Tribute to Tin Can Sailors - Fox War Stories

In this thrilling episode you’ll go to war aboard the destroyers of World War II. Their crews nicknamed these ships “tin cans” because they lacked armor. The hundreds of destroyers and the 300,000 brave souls that sailed aboard proved invaluable in both the Atlantic and Pacific theatres.

"War Stories" host Oliver North talks to several sailors who survived a punishing typhoon in December of 1944. Evan Fenn tells how he barely escaped the USS Monaghan as it was overwhelmed and capsized by seas towering near 80 feet. You’ll meet another sailor whose ‘tin can’ went head to head with a massive Japanese battleship. And you’ll learn, from a survivor, what it’s like to have suicidal kamikazes smash into your ship, just feet from your battle station.

The Last Stand of the Tincan Sailors

“Ten Feet Tall and Bullet-proof”
An interview with James D. Hornfischer
Author of The Last Stand of The Tin Can Sailors
Military Book Club — http://www.militarybookclub.com
Copyright © 2004 Military Book Club
http://www.tincansailorsbook.com/author.html

When the destroyers and destroyer escorts guarding small escort carriers off the Philippine island of Samar, known as Task Unit 77.4.3., found themselves under the guns of a huge Japanese surface fleet, including the super-battleship Yamato, they performed one of the bravest acts in U.S. naval history. They charged directly into the line of fire. It’s a story serious military readers have always known about in general. But after reading Hornfischer’s book, the first full account of this astonishing battle, our appreciation of the tin can sailors’ heroism grew. This is what we learned from speaking to James D. Hornfischer.

Military Book Club: Where did the idea for The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors come from?
James D. Hornfischer: Somewhere around the age of 10, I picked up the book Tin Cans by Theodore Roscoe [an abridged edition of United States Destroyer Operations in World War II] and first read about the battle off Samar. I was a Military Book Club member at about that time, at a young age.

MBC: The battle is not an entirely an obscure event.
JDH: Not for Pacific war buffs. But there’s no knowledge of it in the wider culture. And while I had heard about gallant ships like the USS Hoel, Johnston and Samuel B. Roberts, I knew nothing of the men who were on them. I was thrilled to meet many of them while researching this book.
There’s never been a full narrative treatment of what in the opinion of many admirals and many distinguished historians is the U. S. Navy’s finest hour. So I decided to make the subject my own and to investigate it.

MBC: This was, in a sense, the battle of Thermopylae for the Navy.
JDH: Absolutely. You can compare it to so many different engagements. It was actually fought on the same day as the charge of the Light Brigade, October 25th.
It was in a sense the Alamo: the doomed, outnumbered garrison making its last stand. It was George Custer. You can look all throughout the annals of military history and find moments of gallantry against long odds like this. It’s really one of the most inspiring stories I’d ever come across, but I was just amazed at how little detail I’d read about it. It was always folded into larger events.
As one of four battles in the Leyte campaign, Samar has never been given its due—even though we lost 850-plus men there. In none of the other battles of Leyte did our casualties exceed double-digits.

MBC: I think a lot of admirals would have preferred it that way.
JDH: That’s the theory of a lot of men who were there. The Navy kept it quiet, because celebrating their heroism too vigorously might have underscored the mistakes of Halsey and Kinkaid.

MBC: Even Admiral Nimitz. There were lots of admirals to point fingers at.
JDH: Admiral Nimitz gave Halsey license to roam, which he really shouldn’t have under the circumstances.

MBC: Halsey probably should have ignored that Japanese decoy fleet.
JDH: We know that in hindsight, of course.

MBC: And that led to …
JDH: …the last major fleet engagement in history. This is the only time the Yamato ever fired its main battery at another ship…and didn’t hit anything. And those little American destroyers, the destroyer escorts, the jeep carriers…. They stood up to this huge force and won the most improbable victory in the annals of naval history.

