Transcription
A small American destroyer charged a fleet of four battleships, six heavy cruisers, and 11 destroyers alone. For 3 hours it fought them all, then it sank to the bottom of the Philippine Sea, 4 miles down, and it's been sitting there ever since.
Most people know the Johnston sank. What I want to know is where it ended up, what state it is in, and why nobody has ever gone back for it. The answers to those questions are genuinely strange, and some of them I went back and checked twice before I was sure.
The USS Johnston was a Fletcher-class destroyer built for the United States Navy during World War II. Launched in 1943, the Johnston was 376 ft long and displaced just over 2,000 tons fully loaded. In naval terms, a destroyer is a small ship, fast and lightly armored, designed to escort larger vessels and screen them from attack. The Johnston carried five 5-in guns and 10 torpedo tubes. Against a battleship, those weapons were almost meaningless. Against a fleet of them, they were a joke.
Nobody told Commander Ernest Evans that. Evans was 36 years old, born poor and Cherokee in Oklahoma. He had beaten extraordinary odds just to reach the Naval Academy, graduating in 1931 at a time when the Navy was not welcoming to Native Americans. When the Johnston was commissioned in October 1943 at Seattle, Evans stood before the crew and said something that would later be quoted in every account of what followed. "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." Nobody got off.
Stay with me, cuz what Evans did next is one of the most extraordinary things that happened in the entire Pacific War, and almost nobody outside of naval history circles knows about it. By October 1944, the war in the Pacific was turning. American forces were pushing toward the Philippines. The Japanese navy knew that if the Americans established a foothold there, the war was effectively over. So, they gambled everything on one last major operation, the Battle of Leyte Gulf. It was the largest naval battle in history, and one small part of it, fought off the island of Samar on October the 25th, would involve the Johnston.
That morning, a Japanese task force that had slipped through the night undetected appeared on the horizon. The force included the Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, along with three other battleships, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and 11 destroyers. They were heading directly toward a group of six small American escort carriers, and their screen of three destroyers and four destroyer escorts. One of those destroyers was the Johnston. The escort carriers were slow, thin-hulled ships designed to support ground troops. They were not built to fight battleships. Their aircraft were loaded with bombs for ground attack, not armor-piercing shells. If the Japanese fleet reached them, they would be sunk within minutes. Behind the carriers were thousands of American troops landing on the beaches of Leyte.
Evans did not wait for orders. He turned the Johnston toward the enemy fleet and pushed the engines to maximum speed. This is the bit that got me. The Johnston did not have orders to attack. There was no plan. Evans simply looked at what was coming, looked at what was behind him, and decided, one destroyer against a fleet. He laid smoke to shield the carriers, then charged directly at the Japanese line, and launched all 10 of his torpedoes at the cruiser Kumano at a range of just over 9 mi, well within the reach of the Yamato's 18-in guns. One torpedo struck Kumano and blew off the bow. The cruiser fell out of the Japanese formation, then the Japanese guns found the Johnston. Three 18-in shells from the Yamato hit the Johnston in quick succession. The blast destroyed the engine room, knocked out three of the five guns, blew two fingers off Evans' hand, and stripped him of his shirt. Evans went below, bandaged his own hand, came back up and kept fighting.
For the next 2 hours, the Johnston fired everything it had. When the torpedoes were gone, it used the remaining guns. When fire knocked out communications to the steering room, Evans moved to the fantail of the ship and shouted steering orders down through an open hatch to men turning the rudder by hand. The Johnston made simulated torpedo runs at Japanese ships just to force them to take evasive action and buy time. It was hit repeatedly. It kept firing. The Japanese admiral later wrote that his ships had been attacked by what he assumed was a heavy cruiser. It was a destroyer, a third the size, fighting with two working guns.
Here is what nobody expected. The Johnston's attack and the attacks by the handful of other small ships alongside it so confused the Japanese commander that he made a decision that defied all military logic. Keep going. I will get to that. After nearly 3 hours of continuous combat, the Johnston was finished. The guns were silent. The engines were gone. The ship was burning and listing badly. At 9:45 in the morning, Evans gave the order to abandon ship. As the crew went over the side, survivors reported seeing the crew of a passing Japanese destroyer, the Yukikaze, come on deck and salute the sinking Johnston. Evans himself made it to a life raft. He was never seen again. At least 90 of his crew vanished with him. Of the Johnston's complement of 327 men, 186 died. The Johnston sank at 10:10 in the morning, October the 25th, 1944.
