The Destroyer That Fought An Entire Japanese Fleet

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]At 0658 on the morning of October 25th, 1944, a lookout aboard the escort carrier USS Fanshaw Bay spotted something on the northwestern horizon that should not have been there. Towering Pagota masts, the unmistakable silhouettes of Japanese battleships. Within minutes, the radio crackled with a transmission that confirmed what every man in the task unit already feared. Center Force, the most powerful surface fleet Japan had dispatched in two years, had emerged from the San Bernardino Strait overnight, completely undetected, and was now bearing down on a collection of slow, thin skinned escort carriers and their handful of escorting destroyers at a combined closure speed of nearly 40 knots. The men of Taffy 3, the informal designation for task unit 77.4.3, 4.3 were not equipped for this moment. They had never been built for it. What was about to happen to them and what they were about to do in return would become one of the most extraordinary actions in the history of naval warfare. To understand how a single destroyer named Johnston came to charge alone into the guns of a Japanese battleship fleet, it is necessary to understand both the vast strategic context of October 1944 and the particular character of one man who had been waiting his entire career for exactly this kind of fight. The Battle of Lady G did not begin on October 25th. It had been building for years, and in its immediate operational sense, it had been building for days.

[00:01:41]When General Douglas MacArthur's forces waited ashore at Lady in the Philippines on October 20th, the Japanese High Command recognized that the moment of strategic reckoning had arrived. The Philippines were not merely territory.

[00:01:55]They were the lynch pin of Japan's entire defensive perimeter, the geographic choke point through which oil from the Dutch East Indies flowed northward to the home islands. Lose the Philippines and Japan's war industry would starve within months. The Imperial Japanese Navy understood this with perfect clarity. The response was show Ichigo, Operation Victory number one. It was an enormously complex plan involving four separate naval forces converging on Lee Gulf from multiple directions simultaneously.

[00:02:30]The intention was to use a northern decoy force of carriers largely stripped of aircraft to lure away Admiral William Hoy's powerful third fleet. With the American covering force drawn north, two surface action groups would converge on Lady Gulf from the west and south, catching the invasion fleet in a pinser and destroying the transports, supply ships, and landing craft that sustained MacArthur's beach head.

[00:02:57]Without those ships, the invasion would wither and die. The southern prong of this attack under Vice Admiral Shoouji Nishimura was destroyed in Nsuriga Strait in the early hours of October 25th in a textbook naval ambush.

[00:03:12]But the northern decoy worked precisely as intended. Admiral Hally, commanding the most powerful fleet in the Pacific took the bait completely. He turned his entire force north to chase the Japanese carrier decoys, leaving San Bernardino Strait unguarded.

[00:03:31]He did not inform Rear Admiral Thomas Concincaid, commanding the seventh fleet responsible for protecting the invasion, that he was doing so. Concincaid believed Hollyy had left a covering force at the straight. He had not.

[00:03:47]Through that unguarded straight in the darkness before dawn on October 25th, steamed the most powerful surface force Japan had assembled since midway.

[00:03:58]Center Force under Vice Admiral Teo Karita comprised the super battleships Yamato and Mashi. Three additional battleships, 10 heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and 11 destroyers. The Yamato alone displaced 72,800 tons at full load and carried 9 18.1 in guns. Each barrel capable of throwing a 1,400 kg armor-piercing shell over 42 km. There was no ship in the American Navy that could survive a direct hit from those guns. There were few ships that could survive being near one.

[00:04:37]Facing this armada was Taffy 3. Rear Admiral Clifton Sprag commanded six escort carriers. Three destroyers and four destroyer escorts. The escort carriers, the Fanshaw Bay, St. Low, White Plains, Kenan Bay, Kitkun Bay, and Gambia Bay were converted cargo halls.

[00:05:00]They displaced roughly 10,000 tons each, made a maximum speed of 17 to 18 knots, and carried a single 5-in gun a piece for surface defense. Their flight decks held aircraft armed for ground support missions, not anti-ship strikes. The three destroyers were Fletcherclass fleet destroyers, capable and wellarmed for their type, but designed to fight submarines and screen larger warships, not to slug it out with battleships.

[00:05:32]The four destroyer escorts were smaller still, roughly half the displacement of a fleet destroyer, slower, and more lightly armed. The entire force of Taffy 3 displaced perhaps 80,000 tons in total. Center Force displaced over 300,000.

[00:05:52]The Johnston Destroyer 557 was one of the three fleet destroyers in Taffy3's screen. She had been commissioned on October 27th, 1943 and had served in the Pacific for nearly a year, earning a battle star at Guadrilene and participating in operations throughout the central Pacific.

