Part I

Tin Cans

“Captain, how often does a little ship like this sink?” “Usually just once.”

—The Gismo, newsletter of the USS Samuel B. Roberts, September 30, 1944

One

On January 20, 1944, three months prior to the commissioning ceremony that would make it a U.S. Navy warship, the welded hull of DE-413, its prow festively draped in red, white, and blue bunting, slid off the ways at the Brown Shipbuilding Company and entered the Houston Ship Channel with a roaring sidelong splash. At the launching ceremony, administered by the employees of Brown’s pipe department, a prayer was said to be in the hearts of all who watched: “May she be a sound ship, capable of rising to the heights when her supreme moment comes.”

The hull that would become the USS Samuel B. Roberts had been laid down alongside the hull that would become her sister ship, the Walter C. Wann, on December 6, 1943. Two weeks later the twins were moved from their initial production stations, and work began on the Le Ray Wilson and the Lawrence C. Taylor. From July 1942 to March 1944 the shipwrights, marine electricians, pipefitters, machinists, and welders at Brownship would turn out sixty-one destroyer escorts, one pair following the next with punch-clock efficiency.

As the shipyard workers continued making the Roberts ready for sea, installing gun mounts, laying ducts and wiring, and testing the ship’s many internal systems, a group of newly minted seamen left the naval training center at Norfolk, Virginia, and boarded a train to Houston to fill out the ship’s complement of seamen and rated petty officers. The weathered World War I-era passenger train took five days to make the trip. The recruits’ place in the world was reflected not only in the nineteenth-century decor of their accommodations—a potbellied stove warmed one end of the car; gas lamps lit their card games—but in the unceremonious manner by which their train got shunted aside whenever a line of boxcars had to get through. During wartime, and decades before America would develop a culture of personal convenience, there was no denying that cargo could be as important as men.

Once, interminably delayed while a long freight train squealed by ahead of them, the enlistees, accompanied by the two youngest ensigns assigned to the Samuel B. Roberts, John LeClercq and Dudley Moylan, piled out of their passenger car and passed the time riding cows bareback in a pasture. Another time, stuck in a mountain rail-yard with nowhere to go, they got off the train, took over a rural diner, and helped cook their own dinner. Three railcars full of young sailors and no drill-field exercises to burden their days—it was a memory that would grow dearer with time, and it bonded them as only the great adventures of youth can.

What the kids had gone through in basic training was meant to adjust their perspective on their relative individual worth in this new world. For teenagers entering military service during wartime, the shock of boot camp was bracing, equalizing. It leveled the little hills and valleys of socioeconomic differences, broke down egos, and made new recruits glad to end up wherever the Navy Department’s Bureau of Personnel might send them. When Dick Rohde, son of a New York City ship chandler who went broke in the Depression, arrived at boot camp in Newport, Rhode Island, he first encountered the well-calibrated cruelty that would ensure his smooth entry into the wartime fleet.

Sharply dressed in his neatly pressed uniform, the boot camp company commander, as World War II-era Navy drill instructors were known, lined his men up at first muster and addressed them gently. “I know what it’s like for you guys. A couple days ago you were home with your mothers and fathers. Now all of a sudden here you are. You’re up in this strange part of the country. You’ve been rooted out of your homes. You’re homesick. You’ve got your hair all shaved off and you got those shots. I just want to tell you that for the next six weeks, I’m going to be your mother and your father. I’m going to make sure things go just as nicely for you as possible. That’s the reason I’m here. If there’s any way I can accomplish these things I’m gonna do it. I want you to know that.”

Well, this I can handle, Rohde thought. Maybe it wasn’t so bad that the Marines had turned him away, the big sergeant behind the desk saying something alluringly dismissive like, “Go home and grow up and then come back and we’ll talk to you.” Rohde didn’t go home. He went around the corner to the Navy recruiter, who had ready good use for an eager seventeen-year-old. Let the Marines slog through mud—Dick Rohde from Staten Island was going to sea.

“Now, I’m going to call the roll,” the company commander said. “I don’t know how to pronounce some of your names, so if I make a mistake, please correct me.” He got down to Rohde on the list and called out, “Road?”

“Uh, sir, that’s Rohde,” his young charge offered, emphasizing the long e.

The company commander walked up to the freshly cropped boot, and it was then that Rohde discovered the true nature of the instructor he had dared to admire. “No, that’s Shithead!” he roared. “Your name from now on is Shithead!”

Thus began a six-week program of drill-field marching, obstacle-course running, weapon maintenance, latrine cleaning, and more. Each morning when Rohde’s name came up at muster, the company commander called out “Shithead?” When Rohde’s mother heard about the treatment her son was getting at the hands of the U.S. Navy, she vowed to blow the lid off the scandal through the good offices of Mr. Walter Winchell and his little newspaper column. Her son put an end to that plan. Perhaps mothers were poorly equipped to appreciate the educational value of scrubbing a concrete courtyard with a medium-bristled toothbrush. Dick Rohde survived boot camp. He became a sailor.

Rohde had skills the Navy prized. As a one-time page to a Wall Street investment banker, he was a proficient typist. That, combined with the rudimentary Morse code he had learned in radio club at Staten Island’s Curtis High School, set him up to strike for a radioman’s rating. With new ships launching daily from shipyards all around the country, bodies were needed—and minds too. There was a shortage of trained radiomen to man the sets. In March 1944 Dick Rohde went to the U.S. Naval Training School in Boston, where radiomen were made.

The genius of the Navy’s personnel system was that it sorted young men by their talents, trained them for specialized duty, and funneled them to places where their knowledge would benefit the nation most. A recruit with promise in a particular technical area could go to a service school to study a specialty. Someone with a keen ear for pitch recognition would be encouraged to attend sound school in Key West, Florida, where he learned to operate sonar equipment. An enlistee with an engineering background might be a candidate for radar school at MIT in Cambridge. Most recruits went straight to sea, where they got about the sweaty business of scraping paint, loading supplies, maintaining equipment, and doing anything else the petty officers said needed doing. Seamen who discovered their callings aboard ship could affiliate themselves with a particular department and “strike for a rating” in that area. A sailor with the designation “seaman first class (radioman striker)” would be the gofer of the radio department. As long as he didn’t slip too often with the coffeepot, he would in time get promoted to radioman third class, a petty officer rating that signified his expertise in the chosen field.

After completing basic training at Newport and graduating from radio school in Boston, Rohde went to the receiving station at Norfolk, Virginia, where like scores of men he awaited assignment to a ship and got further training. The training never quite ended, for there was always something else to learn. At Norfolk Rohde’s training went beyond drill-field rote and began to reflect the realities of life under fire. One day he entered a large room enclosing an indoor swimming pool. Into one end of the pool was poured fuel oil, which was summarily set alight. He and his fellow seaman recruits were directed to jump into the smoking, flaming water, to splash the burning fuel away from them, and to make their way to the clean end of the pool. Nary an eyelash was singed, but their minds were seared indelibly with a glimpse of what might lie ahead.

Like many others in the mob that had boarded that train in Norfolk, George Bray had not joined the Navy looking for a fight. Like most enlisted men, he was a pragmatist. The calculus was simple: a war was on. If you were eighteen or older, the thing to do was join the service. If you were seventeen, you could get a parent to sign your enlistment papers. Or you could just lie about your age. Ends justified means: if you wanted to impress a girl, your best bet was to get yourself in uniform as quickly as possible. The only question was what service you preferred.

When the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor and the war started, Bray had been as eager to sign on as the next kid. But he tempered idealism with practicality. He looked at the options available to him and chose the Navy for reasons that recruiters surely exploited in the 1940s: he would get three meals a day, clean bed linens, and none of the trench-humping that was the daily lot of the infantryman.

Not that Bray was a shrinking violet. Back in Alabama he had made the high school varsity football team as a seventh grader. He was a hard-nosed halfback, adept at catching passes out of a Notre Dame-style T formation, which had come into fashion in 1943 when Fighting Irish quarterback Angelo Bertelli brought it to South Bend and won the national championship and the Heisman Trophy along the way. Halfway through his senior year Bertelli had joined the Marines. If military service was good enough for one magician of the T formation, it was good enough for another. And so Bray found himself aboard the U.S. Navy’s smallest man-of-war, a destroyer escort.

In Houston the men came aboard the Roberts as it was undergoing a final fitting out prior to the commissioning ceremony that would convert it from the private property of the Brown Shipbuilding Company to a public asset as a United States Ship. Those who came by train found that their Spartan accommodations had been good preparation for shipboard life. Their bunks on the Roberts were three-high, with forty or fifty men to a compartment. There was little venting, let alone air-conditioning. But comfort is an afterthought for a teenager on the cusp of adventure. Dick Rohde swooned at the thought of what was in store for him in the Pacific. “There was always something new, always something exciting,” he said. “We weren’t homesick at all. It was just ‘Wow, what’s going to happen next?’”

Two

What happened next would be up to Bob Copeland. It was his world—the enlisted men just lived in it. The commander of three previous ships, Captain Copeland, a naval reservist from Tacoma who had left behind a budding legal career to assume his fourth command, arrived in Houston on March 4, 1944, and instantly liked what he saw in the Roberts. Holed up at the Rice Hotel while the ship neared completion, he and his officers spent each day at the shipyard, watching the nondescript slab of metal become a warship.

Fair-minded, firm, and shrewd, Copeland, at the advanced age of thirty-three years, had a rare gift: the ability to assert his authority and make his men like it, both at the same time. No one on the Samuel B. Roberts was ever heard bellyaching that they had gotten a raw deal from Bob Copeland. He wasn’t above turning to an enlisted man and asking, “So, how’s your family?” If he saw a picture of a sailor’s girlfriend on a desk, he would be likely to ask, “You still hearing from her?” He led his crew from a position of trust. And they trusted him for his ability to lead.

The skipper of the Roberts had been a lawyer exactly as long as he had been an officer. Commissioned as an ensign the same day he was admitted to the Washington State Bar Association, he had maintained a trial law practice in Tacoma while fulfilling his commitment to the naval reserve, with meetings one night a week. The fact that Bob Copeland was not “regular Navy”—an Annapolis graduate with a full commission and a full-time job in the fleet—owed more to his sense of family duty than to a lack of devotion to naval service.

Like the rest of his generation who grew up amid the patriotism and Wilsonian high-mindedness of World War I, Copeland had come of age aspiring to be a warrior. Eight years old when the Great War ended, he had spent his childhood infused with enthusiasm for playtime war, prancing around in doughboy getup, tin hat cocked over his forehead, stockings pulled up over his calves, wooden rifle at the ready. In his teenage years, when his peers had moved on to playing sports, Bob Copeland was up in his room running his own private navy. He kept his fleet on paper, order of battle formed up, a command hierarchy drawn. Though his devotion to naval strategy might have led him to neglect certain skills that would be useful at sea—such as the ability to swim—it filled his imagination and prepared him for the managerial reality of command.

At a critical juncture in his young life, he had been offered the chance to attend Annapolis. Every Fourth of July young Bob Copeland watched the fleet weigh anchor in Tacoma’s Commencement Bay to help the city celebrate Independence Day. Destroyers, cruisers, and battleships, and the Admiral. The Admiral was there. The opportunity was not lost on Bob Copeland. He aimed to see the Admiral, if only he could buck up his courage to make the trip. Every day he went down to the docks where small boats ferried townsfolk out to see the ships. But each day Copeland’s nerve failed him. Finally, on the last day the fleet was to be there in July 1927, he mustered the will to amble aboard the small harbor ferry and go see the Admiral. Tucked in his pocket was a letter of introduction from the mayor of Tacoma. He approached the flagship, climbed aboard, and handed the envelope to the officer of the deck. The letter was passed to the executive officer, then to the Admiral himself.

Before Copeland could grasp what was happening, an invitation was extended to him. He would see the Admiral in his flag quarters. A kid who commanded a world-beating fleet on paper was permitted to sit down and talk to a man who earned his living doing the real thing. They talked for hours. Copeland’s knowledge of naval history, his appreciation for fleet organization and command, won him an unexpected prize: the Admiral told him he should go to Annapolis.

Better than that, the Admiral wrote a letter. To Copeland’s congressional representative. Who wrote a letter. To the commandant of Annapolis. An appointment to the Naval Academy was there for the taking.

But his mother, who had an extreme, unreasoning fear of water, could not abide the idea of her only child going to sea. So the family doctor was summoned. He mustered his most ominous tone of voice and said to the seventeen-year-old something like this: “Robert, your mother’s health concerns me deeply. She might very well have a heart attack if you decide to enter the service. Please don’t cause her this stress.” Born to his parents ten years into their marriage, Copeland knew that he was a long-wished-for and only child. He decided that he could not inflict such pain on his mother. Bob Copeland, the dutiful only son, declined his appointment to the breeding ground of admirals.

He would settle for living in smaller worlds. In 1929, Copeland enlisted in the naval reserve and, six years later, was commissioned as a naval reserve officer, coincident with his completion of law school. Having fulfilled his commitment to the service, he returned to civilian life in 1935 to practice law in Tacoma until 1940. Ordered back to active duty during the Navy’s prewar expansion, he commanded two auxiliary ships and the destroyer escort USS Wyman before reporting to Houston as skipper of DE-413. He liked the men he found there. In Houston, standing on the bridge of the protean warship, watching the workers of the day shift scramble down the gangway and into the safety of their civilian lives, Copeland noticed two officers looking up at him from the dock. His instinct told him he would come to know them well. He ambled down and asked them if they belonged to his ship. They did. One was Lt. William S. Burton. The other was Lt. Lloyd Gurnett.

In Burton, Copeland found a kindred soul, for Burton had previously been a lawyer too. But the attorney from Cleveland had the edge on his captain in family prominence: Burton’s father, Harold Burton, a World War I Army captain and the former mayor of Cleveland, was a member of the U.S. Senate. (He would become, after the war, a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.) Copeland was relieved to find that Burton did not let it go to his head. “He stood on his own and successfully lived down his family fame. Bill by his own abilities and his own personality won his way completely with both the officers and the enlisted men.”

Lieutenant Gurnett was a mustang, a sailor who had climbed the enlisted ratings—in Gurnett’s case, to chief quartermaster—and finally achieved a commission at sea. “Lloyd knew his navy, knew his job, and didn’t know when to quit working. No man on board worked harder or loved the ship more than he,” Copeland would write. Because Gurnett’s dedication was so readily apparent, Copeland gave him the post of first lieutenant, making him responsible for the construction department, which handled damage control, shipkeeping, messing, berthing, and repairs. The officers were joined by their so-called nucleus crew: thirty-odd chief and first-class petty officers who had the experience to whip a green crew into shape, as well as other key officers, including Tom Stevenson, the communications department boss, and Bob Roberts, the ship’s executive officer.

The Samuel B. Roberts was christened in posthumous honor of a twenty-one-year-old naval reservist from Portland, Oregon, Samuel Booker Roberts, Jr., killed on Guadalcanal when, at the height of fighting on September 28, 1942, he took the landing craft he commanded and motored in to draw fire away from ships trying to rescue Marines trapped in a Japanese crossfire. When the secretary of the Navy informed Roberts’s bereaved mother that DE-413 would be named in her late son’s honor, she planned to come down from St. Louis to attend the ceremony. Her husband was an engineer working for Mississippi River Flood Control, but even he couldn’t stop the great river from rampaging as the big day, April 28, 1944, approached. Floodwaters washed out the southbound rail lines, and travel became impossible. The wife of the flood controller had no choice but to yield to high water. She wrote Bob Copeland with her regrets and enclosed a photo of coxswain Roberts, which the captain placed in the wardroom.

She also made a request: would he find a place on his crew roster for Jack Roberts, her youngest son, who was finishing basic training at Great Lakes Naval Training Station? The younger Roberts badly wanted the assignment. From Galveston, Copeland wrote the Navy Department with a request to bring Jack Roberts aboard.

Commissioning is a signature moment in the life of a warship. An authority on naval history has observed, “If launching may be likened to birth, and christening the endowment of individuality, then at commissioning the ship is at the threshold of a productive and rewarding maturity.” It constitutes its formal transfer to the care of its commanding officer. Its officers and crew assemble on the quarterdeck as the fleet’s district commandant or his representative reads the directive that assigns the vessel to the fleet. The Navy band plays the national anthem, the ensign is hoisted, and the commissioning pennant is broken out. The new commanding officer reads his orders and assumes command, and the first watch is set.

A productive and rewarding maturity—close though it was for the Samuel B. Roberts— lay far in the future for Bob Copeland’s two small children. His wife of four and a half years, Harriet, had been there when all three of his previous ships had been commissioned, from his first command aboard the coal-burning tug, the Pawtucket, to his most recent tour aboard an older destroyer escort, the Wyman. He wanted her there in Houston for the commissioning of the Roberts, and he let her know it, cajoling her in letter after letter to make the long trip from Tacoma. But his efforts at persuasion could not overcome the imperatives of new motherhood. Though she wanted to be there for her husband, Harriet Copeland had an infant daughter and toddler son to care for. And so on the day the Samuel B. Roberts became a Navy warship, Bob Copeland took command of her without the comfort of family. Copeland would continue to chide his wife for missing the commissioning. “I think I overdid it,” he later acknowledged. He finally relented when Harriet wrote him, saying, “There’s an old saying that one picture is worth ten thousand words, and the enclosed picture will perhaps explain why I wasn’t there.” Tucked inside the envelope was the front cover of the Saturday Evening Post. It depicted the inside of a firehouse, firemen clambering aboard an engine as it raced out of the station. Their mascot, a Dalmatian, was left sitting on a large red pillow, suckling a litter of puppies as the pumper zoomed off to battle the flames. As Copeland raced off to his own four-alarm fire in the Pacific, he could not be sure he would ever see Harriet and their children again.

After the commissioning ceremony on April 28, the Roberts departed for Bermuda with a group of other destroyer escorts for an extended shakedown cruise to test and break in the ship’s physical plant. But as an experienced commander like Bob Copeland well knew, the successful operation of a warship would depend as much on his ability to forge the character of the ship’s crew as on the Texans’ skill in forging the curve of the ship’s keel.

After shakedown was complete, the Roberts escorted a paddle steamer up the East Coast to Norfolk, then continued northward to Boston for a final fitting out and inspection prior to going to war. In Boston seaman second class Jack Roberts reported for duty. The only people on the ship who knew his connection to the Mr. Samuel B. Roberts were the skipper and his executive officer, Lt. Bob Roberts. No one suspected a thing, for the surname Roberts didn’t stand out: the ship already had two of them. By the time the fact of young Jack Roberts’s relation to the heroic landing craft skipper of Guadalcanal slipped out a few months later, his captain wrote, “Jack Roberts had made his own way, and his place in the ship’s company was secure for him in his own right.”

When he finished boot camp, Jack Yusen was ordered to join the Samuel B. Roberts at Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston. On June 7, 1944, as the U.S. Army was consolidating its hold on the Normandy beachhead, Yusen loaded his seabag aboard a truck with eleven other recruits and was driven to the docks to meet his new ship. When he saw the big turrets and bristling guns, his first thought was, What a ship! Then a petty officer approached the New Yorker and his buddies and asked, “What are you guys looking at?” The petty officer told them that the object of their admiration was in fact a British heavy cruiser. He then pointed to the dry dock on the other side of the pier. “You’re going on that one over there.”

The large waterless enclosure appeared to be empty, save for a single mast that stuck up out of it, a radar antenna affixed to its top. “That’s your ship,” the petty officer said. Yusen and his friends were crestfallen. “We looked down the dock at the little ship—306 feet long—and then looked at the big cruiser, and said, ‘Oh my God!’”

How quickly disappointment turned to pride. Destroyer escort sailors tended toward an intensity of pride that was out of all proportion to their undersized ships. Four days into his new life as a Samuel B. Roberts sailor, Yusen walked with his buddies on liberty into a Boston pub. When Navy men meet in barrooms or dance halls, or wherever women are nearby, they seldom pass up the opportunity to boast about their ship. Yusen said, “They’d ask you what ship you were on. We’d say, ‘We’re from the Samuel B. Roberts— the USS Samuel B. Roberts, DE-413.’ You’d say that with pride. You might be talking to someone on a heavy cruiser. So you’re just telling him that we’re as good as you. We had that pride already. We had been on the ship for four days. So much pride, and it had been only four days.”

The feeling that destroyer escorts were special manifested itself in surprising places. In a stained-glass window that adorned the Norfolk yard’s nondenominational chapel, someone had glued an image of a destroyer escort, cradled like a baby in the arms of Jesus Christ. The image struck somebody as sacrilegious and was removed. But the sentiment was surely genuine enough.

Pride would take the Sammy B. far. But the fact remained that the destroyers that the Roberts would join in Taffy 3’s screen—the Hoel, the Heermann, and the Johnston— carried two and a half times the gun power and more than three times as many torpedoes as their smaller cousins. Sailors who possessed the detachment of distance—for instance, the men on the escort carriers who relied on the tin cans for protection—grasped the practical significance of entrusting their well-being to the more diminutive ships. When they looked out and saw DEs skirting the perimeter of the formation in lieu of destroyers, they would just shake their heads. Could they be trusted to protect them?

Bob Copeland of the Samuel B. Roberts readily validated their concern: “We were short of destroyers—we were always short of destroyers—and actually this was a destroyer’s job. So they used a lot of DEs to finish out the screens. In all we had three destroyers and four DEs that made up the screen ships. We actually should have had eight or ten in the screen. We were overextended and trying to carry on a big operation.”

Destroyer escorts were not built to ride high in the battle line and trade salvos with an enemy fleet. The Roberts’s designed displacement—the weight of the seawater that her hull displaced—was 1,250 tons. Fully loaded for battle, she displaced about 2,000 tons. She went to war with 228 men: 217 enlisted and eleven officers. But by the standards of the fleet she was a pipsqueak. The battleship Missouri, with a complement of 1,921, was nearly three times the Roberts’s length and almost thirty times her weight. Unlike the Mighty Mo, the Roberts had not been built for engaging armored dreadnoughts at 28,000 yards. Destroyer escorts were runabouts. In port, they delivered mail to the larger ships. At sea, they rode the outer edge of a formation, keeping watchful eyes, sonar stacks, and radar scopes to the ocean and the sky.

Whereas the big ships’ bulk was their best insurance against heavy seas, destroyer escorts lived at nature’s fickle mercy. As the seas went, so went the DEs. In an unpublished 1945 dispatch sent shortly before he was killed by machine-gun fire on Okinawa, Ernie Pyle evoked the precarious seaworthiness of the tiny vessels: “They are rough and tumble little ships. They roll and they plunge. They buck and they twist. They shudder and they fall through space. They are in the air half the time, under water half the time. Their sailors say they should have flight pay and submarine pay both.”

The Roberts was rated for twenty-four knots but could make nearly thirty when her two six-thousand-horsepower Westinghouse turbines were spinning under full steam pressure. Her armament was light. A Butler-class destroyer escort’s main battery consisted of two single-barreled five-inch/38-caliber naval rifles, one fore and one aft. A triple torpedo mount amidships was her most powerful weapon against enemy surface ships. A well-located torpedo blast could cripple a large capital ship. But with a range of not more than ten thousand yards, the torpedo’s effective use required that the ship maneuver to virtual point-blank range—and survive that approach despite her complete lack of armor or other self-protection beyond the whims of luck.

Destroyer escorts were every bit the equal of destroyers (DDs) in antisubmarine operations. They used the same sonar equipment, but DEs were more maneuverable, able to turn a circle less than half the diameter of what a destroyer circumscribed. Still, the pilots and crew on the escort carriers (CVEs) would have preferred to see full-fledged Fletcher-class destroyers riding shotgun on the task unit. But it was 1944, the ocean was vast, and the same American heavy industry that raced to fill the oceans with aircraft carriers was hard pressed to turn out enough destroyers to protect the flattops. Destroyer escorts, cheaper and faster to build, filled the bill of necessity. And they did it well.

*      *     *

THROUGH SOME OLD-FASHIONED SHIPYARD horse trading in Boston, Copeland secured certain mechanical improvements—a pair of gyro repeaters for the bridge wing foremost among them. With the new compasses his quartermasters and watch officers would be able to take more accurate bearings. To help turn his mostly teenage crew into a team ready to fight a desperate and savage enemy, Copeland brought aboard key noncommissioned officers and technical specialists through the Navy’s personnel lottery.

As the Samuel B. Roberts left Boston Harbor and broke into the wide waters off Cape Cod, Captain Copeland set course for Norfolk. Provincetown was coming into view on the starboard bow. Ens. John LeClercq, the officer of the deck, and his captain, seated in his bridge chair, scanned the morning sea and listened to the slow cadence of the sonar system’s echo-ranging machine as it sent its sharp falsetto calls into the deep in search of enemy submarines. Suddenly Copeland noticed that the outbound ping was getting a hard echo in return. “Before I could fully believe my ears, the sonar operator called out, ‘Good contact! Four hundred yards—up Doppler!’” referring to the acoustic signature a bogey made while closing with the ship. Copeland thought to himself, Barely out of port, and a submarine is already stalking us?

Recognizing the possibility of collision, Copeland leaped from his chair and grabbed the engine order telegraph to ring a stop bell. Before the skipper could send down the order, there came a deep, hollow-toned boom and a reverberating crash that shook the ship. It felt as if a torpedo had hit. Copeland rang a “back full” order to the engine room, but the impact continued to grind along. A few seconds later a second violent seaquake shook the ship.

“I was belowdecks when there was a great shock, then a grinding sensation along the keel, and finally the stern shook violently,” chief yeoman Gene Wallace recalled. “I rushed to the deck, and there on the sea was evidence that the Roberts had made her first kill. There was blood on the water and bits of flesh—positive evidence of a kill—of a whale.”

The Roberts’s first underwater kill was a magnificent sixty-foot-long specimen whose backbone had been severed by the ship’s slender bow. The stricken animal spouted a geyser of blood as the officers and crew raced topside, ran to the rail, and looked on aghast. The whale’s immense bulk rolled alongside the starboard side of the ship as a growing blood slick stained the water. The destroyer escort’s churning starboard screw sawed at the whale, cutting clean through its backbone again. The crew watched transfixed as the ruined beast surfaced behind the ship.

No captain ever wants to report that he has run his ship aground—certainly no captain with hopes for a bigger command. But what other conclusion should be drawn from the dented bow, the bent keel, and the broken screw? Captains customarily made up stories to cover for their negligence. “It is legendary in the Navy,” Bob Copeland later wrote, “that unless she sticks fast, no ship admittedly runs aground, all groundings being laid to collisions with submerged logs and the like.” But this was no phony sea story, and Copeland didn’t want a stench of suspicion hanging around him or his ship. The exec, Lt. Bob Roberts, took a fix on the ship’s position, documenting its location well clear of shallow waters where a grounding could take place. Meanwhile, Captain Copeland, ever the lawyer, ordered his crew to gather up the exonerating physical evidence. Several chunks of whale hide and flesh were recovered from the ship’s hull and preserved in medicinal alcohol by Dr. Erwin, the division medical officer.

Copeland continued on to Norfolk to have the broken propeller repaired in dry dock. No question ever arose as to the origins of the Samuel B. Roberts’s inaugural bruising. It was an incident that grew in comic magnitude as time went by. But just as surely could it be said that the Sammy B.’s voyage to the Philippine Sea had begun with a very poor omen. Such dramatics—and the small vessel had yet to enter a combat zone.

*      *     *

WHILE THEIR SHIP WAS convalescing in Norfolk, Lieutenant Roberts and Captain Copeland made final adjustments to the crew roster, weeding out a few ne’er-do-wells from the ship’s complement of 219. Among the 217 keepers, Copeland could sense a coming together that boded well for the upcoming journey to the Pacific. The skipper gave his crew leave and instructed them to report back to the ship in time for its departure a few days later.

Bud Comet, a nineteen-year-old seaman, took the opportunity to visit his family in their coal-mining settlement on the Guyandot River in northern West Virginia, where they lived in a home owned by the coal company. So long as Mr. Comet showed up reliably at the mine and obeyed his superiors and called his boss “Mister,” he would have a place to live and get the hours he needed to bring home a living wage to his family. Mostly he fed his family out of his vegetable garden—after he gave the best produce to neighbors. “My dad figured there were people there poorer than us, he gave the best stuff to them, and we got what was left. If he killed a hog, he gave most of the hog away,” Comet said. When the visit was over and Bud was due to rejoin the Samuel B. Roberts, he saw his father off to work, then left to catch the train to Norfolk. He found a seat aboard the train and looked up to see a familiar face sitting across from him. “I want to talk to you,” his father said.

Bud knew that the foreman at the coal mine didn’t grant time off lightly. From the look in his father’s eye, he could see that what his father was about to say was likely going to be important.

Mr. Comet was concerned for his son’s future. It was 1944. The world was at war. He told the teenager he was worried that he would get out to the front and be overwhelmed or afraid and wouldn’t do his job. If he screwed up and went over the hill and if the MPs had to track him down and haul him to the brig, he would bring upon his family the worst of sins: dishonor. If there was one thing he needed to avoid, his dad said, it was dishonoring his mother.

