miles away. Rushing to battle stations, sailors readied weapons as the Bangust headed toward the suspicious object. Davis’ battle station was on the gun rangefinder, “the highest and most visible target on the ship.” The destroyer escort fired a star shell spread to illuminate the object, thought to be either a small fishing boat or enemy submarine. The Bangust also sent Morse code via underwater sonar to the vessel requesting identification. Instead the vessel dove, confirming to the Americans that they had encountered a Japanese submarine. “We made three hedgehog runs, but they were not successful,” Davis said, adding that the submarine’s captain was very skillful at taking evasive maneuvers to avoid being hit. “On the fourth run, we nailed him with the hedgehog.” The submarine, later identified as RO-42, exploded right beneath the destroyer escort, violently rocking the Bangust and jettisoning various pieces of equipment into the air.
“It shook the hell out of the ship,” Davis recalled. “At first we thought we had been torpedoed and we immediately called for damage-control reports. We had split a seam on the underpart of the ship from the force of the explosion.” Five subsequent explosions followed. The strong odor of diesel oil was detected and air bubbles and pieces of cork floated to the surface. At dawn an oil slick two miles long and half mile wide was discovered. Throughout the morning, oil continued bubbling to the surface until it covered an area ten miles in diameter.
Then the sharks showed up—at least two dozen of them circling the area where the explosion had occurred. For Lt. Leonard Andrews, the sharks came a little too close for comfort the morning after the attack. As he leaned over the side of the ship to get a better look at the debris in the water, a gust of wind blew off his hat, which landed on the water’s surface. But Andrews could forget about retrieving it. “It was gobbled up almost instantly when it hit the water,” Davis said, adding that the officer was more than a bit irritated since he had been working at getting the shiny gold braids on his new cap to look a little more “salty.”11
Although destroyer escorts originally were designed to escort convoys and fight Nazi U-boats on the North Atlantic, they also would end up battling the Japanese submarines as they plied the waters of the Pacific Ocean. In fact DEs, sometimes assisted by other American warships, were responsible for sinking some twenty-six Japanese submarines in the Pacific as well as one found lurking in the spring of 1943 in the mid-Atlantic southwest of the Azores.
The destroyer escort credited with the most “kills” of Japanese submarines was the USS England, which sunk six Japanese boats in just twelve days in May 1944, a feat unparalleled in American naval history. On the evening of 17 May 1944, a group of destroyer escorts, the USS England, George, and Raby, was on routine patrol between the Marianas and the Japanese-held Truk when the England received a radio message from Admiral Halsey that a Japanese submarine was spotted heading south from Truk toward the Solomons. The destroyer escorts were dispatched to investigate the submarine, suspected of carrying supplies to Buin on the island of Bougainville, still in Japanese control. But their search was about to turn up more than one submarine.
The American vessels steamed northwest, making sonar sweeps along the way. At first they didn’t find anything. The next day the England picked up a sonar contact 100 feet deep south of Bougainville, quickly moving in for the kill. After several hedgehog runs at the submarine, whose captain took the boat down to 324 feet to avoid the missiles, they hit pay dirt. A violent underwater explosion occurred, lifting the England clear out of the water—an explosion so severe that sailors on board were sure they had been torpedoed. But within a short time, large amounts of oil, debris, bags of rice, broken furniture, cork, and even a mattress bubbled to the surface, confirming that the submarine had sunk. Sharks quickly arrived to survey the area for human remains.
This was the beginning of what would be twelve days of high drama in which the England, not yet six months old, would sink five more submarines stationed as part of a Japanese scouting line to alert them of any American advancement toward the Marianas, Palau, or the Philippines. Even if the submarines were sunk, the Japanese reasoned, they should have enough time to get a message to Tokyo of the advancing forces. But the USS England, along with the George, Raby and, later, Spangler, was about to unravel the Japanese plan.
When all was finally ended, six Japanese submarines lay at the bottom of the ocean, Tokyo’s scouting line had been eliminated, and American forces were free to move ahead to the Marianas, Saipan, Tinian, and Guam with Japan sending its forces to the island of Palau, where they assumed incorrectly that the Americans were heading.
John A. Williamson, the executive officer on board the England, who also served as an instructor at the antisubmarine school in Miami, said that the efforts of the George, Raby, and Spangler were “instrumental in gaining contact and tracking submarines.” While those destroyer escorts were not credited with firing any of the hedgehogs that resulted in the sinking of the Japanese submarines, according to the executive officer, they did track them, provide vital information to the England, and even made some runs on the boats. Williamson, whose ship received a presidential citation, believes the George and Raby should receive some type of award because they were with his ship the entire time of the six sinkings. Sailors on board the other ships contended that sinking the six boats was the result of a “combined effort” and that all four destroyer escorts should have received presidential recognition.12
While the England and the other destroyer escorts scored a major victory that would forever be recorded in the annals of American naval history, there were still plenty of Japanese submarines stalking American vessels in the Pacific, and it would not be long until another destroyer escort would be embroiled in combat with one of the largest of them.
Robert Currie, a twenty year old from Newtonville, Massachusetts, who had joined the Navy in 1942 would find himself on board a destroyer escort, the USS Riddle, about to come face to face with a so-called I-boat, one of Japan’s large submarines, constructed based on Germany’s U-boat design. Currie, who wanted to be a pilot, arrived at the federal building in Boston to join the Army Air Force but was turned down because he only was a high school graduate. So he flipped a coin to see whether he would try to enlist in the Marine Corps or the Navy. Heads, it was the Navy, and he was off to boot camp in Newport, Rhode Island. Rushed through training because of America’s desperate need for sailors, he was selected to go to quartermaster school followed by officers’ training school. But that isn’t what Currie had in mind. “I wanted to go to sea,” he recalled, and he was afraid that if he didn’t get out to sea soon, the war would end and he would never see any action.
After a brief teaching duty at Sampson, the young quartermaster eventually got his sea duty on board the Riddle, where he finally would see the action for which he had been yearning since boot camp. Independence Day 1944 would be that day. The Riddle and the destroyer USS David W. Taylor were screening a group of six oil tankers and an escort carrier in the vicinity of the Marianas. A tropical breeze helped make this beautiful Fourth of July even better. Seas were calm and the sun was shining. All seemed right with the world until Currie heard the words, “Contact. Bearing 250 degrees, range 1,900 yards!” Sonar had picked up something metallic deep in the water. Battle station alarms sounded as the Riddle swung around to investigate.
“I was on the bridge and heard the ping,” Currie said, certain they had found a submarine. “The convoy took an emergency sharp turn to the left and we started making some runs on it [the submarine].” Despite firing depth charges and hedgehogs, all was quiet beneath the water—the submarine was obviously taking evasive actions to avoid being hit. The USS David W. Taylor joined the attack. “They dropped some depth charges and there was a big explosion,” Currie recalled. Oil and debris floating to the surface. Both vessels were credited with the “kill.”13
While destroyer escorts continued to rack up a respectable number of submarine “kills” over the course of the war in the Pacific, vengeance was to be enacted by Japan. On a rainy evening in October 1944, the USS Eversole was about to meet its match in the Leyte Gulf area, about three weeks after another destroyer escort, the six-month-old USS Shelton, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine, RO-41, off Morotai. Although sailors on board the Shelton rushed to save the injured ship by throwing heavy equipment overboard in an effort to stay afloat, it was too heavily damaged by the torpedo, which hit the fantail and blasted away the starboard propeller. It capsized and sunk while under tow. Thirteen of the Shelton’s men died and twenty-two were injured.
