The ‘Rejected’ American Warship That Terrified Japan More Than Fleet Destroyers

October 25th, 1944.

The Philippine Sea off Samar Island.

A Japanese lookout aboard the heavy cruiser Chukuma spots smoke on the horizon.

Within minutes, Vice Admiral Teo Kurita has his answer from the signal bridge.

American carriers.

The lookouts count at least six flight decks surrounded by what appear to be cruisers and destroyers.

Karita cannot believe his luck.

His center force has somehow stumbled upon the main American fleet.

Four battleships, including Yamato, the largest ever built at 72,000 tons.

Six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, 11 destroyers against what he believes is a carrier task force caught completely by surprise.

He orders a general attack.

But Karita has made a critical error.

Those are not fleet carriers.

They are escort carriers, slow converted merchant holes with thin steel plating.

Those are not cruisers.

They are destroyer escorts.

Ships that Navy admirals had called secondclass vessels incapable of fighting surface actions.

Ships that weigh less than a single turret on Yamato.

Ships that the Bureau of Ships had formally objected to building just 3 years earlier.

What happened next would prove the admirals catastrophically wrong.

To understand why the United States Navy built ships it did not want, you have to go back to London in 1940.

Captain Edward L.

Cochran arrived in Britain during the worst of the Atlantic convoy losses.

German Yubot were sinking merchant ships faster than Allied shipyards could replace them.

The Royal Navy desperately needed escort vessels, but every destroyer was committed to fleet operations.

Cochran studied the problem and returned with a recommendation.

The United States should design a new class of ships specifically for convoy escort duty.

The ships would be smaller than a destroyer, cheaper to build, and optimized for anti-ubmarine warfare rather than fleet actions.

The Bureau of Ships rejected the proposal.

Their reasoning was straightforward.

Standard fleet destroyers could handle any escort mission.

Building a separate class of reduced capability ships would waste industrial resources.

The chief of naval operations supported this position.

America, they argued, needed more fleet destroyers, not what some officers privately called toy destroyers.

But Britain was losing the war at sea, and Britain had leverage.

The British supply council formally requested destroyer escorts on June 23rd, 1941.

They needed ships.

They did not particularly care whether the United States Navy wanted to build them.

On August 15th, 1941, President Roosevelt authorized production of 50 British destroyer escorts, overruling his own naval leadership.

The admirals had lost the argument.

What they did not yet understand was that they had also been wrong.

The specifications told the story of deliberate compromise.

A Buckley class destroyer escort measured 306 ft long, displaced between 1,700 and 2,100 tons, and made 24 to 28 knots, depending on the variant.

Compare this to a Fletcher class fleet destroyer.

It was 376 ft long, displaced 2,500 tons, and could make 38 knots.

The fleet destroyer had five 5-in guns, while the destroyer escort had two.

It carried 10 torpedo tubes versus three on the escort.

On paper, the destroyer escort looked like exactly what its critics claimed, a lesser ship for lesser missions.

But the numbers told a different story.

A fleet destroyer cost approximately $6 million and required 12 months or more to build.

A destroyer escort cost between 1.5 million and $3.5 million and could be completed in 20 weeks.

When you are losing the convoy war, mathematics matters more than specifications.

The production system that emerged was remarkable for its efficiency.

Brown ship building in Houston averaged one destroyer escort per week at peak output.

Bethlehem Hangingham in Massachusetts built 227 destroyer escorts, more than any other yard.

Factories that had never built warships before learned to assemble them from pre-fabricated sections.

The same industrial capacity that opponents said should build proper destroyers instead produced three destroyer escorts for the price of one.

The Navy ordered 1,05 destroyer escorts.

They received 563.

Cancellations came as the submarine threat diminished.

But by then the ships had already proven something unexpected.

These secondclass vessels could fight.

The weapon that transformed destroyer escort capabilities came from British innovation.

Commander Charles Frederick Gudiv of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve developed a forward throwing mortar system that the British called Hedgehog.

The concept addressed a fundamental problem with depth charge attacks.

Depth charges required a submarine to be directly beneath the attacking ship.

But the moment a surface vessel passed over a submerged target, sonar contact was lost.

The submarine had precious seconds to change depth and course while the destroyer steamed forward, dropped charges, circled back, and reacquired contact.

If the charges were set to the wrong depth, they exploded harmlessly.

If the submarine maneuvered correctly, it survived.

