Part III

A Vanishing Graveyard

When great men blunder, they count their losses in pride and reputation and glory. The underlings count their losses in blood.

—Theodore C. Mason, Battleship Sailor (1982)

Forty-six

When a ship sinks, the battlefield goes away. Currents move, thermal layers mix, and by the time the surveyors and rescuers arrive, the water that bore witness to the slaughter is nowhere to be found. The dead disappear, carried under with their ruined vehicles. No wreckage remains for tacticians to study. There are no corpses for stretcher-bearers to spirit away, no remains to shovel, bag, and bury. On the sea there is no place to anchor a memorial flagpole or a headstone. It is a vanishing graveyard.

The sudden silence was the first thing many survivors of the Hoel, the Gambier Bay, the Samuel B. Roberts, and the Johnston noticed after their ships had been smashed and swallowed. To many, the quiet was unwelcome. The noise of battle—the roar of machinery, the shrieks and blasts of shells incoming and outbound, the shouts and screams of their buddies—had anesthetized fear. Now the noise lifted like a curtain, unveiling the hidden inner vistas of their grief and shock. When their ships sank, their duties went down with them. Permanently discharged, the survivors were left without the distraction of work to do. The things they had seen could now be contemplated. The wounds they had suffered began to ache, sting, and burn.

The four groups of men were scattered over roughly thirty miles of ocean. Survivors of the Hoel, sunk first at 8:55, constituted the northernmost group. The Japanese had been in the heat of pursuit when the destroyer went down. The men of the Hoel were then treated to a full fleet review as the Center Force’s leviathans paraded past them to the south. After that, the survivors had no idea what had become of the enemy—or of the rest of Taffy 3 for that matter. South of where the Hoel’s men swam were the survivors of the Gambier Bay. They had the distinction of serving on the only American aircraft carrier in history ever sunk by enemy naval gunfire. Like the destroyermen, they had seen the enemy up close, had felt the heat of his muzzles firing. Finally, farther south still, floated the men from the Johnston and the Samuel B. Roberts, whose ships, having fought to the last, sank within a few minutes and a few thousand yards of each other.

Such descriptions of the groups’ proximities, given with the benefit of a backward-looking bird’s eye, were unavailable to the men in that terrible moment. The currents and wind took hold of them, and from their initial entry into the water, there was no telling how they moved relative to one another. A thousand men dotted the ocean’s swells, cast about by the waters. For small groups and individuals alike, however, the experience of survival was one of sudden, sinking aloneness.

The lazy swells of the Philippine Sea raised and lowered the men at regular intervals. At the top of a swell, if he was inclined, a man could take in his wide surroundings and look for other survivors to merge his fortunes with. In the bottoms, surrounded by gentle slopes of seawater like the sides of a shallow bowl, he would be left to contemplate his private misery. Land was but an abstraction; though the peaks of Samar were visible where the squalls and clouds permitted, reaching up from beneath the horizon, the beaches that lay beneath them were out of sight, some thirty miles away. For a wounded, exhausted swimmer, it might as well have been a whole ocean.

For them, the world existed only in two dimensions. With their eyes at sea level, they had no vertical parallax by which to gauge distance. The physical fact of the round earth made height a telling advantage at sea. Lookouts on the ships with the tallest masts could see farthest and spot the enemy soonest. The Yamato was the first Japanese ship to fire not only because of her powerful guns but because her lookouts enjoyed the loftiest aerie in the flotilla. When the survivors entered the water, however, the circumference of their world shrank like a contracted camera aperture. Even on the clearest day the Hoel’s survivors would have been out of sight of the Roberts’s survivors. Any imaginary line connecting them would have arced over the face of the earth far enough that the curve of the world blocked their view.

By sweeping his arms together, George Bray gathered up a foamy pile of fuel oil and tried to splash it all away from him. But the stuff seemed to have a mind of its own. It floated back at him, sticking to everything. It would not go away. Here and there the slick was burning in the lazy manner in which oil is prone to burn.

Bud Comet paddled his raft to Bray’s group and tied up fast to the small flotilla of survivors. This group was sixty-odd strong, gathered on and around a life raft whose wooden lattice bottom, suspended by ropes from the raft’s hard foam ring, had been mostly shot out. Some seven feet long and four or five feet wide, the raft was more like an oversized doughnut float than a proper inflatable boat. Tied up to the raft to form a little archipelago was a floater net, a twenty-by-twenty-foot expanse of mesh netting made buoyant by hard rubber disks linked together in strings of eight. Jack Moore, Lt. Luther West, and chief Cullen Wallace were its ranking members.

Most of the men in this group were in fair health. About half of them had no injuries at all. The majority of the rest had wounds that were not immediately life threatening—holes through flesh, gashes to limbs, odd burns and scrapes, blood leaking from the ears. A few were far worse off, and these men, en route to what would probably be a slow death, were laid inside the ring of the raft. Jerry Osborne, a water tender in the Roberts’s demolished forward boiler room, had been scalded so severely that he had third-degree burns all over his body. He lapsed in and out of consciousness. The midocean silence was now and then cut through with his and others’ long groans, at unpredictable intervals swelling into screams.

A few hundred yards away from them, on their own raft-and-floater-net assemblage, drifted another group of about fifty men, among them Bob Copeland, Bob Roberts, Bill Burton, Dudley Moy-lan, Tom Stevenson, Lloyd Gurnett, and two of the ship’s four surviving chiefs, Rudy Skau and Frank Cantrell.

Some distance away on the current, another group of about seventeen or so Roberts survivors clung to a far less sturdy contraption: a pair of fourteen-foot-long wooden planks that the deck division had once used as a scaffolding for scraping and painting the side of the hull. The structure wasn’t seaworthy, and a lot of the men clinging to it were in very bad shape.

It was clear to Stevenson and others that the wounded would be better off with them. Only seven could fit inside the raft, so the captain and pharmacist’s mate Oscar King evaluated their wounded and decided who would gain tenancy to this prime real estate. Everyone else floated in the water around the raft, clutching the manila lines of the floater net tied up to it.

Tom Stevenson, Lloyd Gurnett, soundman third class Louis Gould, and Charles Natter, who was a particularly strong swimmer, spent a few hours on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth trying to unite the stragglers on the scaffolding with their group. They swam to it and struggled to move the bulky structure toward their own raft and net. When they tired of the impossible task of propelling the sagging mass of wood through the water, they tried to cajole the healthier survivors to swim with them. To their frustration, most of them refused to leave the scaffolding—a bird in the hand and all that. Staying put beat swimming an Olympic distance through waters well populated by large sharks. Ultimately, they settled for ferrying back to the raft men who were too weak to make it themselves and too shell-shocked to resist rescue.

Yelling deliriously, Bill Stovall, Gun 52’s pointer, was among several men pulled into Copeland’s raft. He had been blown from the mount’s steel enclosure, his lungs scorched in the fiery blowback from the breech. He had lived long enough to see the ship sink, but as he hollered on, it was clear that the only humane thing to do was to avoid prolonging his agony. Exchanging pained, knowing glances and solemn nods, the men eased Stovall into the water and allowed it to swallow him.

*      *     *

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

The oil was an efficient sunscreen too. Most of the squalls had been warmed away by the rising South Pacific sun. It baked their skin and reflected off the sea to burn their undersides as well. But the oil protected their skin. Exposure to the ocean’s elements didn’t seem like much of a threat at the time. They knew help was on the way.

Looking up, Tom Stevenson could see a swarm of specks against the ceiling of the blue sky—planes outbound on strike missions of some kind. The aircraft—could they be from the Taffies?—were probably too high for their pilots to spot the survivors. Optimism reigned nonetheless. Figuring on a prompt rescue, Copeland had doled out most of the raft’s provisions. Each man got two malted milk tablets, a piece of Spam, and a few ounces of water.

Sure enough, a good omen soon came. Around three P.M., out of the blue, came the low-throated growl of a Wright radial engine, drowning out the sound of seawater lapping against the raft. A TBM Avenger roared by. Low over the wave tops, the pilot banked hard, circling the group and flashing a thumbs-up sign through the long greenhouse canopy. As the plane zoomed away, its engine fading with the down Doppler, everyone was jubilant. That was it, Stevenson thought. They were all but rescued. The pilot would call in their position, and a ship or a submarine would be sent to get them.

Forty-seven

Swimming in the bloodied waters that had swallowed their ships, none of the survivors of the late, great screening vessels of Taffy 3 were in a position to distinguish victory from defeat. The Japanese men-of-war that had sunk them had charged blithely past, presumably to sweep away the remains of Taffy 3 and to charge through Taffies 2 and 1 on the way into Leyte Gulf itself.

Who was going to tell them what had really happened? And would they even have believed it? The men of the destroyers and destroyer escorts had helped win a victory of the most impossibly resounding kind. Their dashing skippers had put themselves on the line first and started an improbable rout. Now Bill Brooks and friends, the avenging angels from the escort carrier squadrons, would help finish it.

