The tin cans that charged battleships
A group built for something else
Off the island of Samar on the morning of 25 October 1944, Task Unit 77.4.3, radio call sign "Taffy 3", was doing the job it was built for. Its six small escort carriers under Rear Admiral Clifton A. F. Sprague were flying support for the troops landing at Leyte. Its screen of three destroyers and four destroyer escorts was there to hunt submarines and fend off aircraft.
Then lookouts sighted the pagoda masts of Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita's Center Force. It had four battleships, Yamato among them, along with heavy cruisers and destroyers. The escort carriers could make only about 17 knots. They could not outrun the enemy and were not built to fight a surface battle.
"Small boys" against battleships
What the escorts could do was turn around. Sprague's carriers ran and launched every aircraft they had. The destroyers Johnston, Hoel and Heermann, and then the destroyer escorts led by Samuel B. Roberts, went at the enemy through their own smoke and rain squalls. They fired torpedoes and kept their 5-inch guns shooting, trying to break up the Japanese formation and buy time for the carriers.
Commander Evans and Johnston
USS Johnston (DD-557) was commanded by Commander Ernest E. Evans. His Medal of Honor citation, a public U.S. government document, describes the fight in plain language. It records that he went into action against "a powerful hostile force", and that after Johnston was badly hit he "shifted command to the fantail, shouted steering orders through an open hatch to men turning the rudder by hand", and kept fighting his ship.
Johnston sank that morning. Of her crew of 327, only 141 survived. Evans was not among them.
Hoel and Samuel B. Roberts
USS Hoel (DD-533), under Commander Leon S. Kintberger, went in early and drew heavy fire. Only 86 of her company survived, and 252 officers and men were lost.
USS Samuel B. Roberts (DE-413), commanded by Lieutenant Commander Robert W. Copeland, was a destroyer escort, an even smaller ship designed for convoy work. She pressed her own attack and was sunk. Of her crew, 120 survived and 90 were listed as missing or dead. One of her gunners, Gunner's Mate Third Class Paul H. Carr, kept his gun in action and received the Silver Star posthumously.
What it cost
The escort carrier Gambier Bay was sunk by gunfire. Later that morning St. Lo was hit by a suicide aircraft and became the first major ship sunk that way. NHHC counts 635 men who died aboard Gambier Bay, Johnston, Hoel and Samuel B. Roberts. Many more survivors spent days in the water before rescue.
Kurita's force turned away. Historians still argue about why, but the men in the water knew what their ships had done to make that possible.
Found again
In 2021, explorer Victor Vescovo surveyed the wreck of Johnston more than 21,000 feet down off Samar. In 2022 the Navy confirmed that a wreck at 6,895 meters was Samuel B. Roberts. NHHC called it the deepest shipwreck ever located and surveyed. Both are war graves, and they are treated with care.
Sailors gave destroyers a nickname that stuck: tin cans. Off Samar, a few of them turned toward the battle line and saved many more lives than they lost.
Our Pacific Patrol collection is made with the small ships, and the crews who sailed them, in mind.
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