[00:06:13]She was a Fletcher class destroyer, 376 ft long, displacing 2100 tons at standard load. Her main battery consisted of five 5-in 38 caliber guns in single mounts, capable of firing 15 rounds per minute each. She carried 10 21-in torpedo tubes and two quintuple mounts, each loaded with the Mark 15 torpedo. She could make 35 knots in ideal conditions against battleships and heavy cruisers. These were not weapons of destruction. They were gestures. Her commanding officer was Commander Ernest Edwin Evans, a part Cherokee Native American from Pawne, Oklahoma, who had graduated from the Naval Academy in 1931.

[00:07:02]Evans was known throughout the destroyer force as an aggressive, tenacious officer with an almost physical appetite for combat. When he assumed command of Johnston in 1943, he delivered a speech to his assembled crew that was unusual in its directness, even by the standards of wartime. He told them he intended to go in harm's way. He told them that anyone who was not prepared to fight to the last should transfer off his ship now. No one transferred. At 0658 on the 25th, when those pagod masts appeared on the horizon, Evans did not wait for orders. The range to the leading Japanese ships was already closing through 30,000 yards. At 0705, before Rear Admiral Sprag had issued any orders beyond making smoke, Evans ordered Johnston to flank speed and turned her boo toward the Japanese fleet. He did not request permission. He did not broadcast his intentions to the task unit. He simply drove his ship toward the enemy at 30 knots, making smoke as he went, and began firing his 5-in guns at a range at which they could not possibly penetrate Japanese armor. The initial salvos from Johnston's guns were not intended to destroy. They were intended to attract attention, to force Japanese gunners to track a moving target, to buy the escort carriers another few minutes to run. At a range of 18,000 yd, the 5-in shells were falling among Japanese heavy cruisers.

[00:08:38]They were not penetrating. They were causing superficial damage at best, but they were doing something. They were making the lead Japanese ship's maneuver. At 0710, Evans made the decision that would define his ship's place in history. At a range of approximately 10,000 yards, still under fire from ships whose main batteries threw shells weighing over 200 kg, Evans ordered a torpedo attack. He was driving toward the center of the Japanese formation. He was going to close to within torpedo range of a fleet that outweighed his ship by a factor of several hundred to one. Johnston accelerated to 35 knots. Japanese heavy cruisers were firing their main batteries, 8-in guns, and the splashes were rising around the destroyer in columns of colored water because Japanese ships loaded their shells with distinctive dye to help their spotters identify which ship's shells were falling where. Columns of green water, columns of red water, columns of yellow water rose around Johnston as she drove in.

[00:09:48]Evans held course at 0720. At a range of approximately 9,000 yd, Johnston fired all 10 of her Mark 15 torpedoes at the heavy cruiser Kumano. The Mark 15 ran at 45 knots to a maximum range of 15,000 yd with a 500 kg warhead. Evans then turned his ship hard to lay smoke between the Japanese fleet and the retreating carriers.

[00:10:15]One torpedo, possibly two, struck Kumano. The cruiser's bow was blown off.

[00:10:22]She dropped out of the formation and would play no further role in the battle. This should have been the end of Johnston.

[00:10:30]She had made her attack. She had done what she could. The Japanese had her range in course. At 0730, the inevitable happened. Three 14-in shells from the battleship Congo struck Johnston in a cluster, followed almost immediately by three 6-in shells from a light cruiser.

[00:10:51]The first salvo destroyed the engine room, cutting Johnston's speed from 35 knots to 17. It knocked out three of her five guns. It wounded Evans himself, shredding the fingers of his left hand and peppering his face and neck with fragments. He refused to leave the bridge. His helmsman and fire control officer were killed outright. Several men in the engine room were killed instantly.

[00:11:16]Johnston was stopped in the water for a moment, drifting. Damage control parties moved through smoke and fire. The engineering crew working in conditions that had killed several of their shipmates managed to restore partial power. Evans ordered more smoke. He was not finished. What followed next strains the capacity of rational analysis. Taffy 3 was being overtaken. The Japanese heavy cruisers, which had initially turned away from Johnston's torpedo attack, were now reforming and closing on the escort carriers. The carriers were making every knot their converted halls could manage, perhaps 18 knots against Japanese cruisers capable of 33.

[00:12:01]The mathematics were not favorable. At approximately 0750, Johnston, now running on partial power with three of her five guns inoperable, driving raining visibility in some sectors, moved to intercept a column of Japanese destroyers that were advancing to make their own torpedo attack on the escort carriers.

[00:12:23]Evans placed his damaged ship between the Japanese destroyers and the carriers and opened fire with his two remaining guns.

[00:12:31]The Johnston, already grievously damaged, was driving toward enemy destroyers to shield ships she had no orders to protect, executing a maneuver that her commanding officer had apparently decided upon entirely on his own authority. The Japanese destroyers were Fubuki class and Yugumo class fleet destroyers, comparable in size to Johnston, but undamaged and armed with the devastating Longance oxygenfueled torpedo. the type 93, which carried a 500 kg warhead to a range of over 40 km at 36 knots. Evans knew what those torpedoes could do to an escort carrier.