Launching from the Marcus Island at 11:15 A.M., Brooks, the first Taffy 3 pilot to spot the Japanese fleet on its way south, was now among the last to watch it flee. He was in the vanguard of the Taffies’ latest parting gift to the Japanese Center Force: a fifty-six-plane strike whose savagery and efficiency tended to support Kurita’s decision to withdraw. Pilots from the sixteen CVEs of the three Taffies formed pickup squads on the wing. Brooks flew with Ens. William Mc-Cormick of the Fanshaw Bay’s VC-68 and Lt. Cdr. T O. Murray, skipper of the Marcus Island’s resident squadron, VC-21. That group of fourteen Avengers and eight Wildcats merged with a group led by the Kadashan Bay’s skipper, Lt. Cdr. John Dale, which in turn joined planes led by Lt. Cdr. Richard Fowler, the resourceful Kitkun Bay air group commander who had taken a breather aboard the Taffy 2 jeep Manila Bay after his morning exploits. They required no navigation data to find their targets. Raging fires from the stricken Chokai and the Chikumaproduced twin columns of smoke that were visible from the flight deck of Taffy 2’s carriers. This gathering of planes, which rendezvoused as green-dyed shell splashes from the Haruna were walking the seas around Taffy 2’s destroyer screen, was the fourth of six air strikes that Taffy 2 would send against Kurita that day. They found the Japanese fleet about fifteen miles east of Samar Island, off Cebu Bay.

The CVE pilots learned on the wing to do what Halsey’s and Mitscher’s aviators prided themselves on doing. In the days leading up to the Battle off Samar, several jeep-carrier fighter pilots had distinguished themselves in air-to-air combat against bombers swarming the Leyte invasion beachhead. Overall on the day, Wildcat pilots from the three Taffy groups downed fifty-four Japanese planes and claimed twenty more as probables. Now, with an enemy fleet within their grasp, it was the Avenger pilots’ turn to work in the big leagues.

Even had the Center Force commander not recalled his ships on the brink of triumph, they still would have had to survive this angry swarm of American planes. Indeed, with such a surprising gathering of strength arrayed against him, it remains unclear what Kurita could have accomplished had he pressed south toward Leyte Gulf. First, he would have done so alone. He had learned while withdrawing that Nishimura’s Southern Force had been wiped out the night before. And he strongly (and correctly) suspected that MacArthur’s transports had long since unloaded the last of their troops, weapons, food, and supplies. The heavy cruisers Tone and Haguro, having gotten within five and a half miles (a short ten thousand yards) of Sprague when Kurita’s order went out, might have sunk a few more CVEs, but they wouldn’t have gotten far against aerial opposition such as this: fifty-six well-armed planes, and another strike arming on the Taffy 2 carriers behind them. Admiral Stump had ordered his planes to cripple as many Japanese ships as possible—there was no sense administering overkill with Halsey coming back south to clean up any messes they made. The American aviators made as many of them as they could. Kurita had more than he could handle keeping his fleet together in the face of the blue hornets from the escort carriers.

Overtaking the withdrawing ships swiftly, the pilots circled at eight thousand feet, the radio frequencies ababel with pilots excitedly reporting their contacts. If radio communication was strained, the pilots now enjoyed the relative luxury of unpressured time in which to choose their targets. As Commander Dale’s section took the starboard side of the formation and Fowler’s the port, Bill Brooks, Ensign McCormick, and Commander Murray passed the Japanese squadron and made a wide looping turn. When the signal went out to strike, they came in from the north, starting eight miles out and bearing down on the enemy. According to Commander Murray’s after-action report, “In a beautifully coordinated attack, strafers led glide bombers followed by torpedo planes which made their drops as the last bombs hit.” The Japanese ships turned hard to port as the Americans swooped in. Murray pushed over into a steep right turn, following the ships, with McCormick behind him and Brooks bringing up the rear. When flak began to pepper the sky, the planes split formation, with Brooks and McCormick swinging to Murray’s right, lining up a Nagato-class battleship while McCormick lined up an Atogo-class heavy cruiser straight ahead.

∗ The Chokai was the only Atago-class heavy cruiser in this battle. “Now you’re on your own,” Murray said. But when McCormick opened his weapons bay doors, his torpedo fell out and plummeted to the sea.

With the battleship in view, Brooks flew down to 900 feet, lining up fifteen degrees off the ship’s starboard bow and entering the critical “needle-ball and airspeed” phase of his run. If he had figured right, he would glide down to 500 feet and drop, and the battleship’s counterclockwise turn, extrapolated to that point, would put it broadside to his torpedo in the last seconds of its bubbling approach. Ray Travers, hunched over his radar console’s A-scope, hollered out the range to the target, first in miles, then in yards as the range closed. Joe Downs was itching for something to shoot at. He looked to starboard, and there lay a big Japanese cruiser.

“I’m gonna take on this cruiser, okay? It won’t spoil your air-flight, will it?” Downs asked Brooks over the intercom. Cranking the flat-sided spherical greenhouse-glass turret out to the side changed the plane’s aerodynamics, which was not always helpful to a pilot concentrating on making a delicate torpedo run. The pilot told him not to worry about it, so Downs went hunting. The gunner cut loose, sending a hot spray of tracers, ball, and armor-piercing rounds popping and ricocheting across the ship’s superstructure.

Joe Downs had nearly exhausted his ammo can when, abruptly, the plane lifted straight up with a jerk. He thought the plane had been hit. In the excitement he had all but forgotten the two-thousand-pound torpedo payload that Brooks had just released, creating quite a change in inertia.

An endless series of seconds passed—twenty or thirty of them—while the torpedo cruised the thousand-yard path to the ship. Seated rearward in the gunner’s seat, Downs watched the ship shrink in the distance, then get swallowed in a flash of flame. Their torpedo struck forward of the bridge, producing a dirty geyser of water. The Nagato’s bulky mass heaved and shuddered, seeming to lift slightly, then drop back into the sea.

“Oh man, you got her, you got her!” Downs shouted. McCormick saw it too. Brooks circled to watch, then settled on a course that would take him back toward his adoptive home, the Taffy 3 flagship, the Fanshaw Bay. He was by no means unique in this regard, but it would be the third flight deck Brooks’s wheels touched during that long day.

At 12:40, about twenty minutes after Murray’s and Brooks’s attack, the Kitkun Bay’s Richard Fowler led his group around a big cumulus cloud and dove down out of the sun. The loose enemy formation was looping around to the left, exposing its starboard flanks to Fowler’s vengeful blue angels. The skipper dropped his bombs over a battleship, hitting it just aft of the bridge. His wing-man’s bombs struck near the mainmast, while two more pilots scored near-misses astern. Another Avenger pilot reported hitting the Nagato with a torpedo amidships. A heavy cruiser just inboard of the battleship was struck by two bombs.

Just before touching down on the Fanshaw Bay, Fowler picked up a transmission from the Wasp air group, one of Halsey’s squadrons, reporting the sighting of the retiring enemy fleet. Ziggy Sprague’s old ship, with the rest of Adm. John S. McCain’s Task Group 38.2, was closing fast. The Third Fleet’s contribution to the Battle off Samar was far too little, far too late. Because McCain’s strike was launched at extended range, the pilots’ fuel reserves were too low to permit deliberate target selection and preparatory maneuver. But their arrival did tend to underscore the point that had Kurita not withdrawn, he would have run smack into yet another powerful air group.

At about 2:15 P.M. the Chikuma, crippled earlier by White Plains fliers, her topside charred by salvos from the Samuel B. Roberts, was finished off by planes from the Taffy 2 jeep Ommaney Bay. Preceded by four Wildcat fighters that spat two thousand .50-caliber slugs into the cruiser, three TBM Avengers, led by the VC-75 commander, Lt. Allen W. Smith, swooped in low and lay a spread of torpedoes into her port side, just forward of amidships. Seawater rushed in, and the cruiser heeled and rocked a few times, then rolled onto its port side and sank in about fifteen minutes.

Farther to the north, Taffy 3 pilots were in hot pursuit of any other Japanese ships that could still make steam. Tommy Lupo of the Fanshaw Bay’s VC-68, having reholstered his pistol and reloaded with bombs commandeered from the Army, had taken off from the airfield at Tacloban sometime before. Heading north, he found a Mogami-class cruiser, probably the stubborn Kumano, limping toward San Bernardino Strait, her bow broken in the battle’s early minutes. Gliding down alone, Lupo overtook the cruiser, dove on her from her starboard quarter, rode the bright rails of the ship’s tracer bullets down to his bomb-release point, and walked a brace of bombs right up her back. One of his 250-pounders appeared to drop right down the ship’s exhaust stack. A fountain of smoke and crud shot skyward from amidships, and as he flew away, orange tongues of flame could be seen licking through the smoke.

Intermingling orphaned pilots from Ziggy Sprague’s task unit with the squadrons of his own six carriers, Taffy 2 commander Admiral Stump’s carriers mustered a total of 204 sorties against Kurita, 117 by Avengers and 87 by Wildcats, dropping 49 torpedoes and 286 500-pound bombs, and firing 276 rockets and untold thousands of rounds of machine-gun ammunition. By the time the last of his pilots returned to Taffy 2 at 6:25 P.M., just before nightfall made carrier operations doubly hazardous, Kurita’s force had been smashed down to size. Limping north toward San Bernardino Strait went a battered and broken Center Force, reportedly consisting of four battleships, just three heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and seven destroyers.

