Pacific Glory

AUTHOR’S NOTES

I first heard the story of the destroyer fight at Leyte Gulf from my father, who was a destroyer division commander in Halsey’s fast carrier task force when the battle occurred. He was Naval Academy class of 1927 and rose to the rank of vice admiral before retiring after forty-two years’ service. Like many officers of his vintage, he had strong opinions about the battle, and the debates about Leyte probably go on until this day.

As a midshipman I studied the battle in my first-class (senior) year at the Naval Academy in 1963. I can remember voicing some of my father’s opinions on what happened to our professor, E. B Potter (professor emeritus of history at the academy and biographer of Nimitz, Halsey, and Burke) and being taken to task by him for uttering various heresies. The way I saw it, though, Pop had been out there when it happened, so I thought his version was more likely to be accurate.

When my first destroyer visited San Francisco in 1964, I learned that Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz lived in the big quarters up on the hill on Treasure Island, where my ship was tied up. My dad had told me that if I ever got the chance to meet him, make sure I did. So I called the quarters and told his aide that I was Ensign Deutermann and that I’d like to make a formal five-minute call and that Admiral Nimitz might remember my father. The aide was probably so astonished by this request that he forgot to say no. An hour later I showed up in my best uniform, calling cards in hand, to pay my respects to the admiral who had overseen victory in the Pacific.

Nimitz looked just like every picture I’d ever seen of him except perhaps grayer: I didn’t know the meaning of the word “gravitas” then, but afterward I did. He solemnly bade me sit down. A steward brought coffee, which I tried hard to keep from spilling. The admiral told me a story about my dad that I hadn’t heard and then inquired if I had any questions for him. I asked him what had been the Navy’s most glorious battle of the Pacific war.

Only an ensign would ask such a question, especially the “glorious” part, but he was nothing if not a kind man. He said there were two that came to mind: Midway and Samar, which is another name for what happened that day off Leyte when the destroyers took on the IJN Yamato and her consorts. Midway was almost a given, but I then asked how such a thing as Samar could have happened. His aide, aghast at my impertinence, stiffened in his chair, and I scrambled to take back my question, but Nimitz just waved me silent with an imperial hand.

“Don’t ever make assumptions,” he said, somewhat sadly. “I made an assumption, and that’s how Samar happened.”

He didn’t say: Bill Halsey screwed it up. He was saying: I screwed it up. Such was the moral serenity of C. W. Nimitz, and I never forgot it, or his advice about making assumptions.

I wrote this book because I’ve always wondered what it would have been like to do what they did that day. Having been a destroyer skipper and, later, a destroyer squadron commander, I’ve often wondered what I would have seen, heard, and, most importantly, done when the orders came to go drive off those approaching Japanese battleships, and eighteen-inch shells began to fall around my ship.

I chose in some cases to invent ships’ names, such as Winston, so as not to tread on the ordeals of the real ships and their officers and enlisted men. Once I did that, I then had to take some liberties with the real history in terms of precisely when and where things happened. After refreshing my own knowledge from more recent works than were available in 1963, I concluded that the pilots from the little jeep carriers played just as important a role in making the Japanese admiral blink as the destroyers had. Some historians/authors take the position that the planes were actually the decisive element, leading Admiral Kurita to conclude that Halsey’s fleet-carrier formations, by which his forces had already been savaged while approaching Leyte, were right over the horizon. That might be true, but it wasn’t the airplanes that made Kurita turn his flagship away in the middle of the fight and effectively out of the action — it was the threat of the destroyers’ torpedoes.

Kurita was embarked on the battleship Yamato, sister ship of Musashi. These two behemoths were the biggest battleships ever built. Admiral Kurita had been promised that he would be supported from airfields on Luzon. No such support ever materialized. Having watched American carrier pilots destroy Musashi a day before he came through the San Bernardino Strait to surprise the Taffys, I think he decided to get out of there while he still could once that increasingly hostile aluminum overcast began to form over his head. This persuaded me to write in the character of Mick “Beast” McCarty to tell the story of what the jeep aviators did on that terrifying morning. Beast ended up grabbing a bigger role in this book than I’d anticipated, but that’s the nature of carrier aviators, God love ’em.

For a general appreciation of what happened at Leyte, I recommend four books, two of which are recent. The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, by James D. Hornfischer, is an outstanding blow-by-blow description of what happened to the destroyers. Sea of Thunder, by Evan Thomas, expands on this story by folding in the Japanese view of the battle as well as Admiral Halsey’s. Thomas Cutler’s 1994 book, The Battle of Leyte Gulf, has an extensive bibliography if you want to gain an expert’s understanding of the battle. And, of course, there’s always Theodore Roscoe’s 1953 classic, United States Destroyer Operations in World War II, a book I read and re-read a hundred times as a teenager in a Navy family.

All that said, I must beg the indulgence of both the professional and amateur historians who will undoubtedly harrumph when they see some of the historical distortions I’ve introduced in this story. For instance, in Pearl I’ve made it sound like the hospital, the base O-club, and the BOQ were all close together. In fact, Hospital Point is part of the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and not really near the O-club or the BOQ. (The hospital is long gone.) I have the Punchbowl cemetery being finished in 1948—that actually happened in 1949. Marsh Vincent’s ship, Evans, I named for the skipper of the USS Johnston, Commander E. E. Evans, USN. USS Johnston was one of the destroyers that went down off Samar after a gun duel with a battleship. Commander Evans was of Cherokee extraction, and he won the Medal of Honor for his gallantry that day. Posthumously. There was no USS Evans in those days, because the last U.S. Navy ship of that name had been “lent” to England at the start of the war under the Lend-Lease program.

It may also interest the reader to know that there are over two dozen Navy vets whose ashes have been interred within the hulk of Arizona since her destruction on December 7, 1941. The Navy has a policy that anyone who survived the attack on that ship may be interred inside her when the time comes. Men who were otherwise veterans of Arizona but not aboard that dreadful Sunday may have their ashes scattered over the sunken hulk.

Having finished the book, I still wonder if I would have had the guts to do what those captains did that day, especially Commander Evans, whose decision to turn again into the fight committed his already crippled ship, his battered crew, and himself to just about certain destruction. I’ve concluded, after twenty-six years in the Navy and three commands, that one simply cannot know until the time comes and the elephant rises over the horizon.

The skippers of those destroyers off Samar apparently had no doubts as to what had to be done. “Glory” is usually an inappropriate word when applied to war, man’s most horrific endeavor, but what the planes and the destroyers did that day was surely a moment of glory and unsurpassed valor. To this day, I remain in awe of them.