No Higher Honor (4 page)

Chief Gunner's Mate Tom Reinert ate this up like warrior's manna. Few aboard the
Roberts
had more years at sea than Reinert, the senior enlisted man in the ship's ordnance division. None was more determined to make the brand-new frigate a standout in the fleet.

Like most Americans who graduated from high school in 1970, Reinert had faced a choice: go to college, or join the military. For the ship-infatuated teenager from St. Petersburg, Florida, it was an easy decision; he'd never much cared for school. But once in the navy, Reinert was surprised to discover that he liked to study when the subject interested him. So he graduated with honors from five-inch gun school and then displayed such mastery of the Mark 13 missile launcher that the instructors asked him to stick around to teach the class. In 1984 Reinert requested duty aboard the
Roberts
, savoring the challenge of turning a new crew into one of the fleet's best.

In particular, the gunner had his eye on the “Battle E” awards. Every eighteen months, ships were tested for their “battle efficiency” in gunnery, communications, engineering, and six other areas. “Mission ‘E's” were awarded for outstanding ability in a specific category; a winning crew hastened to break out its paintbrushes and daub the record of its achievement under the bridge. A white capital “E” denoted excellence in communications, a red “DC” for damage control, and so forth. But the most coveted and prestigious award was the Battle E itself, which went to the best ship of its class in its squadron. The winning ship marked its achievement on the bridge with a big black-shadowed “E,” just like the hull number on the bow and not much smaller. Moreover, the award came with a personal decoration for each crew member: a dark-blue ribbon bearing a little silvery “E.” The
Roberts
's squadron, Naval Surface Group Four, contained nine
Perry
-class frigates. Only one could win.

On Reinert's previous sea tour, the gunners couldn't even remember the last time they won a mission E. He had refused to leave the destroyer without one, and his team eventually painted their capital letter on the
bridge. But the exhausting effort convinced him that it was much easier to start good than to get good. He intended the
Roberts
to earn an “E” the first chance they got.

Reinert found the other chiefs of similar mind, and they bonded over barbeque and beers at the Virginia Beach motel they designated their precommissioning headquarters. They dubbed themselves the “Sammy B Fun Bunch” and launched forays to the beachfront bars in custom T-shirts. “It was tight right from the get-go,” said Chuck Dumas, a signalman first class who joined the
Roberts
in May 1985 and was eventually advanced to chief. “With a lot of ships, you have these pockets of people who have their own little world. With the
Roberts
it was different; it seemed like everybody worked together on everything. If there was something to be done, there were plenty of people to take care of it . . . That chiefs' mess was ninety-five percent top-notch, and they led by example. Totally. If there was a working party, they would get involved with it. They wouldn't just stand there and direct.”

Dumas credited the crew's success to Rinn's early messages, and to the chiefs for running with them. “Right from the start, we said, ‘This is the
Sammy B. Roberts
, and this is the way we're going to do it,'” Dumas said. “Every sailor that came, it was instilled in his brain basically that, look, this is the third
Sammy B
, and we want to uphold every tradition to the utmost.”
⁸

That was just the spirit Rinn had sought. A good crew is a proud crew, and the captain believed that pride could start with a connection to the name painted in black letters on the ship's stern. He said: “From the beginning, every sailor who came aboard that ship, we taught them the tradition. Who was Samuel B. Roberts? I've been on ships where the sailors don't have a clue who the ship is named after. Not on
Samuel B. Roberts
. They knew who Samuel B. Roberts was.”
⁹

THE SHIP'S NAMESAKE
was born in 1921 to a pair of navy veterans in San Francisco. His father was a former machinist's mate; his mother had answered a World War I call for clerical “yeomanettes.” Samuel Booker Roberts Jr. enlisted in the naval reserve in 1939, flashing a cockeyed smile at a boot camp photographer. The navy taught him the skills of a coxswain—a master of small boats—and early duty took him from
California to Iceland and back. Then Roberts was assigned to the USS
Bellatrix
(AK 20), an eight-thousand-ton amphibious cargo ship, and sent into battle in the South Pacific.
¹⁰

In August 1942 the
Bellatrix
and eighty-two other ships launched the assault on Guadalcanal, America's first counterpunch at Japanese territory. For two days Roberts and other coxswains ferried troops and gear to shore. Then four allied cruisers were sunk off nearby Savo Island, and the navy called a hasty retreat. The move stranded nineteen thousand marines in enemy territory with four days of supplies. Roberts and two dozen other navy and coast guard sailors volunteered to run a hastily constructed supply post farther down the coast. For seven miserably hot weeks they piloted their Higgins boats from a former coconut plantation at Lunga Point, hauling food and ammunition to the troops.