Three weeks later, 28 October, was a rainy and very dark night in the waters of Leyte Gulf. “I was asleep when all of a sudden without warning I was thrown out of my bunk,” the Eversole’s Daniel R. Gallagher said. “It was pitch black and I didn’t know what happened.” With blood streaming from his forehead, the nineteen-year-old sailor stood up and tried to feel his way through the dark after-steering compartment when a second explosion knocked him off his feet. “There must have been men yelling but I don’t remember as I was in shock.” The teenager, clawing his way through the dark, found the ladder and climbed topside. “The ship was one foot from the water on the starboard side,” Gallagher said. He scrambled to the railing to jump overboard.
But Gallagher could not swim. He had no life jacket and most of his shipmates already were in the water. “I was scared and in shock,” he said. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a life jacket slid down the deck, landing right in front of his feet. “God let that happen as it saved my life.” Hastily strapping it on, he quickly dived over the side and started to make his way to a life net, bouncing in the churning waters about eighty feet away.
Stanley G. Skebe, the machinist’s mate, had just showered after finishing the eight-to-midnight watch. Skebe and shipmate Ray Jambois retired to the after crew quarters to get some sleep, but it was so hot in that compartment that Skebe picked up his clothes and life belt and went to the machine shop, where it was cooler and where shipmate Jack Neumann offered his cot to the sailor while he stood watch. Skebe lay down on the cot and fell fast asleep.
“The next thing I knew I was lying face down on the deck with my head against the hatch coaming,” Skebe said. “I don’t know how long I had been lying there, but I did hear someone say, ‘There’s a body here’ and felt several men step over me as they went out of the machine shop.” His shipmates thought he was dead. “The lights were still on forward when I finally was able to get up.”
Covered in blood, the terrified sailor strapped on his lifebelt as he watched shipmates slide down ropes into the dark ocean. He quickly followed, swam to the cork life raft, and hung on in the pouring rain as he watched his seven-month-old ship break in two and slip silently beneath the seas. It was gone in fifteen minutes.
Drenched in oil in the predawn gloom, the injured sailors clung to the life raft praying and hoping to be rescued. Suddenly they saw a light in the water and thought the ship’s whaleboat was on its way to save them. They started yelling for help until they realized it was no whaleboat. I-45, the Japanese submarine that had torpedoed their ship, had surfaced and Japanese sailors were on deck firing machine guns at the American sailors struggling to stay afloat in the water. They strafed the men with 20-mm gunfire for some twenty minutes, although the darkness and rain kept them from hitting the American sailors. Suddenly a tremendous underwater explosion, possibly a Japanese antipersonnel bomb deposited on the ocean floor, accomplished what the Japanese gunfire had failed to do.
“My communications officer was instantly killed about five feet from me,” Capt. George Marix of the Eversole wrote. “I was seized with very bad cramps and lost all control of my bowels.” The skipper, who had been the last to leave the sinking ship after giving an injured sailor his life jacket, said that unconscious men started to drift from the floater net and he and his officers swam them back to the net, placing them on board. He estimates thirty men died from the underwater blast.
When the destroyer escorts Richard S. Bull and Whitehurst showed up, the submarine quickly submerged. The Whitehurst tracked the boat and, after getting a strong sonar contact, fired hedgehogs into the ocean. A thunderous underwater explosion followed, signaling that the submarine had succumbed. As daylight dawned, debris from the Japanese boat confirmed the “kill.” Eighty Eversole sailors died and 136 were rescued, all injured and struggling in the water for a harrowing two hours until help arrived.14
Six months later the Japanese would exact their revenge on the USS England, which had set a record sinking six Japanese submarines the previous May. While patrolling near Kerama Retto off the southwestern coast of Okinawa in May 1945, the destroyer escort was attacked by three kamikazes, one crashing into the England’s bridge, instantly killing sailors in the CIC and engulfing the ship in flames that incinerated the wardroom, captain’s cabin, ship’s office, and pilothouse. Some thirty-seven sailors died and twenty-five were injured, but the men in the ship’s damage control, spraying water on the inferno as well as dousing those of their fellow shipmates whose clothes were on fire, extinguished the flames and managed to keep the vessel afloat. The England would survive and was towed into Leyte for temporary repairs, but it would never again see battle.15
Submarines, kamikazes, and stormy weather were not the only worries for the American fleet. The Japanese were trying out a new weapon called a kaiten, a one-man human torpedo capable of delivering a powerful 3,400-pound bomb directly into the underbelly of a warship. Ranging from 48 to 55 feet in length, the midget submarines, with their expendable operators, could travel at speeds from twelve to thirty knots and had a short periscope so the sailor could locate his target. In November 1944 a kaiten was successful at sinking an 11,000-ton American oil tanker, the USS Mississinewa, and soon one would take aim at the destroyer escort USS Underhill.
Richard Graves, a twenty-five-year-old Chico, California, native was an ensign on board the destroyer escort USS Rall that November in 1944. The Rall, commissioned seven months earlier, had provided escort service to oil tankers during the assault of Leyte Gulf and was now anchored along with several other warships in the relatively safe Ulithi Harbor awaiting repairs and orders for the next engagement. They would not wait long—for that engagement, it seems, would be coming directly to the harbor and the American vessels anchored there.
Graves grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and did a lot of sailing on his brother’s sailboat during his younger years. “I loved the Navy and loved sailing,” he said, which is why he selected that branch of service, although he acknowledged that the unattractiveness of trench warfare played a role in his decision, just as it had for many teenagers enlisting in the sea services. On the afternoon of 19 November, Graves and some of his buddies were off duty from patrolling the harbor entrance and were enjoying a delightful time swimming and sunning themselves in the lagoon, protected by moveable submarine net gates and ship lookouts. Beating down on their skin, the warm sunlight felt good, giving the men a welcome reprieve from the rigors of battle. But the reprieve would soon come to an end.
A bit “fuzzy headed” the next morning, Graves and his shipmates were jarred awake at dawn when the captain called everyone to battle stations. It seems that Japanese midget submarines had managed to sneak into the harbor and one crashed into the USS Mississinewa, an American oiler anchored there. Sailors on board the tanker were going about their normal morning chores and had no idea that their ship, supposedly safely moored inside a heavily protected harbor, was about to become a flaming inferno. Its tanks had been filled to capacity with 404,000 gallons of aviation gas, 9,000 barrels of diesel oil, and 90,000 barrels of fuel oil. It was a perfect target, a virtual powder keg, for a human torpedo. The ship exploded in a cauldron of flames.
“It was a terrible blast, and I had no idea what was going on,” Graves said. “As soon as the anchor cleared the bottom we were underway” in search of the midget submarine. But it was too late—the damage already was done. The Mississinewa was burning uncontrollably, and as the flames spread, more explosions followed as thousands of gallons of fuel ignited. Flames reached one hundred feet into the sky and, within three hours, the six-month-old vessel turned over and sunk, reported to be the first victim of the deadly new kaiten weapon. Fifty sailors, including three officers, died in the explosion.