And here is the thing that stopped the whole Japanese operation. The charge by the Johnston and the other small ships had been so aggressive, so unexpected, so relentless that the Japanese Admiral, facing what he believed was a much larger American force, turned his fleet around and withdrew. He retreated with the Yamato and the remaining ships without ever reaching the carriers. The American landing operation continued. The Philippines were taken. The Japanese Navy never recovered. The Johnston alone had helped turn the tide.
The wreck was not found for 75 years. In October 2019, a research vessel owned by the late Paul Allen located something at the very edge of its operating depth in the Philippine Trench. Wreckage consistent with a Fletcher-class destroyer, but too deep to fully survey. The question remained, was it the Johnston or the USS Hoel, a sister ship lost in the same battle? On March the 31st, 2021, the answer came. Explorer Victor Vescovo piloted a private submersible to the site on what became the deepest wreck dive in history. The submersible descended for 4 hours through total darkness to reach the bottom. And there, in high-definition footage seen for the first time in 77 years, was the hull number 557, USS Johnston, confirmed.
What the cameras found was not what anyone expected. The Johnston is sitting largely upright on the seafloor at a depth of 21,180 ft. That is 4 mi down. It is 62% deeper than the Titanic, and one of the deepest wrecks ever found. The 5-in gun turrets are still in place. The torpedo racks are still visible on the deck. The bridge structure is intact. There was almost no biological growth, no encrustation. The wreck looks in many places like a ship that simply stopped moving. The extreme depth preserves everything. There is so little oxygen at that depth that marine organisms cannot survive in the numbers needed to break down the metal. The Johnston is not rotting. It is sitting in the dark largely as it was on the morning it went down, surrounded by the battle damage that killed it.
So, why has nobody gone back? Why has nobody properly explored it? The answer is simpler and stranger than you might think. Almost nothing on Earth can reach it. The submersible that confirmed the wreck's identity, the deep submergence vehicle limiting factor, is one of a tiny handful of vessels in the world with the capability to dive to that depth. It is privately owned. The dive took most of a day just to descend and return. There is no permanent human presence at 21,000 ft. There are no remotely operated vehicles in regular service that operate at that depth. The technology required to work down there does not exist in any practical commercial form, but even if it did, the Johnston cannot be touched.
Under the sunken military craft act of 2004, every United States Navy wreck worldwide is protected by American law, regardless of where it sank. The Johnston is formally designated as a war grave. 186 men are still on that ship. No salvage, no recovery, no artifact removal. The law is unambiguous. Vescovo's team gave all of their footage, sonar data, and field notes to the United States Navy and made nothing public without authorization. A three-dimensional model was later produced by naval historian Park Stevenson from the survey data. That model showed clearly how much damage the Johnston absorbed before it finally went under. Multiple direct hits, structural failures across the entire ship. The Johnston had been in the process of being destroyed for 3 hours before it finally sank.
The wreck is expected to remain largely intact for centuries. Nothing down there accelerates decay. No light, no warmth, no oxygen to speak of. The Johnston will outlast almost every monument ever built to honor it. So, that is where the USS Johnston is, 4 miles down in the Philippine Trench, sitting in the dark, guns still in their places, whole number still readable on the bow. It is too deep for any conventional salvage operation that has ever been attempted. It is a legally protected war grave, and it is in water so cold and so still that it may look almost exactly like this for the next 500 years.
A ship crewed by 327 men took on the most powerful fleet Japan could put to sea and refused to run. The captain lost two fingers in the first exchange and kept giving orders. When the steering failed, the crew turned the rudder by hand. When the torpedoes were gone, they used the guns. When the guns were gone, they made dummy torpedo runs just to keep the enemy guessing. The Japanese admiral turned his fleet around and went home. The Johnston went 4 miles down. It is still there.
If you want to see more videos like this, let me know in the comments and I will keep making them.