By BILL WELCH
Morning News city editor
It's another sunny morning on the Pacific Ocean.
The sky is blue. The sea is bluer.
It's Oct. 25, 1944, and Hank Hood is aboard the USS Hoel. It's his job to steer the ship in whatever direction ordered.
Today the direction will be toward overwhelming odds.
Today is Wednesday. That means beans. Beans for breakfast, along with cornbread. That's something to look forward to; it beats the standard
powdered egg breakfast with ease.
It's morning and the destroyers and destroyer escorts of ""Taffy 3'' prepare for another day of guarding their small escort ""jeep'' aircraft carriers while they
launch air strikes to support of U.S. Army troops on the Philippine island of Leyte.
They've done this before, at other island invasions. The destroyers keep an eye open for Japanese submarines or aircraft,
though neither makes many appearances around this part of the fleet. This part of the fleet, the Seventh Fleet, is intended for troop support. Their mission is not to square off against Japanese ships or aircraft
because that's what the Third Fleet does.
Third Fleet has the big carriers, the big, fast, new battleships and cruisers, and plenty of destroyers.
Taffy 3, as well as Taffy 2 and Taffy 1, do the relatively humdrum -
give the ground troops air cover. They steam in patterns off the island of Samar, to the northeast of Leyte. No major warships are around. The Seventh Fleet's battleships and cruisers are to the south,
having spent the night pounding one arm of the Japanese fleet into oblivion. The Third Fleet's carriers, battleships and cruisers are way off to the north, chasing what turns out to be a decoy element of the
Japanese fleet - virtually empty aircraft carriers.
It's 7:00 in the morning and everything changes for Taffy 3.
""The first I knew that something was up is all of a sudden BOOM and a huge geyser of water
appeared ahead of us and toward the carriers,'' Hood recalled. Hood was at the wheel of the ship. His job as quartermaster was to steer the ship during general quarters and special situations, like a battle. He
lives in the Erie area now, a retired engineer at Top Roc concrete and with PennDOT.
The geyser of water came from one of the Japanese surface warships that has steamed into the open waters east of the Philippines.
The Japanese have four battleships, one of which is the largest in the world, eight cruisers and a dozen destroyers. they can sweep aside the ships of all three Taffy groups and then wipe out the transports,
leaving the Army without supplies.
Taffy 3, the task force they meet first has a screen of three destroyers and four destroyer escorts. Their combined tonnage is less than any one of the battleships they will
face. They must protect, somehow, the six jeep aircraft carriers.
The carriers have a top speed of 17 knots. The Japanese can better that by an easy 10 or more knots.
The American admiral, Clifton Sprague,
takes little time to decide what to do.
The destroyers and destroyer escorts, along with all available aircraft, must attack to buy time for the carriers and for the transports.
The Hoel and her sister ships,
Johnston and Heerman were first ordered to make smoke. At 7:16 came the order to attack. Destroyer escorts Samuel B. Roberts, Dennis, John C. Butler, and Raymond would also attack.
""We were
scared - less,'' says Hood. They had been through invasions, air attacks and return artillery fire, but nothing like this. ""Now we were faced with a helluva a big Japanese fleet coming at us at 30
knots.''
""Our orders were to make a torpedo attack. Destroyers are expendable. We knew that.''
This attack by the destroyers has often been likened to the Charge of the Light Brigade.
When
they came out of a rain squall that had provided some cover for Taffy 3, the Hoel nearly collided with the Heerman.
""I was really spinning that wheel.''
The American ships had plenty of targets for the 10
torpedoes each carried. The difficult part - the suicidal part - was getting close enough to launch them. Best range was one to two miles. That's practically point-blank range for naval guns.
Hoel
picked the Japanese battleship Kongo. The Kongo and other enemy ships did their best to stop that attack, firing salvo after salvo at the Hoel.
""Subconsciously, we knew this is a fatal thing. We're going at
ships that are much bigger than we are and we're not going to hurt them with our guns, only if we get a lucky hit with a torpedo. We were expendable. But it was our job.''
""We took several hits
on the first run, but we were still maneuvering. After releasing the first salvo of torpedoes, we made a turn for the second run. During the turn we got hit on the bridge.''
That hit killed nearly every man on
the bridge. It knocked Hood unconscious and laid him flat. When he came to, an officer was at the wheel.
""I knew what I had to do - get to that wheel. I told the officer that he was doing my job
and I took the wheel.'' There was no question of which way to steer - toward the enemy.
So the badly-damaged Hoel came back for more, to launch its second set of five torpedoes at the heavy cruiser Haguro.
Hoel's men thought they saw hits. None were recorded, but the Haguro and other ships steered away from the battle to avoid the deadly weapons.
Japanese shells continued to hit on and around the American ships.
One officer estimated that 300 two- and three-gun salvoes were fired at the Hoel. Johnston, Heerman and Roberts were the objects of similar attention. The noise of battle filled the air.
