USS Johnston (DD-557)

By the time America went to war in the Pacific, the workhorse of every fleet was the destroyer — the fast, lightly-built “tin can” that screened the battle line, hunted submarines, fought off aircraft and carried the torpedoes that could cripple a capital ship. The US Navy's answer to the demands of a global war was the Fletcher class, a clean, roomy, powerfully-armed design that would be built in greater numbers than any other American destroyer: 175 ships, the backbone of the Pacific destroyer force.

USS Johnston, DD-557, was one of them — laid down at Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding and commissioned in October 1943 under Commander Ernest E. Evans, a tough, plain-spoken officer of Cherokee and Creek descent. At her commissioning Evans told his crew, in words that would prove prophetic, that this was to be a fighting ship, and that anyone who did not want to go in harm's way had better get off. None did.

The Fletchers were everything a wartime destroyer needed to be. They mounted five 5-inch (127 mm) /38 dual-purpose guns — superb weapons equally good against ships, aircraft and shore targets — backed by a heavy battery of 40 mm and 20 mm anti-aircraft guns and, above all, ten 21-inch torpedo tubes in two banks, the destroyer's great ship-killing punch. Long-hulled and seaworthy, they could steam at over 36 knots.

But a destroyer bought its speed and firepower by going almost entirely without armour. Johnston's thin steel plating was meant to keep out splinters and machine-gun fire, nothing more; a single hit from a battleship or cruiser shell could pass clean through her or tear her open. Her protection lay not in armour but in speed, agility, smoke and surprise — and in the skill and nerve of her crew.

It was a design built on a simple bargain: a destroyer was never meant to stand and fight heavy ships. Her job was to dart in, loose her torpedoes and dart out again behind a smokescreen. On one extraordinary morning off Samar, Johnston would be asked to do the exact opposite — and would do it without hesitation.

On the morning of 25 October 1944, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the unthinkable happened. A powerful Japanese surface force — the Center Force built around the giant battleship Yamato, three other battleships and numerous heavy cruisers — emerged out of the dawn and fell upon “Taffy 3,” a small, lightly-armed group of American escort carriers and their handful of destroyers and destroyer escorts. Between the Japanese guns and the vulnerable carriers stood almost nothing.

Without waiting for orders, Commander Evans turned Johnston straight toward the enemy fleet — a lone 2,000-ton destroyer charging battleships and cruisers many times her size. Closing through a storm of fire, she launched her full spread of torpedoes and blew the bow off the heavy cruiser Kumano, then raked enemy ships with her 5-inch guns to draw their fire away from the carriers.

Johnston was hit again and again. Heavy shells knocked out her engines and guns and swept her decks; Evans, wounded and with fingers blown off one hand, kept conning her from the after steering position, shouting helm orders down to men turning the rudder by hand. Still she fought on, the other destroyers of Taffy 3 following her in to the attack.

For more than two hours the tiny ships of Taffy 3 harried a fleet that should have annihilated them in minutes. Their reckless, repeated torpedo and gun attacks — and the strikes of the escort carriers' aircraft — so confused and unnerved the Japanese commander that, on the very edge of a crushing victory, he broke off the action and turned away, convinced he was facing a far heavier force.

Johnston did not live to see it. Surrounded and battered to a wreck, dead in the water and out of ammunition, she was finally abandoned and sank mid-morning, ringed by enemy destroyers that poured fire into her to the last. Survivors recalled a Japanese captain saluting the dying ship as she went down. Of her crew of over 320, some 186 were lost, Commander Evans among them — last seen in the water, never recovered.

For his leadership Evans was awarded the Medal of Honor, the first Native American in the US Navy to receive it. The stand of Taffy 3 off Samar is remembered as one of the most lopsided and heroic actions in the history of naval warfare.

Evans had taken his ship into the fight on his own initiative, charging a line of battleships and heavy cruisers with a single destroyer — an act his crew never forgot. That a handful of destroyers, destroyer escorts and escort carriers could turn back Kurita’s powerful Center Force off Samar remains one of the most astonishing feats of arms in naval history, and Johnston’s charge is at the heart of it.

USS Johnston was an ordinary destroyer that did an extraordinary thing. Asked to defend the helpless escort carriers against a battle fleet, she and her sisters of Taffy 3 attacked without hesitation, trading their small ships and their lives to buy time — and in doing so helped turn back a Japanese force that might otherwise have fallen on the invasion shipping at Leyte.

Her name became a byword for courage against impossible odds. In 2021 her wreck was located lying upright on the seabed at a depth of around 6,500 metres — for a time the deepest shipwreck ever surveyed — her hull number still legible, a fitting marker for one of the most gallant warships ever to fly the American flag. Johnston is remembered not for her size or her guns, but for the spirit of the men who took “a fighting ship” straight at a fleet and would not turn away.

• Roger Chesneau (ed.), Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1922–1946 (Conway Maritime Press).
• James D. Hornfischer, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors (Bantam Books).
• Norman Friedman, U.S. Destroyers: An Illustrated Design History (Naval Institute Press).