[00:13:12]He placed his ship between them in the Gambier Bay. For the next 40 minutes, Johnston fought in a fog of gunfire and smoke that would later make precise reconstruction nearly impossible. Her two remaining guns fired continuously.

[00:13:27]Survivors would recall that Evans was on the bridge con without a shirt using a tin megaphone to shout orders to the engine room because the communication system was destroyed. He had lost two fingers. He was directing the last fight of his ship with the focused intensity of a man who had always known it would come to this. At approximately 0830, the other two destroyers of Taffy3's screen, Hull and Hearman, had made their own torpedo attacks and sustained their own catastrophic damage.

[00:14:01]Hull was already dying, struck by an estimated 40 shells from multiple calibers, maintaining fire until her last moments.

[00:14:12]The destroyer escort, Samuel B. Roberts, which had no business charging into a gun battle between fleet destroyers and battleships, had also attacked with torpedoes, earning her the later description of a destroyer escort that fought like a cruiser. The escort carriers themselves were under direct fire. Gambia Bay was hit repeatedly by heavy cruiser shell fire and was sinking. Kenan Bay was struck by 15 shells and somehow stayed afloat. St. Low would be struck by the first successful kamicazi attack in history, sinking with heavy loss of life. Though this came after the surface action had nominally ended. And then at approximately 0911, the Japanese did something that remains one of the most analyzed command decisions in naval history. Vice Admiral Karita ordered a general retirement. He turned center force around and steamed back towards San Bernardino Strait. The reasons Karita gave and the reasons historians have subsequently debated form a complex layering of factors. His ships had been at sea and in combat for days. He had lost the battleship Mashi the previous day to sustained air attack. He had received reports garbled and confused by the chaos of battle that suggested he faced much heavier opposition than was actually present. The American destroyers and destroyer escorts had made torpedo attacks from multiple directions. Attacks that forced his battleships to maneuver defensively and disrupted the coordinated gunnery that should have dispatched the escort carriers quickly. His heavy cruisers had been badly mauled by both air attack and torpedo damage. He believed incorrectly that he faced fleet carriers and fleet destroyers rather than escort carriers and their small screen.

[00:16:06]The torpedo attacks and aggressive gun action by Johnston Hull Herman and Samuel B. Roberts had done something that no amount of bravery alone could explain. They had convinced a Japanese admiral commanding an overwhelming force that he faced a coordinated defense by a larger, more capable enemy force. The fog of war worked in one direction on October 25th, 1944, and it worked decisively.

[00:16:34]Karita did not know that the American destroyers had expended nearly all of their torpedoes.

[00:16:40]He did not know that Johnston was running on one engine with two guns and a commanding officer directing battle from an open bridge with a megaphone and fragments of metal in his face. He saw aggressive continuous attacks from multiple directions executed with a disregard for self-preservation that to his tactical mind suggested professional execution of a prepared defense rather than desperate improvisation by a force that knew it was about to die. Johnston did not survive the battle. As the Japanese ships turned to retire, they fired on the damaged American destroyers they were leaving behind. At approximately 0945, Johnston was struck again and again until she lost all power and all ability to maneuver. Evans ordered abandon ship at approximately 1000 hours. He was last seen on the fan tail directing damage control efforts. His body was never recovered. Of Johnston's 327 officers and men, 186 survived the sinking. They spent nearly 50 hours in sharkinfested water before rescue ships reached them.

[00:17:54]86 were initially rescued, but several died in the following days. The precise toll settled at 141 dead from Johnston's crew alone.

[00:18:05]Commander Ernest Evans was awarded the Medal of Honor postumously, the citation describing with controlled understatement the events of October 25th. He was, the citation noted, the first to make contact with and the last to withdraw from the enemy.

[00:18:24]There are words in official commendations that carry more weight for what they do not say than for what they do. The broader accounting of the battle of Samar, which is what historians designate the specific engagement of Taffy 3 against center force, reveals how close the margin actually was.

[00:18:42]Kareda's retirement came at a moment when the escort carriers had nearly exhausted their ability to run. Two were already sinking or dead in the water.

[00:18:52]The others had been hit multiple times.

[00:18:55]Had Center Force pressed its attack for another 30 to 40 minutes, it is difficult to construct a scenario in which the remaining carriers survived.

[00:19:04]Beyond the carriers themselves lay the transports and supply ships of the Laty invasion fleet. These vessels loaded with fuel, ammunition, and the material sustaining MacArthur's beach head were entirely undefended.