He reminded his son of his own beginnings. Born in Italy, the senior Comet was raised under the worst of political systems. He had come to this country and managed to make a living and provide for his family. What this meant, he said, was that America was worth dying for. Death would be acceptable, so long as it was honorable. “An honorable man dies once,” he told Bud. “A coward dies a thousand times.” Comet thought he had heard that line somewhere before, maybe from Shakespeare. His father didn’t mention anything about the Bard. Bud Comet was pretty sure his father had never read Shakespeare. He said, “I think he got that out of his heart.”

But Bud Comet’s heart was already spoken for. He had fallen hard in love. The object of his affection was the Samuel B. Roberts. “I had confidence in the ship. I had confidence in the people who I had met on the ship. I had confidence in the officers who I saw on that ship. Mr. Roberts, our executive officer, was Annapolis—very strict, strictly Navy. I felt that he would be more strict than anybody else. There was Stevenson and Moylan. I had a lot of respect for them.”

Comet grew to like Dudley Moylan. The ship’s junior officer, with an English degree from Duke and a “ninety-day wonder” commission from Notre Dame’s officer candidate program, was prone to spontaneous kindness. On late watches, once in a while, Ensign Moylan would bring by a pot of coffee and some cups, toss them around, fill them, and sit down in the gun tub with the men and visit and just talk, one man to the next. Junior officers could be that way. John LeClercq was like that too. There was an unshakable goodness to him, with his blond hair and easy, boyish smile. He had a natural empathy for even the greenest sailor. LeClercq and Moylan were the only officers with the group that made the five-day train journey from Norfolk to Houston.

Enlisted men who talked with Johnny LeClercq weren’t put off by his gold bars. He didn’t put up any of the barriers that other officers did. “I remember LeClercq,” Bud Comet said. “He looked at you always and smiled—like he was in love with the ship too and the people that he was serving with and was very proud.” Somehow the Samuel B. Roberts just seemed to foster that kind of pride. It tended to trickle down from the top.

Of course, anybody caught up in the fantasy that the Samuel B. Roberts was the Good Ship Lollipop always had Bob Roberts to reckon with. He could be arch and domineering. But in that sense his personality meshed well with the job description for an executive officer. He was remote even from his own officers. Enlisted men lived in another universe altogether.

Like Lloyd Gurnett, he was a mustang, an officer who had entered the Navy as an enlisted man and performed well enough to win a field appointment to Annapolis. Coming out of high school in Ridgefield, Connecticut, he had been beaten to his congressional district’s Naval Academy appointment by an ambitious Yale University sophomore. So he made his Navy career the old-fashioned way. He jumped into the enlisted ranks with both feet and within two years won entrance to Annapolis by taking competitive examinations at sea.

He and Copeland were among the few experienced officers on the Samuel B. Roberts. Most of the others were so-called “ninety-day wonders.” There was no small amount of sarcasm behind the title, for veteran petty officers seldom acquiesced to the authority of the young men who swaggered aboard as newly minted ensigns in the naval reserve. In theory a ninety-day wonder was superior even to the seniormost chief. But if a young officer planned to have a long and thriving career in the naval service, he was wise to defer to his chiefs’ experience.

At the top of the chain of command of enlisted men, the warrants, the chiefs, and the first-class petty officers were the ones who had the experience to get things done at sea, from tying lines to launching boats to bringing on stores to organizing work parties. On the Roberts, Red Harrington, the first-class boatswain’s mate, was the catalyst for most of what the deck force accomplished. The radio department relied on the leadership of Tullio Serafini, a grizzled but popular chief whose naval service dated back to World War I. Chiefs did not wear golden-barred epaulets or cap brims laden with braided “scrambled eggs.” They did not dine with fine silver in the officers’ ward. But they were capable men who had spent their best years at sea. By virtue of seniority, a forty- or fifty-year-old warrant officer, whose half-inch gold stripe gave him the actual privileges of an ensign, earned more money than many an admiral.

In his two years as an enlisted man, Bob Roberts had painted enough bulkheads and tugged enough lines to acquire a certain saltiness to his personality. But as the only Annapolis graduate aboard the ship—class of 1940—he comported himself with the assured professionalism that only Bancroft Hall and Tecumseh Square could breed. His blend of experience and pedigree made him a respected leader. Beyond those emotional nuances, the exec’s job was intellectually demanding as well. To handle the considerable responsibility of supervising the CIC, the executive officer of a destroyer or destroyer escort had to have a quick mind. During a torpedo run it fell to him to perform the exacting work of selecting the ship’s course to put it in optimum position to fire its torpedoes. A computer was available to help with the mathematical chore. But computers, even simple durable mechanical-analog devices like the first-generation Mark 1A fire-control computer, could fail. In those cases, the human mind had to step into the void and determine the target’s speed and course, his own best firing course, the torpedo’s optimum speed, and all the difficult geometry that that work involved. Bob Roberts’s mind was among the best. Copeland called him “as fast as a slide rule and as accurate as a micrometer … an A-1 crackerjack boy, as sharp as a phonograph needle.”

Bob Roberts probably looked at a young officer like John LeClercq, so full of niceness and interpersonal engagement, and saw a greenhorn who needed a little toughening. The exec knew how to focus impressionable minds by hitting them where they were strong. Once he pulled LeClercq aside and told him he didn’t like his attitude toward the Navy and thought he didn’t take enough interest in his men. LeClercq rated himself highly on both counts and seethed at the remark for weeks. Later, he exacted an underling’s brand of revenge. When he was scheduled to take the ship’s whaleboat to retrieve the punctilious exec from liberty, LeClercq found a defensible reason to be three and a half hours late. He and his buddy, the juniormost officer on the ship, Dudley Moylan, got a laugh out of the passive insurrection. But LeClercq was dead serious about avenging his honor as a friend of the crew. “As long as I have the confidence and trust of the enlisted men,” Johnny wrote his mother, “Mr. Roberts can go to blazes.”

*      *     *

IN NORFOLK, LLOYD GURNETT pulled some strings (or just as likely, picked some locks) and requisitioned for the crew its very own ice cream maker. The luxury of carrying such a machine typically belonged to aircraft carriers and other larger ships. Usually escort vessels contended for the privilege of rescuing a downed pilot, knowing that their reward in exchange would be five gallons of the frozen treat. Now the Roberts could tend to its own needs in the realm of iced confectionery.

Before leaving Norfolk, Bob Copeland decided to add one last recruit to the ship’s complement. How the dog first came aboard had less to do with the captain’s preferences than with the drunken enterprise of some Roberts sailors on shore leave. The small black mutt was found on the dock, smuggled aboard, and hidden someplace where officers seldom went. Before too long, in a fit of candor, one of the sailors went to Captain Copeland and asked permission to keep the dog on the ship.

Copeland and Gurnett took the dog into the wardroom, sat down over coffee and cigarettes, and decided that greater expertise than theirs was required if the dog was to be made a crew member in good standing. It was well after midnight, but they summoned Doc Erwin.

The sleep-ruffled physician arrived as ordered, standing on the cold floor of the wardroom in slippers, a skivvy shirt, and cotton khaki trousers. As the doctor rubbed his eyes, Copeland said, “We have a new recruit on board, and I want you to give him a physical and make out a health record for him so that we can properly take him up in the ship’s company.” Erwin stared at him. Had he really been called at three A.M. to perform a routine physical exam on a new crew member?

Gurnett brought Erwin some coffee. “Come on, Doc, sit down,” he said. The physician looked around for his patient. Copeland gestured beneath the large table. Erwin looked down at his feet, saw the puppy, and erupted in anger. He told the captain what he thought of his and the first lieutenant’s little joke. On the verge of stomping off to his bunk, he was stopped in his tracks when Copeland said, “Oh, this dog is going to be the ship’s mascot, and everything has to be just so.” Grudgingly, the doctor pulled out his stethoscope and got to work.

His skipper was impressed. “He really gave the puppy a thorough going-over. He took the stethoscope and checked the dog’s heart and lungs, and he got the blood pressure thing out and wrapped him up. I don’t think he had any more idea how to take a dog’s blood pressure than I did. He made out a complete medical report on the puppy. He put on a good show for just the two of us, Gurnett and me. Then he sent for the chief yeoman. I think he was as put out as Dr. Erwin had been at being broken out of his bunk. However, he entered into the spirit of it too and made up a service record for the puppy. We forthwith named the mascot Sammy.”

Given the rating seaman second class, Sammy received a rapid promotion to petty officer during a tour of the boiler room initiated by an obliging fireman who found him peering down a hatch toward the black gang’s wonderland. The noise of the boilers threw the animal into a fit. As he relieved himself onto the hot steel deck, he earned his rating of water tender first class.

A sailor adept at tailoring, Sam Blue, took a kapok life jacket and, with a few cuts and stitches, fashioned a miniature life jacket for the dog. Sammy made a splash. Speculation flew in The Gismo, the ship newsletter, that he had a canine paramour in Tokyo and saw the DE-413 as his quickest way across the Pacific.

The teenagers and young men aboard the Samuel B. Roberts acquired a certain degree of affection for the mammals that touched their lives, both the one they had accidentally killed and the one they now saved. With their official mascot now on board, the boys joined by their dog, the ship’s journey to the Pacific was delayed no further.

Three

From Pearl Harbor, transferred from the Third to the Seventh Fleet, the Samuel B. Roberts escorted convoys to the naval base at Eniwetok, a huge coral atoll whose massive lagoon, a circular landscape of coral heads filled with white sand and bright blue water, was cut through with sleek gray warships. The Roberts made the Oahu-to-Eniwetok run twice before continuing south with a convoy toward Manus, at two degrees south latitude, in the Admiralty Islands, where part of the Philippines invasion force was gathering.

Getting there required that the Roberts cross the equator, an event that is of some significance in Navy tradition. When a ship crosses the equator, it is common for one with a significant complement of newcomers to hold a crossing-the-line ceremony. Apart from usual divisions of rating and rank, men aboard warships fall into two classifications: so-called “shellbacks” have crossed the equator before; “pollywogs” have not. The distinction is treated as important enough to push aside the meritocracy of rank that separates the men. A pollywog lieutenant is still merely a pollywog, and a shellback seaman a shellback.

On a ship full of reservists and new recruits like the Roberts, the pollywogs vastly outnumbered the shellbacks. Bob Roberts was the senior shellback. Only two other officers, Lt. Herbert W. (“Bill”)

Trowbridge and Lt. Lloyd Gurnett, had crossed the equator before. They were joined by twenty-five or thirty enlisted initiates of the “charmed circle,” as Bob Copeland called them. The rest of the officers and crew, nearly two hundred men, were pollywogs, Lt. Cdr. Robert Witcher Copeland among them.

Their initiation was as much theater as ceremony and as much hazing ritual as theater. In preparation, the shellbacks broke out old swabs, manila line, canvas, and bunting from the ship’s stores and fashioned costumes for King Neptune and his “royal family” to wear. The screen commander’s signalman, a man named Price, played Davy Jones, Neptune’s messenger. Bill Trowbridge, garbed in a long-tailed coat, a silk top hat, a golden wig, and a big white mustache, was the royal judge. To Copeland, he “looked like a country circuit judge of Abe Lincoln’s time.” A carpenter’s mate, Dari Schafer, “painted and powdered … until he actually looked pretty delicious,” was Neptune’s wife, dolled up in hula skirt and a brassiere. The royal dentist was there, and the royal barber too. But the best-of-show prize went to Tullio Serafini. The old chief radioman, all 240 pounds of him, made an ideal royal baby. He showed up wearing a big diaper fashioned from a mattress cover or a large sack and held with a big safety pin. Aside from that, he didn’t wear a stitch.

The initiation began when Davy Jones, dressed in a pirate suit made from black bunting, declared that the ship was about to enter the domain of Neptunus Rex and demanded that all shellbacks ensure that the pollywogs pay their due respects. Copeland had his yeoman pass a special order that all crewmen were to wear their undress whites, and officers to wear their dress whites.

It began with minor indignities. An officer who was particularly unpopular with the crew was forced, in the highest heat of the equatorial day, to sit on the steel deck over the sound hut, above the pilothouse, and don a complete suit of foul-weather clothing, which included multiple layers suitable for the arctic and a rubberized topcoat. Over it they strapped a kapok life jacket and perched a sou’wester hat on his head. As the officer baked from within, he stayed topside as ordered for an hour and a half, keeping the watch with a large pair of binoculars. Pollywog Copeland was sent forward to stand by the jack staff and keep a lookout on the horizon, using a portable foghorn as a long glass. He played along gamely, calling to the bridge a steady stream of lookout’s reports: seahorses drawing carriages, and all manner of other fanciful trappings of Neptune’s realm.

After the shellbacks lingered over steaks and a rich variety of side dishes, while the pollywogs watched and waited, the pollywogs were given beans, bread, water, and coffee. Then the initiates were ordered to hear the charges against them. The less memorable or colorful crewmen were accused of “being a pollywog.” Most, however, had additional charges to defend. When Bob Copeland’s turn came,

I found myself charged by King Neptune with the most heinous of crimes. I had killed a whale. A protected whale, of all things, served in Neptune’s royal hunting grounds for Neptune’s exclusive sport and game…. On the face of it I was guilty. The whale was certainly dead. My ship had killed it. And of course, as everyone knows, the captain is responsible for what the ship does, good or bad. It appeared that I was as guilty as Robin Hood for invading Sherwood Forest and shooting the bloody king’s deer.

Around eight P.M. all hands were ordered to stand down for the night. The following morning the initiation resumed. The crews aboard the five other ships in the convoy’s screen were holding their own crossing-the-line ceremonies. To ensure that at least a few of the ships had a full watch at any given time—this was, after all, wartime and Japanese submarines were about—the ships started their ceremonies thirty minutes apart.

On the Roberts the pollywogs were ordered to the fantail, stripped down to their shorts, and faced prosecution for their offenses. Fire hoses were turned on them—all warships had firefighting gear that would make most municipalities proud. Bob Copeland was duly soaked; then the royal devil, wielding a pitchfork whose copper tines were wired to a high-voltage, low-amp electricity source, stuck him a few times, delivering a bracing jolt. Ushered before the King, charged by Lieutenant Trowbridge, the royal judge, Copeland produced the soaked piece of paper containing a poem he had written in his defense. His alibi went, in part:

I hit the whale, that much is true

But I pray, my Lord, what could I do?

My ship was on a mission bound

When the royal whale did choose to sound.

My ship, it never had a chance.

Your whale came rushing like a lance,

Straight up at us from depths below

We were attacked by an unseen foe.

The whale we hit, death was his fate;

But not in malice, rage or hate.

No other course was left to me

So self defense is now my plea.

After considering the plea, the court handed down a verdict requiring the skipper to visit the royal dentist and the royal barber, kiss the royal baby, then run the royal gauntlet. By the time the captain, now a shellback, returned to his cabin to clean up, he had had his hair smeared with fuel oil paste and his mouth washed by a valve sprayer filled with diesel oil, vinegar, paprika, and other imponderable ingredients; he had planted a kiss on royal baby Serafini’s grease-loaded navel, and he had run the gauntlet, crawling through a fifteen-foot canvas ventilation tunnel filled with a two-day-old compost of eggshells, coffee grounds, potato peels, and other unmentionables, while shellbacks pounded him through the canvas with large wooden paddles.

Copeland cleaned up as best he could, then returned to the fantail in time to see the four mess stewards, Washington, First, Butler, and Lillard—the only black men on the ship—get theirs. “Those mess men were good fellows and they took the initiation in stride. If I ever had any race prejudice in me, the war knocked it out of me.” The system of segregation that kept the black sailors in the mess could not withstand the bonding effects of the crossing-the-line ceremony.

The only thing worse than participating in the ceremony was sitting it out. Watching his shipmates run the gauntlet, one crewman became squeamish and asked to quit. Lieutenant Roberts didn’t miss a beat: “We’ll dismiss him; he’s out of it.” Indeed, the ceremony was purely voluntary. This sailor was free to go. About two hours later, once it sank in that he was now the only pollywog aboard the ship, he returned and begged to be “given the works.”

According to Copeland, “I suppose we were mean, but we wouldn’t let him have it…. He had had his chance and he flubbed the dub. I still can’t help but feel sorry for the poor boy. I know what he missed. He really missed the feeling of something you can’t put into words, a feeling of belonging.”

*      *     *

COPELAND’S CREW BELONGED. There was no more practical preparation for war than the fraternal coming together of the young men who gave the Samuel B. Roberts life. At Manus, the ship itself found new associations too. On October 12, after Bob Copeland and the other skippers had been briefed on the planning for Operation King Musketeer II, as the Philippines invasion was known, the destroyer escort joined her cousins in the Seventh Fleet: the old battleships of Admiral Oldendorf’s Task Group 77.2, the escort carriers of Task Group 77.4, and most of the other tin cans that would join her under the call sign Taffy 3 for the long journey to Leyte.

Four

The three destroyers of Taffy 3—the Hoel, the Heermann, and the Johnston— were the only ships in the Seventh Fleet task unit that were not conceived as lesser versions of a more capable vessel. Escort carriers were bargain-basement aircraft carriers. Destroyer escorts did the work of destroyers with less than half the main weaponry and one-third less speed. But the trio of Fletcher-class tin cans were deep-sea thoroughbreds, members of the finest class of U.S. destroyers produced during World War II.

Tin cans. Destroyers wore the nickname proudly, for none better suited these ships whose three-eighths-inch steel decks creaked and bent in wave troughs but rode out storms like corks. The destroyers’ forerunners were the torpedo boats that had shown their offensive value as early as the Civil War. Their successes spurred U.S. naval planners to carry their design forward as the industrializing nation mobilized to defend the far reaches of the hemisphere as required by the Monroe Doctrine. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt championed the construction of “torpedo boat destroyers” seaworthy enough to sail with the oceangoing battle line and protect it from an enemy’s torpedo boats. In the years leading up to World War II, as the Navy experimented within the strict zero-sum environment bounded by the variables of size, speed, offensive power, survivability, and cost, the modern concept of the destroyer evolved.

By 1944 the Fletcher-class destroyers that rode with Taffy 3 represented the state of the art. They were the first class of U.S. warship to be designed free of treaty limitations. Because their design coincided with the massive ramp-up in production during the early years of the war, more Fletchers were produced than any other class of combatant vessel. From the February 1942 launching of the Nicholas at Bath Iron Works in Maine to the June 1944 launching of the Rooks at Seattle-Tacoma, 175 Fletcher-classdestroyers would be built by the time World War II ended. Most of them served in the Pacific. Because the absence of treaty restraint enabled the Navy’s General Board to tailor the new destroyers to their mission rather than to the requirements of diplomats, the Fletchers were large ships. Overstretching a football field at 376 ½ feet in length, they were far more imposing than the nickname “tin cans” might have suggested. It would have taken Ted Williams’s best swing to hit a baseball from a Fletcher’s fantail all the way to its graceful bow. With a displacement of 2,050 tons (2,700 with a full fuel load), they were swift, seaworthy, and stout, with considerable firepower. Though rated at a top speed of thirty-six knots, the Fletchers carried enough weaponry to make the biggest enemy feel their punch—ten Mark 15 torpedoes, five single-mounted five-inch/38-caliber guns, a formidable thicket of twenty- and forty-millimeter machine guns, two roller racks of depth charges, and the sophisticated sensing equipment to land them on their targets. That ships so swift could span the distance from home plate in Fenway Park to the Green Monster in deep left-center field was impressive testament to the power of the Navy’s industry and technology. Yet in the taxonomy of U.S. warships of the 1940s, destroyers were mere dust mites compared with the new battleships named for states and roaming the seas on behalf of their federal union.

Individual warships draw much of their personality from two sources: their mission, and the personalities of their most prominent officers and chiefs. With destroyers, a certain tension existed between their mission and their mind-set. Their mission had long been defined by the Navy’s expectation that any war against Japan would involve refighting World War I’s Battle of Jutland: heavy ships trading salvos at long range; destroyers standing faithfully by the battle line, interposing—screening—as needed to protect the higher-value ships. The destroyers’ offensive value was largely an afterthought.

Destroyer commanders tended to have a more expansive view of their combat potential. Recognizing the power of their principal armament—torpedoes—to turn the tide of a battle, they chafed at their role as auxiliaries. But even as the Japanese were ravaging American fleets in the Solomon Islands with torpedoes and aggressive tactical doctrine that made their destroyers giant-killers, and even as carrier aircraft were proving decisive at Midway and elsewhere, American tacticians insisted on the supremacy of the heavy gun and refused to free destroyers to operate in an offensive role.

As the war proceeded, the big ships won followings back home with front-page headlines and photos. But the less glamorous grunt work performed by the destroyers helped make their larger cousins’ iconic status possible. They worked the outer perimeter of their task forces, pinging the deep for submarines and watching the skies for planes. “Tin cans” may have been the moniker that stuck to them, but a Heermann sailor appreciated their true nature: “the hunting dogs of the fleet.” Their vigilant work allowed their more regal principals to maintain the illusion of invulnerability. Though battleship guns were often decisive wherever they engaged, as often as not the bigger ships asserted themselves by their mere presence. Destroyers and destroyer escorts asserted themselves with their weapons or did not assert themselves at all.

If battleships and carriers were corporations, with payrolls of thousands managed by a bevy of mid-level managers who wore the gold stripes of lieutenants and lieutenant commanders, destroyers and destroyer escorts were mom-and-pop shops. Where the capital ships carried themselves with a certain institutional hubris that existed apart from the men who ran them, the DDs and DEs were steel-plated extensions of their most prominent individual officers and chiefs. In this respect, the standard persona of a fleet destroyer was made unique by the shaping and molding of human hands. Bob Copeland shaped the identity of the Samuel B. Roberts. But in that respect, among the skippers of Taffy 3’s screen, he was not unique.

The leader of the seven ships that screened the six escort carriers of Taffy 3 was the USS Hoel. Commissioned on July 29, 1943, at the Bethlehem Steel shipyard in San Francisco, the Hoel had the luxury of two competent, popular skippers: the current boss, Cdr. Leon Kintberger, and the former captain in whose shadow he worked: his predecessor, Cdr. William Dow Thomas, who stayed aboard as Taffy 3’s screen commander.

Barrel-chested and good-humored, Thomas had been a popular captain. His popularity and knack for command earned him the just desserts of the skipper who does his job a bit too well—he got promoted straight out of it. Newly promoted and awaiting reassignment, he was not able to get off the Hoel before the Leyte operation began. So he chose to remain aboard his old ship as commander of Taffy 3’s seven-ship screen. He could be found in the wardroom every night, playing cribbage over coffee. Kintberger, cheerful and pleasant, handled the inevitable benign pressure of Thomas’s continued presence with aplomb and grace. Alfred Thayer Mahan had written of the “Nelson touch,” a personal style of command favoring cordial social relations with officers, professional appreciation, and confidence. The Nelson touch was “rarely the result of careful calculation, but bespeaks rather the inner graciousness of the heart that [Nelson] abundantly possessed.” The Hoel’s wardroom seemed to operate by Nelson’s principle. Not every ship was so fortunate.

Cdr. Amos T. Hathaway, age thirty, had once been the Hoel’s executive officer. As exec, he was effectively the ship’s general manager, Commander Thomas’s right hand in all matters. He imposed discipline. He maintained the good order of the crew, the upkeep of equipment, set the daily schedule, and oversaw its fulfillment by the senior petty officers. As boss of the CIC, he was the ship’s eyes and ears. But the way he interpreted and acted upon the things he saw and heard was seldom to the liking of the Hoel’s crew.

Hathaway was a martinet, as disliked by his men as Thomas was admired. As martinets are wont to do, he disposed of his duties with an exacting severity. That trait served him well, for executive officers seldom advance by gaining the affections of underlings. Shortly before the Hoel joined Taffy 3, Hathaway got a promotion and command of his own ship.

The men of the Hoel who had the closest acquaintance with his predations and mind games quietly cheered his departure. But that departure took him only as far as the other side of the formation. When Amos T Hathaway took command of the Heermann, one destroyer’s relief became another one’s pain.

As the new skipper of the Heermann, Hathaway made his mark quickly enough. The day before he was to inspect his crew at a full muster, he asked his chief yeoman and captain’s talker, Harold Whitney, to bring him the service records of the full crew. He spent the night with the records and the next day demonstrated the power of his photographic memory by walking down the ranks, stopping at every fifth or sixth man, and asking about his wife, family, and hometown, by name and with nary a mistake.

Though he stood six foot four, he weighed around 130 pounds. With sunken cheeks, protruding ears, and eyes that naturally bugged, he was wiry not only in physical bearing but in voice and attitude too. He was reflexively peevish and relished keeping his officers off balance and on their guard. His memory made him a marvelous stickler for “Rocks and Shoals,” as the Navy regulations, Articles for the Government of the Navy, were known. He would reject written reports without comment—“This is wrong. Fix it.” But he was just as likely to upbraid someone for slavishly following the rules when they didn’t suit him.

The patrician collegiality that marked many Navy wardrooms was altogether missing from the Heermann. The native Coloradoan’s shrill voice could often be heard chastising someone over one or another point of order. “He was a son of a bitch,” said a former Heermann officer fifty-six years after the fact. “He made Captain Queeg look like a sissy.” That officer wasn’t alone in his ill sentiments. The Heermann’s physician, Dr. Edwin Bebb, was required to keep a monthly medical record on each of the ship’s officers. Though he knew he was shielded by his medical credentials, Bebb feared his skipper would resent his adverse assessment of his psychology and seek a pretext to court-martial him.

When Hathaway had been the Hoel’s exec, his underlings could take refuge in the kindness of their skipper, William Thomas. But on the Heermann, where he stood atop the chain of command, Hath-away’s will was law, and officers who flouted it by coddling persecuted crew members risked drawing his fury. The Heermann’s wardroom buzzed with half-cocked fantasies about doing the skipper in. Something had to be done, the thinking went. This was not His Majesty’s Navy circa 1835. This was America. Someone suggested that it might be arranged for Captain Hathaway tragically to lose his footing out on deck during a storm. But regicide was beyond them. Ultimately they settled on less capital forms of aggression.

One day when Hathaway was gone from his quarters, someone found a way to insert a handful of marbles into the compartment above his sea cabin. Every time the Heermann rolled—and like any destroyer it rolled often and deeply—the captain was serenaded by the clangorous lullaby of the little spheres rolling across the thin steel plating over his bunk.

Such petty conspiracy-mongering bound the Heermann’s crew together against a common enemy. At least Hathaway served in that role until a real foe could be engaged. Perhaps when the shooting started, the crew would see their skipper’s malign will as a weapon in its own right. What force might it have when joined with theirs and turned upon an actual enemy?

The Hoel was run by the popular duo of Kintberger and Thomas, the Heermann by the white-knuckled autocracy of Amos Hathaway. The fighting culture of Taffy 3’s third destroyer, the Johnston, was the product of one man’s inspired leadership: that of its first and only captain, Cdr. Ernest E. Evans.

When Evans arrived at the Seattle-Tacoma shipyard to oversee the fitting out of the brand-new USS Johnston, DD-557, he impressed his crew immediately with the substance of his will. At the ship’s commissioning ceremony on Navy Day, October 27, 1943, he informed his raptly attentive audience: “This is going to be a fighting ship. I intend to go in harm’s way, and anyone who doesn’t want to go along had better get off right now.” As if to underscore the invitation, he added, “Now that I have a fighting ship, I will never retreat from an enemy force.” Something in the tone of his voice told his listeners that he was deadly serious. Not one of them accepted his offer to leave the ship ahead of whatever trouble he had in store for them.

Indeed he was serious. As an officer aboard the World War I-era four-piper destroyer Alden, Evans had witnessed the disaster of the Battle of the Java Sea in February 1942, in which a Japanese heavy cruiser force made short work of an Allied fleet. Two weeks after the battle Evans assumed command of the Alden. But he never expunged from his mind the sting of having to flee from the Japanese. In that sense, he came to the Johnston with a cross to bear.

Evans had initially pursued military service with the dream of becoming a Marine officer, but an appointment to Annapolis escaped him. So in May 1926, at the age of nineteen, he said farewell to Muskogee, Oklahoma, and enlisted in the Navy. Thirteen months after his enlistment he won entrance to the Naval Academy class of 1931 via fleet competition. His Annapolis midshipman’s moniker, “the Chief,” would prove to be apt for at least two reasons. First, he was by nature always in charge. Anyone who met him could feel the way his charisma naturally filled a room. Then there was the matter of his proud Cherokee heritage. His ancestry was not overwhelmingly evident in his appearance. The set of his dark-browed gaze, the large chest, and the subtle smirk of his lips accented by a neat black mustache made him look like a somewhat stouter incarnation of Clark Gable. It was clear to all who met him that Ernest E. Evans was not a man to trifle with. He bestrode his narrow bridge like a colossus. The fighting spirit of his forebears animated him.