Forty times the
Hoel was hit. Many of the heaviest shells - each weighing a ton - passed through the destroyers thin hull and exploded just after going through. They didn't cause immediate, serious hull damage but the shrapnel
took many lives of men at topside stations.
""We couldn't understand why we were still afloat.''
Of the Hoel's five 5-inch guns, three were out of action. The two guns forward continued to fire. The
smaller, 40mm antiaircraft guns were firing too.
By now, the Hoel had come to a stop, its engines out of action. The ship was going down by the stern. The captain ordered the crew, what was left of them, to
abandon ship. The men in those forward five-inch guns kept firing away. An officer had to go forward and order them to leave the guns and get in the water.
After passing the word, Hood jumped into the
water and joined a group of three rafts. His Mae West life preserver keeping him afloat, he tied himself onto a floater net, much like the ropes used in swimming pools today.
The 86 survivors drifted
quite a distance from the ship when it rolled over and went down. With the ship went 253 men. The running battle continued on past them.
A Japanese destroyer steamed in their direction.
""We expected to be machine-gunnned or depth-charged.'' Some men prepared to dive under water to avoid the machine guns. Others felt it would be better to float on their back to be best positioned if
depth charges exploded beneath them.
Neither happened. As the destroyer went by, an officer on the bridge saluted the American survivors, an obvious sign of respect for their gallant efforts to protect the
carriers.
Two other American ships, the Johnston and Samuel B. Roberts would sink from Japanese gunfire in the next couple hours. So would the carrier Gambier Bay. Four Japanese ships would sink from
damage inflicted by U.S. ships and aircraft. Another jeep carrier, the St. Lo, would sink when hit by the first kamikaze attack of the war.
""And then there was silence,'' Hood said. ""It was almost deafening.''
What the American sailors in the water - those who would survive - would not know for a few days was that the
Japanese turned away at 9:25 a.m. two hours after the Hoel sank. They turned north and then went back through San Bernardino Strait and away from any other contact with the U.S. fleet.
""We thought they had to be stupid,'' Hood said.
But it was quiet now, and the battle appeared to be over. All the sailors had to do now was await their rescue.
It would be a hungry wait.
The action had started before most of them had had breakfast of beans and cornbread.
The rafts' emergency supplies had been damaged in the battle. Salt water had gotten into much of the fresh water. There was
little to eat.
The wounded men were in the rafts. Teh able-bodied were floating alongside. Some were tied to the floater nets. Some were just hanging on. the water temperature was in the high 60s.
The
hours dragged by. The sailors waited for their rescue. They got half a cup of water and a cracker during the day; another half cup of water at night. Those in the water started to shiver. They
began to slip in and out of consciousness. The wounded men in the rafts suffered; some died.
""There was one ensign that go me so mad. He wasn't tied to the net. He kept letting go and
floating away and I would have to grab the back of his life preserve and pull him back. Finally, I tied him to the net.''
Night came. The men in the water became almost catatonic from hypothermia and
thirst. Some drank the ocean salt water. Some hallucinated.
""We couldn't understand why no one came.''
No one came because the men of the Hoel, the Johnston, Roberts had been forgotten, as had
the men of the St. Lo and the Gambier Bay.
Orders for search and rescue didn't go out until late in the day after an officer with the amphibious forces was leafing through the day's radio transcripts. He saw
aircraft sighting reports of many men in the water, but noticed there were no radioed orders to rescue those men. He got a flotilla of medium-sized patrol and amphibious craft together and sent them out to search.
The Hoel's men would be found well into the next day; The Johnston's a day later.
""We sighted the superstructure of a ship. It was boxy and I thought it was Japanese. We debated. Do we flash
them? OR do we take our chances and hope an American ship comes for us? Fortunately, they sighted us and settled the matter.
""The coffee they gave us when they got us aboard tasted so good.''
Fifteen of the Hoel's survivors died before they were rescued.
Hood's signals division of about 30 men was down to six or eight. He lost several friends.
""That was pretty tough.''
The action off
Samar was part of the four-day Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle of World War II. Taffy 3's part in that action is recorded as one of the most gallant in U.S. Navy history.
In the recently published
""The Battle of Leyte Gulf,'' historian Thomas J. Cutler writes at the end: ""One is reluctant to begin singling out individual ships and their commanders because all played important roles and
because there are many examples of outstanding performance that deserve recognition. But in the case of the Taffy 3 escorts, an exception would be in order. What the men in those ships did on that October
morning off Samar deserves to be a focal point of the nation's naval heritage, ranking with John Paul Jones's epic ""I have not yet begun to fight'' battle.... There should be more tributes. A statue
commemorating the deeds of those ships and the men who crewed them ... should be erected in the nation's capital so that all Americans will be reminded of the kind of courage and sacrifice this nation can produce when
circumstances require.''
Hood kind of shrugs that off. He and the close-knit survivors of the three sunken escort ships, still gather regularly for reunions.
""None of us think we're heroes,'' he
says. ""We did what we were told to do. It was our job.'' He pauses a second.
""I think we did it well.''
