Minnesotans recall the battle

By Al Zdon
When Don Keis tried to join the Navy, they put him on a scale and found his weight to be 116 lbs.
The minimum for a sailor in those days prior to World War II was 118 lbs.
"I asked them what I should do," Keis told the overflow crowd at the World War II History Round Table at Ft. Snelling. "They said to go down the street to the nearest produce market, to buy three pounds of bananas, to eat them and come back.
"That's exactly what I did. I came back and weighed in at 118 lbs. I signed up for six years."
After that Keis said he only had two major shocks in his life: One was standing on the deck of the battleship USS Maryland as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the other was being attacked by the Japanese fleet at the Battle for Leyte Gulf in 1944.
Keis, a St. Paul native, was one of five speakers at the History Roundtable. The history portion of the program was presented by John Lindley, a published naval historian.
A little less than three years after Pearl Harbor, Keis was stationed on board the USS Heerman, a destroyer in a group called Taffy 3. The three Taffy groups, made up mainly of smaller ships and "jeep" carriers, were assembled to help defend the Army and Marine landing on Leyte beach.
The Heermann went to general quarters early on the morning of Oct. 25, 1944, when splashes in the water indicated Taffy 3 was under attack. "We aimed our guns at the sky because we thought it was horizontal bombs coming in from aircraft. We finally figured out where the attack was coming from."
It was coming from a huge Japanese armada, led by the largest ship in the world, the battleship Yamoto, cruising down the side of Samar Island, heading for Leyte Island.
The Heermann and other ships laid down a thick cloud of smoke, and the destroyers charged out it to attack the huge Japanese ships. "It was just us destroyers, and one little destroyer escort — she was going to scare them too." Keis said.
Shells were raining down on the Heermann. Most of them were armor piercing shells and they weren't exploding because there wasn't enough metal on the destroyer to set them off. They simply passed right through the ship.
Three eight-inch shells hit the Heermann, including one that struck the ship's smoke stack and the food locker right below it. "They were storing beans up there, and one officer happened to be standing there and was just covered with beans. Warm, hot, sticky beans. He was up to his neck in beans. I hear that he never ate beans again."
Keis' job was a pointer on a five-inch gun. "The captain told us to only fire regular shells, but we just kept firing round after round, whatever came up. We fired magnetic shells, which were still considered secret at that time, and star shells, which were for illumination. We figured if we couldn't blow them up, we'd burn them to death."
A pilot who had been rescued by the Heermann the day before had asked to be put to work, and had been assigned a job on the superstructure watching for enemy planes. He was killed by the shelling. "We later had him listed as part of our ship's company that was killed that day," Keis said.
In all, the Heermann buried 37 men at sea the next day. "We wrapped them in blankets and tied a five-inch shell between their legs. It was a good destroyer, and those were good men. Once Americans get going, no one can beat them."

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Hank Pyzdrowski of Minnetonka was a pilot aboard the escort carrier USS Gambier Bay, also a part of Taffy 3. He flew a Grumman TBM Avenger, usually equipped with eight rockets on its wings and two 50 caliber machine guns.
Up to that point, the Americans had enjoyed a great run of success at Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. "We had a feeling that we couldn't be beat, and that was a good feeling for a pilot."
On the 24th of October, the American fleet was alerted, Pyzdrowski said, when a scout plane from a Japanese cruiser was destroyed.
On the morning of the 25th, general quarters was sounded. "Ten minutes later, it was sounded again, and this time the bugler was going crazy," Pyzdrowski said. "We knew something big was coming."
That something big was the Japanese navy. "Those ships looked so beautiful on the horizon. It wasn't until they started shooting as us that they didn't seem so beautiful."
Gambier Bay launched all its planes but four, and they were being equipped with torpedoes.
"As they launched the first one, someone yelled out that he only had 40 gallons of gas. He took off anyway and headed right for one of the cruisers. I saw the second pilot waiting on the catapult, and when they gave him the signal to launch, I saw him flick his cigarette away. It's funny how you remember those little things in a time of battle."
Pyzdrowski was next up. His plane was loaded on the catapult, but just then the Gambier Bay came under a heavy attack and had to take evasive action. "I was up in the cockpit atop the catapult. I saw the whole battle taking place in front of me, what a glorious sight. I saw the destroyers head out to challenge the Japanese."
In the end, the shelling damaged the catapult, and before it could be repaired, the ship had turned downwind. Pyzdrowski was ordered get out of the plane, and it was jettisoned.
By this time the Gambier Bay was in bad shape. "It didn't bother me that the ship was going to sink, it bothered me that I was useless and didn't know what to do." He helped get life rafts ready and later found a shipmate, a man from his hometown of Pittsburgh, dying. "I took his wedding band and brought it home to his wife."
He was ordered to get his fellow squadron officers ready to abandon ship. As he entered their space on the ship, he found that they had broken into his locker and gotten into a case of Scotch his family had sent him to celebrate his 21st birthday with. "They had made a teepee of mattresses, and most of them were pretty well snookered. The ship was listing about 30 degrees by this time.
"One of the other officers said, 'Hank, we've got to get these guys out of here.' But it was clear that many of them didn't know what they were doing. We got them into the water, and I suppose the Scotch was the best anti-freeze they could have had."
The ship had taken 26 direct hits by this time. Pyzdrowski got in the water and swam away from the ship as it sank, bow first. "To see your ship go down is an overwhelming feeling, it's like losing a part of yourself."
Most of the crew that survived spent two days in the water. At one point a Japanese ship cruised by with Japanese marines on board. "We thought they were going to shoot us, but then the Japanese marines saluted us."
The men were eventually rescued. "I was a kid when I went into the Navy. I was a man when I came out."

