On the morning of October 23, 1944, the U.S. Navy drew first blood in what became known
as the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
At the break of dawn, in the narrow waters of the Palawan Passage, two Gato-class submarines—USS
Darter and USS Dace—fired a spread of torpedoes that took down the Japanese cruisers Atago
and Maya.
Another cruiser, the Takao, limped away with irreparable damage.
In addition to the harm leveled against the Japanese Center Force, the crews of Darter
and Dace sent an accurate sighting report to their superior officers in Australia.
Specifically, USS Darter sent a message that reported “many ships,” including three
battleships, cruising at 18 knots, heading northeast toward the Tablas Strait.
In a matter of minutes, Darter’s message reached the bridge of USS New Jersey, Admiral
William Halsey’s flagship.
Halsey read the message with interest.
He later remarked, “Darter’s dispatch was proof that a major movement was afoot.”
Darter and Dace granted Halsey twenty-four crucial hours to reposition his forces to
meet the Japanese threat.
At the time, Halsey’s 3rd Fleet contained 90 combat vessels, a mix of fleet carriers,
light carriers, battleships, heavy cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers.
Halsey’s fleet was divided into four task groups.
He ordered one of them, RADM Frederick Sherman’s, to take up position off the Pollilo Islands.
He ordered RADM Gerald Bogan’s group to take up position 140 miles southeast of Sherman’s
group—off San Bernardino Strait.
He ordered RADM Ralph Davison’s task group to take up station at the southern tip of
Samar, 120 miles south of Bogan.
The fourth task group, RADM John McCain’s, was heading to Ulithi to resupply.
Halsey ordered it to refuel at sea and return to the Philippines as soon as possible.
Throughout the morning of October 24, Sherman’s, Bogan’s, and Davison’s carriers launched
their search planes.
A sighting report arrived, confirming what USS Darter’s message had said.
At 7:30, a search team from USS Intrepid spotted Kurita’s Center Force as it approached the
Tablas Strait.
An hour later, Halsey ordered Bogan’s task group to launch planes and go after it.
He planned on sending Sherman’s carrier planes as a second wave, but the Japanese
spoiled those intentions.
From his headquarters in Manila, the commander of the 2nd Air Fleet, Admiral Shigeru Fukudome,
plotted an unwelcome surprise for the Americans.
Throughout the month of October, Fukudome had assembled 550 land-based aircraft—most
of them housed at Clark Field on Luzon—in preparation for the Americans’ arrival.
With the American carriers so close to shore, they proved too tempting a target for Fukudome
to pass up.
Promptly, he ordered his pilots to scramble an airstrike.
At 8:27—at almost the same time that Halsey ordered Bogan’s group to launch—180 of
Fukudome’s planes came roaring in from Luzon, heading toward RADM Sherman’s task group,
which consisted of the fleet carriers USS Essex and USS Lexington, the light carriers
USS Princeton and USS Langley, the light cruiser USS Reno, and 9 destroyers.
Sadly, most of Sherman’s fighters were providing escort for the scout planes or they had gone
on strafing missions against airfields near Manila.
Between his four carriers, Sherman had only 42 F6F Hellcats available.
Nevertheless, he barked into the loudspeaker on USS Essex: “All available fighter pilots
man your planes immediately!”
On Essex, CDR David McCampbell of Fighting Squadron 15 ordered the deck crew to cease
refueling his Hellcat.
From his cockpit, he signaled an immediate launch, and he roared into the sky with a
half-filled tank and only six other Hellcats following him.
McCampbell’s squadron barreled into the first wave of sixty Japanese planes.
In a swirling dogfight, McCampbell shot down nine enemy planes, the greatest kill record
for a U.S. Navy pilot in a single day.
Altogether, Essex’s seven Hellcat pilots claimed 24 kills, bringing down forty percent
of the first wave.
The other undersized American fighter squadrons did just as well.
Princeton’s 12 Hellcats brought down another 34 enemy planes.
Lexington’s 11 fighter planes claimed 13, and four Hellcats from Langley claimed another
5.
Those Japanese pilots who outran the Hellcats reached Sherman’s task group only to receive
a hail of anti-aircraft fire.
Dozens more were brought down.
