Sunday 1 November 2026 · about 8 minute read
The Last Stand of Taffy 3
On 25 October 1944, six little carriers and seven escorts woke up to find the biggest battleship ever built bearing down on them. This is what they did next.
At 6:37 in the morning, a young pilot named William Brooks was flying a routine antisubmarine patrol from the escort carrier St. Lo when he spotted ships on the horizon. He expected American ships. Then he saw the pagoda masts, and he radioed back that he was looking at "the biggest battleship I ever saw."
He was looking at Yamato. She was the largest battleship in the world, and on her own she weighed about as much as every ship in his task group put together. Behind her came three more battleships, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and eleven destroyers. This was Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita's Center Force, the heart of what was left of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Between that fleet and the American landing beaches on Leyte stood a group of thirteen small ships known by its radio call sign: Taffy 3.
Nobody was supposed to be here
Five days earlier, American troops had stormed ashore on Leyte, and Japan had thrown nearly its whole navy at the invasion. The plan was a gamble. A force of Japanese carriers, nearly empty of planes, would sail south as bait. If the Americans took it, Kurita's battleships could slip through the San Bernardino Strait and fall on the invasion fleet.
Admiral William Halsey took the bait. On the night of 24 October he led the Third Fleet's fast carriers and battleships north to chase the decoy, and the strait was left unguarded. Kurita came through in the dark.
Taffy 3 was never meant for this kind of fight. Its six escort carriers were small ships built on merchant hulls, nicknamed "jeep carriers," with a top speed of about 17 knots and a single five inch gun on the stern. Their planes were loaded for hitting ground targets and hunting submarines. Their screen was three destroyers and four even smaller destroyer escorts. Not one ship in the group carried a gun that could pierce a battleship's armor.
Their commander, Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague, could not outrun the Japanese and could not outgun them. He could only buy time.
Shells in color
Yamato opened fire at about 7:00, from roughly 17 nautical miles away. Soon the water around the carriers was erupting in towering splashes, and the splashes were colored. Japanese battleships loaded dye into their shells so each ship could spot its own fall of shot: pink from Nagato, a greenish yellow from Haruna, a deep red from Kongo. Yamato's were plain white. One American sailor remembered thinking that the enemy was shooting at them in Technicolor.
Sprague moved fast. He turned his carriers east into the wind, launched every plane he had, ordered smoke, and called for help in plain language over the radio. He ducked his ships into a passing rain squall for a few precious minutes of cover. When they came out the other side, the Japanese were still closing.
"A fighting ship"
One ship did not wait for orders. USS Johnston was commanded by Commander Ernest Evans, an Oklahoman of Cherokee and Creek heritage. A year earlier, at her commissioning, he had told the crew, "This is going to be a fighting ship. I intend to go in harm's way."
Now he proved it. With no order from Sprague, Evans turned his destroyer toward the enemy and charged, guns firing and smoke pouring from her stacks. Johnston closed to torpedo range and fired all ten of her torpedoes at the heavy cruiser Kumano. At least one struck home and blew off Kumano's bow.
Minutes later, Johnston paid for it. Heavy shells tore into her, knocking out an engine and her steering, and a hit on the bridge took two fingers from Evans's hand. She kept fighting.
The small boys
At 7:16, Sprague ordered the rest of his screen to follow Johnston in. The sailors called the destroyers and destroyer escorts "small boys," and that morning the small boys went at battleships.
USS Hoel charged a column of heavy ships and fired torpedoes at a battleship and then a cruiser. Her captain later counted more than 40 direct hits on his ship. Her forward guns kept firing even after she lost power and steering. She sank at 8:55, and more than 250 of her men died with her.
USS Heermann raced through the smoke and fired torpedoes at the battleships. To dodge them, Yamato turned away and ran north, and the most powerful ship in the Japanese fleet was carried out of the fight for crucial minutes.
Then came the destroyer escorts, built to hunt submarines and never meant to face a battle line. Aboard USS Samuel B. Roberts, Lieutenant Commander Robert Copeland told his crew what was coming: "This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can."
They did a great deal of damage. The Sammy B fired her torpedoes at a heavy cruiser from about two miles out, then stayed in close and fired more than 600 rounds from her five inch guns in about 35 minutes. Her aft gun crew fired nearly every shell they had until one exploded in the breech. Gunner's Mate Third Class Paul Carr was found dying at his post, still holding a shell and asking for help to load it. Around 9:00, shells from the battleship Kongo tore the Roberts open. Of her 224 men, 89 were killed. She went down as "the destroyer escort that fought like a battleship."
The carriers fight back
Overhead, Taffy 3's pilots attacked the Japanese again and again with whatever they had. When the bombs and torpedoes ran out, some flew dry runs at the cruisers with empty guns, just to make the enemy gunners flinch and turn. The carriers' lone stern guns fired back, and a hit from White Plains may have touched off the torpedoes aboard the heavy cruiser Chokai.