The destroyer escorts USS Halloran and Weaver joined the Rall and two destroyers as they searched the harbor for other submarines that might have snuck through the net. Lookouts on board the Rall spotted a swirl in the water near the cruiser USS Mobile and dropped three depth charges, as did the other DEs. An underwater explosion followed.
“We came about and saw the swirl in the water,” said William Shumate, a nineteen-year-old fire controlman on board the Rall. “We dropped the depth charges and two men were blown to the surface.” They tried to retrieve the bodies of the two Japanese sailors blown out of the kaiten, but were unsuccessful. Shumate said the water’s surface was blue and pink in color as hundreds of dead fish floated near where the depth charge had exploded.16
Although kaitens were certainly a deadly weapon, the Japanese were not able to sink too many American warships with these human torpedoes, an underwater version of a kamikaze. But for the twenty-one-month-old destroyer escort, the USS Underhill, its first contact with one of these suicide submarines, unfortunately, would be its last. Steaming about 150 miles northeast of Luzon, the DE, along with several other escort vessels, was escorting seven landing ships and a merchant ship from Okinawa bound for Leyte. The day was hot and the sea was a glassy calm on that 24 July afternoon as the Underhill led a convoy of ships filled with battle-weary American soldiers of the 96th Division. Sailors on board the destroyer escort had spotted a Japanese airplane in the distance earlier that morning, but the aircraft never got within firing range. The snooper plane was suspected of gathering information on American ship movements and sending that information to Japanese submarines prowling the area.
Suddenly sonar picked up a metallic object in the water, wrote James W. Gannon, the ship’s machinist’s mate. The captain swung the Underhill around to investigate. “As we drew nearer he [the antisubmarine officer] first reported it as moss, and later as it got nearer he reported that it had prongs or horns,” Gannon recalled. Closing in, it was identified as a mine floating about twenty-five yards away, directly in the path of the convoy. As the Underhill sailors fired machine guns to explode the mine, sonar picked up another contact. But this new contact was no mine—it was moving. “Periscope on the starboard side,” a lookout shouted. At least two and possibly as many as seven kaitens, accompanied by their “mother” submarine, thought to be I–53, were heading on a direct collision course with the convoy of American ships.
“Following the noon meal I was standing on the fantail talking with a group of shipmates when battle stations were called,” noted Underhill electrician’s mate Rodger J. Crum, who had finished watch at noon before taking lunch. Rushing to his battle station in the number one engine room, Crum put on his sound powered phones. Then he heard a command from the captain that always generated an unsettling anxiety on board a ship: Stand by to ram. Unable to see what was going on topside, some sailors simply prayed while others braced themselves and just waited. Placing his back against a stantion in front of the switchboard, Crum held on to the wooden bar that ran the length of the switchboard.
Donald Kruse, the eighteen-year-old Troy, New York, kid who, thirty-one months earlier, had his bags packed and ready to leave for Navy boot camp when the mailman delivered his Army draft notice, was stationed in the engine room along with Crum, who shouted, “Krusey, stand by for ram!” The Underhill successfully had depth charged one of the suicide submarines, confirmed by the dark, oily debris that bubbled to the surface. Now it was increasing its speed and preparing to ram the other Japanese submarines before they could collide with the convoy.
It was a surreal period for the sailors belowdecks, when time appeared to stand still. Then it happened—a terrible crash and explosion. The ship went dark. “Next thing I knew I was bouncing around the engine room,” Kruse said. “One hit and then about forty seconds later the second hit—one on the starboard side beneath the bridge and the other between the bridge and the stack on the port side. Everything started to break loose.” Some believe the Underhill hit the larger mother submarine with its bow, and then one of the kaitens crashed with its explosive head directly into the port side of the DE. Witnesses feel there were at least two kaitens and these were what collided with the Underhill. Japanese authorities insist only one kaiten was launched from I-53 that day—the one they say sunk the Underhill. Regardless of the type or number of submarines, a huge explosion followed, with orange flames reaching into the clear blue skies as heavy black smoke poured out of the mortally wounded ship.
A dazed and bloody Kruse, suffering head and shoulder injuries, rushed topside, but when he started to walk forward, he was shocked to find half of his ship was gone. The Underhill had split in two and the ship had started to sink. Machinist’s Mate Crum was still in the engine room, which was filling with steam, smoke, and water. He tried to open the forward port escape hatch but it wouldn’t budge. He and the other men were able to climb out through the starboard aft hatch.
“When I walked onto the open deck I was startled to see the bow of a ship in a horizontal position a hundred or so yards away,” Crum wrote. “Then I looked forward and realized that it was the bow of our ship.” Bodies of dead and dying shipmates were scattered across the deck, many covered with oil and other debris from the wounded ship, some badly burned from the explosion. Steel rubble was strewn about the deck. Joseph H. Timberlake, the ship’s engineering officer, was holding on to the handrail of the raised platform near the throttle board when the explosion catapulted him into the air. As he fell to the deck, a second explosion threw him into a mass of twisted pipes and plates, where he held on as the floor plates dropped to the lower level. He lived, along with 116 crew members who were rescued, but 113 men, including forty-eight-year-old Capt. Robert M. Newcomb and 9 of the ship’s 14 officers, perished.17
Lt. Nathaniel G. Benchley was skipper of PC-1251, one of the patrol crafts in the convoy with the Underhill, and witnessed the explosion and sinking of the destroyer escort. “On my ship, the PC-1251, most of the crew were reading their newly arrived mail, the executive officer and the communications officer were playing cribbage, and the gunnery officer was making peanut-butter fudge,” Benchley wrote, adding that he remembered the Underhill as a “well run . . . happy ship.” Having just arrived from duty in the Atlantic, the Underhill, Benchley noted, had run with “much faster company” battling Hitler’s U-boats and it was clear to him that the destroyer escort would be running a very efficient screen for the convoy: “The contagion of efficiency spread from the Underhill to the other ships, and we felt that we could take on any Japanese who might be so rash as to try to intercept us.” That theory was about to be tested.
The sun was extremely hot and the ship railing burned to the touch. Benchley turned over command to the officer on the deck, retiring to the cooler ward room, where he started a game of cribbage with Howard Tampke, a blond gunnery officer who hailed from Texas. A short time later, a signalman entered the ward room and handed Benchley a message. The Underhill was offering ships in the convoy five gallons of ice cream each day in an order of rotation. Today was Benchley’s turn. “That’s pretty damned nice,” he said, initialing the message. A happy signalman left with the hope that he would be enjoying some cold ice cream in about a half hour. But before any could be transferred, word came from the Underhill that the ice cream would have to wait. The destroyer escort had spotted a floating mine and was trying to sink it. Benchley went topside and peered through his binoculars as the Underhill fired at the mine. Then the intercom on the bridge sputtered: “Tell the captain the DE says he’s got a sub contact. He’s leaving the mine to chase the contact.”
“Five will get you seven it’s a whale,” Tampke told the captain. “Last ship I was on, we got two whales, one certain and one probable.” Benchley agreed. “This guy’s just out of the Atlantic. He probably thinks every contact he gets is a sub,” he said, peering through the glasses at the Underhill and the white puffs of smoke as the DE launched its depth charges.
“I strained my eyes looking through the glasses, but the Underhill was beginning to shimmer in the horizon heat waves, and for a moment I lost sight of her,” Benchley said. “Then I saw a burst of smoke, and thought excitedly that she might have exploded the sub, but the smoke turned into a boil of orange flames and started to rise straight upward; it bubbled and boiled and churned in a curdling of orange and black until it got up to about ten thousand feet, and then the smoke flattened out and mushroomed dirtily into the base of the white cumulus clouds.”