MBC: Now for the members of The Military Book Club who haven’t read the book yet, tell us just a sentence or two on the four stages of Leyte Gulf, because I was just aware of three.
JDH: Well, they typically count the battle of Surigao Strait—

MBC: That’s the famous crossing of the “T.”
JDH: Right, that’s the destruction of the southern force. There’s the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea, which is the sinking of the Musashi, basically. The Battle off Cape Engaño, which was Halsey’s destruction of Admiral Ozawa’s decoy force of aircraft carriers. And then there’s the Battle off Samar.
Only two of those were surface engagements, proper naval battles in the classic sense of the term. And they were the last two surface actions in U.S. history—Samar and Surigao Strait.

MBC: Weren’t there a few surface-to-surface engagements in the Falklands?
JDH: Well, there were air-to-surface engagements, and the Argentine cruiser the General Belgrano was sunk by a British submarine, but there weren’t any…—

MBC: General fleet engagements.
JDH: Right. I guess the accurate thing to say is that these battles during the Leyte Gulf campaign were the last fleet engagements in history, where you had columns and formations, and sustained combat over a period of time, major gunfire from battleships and heavy cruisers.
This was the first and only time the Yamato ever fired its guns at a surface target. Her sister ship, the Musashi, never did.

MBC: Those ships never paid back a portion of their investment.
JDH: Never came close.

MBC: Yeah… I noticed something in reading your book. Now this could be my imagination—but it seemed that as the book progressed, you became more and more energized by the history you were revealing. You were caught up in the scale of the battles. And I noticed that your words themselves seemed to be more colorful with a greater and greater emotional content. I got the feeling you were identifying with the men.
JDH: That may be so. One thing I can tell you: my editor and I have worked so intensively on this book that I think I’ve lost all objectivity on it. So it’s interesting to hear a fresh assessment like that.
I wrote most of the book based on the interviews I did with the men who were there. And from privately published volumes of crew memories that the different ship survivors associations published. The Johnston gang put out a book like that; the USS Hoel association has one as well. Each volume has about fifty different crewmen contributing to it, each writing down their memories. During my research, I wove them together into a single chronology.
Joe Smith told me what happened from 7:00 to 9:00 in the morning, and then Bob Jones added something during the same time. I threaded them together. Multiply that out by fifty sailors on the Johnston and fifty sailors on the Hoel, and you can develop an amazingly textured portrait of a battle, with a lot of emotion and interesting details that never made it into the official reports.

MBC: A tapestry.
JDH: Exactly.

MBC: How many men did you speak to in the course of this book?
JDH: I interviewed about sixty veterans of the battle, and gathered unpublished written accounts from many more. They’re all mentioned in the bibliography.

MBC: I saw them—it’s extensive.
JDH: Each one added something fresh. To a certain degree these accounts were duplicative, but usually any one individual would have something striking to say about what he observed at any given moment. Like the time a Japanese shell hit a safe on the USS Hoel. The man who told me about it was the paymaster. And he saw the cash drifting down the blood-soaked decks with the blood. Its one of those things you can’t make up and he was one of the few people who saw that. I don’t think it ever made it into an official record.
Every individual had something like that—maybe not that stark, but with something striking or interesting. And once you’ve built that tapestry, you have a pretty gripping read. It was a very exciting to be able to build a combat narrative around so many points of view.
If you do enough research, you can start to triangulate events from multiple points of view, which is when a narrative really starts to acquire some depth.

MBC: After the battle, Japanese ships passed the survivors, and one of their sailors throws something. Some of the guys clinging to life rafts think it’s a hand grenade, but it turns out to be a can of tomatoes.
JDH: Right. They were doing all kinds of things. I’m not sure if the American sailors in the water were seeing the same ship or the same Japanese group, but I got many different accounts of what happened. One veterans recalled that the Japanese were flipping them the bird, another saw Japanese sailors who were saluting, others were throwing potatoes, and, yes, cans of tomatoes—packed in Arkansas, according to the old sailor who told me. There were so many different things going on, it’s hard to arrive at the truth, of course, but you just kind of report it all, and let the totality of it sink in.

MBC: How long did it take you to write the book?
JDH: I made a conscious plan to start writing after the New Year’s holiday in 2002, and I turned in most of the first draft by September—and that was after I had gathered string for well over a year.