On 27 September several hundred marines piled into a dozen of the wooden boats and headed up to a beach near the Matanikau River, where Lt. Col. Chesty Puller, the legendary combat leader, hoped to outflank a Japanese strongpoint.
¹¹
Roberts and the other coxswains dropped the troops off and headed back to base. But half a mile inland, the marines stumbled upon dug-in enemy soldiers. A passing U.S. dive-bomber picked up their distress call and flashed a message to Lunga Point. The sailors clambered back into their boats and sailed to the beach. The marines burst from the trees at a dead run, with Japanese machine gunners tracking them across the sand with deadly bursts. The sailors returned fire, but their light .30-caliber slugs offered little deterrence. Roberts had volunteered to create a diversion in just this situation, and so the coxswain pulled his boat off the beach and back into the surf. Running wide open at ten knots, he cruised up and down the shoreline, drawing the deadly attention of the Japanese troops. The distraction eased the pressure on the marines, and the other boats gathered them up, pulled off the beach, and turned to go. Roberts held his own boat in range a fatal moment too long, and machine-gun bullets caught him in the neck. He died aboard a medical evacuation flight.
¹²
The coxswain received a posthumous Navy Cross, the service's second-highest decoration.
¹³

Within months, the navy bestowed upon Coxswain Roberts an even rarer honor: it gave his name to a warship. In April 1944 the fleet commissioned USS
Samuel B. Roberts
(DE 413), an eighteen-hundred-ton
destroyer escort—essentially, a pocket-sized destroyer lightly armed with a pair of five-inch guns and a triple rack of torpedo tubes.
¹⁴
Like Paul Rinn's guided missile frigate, the first
Roberts
was built to shepherd troopships and merchant craft, and to do it at a bargain price. Yet the deeds of this diminutive warship would deepen the luster of its name. Before the year was out, the
Roberts
would help seal the fate of the Japanese empire amid the largest naval battle ever fought.
¹⁵

Responsibility for preparing the
Roberts
and its crew belonged to its first and only commanding officer, Lt. Cdr. Robert Copeland. Perhaps thirty of the ship's roughly two hundred sailors had ever been to sea; the rest were farm boys and city kids who had been hastily introduced to naval warfare in Norfolk. A naval reservist and lawyer from Tacoma, Washington, Copeland worked hard to ready his sailors for battle. “A good ship is actually no good without a good crew,” the captain told an interviewer long after the war. “A good crew can do pretty well with even a passable ship; but when you have a good ship and then get an A-1 crew, you've got something that can't be beaten.”
¹⁶
Its training complete, the
Roberts
sailed west to join the greatest armada ever assembled.

In October 1944 the U.S. Seventh Fleet, a collection of more than seven hundred troop transports, battleships, cruisers, and supply ships, disgorged thousands of army troops onto the beaches of the Philippine island of Leyte. The invasion threatened Japan's entire war effort; the loss of the Philippines would sever access to Indochinese oil and immobilize what remained of the imperial fleet. Desperate, the imperial high command threw its last strength into an attempt to repel the landing fleet.

The Battle of Leyte Gulf began badly for the Japanese. American warships annihilated a flotilla that crept in from the south.
¹⁷
But hope glimmered in Tokyo when a northern stratagem stripped the Seventh Fleet of its northern guard: the U.S. Third Fleet was lured from its station by a toothless group of empty-decked Japanese aircraft carriers. On October 25 a Japanese battleship squadron plunged through the defensive gap. Built around the super-battleship
Yamato
, this center force mustered three other battleships, eight cruisers, and eleven destroyers. With the Third Fleet gone, only a baker's dozen of Seventh Fleet warships stood between the
Yamato
group and the wallowing U.S. troopships in Leyte Gulf.

