Kintberger bore in closer, fishtailing in to nine thousand yards off the starboard beam of a battleship, probably the Kongo, whose long dark form was visible intermittently through the smoke.
“Tube One—”
“One aye!”
“Half salvo, starboard side…. Steady now. Match pointers.”
“Ready One.”
“Stand by. Fire One!”
Five torpedoes rushed over the starboard rail and smacked the sea, running hot, straight, and normal. Kintberger ordered, “Left full rudder,” and the Hoel leaned into the helmsman’s hard turn of the wheel, running away to the south.
Belowdecks, amid the roar of the boilers and the 120-degree heat, water tender third class Francis Hostrander felt the ship shudder as a Japanese shell entered the forward fireroom on the starboard side, just above the waterline. It blasted a hole in the hull two feet in diameter, blowing a spray of red-hot shrapnel into the men working the boilers. Many were injured, but mercifully the storm of metal left the steam lines intact. The space went dark, save for the beam of daylight entering through the bulkhead’s newest porthole. No one’s name had been on that oversized bullet. The roar of the boilers surged on.
Seconds later another salvo struck, and one of its shells was covered with names. It entered the after fireroom, shattering lines and setting loose a holocaust of superheated steam. Those who were not immediately scalded to death were trapped by the hot steam cloud that rose to the top of the compartment and gathered by the escape hatch, blocking their exit until it cooled and condensed. Sixteen of seventeen men died. A sailor named Vern Simmons was the compartment’s sole survivor.
Another shell punched through the port side into the after engine room, making a clean two-foot hole just above the waterline and exploding against the heavy steel housing of the reduction gears, freezing the Hoel’s port screw. The destruction of the turbine shut down half the ship’s electrical generating capacity too. A cloud of wayward steam escaped topside, engulfing the crew of Gun 53 amidships in white vapor. Another shell struck below them in the gun’s handling room, starting a fire that laced the white clouds through with black smoke.
Live steam swamped the forty-millimeter gun on the port side amidships. Dick Santos, a radioman striker who was the trainer on that mount, had his feet and ankles burned so severely that he could not walk. Shrapnel peppered his back and legs. Bathed in steam, the position was fast becoming untenable, but Santos couldn’t move. Ship’s cook third class Jim Norris, with Santos, had a clear line of sight aft. He watched the shells hit Gun 53 and the engine and fireroom: “Guys were piling out of there screaming—some were scalded and some of them were on fire. God, it was awful. I didn’t count the hits. Let’s say there were too damn many.” Rolling masses of superheated steam finally drove Norris away from his mount. He ran toward the bow and tried to get inside Gun 52, but the crew refused him and held the hatch shut. Norris climbed down the ladder running to the main deck from Gun 52’s platform and heard men praying somewhere in an interior passageway. He came upon the bodies of pharmacist’s mate third class John Quinn and ship’s cook first class J. R. Lindsey lying sprawled on the deck. The sight of their corpses rinsing in bloody seawater made him retch.
Across the deck from Santos and Norris, the explosion lifted the heavy tub of the starboard forty-millimeter gun right off its revolving base. From within the steam cloud Larry Morris couldn’t see a thing. When the whipping wind washed it away, the seaman first class realized that several of his crew, including his gun captain, had disappeared altogether.
Three more shells from God knew where rocked the Hoel astern, one near the base of Gun 55, freezing the mount in train. Another one whistled overhead, slicing off a length of Gun 54’s barrel as cleanly as a giant blowtorch. The six-foot tube of hardened, rifled steel clanged to the deck and began rolling to and fro with the fan-tail’s every tilt. The final shell from this deadly salvo struck the chemical smoke generators on the fantail, spewing white phosphorus across the deck, which burned and burrowed into sailors’ exposed flesh.
“Stuff just flew all over us on the forty-millimeter gun,” said Hugh Coffelt, the pointer on the mount aft of Gun 53. “We had no protection at all. The Japanese kept firing at us, with great success, sometimes missing though, and when they did miss, it sounded like a freight train passing by. Then they began to use shells that would explode over us. That was when I and others on the gun got hit with shrapnel. I got hit so hard that it knocked me off my seat to the deck. I was the only pointer on that forty-millimeter gun, and I still can’t figure out how I was knocked off that seat to the deck, as I was hit in my left chest, not far from my heart.”