“The Underhill disappeared from sight,” Benchley said, as sailors squinted into the distance in stunned silence. “That dark mushroom of smoke from the Underhill hung in the sky until the last pink streaks of afterglow were blotted out by the oncoming night.” The Underhill had accomplished its mission to protect the convoy of American ships, which safely arrived to the Philippines. The ship and half its crew, however, were entombed at the bottom of the ocean.18
Charles Esch, a seventeen-year-old Colorado Springs native who had dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade to join the Navy, was assigned as a radioman on board the USS Haas and was on board as the ship headed through the Panama Canal in December 1944 to assist with the invasion of the Philippines. As the Haas traversed the locks and entered the Pacific, the young sailor, whose father was in the infantry in World War I and now had a job as a sheet metal worker, was impressed with the calm, mirrorlike ocean. “Boy, we’re in heaven now,” Esch thought, although it would not be long before he realized that those beautiful blue waters were just as dangerous as the waters on the other side of the canal.
Two months after arriving in the Pacific, the Haas and five other destroyer escorts were escorting a convoy of troop landing ships in the middle of a rainstorm when one of the ships, a seven-month-old landing ship, LST-577, exploded and sank off the Philippines, the victim of a torpedo fired from a Japanese submarine, which had escaped detection by sonar on any of the escort ships. Although they made at least two runs on the submarine, they were unable to locate it. Five hundred Marines died in the explosion. The destroyer escort, like many others assigned to the Pacific, went on to provide shore bombardment during the invasion, clear free-floating mines from the water, and even assist in a submarine attack near Leyte Gulf, which Esch recalled resulted in an oil slick five miles long.19
Kamikazes were one of the more feared and deadly weapons used against American ships in the Pacific. Coming out of the sun without warning, these suicide planes laden with explosives and often a full fuel tank, plunged directly into a ship, exploding on contact. Americans knew that the pilots of these planes had no plans to go home and were intent on one mission only—finding an American ship and flying their plane directly into it.
For a sixteen-year-old kid from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the kamikazes were a nightmare come true. After dropping out of school and lying about his age, John Kunsak Jr., one of twelve children born to immigrant parents, was assigned to the USS Rall and was on board the ship off Okinawa when five kamikazes appeared in the bright afternoon skies, heading on a collision course for the little destroyer escort.
“I saw all five planes peel off,” said Kunsak, who was firing from his battle station on the 3-inch, .50-caliber gun. “We got three of them. A cruiser in the area shot down the fourth one.” But there was still one kamikaze left, “and he was flying directly for my gun.” Kunsak said he was about to shoot the kamikaze down when he was ordered to hold fire by his gunnery officer. It appeared that a Marine Corsair fighter was directly behind the Japanese plane attempting to shoot it down. It missed. But the kamikaze did not. “Within fifteen seconds the kamikaze hit right below my gun and dropped a 500-pound bomb that exploded on the other side,” Kunsak said. “During that time, I was shot in the leg, the arm, and I had twenty-six pieces of shrapnel in my buttocks. They thought I was dead.”
But he wasn’t. “I woke up in a pool of blood,” Kunsak recalled. Later he was transferred to a hospital ship. The kamikaze, with its 500-pound bomb slung beneath the plane, crashed into the starboard side aft as the bomb tore through the ship and exploded in the air about fifteen feet from the port side.
Ens. Richard Graves remembered the horrific aftermath. Damage to the ship was severe. Blood and bodies were everywhere. One sailor was killed instantly when a piece of shrapnel pierced his heart. A gunner’s mate, still at his duty station, had blood streaming down his face, his bones protruding from his left arm as it hung limply at his side. Nineteen-year-old Tom Cooney, who had signed up for the Navy while still attending high school in Springfield, Massachusetts, was on the number two gun and was thrown overboard by the impact. Some sailors were crushed by the plane as it crashed into the DE. Twenty-one sailors died and thirty-eight were injured. But damage control was able to keep the ship afloat and it would live to sail again.20
Kamikazes, or bogeys, as they were known among sailors, were especially deadly for those serving picket duty around Okinawa, along the so-called bogey highway. Some ninety-seven destroyers and at least fifty-one destroyer escorts were assigned this dangerous duty to screen for possible submarine attack, vital in support of amphibious operations on Okinawa. On picket duty, sailors would watch, wait, search, and pray—they did a lot of praying along the “bogey highway.” Some called this the toughest duty of the war. These ships would bear the brunt of kamikaze attacks, suicide swimmers, suicide boats, torpedoes, submarines, midget submarines, and floating mines. It wasn’t duty for the faint of heart.
Robert D. Piper, a native of Naperville, Illinois, served as assistant communications officer on board the USS O’Flaherty when the newly commissioned ship was assigned picket duty along the bogey highway. It was dangerous duty, and ships serving in that capacity frequently were badly damaged or sunk. Piper remembered Capt. Paul L. Callan’s concern over the assignment and the skipper decided he was going to do something to ensure that his men had enough firepower should the kamikazes show up.
Lt. Norm Givens had a brother who was a Marine colonel on Okinawa, Piper said, and they were able to get a message to the colonel. “We offered him a case of beer for every 50 caliber machine gun,” Piper recalled. “We were in Buckner Bay on the east side of Okinawa,” he said, when they put Givens and Piper ashore to get the machine guns. After hitchhiking through the island to find the colonel, the two men finally located him in the northern section. They had dinner and then got down to business. “We loaded the ten 50-caliber machines guns and they threw in two .30s,” Piper recalled. They then proceeded to a signal tower to send a message to the O’Flaherty: “Have guns . . . send beer.” The whaleboat showed up with the beer and the exchange was made.
“They mounted them [the machine guns], five on each side, starboard and port, right along the edge of the deck,” Piper recalled. “The two .30s were mounted on the bridge.” But the new guns would not stay mounted for long. Within a short time the O’Flaherty was back with its carrier group and, before too long, came alongside the flagship carrier with the admiral on board. Once he got a look at the machine guns mounted on the little DE, he called over an order to “deep six all unauthorized ordnances” and the sailors were forced to drop the machine guns over the side. The machine guns were gone and so was their beer. “We were all kind of bummed,” Piper said.21
John P. Cosgrove and his ship, the USS Gendreau, spent twenty continuous, anxiety-filled days on picket duty, going to battle stations sixty-seven different times. Growing up in Pittston, Pennsylvania, where his father sold Model T Fords, young Cosgrove was working in Washington, D.C., when he heard FDR deliver his “Day of Infamy” speech. He enlisted in the Navy immediately. Having worked at the Associated Press, Cosgrove was assigned to the Navy’s office of censorship, a disappointment for the Pennsylvania native, who really wanted to be at sea. “I felt like I was masquerading as a sailor,” Cosgrove said of the “plush assignment” in the censorship office. Eventually he got his wish and went off to boot camp after having worked in a clerical capacity in Navy for almost two years. Assigned as a yeoman on board the USS Gendreau, he stepped on board on St. Patrick’s Day and was happily out to sea.