Two of the battleships trailed broad slicks of oil; three destroyers and one of the light cruisers lagged behind the main group; and one heavy cruiser appeared heavily damaged. Impossible to catalog but probably significant nonetheless were the assorted lesser catastrophes inflicted by the ceaseless strafing, bombing, and battering by American five-inch shells. Twenty-four aircraft from the jeep carriers had fallen to Japanese antiaircraft fire, with forty-three pilots and aircrewmen lost or missing in action.

Some pilots survived by the slimmest of margins. Richard Roby, the Gambier Bay Wildcat pilot, escorted Foster Dillard back to Tacloban after a strike on the Japanese fleet. Seeing Dillard’s plane swerving on an unsteady course, its pilot without a helmet and no hatch, bareheaded to the rushing wind, Roby suspected immediately that his VC-10 squadronmate was “punchier than a three-dollar bill.” He couldn’t keep a level heading, and if the young pilot could scarcely manage level flight, how would he handle a landing on a muddy, pitted airstrip?

Somehow Dillard reached Tacloban, made a reasonably steady approach, and eased his Wildcat onto the muddy runway. The plane taxied down the tarmac, hit a soft spot, and flipped forward, driving its propeller hub into the ground. Roby pulled around for another pass, giving the men on the ground time to push the wrecked fighter plane out of the way. Then Roby made another approach and landed. When he found Dillard, the wounded pilot had taken so much shrapnel to the face that he looked like a smallpox patient. For the pilots of VC-10, as for all the pilots of Taffy 3, the morning of October 25 had been a long one.

The aviators from the Seventh Fleet’s escort carriers finished the Battle off Samar on their terms because Kurita had declined to finish it on his.

On whose terms the survivors in the water would end their ongoing struggle remained very much an open question.

Forty-eight

The impossible horror of the war’s first kamikaze sinking had come upon them suddenly and without warning. Murderously effective, the attack on the St. Lo and the other CVEs set the lookouts on Taffy 3’s remaining ships on high alert. Though Ziggy Sprague worried about the possibility of submarine attack—there had been enough odd sightings of torpedo wakes coming at his ships during the morning’s fighting to alert him to the threat—he detached what remained of his screen, the Heermann, the Dennis, the Raymond, and the John C. Butler, from escort duty and ordered them to recover the survivors of the St. Lo dotting the sea where the carrier had gone down. Expertly conned by her skipper, Sig Hansen, her narrow hull draped in cargo nets for survivors to climb, the Dennis moved through the St. Lo’s debris field retrieving survivors. The healthiest among them clambered aboard asking, “Hey, what’s for chow?” “What’s the movie tonight?” or “Where the hell is haul-ass Halsey?” The worse-off were pulled from the sea and given morphine and a soft place to lie down. The Dennis’s rescue effort, led by first lieutenant Frank Tyrrell and chief boatswain’s mate Joe Barry, saved more than four hundred survivors from the St. Lo and thirty-five pilots.

Retrieving the other survivors would be a much taller order. The Avenger pilot who sighted Tom Stevenson and the rest of the Roberts survivors, under strict radio silence, made a mental note of their coordinates to pass along to the Seventh Fleet after he landed. It seems his mission lasted longer than his memory. The coordinates that were given to Admiral Kinkaid were off by a wide margin. An attempted correction offered little more help. Admiral Stump informed the Seventh Fleet commander around 12:30 P.M. that hundreds of survivors were adrift at 11°12′N, 126°30′E, which was twenty to forty miles south of the various sites where the Taffy 3 ships had gone down.

Though Ziggy Sprague was prompt in asking Admiral Kinkaid to launch a rescue operation to save the survivors of Taffy 3, owing to the desperate nature of the fight against the continuing kamikaze attacks and the preoccupation of the PBY Catalina patrol planes with rescuing downed fliers, it wasn’t until 3:30 P.M. that a serious rescue attempt was made. At that time Admiral Kinkaid ordered Tommy Sprague to detach all available screening ships and begin a search close to the original erroneous position. Because it consisted of ships unassisted by planes, the rescue mission had a margin for error much slimmer than the error itself. The destroyer escorts Eversole and Richard S. Bull steamed northeast and arrived at the specified coordinates at 11:30 P.M. Finding nothing, they returned to Taffy 1 empty-handed that night.

When Admiral Halsey finally returned from chasing Admiral Ozawa’s goose, he detached several destroyers to sweep the area, looking for Japanese stragglers. Though they passed close to where some Taffy 3 survivors floated, they were looking for things considerably larger than heads bobbing on the waves. They failed to locate them as well.

*      *     *

AS THE AFTERNOON WORE on, Tom Stevenson, Charles Natter, and Lloyd Gurnett had just about given up their attempts to bring back the men floating on the planks. The survivors who clung to them, many badly hurt, were exhibiting a dangerous combination of recalcitrance and resignation. They refused to leave. The scaffolding must have been just seaworthy enough to make the reward of setting out for another precarious refuge seem dubious and theoretical, even if their captain was supposedly in charge there.

Natter did his best to help them. He was a capable swimmer, athletic and strong. Adrenaline made up what strength he had lost from the shrapnel peppered through his shoulders. But there were limits to what the stout signalman could do. Men were not made to outswim sharks.

The predators were gathering in growing numbers. For a time the pool of fuel oil that surrounded them seemed to keep the sharks at bay. But by late afternoon enough blood had leached into the water to attract a crowd.

Charles Natter was catching a breather on the scaffolding when the sharks ended the tease and acted on their nature. One of them came up and pulled Thomas Mazura, one of his friends from the Sammy B.’s signal division, from his plank. Natter had little time to mourn. Like an inverted fang, another big fin glided toward him, and he was hauled under too. Seeing it all happen, John Conway was at last persuaded to take his chances swimming for Copeland’s raft. The coxswain tried to talk others into joining him, but hurt and exhausted, they wanted no part of it. Conway was the only man from the scaffolding to reach Bob Copeland’s raft and floater net that afternoon.

At one point Copeland counted as many as fifty shark fins cutting the surface near him. Thanks to the oil that bathed the survivors in his group, these predators were all swim and no bite. But because no one could be too confident of that, the men feared the worst whenever a fin moved closer and then disappeared under water. The captain of the Roberts didn’t want to think about what might have happened to his signalman and the men he had gallantly tried to save.

Whether through exhaustion, wounds, or willpower, the men stayed quiet. Their stoicism impressed Bob Copeland.

I’ve read a lot of stories about how men on life rafts behave; they either curse—curse their luck and curse everybody—or they get a big shot of religion and pray and sing songs. Our men didn’t do that at all…. They were a very quiet group…. They bore their suffering in almost total silence…. We were just beaten to a pulp, that’s all.

The only outbursts on Copeland’s raft were the final thrashes of the dying. Charles Staubach, the grievously wounded chief electrician’s mate, lay motionless inside the raft, tended to by healthy survivors.

But around three that afternoon he went out of his head, ranting and raving deliriously before succumbing to death.

As the sun fell in the western sky, optimism about a quick rescue was turning to discouragement. Copeland noticed that Bob Roberts’s stoutly girded calm was giving way to a very evident despair. “I tried to bargain with God,” Roberts later wrote. “I explained to Him that my wife had just had a baby boy whom I had never seen, and that though I was ready and willing to die, if He would allow it I would take care of them as long as I lived.” Copeland huddled privately with his exec until Roberts regained his composure. “He was a tower of strength from there on in,” Copeland wrote.

Copeland asked Roberts, “Where do you think we are?” Roberts said, “Well, Captain, I don’t know exactly where we are, but I’d say we’re roughly thirty miles east of the island of Samar and about thirty miles north of its southern tip. That’s as close as I can give you from the last navigational fix I had before we went into battle. That’s close. We are within five miles one way or another.”

Thirty miles off Samar. If they were high enough above the water, in the crow’s nest of a battleship using binoculars, they might have seen its shores. But from sea level, where they floated, the line of sight to the horizon was just fourteen miles. When the clouds and rain permitted, all they could see were its peaks.

“Well,” Copeland said to Roberts, “you and I are the senior officers, and we better set a good example.” They each took a paddle and climbed up on the side of the raft and began stroking a course west into the setting sun.

Forty-nine

The survivors from the Johnston were greater in number than the Roberts group but were situated similarly to the other survivors from Taffy 3’s sunken ships. Well over a hundred men drifted the ravaged waters on lengths of plank and timber, on floater nets and life rafts, or were held afloat only by kapok vests or life preservers. Organized and calmed by their officers and senior petty officers, they decided to let their large group disperse on the currents, each group centered on a life raft/floater net ensemble, in order to maximize their chances of detection.

The most seriously wounded were gathered inside the rafts. Howard Craven, from the electrical department, had his throat slashed clear around the neck by a large shard of shrapnel. Though few expected him to survive, he surprised them all not only by surviving but by summoning the energy and Samaritan will to tend to James Cooper and Jack Walker, who had been badly burned and lay shivering in the raft.

A large group that included Bob Hagen, Ellsworth Welch, Ed Di-Gardi, Jack Bechdel, Jesse Cochran, Milt Pehl, and Hank Wilson was clustered around two rafts and a pair of floater nets strung together with manila line. Wilson had gotten badly burned by boiler steam when the fireroom was hit. Pharmacist’s mate Clayton Schmuff swam about making his rounds, putting sulfa powder on burns and giving morphine to the most seriously wounded. Jack Bechdel, missing most of a leg, was so benumbed by morphine that he found it within himself to sing. With a voice mellifluous and strong, he sang as if they were gathered around a campfire.

