They Called It Madness — How 1 Tin Can Held Off the Mighty Yamato for 3 Hours

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]October 25th, 1944.

[00:00:03]10:10 a.m. The Philippine Sea off Samar.

[00:00:08]Commander Teruchi Masamichi stands at rigid attention on the deck of the destroyer Yuki Kaz. He is saluting. Not his admiral, not his emperor. He is saluting a burning, capsizing American destroyer 1,000 yd off his starboard beam. a ship his navy had just spent two hours trying to kill. In the oil slick water below, a shirtless American officer with no fingers on his left hand raises his bloody right hand and returns the salute.

[00:00:38]The Imperial Japanese Navy had built the largest battleship in human history to crush men exactly like this one. And somehow on this morning, a 2,50 ton tin can made the Yamato turn and run.

[00:00:54]This is how the ship being saluted was the USS Johnston DD557, a Fletcherclass destroyer built in Seattle in under 11 months by a workforce that included housewives, locomotive drivers, and welders who had been designing women's hats the year before. She displays 2,50 tons. Her hull was 3/8 of an inch of steel, thinner than the door of a modern refrigerator.

[00:01:22]She cost the American taxpayer roughly $6 million. The United States built 174 more just like her. The ship she had been fighting was the Yamato. 70,000 tons, nine 18.1in guns, each firing an armor-piercing shell that weighed more than a Ford sedan. She was the largest, most heavily armed warship ever constructed by human hands. Japan had built exactly two of her class in deep secrecy at the cost of sacrificing entire sectors of their civilian economy. She was irreplaceable.

[00:02:00]On the morning of October 25th, 1944, these two ships met off the eastern coast of Samar Island in the Philippines. By every mathematical, doctrinal, and logistical standard known to the profession of arms, the encounter should have lasted 11 minutes.

[00:02:18]It lasted over 2 and 1/2 hours. When it ended, the Johnston was dead. The Yamato was steaming north, away from the battle, away from her mission, away from the American beach head she had been sent to destroy.

[00:02:33]The Imperial Japanese Navy had spent four decades building itself around a single idea. They called it Kai Kessan, the decisive battle doctrine. The theory held that one cataclysmic surface engagement fought by the finest battleships in the world, crewed by men whose spiritual superiority could not be matched by any soft materialistic democracy would decide the Pacific.

[00:03:01]Every warship, every gunnery drill, every cadet's indoctrination had pointed toward this moment for 40 years. On October 25th, the moment came. The finest battleships of the Empire slipped through the San Bernardino Strait undetected. They emerged into open water. They found American carriers. The script was written.

[00:03:25]Then something happened that the script did not contain. A Native American destroyer captain from a landlocked town in Oklahoma. A man who had been turned away from the Marine Corps for the color of his skin looked at the largest battleship fleet on Earth and ordered his helmsmen to attack it alone at flank speed into the teeth of the guns. What the Japanese witnessed over the next 3 hours would rewrite their understanding of the enemy, of courage, and of themselves. By the time it was over, a Japanese fleet admiral would be writing the word irritated in his diary while watching the Empire lose the war. And the salute on the deck of the Yuki Kaz would be the smallest part of the confession.

[00:04:16]Ernest Edwin Evans was born on August 13th, 1908 in Pawne, Oklahoma, which is roughly 1,000 m from the nearest saltwater in any direction. His father was Cherokee, his mother was Muscogee Creek. In 1926, at the age of 18, Evans walked into a Marine Corps recruiting office and was told in so many words that his kind of American was not the core's kind of Marine. He walked across the street and joined the Navy as an enlisted seaman instead. What followed was the kind of career the Empire of Japan had convinced itself was impossible in a democracy. A boy from the plains raised in a state where his grandparents had been forced onto reservations, rising through the ranks on merit alone.