All told, it had been a veritable massacre of Japanese aviators.
But then, as the attack subsided, one Japanese pilot scored an epic hit.
At 9:49, as USS Princeton turned into the wind to begin recovery operations, a lone
D4Y Judy dive-bomber came barreling toward the carrier, as if from out of nowhere.
At 1,500 feet, the Japanese pilot released his 250-kilogram bomb, which slammed into
the flight deck between the elevators.
The bomb exploded on Princeton’s hangar deck, killing several men in the scullery.
At first, Princeton’s damage didn’t appear dangerous.
Casualties had been minimal and the wreckage superficial.
Unfortunately, a series of secondary explosions soon followed.
On the hangar deck, a fragment from the Japanese bomb ripped open a TBM Avenger, scattering
aviation fuel everywhere.
The scullery fire reached this pool of gasoline, causing the plane to explode.
This detonation caused the carrier’s firehoses to lose their water pressure, preventing the
crew from quelling the blaze.
Slowly but surely, the expanding fire reached five more parked TBMs.
At 10:10, their fuel tanks exploded, followed in quick succession by their ordnance.
LTJG Thomas Mooney was a TBM pilot on USS Princeton.
In fact, it was his TBM that had been ripped open by the Japanese bomb.
At the time of the bomb strike, Mooney was sitting in his squadron’s ready room.
He remembered what happened next.
"I recall that the initial impact was very slight, just sort of a jolt, but it was nothing
that seemed catastrophic.
I thought, ‘Hot damn, we’ve taken a hit; now we get to go home!’
I thought it was nothing—that something hit aft on the ship somewhere—and I thought
to myself, ‘It can’t be significant.’
The door to the passageway that went by the ready room was open, which wasn’t all that
common because the ready room was air conditioned and the rest of the ship was not.
But it seemed like, in a matter of seconds, maybe three seconds, this gigantic fireball
went by the open door—this huge thing.
It looked like a little nuclear explosion.
It just sailed down the passage way.
It was fascinating, unforgettable.
It made absolutely no sound, it was absolutely incredible; I’ve never seen anything like
it.
We just sat there looking at one another saying, ‘What the hell?’
Nothing came over the speakers.
So there was a period, it might have been about two minutes, before I realized that
we were in big trouble."
In an instant, USS Princeton was dead in the water.
Other ships came along side it and began spraying it with water, but unfortunately, the crisis
worsened.
The hangar deck fire reached the fuel storage tanks, and despite the exertions of the crew,
they failed to prevent another secondary explosion from occurring.
At 3:23 P.M., Princeton was again rocked by another violent discharge.
At this point, LTJG Mooney was on the flight deck near the front elevator.
He had been milling around uselessly, until a sailor beckoned him to hold a fire hose.
Mooney and several pilots grabbed one of the hoses and began spraying water into the cavernous
elevator shaft.
Mooney described the next explosion: "A guy hollered at me that there was a hose
that wasn’t being used, so I went over and got a hose to pour water into the elevator
because there was a gasoline storage area under it.
The idea was to keep the thing as cool and wet as possible so that it wouldn’t explode.
I have no idea how long this lasted, maybe it lasted five minutes, maybe half an hour,
but suddenly, there was one enormous rushing sound.
It wasn’t even like an explosion, it was just an incredible rush of air, and the elevator,
which was down on the hangar deck, simply came straight up in front of me and went right
up in the air and went right over the radar mast!
I can’t remember there being any shock.
I don’t remember being knocked out or anything.
I just thought, ‘Whoa, the number one elevator just flew out!’
So we decided at this point that pouring water in there wasn’t going to be necessary."
Mooney did not hear an explosion, but one definitely occurred.
The fuel ignited, throwing up a fiery cloud.
Shrapnel rained like a torrent and several rescue ships—USS Birmingham, Irwin, Morrison,
and Reno—suffered heavy damage from falling debris.
In fact, USS Birmingham lost 229 sailors killed, more than had died on the bomb-struck Princeton.
As Captain
Thomas Inglis recalled, Birmingham looked like a “veritable charnel house of dead,
dying, and wounded.”
After the second explosion, Princeton’s captain ordered the crew to abandon ship.