Gambier Bay, on the exposed flank of the formation, took the worst of it. From 8:10 she was hit at least fifteen times. Many of the Japanese shells were armor piercing rounds made to punch through battleships, and some passed straight through the thin hull of the little carrier without exploding. It was not enough to save her. She capsized at 9:07 and sank four minutes later, the only American aircraft carrier sunk by enemy gunfire in the entire war. She lost 147 men.
"All ships, my course north"
Johnston, crippled and down to one engine, kept going back in. When a Japanese light cruiser and a pack of destroyers lined up a torpedo attack on the carriers, Johnston steamed between them and spoiled it. She was firing so hard that two Japanese cruisers reported her as a cruiser. With his bridge wrecked, Evans moved to the stern and steered the ship by shouting orders down an open hatch to men moving the rudder by hand.
By 9:45 Johnston was dead in the water, ringed by enemy ships. Evans ordered abandon ship. A Japanese destroyer closed in to finish her, and Johnston sank soon after ten o'clock. Of her 327 men, 186 were lost. Ernest Evans was never seen again.
And then, with the carriers seemingly at his mercy, Kurita quit. At 9:20 he signaled his fleet: "All ships, my course north, speed 20." Three of his heavy cruisers were sinking or about to sink. His formation was scattered, and the air attacks had never stopped. Kurita believed he had been fighting big fleet carriers and that more were on the way. On the bridges of Taffy 3, men watched the Japanese fleet turn around and could hardly believe it.
The longest wait
The morning was not over. Just before 11:00, Japanese planes dove on the carriers, and these pilots did not intend to pull out. One crashed through the flight deck of St. Lo, the same ship that had launched William Brooks that morning. The bombs and torpedoes in her hangar went off in a chain of explosions, and she sank in about half an hour. St. Lo was the first major ship ever sunk by a kamikaze.
For the men in the water, the worst was still to come. Through a mix of confusion and delay, rescue ships did not reach many of the survivors until 27 October. For about two days they clung to rafts and floater nets under the tropical sun, with no water, while sharks circled. Many who survived the battle did not survive the wait.
What they bought
Taffy 3 lost two escort carriers, two destroyers, and a destroyer escort. Across the morning, the escort carrier groups off Samar counted more than 1,100 men killed or missing and 913 wounded. In return, the little ships and their planes sank or crippled four Japanese heavy cruisers and turned back the strongest surface fleet Japan had left. Kurita's battleships never reached the landing beaches at Leyte.
Taffy 3 received the Presidential Unit Citation. Ernest Evans was awarded the Medal of Honor, the first Native American in the U.S. Navy to receive it. Admiral Chester Nimitz later said the outcome was "nothing short of special dispensation from the Lord Almighty."
The ships stayed lost for almost eighty years. In 2021, explorers in a deep diving submersible reached Johnston more than 21,000 feet down in the Philippine Trench. A year later they found Samuel B. Roberts even deeper, at about 22,600 feet, the deepest shipwreck ever located. The searchers spotted her first by her three tube torpedo launcher, lying on the seafloor.
When they left, Gambier Bay and Hoel were still missing.
Also from our first two weeks
Each morning brought a new dispatch. Catch up on any you missed:
No. 001 · USS Kearny torpedoed, 17 October 1941 · Read on X
No. 003 · The Nuremberg indictment is filed, 18 October 1945 · Read on X
No. 005 · Tin cans go to war, 19 October 1942 · Read on X
No. 007 · MacArthur returns to Leyte, 20 October 1944 · Read on X
No. 009 · Aachen surrenders, 21 October 1944 · Read on X
No. 011 · Mark Clark's secret landing, 22 October 1942 · Read on X
No. 013 · The barrage at El Alamein, 23 October 1942 · Read on X
No. 015 · UN Charter takes effect, 24 October 1945 · Read on X
No. 017 · The last stand of Taffy 3, 25 October 1944 · Read on X
No. 019 · Hornet's last fight, 26 October 1942 · Read on X
No. 021 · The guns at Outpost Snipe, 27 October 1942 · Read on X
No. 023 · Greece says no, 28 October 1940 · Read on X
No. 025 · America's draft lottery, 29 October 1940 · Read on X
No. 027 · Rescue of the Lost Battalion, 30 October 1944 · Read on X
No. 029 · Reuben James is sunk, 31 October 1941 · Read on X
Sources
The Battle off Samar: The Sacrifice of "Taffy 3", Naval History and Heritage Command
H-Gram Special Edition: Samar, Naval History and Heritage Command
Johnston (DD-557) and Hoel I (DD-533), Naval History and Heritage Command
Harm's Way: Ernest E. Evans, Naval History Magazine, U.S. Naval Institute
Battle off Samar, USS Gambier Bay, and USS Samuel B. Roberts, Wikipedia
Deepest shipwreck, Guinness World Records
Thank you for reading the very first Weekly Dispatch. Every Sunday from now on, we'll pick the most remarkable story from the week's dates and tell it in full. Next week: the first days of November.
WW2 Dispatches