[00:05:02]Evans won a fleetwide competition for an appointment to the Naval Academy. He graduated from Annapolis in 1931. By 1943, he was a commander with his own ship. That ship was waiting for him at the Seattle Tacoma Ship Building Corporation in Washington State. She had been laid down on May 6th, 1942, launched on March 25th, 1943, and commissioned on October 27th of the same year. 11 months from keelplate to active duty. The woman who had supervised the flow of valves and fittings onto her hull was Maxine Gleason, a mother of two who had spent the previous decade designing women's hats in a Seattle milinary shop at the Seattle Tacoma yard. By June 1943, 5,000 women were working the cranes, the welding torches, and the diesel locomotives. At Boeing across town, 86% of the African-Amean workforce was female. None of them were permitted to serve in the Navy they were building. On the day the Johnston was commissioned, Evans stood on the fan tail in his dress blues and addressed his new crew. What he said was not the speech of a man who planned to survive the war.

[00:06:19]This is going to be a fighting ship. I intend to go in harm's way and anyone who doesn't want to go along had better get off right now.

[00:06:29]Not one man asked for a transfer.

[00:06:33]One year later, on the morning of October 25th, 1944, the Johnston was steaming with five other American destroyers and destroyer escorts off the island of Samar, screening six escort carriers, flat topped merchant holes with flight decks bolted on, capable of a maximum speed of 18 knots, crewed by pilots whose mission that morning was ground support for the Army's Lee landings. The task unit had been assigned the radio call sign Taffy 3. The sailors of the escort carrier force had a nickname for their own ships. They called them combustible, vulnerable, and expendable, CV E. The letter stood for escort carrier. The joke was gallows humor.

[00:07:23]At 0623, the Yamato's radar picked up American aircraft. At 0650, Japanese lookouts in the morning haze saw masts on the southern horizon and correctly identified them as American.

[00:07:36]Then they incorrectly identified them as Admiral William Hollyy's fast fleet carriers.

[00:07:42]30 knot fleet carriers screened by heavy cruisers, the main striking arm of the United States Pacific Fleet.

[00:07:51]The Japanese had in fact stumbled upon six slow escort carriers and seven small screening vessels whose combined displacement was less than a single one of Yamato's main turrets. The Japanese could not see what they were actually looking at. Their own doctrine had made them blind to it. Aboard the flagship Yamato, Vice Admiral To Karita gave the order to engage.

[00:08:16]23 Japanese warships, four battleships including Yamato and Congo, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and 11 destroyers opened their gunports and began closing the range. The total weight of the Japanese broadside was more than 12 times the total displacement of every American ship in Taffy 3 combined.

[00:08:40]On the bridge of the Johnston, the General Quarters alarm sounded.

[00:08:44]Signalmen began frantic TBS radio calls.

[00:08:48]Rear Admiral Clifton Sprag aboard the escort carrier Fans Shaw Bay ordered his carriers to turn east into the wind to launch every aircraft they had. He ordered his screen to make smoke and delay the Japanese advance. Commander Evans had a different interpretation of the word delay. He stepped to the voice tube and ordered his helmsman full left rudder. Then he ordered the engine room to flank speed. The Johnston healed over, her bow swung north, and she began accelerating directly toward the largest battleship fleet assembled in the Pacific War.

[00:09:25]No orders had told him to do this. The Imperial Japanese Navy believed it could not lose. This was not bravado, it was doctrine. In 1905, at the Battle of Tsushima, Admiral Togo Heihihhatiro had annihilated a Russian fleet at a cost of fewer than 100 Japanese lives. From that morning forward, every naval cadet in Japan was taught that the nation's destiny was written in saltwater and gunsmoke.

[00:09:56]The entire purpose of the Imperial Navy became the preparation for a second Tsushima against whichever Western power came next.

[00:10:05]By 1936, the second Tsushima had a formal name, Kanti Kessan, the decisive battle. Every ship, every gunnery manual, every officer's career was pointed at the day when the Imperial Fleet would meet the United States Pacific Fleet in open water and destroy it in a single engagement of overwhelming caliber. The weapon built for that day was the Yamato. nine guns of 18.1 in, armor belts 16 in thick, a main battery turret that weighed more than an entire American destroyer.

