Rescued at sea

For 70 years now, Glen Huffman has been reliving one of the largest naval battles of all time.

"You lie awake and you think about things," Hoffman said, explaining why his memory of the battle is so clear. He's thought about it hundreds of times over these seven decades. Hoffman is a survivor of the first USS Samuel B. Roberts, a destroyer escort that was sunk during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. He was 19 years old.

At least eight books have been written about the battle, including "The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors." Huffman has been collecting the books and has owned some autographed copies.

But for years he didn't talk about it.

After a career with the phone company in Illinois, Huffman retired to Bella Vista in 1985. In 1996, he and his first wife, who died in 1998, were traveling to visit friends from Bella Vista who spent part of the year in Texas. They told him about the Admiral Nimitz Museum in Fredricksburg, Texas.

In the museum, he saw a photograph of a moment he remembered clearly.

The photo portrayed the carrier USS Gambier Bay hit during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. When he said he remembered seeing the scene in person, a woman who overheard the comment asked Huffman about it. After learning he had been on the Sammy B., she wanted to know if he had signed up at the front desk for the USS Samuel B. Roberts Survivors Association.

Her brother had been an officer on the same ship. That was the first he had heard of the organization that was to become a big part of his life.

Navy career

Huffman received his draft notice just after his 18th birthday in 1943. He hadn't graduated from high school yet, but he was ready to go. Traveling with a small group of inductees, they were given a choice of service branches. Another inductee answered first.

"I'd rather ride than walk, so I'll join the Navy," he said. Huffman thought that reasoning was sound.

After his training, he was assigned to a brand new ship, the USS Samuel B. Roberts, a destroyer escort.

A destroyer escort, he explained, is smaller than a destroyer. It was designed to combat submarines. Because of the light-weight construction, they were often called "tin cans."

He was on the shakedown cruise of the ship they called the Sammy B., and traveled on it to Boston for a coat of camouflage paint. Leaving Boston the new boat hit a whale and had to stop at Norfolk for repairs. Eventually, the Sammy B. became part what became known as "MacArthur's Navy." General Douglas MacArthur was making good on his vow to return to the Philippines, Huffman explained.

The infamous Taffy 3

The ships assigned to that area were divided into three groups: Huffman on the Sammy B. became part of Task Unit 77.4.3 -- radio call name Taffy 3, which was composed of 13 ships. Taffy 1 and Taffy 2 had similar numbers. There were part of the Seventh Fleet.

On Oct. 25, the U.S. Third Fleet, commanded by Adm. William "Bull" Halsey, was drawn north by what turned out to be a decoy, Huffman said. That left the San Bernardino Strait unguarded when a large Japanese force came through and found Taffy 3.

Taffy 3's part of the battle didn't last long -- but it had great impact on the fight because the Japanese armada thought they faced a much larger force. As the Japanese force made up of battleships, including the super battleship Yamato which was so big it displaced more than all of Taffy 3's ships combined, cruisers and destroyers approached, the American carriers scrambled to launch their airplanes. Planes from Taffy 2 were launched and joined in the battle, but the ships were too far away to help. Taffy 1 was even further away to the south.

According to the battle narrative online, Lt. Cmdr. Robert W. Copeland on the Sammy B. sized up the situation, which he passed to his crew over the public-address circuit: "This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can."

He followed a sister ship, the destroyer USS Johnston, in a battle charge. At 4,000 yards the Sammy B., fired a volley of torpedoes at a Japanese cruiser, which struck the ship, causing it to fall behind the other Japanese ships.

The Sammy B. then turned her attention to a heavy cruiser that was firing on the aircraft carriers. The Sammy B. met the cruiser broadside and began to rake the much larger ship. Being so close to the Sammy B., the Japanese ship had difficulty firing its larger guns at the little ship.

For the next 35 minutes the broadside battle raged, with another U.S. ship joining the broadside on the other side of the cruiser. The action crippled the Japanese ship.

