Read Down to the Sea for Free Online Page A

close to making a similar sacrifice during the Battle of Midway in June 1942. After being struck by several enemy torpedoes, the aircraft carrier Yorktown lost power and went dead in the water. The crew abandoned the badly listing ship, but the carrier somehow stayed afloat through the night. The next morning a 170-man salvage party went aboard in a last-ditch effort to save the vessel. Brought alongside was the destroyer Hammann, which tied up to the crippled carrier’s starboard side to furnish pumps and electrical power. Shortly after 3:00 P.M. , a Japanese submarine lurking nearby released a salvo of torpedoes that churned toward Yorktown ’s starboard beam. Standing lookout watch on Monaghan ’s bow, Candelaria spotted the white wakes in the water. He looked up toward the bridge, where he saw standing on an outside platform Lieutenant Commander William Burford, who had earned the nickname “Wild Bill” as a result of his aggressive attack on the submarine at Pearl Harbor. Before Candelaria could sound the alarm, another lookout yelled, “Torpedoes!” Almost immediately, Monaghan sped up. To his disbelief, Candelaria realized Burford was trying to maneuver Monaghan into the path of the torpedoes to keep the aircraft carrier from being hit. Had he succeeded, Candelaria knew, the bow would have been blown off and “I wouldn’t be here,” but the spread of torpedoes missed Monaghan . Two impacted Yorktown, sealing her fate, and a third struck Hammann amidships, breaking the destroyer’s back in a fiery explosion and causing her to sink in less than a minute, killing many of her crew.
    Now, eight months after that near miss and with a new skipper in command, Lieutenant Commander Peter H. Horn, all hands aboard Monaghan knew the torpedo run on the enemy cruisers was a suicide mission. In all likelihood, they would be blown out of the water before reaching torpedo range. At best, they would provide a diversion, their deaths serving as a delaying action.
    In the engine room, the chief engineer went down the line of men who worked under him, shaking their hands. “I should have sent you to diesel school,” the chief told Machinist’s Mate 1st Class Ernest Stahlberg. Had he done so, they both knew, Stahlberg would have been “in the States right now.”
    The chief and others aboard ship—from mess cooks to gun crews—were saying their goodbyes. They all figured they were about to die one way or the other, either after Monaghan received a hit from an enemy cruiser or when they abandoned ship in freezing seas, where they would last only minutes before hypothermia set in. “We were goners,” Candelaria remembered.
    As the destroyers bore in, the Japanese ships fired nonstop at them, “smothering them with splashes” from near misses. To observers on the other U.S. ships, it “seemed impossible” that the three destroyers would survive.
    Topside on Monaghan, Seaman 1st Class Joseph Guio Jr., of Holliday’s Cove, West Virginia—25 miles west of Pittsburgh—would not have disagreed with the prevailing pessimism. Having turned twenty-five a week earlier, Guio was older than many of his shipmates. A husky six-footer, Guio had worked in the steel industry since high school. Although defense industry deferments were available to steelworkers, Guio had walked into a Navy recruiting office three months after Pearl Harbor and signed up. After boot camp, he went to gunnery school in Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Illinois, graduating with a final mark of 93.2 (out of 100). His battle station was a forward 5-inch deck gun. It was from there Guio and the other dozen men in his gun crewwere slinging everything they had at the charging enemy ships—fifteen 55-pound rounds per minute—and “boy, what a sight” Guio had as the opposing forces took dead aim on each other like Dodge City gunslingers.
    The Japanese flagship,