Small Boys, Big Guns

Six aircraft carriers with no armour. Three tin-can destroyers. Against the largest battleship fleet ever built. The internet says they charged, and won. It sounds impossible. So we pulled the records.

October 25, 1944, at dawn off the island of Samar. A small American group called Taffy 3, six thin-skinned escort carriers guarding the invasion beaches, looked up to see the horizon fill with the Imperial Japanese Navy: four battleships including the Yamato, the biggest warship on Earth, eight cruisers, eleven destroyers. Their guns could kill from twenty miles away. The Americans' biggest gun reached seven. It was the worst mismatch in the history of naval war.

And then the destroyers did the unthinkable. They turned and charged straight at the battleships. Commander Ernest Evans drove USS Johnston into the smoke and the shellfire, closed the range, and put a torpedo into a heavy cruiser, blowing off her bow. The little ships laid smoke, dodged shell columns the size of buildings, and attacked again and again. Johnston, Hoel, and the destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts were sunk. So was the escort carrier Gambier Bay. More than a thousand Americans died.

But after two hours, the Japanese admiral turned his fleet around and retreated. He was sure that anything attacking him this fiercely had to be the main American fleet. It wasn't. It was a handful of the smallest ships in the Navy. As the Johnston went down, a Japanese destroyer captain saluted her crew.

Verdict: NOT BS. The smallest ships took on the biggest guns, and turned them back. Admiral Nimitz called Taffy 3's survival nothing short of a special dispensation from the Almighty.

The receipts are at bskiller.com/reels.

Sources: Naval History and Heritage Command (US Navy), National WWII Museum, US Naval Institute.