As the afternoon dragged on, Ellsworth Welch reflected on the ordeal that they had all just experienced, thinking their circumstances could only get better. “Our thoughts were, 3,000 ships, 200,000 men, thousands of airplanes…. It won’t be long now…. We were just a couple of hundred miles from the greatest naval armada ever assembled on earth.” To a man they were convinced that the proximity of powerful friendly fleets all but ensured their rescue. Their admiral knew they were out there. Pilots had sighted them. Rescue would be the simple product of time, patience, and fortitude.

While they waited for America’s overwhelming military power to come to their assistance, they passed the time struggling to keep their spirits up, wondering aloud about the outcome of the battle and the fates of particular shipmates, telling stories, passing cigarettes, and munching on hardtack biscuits and salty water.

By midafternoon their submerged doubts began to surface, along with the first sharks. Bill Mercer watched a particularly large one work its way toward them in a widely meandering zigzag, finally cruising by close enough that the men could extend their legs and kick at it. Faced with splashing and kicking life-forms, it elected not to harm them. The men scanned the horizon through 360 degrees, watching their hopes for a speedy rescue diminish and vanish.

*      *     *

WHEN DARKNESS FELL, THE sharks grew more assertive. In the pitch-black Pacific night, they revealed themselves by proxy. Moving through the plankton-rich waters, disturbing the photosensitive plant life, the sharks ignited an eerie phosphorescence that formed a faint glowing path toward the men in the rafts. There was splashing and cursing. Shrill voices rose and then were gone. Someone said something about spotting a ship. Someone else produced a Very pistol, and several flares lofted skyward—red, white, and green—burning arcs of colorful brilliance through the night. When there was no response in kind from the rescuer, the men feared they had alerted a Japanese ship. Their panic became quieter if no less desperate.

Drifting toward a fatal sleep, the men decided to fasten themselves together with their CO₂ inflatable life belts, assigned each other numbers, and counted off at intervals to indicate their physical and mental presence. Clint Carter had just finished securing himself to Chuck Campbell when someone yelled “Shark!” and the men started climbing atop one another toward the stars. In the zero-sum equation of saltwater buoyancy, one man’s success was another man’s sudden dunking. Something bumped Carter heavily in the back, and he felt a wrenching force. He screamed, put both hands on Campbell’s shoulders, and lifted himself out of the water as a shark’s bear-trap jaws tore away a chunk of his kapok, along with a small bloody piece of his side. As Carter rose up, his weight plunged Campbell under. The shark let go of Carter, Carter let go of Campbell, and Campbell surfaced sputtering and gasping. Then the shark tasted Carter again, and once more he dunked Campbell in his bid for the raft. The shark let go of Carter, Campbell surfaced, and regaining his breath, he helped lay Carter, bleeding badly, into the raft.

Chief gunner’s mate Harry Henson got bitten in the thigh hard enough to crush bone. Joe Taromino took bites in the left arm and shoulder, Vince Scafoglio in the area of his left kidney.

In the night, despite the ministrations of their shipmate with the slashed throat, Cooper and Walker passed away. Someone offered a few solemn words, their life jackets and life belts were removed for someone else’s benefit, their dog tags were collected, and their bodies were released and allowed to sink. Watching them go under, Bill Mercer felt like “an eighteen-year-old boy going on forty.”

As the night deepened, hopelessness set in for the wounded who could no longer endure the glacial passage of time. Before Ed Haubrich died of his severe leg wounds, he asked Dusty Rhodes, the cook in the chief’s mess, for a sandwich. A Johnston sailor who had suffered a deep shark bite to the abdomen asked to be put out of his misery. For nearly an hour he begged for his shipmates’ mercy, moaning, screaming, and crying. He finally received it when someone pulled out a revolver, misfired it, then produced a knife and cut his throat.

*      *     *

“WHY DON’T WE ALL sing?” The survivors in Jack Moore’s group made a halfhearted attempt to render a familiar tune. “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” “The Swanee River.” “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” But they had suffered too much to indulge in musical reverie. Their hearts weren’t in it. “I remember a few people started singing,” Dick Rohde said, “and then it just sort of died out. Nobody really wanted to sing. It didn’t go over too well.”

Though they stayed mostly quiet, the arrival of sharks triggered their survival instincts, and desperate spasms of fighting broke out, the men climbing one another like ladders, frantic to leave the water. They pushed one another down, clutching and grabbing with death-grip strength. They swallowed seawater, gagged, and lunged upward, coughing and swinging fists. George Bray and Chalmer Goheen tried to quell the panic, but it had a life of its own. Finally, after the men had worn themselves out, it stopped by itself.

When quiet settled in again, the men laid their heads on the sides of the raft and on the coarse rope mesh of the floater net. George Bray struggled to remain alert. He was starting to think the sharks might be toying with them. He had seen them swimming in slow circles below. Though it was hard to gauge precisely how large they were, he knew they weren’t small. The last rays of daylight had revealed some big ones down there: ten, twelve feet long, he thought. There had been smaller fish present with them—hundreds of them hovering together in stationary schools. Possibly barracuda. In months past Bray and the others had occasionally seen sharks following the Roberts near dusk, gorging themselves as the garbage was thrown overboard. The sharks patrolling the waters off Samar on October 25, having endured the cacophony of the bloody morning, would find richer fare in the ensuing days.

Eventually George Bray stopped worrying too much about what might be in the waters beneath him. By the time the sun was dipping out of sight to the west, fear of the big predators yielded to wary acceptance. Mostly he just stopped looking down. Mostly he started worrying about what might—or might not—be coming for them from over the horizon.

Fifty

When no ship came to rescue the survivors of the Samuel B. Roberts during the night, Tom Stevenson feared the Japanese had won the battle. The big force of Jap cruisers and battleships, he thought, had incinerated the other ships of Taffy 3 and pressed on to the Leyte beachhead. What other conclusion could be drawn? If any of the American ships had survived, wouldn’t they be combing the oceans where the Roberts and the others had gone down, pulling alongside and hauling them aboard to safety? The Sammy B.’s sacrifice, it seemed, had been in vain.

Untold hours into the deepening night, Stevenson heard a shout. The voice sounded American. With others, he called hoarsely in reply, and echoing one another, ranging by sound, the source of the shouting finally found them. It was a man, swimming alone.

Soundman Howard Cayo, the former circus acrobat, had been with the men on the scaffolding. He was one of just a few there to survive the shark attacks—saved, it seemed, by his litheness and strength. Cayo joined the group, relating the horrible story of what had happened on the scaffolding.

The fear was with them already, but now it worsened. They kicked and splashed at phantoms. Clutching the floater net hitched to Copeland’s raft, kicking futilely in the direction of land while Copeland and Bob Roberts paddled from the raft, Stevenson prayed silently, God, if you get me out of this, I’m going to become the best husband and raise a great family. That’s all I’m going to ask.

*      *     *

THE NIGHTTIME SKY, IMPASSIVE and immobile, betrayed no sign of the passage of time. To Jack Moore “it seemed very much like an entire week of darkness.” The first indication of change that touched George Bray’s senses came to him after midnight: the rich scent of land. The pure ocean air cleansed the nasal cavities so thoroughly that there was no mistaking the sweet effluvium of the Samar jungle. Its rich, warm smell came wafting over the waters, borne to them on shifting winds.

The ocean currents or tides or whatever other inscrutable forces pushed them through the waters were shifting too. When the survivors tried to swim toward shore, the currents defied them. With a man straddling the ring of the raft on each side, they paddled to exhaustion but made little apparent headway. But once the men surrendered to the current, the tides seemed to relent and even to cooperate.

When Bray heard the sound of breakers hissing on the unseen beach, he guessed that his group couldn’t have been more than a mile from land. They resumed paddling. But a nagging thought made them hesitate. Samar was Japanese held. You didn’t just go ashore by night without doing a little reconnoitering. The dark island was famous for danger. Discovered by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521, Samar was five thousand square miles of oozing malarial swamps fringing majestic forested mountains. The terrain was liberally soaked with the blood of insurgents, saturated with a myth of violence. From the 1901 Balangiga massacre, in which fifty-nine U.S. troops were ambushed and killed by Filipino guerrillas, provoking Brig. Gen. Jacob Smith to declare that all Filipinos over the age of ten must be killed and “the interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness,” to the nightmare campaign waged by the pulajan insurgency against the Manila Constabulary in 1904-05, in which rebels burned fifty-three villages in a two-month period, it had fairly earned the nickname “the bloody island.” Samar had seldom known peace, even less now that its foreign occupiers were as brutal as its native insurgents.

The clouds shrouded the moon; where squalls fell to the sea, they looked like forests of trees on land. Without knowing their geographical bearings, the men could not know what to do. In the pitch dark, in the safe distance, Jack Moore spotted a patrol boat of some kind, its searchlight playing over the dark waters in their vicinity but failing to discover them.

George Bray and the others stopped paddling and lay to rest, trying to orient themselves by the position of the moon. But like the tides, that too was a shifting variable. It lay hidden behind thick clouds. They fell asleep one by one, and when they awoke again and found their bearings by the early light of daybreak, they discovered that they had drifted farther out to sea.