Evans appreciated the hidden nature of things, the power of the unseen over the tangible. In matters of discipline, he generally preferred to let the idea of his wrath do the work of the actual thing. He never exploded in anger as Hathaway did. He seldom if ever upbraided a subordinate openly for poor performance. But then he seldom smiled either. “He expected every man to do his job without any psychological ploys,” Lt. (jg) Ellsworth Welch, Evans’s antisubmarine warfare officer, remembered. Evans trusted people to do their work. If they failed, he let them—he knew instinctively, as they did, that they wouldn’t fail him twice. He never quite had to spell out the consequences; the very thought that the skipper might become disappointed was enough. The Johnston’s gunnery officer, Lt. Robert C. Hagen, said, “He had great faith in all of us, unbelievably so. I don’t recall him saying a mean word to me the whole time…. The captain was a true, instinctive fighter…. We were on a high-class ship because the captain was high-class.”

If Ernest Evans was not destined to be a Marine, he would settle, seventeen years after his enlistment, for running a warship like one. That meant simply that he would take care of his men. He would also, soon enough, take care of Marines. In February 1944, during the invasion of the Marshall Islands, the Johnston drew shore bombardment duty to support Marines advancing against stiff enemy opposition on the islands of Kwajalein and Eniwetok. For Evans, it was not just another assignment. Beyond his generalized desire to grapple with an enemy, he had empathy for the mud-slogging grunts moving into the Japanese killing fields ashore. He knew this: he could well have been one of them. The Johnston got in close, sometimes so close as to pierce the veil of distance that usually stood between Navy men and conditions ashore.

For many of the crew it was their first sight of blood. According to Edward Block, a coxswain, “a landing craft came alongside with young kids who had been wounded on the islands. They were brought to our ship because we were close in to the beach and we had a doctor on board. To see those young kids lying there all shot up brought tears to my eyes and I cried. There but for the grace of God …”

The crew of the Johnston witnessed more of it during the Marianas campaign, during the bombardment of Guam. Broadside to the beach, pounding the caves in the cliffs above with a full battery of five-inch fire, the Johnston fired so furiously that the guns glowed red. Bob Hagen had to take the occasional break, just to let the barrels cool. During a lull boatswain’s mate first class Bob Hollenbaugh went below to check on Gun 54’s handling room, when he encountered a young Marine in the care of the Johnston’smedical division. Hollenbaugh approached the Marine, who held fast to consciousness despite the gruesome fact that he had had an arm shot off, and asked him how he felt. “I’m fine, sir.” The kid told the boatswain’s mate that he had entered the Marines just nine weeks ago. “That kid looked like he was about fourteen years old,” Hollenbaugh said. “My God. What is this world coming to? I’ll never forget the expression on that kid’s face. And he still had the presence of mind to look up at me and call me sir.”

Evans cared about the kids fighting ashore. Time after time he took the Johnston closer to shore than the Navy’s bombardment plan specified. When his allotted number of shells were fired into the island—such quantifiables being carefully managed by higher command—he beseeched his superiors for more. “Damn it, they need fire support, and we’re going to give it to them,” he said. Twice during the shelling of Guam, Evans boarded his wooden captain’s gig, was lowered into the water, and motored over to the task group’s flagship to ask for more ammunition. He got it.

“We would pull away from our positions near the shore and reload with ammo and then pull back in to resume firing,” fireman third class Milt Pehl said. “At times we were so close to shore that we were actually hit by small arms fire.” In the first year since her commissioning, through six invasions, the Johnston never suffered a hit worse than that.

The full-court-press gunnery duty placed a lot of pressure on the men directing the shooting. In Bob Hagen, one of the destroyer’s senior lieutenants, Evans had the kind of gunnery officer the skipper of a fighting ship had to have. Of the seventy men in his gunnery department—which included not only the men who manned and loaded the guns but also the fire-controlmen in the gun director and the radar-men in the combat information center, the crews on the two quintuple torpedo mounts, and the “ping jockeys” on the sonar stack—only seven had ever been to sea before coming aboard the Johnston.

Hagen had pushed them hard in training, teaching them the job by rote and repetition. Training a green deck force, never a small task, was made more difficult still when the man responsible for that job on the Johnston, the chief boatswain’s mate, went “over the hill” the day before the Johnston was scheduled to go to sea. A ship had to have a chief bosun. If Captain Evans did nothing else to impress his crew, he would still have ensured their eternal gratitude for securing as a replacement chief boatswain’s mate Clyde Burnett.

Burnett was a child of the fleet. An orphan reared in south Texas by four different families, the Johnston’s chief boatswain’s mate began his life of service in the Civilian Conservation Corps before enlisting in the Navy more than two years before the Pearl Harbor attack. Burnett had just returned from a tour of duty in the Pacific when Evans found him ashore at a Navy receiving station in San Diego. “The captain put the make on him,” Bob Hagen said. “The guy didn’t have a chance.”

As a superior chief bosun should be, Burnett was right hand to the captain. Ernest Evans relied on him as a liaison to his enlisted force. In turn, Burnett delegated their supervision and discipline to his capable first-class boatswain’s mates. Harry Longacre ran the First Division, the hundred-odd sailors who comprised the deck force on the forward half of the ship. His counterpart aft, boss of the Second Division, was Bob Hollenbaugh, a sharp, no-nonsense Indianan whose father, a machinist’s mate in the Dantesque boiler rooms of a World War I-era battleship, had counseled Bob to get a topside rating at all costs. Hollenbaugh performed his duties cleanly and professionally and with not a little relish. On a crew made up mostly of first-time seagoers, his, Longacre’s, and Burnett’s most vital contribution was their experience.

Burnett proved to be a popular chief. The boyish twenty-four-year-old with the lantern jaw and quiet manner watched over the kids on the Johnston’s deck force like a father. The kids who swabbed and painted and scraped and loaded supplies and took on fuel loved him like one.

But forging a crew into a hardened fighting unit mostly required, not love, but discipline and ruthless, repetitive drill. In that respect Evans prized Lieutenant Hagen’s tough, stickler’s nature. He let his gun boss draw up the general quarters or battle stations assignments and gave him the discretion to call the crew to GQ most anytime he liked. Hagen used that freedom liberally, so much so that the Johnston acquired its own inevitable nickname, long before it reached a combat zone, “GQ Johnny.” When the claxon sounded, the men raced to their guns and searched for targets. For antiaircraft gunners, there were long nylon target sleeves towed by pilots—very brave pilots—from the nearby air station. Crews on the five-inch mounts fired on sleds pulled behind tugboats—very brave tugboats—at varying ranges on the surface.

It took a lot of drill for the crew’s proficiency to live up to the precision of their equipment. Each of the Johnston’s five-inch gun mounts was engineered with the precision of an outsize Swiss watch. The turret assemblies were three stories tall, running deep into the bowels of the ship. Each gun mount sat atop an ammunition handling room, where crew loaded shells onto hydraulic hoists—dumbwaiters—that whisked the shells upward. Below the handling room was a magazine that fed all the handling rooms.

Among the greatest innovations of the 1940s-era Navy were the radar fire-control systems with which all new surface combatants were equipped. Unlike the weapons on the smaller destroyer escorts, the guns of a Fletcher-class destroyer were controlled centrally by its gunnery officer. Seated in the enclosed gun director platform high above the bridge, Hagen operated a two-handled steering mechanism that controlled the aiming of the Johnston’s five main gun mounts. When Hagen ordered the gun crews in the mounts to “match pointers,” the guns came into alignment with the director, and the gun captains relinquished control of their mounts to Hagen. At that point the two men beside him in the gun director, the pointer and trainer—teenage enlisted men named George Himelright and James Buzbee—took over. They kept whatever they were shooting at fixed in the crosshairs of their telescopes, one for gauging bearing (or direction), the other gauging elevation (or distance).

In heavy seas, the sight of a destroyer’s five director-controlled guns swaying in unison to stay on target as the ship pitched, yawed, and rolled could be unsettling. This synchro-gyroscopic wizardry relegated the men manning the guns to auxiliary backups whose duties went beyond simple loading only if the system broke down. As long as range and target data kept feeding the fire-control computer, they had no aiming to do and little discretion to exercise. Gun crews had only to pull rounds off the hydraulic shell hoist and lay them in front of the powder canisters in the sliding breech tray. Their most immediate challenge was to keep their fingers and hands from getting crushed between a heavy shell and the breech mechanism.

In another day, eyesight was essential to gunnery. Optical rangefinders were useful to a point, but the critical work of spotting shell splashes and correcting aim belonged to those with the sharpest eyes. By 1944, even in its first generation, American fire-control technology was so good that it could make a top performer out of a man who would probably have been unsuited to the job not long before.

At age seventeen, having beaten out sixty applicants in competition for the honor, Bob Hagen arrived at Annapolis as an aspiring plebe—only to get sent home that same day for flunking a routine eye exam. He opted for the enlisted route, scraped paint for two years aboard the battleship Texas, then returned to the States to attend junior college and finish his bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas. In his second bid for an officer’s commission, Hagen attended the reserve officer “ninety-day wonder” program at Northwestern University. In September 1941 in Chicago, Bob Hagen at last got his ensign’s gold stripe.

Hagen saw action almost immediately off Guadalcanal, as assistant communications officer and radar officer aboard the destroyer Aaron Ward. In a ferocious nighttime surface engagement against superior Japanese forces in November 1942, he took shrapnel to his left biceps, nearly bled to death from his wounds, and won a Silver Star for gallantry. Returning to the States to convalesce, he decided that he would rather pursue his career in gunnery than in communications. “The gun boss could fire a hundred shots and hit once and he’s a hero,” he said. “In communications, if you screw up [in transcribing] one letter, all hell breaks loose, and you’ve committed a mortal sin. I said to myself, ‘I’d rather be a hero.’”

*      *     *

HAGEN FINISHED GUNNERY and fire-control school in Washington, D.C., learning to use the gyroscopes and servo motors that ensured that imperfect eyesight would not impede his advancement. For certain specialized purposes, the Johnston’s Mark 1A fire-control computer and Mark 37 radar were better than any pair of spectacles, if rather more expensive to clean.

Following her commissioning at Seattle-Tacoma, during the Johnston’s shakedown cruise off San Diego, Hagen tackled the challenge of training his crew of inexperienced pollywogs to operate the sophisticated gunnery system. “We were all so green. The gun crews didn’t know what they were doing, and I wasn’t so sure what I was doing either,” he said. In the first days of shakedown, when drills were going poorly, Hagen wrote a friend aboard another ship, “Stay out of our gun range—anything can happen.” He was in Captain Evans’s thrall, eager to please his charismatic skipper. But the captain made it plain that Hagen was on his own in bringing his gunners to proficiency. This freedom to hang himself with his own hawser was nearly as bad as suffering under an ill-tempered micromanager. The pressure began to get to him.

Bob Hagen was “a nervous wreck” during shakedown. Well groomed and intense, a compulsive smoker, disdainful of repose, Hagen had an intellect as sharp as his personality. Intelligence and initiative were de rigueur for a destroyer officer. On a small ship the performance of a few key individuals could make or break her. Hagen had little patience for those who struck him as slow or stupid. In drawing up general quarters station assignments, he distinguished the thinking men from rote operators, installing the latter in the sweaty jobs in the handling rooms and magazines and the former in sonar, CIC, and fire control, where human discretion could make a decisive difference.

Unlike his captain, Lieutenant Hagen didn’t hesitate to dress down an underperformer in front of his shipmates. Aware of their growing resentment, he became cautious among the crew. When possible, he avoided walking the decks alone at night, for fear an embittered sailor might “accidentally” knock him overboard.

But many men were firmly convinced that Bob Hagen, like Clyde Burnett, was one of the best things that could have happened to the Johnston. In six weeks of drill his program of training turned the gunnery department into a competent working team. Boatswain’s mate first class Bob Hollenbaugh was especially sharp. The captain of Gun 54, mounted on the stern of the ship, had the initiative and savoir faire to lead young enlisted men effectively. Hagen also had confidence in Lt. Jack Bechdel, his torpedo officer, and in Julian Owen, a resourceful gunner’s mate with a knack for repairing broken machinery.

The crews in the five main gun mounts—numbered 51, 52, 53, 54, and 55 from bow to stern—competed for bragging rights as the ship’s fastest gun gang. An average rate of fire for a five-inch/38-caliber crew was fifteen rounds per minute. Gun 55, the rearwardmost mount on the ship, got off eighty-four rounds in one four-minute firing drill, an average of twenty-one per minute. With results like that, Hagen dared to begin feeling his oats. Writing again to the same friend he had warned several weeks before to stay clear of his scattershot batteries, the lieutenant discarded all modesty: “You may now bring on the Japanese fleet.” Before an opposing fleet appeared in his sighting telescope, however, the apprentice gun boss would first have to prove his proficiency in action against enemy shore targets.

During the bombardment of Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, Hagen wielded the hammer that Evans used to support the Marines. There the strict training regimen and the engineered precision of the radar-controlled gunnery system came together at last. Captain Evans took the ship in close to the beach, dropping anchor to stabilize her as a gun platform on the northern edge of the landing zone, which frogmen from the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams had marked with navigation lights visible only from the open sea. Hagen was “nervous as a cat,” gripping his slewing handles with white knuckles as the destroyer closed with enemy shore gunners. “They could have machine-gunned us to death, and we were trying to figure out how to defend ourselves,” he said. “All of a sudden over the loudspeaker came this song, and the lyrics, ‘A sleepy lagoon …’” Hagen found that well-trained crewmen could bring humor to any situation. Call it the product of confidence.

*      *     *

AT CLOSE RANGE the Johnston’s entire chorus of weaponry came to bear on the island. There was the sharp, earringing bark of the fiveinchers, the rhythmic thumping of the twin-mounted forty-millimeter machine guns, and the faster metallic chatter of the single-barreled twenties. Men from a damage-control party broke out rifles and made like Davy Crockett from the main deck. Lt. (jg) Ellsworth Welch took out his. 45-caliber pistol, outstretched his arm, and enfiladed the distant enemy with the handgun.

From his perch in the gun director, Hagen spied a Japanese officer on the beach, waving a saber, rallying his troops to the fight, and thought, Why not? He put the officer in the sights of his slewing device. The fire-control computer clicked and whirred and zipped coordinates to the Johnston’s five main gun turrets. When Hagen closed the firing key, they all barked as one. The technology lived up to its brutal promise. The five-shell salvo obliterated the man.

“Mr. Hagen, that was very good shooting,” called Captain Evans from the bridge. “But in the future, try not to waste so much ammunition on one individual.”

Five

The thirteen warships that were gathered under the code name Taffy 3, their crews totaling about 7,200 men, sailed under the command of Rear Adm. Clifton Albert Frederick Sprague. He was one of the new generation of naval officers who had made their careers in naval aviation. A graduate of the Annapolis class of 1918, he had been tagged with the nickname “Ziggy” for the kinetic style of his gait—limbs agangle, “tousled hair swinging fore and aft”—as he shuffled off to class. Though just five feet nine inches tall, he was sturdily built, a skilled and enthusiastic baseball player, and according to a Naval Academy classmate, “clever in nearly every sport.”

Sprague had heard the call of the sea at an early age, from his family’s oceanfront cottage in Rockport, Massachusetts, thirty-five miles up the coast from Boston. There he had spent his childhood summers fishing from the jetties of the picturesque Headlands with Buster, his Irish setter, and prowling the rocky shoreline of Sandy Bay with his younger sister, Dora, hunting for crabs to use as bait. His attraction to the ocean became so strong as to be physical; he had to be near the sea. To Clif Sprague, traveling even a few miles inland was like entering a vast, arid desert: tolerable for short stretches but leaving him eager to reimmerse himself in the ion-charged salt air.

For the newly minted ensigns pouring out of Annapolis, naval aviation offered fresh career paths to be blazed, unprecedented opportunities to learn and to lead.

In 1919, as Lieutenant Sprague was serving on board the USS Wheeling, the General Board of the Navy declared that “fleet aviation must be developed to its fullest extent.” The board, a committee of admirals who counseled the secretary of the Navy, predicted that in future naval battles “the advantage will lie with the fleet which wins in the air.” Embracing the dangers and uncertainty of the field at a time when its preeminence was anything but assured, Ziggy Sprague and the Pensacola class of 1921 were pioneers. When he finished Pensacola’s fledgling aviation program after nine months of flight training, he joined a small cadre of naval officers who were qualified to fly. Sprague knew change was coming, and he positioned himself to contribute to it. His assignments throughout the 1920s exposed him to the latest thinking in carrier operations. Assigned to Philadelphia’s naval aircraft factory in 1923, he helped engineers work out the wrinkles in the catapult systems that launched the heavy aircraft from their carriers. Later, Sprague worked as a test pilot at Hampton Roads Naval Air Station in Virginia, assisting the inventor Carl Norden in devising safe ways to land planes on a carrier deck.

If Sprague helped create this world, it in turn placed its mark upon him. It was evident in the physical structure of his countenance. Early in his naval career Sprague acquired what people in the aviation trade called an “instrument face,” the pug-nosed look of the test pilot. When the arrester hook on the tail of his plane snagged the wires stretched across the experimental flight decks upon which he practiced, as often as not the jerk caused his plane to stop with considerably greater suddenness than his face did. His frequent collisions with the cockpit instrument panel literally reshaped the contours of his appearance. His nose was slightly flatter than it should have been, his teeth looser. Aviation was a dangerous business, to be sure. By the time the war was over, nearly a quarter of Sprague’s Pensacola class—eight out of thirty-four—had been killed in mishaps on the flight line.

Despite this revolution’s stark dangers, Sprague was thrilled to be part of it. He loved airplanes, cherished the very idea of flight. But like any revolution, naval aviation came up against a reactionary old guard, many of them at the highest levels of Navy command. The battleship officers, whose traditional “gun club” culture had long dominated the fleet, wanted nothing to do with these flaky flying futurists who seemed blind to the beauty and breathtaking power of an eight-gun main-battery broadside. Sure, battleships carried airplanes. Parked on catapults mounted on their sterns and after turrets, floatplanes were useful for scouting and gunnery spotting. But by and large they were considered bothersome contraptions notorious for soiling the handsome teak of the dreadnoughts’ quarterdecks with oil and grease.

As for the men who flew them, the old guard didn’t see commissioned aviators as special or different. They were simply regular officers with a peculiar specialty. Naval aviation was a sideshow. This conceit revealed itself in the fact that in 1923 eighty-eight out of the hundred pilots trained that year were transferred back to duty in surface ships so that they could sharpen their talents as line officers. Advocates of airpower resisted this chauvinism, stating that “aviation is essentially and fundamentally a different profession…. Practically every country in the world … has accepted the assignment of personnel to aviation as a permanent life work.” But the old guard at Annapolis would hear none of it. Chief of Naval Operations William S. Benson listened to the proponents of the brave new wild blue world and dismissed it all as “just a lot of noise.” The officer he appointed to supervise the Navy’s air arm held the lofty rank of lieutenant junior grade.

By the mid-1920s, however, while Ziggy Sprague was trying out catapults and putting arrester systems through their paces at the Ana-costia Naval Air Station near Washington, D.C., neither rhetoric nor administrative gamesmanship could trump the arrival of an idea whose time had come. The U.S. Navy was on its way to becoming a carrier-based fleet. The Lexington and the Saratoga were operational, converted in midconstruction from battlecruisers to aircraft carriers. The move was in part motivated by the need to satisfy the new limitations on large warship construction that the Washington Naval Treaty imposed upon the United States, Britain, and Japan. But their transformation was also a clear sign of the shape of wars to come. Their eight-inch main batteries were shunted aside to starboard, making room for spacious flight decks that stretched from stem to stern. Beneath those 888-foot expanses of wood, the flywheel catapults Sprague had tested would launch aircraft into the sky. On landing, they would be brought safely to a stop by the arrester wire systems he had helped Carl Norden to refine.

In 1925 Sprague married Annabel Fitzgerald, whom he had met at a naval officers’ party on Christmas Day, 1924. Their wedding was notable for the absence of her brother, a wanderer whose migrations seemed to intensify whenever important family occasions loomed. She was not close to F. Scott Fitzgerald; she did not approve of the author’s fast lifestyle. Annabel must have been dismayed at some level too by the life her husband had chosen. He was away on assignment when their first daughter was born and was routinely called to service at times when his family needed him. Courtney, his first daughter, would one day explain, “The Navy was his life, and it came first. It never entered our minds that the Navy didn’t come first.”

In March 1928, assigned to the Lexington, Sprague moved from the laboratory to the front line. He was given a plum, highly visible job as its flight deck officer and assistant air officer. Like a cello virtuoso appointed to conduct a symphony, the veteran test pilot relished the intricacies of command. Orchestrating the movements of planes and the tempo of flight operations aboard ship drew on all of the knowledge he had gained, all of the instincts he had developed in previous assignments. He learned how to coordinate the flight deck crews as they moved planes for launch and recovery operations and how to anticipate what weapons and equipment would be needed and when, the sequence in which they were to be used, and the order in which the planes would fly off the ship. He rehearsed the choreography that would make the Lexington, home to two thousand sailors and seventy-two airplanes, an efficient fighting ship.

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

That day, as captain of the seaplane tender Tangier, Sprague watched every ship tied up to Ford Island except his get hit during the Japanese attack. Loaded with torpedoes, an inferno awaiting its spark, the Tangier early in the battle became shrouded in smoke from the burning wrecks around her. The previous day, December 6, Sprague had upbraided his crew for their sloppy performance during an intensive series of drills. He broke with his nature and let them have it. Gathering his officers in the Tangier’s wardroom, Sprague said, “We’re not prepared. We can’t trust the Japanese. How do you know the Japanese won’t attack tomorrow?” The next morning the Combined Fleet struck. The Tangier’s gunners were by many accounts the first in the harbor to fire on the Japanese. They brought down three enemy planes, and their ship was never hit.

Among his classmates in the Annapolis class of 1918, however, Sprague was among the last to lead an aircraft carrier into action. Forrest Sherman was captain of the Wasp as early as 1942. J. J. “Jocko” Clark commanded the Yorktown. Thomas Sprague—no relation to Clif—began skippering the Intrepid in June 1943. When Sprague was ashore at Annapolis serving as a flight instructor ten years out of the academy, one of his students was a man who would become the most publicly acclaimed naval officer since Dewey. Capt. William F. Halsey decided early on to stake his professional fortunes on the wings of the naval air service. “I was eating, drinking, and breathing aviation,” Halsey wrote in his memoirs. “I flew as often as … Ziggy Sprague would give me a ride.”

While Sherman, Clark, and Tommy Sprague were living on the sharp edge of the naval air war against Japan, Ziggy Sprague was ashore, first supervising air defenses along the Atlantic and Gulf coastlines of Florida, then commanding Seattle’s Sand Point Naval Air Station. But soon enough Sprague would have a new seagoing command. It would only strengthen his appreciation for what carrier-based airpower could do.

In October 1943 Sprague took command of the newly minted Essex-class fleet carrier Wasp, the ninth Navy ship to carry that storied name. The Wasp’s most recent namesake, captained by Forrest Sherman, had been sunk by a Japanese submarine off Guadalcanal the year before. But American industry saw to it that Wasp number eight was replaced by an even more formidable ship. Built to house nearly 3,500 officers and crew, the Wasp’s newest incarnation was launched at Quincy’s Fore River Shipyard on August 17, 1943.

Ziggy Sprague was slow to make his mark on the new ship, slow even to be noticed. The ship’s newsletter reported that Captain Sprague, true to modest form, “came in quietly and took over with so little fanfare that it was several days before the word got around.” But there was no doubting his effectiveness. One of Sprague’s officers aboard the Wasp was Lt. John Roosevelt, the youngest son of the president who would shortly make Sprague an admiral. Lieutenant Roosevelt wrote that Sprague “took a very green crew and molded us together into a unit that each and every one of us had a personal pride in.”

At the Wasp’s commissioning ceremony in Boston, Sprague had told the assembled crew, “The air group is the only reason for the carrier’s existence. Remember that…. Their comfort and efficiency is our major concern.… A carrier, offensively, you know, is no better than the air group it supports.” They were the words of a true fly-boy.

Sprague’s appreciation for his air groups was shared at the highest level of carrier command. The Navy’s leading maestro of carrier operations, Vice Adm. Marc A. Mitscher, knew that a pilot’s value went beyond economic calculation. “You can train a pilot for $50,000. But never, ever tell a pilot that,” Mitscher would tell his biographer. “We can’t buy pilots with money…. The whole striking force of this carrier, all we spend in preparation and operation up to this point, finally is spearheaded by a hundred young pilots. Each of these boys is captain of his own ship. What he thinks, his confidence in what he is doing, how hard he presses home the attack, is exactly how effective we are…. We don’t hypnotize them. These kids aren’t crazy.”

As important as pilots were, good old-fashioned seamanship remained essential in carrier operations too. On this score Sprague performed admirably. At the helm of the Wasp under air attack during the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, he maneuvered the ship so skillfully that he dodged three bombs dropped by Japanese planes and won the Navy’s Legion of Merit for the engagement.

About three weeks later, on July 9, 1944, Captain Sprague was appointed to the temporary wartime rank of rear admiral by order of President Franklin Roosevelt. The president’s son, Lieutenant Roosevelt, observed, “When he was promoted from Captain to Admiral, we were all happy that his fine quality of leadership had been recognized but, at the same time, we felt a personal loss when he left the ship.”

Sprague, at age forty-eight, was one of the youngest flag officers in the fleet. But admirals did not command individual ships. He would leave the Wasp and graduate to bigger things—though in his case bigger things meant smaller ships. In August he found himself assigned to command Carrier Division 25, which consisted of the escort carriers Fanshaw Bay, Midway, White Plains, and Kalinin Bay. When the Seventh Fleet’s escort carriers were divvied up into three task units for the Leyte operation, Carrier Divisions 25 and 26 were joined under the rubric of Taffy 3. Sprague commanded the combined unit from his flag quarters on the Fanshaw Bay.

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

Ziggy Sprague was not ambitious in the outwardly grasping manner of some of his colleagues at the flag rank. His predecessor in command of Carrier Division 25 was Rear Adm. Gerald F. Bogan, who was promoted to command one of Halsey’s Third Fleet carrier groups. During his tenure aboard the Fanny B., Bogan could not seem to bear the perceived indignity of flying his flag from the cramped quarters of an escort carrier. He made sure his officers and crew participated in his misery. Though most were new enlistees and reservists who had never before been to sea, Bogan demanded perfection of them, or at least perfect compliance with “Rocks and Shoals,” which began with the declaration: “The commanders of all fleets, squadrons, naval stations, and vessels belonging to the Navy are required to show in themselves a good example of virtue, honor, patriotism, and subordination.”

The indelicate assessment of one senior Fanshaw Bay enlisted man was that Bogan was a “first-class horse’s rear end.” And the disdain was decidedly mutual. With only one officer excepted, Bogan later wrote, “the entire crew [of the Fanshaw Bay] was incompetent.” Years after the war he would harbor bitterness toward the carrier, decrying it as “the worst ship I’d ever seen in any Navy.” If Bogan’s attitude toward the Fanshaw Bay was determined by the drag he thought it exerted on his professional ascent, perhaps an ambitious officer was bound to hope that his assignment to command an escort carrier division was a short one. Climbing the flag ranks required heading to the front lines with the big fleet carriers, not sitting in a rear area aboard a dawdling Kaiser coffin. Quiet, gently ironic, professorial in bearing, Sprague never let his ego interfere with his work.

As flag commander, Sprague was no stranger to the well-being of the Fanshaw Bay’s crew. He made it his business to walk the decks of the Fanny B. and stay mindful of the predicaments of the enlisted man. His style had long been one of good humor and egalitarian informality. He knew how to put nerves at ease with offhand storytelling and easy good humor, a habit of character that was evinced in the wrinkled laugh-lines around his mouth. He was the kind of officer who stopped by the radio room after midnight in his robe and slippers to chat over coffee with whomever he found on duty. At sea he allayed homesickness by easing the enforcement of certain regulations: the galley and mess hall stayed open at all hours, and gambling, while never encouraged, was quietly tolerated. As it was on more than a few Navy ships, gambling was a cottage industry aboard the Fanshaw Bay. Marathon craps and poker games were run on the sly in the ship’s metal shop and other hideaways belowdecks. The sharp sound of dice ricocheting off metal bulkheads could keep a light sleeper awake through the night. But Ziggy Sprague turned a deaf ear to it, considering it a harmless vice. At best it was a dependable morale-builder for enlisted men, far from home and at sea for the first time.

A Fanshaw Bay crewman recalled, “For the first time we had a man in charge of the task unit who made us feel like we were on his team. A man who wasn’t mad because he hadn’t received an Essex-class command.”

Ziggy Sprague was wise to use a light hand with the reservists and greenhorn enlistees who manned the Fanshaw Bay. Coming from the factories and high schools and cornfields of America, many had received aboard the Fanshaw Bay their first sight of the open sea. With several exceptions among the small core of career officers and petty officers on the ship, they were the very definition of a motley crew, in the words of one, “a conglomeration of farmers, ranchers, mechanics, scholars, carpenters and about everything there is but actual sailors.”

