How the USS Samuel B Roberts DE 413 fought battleships

A destroyer escort was not built to fight a battleship. She was built to shepherd convoys and hunt submarines, cheaply and in quantity, and the design reflects exactly that.

On the morning of 25 October 1944, off Samar in the Philippines, the Samuel B. Roberts attacked a Japanese surface force that included battleships and heavy cruisers. She did it deliberately.

How it happened

The American escort carrier group known as Taffy 3 was operating off Samar, supporting the landings. It was a light formation: small slow escort carriers converted from merchant hulls, with destroyers and destroyer escorts screening them.

A powerful Japanese surface force came through San Bernardino Strait and found them.

The mismatch was severe. Escort carriers made eighteen knots on a good day. The Japanese force included Yamato, the largest battleship ever built. Against fourteen inch and eighteen inch guns, the Americans had five inch guns and torpedoes.

What the escorts did

They attacked.

The destroyers and destroyer escorts went in to make torpedo attacks and to lay smoke between the enemy and the carriers, which is a way of saying they put themselves between the guns and the ships they were protecting.

Roberts closed to a range where her five inch guns could actually do something, fired torpedoes, and kept firing her guns until they were destroyed. Accounts describe her expending an enormous proportion of her ammunition in a short time, and one of her gun mounts continuing to fire after the power to it failed.

She was hit heavily and sank that morning. Something like eighty-nine of her crew were lost.

Why it mattered

The Japanese force turned away.

The reasons are argued about by historians and they are not simple. Confusion about what they were facing, the aggression of the American attacks, the smoke, the aircraft, damage taken, and decisions made by the Japanese commander that are still debated.

What is not seriously disputed is that a much weaker force prevented a much stronger one from getting in among the escort carriers and the transports behind them.

The nickname attached to Roberts afterwards, the destroyer escort that fought like a battleship, comes out of that action.

What she actually was

A John C. Butler class destroyer escort. Around 1,350 tons, two five inch guns, a torpedo mount, and depth charges. Crew of around two hundred and twenty.

To put that in some order, Yamato displaced roughly fifty times as much.

Destroyer escorts were built in large numbers precisely because they were cheap and quick to build, and because the Atlantic convoy war needed hulls more than it needed quality. That they ended up in a surface action against heavy ships is an accident of where the war went.

The part I would emphasise

It is easy to write about this action in a way that makes it sound like a film, and the sailors who were there did not experience it as one.

What actually happened is that a group of men in a small, thin skinned, lightly armed ship understood clearly that they were going to be hit, and went in anyway because the alternative was letting the carriers behind them be destroyed.

That is a different thing from bravado. It is a calculation, made quickly, by people who knew the arithmetic.

On the wreck

The wreck of Samuel B. Roberts was located in 2022 at a depth of around six thousand eight hundred metres, which made her the deepest shipwreck ever surveyed at the time.

She is DE-413. A later Samuel B. Roberts, FFG-58, struck a mine in the Persian Gulf in 1988 and survived, and that ship's damage control effort is studied in its own right. Two ships, two different stories, and they get conflated more often than they should.