The swarm of airplanes and the tactics of the destroyers and destroyer escorts lead the Japanese admiral to conclude he faced a much larger force, so he retreated -- but not before sinking a number of U.S. ships, including the Sammy B. and the Johnston. The Johnston's commander, Cmdr. Ernest Evans, who died in the battle, was awarded the Medal of Honor.

The actions of Taffy 3, which received a Presidential Unit Citation, helped protect the beachhead of MacArthur's landing in the Philippines.

Abandon ship

Throughout the battle, Huffman was close to the captain, relaying orders to the gunners. Then one gun, along with the eight men who manned it, was blown off the Sammy B. Not long after, the captain gave the order to abandon ship.

According to several online battle narratives, the order to abandon ship came after Japanese shells disabled both engines, leaving the ship dead in the water.

Huffman didn't bother with the stairs. He climbed over the side. He was already wearing a life vest, but when he saw an extra belt, he grabbed it. In training, they had been taught to swim away from the ship because it would draw down anyone around it when it sank. He stopped swimming long enough to watch a shipmate who he knew could not swim, go down on the ship's fantail.

"He didn't make it," he said simply.

As the ship sank, the sailors in the water saluted.

Another shipmate did make it. When they met in the water Huffman gave him the extra life belt. Eventually they saw a life raft from the ship floating nearby.

The life raft was filled with wounded. It held 16 men and many more were in the water holding on to ropes to stay close to the raft. A boatswain's mate who was nearby had survived an earlier sea battle. He advised each sailor to find a partner. There was no telling how long they would be in the water, so they had to take turns sleeping. While one sailor slept, the other watched out for him.

They were in the water for 52 hours. Huffman saw one shark swimming near by and heard that two sailors were probably lost to sharks, although he's not sure about that.

When he was rescued Huffman weighed only 96 pounds. He was anemic and dehydrated.

"I couldn't have lasted another night," he said. Later, when he was sent home on survivor's leave, his family assumed he was AWOL. They had been told he was missing in action and no one had told them that he was rescued.

His partner in the water, Whit Felt, the sailor who had received the extra life belt, wrote about the rescue for the survivors association newsletter. What they didn't know at the time was how close they came to not being rescued. The ship that picked them up had been ordered back to Leyte, Felt wrote years later.

There were also Japanese survivors in the water and the fear was that they could overpower the rescuers and commandeer the ship. The commander opted to look a little longer for American survivors. When he saw figures in the water ahead, he knew how to identify them.

Over the bull horn he asked the question, "Who won the World Series?" When the answer came back, "St. Louis," the rescue began.

Huffman was one of 134 survivors out of a crew of 224. In 1982, when the Survivors Association started to meet they were actively looking for all survivors, but they never would have found Huffman. In the Navy he had to use his given name, Ernest, but in civilian life he only used his middle name, Glen.

He left the service in 1946 because he was tired of standing in line and taking orders. He started working outside for the phone company, but eventually worked his way into a management position and earned a good retirement.

Silence broken

"I never talked about it," he said of his naval career.

It was only after he joined the Bella Vista Fly Tyers and met other veterans -- including two who were actually involved in the battle on other ships -- that he started to realize he had lived through history and history needs to be remembered. That was when he finally started to talk about his experience.

He presented his story to the Fly Tyers, the Lions Club, and several other groups, but he's through presenting for now. His memories have been carefully catalogued in a series of loose-leaf notebooks that he keeps along with a small library of books about the battle and a shadow box that houses his medals.

The last Survivor's Association newsletter, from April 2014, listed only seven survivors still alive. All of them were to be invited to the decommissioning of the latest Samuel B. Roberts, in May of this year. The ship is the third to carry that name and Huffman hopes to go see it taken out of service.

He wants to bring a copy of a painting made by another survivor and see the bronze plaque that lists the crew of the original Sammy B. -- in memory of one of the largest naval surface battles of all time.