After escorting convoys between Hawaii and the Marshall Islands, the Gendreau returned to Oahu as part of the welcoming party for President Roosevelt, who arrived on board the USS Baltimore in July 1944 to participate in a military conference with Adm. Chester Nimitz and Gen. Douglas MacArthur. John Cosgrove will never forget that day. Most of the crew of his ship were looking forward to some liberty once they arrived in Pearl Harbor. Then came the startling announcement over the Gendreau’s public address system: “This is the captain speaking, and I repeat . . . there will be no liberty until after the Roosevelt visit.” Cosgrove recalled thinking, “What in God’s name is Mrs. Roosevelt doing out here? Delaying our longed-for liberty, that’s what she was doing.” He, like many of his shipmates, thought the globe-trotting first lady was making a visit to their neck of the woods.
But they quickly learned that the “Roosevelt” visiting was, in fact, Franklin, not Eleanor. Now the crew had its work cut out for them, cleaning the ship, getting into whites, and scores of others things that the crew must do before an inspection, especially one by the commander in chief. “We were proud of our location,” Cosgrove said. “Our little destroyer escort docked directly across from the berth assigned to the USS Baltimore, soon to arrive carrying the presidential party.” The crew was thrilled with their ring-side view of the president—that is until two water barges came alongside, were secured, and spoiled the DE’s view of the president’s ship. The Gendreau’s skipper requested and was granted a slight change of location so they could have a better view of the Baltimore.
FDR surveyed the harbor and spotted the little destroyer escort, according to the story circulated in DE circles for years. The president’s sweep became fixed and his eyes quizzical. After a studied silence, he asked, “What is that vessel over there?” An aide told him it was a destroyer escort, to which the president smiled and reportedly replied that it was the first DE he had seen that looked like two water barges—the best camouflage job he had ever seen. “The president did recognize our DE,” Cosgrove was convinced—certainly since his son, FDR Jr., was serving as the skipper on board one.22
Later in 1945, following several months of routine escort duty (except the day the Gendreau collided with the escort carrier USS Breton while refueling on heavy seas), the destroyer escort was assigned to the southeast coast of Okinawa protecting amphibious ships that were unloading troops for the assault. That’s when the first kamikaze arrived.
“I was asleep in my bunk when the first attack occurred,” Cosgrove said. It was Easter eve as the kamikaze came in at bridge height, headed right for the ship. “It was so close you could see the pilot,” said Yeoman John A. Virum, a Minneapolis, Minnesota, native who had celebrated his eighteenth birthday just two days earlier. From his battle station on the 20-mm antiaircraft gun, the Japanese pilot looking very young, he remembered: “They were kids just like us.” The Gendreau and a host of landing ships started firing at the plane, shearing off its wing. It crashed in the water about fifty yards from Gendreau on the starboard side. But the kamikazes were not yet finished with the little destroyer escort. More suicide planes would be taking aim at Cosgrove’s ship. In fact, the Gendreau would have five more kamikaze assaults in the next two months.
As dawn broke on April Fool’s Day, Gendreau began its shore bombardment of Okinawa in support of American landing forces. Later, it was stationed along the dreaded and deadly picket line. One kamikaze made a strafing run from port to starboard, but his aim “reminded us of a blind man at a turkey shoot,” Cosgrove said. The gunners fired but were unable to hit the aircraft, which circled the ship and then made a suicide run right through the gunfire toward the ship. “This time we really filled him with lead, but he kept coming; with a quick change in speed and course we outmaneuvered him, but his wheels barely missed the antenna aft of the stack,” Cosgrove said. Virum, who slept all night in the gun tub, said he fired his 20-mm gun at the plane before it exploded in flames and crashed into the ocean twenty yards on their port beam. “We wiped the sweat from our brows and secured from battle stations,” Cosgrove said.
But the Gendreau’s troubles were not yet over. More suicide bombers soon would have the little ship in their sights. One evening, a little after sunset, a kamikaze showed up. Although guns on the ship were blazing, the plane just kept coming, dodging bullets as it barreled on a collision course with the Gendreau. The skipper maneuvered the ship and the gunners kept firing, finally scoring a fatal strike—but not before the kamikaze had released a torpedo that exploded in the water. The plane burst into flames and crashed five hundred yards astern of the ship. The ship was credited with three more kamikaze “kills” while serving picket duty.
The Gendreau’s good fortune was about to run out. It was a clear and sunny day as the destroyer escort was escorting landing ships along the western and southern tip of Okinawa. “I was standing on the poop deck waiting for the breakfast chow line,” Cosgrove said. “Suddenly I heard a swoosh.” One of the Japanese shore batteries opened up on the ship with a direct hit in the number one fireroom, ripping open a ten-foot-square hole in the ship. Three other shells landed astern of the vessel. No one was certain what had happened. Some thought the ship had hit a mine while others thought one of the ship’s boilers had exploded.
Battle stations alarms sounded but the circuits of the ship were shorted out so all the sailors heard was a dull hum over the PA. Word was passed frantically over the phones for everyone to go to battle stations—the ship was under attack. Rushing to battle stations, Cosgrove said, he saw steam and a choking, acrid odor poured out of the fireroom, filling the passageways and officers quarters, making breathing difficult. Two sailors, one of whom had been on board only a week, were lying dead covered in the oil and water of the now-flooded fireroom. Two other sailors were seriously wounded.
As the American destroyer pounded the beach with gunfire, the Gendreau —dead in the water—drifted dangerously toward shore and the Japanese gunfire. The guns on the destroyer became too hot to continue the shore bombardment, leaving the wounded destroyer escort on its own. No matter, for the Gendreau was able to take care of itself. Damage crews shored up the bulkheads and secured the damaged fireroom, getting the ship under way and away from shore. The DE left under its own power for repairs at Kerama Retto, a nearby American-held island southwest of Okinawa used as a staging area for the assault.
Picket duty, or ping line duty, as some sailors called it, consisted of sailing in a figure-eight pattern in the assigned area, keeping a sharp eye out for enemy planes or submarines. Robert D. Young, who had joined the Navy after graduating high school in Thomaston, Maine, was assigned to the USS Sederstrom, ordered to take up its place on the ping line off Okinawa in April 1945. “I most certainly would have preferred to continue operations with the carriers, but we had no choice but to do as ordered,” Young said, well aware of the danger involved in this assignment. Young said that in making the circle eight, the ships on the picket line would always turn seaward so their sonar would scan away from the land. “If we turned toward land and pinged seaward, our sonar would echo off our own wake,” he recalled.
As the sun set on 22 April, ship radar picked up eight bogeys about thirty-five miles away, closing fast on the Sederstrom. As the eight twin-engine bombers raced toward the destroyer escort, four split off and headed north and the other four flew in a direct collision course with the ship. Gunners on board the ship opened fire as the four planes, one of which was a kamikaze, as they emerged from the clouds.
Young was stationed in the radio room and could not see the action from his windowless compartment. But he knew the ship was under attack. Gunners fired at the planes as they made a run for the ship. Young is convinced they splashed three of the enemy planes, although the ship is officially credited with one. The planes retreated from the intense gunfire and disappeared from radar until one of them returned, making a suicide run on the ship. As the plane circled stern to port, it headed right for the Sederstrom’s bridge. “It was so close that the captain was shooting at it with his pistol,” Young said. Gunners fired on it with a barrage of antiaircraft fire until the plane rolled over and crashed into the water, only twenty feet from the ship.