After turning on the smoke generator at the start of the battle, Sam Lucas had little else to do. He didn’t relish being a spectator to the horror unfolding around him, so he lay down on the deck between the depth charge racks and the gun shield of a fantail twenty-millimeter mount. He felt no need to see what came next. Seaman first class Marvin Compomizzo and signalman second class Charles Patten lay down beside him. They could hear the severed barrel of Gun 54 lolling heavily back and forth across the pitching deck; the sound of an aircraft engine—it sounded low, down on the water, moving in, getting louder; the chatter of machine guns out over the water—they were not American guns. They heard the screams and shouts as men ran for cover. They heard the staccato crack of the Hoel’s twenties firing back. They felt the ship lurch hard three times from heavy hits amidships. Then Lucas felt something burning horribly on his neck and back. He did not want to know what it was. He was too scared to give it a great deal of thought.
Dye and shrapnel and asbestos and a soaking stench of blood—it all filled the air over and around the battered after section of the Hoel. Somehow the destroyer did not break up and sink, although even her designers at the Bureau of Ships and her builders at Mare Island might have expected any ship to do so under such a pummeling. The three-eighths-inch steel of her hull held.
Her rudder did not. At the helm quartermaster Clarence Hood found his wheel suddenly unresponsive. The Hoel still carried five torpedoes that needed to get in the water. But now the ship could not maneuver to fire them. The rudder was locked in a hard turn to port, leaving the ship steaming in a circle drawn tighter because only the starboard screw was propelling them now. The Hoel passed through a rainsquall, but the respite was too brief to do any lasting good.
As the wounded destroyer circled against her will, the air was cut by the whoosh and roar of the concentrated enemy fusillades. The Kongo, which loomed off its starboard beam when the first spread of torpedoes was fired, came into view again, this time to port, as the Hoel wheeled around and around, out of control, helpless to evade. Shells were hitting with terrifying regularity all around the ship. The Japanese battleship’s imposing fourteen-inch rifles were mounted in pairs in sleek turrets, two forward, two aft. Now somehow the battleship’s dark mass seemed to be shrinking into the distance, becoming smaller as it turned away from the Hoel. The Kongo’s lookouts had spied the Hoel’s first spread of torpedoes. Its helmsman turned to present the smallest profile to them. Looming into view, some six thousand yards off the port beam, came the Japanese heavy cruisers. Kintberger couldn’t ignore them and hope to survive. Though the ship was still locked into its sickening turn, he could not wait for his steering to come back. He and Lieutenant Coleman knew what they had to do. They would launch their last five torpedoes on the fly or they would not do so at all.
“Get set to fire,” Kintberger ordered. “Lead cruiser. All remaining fish. Stand by.”
“Tube Two—train out to port—curve five ahead. Quick now. We’re swinging fast. All ready? Fire!”
From his forty-millimeter gun amidships, Dick Santos saw a chief standing atop the torpedo mount, hammer in hand. One by one the chief brought down the mallet on the torpedoes’ manual firing pins. They leaped out in succession and hit the water as the Hoel continued her inexorable turn to port.
Minutes passed as the ship and her weapons ran their separate courses. The ship traveled in a counterclockwise arc as the torpedoes sped straight across the arc’s base. Lynn Lowry, the bridge messenger, gasped and pointed down at the water. He could see three torpedo wakes, running along the ship’s bow on the port side. Could they be from the Hoel? Whatever their origin, the Hoel was in danger of running into their path. Instinctively, before realizing the futility of it, Lieutenant Dix shouted, “Right full rudder!” But the rudder was still dead. The big undersea missiles passed several feet ahead of the bow and continued on toward the cruisers, now almost dead ahead of the stricken destroyer. Dix didn’t see it. “Too much was happening to stand and watch.” But others saw the torpedoes stay on course. Lieutenant Coleman announced the countdown. At about the time the Hoel’s second salvo was scheduled to hit, columns of water were seen rising beside the storm-gray hull of an enemy man-of-war.
