Frank Hoeppel

His tiny destroyer was outgunned by the most powerful warships afloat, and he turned toward them and attacked. Commander Ernest Evans took the USS Johnston charging straight into the Japanese battle fleet off Samar, buying with his ship and his life the time that saved a vulnerable American force, in the action remembered as the Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors. He won the Medal of Honor off the Philippines, part of the great Leyte Gulf battle. On the morning of the 25th of October 1944, the climax of the fighting I have been describing, a disaster was unfolding off the island of Samar. Admiral Kurita's Center Force, the fleet with the surviving giant battleships, had pushed through in the night and fallen upon a small, lightly armed American group of escort carriers and their screen of destroyers and smaller destroyer escorts, known as Taffy 3. These were not warships built to fight battleships; the escort carriers were slow, thin-skinned converted merchant hulls, and their only shield was a handful of destroyers. Against them came battleships and heavy cruisers. By any reckoning Taffy 3 should have been annihilated. Evans did not wait to be annihilated. Commander of the destroyer Johnston, a small ship with torpedoes and five-inch guns, facing an enemy with eighteen-inch guns, he did not wait for orders. He turned his destroyer around and drove it straight at the oncoming Japanese fleet, laying smoke to hide the escort carriers and then charging in to attack. Johnston was the first to make smoke, the first to open fire, the first to launch torpedoes, a single destroyer running in alone against a wall of cruisers and battleships. And it worked, for a while, beyond all reason. Johnston's torpedoes blew the bow off a Japanese heavy cruiser. Her guns hammered the enemy ships. And her suicidal aggression, joined by the other destroyers and destroyer escorts who followed Evans's example and charged in their turn, and by the planes from the escort carriers attacking with whatever they had, threw the Japanese into confusion. Kurita, under this ferocious assault from ships that should have been fleeing, came to believe he was facing a much heavier force, cruisers and fleet carriers, and the battle dissolved into a chaotic melee. Johnston was hit again and again, her engines knocked out, her guns failing, Evans wounded, steering by hand from the stern, still fighting. Eventually the Japanese ships closed in and pounded the crippled destroyer until she went down. Evans went down with many of his crew; he was last seen in the water and never recovered. But the sacrifice of Johnston and the other little ships of Taffy 3 had done the impossible. Their mad, headlong defense so rattled and delayed the Japanese that Kurita, his formation scattered and his nerve shaken, eventually broke off and turned away when the almost defenseless escort carriers and the troops on the Leyte beaches beyond lay open before him. A handful of destroyers and escorts and their aircraft had turned back a battle fleet. Evans was the first Native American in the United States Navy to receive the Medal of Honor, awarded posthumously, a commander who took a destroyer against battleships because that was what the moment demanded, and whose aggression helped save an entire force. The wreck of his Johnston lies today on the deepest ocean floor of any shipwreck ever found, and the Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors is remembered as one of the most heroic actions in the history of the American navy.