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Ted Murphy of Edina was an ensign and a fighter pilot on the "jeep" carrier Fanshaw Bay, the flagship of Taffy 3 and the home of Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague, who is given much of the credit for the successful U.S. action against the overwhelming Japanese force.
Murphy remembers listening in over the radio as two American torpedo bombers were scouting over the San Bernadino Strait. "One of the pilots looked down on this huge fleet and said, 'Wow, Halsey must have every ship in the Navy down there.'
"The other pilot replied, 'I'm not so sure those are our ships. Those superstructures look a little like pagodas.' The two dove down for a closer look, and all of sudden one of them radioed, 'There's every ship from every navy in the world down there, and they're all flying the Japanese flag, and they're all shooting at us.'"
As with other lighter ships, when the huge Japanese force attacked, the armor piercing shells went right through the Fanshaw Bay, causing damage but not dealing a lethal blow. "If they had used general purpose shells, they would have sunk every ship we had," Murphy said.
As it was, Murphy got airborne in his FM-2 Wildcat. "I reached for my St. Christopher medal that my mother had given me. I never went near an aircraft without that medal. I felt around for it, and it wasn't there. I figured this was the end of the line. I'm buying the farm on this trip."
It turned out later, he had left the medal hanging on a knob in the shower stall.
Murphy was flying wing for the flight commander, and the squadron leader was peeling the planes off two at a time to attack the huge Japanese fleet. He was assigning them to the destroyers and cruisers below.
"I was just hoping and praying he wasn't saving the (super battleship) Yamoto for me. I was ready for a little rowboat or something."
Instead, Murphy was sent on a strafing run of a heavy cruiser. In the middle of the run, his engine quit, but he was able to change gas tanks and get it started again. The fighters made two more runs, hitting the gun sponsons on the cruisers and shattering the glass front of one ship's superstructure.
Heading back to the Fanshaw Bay, they were informed that they couldn't land on the escort carrier. They headed for a landing base on Samar Island, but found it littered with bomb craters and destroyed airplanes. In desperation, Murphy and the others headed for another airbase further down the island, not knowing if it was in U.S. or Japanese hands.
"We made a pass, and when no one fired at us, we figured it was safe. As soon as we landed, and I got off the plane, an Army guy came running up to me and yelled at me to get my bright yellow Mae West off so I wouldn't be such a target for the Jap snipers."
The strip was just about a mile and a half from the enemy lines, and that night Murphy looked out and saw a dark form slink into a nearby foxhole. "I got my .38 out and, shaking as I was, aimed it in the general direction of that foxhole. The first shot woke everybody else up, and I told them what I saw. We must have fired a hundred rounds at that foxhole.
"When we figured it was safe we crept up and looked in. There was an old mongrel dog in there. And you know what? He didn't have a scratch on him. I got a lot of ribbing later on from guys who wanted to know if I'd seen any snipers lately."