On fire with heavy smoke pouring out, the mortally wounded suicide plane made its final run on the ship and showered the deck with gasoline and pieces of metal as it passed over the DE, crashing into the water. Oren McDermitt, the ship’s barber and loader on the 20-mm gun, was discovered to be missing. He had dived overboard to avoid getting hit by the gasoline and metal pieces. Young said McDermitt was probably the “smartest man topside,” although he could have been sucked into the ship’s screws and chopped to pieces. “When we secured from general quarters,” Young recalled, “I went below and noticed McDermitt sitting on a locker, looking like a drowned rat.”23
Earlier in February, as Americans and Japanese were in a bloody battle to seize control of the island of Iowa Jima, the USS Silverstein was on its way to provide replenishment for the fast attack carriers, already strafing the island with gunfire. Irving Mesher was a New York City boy who had learned to play the trumpet while he was in high school. Knowing he soon would be drafted, the twenty year old signed up for the Navy and, because of his musical talent and keen hearing, was assigned as a soundman on board the Silverstein. He, like many DE sailors, secretly maintained a diary while at sea.
“Today was a rather big day for the Silverstein,” Mesher wrote on 16 February 1945 as the Iowa Jima assault was under way. “We were detached all alone from our task unit to investigate a small craft 7 miles away. When we arrived at the craft we sent our motor whale boat and our boarding crew to investigate.” Mesher said they found a Japanese wooden troop barge with six emaciated soldiers on board. “The Japs looked like living skeletons,” he wrote. The Americans retrieved some Japanese army manuals and other material. They took the prisoners on board the whaleboat and then sunk the barge with gunfire and eight depth charges.
The six Japanese soldiers were conducting interisland transport of soldiers when they ran into a typhoon, according to Radioman William Harney, who also maintained a war diary. The storm wrecked their boat and left them adrift for twenty days living on rice and shrimp. “They were nothing but skin and bones. . . . There wasn’t one of them that was taller than my armpit,” Harney wrote. Hauled on board the Silverstein, the Japanese prisoners were given soup and cigarettes. At first they were blindfolded so they could slowly get used to the sun. “The Japs thought that the blindfolds meant that it was all over for them and got down on their knees to be shot,” wrote Harney. “They couldn’t get over it when they saw they weren’t going to die. All grins and happy. One of them wanted to join the American army.”24
The public has long identified Iwo Jima with the famous flag-raising by the Marines on Mount Suribachi. But the Marines, some 110,000 of them, needed the Navy to get there, transported to the volcanic island in what was one of the largest amphibious operations in the Pacific. There was plenty of ferocious fighting as the operation proceeded, and nine destroyer escorts played a pivotal role in the historic capture. As the assault continued, the dreaded kamikazes showed up, taking aim at the aircraft carrier, the USS Saratoga, and smashing into its flight deck, killing 110 sailors and wounding an additional 180. The escort carrier Bismarck Sea, commissioned nine months earlier and having earned battle stars for its service at the Leyte Gulf and Lingayen Gulf landings, was next in the kamikazes’ sights.25
Edward M. Docalovich, radioman on board the destroyer escort USS Edmonds, was on duty as daylight faded on 21 February 1945 off Iowa Jima. “I was the supervisor in the radio room and we were on the sound-powered phones,” said the Carbondale, Pennsylvania, native, whose father worked in the coal mines. The evening was calm and the teenager was thinking about the nineteenth birthday he would celebrate the next day. Suddenly the battle station alarm sounded. “CIC called the bridge and told us we had a bogey flying low,” he said. The carrier Saratoga, four miles away, already had been hit, and the captain thought the planes, rather than being kamikazes, were likely American aircraft looking for a nest. Radar did not detect an IFF, which was an electronic signature identifying the aircraft as friend or foe.
One of Docalovich’s shipmates, an African American sailor named Jim, was the captain’s cook on board the segregated ship. He rushed to his battle station on board the 40-mm gun once the alarm sounded. Docalovich, with his sound phones on, heard the conversation between Jim and the ship’s skipper as the airplane came low and fast out of the early evening sky. “Captain, request permission to open fire, that’s a Japanese airplane,”Jim said. “I’ve heard too many of those engines . . . that’s a Japanese plane.” Docalovich said the captain, still believing it was a friendly aircraft, refused the order to fire. “It flew right over the Edmonds . . . it wasn’t looking for us,” Docalovich said. “It was so low that the guys on the weather deck said the air wash from the plane whipped up their dungarees. . . . That’s how low it was.”
But it was no American plane, as the Bismarck Sea was about to discover. “That suicide plane hit the Bismarck Sea,” Docalovich said. Actually, two kamikazes crashed into the carrier, igniting the ship’s torpedoes when they hit. An explosion followed with flames reaching one hundred feet into the night sky. It capsized and sank within ninety minutes. Docalovich recalled that neither Jim nor anyone on board his ship ever spoke openly of the incident, but he remembered the captain stayed out of sight and alone in his stateroom for more than a week. “It was sad,” Docalovich said.
Ellsworth Kendig was the ship’s twenty-three-year-old assistant gunnery officer, whose father sold life insurance in Detroit, Michigan. He recalled that the ship’s captain was not too well versed in airplane identification, which may have accounted for his belief that it was a friendly aircraft rather than a Japanese suicide plane. But he also said that it is possible that another factor played a role in the skipper’s decision not to fire. “The plane was in between us and the destroyer,” Kendig said, and if the DE had fired on the plane, the shells might have hit the American destroyer.
The Edmonds, along with the USS Melvin R. Nawman, which had been damaged but survived Typhoon Cobra, then went about the task of picking up survivors. A number of enlisted men and officers from the Edmonds donned life jackets and jumped into the water to rescue sailors struggling in seas strewn with debris and the corpses of American sailors.
“We spent hours that night rescuing survivors,” Kendig said. “It’s amazing the Japanese were not over there with their submarines. . . . We had our searchlights on trying to pick up guys in the water.” Kendig recalled one shipmate, John Brown, the assistant engineering officer, who was a former world-class swimmer at Princeton University. “We tied a rope around his waist and he dove in to rescue men,” Kendig said. “We picked up the captain and the doctor, who turned our ward room into an operating room.” The ship’s dining table became an operating table and the doctor worked all night to save as many men as possible. Many would not live to see dawn.
Some 347 men died in the blast, but more than 375 were rescued. Four more American ships—an escort carrier, two landing ships, and a cargo ship— also were struck by kamikazes that day, making it one of the worst days for the Navy during Iwo Jima.26
But the suicide planes, or “divine wind,” as they were known in Japan, still had plenty of fight left in them. In fact, the month of May 1945 was a particularly bloody thirty days for U.S. destroyer escorts. Seven were attacked and damaged by kamikazes during that period, all in the Okinawa area. The USS England and USS Oberrender both were damaged on the same day by kamikazes, which crashed directly into the vessels. The USS Bright, John C. Butler, O’Neill, William C. Cole, and Halloran all were targeted and attacked by the Japanese divine wind.
Warm and gentle breezes were blowing on Mother’s Day 1945, but the day would turn out to be a far cry from the previous Mother’s Days Charles R. Cox had celebrated in the small coal-mining town of Shamokin, Pennsylvania. Cox dropped out of Coal Township High School in the eleventh grade to join the Navy, and after six weeks of boot camp at Sampson, he was on board the USS Bright and on his way escorting a troop ship to Pearl Harbor. After escorting another convoy to Okinawa, the Bright would take up picket duty, keeping a sharp eye out for enemy planes or submarines trying to break through the picket line off Okinawa.