Hedgehog solved this by firing ahead.

24 projectiles, each weighing 65 lb with 35 lb of torpex explosive, launched in an elliptical pattern 200 yd ahead of the ship.

The crucial innovation was the contact fuse.

Hedgehog bombs only detonated when they struck something.

No more estimating depth.

No more preset timers.

If the pattern landed on the submarine, the submarine died.

The statistics were dramatic.

Traditional depth charges achieved a kill rate of approximately one submarine for every 60 attacks.

Hedgehog achieved one kill for every 5 to six attacks.

A 10-fold improvement.

But there was a psychological problem.

Depth charges always exploded.

Crews heard the detonations and felt they were accomplishing something even when they missed.

Hedgehog produced silence on a miss.

Just splashes and nothing else.

Early crews distrusted the weapon because success felt too quiet.

Training programs had to convince men that the absence of explosions meant the pattern had missed, not that the weapon had failed.

One crew mastered this psychology better than any other in the Pacific.

USS England Hall number DE635 was a Buckley class destroyer escort commissioned on December 10th, 1943.

Her commanding officer was Lieutenant Commander Walton B.

Pendleton.

Her executive officer was Lieutenant John A.

Williamson, a 26-year-old reservist who had become obsessed with hedgehog attack procedures.

Williamson drilled the crew relentlessly.

the loading sequence, the firing patterns, the geometry of approach angles.

Other ships in the escort group considered England’s constant practice excessive.

Williamson considered it preparation.

In May 1944, American intelligence broke Japanese naval codes and learned that Admiral Toyota had positioned a scouting line of submarines designated NA across the approaches to the Admiral T Islands.

Seven submarines intended to report American fleet movements before the invasion of the Marianas.

A hunter killer group including England, USS George, and USS Rabby received orders to sweep the area.

On May 19th, 1944, England’s sonar made contact.

The first attack required five hedgehog salvos.

I16 went down with all 107 hands.

3 days later on May 22nd, England detected RO106.

Two salvos kill confirmed.

The next day, May 23rd, RO104 was detected.

USS George and USS Rabi made the initial attacks.

Nine separate hedgehog runs produced no hits.

England was ordered in.

Two salvos.

RO104 was destroyed.

May 24th, RO116 surfaced unexpectedly and was detected on radar.

England attacked before the submarine could dive.

One salvo.

56 men were killed.

May 26th, RO108 attempted to shadow the Hunter killer group.

Radar detected the periscope.

One salvo.

The submarine broke apart.

At this point, Commander Hamilton Haynes, the group commander aboard George, sent a message that has become part of naval folklore.

How do you do it? Williamson’s training had paid off in a way no one anticipated.

In 7 days, England had destroyed five submarines with 10 hedgehog salvos.

No other ship in any navy had achieved anything comparable, but they were not finished.

On May 31st, another contact RO105.

This time the entire group participated.

16 separate attacks by George Rabi and USS Spangler produced nothing.

Then England made her run.

One salvo kill confirmed.

If you are finding this deep dive into American naval engineering interesting, consider subscribing.

It takes a moment and helps the channel continue producing content like this.

Now, let us see what happened when these cheap ships met the Imperial Japanese Navy’s surface fleet.

Admiral Ernest J.

King, Chief of Naval Operations, sent a message after England’s rampage that captured both his admiration and his awareness of optics.

There will always be an England in the United States Navy.

Six Japanese submarines destroyed in 12 days.

12 hedgehog salvos for six confirmed kills.

A ship that cost $2 million had eliminated a quarter of an entire enemy scouting line and blinded Admiral Toyota before the most important naval operation of 1944.

The admirals who had called destroyer escorts secondclass vessels made no public comment.

5 months later, those same secondclass vessels would do something even the Navy’s harshest critics thought impossible.

October 25th, 1944.

Taffy 3.

That was the call sign for Rear Admiral Clifton Sprag’s escort carrier group off Samar.

Six escort carriers, three destroyers, four destroyer escorts.

Their mission was to provide air support for the Lee landings, not to fight enemy surface ships.

At 6:45, lookout spotted anti-aircraft fire on the horizon.

The shells were the wrong color.

Japanese ships used different die markers than American vessels.

Then the Pagota masts appeared.

Unmistakable Japanese battleship silhouettes.

Sprag initially assumed this was Admiral Hallyy’s third fleet.

It had to be.