In groups, the men began going into the water.
Most climbed down ropes or nets, but some made the perilous 75-foot leap into the water
from the flight deck.
Soon, the seas were full of 1,300 panicked crewmen, each splashing for a new home.
Their time adrift wasn’t easy.
The wind blew hard, at 15 knots, and giant swells flung them back into the sides of the
burning carrier.
Mooney climbed down a dangling fire hose before dropping into the water.
Quickly, his misconception about the ease of changing ships was dashed to pieces.
"I had never had any fear of going in the water.
I figured, ‘that's a piece of cake, I know I can swim!’
I figured the water would be nice.
It would be like swimming off Hawaii, but it was not like that at all!
I'll tell you, man, 15 knots of wind in the middle of the ocean is a lot of wind.
When you’re in the water, you just go down and you can’t see anything.
Nothing’s in sight and then you come up—the wave picks you up and you’re up top and
you see, ah, there’s the ship and some people!
And then you go back down and the world goes away."
USS Irwin closed to rescue the frantic mass of splashing sailors, but the rough seas complicated
matters.
At several points, the wreck of Princeton collided with USS Irwin, damaging the tiny
destroyer and crushing men who were unlucky enough to be caught in between the two ships.
Mooney remembered the unforgettable scenes as he waited his turn to climb up Irwin’s
rescue ladders.
"There was a hospital corpsman on the Princeton.
I didn’t know his name, but I saw him in the water, swimming with two people who had
been hurt, two Princeton people who had been in sick bay for some reason.
What he had done, he had taken a rope of some kind and tied it around the waist of each
one, and then he swam in the water with the rope in his teeth.
He was swimming the breast stroke, and dragging these two fellows behind him.
It was just unforgettable!
He was just an incredibly courageous guy, and I have a very, very clear memory of seeing
him.
Then, I got caught between the two ships and the game got really tough because of the rolling
of the ships.
There would be this big sort of upsurge of water as the two ships came together, and
if you were up towards the bow of the Irwin you would get flattened against the Princeton
and there were many people that I saw who were either killed or seriously injured.
Then their bodies would drift down through the rest of us, because they couldn’t do
anything—they couldn’t swim."
After more than an hour in the water, one of Irwin’s cooks arrived on the fantail
and called to Mooney.
He pointed in the distance, directing Mooney to the body of a yellow-helmeted flight deck
director who was face down in the water.
Being an excellent swimmer, Mooney paddled over to the sailor and discovered that he
was still alive.
The brawny cook tied a lasso and tossed it to Mooney, who promptly affixed it to the
unconscious sailor.
After reeling the sailor aboard, the cook tossed the lasso back to Mooney and hauled
him aboard as well.
After coming out of the water, he shook hands with his rescuer, repeating the words, “Thank
you!
Thank you!”
Mooney never did learn his rescuer’s name and years after the war, he was still trying
to discover it.
Altogether, Irwin’s crew rescued 646 crewmen from USS Princeton, for which the ship later
received a Navy Unit Commendation.
At 5 P.M., after all the survivors had been pulled aboard rescue ships, the Navy began
the awkward process of scuttling Princeton.
It took several tries because USS Irwin’s torpedo launchers had been damaged by its
collisions with the carrier.
Eventually, some of USS Reno’s torpedoes made contact, causing another explosion.
At 5:50 P.M., Princeton finally went under for good.
Altogether, 108 sailors from USS Princeton had been killed.
Princeton’s demise was tragic, largely because it came at the very end of Fukudome’s clumsy
airstrike.
The carrier had been hit by one small bomb, but a series of unlucky events sent the ship
under.
In the larger story of Leyte Gulf, the Japanese airstrike against Task Force 38 had been wholly
unsuccessful.
Fukudome’s pilots had sunk only one light carrier in Sherman’s task group, but at
the cost of the majority of their attacking aircraft.
USS Essex, Lexington, and Langley were still operational.
Now, they were freed up to participate in the airstrikes against Kurita’s Center Force
in the Sibuyan Sea.
The nearly flawless defense of Task Force 38 had given the Americans a chance to respond
with a powerful counterpunch.
The loss of USS Princeton would not be in vain.