MBC: “Gathered string”?
JDH: I guess that’s a writer’s term. Gathering personal accounts, copying documents, interviewing men, gathering and collecting transcripts, transcribing interviews… doing the groundwork that makes it possible to write good history.
So I decided I wasn’t going to worry about writing until January ’02, and then I started writing kind of in a fury, because I’d gathered all this material, and my own impressions of it were accumulating in my right brain.
Once I figured out where to start, I could reach into my “grab bag” of research to describe, say, what the USS Fanshaw Bay was doing, or the St. Lo. And so it was exciting to finally start writing, which consumed most of 2002.

MBC: When Peter Maas, who was not a Navy man or a submariner, wrote The Terrible Hours he felt he had to tell that story—it was almost a compulsion. Did you feel that as well?
JDH: Absolutely! I have no personal “debts” to pay with this in the sense of having family members who were there, but I have a very generalized “debt” for what the U.S. Navy did during World War II. Something about naval warfare has always captivated me.
It’s not like ground combat where you’re free to run. You can’t desert a ship. You’re bound together as a team, for better or worse. And each ship has a personality and a character that’s defined by its officers, its senior petty officers and enlisted men. But I was always captivated by the nature of naval warfare, and I felt like this was one of those moments when the Navy—as Samuel Eliot Morison wrote—”never showed more gallantry guts and gumption.” The Johnston, the Samuel B. Roberts, the Hoel, the Heermann—these little ships have always intrigued me. For me their names have been the very embodiment of heroism and gallantry.Writing this book has enabled me to understand exactly why.

MBC: Okay, now you said in the Navy, no man can run away—no man on a ship. There is one man who can run away…
JDH: The captain can turn a ship.

MBC: Yeah…and which makes me think about the Japanese admiral Kurita.
JDH: He’s taken a beating from historians. Still, you have to put yourself in his shoes. He was exhausted. He was being given partial and incomplete intelligence. He was acting on some hunches that ultimately proved to be correct—for instance that the transport ships he was supposed to attack would be empty by the time he reached San Pedro Bay. And all along he knew that his already battered fleet would have to face Halsey on the way up afterwards. And remember: he had been through that meat grinder once already, on the previous afternoon.

MBC: So after doing damage to ships which he thought were bigger—he thought he had won when he had ordered to leave.
JDH: It’s hard to figure out exactly what was in his head. He gave an interview to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey after the war where he ticked off some factors. One of his chief of staff—Admiral Otani, I think it was—was also interviewed, and gave some other reasons. It seems there was no single reason for the decision to turn around. It was the culmination of complex circumstances
I’m not sure that he had a clear idea that he won. He’d sustained so much damage I think he eventually saw the futility of pressing on. Whether it was the thought of losing more ships pursuing the speculative idea that they might shell MacArthur’s troops for a few hours, or whether it was something else, no one can be sure now.
I guess the hard reality of the failure of the Sho plan, as the Japanese operation to defend the Philippines was called, eventually sank in to him after two and a half hours of fighting. He started to wonder why he was there. The useless exhortations he’d been receiving from the Japanese naval high command up to that point—“With trust in heavenly guidance, we will attack!” There was no analysis in something like that. That’s just an exhortation, so there’s an emotional need to charge ahead, but I think ultimately, once he was confronted with the reality of being ordered to die without really doing anything to defend his nation, he blinked.

MBC: It was easy for people to send brave messages from Japan.
JDH: But if you were there with him—having been dropped into the drink once already, thanks to a submarine attack; having come back aboard only to see the Musashi go down; having turned the corner north of Samar, and having seen three of your heavy cruisers go down, and with real uncertainty about what lay ahead, you would have doubts too.
He really didn’t know whom he was fighting. He knew that the air attacks were not abating, and in fact were getting stronger. You almost have to sympathize with the guy.

MBC: Was the Yamato ever hit during this battle?
JDH: Oh, numerous times. Never hard enough to slow her, but she was being strafed all morning. There’s no documented torpedo hit on the Yamato. As a general matter, of course, it was usually unclear which ship was being hit at any given time.
In the action reports of the pilots, they’re misidentifying the class of cruiser they’re attacking constantly. The chronology is inevitably muddled when you compare one report to the next. One of the challenges of building this narrative was penetrating the—

MBC: “Fog of war.”
JDH: Even the reportsof the eyewitnesses themselves, written within a day or two of the battle, were tough to figure out.