Center force under Admiral Karita had been reported retreating through San Bernardino Strait the previous night.

Intelligence said the threat was eliminated.

Intelligence was wrong.

Karita had turned around.

Four battleships, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, 11 destroyers.

They were now between Taffy 3 and the landing beaches, and they were closing at 30 knots.

Sprag had no good options.

His escort carriers made 18 knots maximum.

The Japanese made nearly twice that.

His aircraft were armed for ground support with bombs and machine guns, not torpedoes.

His three destroyers carried torpedoes, but were hopelessly outmatched.

His four destroyer escorts carried the same guns, but fewer torpedoes and even thinner armor.

Running was impossible.

Fighting was suicide.

Sprag ordered both.

The destroyers went in first.

USS Hoel, USS Herman, and USS Johnston charged the Japanese battle line, launching torpedoes and firing their 5-in guns against ships with 14in and 18in main batteries.

Johnston, commanded by Commander Ernest E.

Evans, a Cherokee and Creek Indian from Oklahoma, scored first blood.

Her torpedoes blew the bow off heavy cruiser Kumano.

Then the destroyer escorts were ordered to attack.

Lieutenant Commander Robert W.

Copeland commanded USS Samuel B.

Roberts DE413.

Before the engagement, he addressed his crew over the intercom.

The words were recorded by survivors.

This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected.

We will do what damage we can.

Roberts had two 5-in guns, three torpedo tubes, and 1,350 tons of displacement.

She was about to engage Chuma, a heavy cruiser weighing 11 times as much backed by Yamato at 72,000 tons.

Copeland ordered the engine room to push past rated speed.

Chief engineer Lucky Trrowbridge acknowledged and opened the throttles beyond what the machinery was designed to handle.

Roberts hit 28.7 knots, four knots over her maximum rated speed.

The entire ship vibrated as the engines threatened to tear themselves apart.

The forward gun mount was commanded by gunner’s mate Thirdclass Paul Henry Carr.

He was 22 years old from Chakakota, Oklahoma.

Carr’s crew fired approximately 325 rounds during the engagement.

For a two gun destroyer escort engaging heavy cruisers and battleships.

This was an extraordinary rate of fire.

When electrical power to the gun mount failed, Carr’s men handc cranked the turret and handloaded rounds.

They kept firing.

Roberts closed to within 4,000 yd of Chuma and launched torpedoes.

At least one struck home.

The heavy cruiser slowed and began to fall out of formation.

Roberts had hurt something 11 times her size.

Then Congo found the range.

Three 14-in shells struck Roberts in rapid succession.

The ship began to break apart.

What happened next defined Paul Henry Carr’s legacy.

The seventh round in his gun mount detonated inside the brereech, killing most of the gun crew.

When damage control parties reached the mount, they found Carr mortally wounded, bleeding from massive shrapnel injuries.

He was cradling the last available shell in his arms.

He begged them to load it.

The men who found him reported that Carr tried to load the round himself, crawling toward a gun that could no longer fire on a ship that was already sinking.

He died holding that shell.

Paul Henry Carr received the Silver Star postuously.

In 1985, the Navy commissioned USS Carr FFG52, a guided missile frigot named in his honor.

USS Samuel B.

Roberts sank at 0911 on October 25, 1944.

89 men died in the battle.

25 more died in the water during the 50 hours before rescue arrived.

In June 2022, Victor Visco’s expedition located the wreck at 22,621 ft, making her the deepest shipwreck ever discovered.

The destroyer escorts and destroyers of Taffy 3 achieved something that should have been impossible.

They confused Karita.

Japanese lookouts consistently misidentified what they were seeing.

Escort carriers became fleet carriers.

Destroyer escorts became destroyers.

Destroyers became light cruisers.

The small ships making smoke and charging aggressively looked like a much larger force.

Karita believed he had stumbled onto Halsy’s third fleet.

He ordered his ships to pursue what he thought were fleet carriers making a fighting retreat.

Instead, his forces scattered, lost coordination, and watched ship after ship take torpedo hits from vessels that had no business engaging them.

At 9/11, Kurita ordered his remaining forces to break off and reform.

He turned north to search for the non-existent American task force he believed was somewhere over the horizon.

By the time he realized his mistake, the moment had passed.

Taffy3’s sacrifice had saved the Laty landing force, over 130,000 soldiers who would have been exposed to naval bombardment if Karita had pressed his attack.

Commander Ernest E.