[00:10:44]She had been constructed behind wooden screens in a dry dock at Kur so that even her own shipyard workers could not see her hole. The Japanese public did not know she existed until after she sank. She was the physical expression of a belief that craftsmanship, secrecy, and spiritual purity could defeat a nation of factories.

[00:11:06]The belief rested on a second, quieter assumption.

[00:11:10]Japanese naval doctrine held that the American sailor was materially superior and spiritually hollow.

[00:11:18]Radar, yes. Aircraft, yes. But the soft, comfortable, democratic American would never close to gun range. He would never trade his life willingly. He would never charge a battleship in a destroyer. The Empire's officers had convinced themselves of this so completely that their tactical playbooks contained no response to the scenario.

[00:11:43]There was no drill for it. There was no doctrine for it. There was no vocabulary in the Japanese naval lexicon to describe what Commander Evans was about to do. And the Japanese had convinced themselves of one further thing. They had convinced themselves that by October 1944, the odds no longer mattered because the quality of the individual Japanese warrior would always close the gap.

[00:12:10]This faith was held most tightly by Vice Admiral Maté Ugaki, commander of the first battleship division. Riding that morning on the Yamato's soaring bridge, Ugaki was the kind of man who would 9 months later strap himself into a zero on the afternoon of the Emperor's surrender broadcast and fly it into the Pacific Ocean because he could not bear to live in a world where Japan had lost.

[00:12:37]He kept a diary. He called it Senzo Roku, war record. The English translation would later be published as fading victory.

[00:12:48]On the morning of October 25th, Ugaki looked down from the Yamato's bridge and saw six small ships that the entire Japanese doctrine assured him would flee. They did not flee. The first one turned and came straight at him.

[00:13:05]Behind Yugaki stood Vice Admiral Karita, the fleet commander. Karita had been at sea for 4 days without sleep. Two days earlier, American submarines had torpedoed his previous flagship, Atago, out from under him. He had swam in oil until a destroyer plucked him out. The day before, American carrier aircraft had sunk Yamato's sister ship, Mousashi, in the Sabuyan Sea. The only other ship of her class, the other half of the decisive battle doctrine, gone to the bottom in a single afternoon under a swarm of American dive bombers and torpedo planes. Karita had watched it happen. He was exhausted, traumatized, and about to make the worst decision of his career.

[00:13:52]His chief of staff was Rear Admiral Tomiji Coyanagi. His operations officer was commander Tonosuk Otani.

[00:14:00]These three men on the Yamato's bridge would one year later in Tokyo sit across from American interrogators from the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and attempt to explain what had happened on this morning. Their interrogations are preserved in the USSBS archives as documents NAV number 9, NAV number 35, and NAV number 41.

[00:14:23]Read them today and a pattern emerges.

[00:14:26]The pattern is that none of these men, even a year later, could explain it.

[00:14:31]Otani tried. Asked about the American carriers, he told his interrogators, "We gave that question much consideration, but never fully made up our minds. We found ourselves perplexed by your carriers because they did not correspond to their photographs."

[00:14:47]The photographs Otani meant were the photographs of the Essex class fleet carriers. He had been staring at escort carriers built on merchant holes at the Kaiser shipyards in Vancouver, Washington. Ships whose blueprints did not exist in any pre-war Japanese intelligence binder because no Japanese intelligence officer had ever imagined a nation that would build aircraft carriers out of merchant ships and treat them as expendable.

[00:15:14]Karita's fleet was not fighting the American Navy it had prepared for. It was fighting an American navy whose existence the Japanese imagination could not contain.

[00:15:25]The Johnston was closing at 36 knots.

[00:15:29]At 0710, the Johnston was inside 18,000 yd of the heavy cruiser Kumano. her five 5-in/38 caliber guns, each controlled by the Mark 37 fire control director on her superructure and fed targeting data by an SG surface search radar and a Ford Mark1 electromechanical gunnery computer began firing at a rate of 20 rounds per minute per gun. In 5 minutes, the Johnston put more than 200 shells into the Kimano superructure. The shells were too small to penetrate the cruiser's armor belt. That was not their purpose.