Most of Mother’s Day was pretty uneventful for Cox and his shipmates. As the sun began to set and the gentle evening winds picked up, however, radar detected an airplane that then quickly disappeared behind Tonachi Jima, a nearby island. Within three minutes, the CIC reported that there was a friendly airplane in the area, with a strong IFF signature. But that was not the only plane in the sky. A second bogey, with a weak IFF signal, appeared about eight miles away and started flying directly for the Bright. The captain sounded the battle station alarm.
Cox rushed to his battle station on the 20-mm gun as the bogey, now identified as a kamikaze, dropped out of the sky and flew about three hundred feet above the water on a direct collision course with the destroyer escort. “As that plane came in, all guns on the port side fired,” Cox said. “I only got to fire one magazine and the plane hit us.” Cox said that his fellow gunner’s mate, Robert F. Thomas, was able to score a direct hit on the plane’s engine and left wing.
As Thomas continued to fire, his gun suddenly locked up. He stayed at his battle station even though the plane continued flying directly toward him. At about 750 yards from the ship, the plane burst into flames, its port wing falling into the water. The rest of the plane crashed into the Bright’s port depth-charge racks, its 500-pound bomb exploding on impact.
The Bright’s rudder jammed hard left and the ship lost steering. The after engine room was completely demolished, both port and starboard depth-charge racks were damaged and inoperative, and smoke-screen generators were blown off. The main deck aft buckled and water poured into the ship, which was now circling aimlessly in the water. Within minutes of the attack, another kamikaze appeared and gunners from the USS Barr as well as those still at their battle stations on board the Bright fired at the suicide plane, scoring direct hits. The plane crashed into the water. Miraculously, only two sailors were injured on board the Bright. Both men—Peter D. Vercolio from Ottawa, Illinois, and Harold E. Crane Jr. of Elizabeth, New Jersey—were rescued from the burning after-steering compartment and survived.27
Over the course of the Pacific war, the need arose for light transport ships with a relatively shallow draft with the capacity to move Army and Marine troops to the various Pacific islands. Old World War I four-piper destroyers were transformed into high-speed transport ships. In addition some 103 destroyer escorts also were converted to haul troops and underwater demolition teams—predecessors of the Navy Seals—throughout the Pacific island–hopping campaign.
Another deck was added to the DEs, along with troop berthing and eating areas. A set of large gravity davits or cranes were installed on either side, from which from 36-foot assault landing craft could be launched. In addition to troops, the converted DEs could move supplies, light trucks, and jeeps to where they were needed.
The USS Blessman was just such a ship. Originally commissioned in the Hingham Shipyard in September 1943, the destroyer escort provided escort to convoys in the North Atlantic and participated in the Normandy invasion. As action shifted to the Pacific and the need increased to move large numbers of troops into the western theater, the ship was redesignated a high-speed transport ship ten months after it went into service and was on its way through the Panama Canal to Pearl Harbor.
Underwater demolition teams, which played an important role during the Normandy invasion, took on even more vital importance in the Pacific war. Removing obstacles that might impede amphibious landings on the islands as well as providing preinvasion intelligence on gun embankments and layout of the beaches prior to the various island assaults, these highly trained frogmen risked hypothermia, severe cramps, and their very lives gathering reconnaissance for American forces. Wearing swim trunks, masks, and fins, the teams would be sent out in rubber boats to gather intelligence. When encountering coral reefs or other obstacles that prevented passage of their boats, they often would remove their clothes, except for underwear, and swim over the reef in order to get a better view of the area. Many were killed or wounded from shore-side gun batteries.
Edward Hinz was a quartermaster on board the Blessman. Born in Chicago, he had decided to enlist in the Navy after receiving his Army draft notice. With six Atlantic convoy crossings and the Normandy invasion under his belt, he stayed on board when his ship was converted to a high-speed transport and headed through the Panama Canal to Pearl Harbor, where it picked up the underwater demolition team and 8,000 half-pound blocks of TNT.
As morning dawned on 17 February 1945, the Blessman was heading toward Iowa Jima as shore bombardment commenced. “We had gone in to make a reconnaissance of both sides of Iowa Jima,” Hinz said. As they moved near the mainland to drop off the underwater team, Signalman Johnny Yarbrough looked over the rail and asked Hinz, “What kind of fish are those?” Those were no fish. They were Japanese shells plopping in the water from a beach assault. Before long, one would hit its mark, killing Frank W. Sumpter, one of the underwater dive team members, who was struck in the back of his head under his helmet.
With the crew’s work complete, the Blessman proceeded to rejoin with the other ships heading away from the island. Accelerating to twenty miles per hour to catch up with the fleet, the Blessman was cutting through the dark seas, leaving a phosphorescent wake in the moonless night. Then it happened. With the phosphorescent wake helping to guide its aim, a Japanese bomber came out of the sky and dropped a 500-pound bomb right on top of the little ship. “I was in my bunk,” Hinz said. “I don’t remember hearing the bomb, but all of a sudden everything was silent. We were dead in the water.”
Sonarman Sidney Marshall had just returned from the mess hall where he had won ninety dollars in a poker game. Lying on his bunk, Marshall counted his money and said that once they arrived in Pearl Harbor, he would send a money order to his wife so she could buy a new coat. He left the compartment to return to the mess, where he hoped to add another ten dollars to his winnings, so he would have an even one hundred for his wife’s coat. He never returned, and later several shipmates reported he had been sitting near the starboard outer bulkhead, where a fifty-foot hole now existed.
“I saw everybody in my compartment run toward the stern, and I got up and put my pants on and got to the foot of the ladder to get up to the main deck,” Hinz said. “When I get up to the main deck I saw the flames shooting up and shells going up like skyrockets.” He rushed up the ladder to the pilothouse and gathered the top-secret documents so he could throw them overboard if the ship started to sink. When he arrived the pilothouse was an inferno. He tied a rope to his waist, grabbed a gas mask and battery-powered lamp, and rushed into the smoke-filled CIC to retrieve the secret documents and put them in a weighted bag so they would be ready to be tossed overboard if necessary.
The bomb went through the stack and landed in the middle of the mess hall, instantly killing all the cooks and destroying the galley. Power was knocked out to the ship, lights were out, and fires erupted, with flames shooting high into the night sky. “The underwater demolition guys were pushing buckets down with their feet in order to get water into them. We had no power, no pressure, none of the hoses worked, and the fire was going up into the sky,” Hinz said, adding that had the bomb hit about fifty feet farther aft, the fifty tons of tetrytol would have exploded, causing even more damage and casualties.
The USS Gilmore came alongside and threw its hoses over to help extinguish the flames. But the damage already had been done. “The stench of burned flesh permeated the air,” Hinz said, adding that they used foxhole shovels to scrape body parts off the bulkheads. Sailors used dog tags, jewelry, tattoos, and clothing to identify the dead. Forty-two men were killed, including twenty-three underwater demolition sailors, and thirty-nine were injured.
