Apelham

Before he ever had his own ship, Ernest Evans watched a fleet run. Java Sea, 1942. Evans was skippering an old four-stack destroyer, the USS Alden, when the Allied force in the Dutch East Indies was picked apart by the Japanese and the survivors scattered. He came out of that campaign with a conviction he never let go of. On October 27, 1943, he stood on the deck of the brand new destroyer USS Johnston and told his crew what kind of ship she was going to be. "This is going to be a fighting ship. I intend to go in harm's way, and anyone who doesn't want to go along had better get off right now." One year later, almost to the day, he got to prove it. October 25, 1944. Off the island of Samar in the Philippines. Halsey had taken the American battleships north chasing a decoy, and the only thing standing between the Japanese Center Force and the invasion beaches at Leyte was a task unit called Taffy 3. Six slow escort carriers built on merchant hulls, three destroyers, and four destroyer escorts. Thin plating. Small guns. Aircraft armed with depth charges because nobody expected a surface fight. Out of the rain squall came 23 Japanese warships. Four battleships, including Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, throwing shells the size of a compact car. Six heavy cruisers. Two light cruisers. Eleven destroyers. The Johnston was the closest American ship to them. Evans did not wait for orders. He turned toward the fleet, laid smoke, and ran in alone at flank speed while his gunners fired everything they had. He closed to under five miles and put a full spread of torpedoes into the heavy cruiser Kumano, tearing off her bow and knocking her out of the battle before he turned back into the smoke. Then Yamato's group found him. Three battleship shells and three smaller ones ripped through the Johnston in seconds. Half her engine power gone, a gun mount gone, the bridge wrecked. The blast took two fingers off Evans' left hand and blew the shirt clean off his back. He waved off the corpsmen and told them to go work on his crew. He wrapped a handkerchief around his hand and kept fighting. With the bridge destroyed and steering control shot away, he ran the rest of the battle standing on the open fantail, shouting rudder orders down a hatch to sailors turning the ship by hand. When the escort carrier Gambier Bay came under fire, Evans took a crippled destroyer with one engine and pointed it at a Japanese heavy cruiser to pull the shooting onto himself. Later he put the Johnston between a line of enemy destroyers and the carriers and drove them off. He was the last one afloat out there. The Japanese eventually ringed the Johnston and pounded her until she stopped. She went down at 10:10 in the morning after about three hours of fighting a force that outweighed her a hundred times over. Survivors in the water said a Japanese destroyer captain came past, stood at attention, and saluted as she sank. They floated for roughly two days before anyone found them. Sharks got into the rafts. Of the 327 men aboard, 186 never came home. Evans was seen going over the stern. He was never seen again. And Kurita, who had battleships in range of a beachhead full of American transports, turned around and went home. He thought he was fighting fleet carriers and cruisers. He was fighting men like Evans. He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously, the first Native American sailor in the United States Navy to receive it. Cherokee and Creek, born in Pawnee, Oklahoma, Annapolis class of 1931. His crew called him Chief. In 2021, a deep sea expedition found the Johnston sitting upright on the bottom of the Philippine Trench, 21,180 feet down. Hull number 557 still readable on the bow. The deepest shipwreck ever located at the time. Still out there in harm's way.