Harold Kight enlisted in January 1944 at age twenty, joining fifteen of his buddies on a train from Holdenville, Oklahoma, to San Diego for boot camp. The oldest of five children from a 250-acre farm in Gum Springs, Oklahoma, south of Tulsa, he had grown up helping his father cultivate corn, peanuts, cotton, pecans, and cattle—whatever would sell in the uncertain economy of the post-Depression plains. Working the fields with his three brothers and sister gave him an appreciation for nature’s bounty. Assigned to the Fanshaw Bay as a seaman, he struck for a ship’s cook rating, working as a mess cook in S Division, which comprised the galley staff and the ship’s supply department.

The quality of food at sea was a crapshoot whose odds tended to vary with the length of time the ship had been away from port, despite the blandishments of the 1944 edition of the Cook Book of the United States Navy: “Active men need large amounts of energy, 3,000 to 4,500 calories per day…. Planning the menu, therefore, should be of primary importance to the commissary personnel, for upon it depends, to a great extent, the health and morale of the men in the general mess.” The Cook Book suggested that menus be prepared a week in advance. A chart offered seasonal pattern menus for the three daily meals—breakfast, dinner, and supper. In autumn, a Tuesday breakfast should feature orange juice, hot wheat cereal, scrambled eggs and ham, coffee cake, butter, milk, and coffee. Main supper dishes included pork sausage links and sauerkraut pie, smothered ham slices, tomato rarebit on toast, and spareribs with barbecue sauce. “While the emphasis in menu planning is placed on the nutritive value of the food,” the Cook Book said, “attention must also be given to providing meals which are interesting, attractive, varied, and satisfying. This is helpful in maintaining good morale.”

The ubiquity of meat products on the template menus suggests a degree of optimism on the part of War Department nutritionists. CVEs were short on refrigerated storage space, and so meat and other perishables never lasted long. The Army guys who came aboard from time to time professed to love the food. Coming from their jungle hellholes where they subsisted on lizards, frogs, worms, and who knew what else, they must have seen a plate of mutton garnished with the ever-present navy beans as an exotic and flavorful indulgence. “Hey, we had good chow; they bragged on it,” Kight said. “You couldn’t find any better bakers than the Navy had aboard those ships,” he said. The bread was fine, so long as weevils didn’t infest the flour.

If the cooks of S Division could not hope to please all comers, at least they could serve them efficiently. Like the victory gardens and scrap metal drives back home, the Cook Book reflected the nation’s preoccupation with using limited assets efficiently.

[A] large mess serving 1,000 men will use less food than ten messes each serving 100 men. To conserve food and avoid great amounts of leftovers, the following reductions are recommended: For messes of 500 to 1,000 men, reduce the ingredients in the recipe by 5 per cent. For messes of 1,000 men or more, reduce the amounts of the ingredients in the recipe by 10 per cent.

The imperative to avoid waste was contagious. Inside the front cover of his Navy cookbook, Harold Kight scrawled a recipe for making cottage cheese out of sour milk: “Pour milk into double boiler, heat over warm water until soft curd has formed, pour into thin cloth bag and drain. Remove curd from bag, break into fine pieces and moisten with cream and season to taste.” In the wartime Navy, you learned to make do. You made food out of waste. You took shortcuts to get the job done. Indeed, the very same notion of efficiency and making more out of less was at the very core of the small carriers that Ziggy Sprague would take into harm’s way.

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

When the Fansbaw Bay, the Samuel B. Roberts, and the rest of Taffy 3 took up positions off the Philippines, painful memories of the escort carrier Liscome Bay were still fresh in their minds. The disaster that befell her became an indelible memory for all who served on CVEs. Before dawn on November 24, 1943, Capt. Irving D. Wiltsie was turning his ship into the wind to launch the morning antisubmarine patrol off Makin Island in the Gilberts chain when an explosion shook the ship and a tall column of water rose from the starboard side. Faster than the human mind could register fear, the collapsing column of seawater was turned to vapor by a massive, flaming secondary explosion triggered deep within the bowels of the ship. A torpedo from a Japanese sub that had slipped past the screening ships hit the escort carrier on her starboard quarter, bursting in the aircraft bomb stowage compartment below the waterline.

The explosion blasted skyward a storm of oil, molten metal, splinters of burning decking, and shredded human flesh, a grisly potpourri that rained down on ships of the task group for miles around. The Taffy 3 destroyer Hoel was bombarding Makin at the time. “It didn’t look like any ship at all,” wrote Lt. John C. W Dix, the Hoel’s communications officer. “We thought it was an ammunition dump…. She just went whoom— an orange ball of flame.”

Fourteen pilots and aircrew from the Liscome Bay’s squadron, VC-39, sitting in their planes awaiting launch, met fiery deaths at the controls of their aircraft. Hundreds of men belowdecks were incinerated by fire, slain by force of shock, or cooked by superheated steam released from broken boilers. Flames that would have overwhelmed four alarms’ worth of firefighters in a major city formed an inferno whose roar drowned out all but the loudest shouts. But they were quenched altogether just twenty-three minutes later when the Liscome Bay’s eviscerated hull slipped hissing and groaning beneath the waves. Lost with her were 644 men, including both Captain Wiltsie and Rear Adm. Henry M. Mullennix, the commander of the escort carrier group.

The Liscome Bay, a product of the shipyard at Vancouver, Washington, had survived just 109 days from her commissioning. But for the rest of the war the memory of her hellish end lurked in the consciousness of anyone aboard an escort carrier.

In 1944 a journalist traveling with the Taffy 3 escort carrier White Plains wrote, “A jeep carrier bears the same relation to a normal naval vessel that is borne to a district of fine homes by a respectable, but struggling, working-class suburb. There is a desperate effort to keep up appearances with somewhat inadequate materials and not wholly successful results.” Nonetheless, in important ways the Fanshaw Bay and her five sister ships in Sprague’s Taffy 3 task unit—the Gambier Bay, the Kalinin Bay, the Kitkun Bay, the St. Lo, and the White Plains— were the very emblem of American power. The way they were built and deployed signified both the Navy’s unparalleled mastery of the vital business of carrier warfare and America’s coming-of-age as a nation of shipbuilders.

Like her larger cousins the Lexington and the Saratoga, the Fanshaw Bay and her sisters in the Casablanca class of escort carriers were adapted from blueprints for a vessel with an altogether different nature and mission. An escort carrier was built on a cargo ship’s hull. Shipbuilding magnate Henry J. Kaiser was the Lee Iacocca of his day, a visionary industrialist whose name was a household word. Among his innovations was the Liberty ship, a cargo vessel that could be mass-produced virtually like an oceangoing Model T. Using a breakthrough welding technique, submerged arc welding, that could stitch steel plate with molten rivets up to twenty times faster than existing methods, Kaiser’s shipbuilders produced a Liberty ship in an average of only forty-two days.

Seeing that he was in a position to bolster not only America’s merchant marine but also the Navy’s offensive capability, Kaiser’s next brainstorm was to reconfigure his merchantmen as aircraft carriers. However brilliant their means of construction, Kaiser took shortcuts on components and materials. Escort carriers did not have many watertight compartments, a standard damage-control feature on American combatants. The ships were driven by inexpensive, idiosyncratic Skinner Uniflow steam engines, peculiar in design and nonconforming with Navy specs for cylinder lubrication, filtering, and quality of fittings, and foreign to the young mechanics coming out of America’s wartime technical schools. In combat conditions breakdowns were common. The hull of a CVE was no better than its engines. High in sulfur and phosphorus content, the thin steel was brittle, a deficiency that worsened when all the hatches, vents, and other structural discontinuities were accounted for.

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

Accompanying Atlantic convoys in 1943, the CVEs and their air groups were deployed to defend merchant convoys against submarine attack. Soon other missions came their way. There was certainly no shortage of new CVEs looking for work. In a one-year sprint of production from July 8, 1943, to July 8, 1944, Kaiser’s shipyards launched fifty Casablanca-class escort carriers. Ferrying new aircraft to the front was one such job, unglamorous but essential to maintaining a high-tempo air war against Japan. The Fanshaw Bay’s first mission was to take a load of P-38 Lightnings to Australia in 1944. If some belittled them as “buckets,” escort carriers formed a highly effective bucket brigade, carrying urgently needed planes to the far reaches of the Pacific. And the Marines soon learned to love them as well. Sailing with invasion fleets to give air support to American troops, CVE pilots became expert in placing bombs into hard-to-hit caves and crevices. The learning curve was steep, but so was the cost to Japanese defenders.

Significantly too, the low cost of the CVEs was its own form of defense. With the escort carriers’ aerial striking force spread over a larger number of small flight decks, the loss of any one ship did little to reduce the group’s overall strength. With its six escort carriers, Taffy 3 fielded the same number of aircraft—about 165—as two large fleet carriers. But if a Japanese plane got lucky, penetrated Sprague’s defenses, and scored a bomb hit that sank one of their number with most of its planes aboard, the group’s collective striking power would drop by only one-sixth, not one-half. This simple arithmetic was itself a powerful military virtue. With so many wooden-planked flight decks arrayed against them, be they the 477-footers of the CVEs or the 872-footers of the Essex-class fleet carriers, Japan had little hope of whittling away America’s control of the skies.

The Fanshaw Bay’s baptism by fire was rather less calamitous than the Liscome Bay’s. It came in June, during the invasion of Saipan, two months before Sprague came aboard as commander of Carrier Division 25 and the other ships of Taffy 3. Launched by catapult in his fully loaded TBM Avenger, Lt. (jg) Joseph W Oberlin, one of Composite Squadron 68’s outstanding pilots, lost power on takeoff for a predawn mission. The plane hit the sea ahead of the ship. With the carrier bearing down on the sinking plane, Captain Johnson ordered a stop bell. As engineers in the firerooms worked furiously to slow the steam, the ship narrowly avoided running over the pilot and his two crewmen. But a few minutes later, after the VC-68 plane had slipped beneath the surface, several deep explosions shook the water and rattled the ship’s brittle hull. It was the Avenger’s depth charges, exploding at their preassigned depth. “Boy, I thought we’d bought the farm, and so did everyone else!” recalled crewman Vernon Miller. “The pipes rattled, and the dust about choked us. But when all settled down and we got the full-speed bell again, we were still afloat.” Lieutenant Oberlin and his two enlisted crewmen, gunner Don Yoakum and radioman George Koepp, were less fortunate. The shock from the undersea blast killed them in the water.

Two days later the American invasion force came under attack by some seventy Japanese bombers and torpedo planes. Leonard Moser, an aviation machinist’s mate first class, was standing on a catwalk near the after elevator. Leaning on the rag mop he had forgotten he was holding, he watched the Japanese planes bear down on the Fanshaw Bay. Intense fire from her gunners and the surrounding destroyers knocked three Japanese planes into the sea. A sleek Tony fighter plane survived the barrage, flew over the ship, puffs of smoke reaching back from its fuselage into its slipstream as the shells struck home. Moser thought the plane would explode in midair, right above the ship. But then he saw the bomb. It fell from the plane’s wing, arced downward, and struck the Fanshaw Bay smack on the after elevator. The bomb penetrated the elevator and exploded in midair above the hangar deck below, where plane handlers were fueling and arming their aircraft for battle.

The bomb’s detonation burst Leonard Moser’s eardrums and set aflame the business end of his mop. But the most serious damage was belowdecks. When the bomb exploded, Lt. (jg) Tommy Lupo, a TBM Avenger pilot from New Orleans, and his roommate were running across the hangar deck to the ladder that led up to the flight deck. Lupo and his buddy were talking as they ran, and when Lupo turned to say something to him, his roommate was headless. The pilot ran at least five steps without his head.

Fire consumed the aft part of the hangar deck. Fourteen men died there; twenty-three more were wounded. The blast burst a saltwater main, and as water raced through open compartments, the ship began to founder. With water rushing in faster than the submersible pumps could send it back out, the ship began to list and settle. Asbestos insulation shook loose from the pipes and ducts overhead and choked the pumps with its detritus.

Members of a repair party dove beneath the surface of the chest-deep water, scooping handfuls of asbestos from the intakes of the pumps. Augmented by bucket brigades manned by all available hands, the pumps needed four hours to bring the water level down to the kneecaps. The ship would survive.

The Fanshaw Bay was lucky. The bomb’s blast had shredded a thick braid of intertwined electrical cables, which began to burn, dropping molten chunks of the conductive alloy onto a rack of aerial torpedoes stacked on the hangar deck. “Whatever kept them from exploding I’ll never know,” Leonard Moser wrote. “Had they exploded, I’m sure it would have sunk the ship. God was with us.”

Offshore of the sprawling deathscapes of Makin and Tarawa atolls, the bomb blast left fourteen men dead aboard CVE-70. They were duly buried at sea en route to Pearl Harbor for repairs. The Fanny B. was still a lucky ship: she had been one live igniter switch away from becoming a full-scale reenactment of the calamity of the Liscome Bay.

Rear Adm. Clifton A. F. Sprague had not grown up religious. Formal worship had played no role in his upbringing in Massachusetts. When he made the Fanshaw Bay his flagship on August 28, just ten weeks after its near catastrophe off Saipan, he came aboard a ship that had already once tested the extent of its blessings. Sprague would soon have his own opportunity to try the fickle mercy of King Neptune, or God.

Six

Warships have two names: the one they are christened with and the letters and numbers that designate them in the fleet’s inventory. Ziggy Sprague’s flagship the Fanshaw Bay was named for a scenic bay in Alaska, a name that conferred upon the ship an identity by which the crew, the public, and history might remember her. But she was known to the fleet’s record keepers as CVE-70, the letters indicating her type, and the number giving her just enough individuality to set her apart on the Bureau of Ships’ ledgers.

The aviators who made their home aboard the Fanshaw Bay during the Philippine operation had no name to give them a collective identity. Under the command of Lt. Cdr. Richard Spalding Rogers from Berkeley, California, who had finished a tour in the Atlantic flying antisubmarine patrols against German U-boats, they were known simply as VC-68. The letter V indicated that the squadron flew heav ier-than-air vehicles. This designation was a relic of naval aviation’s early days when helium-filled dirigibles appeared to be permanent fixtures in the fleet. The C indicated the squadron’s type: a c omposite squadron, one composed of a mix of aircraft types. Larger carriers had two or three distinct squadrons, each specialized by their mission: VT for torpedo bombers, VB for dive-bombers, and VF for fighters. Escort carriers had no such luxury. One group was all they had.

VC-68’s complement of aircraft and personnel varied. It typically had at its disposal twelve to sixteen FM-2 Wildcat fighters, eight to twelve TBM-1C Avenger torpedo bombers, and four pilots for every three aircraft. It was a versatile mix. Although Wildcats no longer flew from the frontline fleet carriers—those ships fielded the F6F Hellcat fighter, superior in every way—the FM-2s were sturdy and dependable. When flown well, especially at lower altitudes, Wildcats could hold their own against the nimble Japanese A6M Zeros. The Wildcat pilots learned to depend on their plane’s native advantages: its armored cockpit, self-sealing fuel tanks, and heavy armament of four .50-caliber wing-mounted machine guns. On these inherent strengths squadron tacticians developed and refined team-oriented tactics that could defeat the faster, more maneuverable Zeros. Though their primary mission was air-to-air combat—shooting down enemy aircraft while protecting American ships and attack aircraft—the Wildcats could carry a light bomb load too. Their pilots, however, found to their dismay that the bombs could be difficult to drop: a pilot had not only to pull the bomb release but also to jerk the plane’s rudder back and forth, shaking the plane in midflight to dislodge the bombs from their notoriously sticky mountings.

The TBM Avenger torpedo bomber was a marvel of aviation engineering, faster, longer-ranged, and more powerful than the death trap that was its predecessor, the Douglas Aircraft Company’s TBD Devastator. Designed by Grumman but manufactured later in the war on the more capacious assembly lines of the General Motors Eastern Aircraft Division, the Avenger packed a tremendous punch. Its massive bomb bay could carry either a single 2,000-pound Mark 13 aerial torpedo—devastating against enemy shipping—or four 500-pound bombs. The plane’s big weapons bay could hold a still larger number of 100-pound antipersonnel bombs for attacking troops on the ground. Or the planes could be outfitted with depth charges for antisubmarine patrols. The plane’s wings were fitted with rails—four on each side—for firing air-to-surface rockets five inches in circumference, useful for blasting targets ashore or at sea. Finally, the Avengers had a pair of wing-mounted .50-caliber machine guns, a third housed in a rotating, flat-sided glass-domed turret behind the plane’s long greenhouse canopy, and a smaller. 30-caliber machine gun, the “stinger,” behind the weapons bay and below the fuselage. It took three men to fly the Avenger: a pilot, who was usually an officer, and two enlisted men—a gunner to operate the turret and a radioman below.

The potential mix of weaponry made the Avengers marvelously versatile. Tactics evolved to maximize the value of all of these weapons types. Avenger pilots could put their aircraft into a shallow dive, fire their wing-mounted machine guns to zero in on a target with phosphorus-tailed tracer bullets, then let loose with the rockets, which were aligned to follow the path of the bullets. Avengers carrying bombs could place them on target in any number of ways. They could be dropped from higher altitudes or placed with greater accuracy from a shallow dive. Since the Avengers were primarily designed to attack ships with torpedoes, flying level as they approached their targets, they were not optimally equipped for steep dives. They had no air brakes, the flaps of perforated metal that swung down from the trailing edge of the wings to slow and control the plummeting plane. Some Avenger pilots treated their lumbering aircraft like dive-bombers nonetheless, plunging from the clouds to lay bombs on enemy targets with pinpoint precision. They were as likely to die from impact with the top of a palm tree as from the inevitably withering enemy antiaircraft fire.

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

The cruelty of the torpedo pilot’s trade was that the greater his proficiency at straight, slow, and exquisitely stable flight, the greater his chances of being blown from the sky. By reputation, fighter pilots were the wilder breed of aviator—daring individualists who itched to match reflexes with an enemy counterpart in the skies. In less sober moments fighter jocks were prone to razz the Avenger guys as “pickle luggers,” their bulky aircraft as “turkeys.” Yet when the Wildcat drivers paused to consider what their buddies at the stick of an Avenger might be called upon to do—bore in on a hostile warship, one eye focused on needle-ball and airspeed, the other on the target, alight from stem to stern with guns aimed their way—few were eager to trade places with them. A TBM pilot from the escort carrier St. Lo, Ens. William C. Brooks, said, “They looked at us and said, ‘Good God, I wouldn’t get into that thing and do what you do for all the tea in China.’”

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THE OLDEST SALTS ABOARD the USS St. Lo, its chief petty officers, knew a thing or two about ship names. They knew at least this: that according to tradition, it was plain bad luck to have your ship’s name changed when under way during wartime. The blessings of the Navy’s christening ceremony were many and manifold. You just didn’t throw that away. If you did, disaster was sure to follow.

Although the Navy secretary’s custom had been to name Henry Kaiser’s new Casablanca-class escort carriers after bays, when CVE-63 came off the ways at Vancouver, Washington, on August 17, 1943, the triumph at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 was still de-liciously fresh in mind. And so in a rush of bureaucratic exuberance, perhaps, the ship was christened two months later in honor of the battle that had turned the war’s tide. The USS Midway was born.

But someone in the Navy Department soon thought better of giving such an outsize name to the decidedly in-size ship. The honor of carrying the name Midway should belong to a carrier more majestic than a Kaiser coffin. Midway, the battle, had turned the course of the war. Midway, the ship, should reflect the glory of its namesake victory just as proudly as the Saratoga and the Lexington did theirs. With the Navy’s next big carrier, a 45,000-ton thoroughbred designated CVB-41, under construction at Newport News, Virginia, the name was summarily wrested from CVE-63 and given to the new leviathan.

On October 10, 1944, as the Midway lay at anchor in Seeadler Harbor, at Manus in the Admiralty Islands, news arrived that the jeep carrier would be renamed the St. Lo in honor of the Army’s recent triumph in France after the D-Day landings. Few of the veteran crew aboard CVE-63 seemed disposed to appreciate the honor, however. When the news came down of the name change, the groans of the chief petty officers reverberated through the ship’s brittle hull so loudly as to defy the rumpus of the Uniflow engines. “Damn Navy,” said an old chief boatswain’s mate. “You don’t change the name of a ship. It’s an ill-fated ship. It’ll be at the bottom of the ocean in two weeks.”

As career sailors—many were in their forties—they had served in the U.S. Navy since the Depression, had lived and breathed the legends and superstitions that formed the core of Navy tradition. Stories circulated of newly renamed ships taking to sea, never to be seen again. In some divisions on the St. Lo, as many as ninety percent of the men requested transfers. Still, many younger members of the ship’s company—the teenage seamen, the twentysomething ninety-day wonder ensigns and lieutenants junior grade—brushed off the superstitions of their elders. “We didn’t shudder and shake about it,” said Ensign Brooks, the junior ensign in the St. Lo’s resident squadron, VC-65. “We respected their view, but we didn’t get all uptight about it. We were too busy doing something else.”

Ever since the St. Lo had taken position off Samar with the Fan-shaw Bay and the other ships of Taffy 3 on October 18, there was indeed no shortage of things for pilots to do. Fliers assigned to morning patrol were roused from their quarters at four A.M. After reveille the Filipino stewards served them a quick breakfast of coffee, eggs, and navy beans. Then, chart boards in hand and parachute harnesses strapped to their backs, they climbed to the flight deck before the sun was up, vaulted into the cockpits of their planes, and ignited their big radial engines to life. Running through the preflight checklist as plane handlers muscled the aircraft into their harnesses on the catapult track, the pilots pressed back against their headrests as the compressed-air system under the flight deck slung the planes from zero to seventy knots in just sixty feet of space. Spitting flames from their exhaust stacks under their cowlings, the heavily laden torpedo bombers dropped from the flight deck toward the water before their big propellers grabbed enough air to carry them away into the predawn darkness ahead of the ship.

Flying at three or four thousand feet, with their fourteen-cylinder, nineteen-hundred-horsepower Wright radial engines throttled back to minimum RPMs and the manifold pressure set for efficient fuel consumption, the TBM-1C Avengers could remain on station for up to six or seven hours on a single mission. Their extended vigilance—patrols were more customarily four or four and a half hours—put tremendous pressure on any Japanese submarines aiming to take a shot at Taffy 3. The enemy often stalked American ships by dawn, hoping to catch a carrier silhouetted against the sunrise for an easy torpedo attack. But when the morning light was just right and the wind was in check and if the sub was not too deep, a pilot looking down at the proper angle to the ocean’s reflective sheen could actually see the silhouette of the underwater predator, like the dim form of a trout in a shaded pool. If friendly surface ships were close, the pilot would radio the contact to the fleet, summoning a destroyer to hunt it down. Then he would dive down and drop his depth charges on the target.

The urgent tempo of wartime operations always put a little guesswork in the difficult business of distinguishing friendly subs from foe. It was a lesson that the St. Lo’s aviators had learned the hard way three weeks before taking up station off Samar, during the invasion of Morotai. On October 3 a spread of torpedoes had appeared from the deep, narrowly missing the St. Lo and the Fanshaw Bay, and struck the USS Shelton in the stern, leaving the destroyer escort dead in the water. At eleven A.M. that morning Bill Brooks, launched to conduct a “hunter-killer” search, spotted a suspicious contact close to the enemy sub’s expected location, and radioman Ray Travers blinkered that day’s Morse code signal to the submarine.

The sub, running with her decks awash but her conning tower still clearly visible, not only failed to return the correct signal but did not respond at all. It continued to dive. By the time Brooks swung around again and winged over to strike, the submarine was under water. He dropped a stick of depth charges some fifty to seventy-five yards ahead of where he guessed it had submerged, then released a canister of fluorescent green dye to pinpoint the vessel’s last known location. Brooks reported his attack and remained on station until relief arrived in the form of the destroyer escort USS Rowell.

The Rowell’s ping jockeys heard through their headsets the telltale ping-woo-woo-oo that signaled contact with an undersea target and began dropping depth charges. Shortly after the foam of the last detonation settled, the Rowell’s crew watched as iridescent bubbles of oil surfaced near their ship. Floating up with the mess was an assortment of flotsam and debris that signaled the end for the target and all hands aboard her—the American submarine USS Seawolf.

After investigation by a board of inquiry, no discipline was taken against Brooks or his crew. But the lesson of the Morotai incident was clear: when bad luck strikes, it is usually the function of a cause far simpler and more readily determinable than crossed stars or a changed ship name.

*      *     *

LIKE THE REST OF the pilots of the fleet, Taffy 3’s fliers were the product of a carefully structured, multilayered training system that did for the Navy’s raw human assets what the great coastal and riverine shipyards were doing for its steel. The Navy’s aviation program had ballooned in scope since the early 1920s, when Ziggy Sprague joined Pensacola’s inaugural class of cadet fliers. By 1943 pilot training had been standardized and systematized. With some thirty thousand aircraft rolling out of America’s factories each year and Detroit’s automotive production lines ramped up and recalibrated to the close tolerances needed to build airplanes, the Navy scrambled to find enough pilots to fly them.

Mostly the service looked to college students to swell its naval aviator ranks, although a college degree was not required if one had the strength and smarts to complete the rigorous training. At first the Navy restricted the privilege of flight to newly commissioned ensigns and other officers. Then grudgingly the Navy relented in the face of war’s demands, allowing senior enlisted men to enter pilot training. In 1943 the Navy announced its goal to train 25,000 student naval aviators that year in order to keep pace with combat and operational losses and fill the flight decks of carriers under construction. A network of preflight and primary flight training schools sprung up all across the country, from Long Island to San Diego, from Corpus Christi to the Great Lakes.

Bill Brooks did his preflight training at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, learning the basics of aerodynamics, meteorology, mathematics, survival swimming, naval etiquette, and other subjects that did not require strapping oneself into a cockpit. Emerging from Chapel Hill as a cadet, he first flew solo during primary flight training at Bunker Hill Naval Air Station in Indiana. There he became acquainted with the N3N Yellow Peril, a two-seater biplane trainer that was forgiving to green hands practicing stalls, rolls, loops, and S turns but that had a dangerous tendency to ground-loop—to cartwheel on landing from the torque created by the engine and the narrowly set landing gear. A pilot could be killed on impact, or a hard shock could rupture a fuel line in the exposed, air-cooled engine, causing a catastrophic fire.

Certified proficient at the entry level, Brooks and his thirty-five classmates moved on to intermediate training at Pensacola, where they flew increasingly powerful single-wing planes: the Vultee Valiant, better known to its trainees as the Vultee Vibrator, and the North American SNJ Texan. Now that the trainees had more or less proven their physical and psychological resilience, their reward was to fly planes that were actually armed. Training at Whiting Field included low-level bombing, strafing, night flying, aerobics, and combat tactics. When they finished the syllabus, the pilots had a choice to make: would they go on to fly fighters, torpedo bombers, or dive-bombers? For Brooks—six foot one, 185 pounds, a former member of the Southern Cal football team—sitting down in a fighter plane’s cramped cockpit was “like getting into a shoebox.” His knees were jammed up under his chin, the controls too close for his long arms. So he chose the more spacious cockpit setup of torpedo bombers.

To train as a torpedo bomber pilot, Brooks went to Baron Field Naval Air Station near Mobile, Alabama—nicknamed “Bloody Baron” owing to the occasional crashes that resulted when the airfield’s swirling red dust gummed up the planes’ air-cooled engines. There Brooks rehearsed higher-risk operations like night missions, tactical flying, and field carrier landings. Nearly one-third of the trainees washed out before they completed intermediate training. It was the final hurdle before Cadet Brooks returned to Pensacola to get a set of wings pinned to his chest and the single gold stripe of a commissioned Navy ensign sewn into his sleeve.

At advanced flight training at Opalaca, Florida, the discipline and danger of attacking a ship while flying with fixed needle-ball and airspeed was drummed into Brooks day and night. He spent several days there flying the accursed Douglas TBD Devastators. “They flew like a bus,” Brooks said of the sluggish old death traps of the Battle of Midway. Brooks did not relish the thought of riding the misnamed Devastator into battle. But soon enough the next-generation Grum-man Avengers arrived. Flying the faster, more powerful plane—dropping torpedoes, both dummy and live, into hundred-foot-long target sleds towed by tugboats—pilots experimented with higher altitudes and faster airspeeds for dropping a torpedo and speeding to the escape. The Avenger could successfully drop while flying at 280 knots at an altitude of 500 feet. That was more than double the optimum attack altitude for the Devastator and twice its rated speed. At the same time the pilots went to ground school to refine their knowledge of emergency procedures, hydraulics, and cockpit layout. They drilled until they could operate all systems blindfolded—an exercise that could save the life of a pilot whose windscreen was blown out during combat and who became blinded by a hot spray of engine oil.