With the flames finally out and the ship badly damaged, sailors surveyed the once-proud vessel, which had served America so well both in the Atlantic and Pacific. Hinz will never forget one of his southern shipmates who, looking over the rubble and dead bodies strewn about the deck, remarked, “Twarn’t no crow that shit on us.” But the Blessman would live to sail another day. After repairs were made in Saipan, the ship returned to the western Pacific, where it served with the occupation forces of Japan.28
As the United States continued its successful island-hopping strategy in the Pacific, it still was not enough to convince the Japanese to surrender. It appeared to the nation’s new president, Harry Truman, that only a massive assault—an atomic bomb as it turned out—would be able to do that. Enter the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis, once a favorite of President Roosevelt, who took it back from his summer home on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, following his famous 1933 New England cruise on board the schooner Amberjack II. FDR also selected the vessel to carry him on his 1936 cruise to South America, where an Inter-American Conference was being held in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Over the course of the war, the Indianapolis participated in most major Pacific battles serving as the flagship for the fifth fleet. But by July 1945 the aging cruiser was no longer the gleaming new warship that had transported FDR in 1933. The fifteen-year-old ship had survived dozens of battles, fighting off Japanese bombers, submarines, and warships and earning ten battles stars. Now it was about to be selected for one of the most important assignments of its long service, an assignment that was destined to be its last: The USS Indianapolis would transport a plywood crate packed with uranium-235 and bomb components from the United States to the Pacific island of Tinian, where the atomic bomb would be assembled.
The Indianapolis swiftly and efficiently carried out its mission in a record-setting five-thousand-mile dash from San Francisco across the Pacific Ocean, reaching Tinian in only ten days. After dropping off its top-secret cargo, the ship stopped by Guam to discharge men and then headed, without escort, to Leyte. It would never arrive.
A little past midnight on 30 July, the ship exploded after being hit by two torpedoes on its starboard side. More than three hundred sailors were killed by the bomb. Nine hundred of their shipmates were cast into the churning Pacific waters, watching in horror as their ship disappeared beneath the waters. They were now alone in the vast open ocean—alone, that is, except for the sharks, which would arrive at dawn.
Four days went by before anyone noticed that the Indianapolis had not arrived at Leyte. Meanwhile, suffering hypothermia, dehydration, and physical and mental exhaustion, the men, many delirious, struggled to survive the shark-infested seas. The nearest land was 350 miles away. Once it was discovered that the vessel was overdue, search parties were dispatched. Making a flank-speed run to the site, several ships, including the destroyer escorts USS DuFilho and Cecil J. Doyle, were the first to spot the American sailors, many burned from the sun, dehydrated, and hallucinating, with open sores covering their bodies.
Carlos R. Monarez, who had quit school in the eighth grade to join the Navy, was not quite prepared for what he saw once they arrived at the site of the ship sinking. Wreckage from the Indianapolis, along with life rafts, jackets, and scores of dead and dying men, were strewn about the area. Monarez recalled that many of the sailors’ upper bodies were floating in the water, supported by life rings—but the lower parts of their bodies were gone, chewed up by the sharks. “They were half men,” the twenty-year-old Newton, Kansas, native said. Their bodies were burned red from the intense sun. Corpses were floating as far as the eye could see.
Only 321 men of the original crew of 1,196 on board ship when the Indianapolis left Guam were rescued. Monarez said his ship was only able to pick up a single survivor. “We spotted one kid who was on top of five life preservers, all by himself,” he said. “When we picked him up, he could hardly see, his eyes were burned from the sun.” But he was one of the lucky ones who would live to see another day.
Picking up survivors of sunken ships and splashed airplanes, battling suicide bombers, and dodging Japanese torpedoes was steady fare for most of the destroyer escorts assigned to the Pacific. Yet there were other, seemingly more mundane duties that, although not as glamorous as sinking submarines and downing enemy airplanes, were every bit as important in the United States’ Pacific theater operations. The USS Wiseman was a destroyer escort that played one of those behind-the-scenes supporting roles.
“This is Cedric Foster speaking to you transcribed from Manila in the Philippine Islands,” began the wartime Boston radio commentator in July 1945. “No matter how trite and bromidic the phrase may sound, necessity still is the mother of inventions.” Foster went on, describing how the devastated city of Manila obtained its electrical power—not from an onshore power station but from one of the United States’ destroyer escorts.
Commissioned in April 1944, the USS Wiseman made three convoy missions before it was called back to the Charleston Navy Yard to be fitted with some special new equipment. The seven-month-old vessel was converted to a floating power station, removing its 40-mm guns on the boat deck and installing reels of electrical power cables and a large electrical transformer. Although other ships have provided power to shore operations, this is believed to be the first to be specifically converted for that mission. Conversion complete, the Wiseman was on its way in January back to the Pacific, where it was destined to make some history providing electrical power in April to Manila, left in ruins by the Japanese.29
Sailing into Manila Bay, still under siege, the Wiseman’s fire controlman, George R. Dawson, said they observed the hulks of more than one hundred sunken ships, with Japanese soldiers hiding in some of them. “We waited about one week and sneaked into what was left of Pier 1, Manila,” Dawson recalled. He said the concrete piers all were in shambles. When they went ashore, Dawson said, they were not prepared for what they found. “We found a lot of dead Japs laying around onshore and in the sunken ships. The stench was terrible, but the Army had not the time to bury them, they were busy fighting the Japs.”
“We encountered quite a challenge running our electric cable from our ship to shore,” Dawson recalled. “We had to keep guns with us to keep the Japs (from) destroying our cable.” He said the island natives and the Army assisted sailors from the DE in laying the cables from ship to shore using kapok floats every ten feet.
“The electricity from this man-of-war reaches dry land by means of enormous cables, a thousand feet long, which are supported in the water by floatation equipment,” Cedric Foster told his radio audience. “From early morning to late at night the humming generators make it possible to live in the City of Manila. The electric lights shine in Manila only because of this naval vessel. . . . These elevators run up and down in the bomb-battered buildings and construction continues . . . reconstruction work . . . for the same reason.”
In addition to supplying more than 5.8-million kilowatt hours of electricity to the city for more than five months, the destroyer escort also provided clean drinking water to the residents since the Japanese had smashed all of the island’s water mains. Using the ship’s evaporators, the DE supplied more than 150,000 gallons of fresh drinking water to Army facilities and the harbor area.
Although this was not direct combat duty, it was a definite challenge for the men on board the Wiseman to stay safely docked, supplying power and water to the bombed-out city when Japanese soldiers still prowled the area. The Japanese presence threatened not only the laying of the cable but also its continued operation. Dawson said two Japanese disguised as Filipinos were discovered working on the cable, attempting to destroy the Army’s step-down shore transformers. Armed guards were posted to continually patrol the perimeter of the ship.
“We had a pretty tough time laying the cable in the water with floats and lights,” Frank Frazitta, the Wiseman’s electrician’s mate, wrote in the diary he kept while on board ship. “Many times I was in the dirty water helping out. They also have a guard with a gun watching the cable leading to the pole.” But sailors on board the DE did have some time for a little entertainment. “We also have been lucky, we get 2 cans of beer every other night before the movies,” Frazitta wrote.
Sailors enjoyed movies shown on a makeshift screen set up on the bombed-out dock alongside the ship. “They are first run pictures which you see back home,” Cedric Foster told his radio listeners. “They are a powerful link between those who fight the war against Japan out here in the Philippine Islands . . . a powerful link between these men and their loved ones in every state of the union.”
“This is Cedric Foster speaking to you transcribed from Manila. I now return you to Boston.”30