[00:19:21]Japanese battleship fire would have reduced them to burning wreckage in minutes. The troops ashore at Lady would have been cut off. The invasion, which had already succeeded in establishing a beach head, might have been strangled before it could be reinforced.

[00:19:37]The strategic consequences extend further. A Japanese victory off Samar would have profoundly complicated the American timeline in the Pacific. The liberation of the Philippines might have been delayed by months or longer. The resources required for a second attempt at the invasion might have shifted the projected date for operations against Japan itself. The human cost of those additional months in lives on both sides across all theaters is a calculation that resists precise quantification, but does not resist imagination.

[00:20:13]All of this turned in some meaningful measure on the decision made by one man with shredded fingers and metal in his face, commanding a damaged ship with two operable guns, who pointed his bow at the largest warships on Earth because it had not occurred to him to do anything else. The Battle of Late Gulf as a whole consumed 4 days and involved over 200 American ships and 64 Japanese ships. It was the largest naval battle in history by virtually any measure. Its outcome decided the fate of the Philippines and accelerated the final phase of the Pacific War. The naval historian Samuel Elliot Morrison would describe Lady Gulf as the decisive naval battle of World War II in the Pacific.

[00:21:00]Within that immensity, the Battle of Samar occupies perhaps 6 hours on the morning of October 25th.

[00:21:07]three destroyers and four destroyer escorts against four battleships, eight heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and 11 destroyers. The mathematics have a certain terrible clarity. And yet the mathematics did not govern the outcome.

[00:21:24]The Johnston was found in 2019.

[00:21:28]Explorer Victor Visco, conducting deep sea surveys as part of the Five Deeps expedition, located the wreck in the Philippine Sea at a depth of approximately 6,460 m, the deepest confirmed wreck of a World War II naval vessel ever located.

[00:21:46]She lies on her side in the darkness of the deepest part of the Philippine Sea, more than 4 miles below the surface. The wreck showed the evidence of the battle plainly. Hall penetrations from large caliber shells, the torpedo tubes empty.

[00:22:03]The guns, still trained to bear on a threat that left this world 80 years ago. The crew of the remotely operated vehicles that surveyed the wreck reported what they saw with the careful precision of exploration professionals.

[00:22:18]There are images of Johnston's name plate, still readable at the bottom of the sea.

[00:22:24]There are images of the gun mounts and the bridge structure and the engineering spaces where men died keeping her moving long enough to matter.

[00:22:32]Commander Evans left no memoir and no substantial private correspondence about his intentions on the morning of October 25th. what he felt in those minutes, what calculations, if any, he performed, whether he believed he was trading his ship and perhaps his life for an outcome that would justify the cost, remains unknowable in the specific and individual sense. What is knowable is what he did. He turned toward the enemy.

[00:23:03]He fired until he had no more ammunition of that type to fire. He launched torpedoes at ships that outweighed him by a factor of 35 to1. He put his damaged hall between Japanese destroyers and the ships they were hunting. He kept fighting after the hits that should have stopped him. He directed the abandonment of his ship from its own deck when there was nothing more to be done, and he did not leave. In the cold vocabulary of naval analysis, what Evans and the other small ships of Taffy 3 accomplished on October 25th was to demonstrate that the tactical calculus of a surface engagement is not reducible to a comparison of tonnage and armament.

[00:23:44]Initiative, aggression, and the willingness to accept catastrophic loss in exchange for disruption of an enemy's plans are measurable quantities of force that do not appear in any table of ship characteristics.

[00:23:58]In the human vocabulary that sits underneath the naval analysis, what happened off Samar was something both simpler and more difficult to put into words.

[00:24:09]Men who knew they were outmatched chose not to act as though they were. They drove into the fire at full speed, and the fire was enough in the end to confuse the men on the other side into believing they faced something other than what was actually there. The Japanese ships that turned away from Lea Gulf on the morning of October 25th outnumbered and outweighed and outgunned everything in Taffy 3 combined. They turned away from men who had already lost or were in the process of losing or had nothing left to fight with. They turned away because those men had fought as though the result was not already determined.

[00:24:50]And in fighting that way, they made it true. Johnston lies at the bottom of the Philippine Sea. Ernest Evans has no grave but the water.

[00:25:03]141 men from his crew never came home.

[00:25:06]The escort carriers they protected survived to fly their aircraft for another year until the war was over and there were no more targets. The beaches at Ley stayed in American hands. The Philippines were liberated.

[00:25:20]The war in the Pacific ended in September 1945 in Tokyo Bay on the deck of a battleship not so different from the ones that killed Johnston on a Tuesday morning in October 1944.

[00:25:33]None of the men who fought in Taffy 3 that morning controlled how the story ended. They controlled only what they did with the time and the tools they had when the pagota masts appeared on the horizon. The time was short. The tools were inadequate. What they did with both of them is why the story is still being told.