After he finished advanced training, a young man aspiring to become a certified naval aviator had to pass one last test: mastering the difficult art of landing on a moving redwood flight deck and catching an arrester wire with the tail hook. Before entering the pool for a squadron assignment, a trainee pilot had to land six successful touch-and-go’s at the Navy’s Carrier Qualification Training Unit, which operated two makeshift aircraft carriers on Lake Michigan, converted paddlewheel excursion boats named the Wolverine and the Sable. Completing this task required the instincts, courage, and feel that separated a carrier pilot from his land-based brethren. Those traits had to be second nature, because a pilot returning from combat might well have to perform this feat while fatigued after a long afternoon in the air, or while slowly bleeding to death from wounds suffered in battle. Sometimes a pilot had to do it at night, when the cues from the landing signal officer—who for an aviator is the most important individual on the ship after the captain—were but two red fireflies darting to and fro in the darkness.

The final air strike of the Marianas campaign was a case in point showing the dangers of nighttime carrier landings. Vice Admiral Mitscher’s decision to launch late in the day—too late for a daylight return—was a calculated gamble. When the pilots returned after dark, locating their carriers in the void of the nighttime sea was nearly impossible.

As his fliers felt their way home through the night, their fuel tanks nearly empty, Mitscher broke the strict nighttime blackout rule, designed to hide the fleet from enemy submarines. He had won the lifelong love of his aviators by following through on his own affection for them. With his pilots desperately searching for a place to land, Mitscher ordered all ships of his task group to switch on their lights.

Jittery about possible exposure to submarine attack, some of his carrier skippers were restrained in their pyrotechnics. But Capt. Clifton A. F. Sprague of the Wasp complied with gusto. Sprague lit up his ship like an oceangoing Christmas tree, impaling the night with the probing white fingers of his giant arc spotlights. He switched on the red flight deck lights. Sailors pointed aloft hand-held flashlights. Destroyers fired star shells to illuminate the storm-threatened night. The light show was glorious, like “a Hollywood premiere, Chinese New Year’s, and Fourth of July rolled into one,” according to the historian Samuel Eliot Morison. With exhausted American aviators bouncing down onto any flight deck that presented itself, losses were kept to a minimum.

Mitscher’s gallant risk deeply impressed his aviators. A dive-bomber pilot from the Enterprise wrote, “I heard pilots express the opinion that the admirals looked upon the fliers as expendable, and I suppose they must to a certain extent, but I shall never again feel that they wouldn’t do everything conceivable in their power to bring a pilot back.… It was a demonstration I shall never forget.”

*      *     *

WHEN BROOKS COMPLETED HIS training at Glenview, Illinois, he flew to the Grumman factory near Floyd Bennett Field on Long Island to pick up a TBF Avenger, then ferried himself cross-country to San Diego to await a squadron assignment. With none immediately forthcoming, Brooks was ordered to the ordnance depot at Whidbey Island, Washington, where he and other pilots worked with engineers from all around the country—Caltech, Harvard, Columbia, General Electric—to solve the problem of the dud torpedoes, which for the first two years of the war had submarine skippers and torpedo pilots alike risking life and limb in a potentially fruitless effort. A simple engineering miscalculation had resulted in firing pins that failed to ignite.

Completing the syllabus at Whidbey in June 1944, Ensign Brooks boarded a Pan Am China Clipper from San Francisco to Oahu, gathering with hundreds of other newly minted pilots at Ford Island Naval Air Station to await assignment to the fleet. From there he hopped toward the front, from island to exotic island. At Eniwetok, the Navy’s forwardmost base at the time, Brooks joined VC-65, the squadron assigned to the escort carrier then known as the USS Midway.

The pilots of VC-65 were older than their ship’s company. Averaging twenty-three to twenty-four years of age, they had wives and kids. The thirty-year-old squadron commander, Lt. Cdr. Ralph M. Jones, well liked for his fairness and seasonable temperament, knew his business and minded it so long as his pilots knew theirs. If one of them screwed up, he didn’t need to raise his voice to register his displeasure. He just glowered—gave them the “big glom.” With a graduate engineering degree from MIT, he was a skilled TBM pilot with a Navy Cross to his name. Jones’s plane was always first in line for the catapult whenever a combat mission was scheduled.

Although the imaginary bulkheads that separated the air group from the ship’s company were thinner and more permeable aboard CVEs than aboard the larger carriers, fliers on both generally considered themselves a breed apart from their deck-bound counterparts. They were concerned with different things, their world uncircum-scribed by the boundary of their ship’s hull. From high altitudes they were accustomed to seeing their carrier for the rectangular mote that it actually was, traversing a watery plain that reduced it to but fleeting consequence. Flying on a combat mission, they watched their carrier vanish into the vast expanse of ocean. Returning to it was like a homecoming. Befitting these differences, pilots lived in quarters separate from the ship’s company. They ate separately, slept separately, socialized separately. They made the ready room their home, gathering there to learn what was new in the world, to read Time magazine and listen to Tokyo Rose. Her tauntings, exquisitely delivered in a singsong Nipponese accent, were seldom irritating enough to defeat the bliss of hearing the Glenn Miller Orchestra six thousand miles from home. Pilots listened to her while playing Acey Deucy and Red Dog, while shooting dice. As often as not, Tokyo Rose’s broadcast was rooted in just enough truth to be informative and just enough falsehood to be entertaining.

Jones seemed to understand the value of a little sporting rivalry in the squadron. Like his task unit commander, Admiral Sprague, he tolerated gambling in the wardroom. And whenever the Avenger and Wildcat pilots started trading jabs about their aviation pedigree, he just smiled. Larry Budnick, a Wildcat jockey, said, “We razzed the torpedo pilots a lot. We were the guys who were winning the war, you know. It was a friendly rivalry.” Just as the Avengers were dubbed “turkeys” or “pickle luggers,” the FM-2 Wildcats, with their noisy nine-cylinder, fourteen-hundred-horsepower Wright engines, were “Maytag Messerschmitts.” For all the horseplay, mostly they were a serious group, soft-spoken and focused on their mission. Lt. (jg) Leonard “Tex” Waldrop, an Avenger pilot who sported a red beard in mute defiance of squadron guidelines, was affable and agreeable, expansive in a way that befitted the stereotype of his native state. Lt. Tom Van Brunt from Tallahassee was a widely respected TBM pilot too. Though he was among the senior pilots in the squadron, having served stateside as a primary training instructor, Van Brunt had made fewer carrier landings than anyone else on the St. Lo. Most of VC-65’s pilots had four months of combat experience already. Van Brunt would have been a section leader but for the fact that he was nearly as green as a freshly commissioned ensign when it came to touching down on a flight deck. He had made just five of them—and not one since his wheels last touched the deck of the training ship Wolverine during carrier qualifications.

*      *     *

BILL BROOKS’S GREAT-GRANDFATHER HAD been a whaling captain who sailed from ports all along coastal Massachusetts during the mid-1800s, doing his part in the ravenous harvest of the Atlantic coast whale population. When the onset of the Civil War boosted demand for oil, he and other whalers decamped from New England’s over-picked seas and took their ships south, around Cape Horn to San Francisco, where they continued to hunt blubber, ranging out to the waters off Maui, then “uphill” against currents and winds to the bounteous waters off Alaska.

A hunter like his great-granddad, Brooks pursued an altogether different sort of Pacific Ocean quarry: the steam-powered gargantuans that flew the pennant of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The twenty-four-year-old pilot was positioned to continue in his great-grandfather’s footsteps, if only the U.S. Navy would let him. The sole complication was the fact that the Avenger pilots who flew from CVEs had been, by and large, stripped of their harpoons, their Mark 13 torpedoes. They were not meant to attack enemy surface warships. That job fell to the fliers aboard Admiral Halsey’s carriers. Charged with antisubmarine patrol and striking at ground targets in support of Army troops, the Avenger crews of Taffy 3 watched as the war moved beyond them with respect to their primary mode of attack.

Taffy 3’s aviators contented themselves with perfecting a type of warfare that was in its infancy and critical to the retaking of the Philippines: the close support mission. The pilots of VC-65 had been pressed into this vital work from the first day of the Leyte invasion. Before the troops went ashore on October 20, Navy special-operations frogmen swam to the beach to clear away obstacles that might impede the progress of the landing force. When their work was finished, Brooks and his squadronmates buzzed the beach at daybreak, cruising low over the wave tops, guns, bombs, and rockets primed and ready as motorboats below zoomed in with big hoops hung overboard to scoop the frogmen out of the water before the enemy could find the range with their shore batteries. With Brooks and his buddies overhead, a Japanese gunner would have been a fool to open fire.

Other times the payload in Brooks’s bomb bay was of the nonex-plosive variety: bundles of printed leaflets exhorting the Philippine people to support their American liberators. As Brooks took his plane down to 250 feet, treetops zipping by below, his radioman, Ray Travers, opened the bomb bay doors and released a paper storm over the scattered Filipino villages. Though the brutality of the Japanese occupation had all but ensured their wholehearted support in any event, the propaganda boosted their hopes and secured MacArthur’s legacy as their savior.

Like the rest of the Avenger crews, Brooks, Travers, and turret gunner Joe Downs preferred more direct forms of engagement with the enemy. Barges, truck convoys, ammo dumps—all were suitable and rewarding targets for a weapons-laden Avenger on a ground support strike. Every day since the landings began on October 20, planes from all three Taffies ranged up and down the Philippine archipelago knocking out enemy infrastructure, interrupting troop movements, playing havoc with communications. Hugging the jungle canopy a hundred feet off the ground, Brooks would hunch forward, looking through his dashboard-mounted gun sight, hunting for quarry. A pilot flying ground support was wise to mind the danger of lingering too long over a target. Those who came in too flat often paid with their lives. Wildcat fighter planes had enough agility for their pilots to fly in steeply. Plummeting at a sixty-degree incline, nearly perpendicular to the ground, they presented the smallest possible target, forced the antiaircraft gunners into a difficult high-angle shot, and built up maximum speed to flee a target area that was sure to be popping with hot lead. Brooks in his Avenger couldn’t manage such a steep dive, but he knew the value of maintaining his airspeed for a fast escape. Rather than pull up sharply and make a high-altitude exit, as some instructors had taught him, Brooks liked to stay low and fly away at treetop level. That technique kept him moving fast and shrank the breadth of terrain from which enemy gunners could hit him. Another way pilots minimized the amount of shrapnel lodged in their tails was to approach the target in a curving pattern. That enabled them to stay out of the path of fire directed at the plane ahead. Boring in straight, close behind another pilot, was a sure way to get eaten up by the inevitable fusillade of wayward ordnance that missed the lead aircraft.

On the inland strike missions, pilots risked exposure to any number of unseen enemy gun positions hidden beneath the trees. And they took a lot of fire from panicked gunners on American ships too. A few barrages of forty-millimeter tracer fire from a friendly ship was all it took to convince many pilots of the ineluctable stupidity of the average gun crew. It was downright harrowing to be airborne while battleships offshore were bombarding targets ashore. Pilots flying gunnery spotting missions became sandwiched in an invisible corridor between salvos from the big ships offshore. While they spotted shell bursts and called in corrections, fourteen-hundred-pound battleship shells flew overhead in trios, plainly visible to the eye. Below, the smaller warheads of the cruisers whizzed past.

Close support of troops was a new job for naval aviators, and the CVE pilots were the first to master it. On a close support mission Brooks would fly to an assigned station and report to an Army air coordinator skimming the trees in a Piper Cub, keeping tabs on his men on the ground. The coordinator would radio instructions: “Proceed to point Able. Make pass to 000 down to 180, along that ridge.” Usually directed to fly parallel to the line of battle, Brooks would wing over to the attack, when possible dropping out of the clouds to mask his plane from Japanese antiaircraft gunners.

With a payload ranging from ten hundred-pound fragmentation bombs for attacking troops and vehicles to a pair of five-hundred-pound semi-armor-piercing bombs for hitting reinforced targets, a fully laden Avenger was a veritable flying ammunition depot. And if he banked the plane sharply, turning it up on a wing, Joe Downs could swing the sphere of his turret out to the side and cut loose on targets of opportunity with his single-mount fifty. Swooping down in elements of three or four planes at a time, the Avenger pilots tended to get the attention of the Japanese. “Stuff would be coming up all around you,” Brooks said. “You’d think, How come I’m not being hit? You’d thank the dear Lord that you weren’t. You’d come through it. You’d join up with your buddies. When you made your exit, you felt like you had conquered the world.”

Brooks became proficient in the art of skipping bombs into caves. He would start the attack at four thousand feet, then go into a dive, juking to dodge flak. But rather than drop his bombs at the customary altitude of two thousand feet, he would fly right down to the deck. By lifting the nose of his plane at the last minute, he could skip his delayed-fuse bombs off the ground and right into the mouth of the cave. More than once he felt the sickening thud of the concussion and shrapnel from his own payload ravaging the tail section of his plane. About as often as not he would discover, on his return to the carrier, fronds of coconut trees stuck in the creases of the wings and fuselage.

Seven years Brooks’s junior, just seventeen, aviation ordnance-man third class Joe Downs regarded his pilot with no small measure of awe. “He seemed fearful of nothing. And he had this burly manner. If you tried to lie to him or something, he would just look at you as if to say, ‘Do you want me to beat you into the ground now or just throw you overboard?’ But he had a great sense of humor.”

Of their various missions, aviators enjoyed antisubmarine patrols the least. They offered none of the kinetic thrill of pursuing an enemy truck across a bouncing jungle trail, bullets and rockets tearing down and converging at the point of attack. On A/S duty, a pilot stuck to his quadrant and flew slowly, watching the glittering sea for hour after hour. “It’s all sea and sky, sea and sky, for hours,” said Tom Van Brunt. Spotting a periscope from four thousand feet required eagle-sharp eyesight and tremendous sustained concentration. Though no pilot was ever documented to have crashed his plane by falling asleep at the stick, drowsiness was a constant threat. Perhaps this was why Avengers carried three men: they could keep each other awake.

“It used to get so hot at night aboard ship,” Joe Downs said. “The sleeping situation was miserable. You’d have fifty, sixty guys in the bunkroom, with poor ventilation, no A/C. You’d get up early for morning general quarters, have chow, then go out on submarine patrol around five A.M. You’d hit this nice cool air, and it was the darnedest thing to stay awake. By six or seven o’clock, your eyes just didn’t want to stay open anymore.”

From his cramped position in the ball turret, Downs could spread his knees and look down at Ray Travers on the radio set. The drone of the piston-driven engine drowned out all attempts at speech, and the intercom was used sparingly, to avoid bothering Ensign Brooks in the cockpit. But every now and then Downs would get suspicious of the inert form below him. He’d give Travers a hard poke with his foot, just to make sure he was conscious. With a sharp slap on the ankle, Travers would return the favor.

*      *     *

NINETY PERCENT OF A pilot’s life was standing by and waiting. Pilots waited in the ready room to get called to their planes, playing cards, talking aviation (always talking aviation), and boasting of their victories, confirmed and otherwise. One thing pilots never talked about was death.

A memorial for a fallen member of the air group was unfailingly a requiem of silence. Since June, in action over the Marianas and Mo-rotai, VC-65 had lost six pilots and ten crewmen. The men were not mourned, at least not openly. “The skipper would assign someone to gather his things and clean out his stuff. We’d get to port and ship it home. There were no eulogies or comments,” Bill Brooks said. “This was an unwritten law. And there was dignity in it, because everybody knew that at any given moment it could be us. You just didn’t want to dwell on it. You had a job to do, and if you dwelled on it too deeply, it impeded your own proficiency. The fellow would be replaced, and you’d feel damn lucky it wasn’t your turn.”

If a body was recovered, there would be a burial at sea, a solemn ceremony led by the chaplain and attended by all hands; the body was wrapped in canvas sheeting and dropped over the side weighted with a five-inch shell. But his squadronmates did not talk about him, did not discuss the circumstances of his end. “You might get upset if someone got drunk and got hit by a truck. But combat was another matter,” Brooks said. With so much time spent waiting, mourning could not be allowed to ferment into despair. For the faithful, there was ample opportunity to pray.

On the St. Lo those who sought other forms of salve could join the group of enlisteds who gathered on the flight deck three nights a week to hear ordnanceman John Getas sing. The quality of the diversions available aboard a ship at sea depended on the talents of its citizens. In Getas the St. Lo happened to boast one of the better operatic baritones in the fleet. Though the boys from Kentucky and Alabama and other points south preferred their hillbilly music, Getas could count on a turnout of ten, fifteen, twenty guys who would enjoy his renditions of “On the Road to Mandalay,” or any of three hundred-odd other numbers he had memorized. Joe Downs kept a hand-cranked Victrola record player in the enlisted sleeping quarters, sandwiched between the hangar and the flight deck amidships, suspended from the bottom of the flight deck.

Life in the war zone permitted quieter diversions as well. At Seeadler Harbor on Manus, the staging ground for the Leyte invasion, Tom Van Brunt discovered that his younger brother Bernard was on a cargo ship, the Luna, that happened to be in port too. They were seven years apart but good friends. Van Brunt got permission from his skipper to go ashore and seek out his brother’s ship. The dock foreman told him that the Luna was anchored at the far side of the harbor. The foreman said he could get Van Brunt to the ship, but wasn’t sure he could get him back in time for the Midway’s scheduled departure the next morning. As Van Brunt was trying to figure out what to do, a motor whaleboat gurgled up to the dock and tied up to the other side. The boat was making the Midway’s mail call. Its coxswain was Bernard Van Brunt.

Tom summoned his best officer’s vox Dei and called down to his brother, “Hey, coxswain, don’t come alongside until I tell you to come alongside. Okay: come alongside.” The surprise of their reunion was proportionate to their distance from home in Tallahassee. The brothers went aboard the Luna for dinner, which was fine except that their brotherly bond could not withstand the curiosity of the cargo ship officers captivated by the novelty of entertaining a combat pilot. Tom ate in the wardroom with them while Bernard went belowdecks with the crew. That night, though, the two men returned to the Midway, and Bernard got a tour of a CVE.

Courtesy of the wardroom steward’s mates, they enjoyed a feast worthy of officers’ country. Then they retired to the flight deck. “It was a glorious, beautiful, tropical evening,” Tom Van Brunt recalled. All night long they watched the ships in the harbor flash their big searchlights off the clouds overhead, blinking messages to each other via Morse. They spent the night talking, and from the conversation Tom Van Brunt learned something surprising: that his kid brother had become a man. The next morning news came down that the name of the Midway would be changed to St. Lo. His brother was the only person in his family who knew.

The men of the St. Lo stole fun where they could find it. But mostly the crew diverted themselves with endless, repetitive work. The nine-hundred-man complement of a CVE was like a one-company town working perpetual overtime. That they were a coherent community was obvious to all. A jeep carrier’s thin hull enclosed all the trappings of small-town life: the barber shop, the doctor’s office, the post office, the power plant, the waterworks, the church, the soda fountain, the boxing ring, the sweatshop factories, and the tenement-style housing. Its residents, loosely grouped into three classes—the pilots, the airedales (as the flight deck crews, aviation mechanics, and technicians were known), and the ship’s company who operated the ship—worked around the clock. Aviation machinist’s mates labored through the night tuning aircraft engines for their morning missions. Ord-nancemen and armorers bore-sighted machine guns, snapped rounds into ammo belts, pulled dollies laden with bombs, and hoisted rockets onto launch rails. Parachute riggers packed chutes. Aviation met-alsmiths repaired damaged wings and fuselages. Deckhands swept down the hangar deck and swabbed the redwood flight deck, cleaning up oil and grease. And there was always paint to chip. That was an all-purpose time-filler, but crucially important. The Navy had learned the hard way, at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere, that handsomely painted surfaces burned furiously, producing clouds of poisonous smoke. The monotony of the remedy had at least one immediate benefit: most every sailor in the fleet soon acquired the thick wrists and forearms that came from repetitive scraping.

The pilots and aircrewmen were the exclusive practitioners of the razor’s-edge lifestyle that the shipbound men could only shake their heads at and admire. The life of a flier was never in more immediate peril than while landing a plane. Bringing an aircraft down through shifting crosswinds to land on a pitching flight deck was an experience that Ernie Pyle likened to “landing on half a block of Main Street while a combined hurricane and earthquake is going on.”

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

Like the squadrons aboard the five other carriers of Taffy 3, VC-65 had twelve to fourteen Wildcat fighters and roughly the same number of Avengers. Its human complement averaged eighteen fighter pilots and twelve torpedo bomber pilots. The war was turning against the Japanese in part for their inability to replace trained aviators killed in battle. Experienced Japanese “sea eagles” stayed with the squadrons until they were shot down and captured or killed. American pilots, on the other hand, were supported by a massive training and logistics apparatus that ensured a steady rotation of talent and matériel to and from the combat zone.

Aircraft continued to roll out of American factory assembly lines to reinforce squadrons on the war’s many fronts. “They came out like sausages there for a while,” said one former Navy planner. The Navy’s production of human assets was no less impressive. At naval air stations all over the American mainland, veteran pilots were returning from the fleet to train new fliers to fill squadron vacancies caused by combat or operational deaths. That VC-65 fielded pilots as skilled as Ralph Jones and Tex Waldrop to begin with was one thing. That it could replace its losses along the way with pilots as good as Tom Van Brunt and Bill Brooks was quite another.

Seven

The war was going badly for Japan. In June 1944, during the invasion of the Marianas Islands—which contained the important bases at Guam, Saipan, and Tinian—the Japanese Imperial Combined Fleet had sailed with its remaining carrier force to challenge the American colossus. Like the battles of Midway and the Coral Sea before it, the Battle of the Philippine Sea was fought almost entirely in the air. U.S. Navy fliers shot down so many Japanese planes, killed so many of their seasoned pilots, that the Japanese aircraft carriers were effectively detoothed as offensive weapons. A fair number of the American pilots knew their way around the hunting fields back home, and clearly they had benefited from the practice. They took to calling the battle the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. Afterward, with the Japanese in retreat, the subsequent invasions of Morotai and Peleliu—critical preparation for the move on the Philippines—had gone unchallenged by the Imperial fleet. Already B-29 bombers were raining fire on the empire’s industrial centers. Only one of the aircraft carriers that had struck Pearl Harbor remained afloat, and it, the lucky Zuikaku, had been by October bled of most of its aircraft and experienced pilots. Nursing its strength since its defeat in the Marianas, the Japanese military awaited America’s next move before committing itself to what might well be its final major fight.

Although the Combined Fleet could not sustain a general offensive in the face of America’s overwhelming superiority, and though its airpower had been whittled down to a paltry force of land-based planes operating from the Philippines and Formosa, its commanders held on to the slim hope that if they could choose the time, place, and circumstances, they might yet land a staggering blow against the oncoming U.S. juggernaut. They would gather their strength and take their best shot. The only question remaining was how to commit limited forces so as to best disrupt America’s next move.

Would the Americans invade Formosa and Japan’s southern home islands? Hokkaido to the north? Would the Philippines be the next target? Could Nimitz and MacArthur be so audacious as to attack Honshu itself and the central Japanese home islands? Designated the Sho-Go (Victory Operation) plan, a strategy was drawn up by the Supreme War Direction Council to defend against the inevitable offensive. Prepared in late July, as MacArthur was wooing Roosevelt in Hawaii, and debated, revised, and approved by the emperor on August 19, the Sho-Go plan was conceived in four variations depending on the geographical region America targeted for its next major thrust. The Sho-1 plan was aimed at deflecting an American assault of the Philippines; Sho-2 would defend Formosa and the southern Japanese home islands; Sho-3 would be used to counter an invasion of Honshu and Kyushu, the central home islands; and Sho-4 was designed to defend Hokkaido and the Kuriles in the north.

Though the Japanese had hints of the American decision to invade the Philippines almost as soon as MacArthur, Nimitz, and President Roosevelt had adjourned their conference at Pearl Harbor, they got their first solid markers of American intentions on October 12, when, just before dawn, four fast carrier groups of Mitscher’s Task Force 38—the backbone, muscle, and fist of Halsey’s Third Fleet—closed to within fifty miles of the Formosan coast and began launching air strikes intended to neutralize Japanese airpower in the theater as preparation for an invasion of the Philippines.

By seven A.M. the first echelons of Grumman F6F Hellcat fighters were sweeping over Japanese airfields on Formosa, interrupting the breakfast of the ground crews scattered along their runways. Resistance was futile. Those few of Vice Adm. Shigeru Fukudome’s 230 fighter pilots who managed to get aloft, Fukudome wrote, “were nothing but so many eggs thrown at the stone wall of the indomitable enemy formation.” Three days of carrier strikes, consisting of 1,378 sorties, left Formosa in ruins.

The Third Fleet’s savaging of Formosa and nearby islands forced an unnerved Japanese high command—both Admirals Fukudome and Toyoda were caught on Formosa during the attack—to prepare both the Sho-1 and Sho-2 plans for activation. In fact, Rear Adm. Ryunosuke Kusaka, who as Toyoda’s chief of staff was effectively in command of the Combined Fleet while his superior was hunkered down on Formosa, ordered Sho-2 activated on the morning of the first attack. But a few days later, on the morning of October 17, Japanese lookouts spotted an advance force of U.S. Army Rangers coming ashore on Suluan Island in Leyte Gulf. It was then they knew that the Philippines was America’s real objective. On the evening of October 18 Admiral Kusaka ordered Sho-1, the Philippines variation, into effect.

The Sho-1 plan was massive in scale, Byzantine in complexity, and exacting in its requirement that four fleets separated by thousands of miles of ocean time their movements with near-impossible precision. From the far-flung imperial anchorages in Japan’s Inland Sea, from Borneo in Malaysia, and from Singapore’s Lingga Roads, the fleets would sortie to the attack. If they could execute the Sho-Go plan as written, land-based aircraft would assault the American carrier groups while a decoy force of aircraft carriers under Vice Adm. Jisaburo Ozawa lured Halsey’s Third Fleet north. Exploiting the gap created by the diversion, two battleship forces, one under Vice Adm. Takeo Kurita, the other under Vice Adm. Shoji Nishimura, with Vice Adm. Kiyohide Shima’s Third Section in support, would then slip through the waters north of Samar and south of Leyte respectively.

The plan played to Japan’s strength, for the Imperial Navy still fielded a formidable force of big-gunned surface ships. Two of its 71,659-ton battleships, the Yamato and the Musashi, were the largest warships in the world. The Nagato, the Fuso, and the Yamasbiro, aged though they were, had displacements in the neighborhood of 40,000 tons. The imperial fleet had two fast 36,601-ton battleships in the Kongo and the Haruna. And its dozen-odd 13,000-to-15,000-ton heavy cruisers and several squadrons of hard-hitting destroyers were capable combatants that had drawn their share of American blood earlier in the war.

Converging from north and south on MacArthur’s landing beach, the two battleship forces would catch the U.S. troops in a pincers movement. The heavy ships would sink at their leisure any transports or supply ships off Leyte, then turn the guns inland and blast the American armies from the rear while imperial troops rallied ashore. If they worked quickly enough, the Japanese fleet might rout MacArthur and make good its escape before Halsey recovered and inflicted an overwhelming air attack upon them. The challenge, of course, would be to move the big ships that formed the two pincers through long stretches of American-patrolled seas, intact and on time, and hope that Admiral Halsey would act as they suspected he might when presented with Ozawa’s bait.

There was good reason for Japan to expect Admiral Halsey, whose Third Fleet guarded MacArthur’s northern flank, to take the bait and chase Ozawa north. Japan’s carriers had long been his obsession. And indeed, recent history proved the necessity of knowing where the carriers were. Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor on a day when the Enterprise and the Lexington were at sea. This cost her the chance to destroy, rather than merely wound, the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The carriers, having dodged the treacherous blow, went on to spearhead the Allied counteroffensive in the Pacific. At Midway six months later a U.S. scout pilot’s fortuitous peek through a break in the clouds enabled the American carrier planes to strike the Japanese flattops first and turn the tide of the war.

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

That hard truth was not lost on Jisaburo Ozawa, the most talented of Japan’s carrier admirals. His seniority in the Combined Fleet lagged behind only that of its commander in chief, Adm. Soemu Toyoda. But for the distinguished vice admiral, widely thought the most capable commander in the Japanese Navy, reality could not have been more bracing: in the age of the aircraft carrier, the Sho-1 plan relegated him to leading Japan’s remaining carrier strength on a mere decoy mission. It was likely a suicide mission as well. Steaming from Japan’s Inland Sea with the fleet carrier Zuikaku, the light carriers Cbitose, Cbiyoda, and Zuibo, two hybrid battleship-carriers Ise and Hyuga, and a force of light cruisers and destroyers, Ozawa fielded the last of Japan’s paltry naval air strength.

Ozawa’s carriers were like dragons whose fiery breath had been quenched. At the controls of their 116 combat aircraft were rookie pilots whose training barely sufficed to land them safely aboard their carrier after a mission. His screen included not only fast fleet destroyers but coastal defense vessels prone to crippling mechanical breakdowns.