MBC: Would you say that a jeep carrier with its one five-inch gun fired the luckiest shot in the war?
JDH: Well, are you referring to my speculation that the USS White Plains may have scored a hit that detonated the torpedoes on the cruiser that was closing on her? Very possibly. Again, that’s speculation on my part. It was such a furious melee at that point, and there were so many things happening simultaneously, that you really have to look hard at the documents even to make an educated guess.
Documents don’t always hold the answers, and often raise more questions than they answer. I had a hard time figuring out when the USS Hoel was hit. Was it on the way in to attack, or was she still holding her station by the carriers? The action report, of course, shed more smoke than light on that particular question.

MBC: It’s curious that you used the word “melee.” Are you familiar with the medieval term?
JDH: A furious sword fight where everybody just gets in there and mixes it up. Basically, that’s what this battle was. I mean all the senior-commander can do is say, “Okay, Little Boys, go in for a torpedo attack.” But that leaves it to the individual commanders to figure out who they’re going to line up with, who they’re actually going to aim at, and so it really does come down to individual initiatives by captains, and a great deal of tactical improvisation.

MBC: Now these destroyer escorts, these “Small Boys”—“Little Boys?”
JDH: Yeah, both terms were used.

MBC: They only carried three torpedoes, and there was no ability to reload. They didn’t have more in the hold of the ship.
JDH: That’s right, they would’ve had to go back to the Leyte Gulf and find a destroyer tender and reload during some quiet time. And there was not much quiet in those two-and-a-half hours!
So they had one chance to land a killing blow. A torpedo has a range of about 10,000 yards. Even a smallest guns of theJapanese oppsing them could reach 18,000 yards. And if you really wanted a good shot with a torpedo, you had to get in to maybe five or seven thousand yards of your target.
So the commanders were working this calculus of how long they dared go, how close can they get before they finally fire. And that was a one-time decision. Considering what they were up against, considering that they were exposed to heavy enemy fire for maybe five or six miles of sailing by really well-trained naval gun crews, it’s amazing they were able to get the job done.

MBC: During this time, Japanese optical range finders were superb. But did they have an edge over the radar the Navy used in ’44?
JDH: Well, judging from the night battles fought earlier in the war, their optical systems seemed to better than ours. The radar, though, was certainly an advantage the Americans enjoyed by the time the Samar action was fought. The Johnston could smack ships in the middle of a dense haze. Her gunners couldn’t see them, but they were able to track them and to bring five-inch guns to bear very accurately. The Japanese had bigger guns, which were perfectly useless if they couldn’t see their targets.

MBC: Tell us about the DE (destroyer escort) that came so close to a Japanese cruiser that the cruiser could not depress its guns low enough to hit the ship.
JDH: I think that was when the Samuel B. Roberts was dueling the Chikuma. That was an observation the Samuel B. Roberts’s skipper, Bob Copeland, made in his account of the battle. They were lying four or five thousand yards off this cruiser’s starboard beam…

MBC: Now if I remember correctly, the DE was firing everything it had—star shells, high explosives, whatever they could jam into the two five-inch guns. And they were making a mess out of the cruiser.
JDH: They ran through their semi-armor piercing common ammunition pretty quickly. So if you’re down in the handling room and your ship’s being rocked by blasts, you fling whatever you’ve got into that shell hoist.
The sailors up on deck were treated to quite a spectacle: these star shells going out, this spray of blinding white burning phosphorous igniting on the deck of the cruiser. They must have been close enough for some of that to actually hit the ship. It’s like firing a roman candle into a house or something—that’s going to burn, that’s going to do a lot of damage.

MBC: Could they have eventually taken down that cruiser?
JDH: I don’t think so. Except for the torpedoes…

MBC: Which they didn’t have anymore.
JDH: …they didn’t have anything that could penetrate the three inches of armor at the water line of a Japanese heavy cruiser. I suppose they could’ve neutralized it as a weapons platform by destroying the bridge and knocking out the range finders.

