The heavy cruiser Mogami, staggering under the impact of heavy shells hitting the ship, showed its teeth. It opened fire on every target its gunners could see, and as it turned to make its escape it fired torpedoes toward the American ships.
A salvo of heavy shells hit the Mogami’s bridge, blowing it completely off the ship, killing the commanding officer and his entire staff. The Mogami slowed and stopped, afire above decks and below. Somehow the Mogami’s crew got the fires under control and repaired extensive damage in the ship’s engine rooms and got the ship under way, steering with a jury rig. With no navigator, and with hardly any officers left alive, the ship moved south away from the merciless rain of shells. The Mogami was to survive for another five hours. At 0900 of that day the Mogami came under heavy air attack, and its crew, gallant men by any standards, abandoned ship.
Meanwhile, Vice Admiral Shima’s Second Southern Force was steaming toward Leyte Gulf to carry out its assignment of sweeping up any American ships that had escaped Nishimura’s attack. This force, consisting of two heavy and one light cruiser and nine major destroyers, came under attack by the dauntless PT boats. The light cruiser Abukuma was hit by one torpedo and forced to drop out of formation. Vice Admiral Shima, operating in an informational vacuum — he had heard nothing from Vice Admiral Nishimura since Nishimura had reported he was under attack from destroyers — decided that discretion was the order of the day and ordered his Second Southern Force to reverse course and head back toward Borneo.
The battle of Surigao Strait, except for some mopping up, was over. Rear Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf, USN, had pulled off the ultimate maneuver of naval warfare between heavy capital ships. He had crossed the enemy’s T and in eighteen short minutes had smashed an enemy battle fleet to bits.
There was no one sleeping aboard the Eelfish as it raced through the western reaches of the Sea of Mindanao on that night. Elmer Rafferty, the ship’s leading radioman, tuned in on the battle radio circuit of the American fleet in the Gulf of Leyte and patched the circuit into the Eelfish’s 1-MC system, the ship’s internal communication system. The off-duty crewmen clustered in the two torpedo rooms and the Crew’s Mess. They heard the first reports from the PT boats when they sighted the destroyers in the van of the Japanese battle force, heard their exultant messages as they hurled their fragile little torpedo boats against the larger ships.
“Fucking PT boat sailors,” Fred Nelson growled in the After Torpedo Room. “They can’t shoot torpedoes worth a damn! We should be there, damn it! All they’ll do is get their asses shot off. Fuckers!” He turned and faced the people in his torpedo room.
“But give ‘em marks for guts. Lots of guts.”
There was silence on the radio circuit after the PT boat attacks, and then the Eelfish crew heard the crisp orders from the first destroyers as they moved to the attack, heard the sharp commands to make smoke, to attack, and then the laconic reports that torpedoes had been fired, that hits had been made.
“Sounds like the little boys got in a good torpedo attack,” John Olsen said as he and Mike Brannon stood in the Control Room looking at a chart of Leyte Gulf. The radio crackled again with the word that the main destroyer attack was beginning.
“Holy cow!” Brannon muttered. “That first tin-can attack was only for openers. Now they’re throwing a lot of tin cans in. You can’t even make sense out of the orders, there are so many of them reporting.” He listened as destroyer after destroyer reported that it was going in to attack. A cheer went up from the crewmen in the Crew’s Mess and the torpedo rooms when a report came in of a hit on a battleship, that two destroyers of the Japanese force had been hit and sunk.
“That was our damned battleship,” Brannon growled. “We had that bastard in the periscope and within five thousand yards and we couldn’t attack! Damn, damn, damn!”
A burst of static blurred the order from Rear Admiral G. L. Weyler for the main battle line to open fire with broadsides against the Japanese. Seconds later, clear as a bell, came the report from the U.S.S. West Virginia that it was commencing broadside fire at a range of 21,000 yards, followed by similar reports from five other battleships.
“That’s it,” Brannon said quietly. “They must have the Japs in a box. Six battleships firing broadsides? My God, no fleet in the world can stand up to that sort of firepower!”
Eighteen minutes later the order to cease fire came. Mike Brannon lifted a telephone off the bulkhead and spoke to the crew.
“From what we heard, what all of us heard, I conclude that a major sea battle has been fought up in Leyte Gulf. My interpretation of what we’ve heard is that with six of our battleships firing broadsides for twenty minutes and then being ordered to cease fire the Japanese fleet we sighted the other day must either be destroyed, or what’s left of it is in full retreat.
“We heard no reports of any of our ships taking any hits, so the odds are that the battle is over, but if we’re lucky, if there are any ships left in that Japanese fleet we picked up in the Sulu Sea, maybe we can get them.” He put down the telephone and motioned to Jim Michaels.
“I want a constant radar search, Jim. If anything did get away I want to go after it.”
A few hours later, just before dawn, the Eelfish radar reported a multiple contact. Eelfish tracked, heading toward the contact at top speed, and got off a contact report. But Admiral Shima’s Second Southern Force, then in full retreat toward Borneo, was moving too fast for the submarine to catch up.
The report from the Eelfish bore fruit. On the morning of October 27, 1944, Admiral Shima’s ships were found by 44 bombers from the Fifth and Thirteenth Army Air Forces, based at Noemfor and Biak. The light cruiser Abukuma, hit earlier by a torpedo from a PT boat, went down in flames under the aircraft bombs. The rest of Admiral Shima’s force scattered and evaded the bombers. After two days of fruitless search the Eelfish was ordered to return to its original war patrol off Tawi Tawi. The radio message from Fremantle congratulating the Eelfish for finding the Japanese battle force that had been destroyed in Leyte Gulf was greeted with silence by the ship’s crew.
CHAPTER 23
Ten days after Eelfish had arrived on station, orders were received to scout the port of Brunei on the northwest coast of Borneo and report on any shipping seen in the port and then return to Fremantle.
“About six hundred miles from here,” Brannon mused as he looked at the course Olsen had laid down on the chart. “Where’s Jerry Gold, I didn’t see a fuel oil report this morning. We’ve done an awful lot of running at top speed on this patrol.”
Gold came into the Wardroom minutes later, wiping his hands on a piece of rag.
“Didn’t know you wanted me, sir,” he said genially, “until the messenger came looking for me.”
“Anything wrong back there?” Brannon asked, eyeing the rag Gold was using as a towel.
“No, sir,” Gold said. “Just adding to my education in how to clean a fuel injector.”
“What’s the fuel oil situation?” Brannon asked. “I didn’t get a report this morning.”
“My fault,” Gold said with a grin. “Got it in my pocket, right here. Meant to lay it on your plate this morning but I just plain forgot.”