This was Task Unit 77.4.3, which went by the radio call sign Taffy 3. It consisted of six escort aircraft carriers, four destroyers, and three destroyer escorts, including the
Roberts
. Copeland had been up all night, ear pressed to the radio, anxiously following the action to the south. By dawn, he was breathing a bit more easily. The southern battle had become a rout, while the Third Fleet—he believed—still covered the northern flank. The impression was shattered around 6:30
AM
when the
Yamato
sent salvoes of 18.1-inch naval shells, each the size of a tree trunk, whistling in from eighteen miles away. Hundred-foot geysers bloomed green and purple, dyed to help gunners track their shots. Taffy 3 lacked even a single gun to reach the distant battleships, and the commanding admiral ordered his force to run.
¹⁸

On the bridge of the
Roberts
, the helmsman wrenched his ship toward nearby splashes, hoping to outguess the Japanese gunners as they corrected their aim. Near misses doused the bridge. The incoming fire grew heavier. At 7:42 the admiral concluded that Taffy 3 would not survive five more minutes of pounding. He ordered his destroyers and destroyer escorts—the seven “small boys”—to turn and attack. It was a suicide mission, and Copeland knew it; his fifty-four-pound shells could not penetrate Japanese armor. Yet he told his crew that they would do what damage they could. Belching a thick screen of covering smoke, the
Roberts
charged the enemy.
¹⁹

In the melee that followed, the small boys of Taffy 3 wreaked havoc upon their lumbering foes. Dodging and weaving at twenty knots, Copeland pressed his torpedo attack on a cruiser. Two miles from his target, he loosed a two-fish spread. A flash appeared below the mast. “We got her!” someone yelled. Copeland hauled his ship around and set upon another cruiser that was stalking the U.S. carriers.
²⁰
His gunners poured a jumble of five-inch gunfire onto its superstructure: standard rounds, armor-piercing shells, antiaircraft munitions, even illumination flares. But eventually, luck ran out for the
Roberts. A
trio of eight-inch shells ripped through the port side, disdaining to explode against something as flimsy as a destroyer escort but crippling the ship with brute momentum. After coming almost unscathed through nearly two hours of combat, the limping craft became easy prey. Fourteen-inch shells soon finished her off. At 9:10
AM
Copeland ordered his crew to abandon ship.

The battle raged on, and it took several days for the navy to rescue the survivors of Taffy 3. By the time a group of U.S. landing craft found them two days after the battle, only 133 living
Roberts
crew members, dehydrated and delirious, could be pulled from the oily sea. But their effort had been enough. The furious counterattack of the small boys, along with heroic efforts by army and navy planes, had convinced the Japanese commander that he faced a much more powerful force of heavy cruisers and carriers. As DE 413 slipped to the bottom, the center force retired to the north. World War II dragged on for nearly a year, but Japan had lost its last chance to salvage a different ending.
²¹

In his battle report, Robert Copeland delivered the ultimate encomium to his sailors: “The crew were informed over the loudspeaker system at the beginning of the action of the Commanding Officer's estimate of the situation; that is, a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival could not be expected, during which time we would do what damage we could. In the face of this knowledge, the men zealously manned their stations wherever they might be, and fought and worked with such calmness, courage, and efficiency that no higher honor could be conceived than to command such a group of men.”

The U.S. Navy commemorates valiant ships as well as valiant sailors, so in late 1946 the service commissioned a second
Samuel B. Roberts
. No half-pint destroyer escort, the twenty-four-hundred-ton DD 823 belonged to the formidable
Gearing
class, the final word in World War II destroyers. Operating out of Newport, the “Steamin'
Sammy B”
established a reputation for nabbing bit parts in big events—a sort of naval Forrest Gump. DD 823 sailed with the first naval squadron to transit the St. Lawrence Seaway and was the last warship through the Suez Canal before war shut the waterway in the 1950s.
²²
In October 1962 the destroyer sped south to help turn back Soviet ships bearing missile parts to Cuba; the next year, the ship gathered up the rubber gloves and oil that rose over the grave of the nuclear attack submarine USS
Thresher
(SSN 593).
²³