But prevailing in battle was not Ozawa’s mission. If he could just get Halsey’s attention, chances were good that the Bull’s predilections would get the better of him. If Ozawa could entice the Third Fleet commander to chase him, it might open for Kurita the northern path around Samar, through San Bernardino Strait, and into Leyte Gulf, where the Center Force’s big ships, rendezvousing with Nishimura’s Southern Force, could devastate MacArthur’s landing beach. Like an aikido master, Ozawa would turn Halsey’s aggressiveness against him. All of it hinged on Ozawa’s allure as bait.

On October 24 Ozawa steamed down from the north, making radio noise and planning to launch an air strike on any American ships it might find. Steaming off Cape Engaño, a peninsula jutting out from the northeastern shore of Luzon, Ozawa did everything he could to be noticed. It was oddly appropriate: engahar is the Spanish verb “to deceive.”

If Ozawa’s deception worked, battleships would do the rest. The Southern Force, with elements under Admirals Shoji Nishimura and Kiyohide Shima, would approach MacArthur through Surigao Strait, south of Leyte. The more powerful group, the Center Force under Takeo Kurita, would trace the coast of Palawan—a long slash of an island that separated the South China and Sulu Seas—maneuver through the ramble of islands in the Sibuyan Sea, and then exploit the gap created by Ozawa’s diversion, moving through an unprotected San Bernardino Strait before turning southward around Samar Island and attacking Leyte Gulf as the Sho-1 plan’s northern pincer.

With the superbattleships Yamato and Musashi, the battleships Nagato, Kongo, and Haruna, ten heavy cruisers, and several squadrons of destroyers, Kurita had more than enough muscle for the job. His challenge would be to survive the inevitable onslaught from American planes and submarines on his approach to San Bernardino Strait. If he could, he might yet hope to meet the Southern Force in Leyte Gulf.

*      *     *

GUARDING THE LEYTE INVASION beach’s northern flank was Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet. Its primary strength lay in the seventeen fast aircraft carriers of Task Force 38, nominally led by the legendary carrier boss, Admiral Mitscher. The carriers, supported by a powerful surface force that included six new battleships, had greater speed and a much longer reach than the Seventh Fleet did. But Halsey’s fleet had a somewhat less clearly established mission. His orders, drawn up by Chester Nimitz in line with the agreement brokered by President Roosevelt in Hawaii, required the Third Fleet to “cover and support” MacArthur’s troops “in order to assist in the seizure and occupation of all objectives in the Central Philippines” and to “destroy enemy naval and air forces in or threatening the Philippines area.” But an amendment to the operations order, added by Nimitz a few days later, stated, “In case opportunity for destruction of major portion of the enemy fleet is offered or can be created, such destruction becomes the primary task.”

Whether it was offered by the Japanese or created by the Americans, that opportunity began to materialize on the morning of October 24, when Third Fleet pilots made multiple sightings of Japanese warships. At 8:22 A.M. Halsey received a report from an Intrepid flier that a Japanese fleet was in the Sibuyan Sea, in the waters west of Samar. Less than an hour later, at 9:18, planes from the Enterprise patrolling the Sulu Sea to the south spotted and attacked another Japanese flotilla containing two battleships evidently headed east toward Surigao Strait. The sightings themselves were more important than the minor damage the planes inflicted. All of the reports coming in from the Navy’s interlocking web of search planes and picket submarines were telling the Americans the same thing: the enemy had been stirred to action.

Because the Imperial Combined Fleet faced serious fuel shortages, U.S. naval intelligence had learned to predict its maneuvers by tracking the advance movements of its fleet oilers. To divine the intentions of the Imperial Navy, one had only to follow the trail of oil.

The Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific Ocean Area (JICPOA), had reported more than a month earlier, on September 18, that “large scale logistic preparations are in the making.” On October 2 JICPOA reported that Japanese tankers had left Sumatra for the fleet anchorage at Lingga and were rehearsing underway-refueling operations. Two weeks later the Combined Fleet was reported to have placed seven fleet oilers at Admiral Kurita’s disposal and ordered two freighters to yield their fuel to the Center Force’s warships if Kurita needed it. On October 20 Navy intelligence discovered that two tankers awaiting Kurita’s orders in the Tonkin Gulf had been directed to rendezvous with the admiral in the western Philippines and refuel the Center Force, also known as the First Diversion Attack Force.

So the tea leaves were there to be read. The only remaining question was exactly when and how the Japanese would strike. On October 23 two U.S. submarines operating west of the Philippines had ambushed a large northbound surface force steaming through the Palawan Passage. The Darter and the Dace sunk two heavy cruisers, the Atago and Maya, and forced a third, the Takao, back to Singapore for repairs. With the morning sighting on October 24 of this same enemy flotilla in the Sibuyan Sea west of Samar, and of the battleship force headed toward Surigao Strait in the south, the full picture was beginning to emerge. From his Seventh Fleet flag quarters aboard the USS Wasatch in Leyte Gulf, Vice Adm. Thomas Kinkaid could at last see the Japanese plan unfolding: a Japanese task group would navigate Surigao Strait and challenge Leyte Gulf from the south. Another threat loomed to the north, in the Sibuyan Sea. But it was accounted for—Halsey’s carrier pilots were all over it, striking hard on the afternoon of October 24 and sinking the superbattleship Musashi. Now Kinkaid had his own welcoming party to prepare.

At 2:45 P.M. that afternoon he ordered Jesse Oldendorf to ready his big ships for a night battle. If the Imperial Navy was going to break through Surigao Strait and reach Leyte Gulf, they would have to defeat the multilayered trap that Oldendorf would set for them. Having seen MacArthur’s Sixth Army to the beach on the twentieth without incident, Oldendorf’s Pearl Harbor battleships, those resurrected old souls of the U.S. Navy, prepared to return to doing what they had been built to do. A challenge was coming. The challenge would be met.

Eight

Steaming by night toward Surigao Strait aboard his Southern Force flagship, the battleship Yamashiro, Admiral Nishimura knew what awaited him and held no illusions about his chances for victory. At 12:35 P.M. the previous day a float plane catapulted from the heavy cruiser Mogami had radioed the fifty-nine-year-old admiral with word that a powerful American battleship force was gathering at the far end of Surigao Strait. The pilot may have been prescient. It was not until mid-afternoon on the twenty-fourth that Admiral Kinkaid, having anticipated that Nishimura was headed his way, ordered Jesse Oldendorf to move his heavies down to the strait and prepare for a night action.

What drove the Japanese admiral to sail to nearly certain death is between his ghost and his Maker. A close friend of the Japanese admiral had seen in him a death wish ever since Nishimura’s only son, Teiji, a top student at the naval academy at Etajima, had died when his float plane exploded during operations in the Philippines in 1942. That Nishimura did not now withdraw from Surigao Strait, that he did not pause and regroup with Admiral Shima’s cruisers and destroyers, trailing him by some forty miles, suggested bravery more than foolhardiness, for bravery is motivated by purpose, and Shoji Nishimura’s purpose had been established not by his own personal loss but by the strategic designs of the Japanese naval command. With the Imperial Japanese Navy’s far-flung forces committed to the attack, the Sho-1 plan was beyond the point of no return.

From his flag bridge on the Yamashiro, Nishimura evaluated the odds facing him and knew that the success of the Sho-1 plan depended on his commitment to it. Even if executing it meant his own death, his effort was likely to lock down a sizable American fleet committed to his destruction and spare Admiral Kurita’s Center Force that many more opponents in its own bid for Leyte Gulf.

Nishimura rested his fortunes on the strong keels of the Fuso and the Yamashiro. The battleships had spent most of the war in Japan’s Inland Sea on training missions, because, like Oldendorf’s old bat-tlewagons, time was passing them by. They were no longer fast enough for the demands of the carrier war. But now heavy-gunned ships such as the Fuso and the Yamashiro were the best Japan had left. The late Admiral Yamamoto, who had first championed naval airpower in 1915, had once derided the big ships as “like elaborate religious scrolls which old people hang up in their homes.” “These battleships,” he once said, “will be as useful to Japan in modern warfare as a samurai sword.” Perhaps. But perhaps too the stark reality that no alternative remained would allow the old swords to be unsheathed to fight as their designers had intended. Under Kurita and Nishimura, they might flash in the air once again.

The Japanese high command had debated the merits of employing the last of Japan’s naval strength on what many commanders saw as a useless sacrifice. Kurita’s chief of staff, Rear Adm. Tomiji Ko-yanagi, thought it beneath the navy’s ancient dignity to send its proudest ships gunning for transports in a harbor. He considered it preferable from a military standpoint, and infinitely better from the standpoint of pride, to seek a decisive battle with the enemy’s carrier forces. Koyanagi argued that a successful disruption of MacArthur’s invasion force would only delay the inevitable. The invasion would regroup, supported by the powerful American carrier force. On the other hand, if Halsey’s carrier groups could be somehow destroyed, the Americans would be unable to sustain their drive toward the shores of Japan. Some officers felt that if the navy was going to risk its existence on the Sho-1 plan, at the very least it should be led personally by the Combined Fleet commander in chief himself, Admiral Toyoda.

It was clear to all that with the outcome of the war hanging in the balance, reserving the empire’s strength was no longer feasible. A decisive battle was needed. This was not a sudden realization. The doctrine of Decisive Battle had driven the Japanese Navy’s strategy and planning since at least 1930. Shaped by the inevitability of fighting a larger American fleet—a situation imposed upon Japan by the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty—the doctrine rested on ensuring local superiority in the western Pacific. It envisioned fighting a war of attrition against the westward-bound foe. In home waters a powerful Japanese battleship force would finish off an American fleet that had been worn out and whittled down by the need to sustain the fight across long distances in the Pacific. Decisive Battle depended upon seizing America’s forward bases and forcing the U.S. Navy to pick its way across the Pacific, where it would be susceptible to attrition by hit-and-run attacks from a mobile advance force comprised of submarines and torpedo-armed destroyers and cruisers.

On August 1, 1944, Combined Fleet Top Secret Operations Order Number 83 directed Japanese forces “to intercept and destroy the invading enemy at sea in a Decisive Battle.” Land-based aircraft would sink the American aircraft carriers while the battleships concentrated on penetrating Leyte Gulf and attacking MacArthur. That mission would be pursued at any cost. At a combined meeting in Tokyo of Japan’s army and navy staffs, Adm. Tasuku Nakazawa, chief of the navy’s operations section, observed tearfully that the defense of the Philippines could be the Japanese Navy’s final opportunity to meet with an honorable end. “Please give the Combined Fleet the chance to bloom as flowers of death,” he told his compatriots. “This is the navy’s earnest request.” It was a request that Shoji Nishimura was fully prepared to honor. Jesse Oldendorf was ready to indulge it too.

*      *     *

LIKE THE OTHER JAPANESE admirals who sailed in fuel-hogging battleships, Nishimura was forced to operate far from the comfortable embrace of the Japanese home islands, out of Borneo and Singapore, closer to what remained of his empire’s meager fuel reserves. Notwithstanding that logistical handicap, the mission was going well thus far. He had been remarkably lucky since leaving Brunei Bay, in Borneo, on October 22, his two battleships accompanied by the heavy cruiser Mogami and four destroyers. First, though the harbor was closely watched by U.S. search planes, he slipped past the web of reconnaissance patrols that Seventh Fleet intelligence had cast all around the Brunei port.

Next, Nishimura passed unseen and unheard through the tripwire of American submarines cruising the Sulu Sea between Borneo and the Philippines to the east. Finally, on the morning of October 24, southwest of the island of Negros, he came under attack by twenty-eight planes from the Enterprise and the Franklin of Halsey’s Third Fleet. A bomb struck the quarterdeck of the Fuso, causing a raging fire that destroyed her complement of float planes. The destroyer Shigure was hit too, losing her forward gun turret. But Nishimura’s striking power, modest though it was in comparison to what the Seventh Fleet was marshaling to meet him in Surigao Strait, was intact.

*      *     *

TIPPED TO THE JAPANESE approach that morning, Admiral Oldendorf used the late afternoon of October 24 to plan his welcoming party for Nishimura’s force. He had more than enough firepower to handle whatever the enemy might send at him.

Entering the bramble of the Philippine archipelago from the west, through the Sulu Sea and into the crease of ocean between the islands of Negros and Mindanao, Nishimura would first face successive swarms of American PT boats, charging him three by three, thirteen waves in all, firing their deck-mounted torpedoes, then withdrawing under cover of darkness and lurking nearby to report his position to Oldendorf throughout the engagement.

As he took a northeasterly course and headed for the confines of Surigao Strait itself, he would next face Oldendorf’s hard-hitting destroyers. The “tin cans”—a name that belied the destroyers’ potent offensive hitting power—would come at him in three squadrons, ranging down both the eastern and western sides of the narrow strait to launch torpedoes at him from the flanks. Each destroyer carried ten of them; the crossfire, Oldendorf and his commanders hoped, would be devastating.

Oldendorf’s six battleships, under the tactical command of Rear Adm. George L. Weyler, would cruise single file across a fifteen-nautical-mile stretch of water at the northern outlet of the strait. Steaming parallel to them, five miles to their south, would be eight cruisers under Rear Adm. Russell S. Berkey, three to Weyler’s right flank and five to his left. Straddling the exit of the strait, the battle line would be poised to finish off any of Nishimura’s ships that survived the smaller ships’ onslaught.

Oldendorf’s five wounded veterans of Pearl Harbor were joined by the battleship Mississippi, which had escaped the treacherous enemy blow on December 7. It had taken nearly three years for the damaged ships to recover and return to a place where they might do their builders’ terrible bidding. Civilian engineers and Navy technicians came from the West Coast to join Pearl Harbor’s yard workers. The army of gathered electricians, mechanics, burners, divers, and pumpers worked around the clock, as often laboring under water in diving suits as under the scintillant Pacific sun. They were the seed of a salvage organization that would boast 27,000 civilian workers in addition to 3,000 Pearl Harbor Navy Yard personnel.

The great ships were patched, pumped, and lifted from the muck, righted with winches, and set upon by the yardbirds at Pearl before being taken to shipyards along the West Coast for repairs and refitting. Shipyard craftsmen replaced their torn hull plates, burst bulkheads, silted boilers, and melted electrical wiring. Naval architects and engineers took down their great cage masts and installed more prosaic-looking structures that housed the latest fire-control radars.

Admiral Yamamoto had morosely foreseen that the sneak attack would provoke America to just the sort of industrial and human mobilization that returned the old battleships to the line. They had taken varied paths to the waters of Leyte Gulf, climbing the curve of the earth across the Pacific, their massive steam-powered screws pushing them along at the speed of a swift bicycle rider. They had visited a series of islands en route, supporting American troops as they went ashore on island after island, from Peleliu to Morotai to the current operation in the Philippines. They escorted convoys along lengthening supply lines across the southern and central Pacific. Their gun turrets, housing rifles that fired shells fourteen to sixteen inches wide and as tall as a man, had been built a generation ago to fight other battleships. But that battle had thus far eluded them. Enemy dreadnoughts had yet to fall within their reach.

Late in the war, as the Navy employed them in shore-bombardment roles, America’s aging thirty-thousand-ton monsters had become little more than massive seagoing artillery platforms. Perhaps it was only appropriate that such machinery, too slow to keep up with the carriers, be placed under the Army’s command.

But now, at Surigao Strait, thanks to the desperation of a Japanese Navy sailing to stop MacArthur at any cost, the world would learn that the pronouncements of the old ships’ obsolescence were a bit premature, if not wholly exaggerated. Pearl Harbor’s ghost ships were not yet ready to fade into history or legend. The dashing new breed of carrier admirals, smug aboard their graceless floating bird farms, might well have declared the battle line obsolete. The presence of Oldendorf’s six battleships in the strait was a declaration of a different sort, one that should have sent a message to the warlords in Tokyo who had ignored Admiral Yamamoto’s prophecy: if America could raise its old dreadnoughts from the dead, what chance could the U.S. Navy’s enemies possibly have?

Oldendorf would take no chances throwing the dice in the fog of war. Here, in the narrow waters of Surigao Strait, there would be no pitched battle. Nishimura would have no room to maneuver. Oldendorf’s fleet would hold its position astride the northern end of the strait and devour Nishimura’s column like a log thrust into the business end of a U.S. Navy wood chipper.

At 2:40 A.M. on the morning of October 25, 1944, the destroyer McGowan radioed Oldendorf, “Skunk 184 degrees, 18 miles.” The beams from the tin can’s radar set had found the enemy in the darkness. All that remained for Oldendorf’s fleet was to close the trap and destroy it.

Nine

Blocking Surigao Strait’s twelve-mile-wide opening into Leyte Gulf, the American battle line spanned nearly three miles of ocean. The six ships that formed it plowed the strait’s waters at a leisurely five-knot speed. When the battle line was headed to the east, the West Virginia led the way, followed in half-mile intervals by the Maryland, the Mississippi, the Tennessee, the California, and the Pennsylvania. When on Admiral Weyler’s command the ships turned to the right, they did so in majestic unison, plowing a 180-degree arc and falling back into line on a reversed course and sequence, with the Pennsylvania in the lead and the West Virginia at the rear.

The battle line, the preferred formation of admirals since 1655, when James, Duke of York, had routed the Dutch at the Battle of Lowestoft, endured for nearly three hundred years on the strength of its irreducible merits: it offered naval commanders both command unity and concentrated firepower. For any naval officer, the dreamed-of scenario was to “cross the T” of his opponent, concentrating their full broadsides on approaching ships that could respond only with their forward batteries. In the narrow waters of Surigao Strait, geography made doing so a much easier proposition. All Jesse Oldendorf had to do was hold his position astride the restricted waters and let the enemy column walk into his crossbar.

But his battleships would not start the fighting. That honor would fall to the smallest combat vessels the U.S. Navy had ever sent into battle. Lt. Cdr. Robert A. Leeson’s thirty-nine PT boats had come off the assembly line built to deliver high-speed hit-and-run torpedo attacks. Lurking like schools of barracuda along the islands of Bohol, Leyte, and Panaon in the eastern Mindanao Sea, they had a twofold mission: to harass, and to track, the approaching Japanese force. The small boats with their fifteen-man crews were well equipped for both jobs. Their three twelve-cylinder Packard gasoline engines gave them top speeds of forty-one knots. At that clip they could close range quickly with a target, launch four stubby Mark 13 torpedoes, turn on a dime, and escape. They were adept at patrol, and their offensive potential was considerable. But Leeson’s crews hadn’t fired a torpedo in anger since the Guadalcanal campaign in August 1943. And attacking an enemy battleship was not something they had ever done before.

The weather was so clear as to be threatening—“too beautiful to serve our purpose,” one destroyer commander would write. The quarter moon shone a luminescent path across the sea to its viewer. Wind was soft and the seas were light, with visibility to a good eight thousand yards, about four and a half miles. But as the Japanese approached, the night darkened. The moon fell toward the western horizon, and rainsqualls walked through, laying black clouds across the sky and making the night, here and there, opaque to all light. Flashes of lightning offered fleeting glimpses of what was about to happen in the strait.

At 10:50 P.M., under a setting moon, Leeson’s first section of PT boats ventured out from the dark corners of the shoreline to attack Nishimura’s force. The ships up the strait heard a tremendous racket as the Packard V-12s roared to life and the torpedo boats raced to the attack. The Japanese ships opened the shutters of their searchlights, illuminated the PT boats, and opened fire. The PTs slashed in in successive trios, loosing torpedoes at the enemy. All missed. The Japanese returned fire, repelling the nuisance but inflicting little real damage. A PT boat skipper grabbed the mike on his TBS radio and exclaimed, “I’ve got a big one in sight…. My God, there are two more big ones, and maybe another.” On Allied ships far to the north, men watched star shells glow like miniature suns and searchlight beams sweep the seas.

The noisy dance lasted three and a half hours. Ten of the PT boats were hit, but only one of them severely. PT-493 took three hits from the five-inch guns of the destroyer Shigure. The shells blew away her charthouse, holed her wooden bottom, killed two sailors, wounded five, and forced the boat to ground on the rocky shore of Panaon Island. Bravely led by their skipper, Lt. (jg) R. W. Brown, the crew jumped off the stricken boat and formed a defensive perimeter, rifles and machine guns at the ready in case the Japanese came for them. But Admiral Nishimura’s goals were far larger than finishing off a few scrappy PT boat sailors. The Americans were left alone, and when high tide came, the splintered hull of their boat rose from the rocks and disappeared into the sea.

Shortly before 12:30 A.M. Oldendorf received a dispatch from his PT boats, duly relayed to him by the PT boats’ tender, the USS Wachapreague. It was the first report he had gotten on Nishimura’s exact disposition and location since ten o’clock the previous morning. Oldendorf evaluated it, found no surprises, and had the satisfaction of knowing that his Japanese counterpart would arrive right on time for the fiery reception that the rest of the Seventh Fleet was planning for him.

*      *     *

THE TWENTY-TWO DESTROYERS THAT filled Admiral Oldendorf’s screen carried a total of 111 five-inch guns and 214 torpedoes. Even without the battleships, a destroyer force like that might well have been able to destroy the bulk of Nishimura’s and Shima’s fleets all by itself. Very nearly it did.

At about 2:30 A.M. Capt. Jesse G. Coward led three ships of Destroyer Squadron 54, the Remey, the McGowan, and the Melvin, down the eastern side of the strait while two more, the McDermut and the Monssen, hugged the western shore. Behind Coward followed six destroyers from Capt. K. M. McManes’s Destroyer Squadron 24, steaming south in two sections: the Hutchins, the Daly, and the Bache were closest to the Leyte Island shore; the HMAS Arunta, an Australian destroyer assigned to the squadron, followed by the Kitten and the Beale, cruised off their port quarter. Finally, Capt. Roland Smoot’s nine-ship Destroyer Squadron 56 would attack in three columns: the Robinson, the Halford, and the Bryant ranging down the eastern side; the Newcomb, the Richard P. Leary, and the Albert W. Grant down the middle of the strait, head-on, firing, then looping back; and the Heywood L. Edwards, the Leutze, and the Bennion on the west side of the strait.

At 2:56 lookouts aboard the Shigure reported three ships at a range of eight kilometers. The large searchlights aboard the battleship Yamashiro switched on, bathing the Remey, at the head of the American line, in hot white light and making her crew feel like “animals in a cage.” She endured the spotlight for three minutes before coming close enough to the enemy to fire her torpedoes. It took little more than a minute for the Remey, the McGowan, and the Melvin to loose their torpex-loaded fish at the enemy. Leaping from their tubes set at an intermediate speed of thirty-three and a half knots, the torpedoes would need eight minutes to reach their targets. Captain Coward turned to port and withdrew to the northeast at flank speed of thirty-five knots. Eight minutes went by, and precisely on cue several large explosions flashed as the battleship Fuso was hit amidships by two torpedoes from the Melvin. With boilers likely shattered, the Fuso slowed from twenty to twelve knots as her skipper, Rear Adm. Masami Ban, swung her out of formation to the right to avoid collisions with the ships cruising in column astern.

At 3:10, barely ten minutes after Coward’s three tin cans launched their torpedoes and just a few minutes after the Fuso was hit, the McDermut and the Monssen fired their own spreads, wheeled around, and made good their escape. The wait for the torpedoes to reach their targets ended in pyrotechnics at 3:20, when torpedoes from the McDermut hit no fewer than three of Nishimura’s four destroyers. The Yamagumo disappeared in a succession of great explosions, sinking with a sizzling noise like a “huge, red-hot iron plunged into the water.” The Michishio, shattered at the waterline, was left behind, crippled and burning. The Asagumo, her bow blown off by the blast, controlled her flooding well enough to retire to the south.

The Monssen’s shooting was almost as good as the McDermufs. A torpedo from that ship struck the hull of the Yamashiro on the port side to the rear. The blast forced the big battleship to slow to ten knots as damage-control parties flooded two magazines as a precaution against a massive secondary explosion. But the Yamashiro’s captain, Katsukiyo Shinoda, soon returned his ship to eighteen knots.

Nishimura and Shinoda were unaware that the Fuso had fallen out of line. At 3:52 the Japanese admiral radioed the Fuso stating, “Notify your maximum speed.” Clearly he thought the Fuso was behind him as he rushed toward the American fleet. Little did he know that unimaginable catastrophe had befallen his most formidable ally.

After taking the torpedo hit from the Melvin at about 3:08 A.M., Admiral Ban had sheered the Fuso to the right so as to prevent the cruiser Mogami behind him from colliding with his rapidly decelerating battleship. As the Mogami steamed past on her port quarter at 3:13, the Fuso began listing to starboard. True to the Japanese Navy’s stubborn form, she continued for a few minutes to advance, at a north-by-northeasterly course, toward the American battle line. But at 3:18 the ship reversed course back to the south, the advancing deterioration of the Fuso’s starboard list likely having tempered Admiral Ban’s fortitude. Shadowed by two PT boats, the Fuso retired to the south as damage-control parties struggled to stanch the inrush of seawater into her starboard-side torpedo wounds. Twenty minutes later, at 3:44, all hands topside on the destroyer Daly observed three large blasts. “Each explosion was a round ball of dull orange flame which subsided and disappeared almost immediately,” the ship’s skipper wrote. They took these for their own ship’s torpedoes. “The ship which was hit by these torpedoes immediately opened fire with major and minor caliber guns, frantically throwing steel through 360 degrees, and initiating general gun action between both forces,” wrote the commander of the Daly.

But within seconds the nighttime heavens flashed into daylight as a great explosion shook the Fuso. The Hutchins, eight miles away, reported “two faint [explosions] and a loud snap.” The Fuso’s immolation could be seen as far away as Oldendorf’s battle line some twenty-five nautical miles to the north. Lookouts aboard the Mississippi reported “flames reaching above the mastheads.” It must have been a magazine explosion, for nothing else could explain its terrifying power—or its lurid result. American radar operators watched their scopes in wonderment as the Fuso’s single large radar signature split apart. Her keel and armored hull shattered by the force of the blast, the great 39,154-ton ship broke in two.

Consumed by flames as hot as a steel mill’s forge and bright enough to illuminate warships nearby, the Fuso’s innards were revealed in cross-section. The pieces refused to sink. Burning and smoking furiously but seemingly animated by defiant spirits, they remained stubbornly afloat. The bow and the stern of the Fuso had acquired separate lives. Each piece clung bizarrely to life, populated by crewmen who refused to concede their ship’s destruction by doing the prudent thing and abandoning her. The lazy two-and-a-half-knot current carried them back down the strait, to the south whence they had come.

Nishimura was reeling, and the U.S. battleships had yet to open fire on the faltering Japanese fleet.

*      *     *

THE FIRE-CONTROL OFFICERS IN the combat information center of the West Virginia, their big turrets rotated out to starboard, had been chafing for an opportunity to open fire ever since they had first spotted the enemy column on their scopes. Admiral Weyler had ordered them to open fire when the range to the approaching Japanese targets had closed to 26,000 yards (14 ¾ statute miles). At 3:53 A.M. the “Wee Vee” opened the major gunfire phase of the battle, the onetime gunnery champ of the fleet unleashing the power of her sixteen-inch guns for the first time at an enemy ship. Two minutes later the Tennessee and the California joined the barrage with their fourteen-inch rifles.

The West Virginia’s gunnery officer laughed aloud as he announced a first-salvo hit to his captain. The older ships in the battle line, equipped with the older Mark 3 fire-control set, were still blind to the enemy at this extended range. But the enterprising gunnery department aboard the Maryland managed to defeat the inadequacy of its radar by locking in on the towering columns of water raised by her three sisters’ falling shells. By ranging on the big splashes, which registered momentarily on the antiquated Mark 3, the Maryland’s gunners fired four dozen sixteen-inch rounds at the enemy. The Ya-mashiro, struck all around her towering pagoda mast, was quickly enveloped in flames.

Meanwhile, Admiral Berkey’s cruisers had found the range themselves. The light cruisers Denver, Columbia, Boise, and Phoenix made up for their thin skin with offensive firepower that was simply vicious. The Boise’s gunnery officer, Lt. Cdr. William F. Cassidy, wasn’t even pausing to spot the fall of his six-inch salvos on radar. He had them locked in continuous rapid fire.

Captain Smoot, commanding Destroyer Squadron 56 farther down the strait, had a front-row seat:

The devastating accuracy of this gunfire was the most beautiful sight I have ever witnessed. The arched line of tracers in the darkness looked like a continual stream of lighted railroad cars going over a hill. No target could be observed at first; then shortly there would be fires and explosions, and another ship would be accounted for.

In just eighteen minutes of shooting, Oldendorf’s left-flank cruisers fired 3,100 rounds at the Japanese column: “It seemed as if every ship on the flank forces of the battle line opened at once, and there was a semicircle of fire which landed squarely on one point, the leading battleship.”

That hapless ship was the Yamashiro. From the bridge of the besieged dreadnought, Nishimura looked for help. He radioed in vain to the Fuso, which he believed to be to his rear, encouraging Admiral Ban to make full speed in his support. The destroyer Shigure hailed the battleship repeatedly as well. It seems that the Shigure’s skipper mistook Nishimura’s own ship for the Fuso. Nishimura probably heard the Shigure’s misdirected broadcasts to “Fuso” and falsely took heart, thinking the battlewagon was in line behind him, accompanied by the destroyer.