[00:16:03]Their purpose was to rake the bridge, the rangefinders, the anti-aircraft positions, and the unarmored spaces where human beings lived and worked. The Kimano's gunnery officers, already blinded by the dense chemical smoke the Johnston was laying as she charged, found their own optical directors obscured by geysers of seawater and steel fragments and human casualties on their own bridge.

[00:16:27]This is where the macro reality of American engineering decided the micro reality of the engagement. The Japanese fleet carried the finest optical rangefinders in the world. Enormous bronze and glass instruments hand ground by craftsmen at Nikon in the 1930s, capable of astonishing accuracy in clear weather. The Johnston carried SG radar, a technology the Japanese did not possess and did not fully understand existed.

[00:16:55]In clear weather, the optical rangefinders were the match of radar. In smoke, in rain, in the chaos of a running fight, the Japanese rangefinders became decorative brass. The Americans could see through the smoke they themselves were making. The Japanese could not. At 10,000 yd, Commander Evans gave the order to fire all 10 Mark 15 torpedoes. The launchers on the Johnston's port and starboard quarters hissed and the torpedoes entered the water. The Japanese lookouts spotted the wakes and the Kumano's captain ordered an emergency turn. But the Mark 15s were running slow that morning. An ironic American weapons failure that had the effect of confusing the Japanese evasion calculation.

[00:17:41]The cruiser turned into not away from the oncoming warheads.

[00:17:46]At 0727, one of the Johnston's torpedoes struck the Kumano squarely on the bow. The explosion tore off the entire forward section of the cruiser forward of her number one turret. Kumano slowed to a crawl, began taking water, and dropped out of the battle. The Suzuya, her sister ship, was forced to slow to cover her, and was immediately set upon by American aircraft. Within hours, Suzuya 2 was gone.

[00:18:19]Two Japanese heavy cruisers removed from the battle by one American destroyer alone.

[00:18:28]And then the answer came. The battleship Congo, 3 mi to the east, had been tracking the Johnston since the destroyer first turned. Congo was 31 years old that morning. She had been built in Britain in 1913 as part of Japan's preWorld War I naval expansion.

[00:18:47]Her eight 14-in guns fired a salvo weighing more than 30,000 lb.

[00:18:54]At 0730, three of those 14-in shells hit the Johnston. A light cruiser put three more 6-in shells into her almost simultaneously.

[00:19:03]A 14-in armor-piercing shell is designed to punch through the 16 in of cemented steel that form the armor belt of a capital ship before detonating in the interior.

[00:19:15]Its fuse is delayed by a specific number of milliseconds to allow penetration.

[00:19:20]The Johnston's hull was 3/8 of an inch of mild steel.

[00:19:25]The Japanese shells went through the destroyer the way a rifle bullet goes through a tin can. They punched clean holes, exited the far side, and splashed into the sea hundreds of yards beyond before the fuses had time to function.

[00:19:40]The Johnston did not explode. She was, however, gutted. The port engine was dead. The aft 5-in mount was silenced.

[00:19:51]The electric steering was gone. Three of the bridge personnel were killed outright. Commander Evans was blown off his feet, his shirt shredded, two fingers on his left hand severed cleanly by shell fragments. He refused morphine.

[00:20:07]He refused addressing beyond a handkerchief wrapped around his mangled hand. He ordered his talker to pass word aft. The ship would be conned from the fan tail by voice shouted down through an open hatch to sailors turning the rudder manually with a wrench. And then impossibly he turned the Johnston around and took her back in. Behind him, inspired by what they had seen, the destroyer Hull and the destroyer Hearman and the little destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts. The Samuel B. Roberts, a ship so small her commanding officer had told his crew over the loudspeaker that morning that they were entering a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. Charged the Japanese line in turn. The Herman got so close to the Haruna and the Haguro that she fired torpedoes at both battleship and heavy cruiser in the same salvo. The Yamato, caught between two converging sets of torpedo wakes, did the only thing her captain could do. She turned her stern to the battle and ran north for 10 minutes to escape the tracks. For 10 minutes, the largest warship ever built was running away from the escort carrier she had been sent to destroy.

