USS St. Lo (CVE-63): the first ship sunk by an organized kamikaze attack

USS St. Lo (CVE-63) erupts after a kamikaze of Lt. Seki Yukio’s Shikishima unit crashed through her flight deck off Samar on 25 October 1944. Fires set off bombs and torpedoes in the hangar and she sank within about half an hour; more than 100 of her crew died. Photo: U.S. Navy, NARA 80-G-270516, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · Kamikaze, 1944–1945

USS St. Lo (CVE-63)

A small carrier that fought battleships in the morning and was sunk by one Zero before noon: the first warship lost to an organized special attack.

USS St. Lo (CVE-63) was one of the 50 Casablanca-class escort carriers built in Henry J. Kaiser’s yard at Vancouver, Washington: small, slow “jeep carriers” on merchant-ship lines, meant to escort convoys and support landings. She was laid down as Chapin Bay, commissioned as Midway and renamed St. Lo only on 10 October 1944, two weeks before she was lost. On 25 October 1944, as part of the escort carrier group known as Taffy 3, she survived more than two hours of fire from Japanese battleships and cruisers off Samar. Then, at 10:51, a bomb-carrying Zero of the Shikishima Special Attack Unit crashed through her flight deck. The bombs and torpedoes in her hangar exploded, and she sank in about half an hour.

She was the first warship sunk by an organized kamikaze attack. Of the 889 men aboard, 113 were killed or missing and about 30 more died of their wounds. The Japanese navy credited her sinking to the unit’s leader, Lt. Seki Yukio, and the result persuaded the navy to make the special attack its standard method. For the men of St. Lo it was the end of a ship they had known for a year; for both navies it was the beginning of the kamikaze war.

This page follows St. Lo from the shipyard to the sea off Samar, from the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, the ship’s association and survivors’ accounts, and sets out what is known of her losses. The morning’s wider story is told in Chapter 2, and the unit that struck her on the page for Seki Yukio and the Shikishima unit.

Chapin Bay, Midway, St. Lo

The ship was laid down on 23 January 1943 at the Kaiser Shipbuilding yard in Vancouver, Washington, under the name Chapin Bay; escort carriers were named for bays and sounds. On 3 April 1943 she was renamed Midway, after the battle of June 1942, and she was launched on 17 August 1943 and commissioned at Astoria, Oregon, on 23 October 1943 with Capt. Francis J. McKenna in command. She displaced 7,800 tons, was 512 feet 3 inches long and could make 19 knots. Her designed crew was 860; she carried a single 5-inch gun, 16 40-mm guns and a composite squadron of fighters and torpedo bombers.

On 10 October 1944 she was renamed again. The Navy wanted the name Midway for a new large carrier, the future CV-41, and chose for the escort carrier the name of the Norman town of Saint-Lô, taken by American troops on 18 July 1944 after one of the hardest battles of the hedgerow campaign. The story of that battle is told in our D-Day and Normandy collection. The ship had just over two weeks to live under her new name.

A year of escort work

After shakedown on the West Coast she made two voyages to Pearl Harbor and one to Australia carrying replacement aircraft. In June 1944 she joined Carrier Support Group 1 for the Marianas campaign, provided air cover for the transports, struck Saipan on 15 June and fought off several air attacks without damage. She operated off Tinian from 23 to 28 July, supported the Morotai landings in mid-September and then operated off the Palaus, returning to Seeadler Harbor in the Admiralties on 3 October. On 12 October she sailed for the Philippines and arrived off Leyte on 17 October, where her aircraft supported the Ranger landings and the operations around Tacloban.

For the Leyte landings the escort carriers were organized in three task units, known by their radio call signs as Taffy 1, 2 and 3. St. Lo was in Taffy 3, Rear Adm. Clifton A. F. Sprague’s group of six escort carriers screened by three destroyers and four destroyer escorts, operating east of Samar to give air support over the beaches.

Morning: the battle off Samar

At 06:47 on 25 October Sprague learned that a large Japanese force was approaching from the north-west. It was Vice Adm. Kurita Takeo’s Center Force, four battleships, eight cruisers and twelve destroyers, which had come through San Bernardino Strait in the night. At 06:58 the Japanese opened fire. Taffy 3 turned away, laid smoke and launched every aircraft it had, while its destroyers and destroyer escorts attacked the battleships with torpedoes and guns.