In reality the Fuso was drifting with the current away from Nishimura’s onrushing force, its two halves ghoulishly still afloat. Nishimura’s southern pincer of the Sho-1 plan was all but destroyed, his largest ships foundering, his destroyers either sunk or sinking, consumed with the imperatives of their own survival. Nishimura did not bother to radio a status report to his compatriot Shima, following behind. He would be left to discover the extent of the catastrophe for himself.

At 4:08 A.M. Shima arrived on the scene. Nishimura’s flagship Yamashiro, steaming northward at twelve knots, was firing blindly into the darkness with her two forward turrets. Silhouetted by her own fires raging amidships, the Yamashiro straddled the light cruiser Denver and hit the destroyer Albert W. Grant with her 5.5-inch secondary battery. But Oldendorf’s ships were too powerful and too numerous, as the cold eyes of their radar gazed through the darkness upon the dying ship. The American gunners were on their game now, their adrenaline overflowing as the pneumatic hoists whisked shells from the magazines up to the gun crews, who placed them onto loading trays, slid the trays into breech blocks, discharged the shells at the enemy, and ejected the empty casings through the bottoms of the turrets to the decks below as the cycle began again and again. A projec-tileman in one of the Boise’s forward turrets broke his left hand while laying shells in the breech tray but missed hardly a beat loading his gun.

Flames appeared to consume the Yamashiro’s entire length. At 4:11, having swung out to the west in an effort to unmask and fire her amidships gun turret, the battleship absorbed two more destroyer torpedoes. Listing heavily to port, the Yamashiro capsized and sank at 4:19, taking with her Admiral Nishimura, Captain Shinoda, and the vast majority of her fourteen hundred men. As the Yamashiro was in her death throes, turning over onto her side, Shima blandly radioed Nishimura, “We have arrived at battle site.”

Shima’s force too should have been eaten alive, except that at 4:09, ten minutes before Shima radioed his counterpart aboard the foundering Yamashiro, Admiral Oldendorf gave him a reprieve, ordering all American ships to cease fire. It was a necessary decision, to be sure. A minute before, Oldendorf had received an emergency message from Captain Smoot’s Destroyer Squadron 56 saying that his valiant tin cans were taking fire from friendly ships. The Grant was hit by seven rounds from the Yamashiro and the Mogami. But eleven more came from the merciless barrage of the American light cruisers, whose errant salvos contributed to the carnage that killed thirty-four men and wounded ninety-four more. The destroyer captains who had so courageously pressed the attack when the enemy was at full strength were now caught in a terrible crossfire.

The ten-minute pause in shooting brought an eerie silence to the strait. The smoke-shrouded surface of the water was still lit by the white glare of star shells overhead, drifting downward on parachutes. Occasionally through the smoke, wrecks of warships smoldered. The cruiser Mogami, brightest of them all, could be seen from the bridge of the cruiser Louisville, “burning like a city block.”

The captain of the cruiser Nachi, under Shima, spotted the Mogami and, believing the ship dead in the water, attempted to move ahead of her to make a torpedo attack. But the Mogami was still making eight knots, which meant that the Nachi’s navigator had miscalculated badly. At 4:30 the two ships collided, the Nachi’s sharp stem glancing heavily off the Mogami’s starboard bow.

Shima had gotten no direct report on what had befallen his Eta-jima classmate’s force. On entering the strait, the retreating Shigure blinkered to Shima, “I HAVE RUDDER DIFFICULTIES.” But the Shigure’s skipper offered Shima nothing further regarding Nishimura’s fate. He would later explain, “I had no connection with [Shima] and was not under his command.” The blazing Japanese wrecks that lit the waters told Shima all he needed to know. “If we continued dashing further north,” Shima wrote later, “it was quite clear that we should only fall into a ready trap.”

At 4:32, having spied a trio of fleeing Japanese ships on the radar fourteen miles away, Admiral Oldendorf took his cruiser the Louisville, the Portland, the Denver, and several destroyers to pursue Shima’s retreating force. “In the pale pre-dawn twilight the scene in Surigao Strait was appalling,” Lt. James L. Holloway III, gunnery officer on the destroyer Bennion, later wrote. “I counted eight distinct fires, and the oily surface of the gulf was littered with debris and groups of Japanese sailors who were clinging to bits of wreckage and calling out to us as we raced past.”

After forty-five minutes of pursuit Oldendorf had the Japanese in gun range again. In one of the most bizarre gunnery engagements of any naval war, the Louisville closed with the forward half of the battleship Fuso and opened fire at a range of nearly eleven statute miles (18,900 yards). Into that hulk the flag cruiser fired eighteen rounds of eight-inch armor-piercing ammunition. Within minutes whatever spirits were keeping the blackened, smoking wreck afloat were dispelled. At 5:36 it disappeared from the American radar screens.

About a mile away, in waters steadily burning from a long slick of bunker oil, the Fuso’s stern section remained miraculously afloat, drifting southward at the speed of a slow walk. Sometime before 6:30, as the sun began to warm the eastern horizon, the destroyer Asagumo, her own bow blown off during Captain Coward’s torpedo attack, had pulled close to the floating pyre to take on survivors. It was only then that the Fuso’s after-section crew decided to abandon ship.

As survivors of the Fuso’s nightmarish ordeal quit the burning hulk and swam for the safety of the Asagumo’s decks, an American PT boat was watching them. At 6:30 Lt. (jg) H. Stadler, commanding PT-323, saw opportunity and sped to the attack. While the stern section of the Fuso went bubbling into the depths of Surigao Strait, Stadler pounced on her would-be rescuer like a cat on a wounded pigeon. He closed range and fired his torpedoes. One of them struck the Asagumo, wounding her mortally. Then at 7:07 the Japanese destroyer was caught by the light cruisers Denver and Columbia and three U.S. destroyers. The Asagumo returned fire, her after turret barking long after her bow was awash. By 7:21 the ship was gone.

At dawn the remainder of Oldendorf’s task group formed into a circular antiaircraft disposition and steamed southward down the strait. According to the skipper of the Daly,

At daylight seven heavy pillars of billowing black smoke could be seen on the horizon ahead. One by one these pillars of smoke disappeared as the ships from which they originated sank under the gunfire of our ships. Hundreds of survivors were reported in the water, almost all of whom refused to be rescued and were left to their fate.

The wounded and the healthy alike turned away their American rescuers. A flustered destroyer commander radioed to Oldendorf, “All survivors in water are Nips and refuse a line. What do you want done with them?” Seconds later came the task group commander’s cold reply: “Let them sink.” Some of the defiant Japanese, those with sufficient muscle or will to survive, managed to swim ashore on Leyte or Dinagat Island, only to be set upon by Filipino guerrillas who relished the spectacle of their sinking and welcomed the opportunity to hack them to pieces with their bolo blades.

Ten

Naval combat is nothing like ground war, but that does not make it any less terrifying. Death comes suddenly, shrieking down with little warning from the sky. If a two-thousand-pound projectile fired from long range has your number—if the lazy, decaying parabola of its trajectory terminates on or near your ship—you are finished, no matter how fine your reflexes or how assiduous your training. In size and explosive power, naval gunfire in this war dwarfed anything in the Army’s arsenal. The biggest howitzer that MacArthur’s troops used fired a 155-millimeter shell, about the same size as the six-inch rounds of light cruisers. Battleship shells were several orders of magnitude heavier. When they struck, they shredded armor, burned steel, and vaporized flesh. They killed any number of ways: by flame, by shock, or by storm of flying shrapnel.

As in ground combat, chance is often decisive to the outcome. Eight of the nine ships of Captain Smoot’s DesRon 56 made daring sorties against Nishimura’s battleships and executed a clean escape. But the Albert W. Grant was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Blasted by friendly fire, she steamed away with thirty-four dead, thirty-four families soon to receive dreaded telegrams from the Navy. And even when the order of battle appeared to doom a ship to destruction, death was no foregone conclusion. The Japanese destroyer Shigure, lucky to the end, had escaped destruction not only at Suri-gao Strait but earlier in the war as well. One of her skippers, Tameichi Hara, grandson of a samurai, would write a widely acclaimed memoir and become celebrated worldwide as the “unsinkable captain.” But even he admitted, “The fact that I survived was entirely a matter of luck.”

The night was illuminated by two sources of light: the flash of American guns and the flames consuming Japanese ships. The crewmen of the Samuel B. Roberts, cruising off Samar about a hundred miles north of the action, were not alone in watching the distant pyrotechnics. The men aboard the invasion ships in San Pedro Bay lay awake all night watching the fireworks, though the sounds did not reach them. Only combatant vessels with TBS sets tuned to the right frequency enjoyed the full experience.

“Large target has disappeared from sight. Target referred to bearing 205 distance 11.”

“Keep track of enemy and make reports on course and speed—we are going to make chase for them.”

“We have one dead in the water—we are going to present him with five fish.”

“We have quite a few survivors in the water. Do you desire we pick them up?”

“Pick them up. Do not overload your ships with survivors. Search each man well to see that he does not have any weapons. Anyone offering resistance—shoot him.”

“Take three destroyers, polish off cripples.”

The men standing the midwatch in the Samuel B. Roberts’s combat information center had begun celebrating as soon as they determined that a rout was on. They pumped their fists, clapped, and cheered. The exec, Bob Roberts, was uncharacteristically ebullient. Hearing the sounds of victory coming over the radio from Surigao Strait moved the tough twenty-eight-year-old to pink-cheeked reverie. He turned to his skipper and said, “By God, I think we finally got ’em.”

Proximity to combat was what a warship commander, or a litigator, lived for. Listening to rogue transmissions of the fighting in Surigao Strait, Captain Copeland and the other men in the Roberts CIC knew that the stakes of their innocuous support operation had been dramatically raised. The enemy had been spotted, met, and routed.

Suddenly the work of baby-sitting a bunch of escort carriers was getting a whole lot more interesting.

*      *     *

AS THE SOUTHERN FORCE was meeting its end in Surigao Strait—the Fuso shattered, the Yamashiro capsized, Oldendorf’s battle line sending salvo after salvo after the stragglers—Kurita’s massive Center Force had an entirely different reception in waters far to the north. Plunging by night through the darkened narrows of San Bernardino Strait, his Center Force was the most powerful gathering of surface combatants the imperial fleet had ever sent into battle. That fact alone should have ensured it a vigorous greeting by American naval forces in the strait.

Standing on the flag bridge of the Yamato, Kurita expected at any moment to see the flash of enemy battleship guns in the distance, to feel the deep reverberations of submarine torpedoes tearing into his battle line as they had in the Palawan Passage the night before. He could not believe the Americans were not there to challenge him. Astonishingly, the night remained quiet. It appeared that luck was on his side.

Eleven

Admiral Kurita’s Center Force was far more powerful than the weaponry Nishimura had brought to Surigao Strait. In addition to two squadrons of heavy cruisers, he had the Yamato and the Musashi, the biggest battleships anywhere on the high seas. For the Japanese sailors aboard the cruisers and destroyers escorting them, the sight of the two gargantuan 863-foot vessels in the battle line stirred the heart. Together with the old Nagato and the fast battleships Haruna and Kongo, it was a gathering of heavies such as Japan had never before assembled.

The decision to commit the Yamato and the Musashi to the gamble to penetrate Leyte Gulf had been controversial. Kurita’s chief of staff, Tomiji Koyanagi, was not alone in his preference for going after America’s carrier groups to slaughtering transports in a harbor. As journalist Masanori Ito summarized the dissent’s position, “We do not mind death, but we are very concerned for the honor of the Japanese Navy. If the final effort of our great Navy should be spent in engaging a group of empty cargo ships, surely Admirals Togo and Gonnohyoe Yamamoto would weep in their graves.”

Kurita had committed himself to the Sho-1 plan with a resigned fatalism. Like the rest of the Imperial Navy’s high command, he saw that the plan placed him in a desperate position. It was aimed at setting up the Decisive Battle, but so far the only side suffering the attrition upon which the Decisive Battle doctrine depended was the Combined Fleet. The strain was evident in the fuel shortages that had forced Kurita to operate far from home in Brunei, where refined bunker oil was more readily available; in the lack of aircraft to protect his ships; in the perpetual infighting between the army and the navy that arose as much from natural interservice enmity as from the shortages. Prior to departing Brunei, Kurita gathered his demoralized commanders aboard his flagship, the heavy cruiser Atago, and addressed the growing dissent about the wisdom of pressing the attack.

“I know that many of you are strongly opposed to this assignment,” he said. “But the war situation is far more critical than any of you could possibly know. Would it not be a shame to have the fleet remain intact while the nation perishes?” Though dashing into Leyte Gulf was risky, Kurita deemed it “a glorious opportunity…. You must remember that there are such things as miracles. What man can say that there is no chance for our fleet to turn the tide of war in a decisive battle?”

The Sho-1 plan’s weaknesses were plain enough to see. It relied on the optimistic notion that Japan could fight a complex sequence of battles on its own precise timetable, at places of its choosing, against an enemy that would acquiesce to every ambush and feint and refrain from the discourtesy of overwhelming it with superior force. The Decisive Battle strategy envisioned Japan holding the Philippines, Guam, and other forward bases but did not reckon with an enemy whose fleet nourished itself at great anchorages such as Ulithi, Manus, and Hollandia. Nor did it account for a flexible, thinking enemy that broke imperial codes and exploited technical breakthroughs such as fire-control sensors and search radar. And it certainly did not allow for an enemy equipped with the audacity of a Bill Halsey, the prudence of a Raymond Spruance, the methodicalness of a Jesse Old-endorf, or the resourcefulness of a Ziggy Sprague.

After departing Brunei on the morning of October 22, Kurita had walked into one disaster after another. First came the devastating submarine attack in the Palawan Passage. Shortly after dawn on October 23, nearly a full day into his sortie, sailing along the island of Palawan west of the Philippines en route to San Bernardino Strait, Kurita’s group was ambushed by two U.S. submarines. Japanese radio intelligence had traced American sub transmissions that originated near Kurita’s location. But the subs did not announce their presence until they were ready to deliver the crushing blow.

At 6:34 A.M. Kurita’s own flagship, the Atago, sailing at the head of a column of five cruisers and two battleships, was struck by four torpedoes. Sixty seconds later two more torpedoes blasted the Takao, following the Atago directly astern. These six hits came courtesy of the submarine Darter, captained by Cdr. David H. McClintock. About twenty minutes later four more torpedoes, fired by Cdr. Bladen D. Claggett’s Dace, hit the heavy cruiser Maya, third in line in the Center Force’s eastern column, sailing about five hundred yards ahead of the Yamato. A shattering explosion filled the night as the Maya’s magazine exploded. “After the spray and smoke had disappeared nothing of her remained to be seen,” wrote Rear Admiral Ugaki aboard the Yamato.

The end had come fast for the three stricken cruisers. The Atago sank in eighteen minutes; the Maya died in four. The Takao, her rudder blown away together with two of her four screws, limped back to Brunei under destroyer escort for repairs. As the rest of his destroyer screen scoured nearby waters for their undersea assailants, Kurita was fished from the sea and that afternoon moved his flag to the more expansive quarters of the battleship Yamato.

Having weathered the onslaught of submarines, Kurita had pressed on northeastward, entering the Sibuyan Sea on the morning of the twenty-fourth. That body of water was some two hundred nautical miles wide, a rabble of islands and passages that provided a haven for enemy submarines and restricted a large formation’s ability to maneuver while under attack. On the eastern side of the Sibuyan Sea was San Bernardino Strait, the bottleneck that separated the Sibuyan from the Philippine Sea. Beyond the strait were the waters where Halsey’s Third Fleet lurked between the Center Force and its Leyte objective.

*      *     *

JAPAN’S FAITH IN MIRACLES was rooted in its history, replete with the apparent results of godly intervention, from the typhoon-assisted triumph over Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century to the rout of the Russians at Tsushima Straits in 1905. But if Kurita was counting on Heaven’s blessings to fall upon the Yamato and the Musashi, there would first have to be a reckoning with the treachery of their very existence.

At least one Japanese commentator implied the existence of a dark curse in their extralegal origins. “The giants of Japan’s Navy were good ships,” Masanori Ito wrote, “but they were built in bad conscience.” When secret plans to build them began in earnest in October 1934, Japan violated in spirit the Washington Naval Treaty. Negotiated in 1922, the arms-limitation agreement held Japanese, American, and British battleship forces to a 3-5-5 tonnage ratio. At the time none of the three major seagoing powers had built a new battleship in fifteen years. That suited Japan’s proponents of the treaty very well. The Combined Fleet’s ten prewar battleships maintained the sixty percent proportion. When more militant voices on the general staff prevailed and Japan defiantly withdrew from the treaty in 1936, detailed design work on the Yamato was already nearly two years along. Work on her sister ship the Musashi would run just a year behind. The omens of their construction almost immediately began to reverberate in the larger culture. The rope netting that screened the Yamato’s construction site from view was so expansive that for months Japanese fishermen had suffered a shortage of hemp.

Even with the 3-5-5 treaty ratio in place, Japanese planners had figured they could maintain at least a regional advantage over the Americans. With the United States saddled with two oceans to defend, Japan could gain superiority in the Pacific. And because American ships had to have beams small enough to fit between the locks of the Panama Canal, the Japanese, free from constraints of intercontinental geography, would hold a size advantage as well. The addition of the two giants increased the ratio of Japanese to American battleship tonnage to 4-to-5. Displacing 72,000 tons each, they were more than twice the size of any warship Japan had ever built.

But as Japan had already proven at America’s expense, the age of the battleship was passing. At about ten A.M. on the morning of October 24, the radar operators on the Musashi reported enemy aircraft approaching: the harbingers of Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 38. And now the second catastrophe fell upon Kurita en route to San Bernardino Strait.

A scout plane from the Intrepid had brought the good news of the sighting to Admiral Halsey. The admiral spent fifteen minutes querying the pilot and conferring with his staff. Then he sent a terse but catalyzing order over the TBS circuit to his task force commanders: “Strike! Repeat: Strike! Good luck!”

When the American aviators arrived over Kurita’s fleet, the spectacle of the Center Force steaming eastward was a commanding one. The wide circle of distinct white wakes was visible from as far as thirty miles away. The first wave struck at 10:26 A.M., with four dozen planes from the Intrepid and the Cabot air groups winging over to the attack. The former occupant of the Fanshaw Bay’s flag quarters commanded those carriers, and it was he, Admiral Bogan, who sent the first of four waves of planes against Kurita. During the course of the afternoon as Admiral Oldendorf was preparing to fight the Southern Force in Surigao Strait, Halsey would launch 259 planes against the Center Force.

The heavy cruiser Myoko and the Yamato were hit, but the Musashi took the brunt of the assault. Her skipper, Adm. Toshihira Inoguchi, sailed with 769 survivors of the heavy cruiser Maya, sunk by the Dace in the Palawan Passage. Manning whatever battle stations their cruiser training suited them for, supplementing the efforts of the Musashi’s own crew, they fought bravely. SB2C Helldiver dive-bomber pilots drew first blood, landing four near misses near the bow and opening minor leaks in the hull. A direct hit atop a heavily armored 18.1-inch turret was closely followed by a torpedo hit forward. Inrushing water caused a five-degree list to starboard.

The agony of the ship’s destruction was only prolonged by her efficient damage control. Belowdecks a network of pumps emptied and filled compartments on both sides of the ship to avoid capsizing. Directing three teams of sailors in control rooms spread throughout the ship, the Musashi’s damage-control officer, Lt. Masanao Naito, orchestrated the pumping and counterflooding to ensure that the wounded ship remained upright. About an hour later, around 11:45, Avengers placed three more torpedoes into the ship’s port side. The flooding was so great that emergency pumping could not keep pace. Naito filled every compartment on the ship’s starboard side but could not stop the list. Admiral Inoguchi slowed his ship to twenty-two knots to reduce the water pressure on the fractured bulkheads.

The last wave of Third Fleet planes arrived over the Center Force at about two P.M. Lt. Cdr. Joseph T Lawler, leading a group of sixteen Hellcat fighter planes from the Enterprise, had spotted the long white wakes trailing from the ships of Kurita’s Center Force as they maneuvered in the Sibuyan Sea. The spectacle of such a huge fleet was familiar to any pilot who had flown over one of Halsey’s sprawling task groups. But still a lump rose in Lawler’s throat. He led his flight beyond the enemy ships to the west, then circled back at twelve thousand feet in order to attack with the sun to their backs. Spreading out into three groups, they chose up targets and dove down in an attack that converged on the stricken Musashi.

Fires were already raging in one of her engine rooms. The blaze had severed a main steam pipe, stopping one of her propeller shafts. Near misses and torpedo strikes had pierced some lower compartments and filled others with lethal carbon monoxide. A bomb exploded on the large tower that housed the bridge, ruining Admiral Inoguchi’s left arm and killing several other officers. Then four more torpedoes burst into the forward part of the ship. The battleship’s heavy armored bow plates were torn outward. One of them jutted out like a cataract, carving into the sea like an armored plowshare. Now the inrushing torrents of seawater were too great even for the Musashi to endure.

Though the imperial crest fixed to her prow stood proudly above the water, her bow was nearly submerged. The ship settled until water lapped over the forecastle. Her two forward turrets, each one heavier than a large destroyer, appeared to float atop the surface of the ocean, just offshore of what appeared to be a small steel isle: her superstructure. It occurred to Admiral Inoguchi to beach his ship and fight her as a shore battery, but her bow was tilling so deeply beneath the waves that a course change would likely have capsized her. As her crew shifted all movable objects to the port side to keep the ship from turning turtle, Inoguchi gave the order to abandon ship. His final report that he handed to his executive officer, Capt. Kenkichi Kato, included an apology to the emperor for his failure to carry his ship to its assigned destiny. His executive officer asked to join him in the ship’s final plunge. “Damn fool!” the captain replied to Kato. “My responsibility is so great it can’t even be compensated by death and I must share the ship’s fate, but the executive officer is responsible for taking the crew to safety and getting them aboard a second and third Musashi to avenge today’s battle.”

Kurita had appealed for air support from the army’s Second Air Fleet on Luzon and from Ozawa’s decoy carrier group. But just ten fighters were available to cover Center Force. The four unlucky pilots who happened to be patrolling over the fleet when the Americans attacked were downed immediately. There was little point sending the rest of them. They wouldn’t stand a chance against the fighters from the Third Fleet.

Kurita was calm amid the chaos, assessing the damage and weighing his prospects for fulfilling his part of the Sho-1 plan mission. The Musashi was gone. The Nagato had taken two torpedo hits but was seaworthy except for a reduced twenty-knot maximum speed. The light cruiser Yahagi had been hit, limiting the fast ship to just twenty-two knots. As worrisome to Kurita as his lack of air cover was the shorthanded status of his destroyer screen. Two of the escorts had broken formation to stay behind with the stricken Musashi. The day before, two more had accompanied the heavy cruiser Takao, torpedoed off Palawan, back to Lingga Roads. Held by their slowest member to an eighteen-knot cruising speed, his ships would be sitting ducks for any enterprising U.S. sub commander lurking in the area. His eleven remaining destroyers would be hard pressed to cover him. Aggravating his concerns, a dispatch from Combined Fleet Headquarters brought this warning: “PROBABILITY IS GREAT THAT ENEMY WILL EMPLOY SUBMARINES IN THE APPROACHES TO SAN BERNARDINO STRAIT. BE ALERT.”

Kurita’s staff informed him that American carriers, wherever they were, had enough daylight left to launch as many as two additional waves of air attacks against him before night fell. He had not yet heard from Ozawa, who was supposed to be maneuvering northeast of Luzon and drawing this devastating offensive power to himself. If Kurita continued eastward toward San Bernardino Strait in these last hours of daylight on the twenty-fourth, it would only make the trip shorter for his attackers.

Kurita feared that the air attack had put him hopelessly behind schedule to meet Nishimura in Leyte Gulf. Was Nishimura still even alive? Kurita had not heard from him since the previous night, at 10:10 P.M., when the Southern Force commander had radioed him that he was on schedule to penetrate Leyte Gulf with the Fuso and the Yamashiro at four A.M. on the twenty-fifth. If he turned away now, Kurita knew he would be hard pressed to meet him.

Twelve

At 3:30 P.M., seeing little point in continuing to sail into the American meat grinder and despairing of his ability to adhere to the Sho-1 plan’s timetable while under constant air attack, Kurita ordered his remaining ships to withdraw westward. He transmitted a message to Combined Fleet Headquarters: “IF WE CONTINUE WITH OUR PRESENT COURSE OUR LOSSES WILL INCREASE INCALCULABLY, WITH LITTLE HOPE OF SUCCESS FOR OUR MISSION. THEREFORE, HAVE DECIDED TO WITHDRAW OUTSIDE THE RANGE OF ENEMY AIR ATTACK FOR THE TIME BEING, AND TO RESUME OUR SORTIE IN COORDINATION WITH SUCCESSFUL ATTACKS ON THE ENEMY BY OUR AIR FORCES.

The turn westward brought the fleet back to the Musashi, dead in the water and settling. Adm. Matome Ugaki, the commander of the First Battleship Division, hoped the crew would do their best to save the ship but could not muster the words to cheer them on.

Steaming away from the Americans gave Kurita a change of heart. Emboldened by a lack of further air strikes and feeling he should at least attempt a rendezvous with Nishimura—he still did not know the fate of the Southern Force—Kurita decided at 5:14 to resume heading east. The Yamato, the Nagato, the Haruna, the Kongo, and their heavy cruiser and destroyer accompaniment heeled around toward San Bernardino Strait again. An hour later the response to Kurita’s four P.M. dispatch to headquarters arrived. Toyoda’s order—his exhortation—was classically fatalistic, steeped in the Japanese propensity for invoking destiny: “WITH CONFIDENCE IN HEAVENLY GUIDANCE, THE ENTIRE FORCE WILL ATTACK!” As grim as the message’s implications were, at least it removed from Kurita’s weary shoulders the burden of discretion. The Sho-1 plan had come too far to turn back. The decision to commit the Imperial Japanese Navy’s most powerful squadron had been made by its supreme commander.

Back on its way toward San Bernardino Strait, the Center Force passed the Musashi once more at sunset, around six P.M. on the evening of October 24. An hour and a half later the great battleship, left behind by her comrades, rolled suddenly to port and vanished beneath the sea. Admiral Inoguchi remained aboard to the end, to perish along with half the ship’s crew.

A plume of steam and smoke rising above the point of her sinking was the Musashi’s farewell to her task force, and to the wider world to whom her existence had been a lurking mystery. Built to conquer leviathans, the Musashi was done in by swarms of tiny flying machines. The rules of war had changed. Now the survivors of the Musashi understood it as surely as did their counterparts from the USS Arizona.

*      *     *

WITH THEIR SINKING OF the Musashi, Halsey’s Third Fleet carrier pilots had dealt the most concentrated and crushing aerial assault on a warship in recorded history. The battleship had absorbed seventeen bomb hits and nineteen torpedo hits before going under. At Pearl Harbor a single bomb had caused the catastrophic magazine explosion that destroyed the Arizona; two torpedo hits had capsized the Oklahoma. The Musashi’s torturous end showed how far naval aviation had come. The sinking of the Musashi was the first time a Japanese battleship had been sunk solely by air attack. That the ship had been the largest one afloat only underscored the point.

But the Musashi was not a carrier, and so Halsey was not satisfied. All his career he had dreamed of bringing an enemy carrier force within range of his planes. His every instinct told him that they were nearby, moving toward some objective that could only as yet be guessed at. His gut told him that the Japanese would not commit their fleet to battle without carriers to support them.

Intelligence reports brought him tantalizing hints of their whereabouts, yet for days the imperial flattops eluded him. He dreaded the thought that the enemy carriers might sit out this campaign altogether, as they had done during the Gilberts and Marshalls campaigns in 1943. Worse, he worried that the Navy might repeat its timid performance in the Marianas, letting Japanese carriers slip away in the night. If the Japanese would not come to him, he resolved, he would go to them.

He had more than enough strength to make a complete rout of it, if he could find them. Among the ninety-four combatant vessels of the Third Fleet were six powerful battleships—the fast new breed, with sixteen-inch guns and the very latest fire-control systems, ably commanded by Vice Adm. Willis “Ching” Lee, an expert in every gun from a. 45-caliber to a sixteen-inch, a member of the 1920 U.S. Olympic rifle team, and the hero of the naval battle for Guadalcanal, where his flagship Washington had sunk the battleship Kirishima. But carriers were the Third Fleet’s centerpiece. Halsey had sixteen of them, eight heavy and eight light, packed with planes and divided into four task groups commanded by the best aviation minds the Navy had yet produced. Admiral Mitscher, the most aggressive carrier commander of the war next to Halsey, flew his flag aboard the Lexington in command of the Third Fleet’s carrier element, named Task Force 38. Under Mitscher were Vice Adm. John S. McCain aboard the Wasp, Rear Adm. Frederick C. Sherman aboard the Essex, Rear Adm. Gerald F. Bogan aboard the Intrepid, and Rear Adm. Ralph E. Davison aboard the Franklin. Between them they had nearly twelve hundred aircraft, with battle-hardened fighter pilots—twenty-nine of them aces—flying the marvelous new F6F Hellcat, as well as torpedo-bomber and dive-bomber pilots flying Avengers and Helldivers. Six heavy cruisers, nine light cruisers, and no fewer than fifty-seven destroyers rounded out Halsey’s force.