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Don Wiegert of Maplewood was a communications specialist on the crew of the USS Wasatch, the flagship of Admiral Kincaid, the head of the Seventh Fleet in charge of the landing operation at Leyte Gulf.
Wiegert ran electric encoding machines, similar to the enigma machines the Germans developed early in the war. "You could encode as fast as you could type."
On the ship, the men worked four hours on and four hours off. "It's supposed to keep you refreshed, but it's the most tiring thing I've ever run into. I know at one point, toward the end of a shift, I just went blind. I couldn't see anything."
Wiegert recalled that when it was time for Gen. Douglas MacArthur to go ashore, the beachmaster was signaled that the landing craft was ready to hit the beach. The overworked beachmaster radioed back, "Let them walk in." And so they did.
"It made for a terrific picture, wading up to his knees," Wiegert said.
Wiegert later learned that Admiral Halsey blamed the fact that his fleet was 300 miles away when the Japanese attacked through the San Bernadino Strait on the fact there was lousy communications.
"I take personal exception to that. We were well trained."
Wiegert does recall one foul-up at naval headquarters in Hawaii, though, as Nimitz was sending a message to Halsey wondering where part of Halsey's force was. "Where is, repeat, where is Task Force 34?" The message encoders were instructed to put in "padding" that would confuse enemy cryptographers. Usually, the padding was just nonsense words at the beginning of the message.
In this case though, the encoder typed in "The whole world wonders," and Halsey's decoders, thinking it was part of the message, relayed to Halsey "The whole world wonders where is Task Force 34?" The message infuriated Halsey who took it as a sarcastic comment on his decision-making ability.
 
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Axel Bundgaard served on board PCS 1429, a converted minesweeper that stood out in the gulf and helped direct the landing traffic toward the beach in an orderly fashion.
Bundgaard, a resident of Burnsville, said the scale of the operation was enormous. "I was aghast at all this going on. I wondered how in the name of heaven were we supposed to stay on station and not run into each other."
Hundreds of Higgens boats brought troops and light gear to the beach while now and then an LST would head in with the heavier equipment.
"The Corsairs were swooping over the beach. There were some happy gunners on one of the ships, and they wanted to practice I suppose, and so they knocked this Corsair down. He managed to ditch the plane in the water, and he got out and stood on the wing shaking his fist. I've never seen a guy so mad in my life."
The PCS stayed on station for three days and then pulled out. "I don't know how we got all those ships out of there. The Japanese could have come right into the Gulf, and we would have been sitting ducks."
Bundgaard said the sailors learned later of the naval battles fought around Leyte Gulf. "I was astounded that all this occurred, and we didn't even know it was going on."