[00:21:28]Driven off by a torpedo spread from a destroyer the size of her own anchor chain locker.

[00:21:35]Vice Admiral Karita aboard her lost sight of the battle entirely. He would never find it again.

[00:21:43]0930.

[00:21:46]The Johnston had been in the fight for 2 hours and 40 minutes. She was listing.

[00:21:51]Her forward 5-in mount was cooked off.

[00:21:54]Her superructure was black with soot.

[00:21:56]Her decks were slippery with oil and seaater and blood. From the fan tale, Commander Evans saw the escort carrier Gambier Bay under direct fire from a Japanese heavy cruiser at close range.

[00:22:09]Gambir Bay had already taken hits. She was burning and falling out of formation. Her pilots were gone. Her hanger was a flame. Her crew was preparing to abandon ship. The cruiser was closing to finish her. Evan stepped to the voice tube and spoke. Commence firing on that cruiser. Draw her fire on us and away from Gambier Bay. The order is preserved in the Johnston's action report written up weeks later by the surviving officers from memory and oral testimony filed under record group 38 at the National Archives.

[00:22:45]Read it now and try to process what it describes. A destroyer on one engine without torpedoes, steering by hand with a captain who has lost two fingers and most of his blood, deliberately placing itself between a Japanese heavy cruiser and a burning American carrier so that the cruiser will shoot at the destroyer instead.

[00:23:07]The cruiser took the bait. Shells began landing around the Johnston again. The Gambir Bay was not saved. She would sink anyway. The only American carrier lost to surface gunfire in the entire Pacific War. But her abandoned ship was completed under the cover of the Johnston's last gun action. Hundreds of her crew reached the water alive because a destroyer with nothing left to give placed itself in the line of fire. By 0940, the Johnston was surrounded. Seven Japanese destroyers had closed on her from multiple angles. A Japanese cruiser was hammering her from 7,000 yd. She had no engine, no steering, no functioning main battery, no torpedoes.

[00:23:56]She was being worked over methodically now, the way butchers work over a carcass. Each Japanese gunnery officer taking his turn. At 0945, Commander Evans gave the order to abandon ship. He was last seen on the fan tail, shirtless, bleeding, directing his crew into the water. He did not leave with them. At 10:10, the Johnston rolled onto her starboard side and began to slide beneath the Philippine Sea. And this is the moment the salute happened.

[00:24:29]The destroyer Yuki Kaz, the lucky snowstorm, a ship that had survived Java Sea and Midway and Santa Cruz and Guadal Canal without a scratch. Crewed by men who had spent 3 years killing the enemies of Japan without mercy or hesitation, passed the sinking Johnston at a range of 910 m. Commander Terrauchi Masamichi, who had seen more surface combat than almost any Japanese officer still alive that morning, stepped to the edge of the Yuki Kaz's bridge wing. He came to attention. He raised his right hand to the brim of his cap, and he held the salute. The sailors lining the Yuki Kaz's rails fell silent. They did not jer. They did not cheer. They watched in the oil black water. Seaman Robert Billy of the Johnston's Deck Division was looking up at the Japanese destroyer passing close enough that he could see individual faces. He saw the commander saluting. And then he saw something else on a scrap of a lifeboat between him and the dying Johnston. Commander Ernest E.

[00:25:39]Evans, shirtless, missing two fingers, covered in his own blood, somehow still upright, raised his good hand and returned the salute. They held it until the Johnston was gone. This is the image Robert Billy carried home. This is the image no Japanese doctrine manual contained.