MBC: Or if the fire that they started got out of control, they might’ve touched off the ammo.
JDH: Sure, there might have been a magazine explosion. But there was nothing that the destroyer could directly do to breach the watertight integrity of those ships short of an actual torpedo hit.
And by the time they’re in those gunnery duels, they’re out of torpedoes. They had nothing left. So it was truly a matter of sacrificing themselves to allow Admiral Sprague’s six escort carriers to escape. And so they just stood toe-to-toe and blasted away until the end.

MBC: One of the defenses for Kurita was that—this is my own observation, but when he withdrew, he saved the Yamato. Because that ship certainly would not have survived a mauling by Halsey at that point. As it didn’t a year later. So he actually came off better in my mind than I had pictured him.
JDH: He did save the Yamato for a time, I suppose. But ultimately when the Yamato was finally sunk, she was swarmed in the open sea by wave after wave of naval aircraft. Very much in the same way the Musashi was sunk, with her big guns silent. If the Yamato was going to do any damage in her rather uneventful career, her moment came at Samar. And one could argue that Admiral Kurita passed up that chance by deciding to withdraw at that point. He did save the ship—but only to lose it in a fruitless suicide mission off Okinawa.

MBC: The Yamato was built for the wrong war.
JDH: Exactly. Her eighteen-inch guns would’ve been hell-on-wheels in a refight of Jutland!

MBC: One of the epic questions in the chat rooms is what would have happened if an American Montana class battleship—should those ships have ever really existed—faced off against a Yamato? I have to ask what’s your opinion.
JDH: I think the Yamato would have been toast. It’s all guesswork at this point. The American advantage in radar would have paid immediate dividends. With that fire-control advantage, even an Iowa-0class ship, in a toe-to-toe scrap with the Yamato, would have likely prevailed. Especially if there was the merest smoke screen or rain squall to blind the Yamato’s optical range finding systems.
At Samar, there are indications that the Yamato or I think the Kongo, had radar. But if so, it was primitive to be sure.

MBC: Going back to destroyers for a second: at Surigao Strait, US destroyers did more damage than the battleship line.
JDH: Just consider the number of torpedoes they launched. I think they had three divisions of destroyers there. Each destroyer, maybe twenty of them all together, had ten torpedoes. I think there might have been more than a hundred torpedoes or more in the water…at the same time.

MBC: Iimagine the fishing in that water was easy after that—just go out with a rake…and a net!
JDH: That’s probably true. Decimated schools of mullet--the uncounted casualties of war.
Everyone wanted to give credit to Oldendorf for having lined up his battleships across the strait, doing 5 knots—or I guess they were doing ten, once the battle started. The so-called “crossing of the T”—well, sure, they crossed the T, but it was through no genius of maneuver. All they had to do was stand there, basically.

MBC: And one of those battleships never even fired its main weapons.
JDH: That’s right—was it the Pennsylvania? And the Mississippi, she fired just a single salvo.
The Battle of Surigao Strait was another one of the truly fine hours of the tin can sailor. The USS Melvin blew the Fuso in half with a single torpedo spread, and numerous other DD’s scored hits too. Admiral Nishimura’s Southern Force was defeated long before our battleships ever opened fire.

MBC: Battleships basically provided a major screen to allow the destroyers and light cruisers to work.
JDH: Right. The destroyers could attack, then safely withdraw under the umbrella of all those huge guns. At Surigao Strait, the only real damage the Americans took was from friendly fire.

MBC: Yeah. Now you mentioned that the Japanese sailors that made it ashore did not receive a cordial welcome.
JDH: That was according to Samuel Eliot Morison’s account. Filipino guerillas were not at all friendly toward the Japanese. One could only imagine their glee watching from shore as these burning funeral pyres steamed past with their towering pagoda masts.
The average Japanese sailor didn’t have a chance once his ship went down. There was no mechanism in place for rescue. As bad as the Americans had it in the aftermath of Samar, the Japanese had even less hope to be rescued.

MBC: Were any of them rescued?
JDH: There were very, very few Japanese survivors of this battle. I don’t know that any of them were rescued. I think that they were left basically on their own. If they weren’t rescued and captured—and in most instances they refused the opportunity to be captured by the Americans—they had to swim ashore on Samar, where again the natives would have held something of an advantage over an unarmed sailor, wounded and swimming ashore, covered with oil.