A short history of the battle

The Battle for Leyte Gulf was one of the major Naval battles of World War II, and was one of the largest battles ever fought in the history of sea warfare. It involved 282 ships and more than 200,000 men.
In late 1944, the Japanese Navy still had quite a few ships, but without air cover and adequate fuel, the fleet was mostly confined to a few ports.
The Japanese correctly determined that the U.S. was going to land an army force on Leyte Island, and they decided to risk their remaining fleet on one huge operation, titled Operation Victory Won, that might destroy the landing and harm the American Third and Seventh Fleets.
The Seventh Fleet was under the command of Admiral Kincaid, whose job it was to directly support the landing operation. The Third Fleet was commanded by Admiral Halsey who had a role in supporting Kincaid, but in also engaging the enemy wherever he could.
The Japanese mounted a three-pronged attack. Two large groups of ships steamed north from Brunei Bay in Borneo, heading for the two main passages through the Philippine Islands, from west to east. At the same time, an armada from Japan headed south to join the southern prong of the attack through the Philippines.
While this was going on, a carrier fleet also came south from Japan to engage the Americans. The carrier fleet was mainly a decoy. So many Japanese planes had been destroyed, and so few pilots were available, that the carriers' main job was to lure part of the American fleet away from the main action around Leyte.
Historians have generally called this carrier fleet the "Northern Force."
The Japanese force heading through the Philippines through the San Bernadino Strait is usually called the "Center Force," and the fleet heading through the southern Surigao Strait is called the "Southern Force."
Most of the action took place from Oct. 23-25, 1944.
The Southern Force had troubles from the beginning. It was made up of ships from Japan and from Borneo, and apparently the two admirals in charge, Nishimura and Shima, were not talking to each other. Nishimura sailed in first, his 12 vessels being harassed all along the way by American PT boats that were unable to sink any of the enemy vessels but were able to keep track of their position.
As the group under Nishimura reached the top end of the strait, not far from the landings at Leyte, they were first attacked by American and Australian destroyers that heroically charged in and attacked the larger Japanese warships with torpedoes.
In the history of naval encounters, the most prized strategic goal for any admiral was to "cross the T," or to have his fleet heading across the top of the oncoming enemy fleet. In that way, the ships at the top of the T will have maximized firepower from broadsides, while the enemy will only be able to use its forward guns.
Nishimura's ships, in single file, charged right into the T, commanded by Admiral Oldendorf, and the result was devastating. The U.S. had eight cruisers and six battleships, including the "ghosts" of Pearl Harbor — the West Virginia, California, Tennessee, and Maryland.  In a short time, the Americans had sunk two destroyers and two battleships and set fire to a cruiser.
Admiral Shima, out of touch with his fellow admiral, arrived on the scene two hours later with his group of ships just in time to see the results of the battle. Shima's flagship managed to collide with the burning cruiser in Nishimura's group. All the remaining Japanese ships retreated, no longer to engage in the battle.
The Center Force was the pride of the Japanese fleet, and contained among its 27 ships the world's two largest battleships, the Musashi and the Yamato. If it had accomplished its plan and been able to get into Leyte Gulf, there's no telling what kind of havoc it might have wreaked on the exposed American troop transports, supply ships and other landing craft.
The Center Force, commanded by Admiral Kurita, ran into some early problems.  On Oct. 23rd, the force was spotted by an American submarine on patrol in the western waters of the Philippines. The submarines Darter and Dace attacked and sank two cruisers and damaged a third.
Alerted to the location of the Center Force, Halsey sent in wave after wave of bombers and torpedo planes. The battleship Musashi was hit repeatedly, and finally sunk. Three other battleships were damaged and a cruiser was put out of action. Kurita ordered the Center Force into a temporary retreat.
Halsey, thinking the Center Force was crippled beyond any further action, ordered his ships north to take on the Northern Force, the decoy Japanese carrier fleet. In his usual all-or-nothing attitude, Halsey left nothing behind to protect the San Bernadino Strait.
Adding to the problem for the U.S. was a mix-up in communications between Halsey and Kincaid. Kincaid was under the impression that Halsey had left a task force behind, or at least had one in waiting. Such was not the case.
Kurita steamed through the San Bernadino Strait in the night and was opposed only by Taffy 3, a group of escort carriers assigned to provide air cover for the landings on Leyte. The little fleet only had three destroyers for protection, and there were only 29 naval guns on board the 13 ships.
Kurita, though, thought he was facing Halsey's large carrier fleet. Admiral Sprague, in charge of Taffy 3, launched all his aircraft and ordered his destroyers to attack. Kurita opened fire with the massive 18-inch and 14-inch guns. Just when all looked lost for Taffy 3, a rain squall appeared and the American force ducked into it.
The destroyers Johnson and Heermann made daring attacks on the Japanese, and were hit again and again. The Johnson was sunk, and the Heerman was severely damaged. The jeep carrier Gambier Bay was sunk.
Meanwhile, Halsey was still chasing the Northern Force. His fleet eventually would sink all four Japanese carriers. Repeated calls for help finally convinced him, though, to break off part of his force and head south. Kurita, still thinking he was facing a larger force than he was, decided to end the engagement. His ships retreated through the San Bernadino Strait.
Taffy 3 was battered and bloodied, but its brilliant and heroic action had turned back a force many times its size. As the Japanese steamed away, the quartermaster on the battered flagship Fanshaw Bay showed the resolve of the unit when he turned to Admiral Sprague and said, "My God, Admiral, they're going to get away."
In the end, the Battle of Leyte Gulf was a huge victory for the U.S. The Japanese fleet headed back to its ports never again to be a factor in the war. In all, the Japanese lost four heavy carriers, three battleships, six heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, nine destroyers and about 10,000 lives. The Americans lost one attack carrier, two escort carriers, two destroyers, one destroyer escort and about 3,000 men.
The landing at Leyte Island turned into a prolonged battle that wasn't settled for over five months.

(Information for this brief history came from Return to the Philippines by Rafael Steinberg, Time-Life Books, 1980, and from the lecture given by historian John Lindley at the World War II Round table at Ft. Snelling on Jan. 11.)