*      *     *

A SHIP STEAMED TOWARD them in the night, its head-on silhouette materializing tall and black against the backlighting moon. A few survivors of the Johnston shouted out, desperate that the ship not miss them. But when it came closer and then turned broadside to them, everyone suddenly went quiet. Its pagoda-shaped mast was all too apparent. Ellsworth Welch identified it as a Terutsuki-class destroyer. It was probably searching for survivors from one of the imperial cruisers sunk in the battle. The presence of a larger predator compelled men who were kicking at sharks to float motionless, loath to break the surface with an out-of-place splash that might reveal their presence. Men who were singing abruptly stopped. “What had been a very noisy group became as silent as a graveyard,” Harold Bereson-sky recalled. When the ship’s searchlight beam swept the seas near them, the silence was broken by soft prayers.

The random strikes of the sharks terrified the men through the night. One moment a kid was there, quietly treading water. The next moment he was screaming, and seconds later he was gone. Quiet. Then screaming. Then gone. Just like that. Ellsworth Welch felt something grab the back of his life belt, rip it off, and tear his pants and shorts. “This was a situation for which I wasn’t prepared,” he wrote. “My contract with the Navy was to fight the enemy, not sharks.” Robert Billie, wounded by the first Japanese salvo that struck the Johnston’s bridge, swung in and out of consciousness through much of the night. Someone tied him up to an unwounded shipmate who helped keep his face out of the water. Thanks to his shipmate’s kindness, Billie would survive. Before the night was over, though, his unhurt benefactor would himself be grabbed and hauled under by a shark.

Fifty-one

At about ten A.M. on the second day at sea, the reappearance of Samar’s mountain peaks boosted the spirits of Bob Copeland’s men. In celebration, the skipper broke out the last of the emergency rations. Hoisting himself up to sit on the doughnut raft’s ring, Copeland rubbed his fingers on his trousers to clean them of oil and ordered each man to swim up to him, whereupon he dispensed the last of the malted milk tablets, three apiece, and the last remnants of Spam and some stale fresh water.

The experience helped Copeland see a certain egalitarian nobility to his crew and officers. “On that raft we were just forty-nine very wretched human beings, entirely dependent upon ourselves and one another in an effort to sustain life. Under those conditions it made no difference to us whether a man’s parents had been rich or poor; whether he was Catholic, Protestant, or Jew; whether his skin was black, brown, or white; or whether his ancestry was English, Spanish, Italian, or something else.” During their second day at sea, the oil mostly dissolved and washed away from their skin, revealing those things that Copeland no longer felt mattered anymore.

Paddling gamely toward shore, Howard Cayo and Tom Stevenson straddled the overloaded raft on opposite sides. While they were laboring, straining to push the impossible weight of their craft through the low swells, a seagull began circling overhead. Seeing a potential meal, Cayo stood shakily, gathered his weight behind his paddle, and swung it upward in a wide arc. He missed the bird but caught Tom Stevenson full in the head on the follow-through, knocking the dazed lieutenant into the sea.

Around midafternoon, while Stevenson was shaking off the effects of the blow, easier pickings came their way. The men on Copeland’s raft spied a wooden crate floating some distance away from them. Cayo and fireman first class John Kudelchuk took off after it and, retrieving it for their captain’s inspection, discovered it to be stamped with Japanese characters. They pulled it open and discovered it was full of dried onions, more than 150 of them. They were passed around, and the men started devouring them, stopping only when they realized the extent to which the onions intensified their thirst. From that point on dehydration and exposure to sun and sea threatened the survivors’ lives as surely as did the sharks.

Some of the men questioned Copeland’s decision to paddle toward shore. With the possibility of rescue shrinking by the hour, they reasoned, shouldn’t they be conserving their strength rather than expending it? Worn down by the multiple pressures of combat, injury, and the agony of watching so many of his crew die and his ship be smashed down around him, the skipper himself was beginning to lose his edge. There was only so much he could endure. In time Copeland started to feel, as did quite a few others, that they should risk swimming to shore under the cover of darkness and make contact with Filipino guerrillas.

But as the sun began to set, they were drifting by their best dead reckoning some four miles from the Samar coast—“too far away to make it in by night and too close to paddle very much farther in daylight without the danger of being detected in the morning,” Copeland feared. While the sun set on their second day at sea, they elected to stay put and take their chances with the currents.

*      *     *

AFTER ANOTHER DAY OF riding the gentle swells, exhaustion set in, and men whose lives depended on their alertness began nodding off to sleep. At first, the problem corrected itself; when their faces hit the water, it served as a sort of self-activating wake-up call. But as their fatigue deepened, compounding the stress they had suffered in two and a half hours of battle, the comfort of the tropical waters was like morphine, a quiet way to a gentle death. The men paired off, taking turns holding each other’s faces out of the water so the other could sleep.

The water’s evident warmth masked its life-threatening nature. Though its temperature was worthy of the tropics, in the mid-eighty-degree Fahrenheit range, it was well below mean body temperature and thus was cold enough to sap the body of a significant amount of heat. The speed at which a body loses heat depends on the density of the medium surrounding it. Since water is denser than air, it has a correspondingly greater capacity to draw heat from a body. And so over time, the ten- to fifteen-degree differential between body temperature and the temperature of the sea sapped the survivors’ energy, exposing them to hypothermia. In the quiet of the tropical night, teeth could be heard chattering. The men huddled close to gather one another’s warmth.

At about ten-thirty on the second night, the Roberts survivors in Copeland’s group spied a flashing white light on the water. Aware that other ships of Taffy 3 had gone down too, they were anxious to unite with their survivors and combine resources. But what if they were Japanese? Copeland had no weapon. There had been a. 45-caliber pistol on the raft, but it had been tossed overboard owing to its weight. Their only other tools were a pair of sheath knives and two flashlights. Copeland flipped on the light in the direction of the mysterious flare and flashed Morse code for AA—Navy code for “Who are you?” He then flashed the Samuel B. Roberts’s call sign, VICTORY DOG 1-4-1-3, hoping his correspondent would realize who they were and why they were there. In reply, the light blinked some Morse-like signals that neither Copeland nor anyone else could make sense of. Then the lights stopped altogether. Had he been communicating with the Japanese?

Someone reported seeing a green flare like the ones the Very pistols fired. Others reported lights that none of the others could see. With the weaker among them beginning to hallucinate from fatigue and ingesting salt water, possibly the vast majority of the lights they reported were phantasms. Copeland saw more lights: a red one, a green one, several more white ones. It was hard to tell what was real, and harder to determine how far away they were. Copeland and his officers later surmised that an ocean current had carried them into a harbor, and the lights they had seen were on channel buoys and docks. It seems, however, that what they really saw were flares fired by another group of Taffy 3 survivors.

When they heard the growl of diesel engines approaching and spied the dark silhouette of a small patrol craft, perhaps half the size of the Roberts, Copeland began to suspect they were closer to land than he had thought before. Though they did not know it, they were probably a mere five hundred to a thousand yards from the beach. Some of Copeland’s men wanted to make a ruckus and hail the ship, but the skipper dissuaded them. The ship, blacked out, passed within a hundred feet of the men.

About an hour before midnight, Copeland’s exhaustion overcame him. His thoughts became vague and befuddled. He lost physical control over his hands and his head. He couldn’t hold his head up out of the water, and he couldn’t hold on to the tailing rope dangling from the life raft.

Copeland retained enough mental acuity to appreciate his uselessness to his men. He argued with Bob Roberts that they should just let him slip away into the deep. But the tough exec won that argument. He lifted his captain from the water, placed him on the side of the raft, and held him around the waist from midnight till dawn. Copeland quietly withdrew into himself, surrendering command of the group to his subordinate.

With the exhaustion traveleds its darker twin, delirium. It was the product of fatigue and of the creeping effects of ingested salt water, a poison that tended to have a phantasmagoric effect on the brain. Though it did not seize hold of Copeland, it afflicted most of the men at one time or another during the second night.

For two days the men had had nothing to drink save the brackish water in the five-gallon water breakers that the raft carried for just this purpose. But soon enough a far preferable alternative presented itself. Tom Stevenson was delighted now to discover a freshwater source that no one had seen before—why hadn’t anyone noticed it? The lieutenant became convinced that if only he could make it down to the first deck of the ship, a scuttlebutt full of cool freshwater was right there for his pleasure. Right below him: a fountain … Right below him: a cool, clear arch of water. Its bubbling gurgle echoed in his mind. If only he could get below, his thirst would be slaked. The ship was right down there, for chrissake, hovering there below him. There’s water down there, fellas. I’ll be back in a minute.

Fortunately for Stevenson, he had the good manners to speak his plan aloud. Hearing the young officer’s suicidal brainstorm, Bob Roberts and Lloyd Gurnett grabbed hold of him and tied him fast to the floater net. As the night wore on, it was clear that the mentally sound were outnumbered and outlasted by the delirious. All of a sudden the night was filled with the siren songs of fresh drinking water, hot coffee, native girls, and warm home cooking. Bob Roberts himself was not immune. An officer swam up to the exec, saluted, and requested “permission to go below.” Roberts granted it and the officer swam off. As the currents propelled the survivors westward through the night, Roberts discerned a point of land that was dotted with fine homes. A gala dinner party was in progress, tuxedoed men and gloriously begowned women enjoying a high time by the sea. The delirium was not limited to the men on Copeland’s raft. Dick Rohde left Moore’s group and swam around looking for a hole in the sea through which he might crawl to gain access to the freshwater scuttlebutt. Charles Cronin, a yeoman second class, retrieved him, but at the first opportunity Rohde was swimming away, looking for a hole containing lemonade. After Cronin had saved him again, the radioman realized that the Philippines weren’t all that far from India. His older brother was over there, flying supplies over the famous “hump.” Surely his brother could help him.