St. Lo fought through the morning. By 08:00 Japanese cruisers were within 18,000 yards and she was firing back with her single 5-inch gun. At 08:30 five Japanese destroyers closed from the starboard quarter, and she exchanged fire with them for about an hour. At 09:15 they launched a premature torpedo attack: an Avenger strafed and exploded two torpedoes, and a 5-inch shell deflected a third. At about 09:30 St. Lo hit a retreating destroyer amidships. Then Kurita turned away. Taffy 3 had lost the destroyers Hoel and Johnston, the destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts and the carrier Gambier Bay, but St. Lo was undamaged.

10:51

At about 10:50, as the carriers were recovering and rearming their aircraft, a new kind of attack began. The DANFS entry describes a concentrated air attack and a fight with suicide planes lasting about forty minutes, in which every escort carrier of the group except Fanshaw Bay was damaged. They were the five bomb-carrying Zeros of the Shikishima unit from Mabalacat on Luzon, led by Lt. Seki Yukio, with their escort. Earlier that morning other special attack aircraft, from Davao, had hit Santee and Suwannee in Taffy 1 to the south.

At 10:51 one Zero crashed through St. Lo’s flight deck. Its bomb and burning fuel reached the hangar, where aircraft were being rearmed, and set off the torpedo and bomb magazine. A series of explosions followed. The ship was engulfed in flames, listed and sank about half an hour later, leaving a column of dense black smoke. The National Naval Aviation Museum, quoting the official history, describes her as leaving “a cloud of dense black smoke to mark her watery grave.”

The men in the water

The four surviving escorts of Taffy 3, the destroyer Heermann and the destroyer escorts Dennis, John C. Butler and Raymond, were ordered to pick up survivors. Dennis alone picked up 434 men. Some were burned or wounded by the explosions. Heermann and Dennis, both badly damaged in the morning’s gun battle, took their survivors to Kossol Passage in the Palaus; John C. Butler and Raymond went to Leyte Gulf.

Of the 889 men aboard, 113 were killed or missing, according to the figures cited from the historian Smith (2014), and about 30 more died of their wounds; the National WWII Museum gives 746 survivors. The eyewitness account of Electrician’s Mate Orville Bethard, recorded by the museum, describes the explosions, the ship listing to port and capsizing, and his rescue by Dennis.

Who struck her

The Japanese navy announced that Lt. Seki Yukio, leader of the Shikishima unit, had struck an aircraft carrier and sunk it, and credited him with St. Lo; he was promoted two ranks after death. American accounts treat the identification as probable: the escort pilots saw a carrier hit and sunk, and St. Lo was the only one sunk, but which of the five Zeros it was cannot be shown. Some accounts say the Zero that hit St. Lo had been aiming at another carrier and turned when it was damaged by anti-aircraft fire. The five young men of the Shikishima unit died in the attack; the others damaged Kalinin Bay, Kitkun Bay and White Plains.

The first, and what followed

St. Lo was not the first ship struck by a Japanese aircraft deliberately crashed: HMAS Australia had been hit off Leyte on 21 October by a single plane, an attack the Australian official history counts as the first suicide hit and Samuel Eliot Morison called “not an organised attack.” But she was the first warship sunk by a unit formed for the purpose, and the success of the Shikishima unit was decisive inside the Japanese navy. On 26 October Vice Adm. Ōnishi Takijirō became chief of staff of the combined land-based air forces in the Philippines, and the special attack became their standard method.

Two more escort carriers were sunk by kamikazes in the months that followed: Ommaney Bay in the Sulu Sea on 4 January 1945, with 93 killed, and Bismarck Sea off Iwo Jima on 21 February 1945, with 318 lost. No ship larger than an escort carrier was sunk by kamikazes in the whole war, as the US Strategic Bombing Survey found in 1946. The small, thin-skinned escort carriers, with fuel and ordnance in open hangars, were the kind of ship that a single aircraft and a 250-kg bomb could destroy.

Memory

St. Lo received the Presidential Unit Citation for the battle off Samar, as part of Taffy 3, and four battle stars for her service. Her survivors formed an association that kept the ship’s history and held reunions for decades. Their accounts, and the photographs of the explosion taken from neighbouring ships, are among the best-known images of the kamikaze war: the hero photograph on this page, National Archives 80-G-270516, was taken within minutes of the hit.