Evans went down with the USS Johnston after she took multiple 14in and 6-in shell hits.

Survivors in the water reported that a Japanese destroyer captain as his ship passed the sinking Johnston stood on the bridge and saluted.

Evans received the Medal of Honor postumously.

He was the first Native American in the US Navy to receive that decoration.

The battle off Samar cost Taffy 3 two escort carriers, two destroyers, and one destroyer escort.

It cost the Japanese three heavy cruisers sunk, three more damaged so severely they never returned to service, and the psychological certainty that American small ships would not fight back.

They were wrong about that certainty, catastrophically wrong.

The Japanese submarine force never recovered from what ships like England inflicted.

Of 174 total submarines operated by the Imperial Japanese Navy, 128 were destroyed.

American anti-ubmarine forces, heavily reliant on destroyer escorts armed with hedgehog, achieved a kill rate that Japan’s doctrine could not absorb.

Captain Atsushi Oi, who commanded the Grand Escort Command responsible for protecting Japanese shipping, wrote a damning assessment after the war.

Japan’s failure in anti-ubmarine warfare had certainly been long for destined.

He noted that the Grand Escort Command was not even established until November 15th, 1943, more than 2 years into the war.

By then, American tactics and technology had evolved beyond anything Japanese doctrine could counter.

Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto, who commanded Oi58 and sank the USS Indianapolis in July 1945, was equally blunt in his postwar analysis.

The Japanese submarine fleet was entirely wiped out, and it can be said that it was a fight in which science had been ignored.

Japanese submarines were large, slow to dive, structurally weaker than German hubot, and equipped with radar far later than their American counterparts.

They prioritized attacks on enemy warships over the convoy interdiction that was destroying Japan’s own supply lines.

Against American hunter killer groups built around destroyer escorts.

They were systematically hunted to extinction.

The numbers tell the final story.

The United States Navy ordered 1,5 destroyer escorts and received 563.

Of those, only 11 were lost to enemy action.

Compare this to 71 fleet destroyers sunk during the same period.

The cheap ships that admirals rejected proved remarkably survivable.

78 destroyer escorts were transferred to the Royal Navy as captainclass frigots where they sank more than 34 Germanot in Atlantic convoy operations.

The USS Frost DE 144 participated in five confirmed Yubot kills and received the presidential unit citation.

The USS Buckley DE51 rammed U66 and fought a hand-to-hand battle with the German crew that included coffee mugs and grenades.

The USS Pillsbury DE 133 boarded U505 on June 4th, 1944, capturing a working Enigma machine.

It was the first boarding action by the US Navy since the War of 1812.

The submarine that Admirals said would not fight.

The ship that could not engage surface vessels, the second class vessel returned to the bridge of heavy cruiser Chuma, October 25th, 1944.

Vice Admiral Karita watches American ships materialize from the smoke.

His lookouts report cruisers and fleet carriers.

His gunners engage what they believe is a major task force.

For 2 hours, his massive fleet chases ships that refuse to die, that keep firing, that launch torpedoes from ranges so close they seem suicidal.

He does not realize that those cruisers are destroyer escorts weighing less than 2,000 tons.

He does not know that his fearsome center force is being savaged by ships that cost one-third what a proper destroyer cost.

Built in 20 weeks by shipyards that had never made warships before.

Armed with a British weapon that only explodes when it hits something.

He orders retreat while winning the battle because he cannot comprehend what he is seeing.

The cheap ships have achieved something no specification predicted.

They have terrified the Imperial Japanese Navy.

563 destroyer escorts built.

Six submarines destroyed by one ship in 12 days.

Four DE ships charging Yamato.

Paul Henry Carr dying with a shell in his arms.

Ernest E.

Evans receiving a salute from the enemy ship that killed him.

The admirals who called them secondass vessels were wrong.

The Bureau of Ships that fought their construction was wrong.

The specifications that showed them inferior to fleet destroyers missed the point entirely.

The destroyer escort was never meant to match a fleet destroyer.

It was meant to be good enough in sufficient numbers, fast enough to build.

And in the Pacific and Atlantic, good enough turned out to be exactly what was needed.

That was American engineering.

That was the destroyer escort.

Leave a comment right now and tell us where you are watching from.

Our community stretches across the entire world.

Tell us if someone in your family served.

Just let us know you are here.

Click the video on the left to watch how this cheap and nasty warship destroyed everything.