Through the night most of the men had dalliances with madness. On Copeland’s raft, Lloyd Gurnett removed his life jacket and said he was going down to the wardroom for a cup of coffee. Though alert shipmates snapped him momentarily to his senses, he did it again every fifteen minutes, until finally they restrained him for good with a well-knotted length of manila line. At one point the strong and able Frank Cantrell declared in full basso profundo, “Object ho!” Bob Copeland lifted his head with his hands. “What is it, Cantrell?” the captain asked.

“I see a big white cottage on the beach with green shutters,” his chief quartermaster said. He took no small amount of umbrage to the derisive laughter that greeted his announcement.

But there were just as many men whose derangement arrived without announcement. When they decided to leave the raft in the dark of night without any word to friends, no one knew to intervene, and they were never seen again.

Tom Stevenson, having imagined himself swimming into a Japanese-held harbor to steal a small boat, found his way back to clarity and saw that discipline was eroding. It was evident in the glazed cast of his shipmates’ eyes. They reflected no visible recognition of the common predicament. The men seemed to shrink as they grew concerned with their own survival. Twelve hours before everyone had lined up in an orderly fashion and come before Captain Copeland to receive survivors’ communion: a few malted milk tablets, some Spam, and a swig of brackish water. Now the men were doing whatever the hell they wanted. They argued with phantoms, ranted at the night sky. When no one was looking, some of them slipped away in search of that scuttlebutt and its bubbling arch of freshwater.

Fireman first class Eugene Wagner moaned miserably into the night, suffering mightily, possibly from ingesting seawater. As his pain and delirium escalated, Wagner went out of his head, cussing out Copeland—“Fucking captain’s no good. Fucking captain’s no good.” Lying in the floater net, he abruptly declared that he wanted to go home and, cursing his skipper all the way, attempted to climb into the water. Copeland ordered someone to hold his arms behind his back and someone else to knock some sense into the delirious sailor. The order was executed, and Bill Katsur, next to Wagner, heard the crunch of fist on jaw. The fireman was groggy but found it within himself to continue the blue streak of obscenity. “Hit him again,” Copeland ordered. Another blow fell. Wagner went silent. When morning came, he was gone from the raft.

Fifty-two

As the second day became the second night, the sea took its toll on the Johnston’s men, from within and without. Even those who had gone unwounded from shrapnel or sharks suffered: severe sunburn to the face, head, and shoulders, lips swollen from brine and sun, eyes bloodshot from exhaustion and exposure, skin softened by seawater and rubbed raw by wet clothing.

Ken Bowers, the pharmacist’s mate, swam around doing what he could for the wounded. But a growing number of survivors were beyond the reach of his modest ministrations. What the sun had done to their skin, the salt water in their stomachs was doing to their minds. Even men who had come through the battle without a scratch surrendered to madness. Some of them gave up their struggles altogether, let go of the nets, and disappeared. Others lived rich fantasies, mingling with their shipmates as if they were back in San Francisco, guests at a cocktail party. Luther Libby, the chief machinist’s mate, left his group several times, saying he was going to get a drink. Charles Landreth, Dusty Rhodes, and others looked after him, several times stopping him from swimming to oblivion.

Late during the second night Libby turned to Landreth and said, apropos of nothing, “I’ll buy you a beer.” Landreth said, “Chief, don’t talk like that. There isn’t any beer or anything else to drink except seawater, and that will kill you.” Libby’s eyes were glassy as he pushed off from the net. Landreth grabbed for him as he and others had done several times. But now his will to wander exceeded their ability to keep him safe. Landreth did not have the strength to hold on. Libby slipped away and was never seen again.

Machinist’s mate Don Starks, who had had two ships shot out from under him, including the battleship Arizona, before he came aboard the Johnston, saw visions of land and houses and people waving at him from a distance. He waved back and on one occasion swam in their direction for a time before he realized they existed only in his head. Natives paddling out to rescue them, riding canoes laden with fruits, vegetables, freshwater, and Filipino princesses. A whale-boat, towing them to shore—let’s just get this engine started. No, it’s not a whaleboat—it’s a destroyer. There: Cap’n Evans is up on that mountain over there. I’m going to go meet him. No, the captain just sailed by us on a ship. Said he’s going to come back to pick us all up.

Most of these delirious declarations found at least a few credulous takers. “We believed it,” wrote John Mostowy. “Who cared anymore?”

*      *     *

BY NIGHT GEORGE BRAY and his Roberts shipmates paddled, guided by the brilliant field of stars, chasing them west in their flight over the horizon. Around midnight, on the darkened horizon, they finally saw the lights. From the way they moved, the men determined the lights to be on land, not sea. They seemed to be moving to and fro, like lazy fireflies. Suspecting they might be Japanese troops, the men ceased paddling. They floated motionless and considered their options. They decided that they preferred the certainty of the dangers they knew to the unknown terrors ashore. They could make their move toward land—if such a move had to be made—by daylight, when they could better sort through the risks and the opportunities.

But after a night of fractured sleep and fragmentary dreams, the men of George Bray’s group awoke to a discouraging sight. The shore was gone. The currents had toyed with the sleeping men. At first, aided by the east-by-northeasterly wind, they had flowed west, supporting the men’s exhausted efforts to paddle for the beach. But then, as they slept, the currents seemed to shift, and the men drifted back out to sea so far that Bray didn’t know if they would ever reach land. All they could make out were Samar’s sharp mountain peaks poking up from below the horizon. Seeing no sign of rescue—no ships, no planes—the men on the raft resumed paddling.

Their kapok life vests, good only for about twenty hours, were no longer much use. Soaked through with seawater, the flotation devices had less buoyancy than the humans they were meant to save. The men took them off and got rid of them. The floater net too had its best days behind it. Its hard rubber disks had sponged up too much water to float. As a result, the net hovered beneath the ocean’s surface, weighted down by its survivors. They decided to keep it, however. At least it held the group together.

The weariest and weakest of them had resigned themselves to death now. Where delirium took hold, tired minds spun fantasies of rest, recreation, and rescue. Five of the healthiest among them, George Bray, Mel Dent, Chalmer Goheen, and two others, decided to take their chances swimming to shore. There was no great send-off; the others had retreated into their private miseries. So the five men just started swimming.

They had gone west perhaps a mile or so, the rising sun behind them lighting their way, when they spotted a dark shape on the horizon. There was no gauging distance from sea level, but Bray thought the spot was getting bigger. If it was a ship, it seemed to be approaching them. And sure enough, it was a ship. It came closer and closer until the flag fluttering from its mainmast came into partial focus. It was red and white, streaked with bright red lines. The rising sun of Imperial Japan was headed their way.

*      *     *

WITH RESCUE SHIPS SEEMINGLY absent, the survivors contemplated their best alternative to rescue by American forces. Like the Japanese survivors drifting in Surigao Strait three nights before, Bob Copeland and his men would rather die than be picked up by their enemy. In view of what they had been through, a few of them—Bob Roberts, Howard Cayo, Rudy Skau, and John Kudelchuk—were in excellent shape. But for the most part, the survivors’ physical and mental condition was low enough to make the prospect of capture and internment in a poorly supplied Japanese prison camp seem less desirable than a clean, quick death.

That night they had stayed quiet while a ship passed them in the dark. Now another vessel approached. Rudy Skau, the chief torpedo-man, had the sharpest eyesight in the bunch. “Skau, take a good look at that ship and tell me what she is,” Copeland said.

“Captain, I don’t know what the hell she is. I think an American flag is flying from her. I can see red and white stripes.”

Copeland pointed out that Japanese battle pennants had red and white stripes too. But after another few moments of scrutiny, Skau was convinced. “Captain, I know she’s an American ship. I see a little blue corner in the flag.”

Copeland asked Bob Roberts to verify the sighting. The executive officer hoisted himself up on the side of the raft and peered through the morning light. “Well, Captain,” he said, “I can’t be sure, but I think there’s a blue corner in that flag.”

They watched the ship approach them, about two miles off the coast of Samar. Some of them wanted to shout out and hail the ship. Copeland feared the worst should his trusted torpedoman prove wrong, but he also recognized the urgency to get his badly wounded men to safety. Jackson McCaskill, the deck force reject who had acquitted himself so heroically in the fireroom before the Roberts sank, lay helpless inside the raft, with the flesh burned from the bottom of his feet. Tullio Serafini, the old radio department chief, was in severe shock, with bones protruding through the skin of his torn legs and left shoulder.

“Okay, Skau,” Copeland said, “are you dead certain?”

“Yes, Captain, I’ll stake my life on it.”

“All right, up you go.” Copeland found the strength to help Skau hop up onto the raft. Steadying himself on the foam doughnut, Skau removed his oil-soaked khaki shirt, tied it to the end of a paddle, and began waving it back and forth.