With her torpedoes now spent, somehow the Hoel had to regain steerage and return to the carriers. Quartermaster third class Donald Ulmanek, manning the after steering room, was ordered to commence manual steering from the aft steering engine compartment. Kintberger ordered all signalmen and lookouts on the bridge to go aft, join Ulmanek, and man the wheel powering the pump that turned the rudder. Somehow the Hoel needed to get back on station by the carriers, laying smoke, standing by, and protecting its herd. With the gyro out, Kintberger asked Fred Green which way south was. Lieutenant Green didn’t need instruments to answer that one. He responded, “Put the sun on your port beam.” Kintberger told Lynn Lowry, who was leaving for the steering engine room, to get ready to steer a 180-degree base course, with ten-degree zigzags to either side.
On one good engine Kintberger would race his stricken ship against time, against the oncoming cruisers that were relentlessly closing the distance, and against the seawater flooding his sole functioning engine room. As flames heated the decks beneath their feet, volunteers for rudder-pump duty sprinted down both sides of the 376-foot ship, under a hail of shrapnel that rained down from the explosions overhead, past dead bodies, some dismembered and others startlingly intact, through slicks of blood and pork and beans and gobs of dye-stained asbestos insulation, and through the last gasps of steam rising from the engineering spaces below. Reaching the fantail, they grabbed the hatch leading to the steering engine room, cranked it open, and pulled it up. They shimmied down the ladder, looking to restore with muscle and sweat the steam power that enabled the ship to maneuver.
Twenty-eight
The Fanshaw Bay’s single open-mount five-inch gun was placed on the stern as if to anticipate the likeliest circumstance of its use: fending off an assailant while beating a flank-speed retreat. As the Japanese cruiser column closed range on the jeeps, Ziggy Sprague ordered the carriers to open fire with their “peashooters.”
The flagship’s gun sat inside a thirty-foot-diameter turntable mounted on ball bearings. Below it, Kight, Frisch, and Whitaker loaded the hoist that brought projectiles and powder cases to the gun deck. They would do twenty or so at a time, then climb up the ladder, sit down, watch the dim forms of the Japanese ships flash at them on the horizon, and feel their teeth rattle from the blast of the Fanny B.’s own gun. Then they would go back below and do it again. Though an electrical elevator did all the lifting, long summers spent hoeing corn, chopping cotton, and tossing eighty-pound hay bales put Kight in good enough shape to do a lot of it himself. The gun’s recoil was considerably stronger, however. Once when he was on the ladder between decks, the gun discharged and the whole ship seemed to shove forward. Kight was jarred off the ladder and dropped through space, his hands clawing through fifteen feet of air.
Watching large enemy men-of-war shoot at his ship made an indelible impression on the twenty-one-year-old Oklahoma farm boy. “The Japs would fire their big guns,” Kight said, “and you’d hear it—a roar of thunder right up close—and your pants would hit your leg from the concussion of the gun…. And then you could see the projectile coming through the air. It wasn’t blurry, it was distinct—2,800 pounds, the size of a Volkswagen coming through the air. It was a bulge of fire with a bullet in the middle of it. It made you want to get somewhere.” Usually there would be fifteen or twenty seconds to make good an escape before the shell landed.
Kight considered it “natural for any individual to want to hide or get out of harm’s way.” On a CVE, hiding from enemy fire was at best a psychological game. At worst, it could be downright embarrassing. “One old boy was always looking for a place to hide. He said to me, ‘Here, Kight, get on top of me.’” The sailor huddled down on the deck, and Kight climbed on top of him, wondering all the while what good it would have done. “The shell would have gone through both of us.”
The peashooter crews on Taffy 3’s carriers fired to good effect. An old chief on the Fanshaw Bay watched the St. Lo’s gunners popping away and saltily observed, “They oughta fire that thing underwater. We could use a little jet propulsion right now.” But the guns proved to be surprisingly useful in their intended application. They scored three hits on a heavy cruiser at 14,000 yards, starting a raging fire on the forecastle. Meanwhile, the White Plains was doing its own unlikely imitation of a fighting ship of the line. As the enemy cruisers hammered away at shrinking range, a gunnery officer shouted out, “Just hold on a little longer, boys—we’re sucking them into forty-millimeter range!”