He would crush the Japanese—if only he could get out of babysitting MacArthur. The general and his Army planners expected the Third Fleet to guard their northern flank, protecting the troop transports and the beachhead at Leyte. Nimitz and the Navy, on the other hand, felt pressure to let Halsey go hunting. In the Leyte battle plan, these two prerogatives collided in a way that allowed the second to defeat the first. On one hand, the Third Fleet was charged to “COVER AND SUPPORT FORCES OF THE [SEVENTH FLEET] IN ORDER TO ASSIST IN THE SEIZURE AND OCCUPATION IN THE CENTRAL PHILIPPINES.” It was to “DESTROY ENEMY NAVAL AND AIR FORCES IN OR THREATENING THE PHILIPPINE AREA.” So far so good: Halsey would attack only if a Japanese fleet threatened the Philippines. But at the final hour Nimitz had given Halsey the wiggle room the aggressive commander craved, permitting his standing orders to be modified by means of Operations Plan 8–44. It read: IN CASE OPPORTUNITY FOR DESTRUCTION OF A MAJOR PORTION OF THE ENEMY FLEET IS OFFERED OR CAN BE CREATED, SUCH DESTRUCTION BECOMES THE PRIMARY TASK.

This new mandate was broad enough to erase Halsey’s duty to MacArthur and Kinkaid. He was free to abandon guard duty. He had the discretion to chase the Japanese Navy regardless of the Seventh Fleet’s needs or expectations. Indeed, Halsey now enjoyed not only the liberty to pursue an enemy fleet, his “primary task,” but the operational flexibility to “create” such an opportunity in the first place. If his degree of creative license was open to interpretation, Halsey, whose ears were tuned to hear what they wanted to hear, could be counted upon to make the most of it. Suddenly offensive operations sounded like Halsey’s primary objective, whether the beachhead was safeguarded or not. As for protecting MacArthur, Halsey figured, wasn’t that what the Seventh Fleet was for?

At 3:12 on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, Halsey had sent to his commanders a contingency plan providing for the formation of Task Force 34, to be composed of four fast battleships, the Iowa, New Jersey, Washington, and Alabama, five cruisers, and eighteen destroyers. Under Willis Lee’s command, they would stand ready to guard San Bernardino Strait against a possible about-face by the Japanese Center Force. Admiral Kinkaid overheard the message and assumed his Seventh Fleet’s northern flank was protected. Monitoring the radio traffic from his headquarters at Pearl Harbor, Nimitz too believed that Task Force 34 had been detached to stand watch over a possible reversal of course by Kurita’s wounded but still-dangerous Center Force.

At 3:40 P.M., less than thirty minutes after Halsey circulated his battle plan, Third Fleet fliers spotted one of Ozawa’s task groups. Halsey’s moment had arrived: he had found enemy carriers. Confronted with two enemy fleets—a mysterious carrier force lurking to his north and a ravaged and retreating Center Force several hundred miles to his west—and thinking it “childish” to stand idle sentry over San Bernardino Strait when such plentiful game had been flushed, Halsey planned to attack the carriers at dawn’s first light. At 8:22 P.M. on October 24 Halsey ordered Admirals Bogan, Davison, Sherman, and Lee to sail north after Ozawa’s force. As Samuel Eliot Morison memorably observed, “Halsey was no man to watch a rathole from which the rat might never emerge.” Halsey retired early, leaving it to his chief of staff, Rear Adm. Robert B. “Mick” Carney, to put his orders into effect during the night.

Halsey’s subordinate admirals had doubts about his decision. Bogan, having reviewed pilot reports saying that Kurita’s Center Force had turned around and resumed its course toward San Bernardino Strait, drafted a message to Halsey, then called his fleet admiral over the TBS radio and read it to Halsey’s staff himself. “Yes, yes, we have that information,” replied the staffer. The abruptness of the response deterred Bogan from explicitly recommending that Willis Lee’s battle line, together with Bogan’s carriers Intrepid, Cabot, and Independence and the other ships of Task Group 38.2, turn south and cover the strait.

Willis Lee was similarly put off. The battleship admiral notified Halsey via signal flags that the Japanese carriers dangling to the north were a decoy and that Kurita’s retreat had been temporary. In response Lee received only a pro forma “Roger.” Lee later called via the TBS radio to make the same point again. He was sure, he said, that Kurita was headed for the strait. No further reply came. He let the matter rest.

Shortly after Halsey’s second in command, Admiral Mitscher, went to sleep for the night, Mitscher’s chief of staff, Cdre. Arleigh Burke, received the sighting report from the night fliers from the Independence and confirmed its essential facts at 11:05. Kurita was in San Bernardino Strait. Burke and another officer woke Mitscher and told him they considered it urgent to send Lee south. Mitscher asked them whether Halsey had gotten the report. They said yes—to which the vice admiral replied, “If he wants my advice, he’ll ask for it.” With that Mitscher went back to sleep.

*      *     *

ONCE THIRD FLEET SEARCH planes had discovered Ozawa’s Northern Force on the afternoon of October 24, the Americans at last had a full picture of the Japanese naval presence around the Philippines: Nishimura’s Southern Force was marching toward destruction in Surigao Strait to the south; Kurita’s big Center Force, hit hard by Halsey’s aviators that afternoon, had lost the superbattleship Musashi and the heavy cruiser Myoko and was in the Sibuyan Sea; and now came Ozawa, tantalizingly on the edge of the search perimeter to the north.

Without the benefit of hindsight, who in October 1944 could have known for sure exactly what Ozawa had? An intelligence report received by Willis Lee suggested that two new fleet carriers, the Amagi and Katsuragi, had recently joined the Combined Fleet. If the two new ships sailed with the veteran Zuikaku, such a carrier force could pose a powerful threat to Halsey and MacArthur both, assuming it had enough planes and pilots. The day before, a lucky Japanese bomb had sunk the Third Fleet light carrier Princeton, with a secondary explosion that inflicted even heavier loss of life aboard the light cruiser Birmingham, alongside to assist her. Halsey incorrectly surmised that Ozawa’s planes had been responsible for the attack. And like every other graduate of the Naval War College, he had been schooled never to divide his strength in a combat zone.

Among the Third Fleet’s operational brain trust, everyone except Halsey himself seemed to know what was coming. As far as he was concerned, he was right where he belonged: patrolling Poseidon’s Pacific precincts, running down enemy aircraft carriers wherever he might find them. Other considerations had seldom waylaid him from that pursuit. As commander of the Enterprise carrier task group on December 7, Halsey had cursed his luck for missing the chance to intercept the Japanese Pearl Harbor strike force. (In reality, he would not likely have survived the encounter.) Reportedly his first words upon seeing the destruction at Pearl were “Before we’re through with ’em, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell!” That fighting spirit animated his every move. The public had embraced his feisty public persona. They didn’t call him the Bull because he sat around babysitting troop transports when larger quarry was just over the horizon.

He hated the nickname. “Bull” was the creation of a press corps eager to give the public a larger-than-life figure in whom to place their hopes against an implacable enemy. He disdained it as artifice, a fictitious character whose phony, flamboyant persona was one of the petty humiliations a man suffers when swallowed by fame.

But if Halsey had not already been known as the Bull, the papers would have had little choice but to so name him now, if only for the snorting manner in which he lowered his horns and took the entire Third Fleet—carriers, battleships, everything—in pursuit of Admiral Ozawa, the matador of Cape Engaño, and his dangling red cape.

Meanwhile, Kurita’s powerful squadron raced through San Bernardino Strait by night, fighting a treacherous eight-knot current but aided by the glow of navigation lights arrayed on either side of the channel. The fact that the lights had been switched on had been duly noted by Third Fleet fliers. Night reconnaissance pilots from the light carrier Independence had spotted the beacons and reported the illuminated channel as a suspicious sign, even as Halsey was steaming north in preparation for a morning strike on Ozawa. The night fliers’ inconvenient report was not enough to pull the Bull away from his northward course. He would not divide his force in the face of the enemy. Nor would he stand idly by while an enemy carrier force—white whale to his Ahab—taunted him to his north.

*      *     *

AT THREE A.M. ON Wednesday, October 25, Takeo Kurita led his Center Force out of San Bernardino Strait north of Samar, heartened, delighted, and above all surprised by the absence of an American welcoming committee. Kurita had expected American battleships to greet him. If dreadnoughts were not waiting, then surely he would tangle again with submarines. The trauma of the ambush in the Palawan Passage was fresh in his mind. But there were no submarines; at least there were no torpedo wakes. Since it was dark, there were no new swarms of planes like the ones that had struck down the Musashi the afternoon before.

At 5:30 A.M., in preparation for daylight, Kurita ordered his fleet out of its multicolumned night-search disposition and into a circular antiaircraft formation. Owing to the wide, thirteen-mile front that his squadron spanned, the reorientation would take more than an hour to complete. When morning dawned, they would take their chances against whatever the U.S. Navy might hit them with, then steam south and do their emperor’s bidding with MacArthur’s invasion force in Leyte Gulf.

Thirteen

It was 5:45 A.M. on October 25, a half hour before dawn, when a TBM Avenger piloted by Bill Brooks, with Joe Downs squeezed into the gun turret and Ray Travers at the radio set below, slingshotted from the deck of the USS St. Lo and climbed toward the dark eastern horizon. At the same time, Oldendorf was leading his cruisers in pursuit of the remnants of the late Admiral Nishimura’s Southern Force, planes from Halsey’s Third Fleet were taking wing to strike Ozawa’s carriers. For Brooks and the other pilots flying from Taffy 3’s CVEs, it was time to hunt submarines.

The previous afternoon Brooks and his squadronmates had returned from patrol to hear reports that a great victory had been won by the better-publicized harpoonists flying from the big carriers of Halsey’s Third Fleet. When word came down that Halsey’s planes had struck Kurita’s Center Force—had actually sunk the Musashi, the sister of the Yamato, the world’s biggest battleship, and forced the rest of the task force into retreat—it appeared there was little possibility of getting into the thick of the action.

Aboard the Fanshaw Bay, Rear Adm. Clifton Sprague had been keeping close tabs on Taffy 3’s air activities, monitoring their radio reports and, when necessary, directing their movements. The night before, Admiral Kinkaid had ordered the commander of all three Taffies, Rear Adm. Thomas Sprague, to prepare for a busy morning. One group would fly down into the Sulu Sea to help Oldendorf track down any stragglers from the night action at Surigao Strait. The Seventh Fleet commander also instructed Sprague to send a dawn patrol to the north, over San Bernardino Strait.

Every morning the thirteen ships of Taffy 3 were abustle with activity long before sunup. Aboard the six CVEs, crews were busy in the hangar deck and on the flight deck readying planes for the morning launch. From the bridge of the Fanshaw Bay, turned eastward into the wind, Ziggy Sprague watched his planes take flight. A dozen Wildcat fighters went up to fly patrol over Leyte Island, protecting troops there from Japanese air attacks. It had taken just eight minutes for the plane spotters and catapult team on the Gambier Bay to put eight Wildcats aloft. The St. Lo launched four more. Fifteen minutes later another group of Wildcats went up to cover Taffy 3. They were followed by a mixed group of Wildcats and Avengers armed to strike at Japanese ground positions on Leyte.

The antisubmarine patrol from the St. Lo, consisting of four Avengers and two Wildcats, were the last Taffy 3 planes to take off on routine morning missions. Bill Brooks, Tom Van Brunt, and two other Avenger pilots—Lt. (jg) George H. MacBride and Lt. (jg) Gerald E. Fields—fanned out to all four points of the compass centered on their task unit. With the planes aloft and morning general quarters over, the crews of the thirteen ships returned to their bunks or went to the mess to grab a little breakfast.

Chewing an unlit cigar—smoking in the cockpit was forbidden—Brooks took his Avenger to four thousand feet, searching for a suitable aerie from which to monitor the waters below. Though sunrise was at 6:27 A.M., the cloudy morning meant full daylight would be late in coming. Wherever a rainsquall lay, the gray clouds fell to the sea like drapes. Brooks climbed their layers, seeking a higher ceiling where he might watch a wider stretch of ocean. The CVE pilots were not instrument rated. As a saying in the ready room went, “If the birds don’t fly, neither do we.” On the morning of October 25 the birds flew. They just didn’t see especially well.

One never knew where a submarine might lurk. As for the rest of the Japanese fleet, it seemed that threat was well in hand. Overnight incomplete accounts of Oldendorf’s victory at Surigao Strait had reached the ships of Taffy 3. The TBS circuits burned with the news.

Aboard the Samuel B. Roberts, Captain Copeland, giddy from his impromptu all-night eavesdropping session in the CIC, celebrated with his staff. The victory meant that Sprague’s group had little to fear from the Japanese. Certainly nothing could get at them from the south. And the idea of a threat coming down from the north was less worrisome still. The Third Fleet was there, its striking power dwarfing even that of Oldendorf’s formidable group. An enemy fleet aiming to reach MacArthur on the beachhead at Leyte would have to get through Halsey first. His Third Fleet had already proven its mettle against the most powerful ships Japan could muster. The Japanese had nothing that could touch it.

Seventh Fleet operations plans were explicit that “any major enemy naval force approaching from the north will be intercepted and attacked by Third Fleet covering force.” Admiral Kinkaid had been secure in the knowledge that Willis Lee’s Task Force 34 was blocking the strait with its four battleships. He knew the task force was likely to be short on air cover—not that there was any pressing need for it. Certainly he wasn’t expecting any surprises.

Some twenty miles northwest of Taffy 3, Bill Brooks, at the stick of his Avenger, continued searching for openings in the layers of cumulus. The weather did not cooperate. As he finished an eastbound leg of his improvised search pattern and turned to the left heading north, another Avenger came into view. The pilot, probably Ens. Hans Jensen from the Taffy 2 carrier Kadashan Bay, who was investigating a strange blip on his radioman’s radar display, waved at him and went on his way. A few minutes later Brooks swung his plane clear of a big squall and found what he was looking for: a large hole in the floor of the clouds.

Then Ensign Brooks found what he was not looking for: there, spanning the visible slice of ocean below, were ships, lots of them. Against the blue-black dawning sea, their darkened shapes appeared, a majestic assortment of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers trailing white wakes that betrayed their southeasterly course and considerable speed. Brooks flipped on the intercom and told Downs and Travers, “Hey, look at that. Halsey must have come down from the north.” It had to be Halsey, the heavy units of the Third Fleet, in all their armor-clad glory.

Downs pressed the intercom button and said, “Thank God they’re on our side.”

Brooks felt a tinge of doubt. There were no carriers among them. If this was Halsey, where were his carriers? And the ships: to the extent that their contours could be distinguished from his perch in the clouds, they didn’t look like American ships. In ship identification training, Brooks, Downs, and Travers had been shown, over and over, the silhouettes of ships flashed for a fraction of a second on a projection screen. The men of VC-65 drilled constantly in the St. Lo’s darkened ready room, training to recognize in an instant not only the silhouettes but their telltale wakes as well.

Were these American ships? Looking down as the armada filed by below him, Brooks made out the tall pagoda towers of Japanese battleships and cruisers. The doubt evaporated into a stunning realization: they are Japanese.

As if to punctuate the thought, black clouds of cordite smoke began to appear around his plane as the Japanese gunners drew a bead on the lone Avenger. “The sky just turned black,” Downs said. “They had our course and altitude. They were really popping them in there.” The enveloping drone of the Avenger’s Wright engine behind the firewall at Brooks’s leather-booted feet drowned out the bark of their blasts. But he could feel them. The detonations buffeted the heavy torpedo bomber in violent staccato. Every so often a spectacular blossom of pyrotechnics would bloom in their immediate vicinity. The air burst would leave behind a smokeless, shimmering circle, some hundred feet in diameter. It looked to Downs like a burning ring of white tinfoil. It sparked and burned for twenty, thirty seconds, then dissipated. As mysterious and hypnotically beautiful as it was, Downs wanted no part of it. Brooks was less concerned for his own aircraft than for his task unit. The Japanese battleships were no more than twenty miles away from Taffy 3—already in long-gun range. Their wakes trailed behind them like long white tails. These ships were hauling ass.

We’re never going to see daylight, Brooks thought. These guys will blow all our ships out of the water. He pulled his plane up out of the thicket of flak bursts and took inventory of the mass of warships arrayed beneath him.

It was 6:43 A.M. Brooks tuned his transmitter to the frequency used by the St. Lo, code-named Derby Base for purposes of radio communication, and delivered the news: “Enemy surface force of four battleships, four heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and ten to twelve destroyers sighted twenty miles northwest of your task group and closing in on you at thirty knots.”

Though the pilot had estimated the makeup of the enemy fleet nearly to a T, Ziggy Sprague, overhearing the report, was incredulous and not a little bit annoyed. Now there’s some screwy young aviator reporting part of our own forces, the admiral thought. Sprague considered the report preposterous, if not flatly irresponsible: Brooks had spotted nothing other than Task Force 34, the battleship group under Admiral Lee that Halsey had left behind to guard San Bernardino Strait while he took his carriers north. The excitable ensign had only magnified his error by breaking radio silence, potentially revealing the presence of U.S. carriers to Japanese radio snoopers. And this to report his stunning discovery of an American surface force.

Sprague hailed the Fanshaw Bay’s executive officer in the CIC, where the movements of nearby aircraft were tracked: “Air plot, tell him to check his identification.” Though evidence of the unthinkable was continuing to mount—radiomen were starting to get some strange transmissions: a chatter of Japanese voices as Bill Brooks’s Avenger came under fire—Sprague wanted proof. Brooks would have to convince him.

An angry voice on the other end of the frequency laced into Brooks with some choice Navy language. Whether it was Sprague or a controller in the CIC was impossible for the pilot to know. He didn’t much care whether the abuse came from a rear admiral or a mere ensign. He didn’t enjoy being doubted. Brooks knew a thing or two about his mission. In advanced flight training he had paid close attention when instructors discussed the way the sea looks under different wind conditions, when they trained him to judge a ship’s speed from the size and shape of its wake, and when they repeated, time and again, the flash-card drill for ship recognition. Seated in the Avenger’s gun turret, Joe Downs heard his pilot vent a few epithets of his own. If confirmation was what the admiral needed, that’s what he would get. Ensign Brooks would go down and verify his report.

Suitably awed by the heavy if inaccurate volume of antiaircraft fire rising up to them from the Japanese fleet, Downs was less sure it was necessary to prove anything. But he was not flying the plane. As VC-65’s junior pilot rogered the order to confirm and pushed his stick forward, putting the Avenger into a thirty-degree dive, Downs, seated facing to the rear, watched the plane of the sea pivot down out of sight and the clouds above him swing into view. The plane dropped down to two thousand feet, back into the bramble of flak.

Brooks lingered over the Japanese fleet for a few long minutes as Ray Travers snapped some pictures with the big K-20 camera mounted in the bomb bay. Brooks slid a metal-framed plotting board out of his control panel and checked his briefing and navigation notes. It didn’t take long to confirm his location. And from this altitude there was no mistaking the distinctive architecture of the battleships and cruisers below. He radioed the Taffy 3 flagship with the bad news: “I can see the pagoda masts, and I see the biggest red meatball flag I ever saw flying on the biggest battleship I ever saw.”

The pagoda masts were unmistakably Japanese. Though the Kongo happened to be the creation of a British shipyard and British ship designers, the ubiquitous xenophobia of the day credited its ungainly profile to the imagined idiocy of the bucktoothed, bespectacled Japanese. The ships had once been the laughingstock of the U.S. Navy. The belief circulated among American officers that they would capsize in heavy seas, toppled by their lofty centers of gravity. But chauvinism about Japanese engineering and naval architecture had been as ill-founded as chauvinism about Japanese tactical skill and bravery. Early battles in the Java Sea and off Savo Island, among others—disasters all for Allied fleets—had revealed both Japan’s deadly mastery of surface combat and the lethal design of her warships. The contours of these seagoing towers of Pisa—impossible to confuse with the sleeker lines of America’s new fighting ships—had become a dreaded sight.

Dread. It was precisely what Ziggy Sprague now felt. Brooks’s report of the pagoda masts was the clincher. And he grasped fully its meaning: against battleships and heavy cruisers, Taffy 3 didn’t have a prayer. Among his thirteen ships there wasn’t a gun heavier than a five-incher. The fifty-four-pound shells they fired, readily loadable by hand, could not penetrate cruiser or battleship armor. They had a surface range of about seven miles. Even the smallest of the four Japanese battleships facing him fired shells that were fourteen inches in diameter and some fourteen hundred pounds in weight. Each armed with an eight- or nine-gun main battery with a range of more than twenty miles, and with speeds approaching thirty knots, the Japanese battlewagons could easily run down and destroy Sprague’s plodding escort carriers. There were four battleships. And the heavy cruisers were arguably even more dangerous. Each one of them—with a treaty-busting displacement of thirteen to fifteen thousand tons fully loaded—carried not only an eight-inch main battery but torpedo tubes as well. And they were swift, capable of thirty-five knots. The Japanese destroyers themselves—eleven of them to Sprague’s three—were together probably more than a match for his entire force.

What chance did Sprague have? His destroyers carried torpedoes. But using them required charging into a range that would be suicidal against capital ships in broad daylight—ten thousand yards at most. They would never make it. The Avengers aboard the CVEs carried some ship-killing weapons: torpedoes and semi-armor-piercing bombs. But there were precious few of them, and most of the bombs were of the light antipersonnel variety, useful for killing troops on the ground and overturning jeeps but useless for stopping a large warship.

Sprague tried to think like his enemy. His first thought was that the Japanese would detach a few heavy cruisers to deal with Taffy 3’s ships and send the rest of the force straight down the coast to Leyte Gulf. With or without the help of the Yamato and the other battleships, the heavy cruisers, Sprague figured, would mop up and wring out most of Taffy 3 in fifteen minutes.

*      *     *

IT WAS 6:47 A.M. when Ensign Brooks confirmed his sighting of the Japanese fleet and relayed it to Ziggy Sprague. At precisely the same moment, Admiral Halsey, on the flag bridge of the battleship New Jersey, received a radio message from Admiral Kinkaid:

“Question: Is TF 34 guarding San Bernardino Strait?”

What the hell was this? Halsey wondered. Why was Kinkaid bothering him now? Sent by the Seventh Fleet commander at 4:12 A.M., two and a half hours before Halsey got it, Kinkaid’s inquiry had traveled from Leyte Gulf two thousand miles east to Manus, languished for a few hours amid a pile of other communiqués, then been routed to the Third Fleet commander. At MacArthur’s insistence, all messages between the Third and Seventh Fleets were routed through his Admiralty Islands headquarters. The communications staff there was deluged with transmissions, the urgent ones all but indistinguishable from the merely important.

Halsey read the late-arriving message from his Seventh Fleet counterpart and thought him out of touch, if not entirely delinquent. Task Force 34, the heart of Willis Lee’s battle line, sailed with him. In the earlier dispatch Halsey had meant that Task Force 34 “will be formed” only on his further command. He was shocked that Kinkaid had assumed the actuality of a mere contingency. Wasn’t it plain enough that Halsey had not detached the four battleships? And why was the Seventh Fleet relying on him in any event? Conceived as a defensive force, it had more than enough firepower. With Oldendorf’s heavies at his disposal, Kinkaid could watch his own back. As Halsey’s assumptions began colliding with Kinkaid’s in the unforgiving light of day, Kurita curled around Samar with his whole Center Force.

The black puffs of flak grasping at Bill Brooks’s Avenger were now visible to the crews on the decks of the thirteen ships of Taffy 3. Above a gray rainsquall to their northwest, they could see the dense pattern of black clouds hanging like layers of charcoal in the sky. Then came their first view of something more frightening still: from below the northwestern horizon, beyond the curve of the earth, rose dark gray towers: the fighting tops of Japanese men-of-war.

As it was dawning on Taffy 3’s commanders that something had gone inexplicably, disastrously wrong, the big triple turrets of the Yamato, and the only slightly smaller guns of her brutal consorts, were drawing a bead on the Kaiser coffins of General MacArthur’s Navy.

*      *     *

BILL BROOKS WAS SOBER with fear. Against the drone of his plane’s radial engine in front of him, he, Ray Travers, and Joe Downs were as quiet as mice. “My gut feeling was we were never going to see the afternoon,” Brooks said. It was of course academic whether death arrived in the form of a shard of shrapnel from an exploding antiaircraft round or from a hard landing in the sea with his carrier sunk. There was nothing to be done against such a powerful Japanese force. Brooks figured the best thing he could do now was use what few tools were at the ready to take some of the bastards down with him.

What tools did he have? He was armed for antisub patrol, not an air strike. In the weapons bay down in the belly of Brooks’s Avenger—behind him, below Downs in the ball turret, and forward of Travers in the radio compartment—sat four 250-pound depth charges. They couldn’t do much to a surface warship. With fuses sensitive to water pressure, not impact, they wouldn’t explode even with a direct hit. Dropped like bombs on the deck of an enemy ship, the best that could happen was that their metal cases might shatter and give crewmen standing in the open a few splinters and cuts. Or he might get really lucky and hit an officer in the head. But it was hardly the kind of attack that had given American naval aviation its world-beating reputation.

Feeling more than a little useless, Brooks looked down at a column of four heavy cruisers below and had a desperate brainstorm. Perhaps he could improvise a new use for his submarine-killing ordnance. With their hydrostatic fuses set to detonate at a certain depth, the depth charges might be useful after all. Perhaps if he dropped them not onto a ship but forward of it, into the water directly in its path, the underwater explosion might rupture it from below. He might shake it up, slow it down, create a leak or something. Who knew?

Brooks swung around and lined up on the tail of the cruiser column. When attacking a submarine, doctrine called for a pilot to dive and drop his weapons at an altitude of 300 feet. Brooks thought better of it here. He didn’t want to get that close to the bristling heavy cruiser. Nor did Downs: 1,500 feet was much too close for his liking. He would have preferred an altitude about ten times that high. Flying directly over the ship at 1,500 feet, black puffs of flak jarring his plane and vibrating his rib cage, Brooks ran down the last heavy cruiser in line from the rear. At 180 knots, the Avenger rapidly overtook the thirty-three-knot ship. As he passed ahead of the target, Brooks jerked his ordnance release lever, letting go his four depth bombs. As they dropped down and behind his plane, the Avenger lurched as if cut from a tether.

He harbored no lofty expectations. He didn’t linger to see the result. His mind was occupied with the imperative of escape. Brooks was an avid quail hunter back home. He knew that the hardest bird to shoot was the one that was flying straight away from you, dipping and veering over the brush. So he followed the game bird’s example. He pushed his Avenger down to the water, building speed for his exit, just fifty feet above the wave tops. Downs, facing to the rear, watched the four depth charges plunge down toward the ship. He saw two of them strike the forward deck of the ship, and two land in the water forward of the bow. Very likely no damage was done. But at least the St. Lo and VC-65 had delivered a little calling card to the Japanese fleet. Ensign Jensen from the Kadashan Bay had done just the same.

Pulling away from the cruiser column, Brooks tapped the intercom button and checked in with Downs and Travers. “Anybody hurt back there? What’s going on?” They chatted gamely, trying to settle their nerves. Aside from a piece of shrapnel that had caught Downs in the hand, the crew was fine. Brooks tried to raise Bendix Base—the Fanshaw Bay— but the radio gave him only silence. Either Admiral Sprague was no longer speaking to him or a chunk of flak had knocked out his transmitter. From the deadness on his headphones he knew it was the latter. Brooks thought over his options. He knew that the St. Lo and the other Taffy 3 escort carriers would not be landing planes. They would be fleeing under fire, probably to the south, zigzagging to dodge shells, out of the wind. Possibly their flight decks had already been shredded by shellfire. Many of them might already be sinking.

From his briefings Brooks knew that a second group of jeep carriers, Taffy 2, was operating south of his task unit. He knew their general direction and was confident he could find them in the open ocean. With fuel running low, he cut back his RPMs and reduced his engine manifold pressure to a minimum. Preferring to be “a live pilot rather than a dead hero,” he ruled out further futile heroics against the Japanese fleet. He decided that his best contribution to the coming one-sided slaughter would be to get himself to a place where he could load a torpedo or a rack of heavy bombs and return to the Japanese fleet, this time meaning business. He set his course for Taffy 2. He would find a friendly carrier, land, rearm, and get back in the air just as soon as he could.

It was 7:15 and shaping up to be a very long morning.