“He hadn’t waved it more than four times when, suddenly, a great blast of antiaircraft fire went up from some twenty- or forty-millimeters, and we could see the ship paying around and heading toward us,” Copeland recalled.

When the ship reached the raft—it was an LCI, a landing craft from MacArthur’s Navy—a crewman in green coveralls, concerned that these sailors in blackface might be Japanese, shouted down the challenge, “Who won the World Series?” Receiving the correct reply—“St. Louis, God damn it!”—the crew of the landing craft tossed a Jacob’s ladder over the side. The stronger survivors climbed its wooden steps on their own power, while a stretcher was thrown over to bring up the wounded.

Tullio Serafini, delirious with pain, was too heavy for the light twenty-one-thread line they used to haul up the first three stretchers. When the ship reached him, Bob Copeland felt a wave of energy surge through his body—enough energy to wax indignant when a boatswain’s mate on the landing craft asked him if he needed any help tying a bowline with the three-inch manila line he tossed down to them to secure their wounded chief radioman.

*      *     *

GEORGE BRAY AND HIS four swimming buddies looked at the ship approaching them and decided that if they were going to die, they might as well go down with the rest of their shipmates. So they turned around and swam at their best speed back toward the raft.

Back at the raft Jack Moore, watching the strange ship approach, turned to his shipmates and said, “Men, it looks as if we’re going to be picked up by the Japs. We’re covered with fuel oil, and they won’t be able to tell we’re Americans until they get right upon us. They may fire upon us. If they do, act as if you’ve been hit quickly.” The superstructures looked all wrong for an American ship; they sloped to the rear “like an airflow Chrysler.”

By the time George Bray and his entourage finally returned to Moore’s group, the small ship nearly upon them, they were resigned to capture, torture, and death. Whipping smartly in the wind, the ship’s flag, they could now see, was partially wrapped around its mast, its blue field of white stars invisible. Like the survivors from Copeland’s group, they did not trust their eyes. It had looked to them like an Imperial Navy battle pennant. But as the ship eased up, the Old Glory flying from its mast was plain to see. The vessel coming toward them was a patrol craft from the Seventh Fleet.

From the deck of the PC, a strong voice called down the same challenge to establish their nationality that Copeland’s group had received, querying them on the recent outcome of the American national pastime’s championship series.

Mel Dent, who followed the major leagues with near-religious fervor, replied without hesitation, “The St. Louis Cardinals.” Someone else added, “Now get me out of the water, you SOB!”

Satisfied that the oil-fouled survivors were American, the crew of PC-623 dropped a Jacob’s ladder over the side and coaxed the survivors toward it. Crewmen descended to them and, arms stretched out below, hauled the survivors from the Samuel B. Roberts aboard its solid decks, which were already crowded with men from the Gambier Bay, the Hoel, and other weary heroes of Taffy 3.

The “hilarious happiness” Jack Moore felt as his rescuers approached did not last long. Someone hollered, “I believe Osborne’s dead.” Moore went to him, felt for a pulse, and thought he detected a slight murmur. Then he swam for the PC. When he reached hailing distance, he hollered to the crew that his man needed emergency help. They threw Moore a line, and the ensign tied it to the stretcher that bore Osborne aboard. Moore swam to the ship, climbed the Jacob’s ladder, then went below for a shave. His skin proved to be far too raw for the task, so he sought out a place to rest. Before he could find a bunk, word reached him that barely five minutes after being hauled aboard the ship that had rescued him, Jerry Osborne had died on its deck from his wounds and exposure.

It was about nine A.M. on Navy Day, October 27.

Fifty-three

The vessels that rescued them were part of a seven-ship task group organized by the commander of the Leyte amphibious landing force, Rear Adm. Daniel E. Barbey. Under Lt. Cdr. James A. Baxter, skipper of PC-623, the group had left Leyte’s San Pedro Bay at 4:06 P.M. on the day of the battle. Picking their way through the sea at ten knots, aligned in a sweeping, mile-wide search formation that Baxter led west from a designated starting point, moving with the current, toward the island of Samar, Baxter’s ships had only empty oil slicks and a single Japanese survivor to show for their efforts when, at 10:29 P.M., Lt. Allison M. Levy, PC-623’s officer of the deck, saw red, white, and green Very flares about twenty miles ahead to port.

Risking shelling from a nearby Japanese-held island, which was said to boast eight-inch shore batteries, Levy ordered Captain Baxter awakened and asked his skipper for permission to break formation and investigate the contact. Twice denied, Levy took matters into his own hands, turning to the helmsman and ordering “All ahead flank” and “Left full rudder.” Baxter ran topside, hollered at Levy that he had disobeyed orders, and ordered the helmsman to resume the original course.

“I informed the skipper and the helmsman that I had not been properly relieved of the deck,” Levy wrote, “and that I would not accept Captain Baxter’s order to relieve me for another fifteen minutes so that his eyes could become adjusted to the total darkness.”

As the ship continued toward the flares, Baxter’s eyes adjusted, he saw the flares, and the argument became moot. Baxter set aside any issue of insubordination and agreed that the flares were probably American. Spotting a raft, he ordered the rest of his ships to investigate with him. They hit a Samaritan’s jackpot. From midnight to 3:35 A.M. on October 27, the crews of the seven rescue ships busied themselves retrieving survivors of the Gambier Bay from the sea. Its decks crowded with almost two hundred exhausted and wounded sailors, PC-1119 was ordered back to Leyte while the others continued searching. At 7:45 A.M. another raft was found, and men from the Roberts were brought aboard. About forty-five minutes later they were joined in safety by survivors from the Johnston and the Hoel as well.

No one could have guessed how close to one another the four ships’ survivors had drifted. The southwesterly currents and their own feeble movements over the water had swept them into the same quadrant of ocean. When James Baxter’s flotilla arrived, pulling them out of the water was quick, concentrated work.

By 10:19 A.M. on the twenty-seventh, when the rescuers set course to return to Leyte, Captain Baxter’s task group had saved about 1,150 survivors of the Gambier Bay, the Hoel, the Johnston, and the Samuel B. Roberts. Because of the delay in rescue, some 116 men had died at sea. The task group’s flagship, PC-623, carried so many Taffy 3 survivors that Baxter had to order five thousand gallons of fuel pumped into the sea to keep his ship from foundering on the way back to Leyte.

*      *     *

CREWMEN FROM THE PATROL craft cut George Bray’s blue jeans from his brine-softened legs, removed his denim jacket, and lathered his skin with rags soaked in diesel fuel to dissolve the residue of black oil that clung to him. The PC’s narrow deck, covered in a brown-black ooze of blood and fuel oil, was so crowded with survivors that a man could scarcely walk across it. Bray was given a shot of whiskey, then taken to the chow hall for a few bites of oatmeal, which he promptly vomited up.

Needing a place to collapse but having seen the tight real-estate market topside, Bray walked forward from the mess hall and descended a ladder through a hatch to the crew’s sleeping quarters. He poked his head into the first compartment he found and saw a sailor reclined on a bunk. The sailor asked Bray, “What are you looking for?”

“Just a place to lay down,” he said.

The sailor, registering Bray’s weathered condition, got up from his bunk, patted it down, and said, “Here, take mine.”

The Roberts survivor hit the sack and was asleep for what seemed about seventeen seconds when the clatter of gunfire roused him. Several waves of Japanese planes had swooped over the small ship, strafing, drawing vigorous fire in return. The cacophony was enough to interrupt his sleep, but it did not bring him fully to his senses. He had endured forty-eight hours at sea, surrounded by sharks, barracuda, and creeping madness. No punk Jap pilot was going to come between George Bray of Montgomery, Alabama, and some hard-won rest.

*      *     *

THE OFFICERS AND TWO dozen sailors on the boat that had hauled aboard Copeland’s four dozen men were overwhelmed by the work of caring for them. But they didn’t mind it a bit. Most of them were already bare-chested, having given their shirts to Gambier Baysurvivors. Weeks ago, en route to Leyte with Sixth Army troops aboard, their ship had been filled with men. Now its hull brimmed with life again, in a mission of mercy instead of assault.

Like the rest of his officers, Bob Copeland did not wear insignia on his shirt, the better to avoid torture in the event of their capture. Amid the sprawl of gaunt humanity on the ship’s decks, it was all the harder to discern Copeland’s rank. Covered in oil, mostly naked, he looked like any of the other half-wasted Taffy 3 survivors. The boys on the landing craft gave him a rag and a bucket of diesel oil and encouraged him to wipe himself clean. “I took about three swipes and fainted—fell right off the bench on the deck,” Copeland wrote. He felt someone lift him up and plant him in a seated position. It was Earle “Pop” Stewart, a radarman third class, giving his captain a bath. Stewart had his exhausted skipper about half clean when the ship’s general alarm began tolling. Japanese planes had found them too. As the LCI’s crew scrambled for their machine guns, the Gambier Bay and Roberts survivors scurried for cover. The Zero fighter planes made several passes, reduced in number each time, Copeland thought, owing to the sharp aim of the crew.

A young sailor dragging a heavy canister of forty-millimeter ammunition found Bob Copeland lying across the portside passageway he needed to cross. The kid kicked the skipper in the butt, saying, “Get the hell out of the way.” Copeland rolled into the scuppers and let the gunner proceed. The gunners were Dead-Eye Dicks, downing three Zeros. Miraculously, no one on the LCI was hit by the angry rain of shells spitting the other way.