[00:26:00]This is the image that was not supposed to be possible because in the Imperial Japanese Navy's ideology, the warrior spirit was the exclusive property of the Japanese soul. And here was a Cherokee Creek sailor from Oklahoma dying in the water with the warrior spirit intact, being saluted for it by the very men who had been taught he could not possess it.

[00:26:24]The Johnston took Ernest Evans down with her. He was one of 186 men lost from her crew of 327.

[00:26:33]His Medal of Honor would be the first awarded to a Native American in the history of the United States Navy.

[00:26:40]90 minutes later, Vice Admiral Teo Karita, 20 m from an undefended American invasion beach, with the largest battleship fleet in the Pacific War still under his command, ordered his ships to turn north and retreat. He had been beaten by the tin cans.

[00:26:59]Karita never explained his retreat satisfactorily. Not to his American captors, not to his own naval historians, not to himself.

[00:27:09]In his USSBs interrogation of October 1945, filed as Navy document number 9, he cited fuel, intercepted signals, and the ferocity of the American defense.

[00:27:22]His chief of staff, Coyanagi, was more specific.

[00:27:25]Asked by his interrogators whether the American smoke screen had been effective, Coyanagi did not hesitate.

[00:27:32]Yes, very effective. The smoke was made very quickly and the use of smoke was skillful. We couldn't see anything during most of the battle. Asked about the torpedo attacks, Coonagi said, "Mane maneuvering to avoid this attack greatly delayed our advance. It slowed us down."

[00:27:52]Commander Otani, the operations officer, admitted the deepest failure. The Japanese fleet had believed throughout the engagement that it was fighting fast fleet carriers capable of 30 knots escorted by heavy cruisers. "We could not close the range," Otani told his interrogators. "The ships he could not close the range on had a maximum speed of 18 knots. The cruisers he feared were destroyers onetenth the size of his own.

[00:28:22]Vice Admiral Maté Ugaki, who had watched the entire thing from the Yamato's bridge, closed his diary entry for October 25th, 1944 with a single bitter sentence about his own commander and staff. The sentence survives in the published edition of Fading Victory.

[00:28:40]I felt irritated on the same bridge, seeing that they lack fighting spirit and promptitude.

[00:28:47]the diehard samurai of the Imperial Navy, writing in his private war diary, watching the decisive battle doctrine collapse in real time. And the word he chose was irritated.

[00:29:00]irritated that his own battleship admirals at the climactic moment 40 years of Japanese naval planning had been pointed at had been outfought by men from Pawne Oklahoma and Tacoma Washington in ships built by hat designers.

[00:29:17]The Imperial Japanese Navy would not fight another major surface action.

[00:29:23]Yamato herself would be sent to the bottom 5 months later off Okinawa on a one-way mission by American carrier aircraft. She would go down without firing her main battery at an enemy ship. The doctrine that had been built to destroy the United States Pacific fleet in one afternoon of overwhelming gunfire had at its moment of maximum opportunity turned and run from 13 small ships. because three of those small ships had refused to behave the way the doctrine said they had to.

[00:29:58]The Yamato lies today on the bottom of the East China Sea, 340 m down. Her hull is broken in half. Her 18-in guns are rust. No one alive remembers the guns are rust. No one alive remembers her commissioning. The wreck of the USS Johnston was located in 2019 by the research vessel Petrol. She lies 6,469 m beneath the Philippine Sea, the deepest shipwreck ever surveyed by human beings. Her hole number 557 is still legible on the bow. Her forward 5-in turret is still trained to port toward the position the Japanese fleet once held. In Panei, Oklahoma, on the main road into town, there is a small bronze plaque honoring Commander Ernest Edwin Evans.

[00:30:52]Every year on October 25th, the town puts flowers beside it. And at the Smithsonian in Washington, in the archives of the National Museum of the American Indian, there is a framed citation signed by Franklin D.

[00:31:05]Roosevelt.

[00:31:07]It awards the Medal of Honor to an American the Marine Corps once turned away.

[00:31:12]The salute never ended. It just changed direction.