MBC: How many people did the Japanese lose?
JDH: The estimate I give in the book was about 10,000, which is a horrible number. There were 3,000 on the Musashi when it went down with severe loss of life. The Musashi was fairly close to shore, so it’s conceivable that there would have been some who made it. Sailors on those cruisers that were sunk off Samar when their fleet was in full retreat really had no chance to be rescued. It was certainly an unfortunate time to be a Japanese sailor.

MBC: I keep coming back to Admiral Kurita. He had been promised land-based air support and was miffed that he didn’t get it. But in sense, didn’t he get it? Because Taffy 3, one of the three jeep groups, was under almost constant attack. And wasn’t that the first time the Japanese used Kamikazes.
JDH: Yes it was, but it came late in the day. And there was no coordination. When the St. Lo was hit by a kamikaze, it was already about 10:50 in the morning. That was about an hour and a half after Kurita had given the order to withdraw… too little, too late.

MBC: Was that was the only air assault?
JDH: A number of the jeep carriers were attacked. The Fanshaw Bay had a near miss. Several of the jeeps took damage. But the St. Lo was the only one to be sunk. Taffy 1 was occupied with air attacks most of the day. But why was Taffy 1 being attacked at all? Taffy 1 was flying ground assault missions. If there had been any coordination, all these kamikaze attacks would’ve been coordinated with Kurita’s coming around the bend, and hitting Taffies 2 and 3.
Taffy 1 had been neutralized and it didn’t participate significantly in the sea battle. But Taffy 2, right to Taffy 3’s south, was largely unmolested and mostly out of Kurita’s gun range during the battle. So its carrier planes were able to load torpedoes and really deal the Japanese fleet quite a blow. Kurita really could have used air support at that point, because the American pilots were having their way. As badly armed as a lot of those planes were, they were fortunate that all they had to contend with was anti-aircraft fire.
Kurita didn’t have any fighter cover. But then again, I doubt that Japanese fighter cover would have lasted any longer fighting “Ziggy” Sprague than they did fighting Admiral Halsey. That’s because the fighter pilots off those jeep carriers were very good, and had proven it on the 24th, the day before. A number of them became aces over Leyte.
There was very poor coordination between the army and navy on the Japanese
side throughout the war. This was just another episode.

MBC: You mentioned that you’re working on yet another book.
JDH: Yes, it’s the epic story of the USS Houston. This cruiser was the flagship of the Asiatic fleet in the dark early days of the war. She was lost with very heavy casualties in the Battle of Sunda Strait. Most of the surviving crew was taken into captivity. And they spent the balance of the war in slave labor camps in Burma and Siam, and in the tin mines in Japan. They helped build the bridge on the River Kwai.
After the Houston was lost, the city of Houston had a bond drive to raise money to launch a new Houston. The new ship joined Admiral Halsey in his drive across the Pacific. And the city raised so much money, that they built a small aircraft carrier as well, the USS San Jacinto. The same one that George H. W. Bush flew from.
It will be book about naval combat, but it will also be a story about perseverance, endurance and survival under the harshest conditions of captivity, fending off disease, torture and brutality by the Japanese. I’m just getting started on it.

MBC: Near the end of The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, you talk about how this generation of heroes is aging. You mention that the veterans groups are losing their bargaining positions with hotel managers when they organize their reunions, because so many of them are dying. They can’t get the good group rates any more.
JDH: The survivors associations for the USS Johnston, Hoel, Samuel B. Roberts, Gambier Bay and St. Lo are among the most tightly bonded fraternities I have ever found. And they have been having reunions since the sixties. But you hear about the number of World War II veterans passing all the time—I think the sad figure is 1,500 a day. The average survivor of the war is well into his eighties. And every year they lose a few more. The newsletters are filled with “in memoriams.”
That’s life, but I think it just underscores the need to remember them, and to remember what these men did when they were ten feet tall and bulletproof eighteen-year-olds, sailing off to war for the first time.

MBC: And after experiencing The Last Stand of The Tin Can Sailors, they will always stand ten feet tall.

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A Prayer For Our Soldiers †