When the remaining Japanese planes flew off, the survivors were taken below, forty squeezed into a compartment meant for half that number. Men who were healthy enough to hustle got a pipe berth suspended in threes from the ceiling. The rest flopped on the deck. “The place was like the Black Hole of Calcutta,” Copeland wrote. “We were all stark naked and utterly exhausted. We resembled reptiles far more than human beings.”

The crew stripped the Gambier Bay survivors to the minimum in order to accommodate the bedraggled newcomers from the Samuel B. Roberts. Lying on the steel deck, Copeland was given some worn khaki trousers and an old dungaree jumper without buttons. One of his men offered him a bunk, and Copeland took it. Two hours later, desperately thirsty, he awoke. Too weak to get up, he rolled over and fell sharply to the deck, landing on knees and elbows. Too exhausted to rise, he crawled over his men, getting cussed as he pressed his elbows into their stomachs and faces. He made it to a ladder, climbed upward in search of a cold drink, and found a grating to the engine room, out of which wafted comforting warm air. Beside the grating was a white porcelain bowl from the crew’s mess filled with freshwater. He gulped it down, lay there for a while, then crawled back down the ladder and got back into his bunk. Twice more during the night, after stretches of fitful sleep, Copeland struggled topside, finding each time the same white bowl filled with clean water, which he eagerly guzzled. After his third long drink that night, around four A.M., Copeland was easing himself down the ladder to his sleeping quarters when he heard one of the LCI’s crew enter the compartment behind him. “My God,” he said, “that dog has drank a lot of water tonight.”

Fifty-four

Captain Baxter’s ships didn’t rescue everybody.

On his second day in the water Neil Dethlefs of the Johnston was stung by jellyfish severely enough to scramble his mind. The quartermaster hallucinated, fading out of awareness and then back into it again. He was adrift with another sailor, radarman third class Joseph Dotson, who evidently had enough strength to keep Dethlefs from drowning, though Dotson himself did not survive. Swimming and drifting, wearing nothing but his dungarees, Dethlefs was conscious of islands nearby. He did not know how far away they were, but he had the notion to wait till dark and then try swimming for the beach. If he could make it, he might rest on dry land, then swim by morning south along the shore and be rescued in Leyte Gulf, though he could not be sure his wild plan—or the island itself—wasn’t just another phantasm brought on by exhaustion, salt water, and the seeping toxins from the jellyfish.

In the afternoon Dethlefs found a standard-issue Navy peacoat drifting on the swells. He collected it and held it until nightfall, then put it on, enjoying its heavy, wet embrace. Passing in and out of consciousness, he awoke once to find that the peacoat had disappeared. And he was standing on the bridge of a vessel; the abandon ship order had been given. His perceptions cleared, and he realized he was pulling off his dungarees as if preparing to jump from the deck into the water. He saw that he was already in the water, though he couldn’t remember jumping, and so he pulled them back on. When he realized that his life belt was losing its buoyancy, he removed his dungarees again, tying the legs in order to use them for flotation. But a long rip in the seat kept them from holding air. Dethlefs resumed swimming for the island. He thought he heard the distant sound of a diesel engine, like those used on PT boats.

Next he was aware of a dizzying vertigo. He was standing on his head, spinning in the water. He righted himself, felt something sharp and rough under his feet, then it was gone as another breaker twisted him back around toward the beach. He gasped for air, and water washed into his mouth again as another wave shoved him sideways and upside down. He grabbed for a hold, finding it on the sharp coral. Then blackness descended as he passed out, waking only when he perceived voices shouting at him. He sat waist deep in water, naked, disoriented. “I thought the whole Japanese Navy was coming down on me,” Dethlefs recalled.

“I was sitting on a coral reef, and I could see a crowd of Filipinos on the beach yelling at me.” One of the group came running across the coral, picked Dethlefs up, and headed back to shore. The American protested, “Put me down. I can walk.” So his carrier obliged. Dethlefs slumped to the ground, realizing that his behind had been chopped up like hamburger from sitting on coral. Large saltwater sores covered his groin. He could not walk. So they carried him. The rest of the day was a blur of motion and voices. He was aware that people were taking him somewhere, but there was no telling where.

He perceived that he was inside a cabin in the jungle. Hands rubbed a soft substance on his sores—cocoa butter. He awoke once to drops of water falling on his face. Looking up, he saw the wide brown face of a Filipino woman, crying, the tears falling down onto his face. “Hello, Mama,” he said to her. The Filipino woman had once been married to an American military man. “She adopted me on the spot,” Dethlefs recalled.

They told him he was on the island of Andeau, about three miles off Samar. He did not know how long he was there. The days bled together. He was lifted and carried to the beach and placed in a dugout canoe. Men covered him with mats to conceal him, they said, from Japanese patrolling a bridge nearby. That night Dethlefs was taken to a settlement of some kind.

“It was like a scene from Terry and the Pirates,” he wrote. Natives in loincloths and head-wraps, torches in hand and submachine guns strapped to their backs, took Dethlefs from the canoe and into a three-room house in the jungle. Five families seemed to be living there. They gave him a chaise longue to sleep in, fitted him with a pair of shorts, and generally treated him like a guest of honor. “The Filipino natives came from miles around to see me. Some would stand outside my window and play guitar and sing for my entertainment. I watched one man sit beside an open fire turning a pig on a spit for most of the day,” Dethlefs recalled. But he couldn’t eat the delectable native cuisine. Baked raw by sunburn and salt water, the skin around his mouth cracked whenever he opened it to chew, smile, or speak. His hosts fixed him a glass of warm cane-sugared water mixed with lime juice. When a large sunburn blister burst on his back, they bathed him and treated the wound. They summoned a doctor to apply tincture of pomegranate to his cuts.

As Dethlefs regained his strength, a tall figure came to the house. It was an American who went by the name Captain Smith. He was in fact an Army Air Force sergeant who had fled to the hills and joined the Filipino resistance when the Japanese had seized the airfield to which he had been stationed. Evidently he had promoted himself to captain in the reassignment. Smith berated the Filipinos for hauling Dethlefs “through every carabao wallow in the area,” then asked the wounded American if he carried a gun. The sailor said no, and so Smith produced a revolver that looked to Dethlefs like a naval rifle—probably a. 44 Magnum, he thought—and gave it to him.

Dethlefs’s odyssey had brought him to the jungle home of Juan Bocar, a Manila attorney and former Samar national representative who became a leader in the Filipino guerrilla resistance. Bocar’s guerrilla headquarters was apparently a nexus for American military personnel separated from their units in the forbidding terrain of Samar. In his care Dethlefs was introduced to a Navy dive-bomber gunner, Joe Tropp, from the Third Fleet carrier USS Hancock. His plane had been downed by a Japanese ship, killing his pilot.

Tropp gave Dethlefs his shoes, then the pair, escorted by a Filipino guide, embarked on a long walk through the jungle to the shore and to a sheltered cove where another American, a Texan named Colonel Davis, had a small boat. Davis told Dethlefs he would take him offshore by night, where a submarine or PT boat would come for him. For two nights they waited offshore, but neither a boat nor a sub showed itself. When a Japanese floatplane spotted them, Colonel Davis decided not to wait any longer. They would take their chances navigating the shoreline, paddling south for Leyte Gulf. The route would take them past Japanese shore batteries atop a cliff overlooking the channel they had to cross. Davis was a tough customer, but Dethlefs could sense his concern.

After dark they slipped into the boat and made their way silently past the cliffs. The enemy took no notice. The next morning they were south of Samar, approaching the island of Dinagat. They raised the American flag on their craft and navigated around the island until they spotted an American LCI, then flagged it down, using semaphore to indicate they were survivors in need of help. That night Dethlefs and Joe Tropp were embarked on a troop ship in Leyte harbor. They spent the following day watching air strikes flying out toward an enemy whose time, thanks in part to their efforts, was soon enough to come.

At least four other sailors from Taffy 3, Bill Shaw and Orin Vad-nais of the Johnston and two survivors from the Hoel, made it ashore and into Juan Bocar’s sanctuary. In the company of two downed fliers and another man, Shaw and Vadnais too missed two planned rendezvous with friendly ships. Like Dethlefs and Tropp, however, they found their way to safety without taking too many chances with the Japanese. An American LCI happened to be delivering supplies to the guerrillas while they were awaiting rescue. The men hopped aboard and rode to Leyte.

*      *     *

TWENTY-SEVEN HOURS AFTER GATHERING in the Taffy 3 survivors at sea, the guardian angels masquerading as the seven ships of James Baxter’s task unit entered San Pedro Bay, delivering the men of the Roberts, the Johnston, the Hoel, and the Gambier Bay to the sanctuary of Leyte Gulf. In the predawn darkness of October 28, solemnly and without fanfare, their crews transferred the survivors onto hospital ships and large transports. With them went the remains of the dead and the personal effects salvaged from men buried at sea. As they finished that delicate job, the morning watch was beginning anew for the ships of the Seventh and Third Fleets.

The awful aftermath of the Battle off Samar had ended. The catastrophe had run its course. Focused on tomorrow, relieved of the tasks that constituted their daily routine, the survivors took their first steps on the uncertain journey of the rest of their young lives.