The Japanese split their four cruisers into two columns, one looking to overtake the carriers to port, the other joining a group of destroyers and advancing to Sprague’s starboard quarter. Between the two columns, lagging to the rear, Sprague could see the battleships. “The Japs were now firing at us from three sides. Within this three-sided ‘box,’ my carriers were formed in a large circle, with the destroyers and destroyer escorts in a larger circle around them. I kept this formation on a southwesterly course, squeezing over ten to twenty degrees to one side and then to the other, according to which side was throwing the hottest fire.” The ships held formation and maneuvered together, their discipline impressing even Kurita’s chief of staff, Tomiji Koyanagi. “I must admit admiration for the skill of their commanders,” he would write.
High above the action, it was plain enough to VC-10 skipper Edward Huxtable what the Japanese commander was trying to do. Already the cruisers, beleaguered by buzzing planes though they were, had made frightening progress outrunning Taffy 3 to the east. For Sprague, further eastward flight was futile. Huxtable advised Sprague that the best course was now south. Of course, Sprague’s radar told him all of this and more. By 7:30 the Taffy 3 commander was already charging hard to the south, now and then angling toward Samar to the southwest. As the pilots pressed home their attacks, word came over the radio that Taffy 3’s destroyer screen was engaging the Japanese fleet, and pilots were cautioned not to hit the inbound American ships.
Sprague’s decision to turn from a southeasterly heading to the southwesterly one was risky. By turning right so sharply, he would give the Japanese a chance to turn inside him, cutting into his circular route and bearing down fast on his starboard broadside. Nevertheless, he felt the need to turn in the direction of help, toward Leyte Gulf, where Oldendorf’s battleships lay. And if the Japanese didn’t catch on in time, Sprague might open some distance between Taffy 3 and its pursuers.
With visibility down to half a mile and with the clouds hovering at a ceiling of 500 feet, Sprague ordered a turn to a course of 200 degrees. Kurita did not get wind of the audacious maneuver until Taffy 3 had emerged from the rainsquall. The Japanese admiral followed the escort carrier formation around in this clockwise quarter-circle, his pursuit slowed by the frequent need to evade the incessant, piecemeal attacks of the hell-for-leather American aviators. Ziggy Sprague had gambled—and, for now, won.
* * *
BLUE ARCHER AND THE rest of the planes from the Kalinin Bay needed just a few minutes to find the Japanese fleet. When Pops Keighley’s radio malfunctioned, Patsy Capano took the lead. At abou
t 7:50 they happened upon a column of destroyers. Capano, Keighley, and Archer came out of the clouds and went right down the line, firing short bursts from their wing-mounted machine guns. The flight of Avengers climbed back into the clouds and joined with seven other Avengers and ten Wildcats hunting for bigger ships.
Within minutes an echelon of cruisers and battleships came into view. On cue from Capano, the pilots turned and plummeted. Third in line, Archer dove at two cruisers as they leaned hard into a leftward turn. From 4,500 feet, Archer dropped all four bombs and landed two good hits. He recovered, climbed, and circled around again. Time to use the rockets. The ordnance crews on the Kalinin Bay aligned the rockets to follow the same path the machine-gun bullets traversed, converging a thousand feet ahead of the plane. Pushing over in a thirty-degree dive on another heavy cruiser, Archer squeezed short bursts from his wing guns to keep his aim true. Then, a thousand feet out, he pressed the button on the top of his stick and let his eight rockets fly.
Archer had become proficient using rockets at Saipan and Guam, knocking out tanks and large trucks and small houses with the weapons in support of the Marines advancing inland. Now he watched them walk up the fo’c’sle of the cruiser. Two of them hit the bridge, exploding brightly and appearing to knock loose some steel weather shields around the main superstructure.
The light bomb loads that some of the pilots carried led them to wonder what precisely they ought to be trying to accomplish. Two other pilots from the Kalinin Bay, whose radio call sign was “Georgia,” debated whether to attack some destroyers they had found or seek out larger quarry. Tom Van Brunt, a St. Lo pilot returning from the aborted morning antisubmarine patrol with the other VC-65 fliers, heard a squeaky voice over his headset: