Book Review: 'The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy’s Finest Hour'

Cover design for Bantam Books: Belina Huey. (C) 2005 Bantam Books, a division of Penguin Random House

World War II is now three quarters of a century away in our collective memory. All of the great or infamous military and civilian leaders – Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, George Patton, Takeo Kurita, and William F. Halsey – are long dead. The elderly veterans that in the U.S. are dying at a rate of 2000 men and women a day are now the junior officers and enlisted men who were then the youngest. In a decade or so, the last people to have lived during history’s largest and bloodiest clash of arms will be gone, leaving only the historical record and a plethora of monuments as reminders of those turbulent, violent years.

Since the 1980s, when authors like Max Hastings,  Stephen Ambrose, Rick Atkinson, Antony Beevor, and Carlo D’Este kicked off the renaissance of popular World War II history writing, many fine books have been published in the U.S., Great Britain, and elsewhere. Some, like John Keegan’s Six Armies in Normandy and The Second World War, are Big Picture tomes about major campaigns or the entire war, told mostly in broad strokes that are interspersed with some telling anecdotes about the conflict through the eyes of individuals caught up in it.

Others, such as Ambrose’s D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II or Antony Beevor’s Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge, seek to recreate the experience of specific battles from the perspective of the highest-ranking commanders all the way down to the lowest GI, Tommy, or Landser.

One of the best members of this group of World War II historians is James D. Hornfischer, who specializes in naval warfare and the campaigns in the Pacific Theater of Operations. Since 2005, Hornfischer has solo-authored four books about the naval struggle between the U.S. and the Japanese Empire – Neptune’s Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal; Ship of Ghosts:  The Story of the USS Houston, FDR's Legendary Lost Cruiser, and the Epic Saga of Her Survivors; The Fleet at High Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific 1944-1945; and
Look Inside

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy’s Finest Hour.

Published by Random House in 2004 as a hardcover and reissued in paperback the following year,
Look Inside

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors was Hornfischer’s first book as a naval historian. It tells the story of the Battle of Samar, the centermost engagement of the Battle of Leyte Gulf – a series of naval encounters that altogether formed the largest sea battle in world history. Because it was the only segment of the complex struggle between the U.S. Navy and the Japanese Combined Fleet where the Americans were caught off-guard and outgunned, the Battle of Samar has been called one of the greatest mismatches in naval history.

Desperately fought on the morning of October 25, 1944, the Battle of Samar is one of the most celebrated engagements in United States naval lore. Facing overwhelming firepower, with no prospect of reinforcement, thirteen American warships began a fight they couldn’t win – and fought it to the death. Weaving together extensive interviews with veterans, unpublished eyewitness accounts, declassified documents, and rare Japanese sources, James D. Hornfischer has created an unprecedented account of a naval engagement unlike any other in American history. A resonant portrait of the Navy man’s indomitable spirit and a stirring tale of heroism in the face of hopeless odds, Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors unforgettably captures the men, the strategies, and the sacrifices that turned certain defeat into a legendary victory. – Back cover blurb, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors.

The book is divided into four main parts and 56 chapters, along with the usual literary addenda that includes a foreword, an acknowledgments page, a bibliography, an index, and an excerpt from the then-upcoming Neptune’s Inferno.

The four parts of The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors are:

·         Part I: The Tin Cans

·         Part II: Last Stand

·         Part III: A Vanishing Graveyard

·         Part IV: Highest Tradition

Though the focus of The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy’s Finest Hour is on the 13 destroyers, destroyer escorts, and escort carriers – “jeep carriers,” in the naval parlance of the day – of Rear Admiral Thomas L.  Sprague’s Task Group 77.4, Hornfischer gives readers an overview of the larger Battle of Leyte Gulf and the Japanese fleet’s baroque contingency plan – code-named Sho-1 to destroy the American invasion fleet near the Philippine island of Leyte.

With the confident knowledge of a man who has done his research and the narrative skills of a natural storyteller, Hornfischer describes the Battle of Samar, the events that led up to the “battle of the Taffies,” and the aftermath of the engagement with an unerring eye for human detail and the pacing of a well-written military novel.

In this excerpt from The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, Hornfischer describes the Japanese perspective as the dawn of the day in question lights the eastern horizon near the island of Samar:

October 25, 1944

San Bernardino Strait, the Philippines

A giant stalked through the darkness. In the moonless calm after midnight, the great fleet seemed not so much to navigate the narrow strait as to fill it with armor and steel. Barely visible even to a night-trained eye, the long silhouettes of twenty-three warships passed in a column ten miles long, guided by the dim glow of the channel lights in the passage threading between the headlands of Luzon and Samar.

That such a majestic procession should move without challenge was surprising, inexplicable even, in light of the vicious reception the Americans had already given it on its journey from Borneo to this critical point. Having weathered submarine ambush the night before, and assault by wave after wave of angry blue aircraft the previous afternoon, Vice Adm. Takeo Kurita, steward of the last hopes of the Japanese empire, would have been right to expect the worst. But then Kurita knew that heavenly influences could be counted upon to trump human planning. In war, events seldom cooperate with expectation. Given the dependable cruelty of the divine hand, most unexpected of all, perhaps was this fact: Unfolding at last after more than two years of retreat, Japan's ornate plan to defend the Philippines appeared to be working perfectly.

For its complexity, for its scale, for its extravagantly optimistic overelegance, the Sho plan represented the very best and also the very worst tendencies of the Imperial Navy. The Japanese military's fondness for bold strokes had been evident from the earliest days of the war: the sudden strike on Pearl Harbor, the sprawling offensive into the Malay Peninsula, the lightning thrust into the Philippines, and the smaller but no less swift raids on Wake Island, Guam, Hong Kong and northern Borneo. Allied commanders believed the Japanese could not tackle more than one objective at a time. The sudden spasm of advances of December 1941, in which Japan struck with overwhelming force in eight directions at once, refuted that fallacy.

In the war's early days, Japan had overwhelmed enemies stretched thin by the need to defend their scattered colonies throughout the hemisphere. But as the war continued, the geographical breadth of its conquests saddled Japan in turn with the necessity of piecemeal defense. America rallied, the home front's spirits boosted by the gallant if doomed defense of Wake Island and by Jimmy Doolittle's raid on Tokyo. As heavier blows landed--the Battle of the Coral Sea, the triumph at Midway, the landings on Guadalcanal and the leapfrogging campaign through the Solomons and up the northern coast of New Guinea--Japan's overstretched domain was in turn overrun by the resurgent Americans. The hard charge of U.S. Marines up the bloody path of Tarawa, the Marshalls, and the Marianas Islands had put American forces, by the middle of 1944, in position to sever the vital artery connecting the Japanese home islands to their resource-rich domain in East Asia. The Philippines were that pressure point. Their seizure by the Americans would push the entire Japanese empire toward collapse.

My Take

I have been a World War II buff since I found an old issue of Reader’s Digest that featured an excerpt from Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day at my grandparents’ house in 1969. I was only six at the time, but somehow I got the gist of the “grown-up” writing and made the connection between Ryan’s written words and the World War II movies I already liked. From then on, I bugged my mother and other adult relatives for more books and magazines about World War II.

My obsession with World War II has never abated, although now I have a more nuanced and mature understanding of that global cataclysm than I did, say, when I was in high school or even junior college. I have not changed my belief that the War – as many people still refer to the conflict – was a necessary one for the United States and her Allies, nor do indulge in the jingoistic fantasies of some Americans that we won the war with little help from Britain or Russia, which was then still the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

It’s fair to say, then, that I’ve probably read over 200 books about World War II from the late 1960s to the present day. I used to check out books by John Toland, Walter Lord, Robert Leckie, and many other authors from my elementary, junior high, and senior high school libraries when I was younger. I also own Cornelius Ryan’s trilogy – The Longest Day, The Last Battle, and A Bridge Too Far – and works by other writers, including Gordon W. Prange, Ronald Spector, Charles B. MacDonald, Martin Caidin, Edwin P. Hoyt, and – of course – Ambrose, Hastings, Keegan, and Beevor.

I have also read several books about the battle of Leyte Gulf, including two eponymous works by C. Vann Woodward and Edwin P. Hoyt. Both are well-written and provide a Big Picture book at the complex and often confused series of engagements triggered by the Japanese implementation of Sho-1.

Yet, for sheer edge-of-your-seat tension and heart-pounding action-packed narrative, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors leaves those two older books in its literary wake like a speeding PT boat running from a Yamato-class super-battleship. Hornfischer doesn’t just tell you what happened at the Battle of Samar; he describes the action so vividly that you can see the rivets on the side of a Fletcher-class destroyer, hear the thunder of the Yamato’s 18.1-inch main battery as the world’s biggest dreadnaught fires at the small thin-skinned “jeep carriers” of Task Group 77.4, and feel a lump in your throat as you read how the Taffy pilots, flying in Avenger torpedo bombers or FM-2 Wildcat fighters, attacked the “heavies” of Admiral Takeo Kurita’s massive Center Force armed only with machine guns, depth charges, rockets, and 100-pound antipersonnel bombs.

The Hoel came through unhit, entered a squall, and enjoyed a moment’s respite as rain pelted the decks. But the speeding ship passed through it in a few short minutes, entered the sunlight once again, then endured a new round of gunfire.

Standing on the bridge wing, Captain Kintberger conned his ship through the boiling whirlpools of the enemy’s misses. Chasing salvos, he steered the Hoel through the cauldron, testing his luck, keeping his ship from falling under the arc of the shellfire. His voice was steady and sure. Dix was impressed with his skipper.

“Right full rudder. Meet her. Steady up.

“Now left full rudder. Give it all you’ve got.”

He never once lets up. He’s calm and firm.

Damn but that guy’s magnificent today.

The Hoel’s luck held, but it was not at all clear how much longer Taffy 3’s would. With each passing second the Japanese cruiser line closed with the carriers, their eight-inch salvos straddling and shaking the fragile hulls of the CVEs.

Since this book was published 14 years ago, its success and the critical praise for his other works has earned Hornfischer a good reputation as a respected naval historian. The book critic for the Rocky Mountain News has lauded the writer for his books, writing, “Hornfischer is quickly establishing himself as doing for the Navy what popular historian Stephen Ambrose did for the Army.”    

With his unstinting dedication to exacting research and with a novelist’s eye for telling a human story, it’s not surprising that Hornfischer earns such accolades.  The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy’s Finest Hour is bound to be a classic account of American seamen at their best under the worst of conditions. I highly recommend it.