A productive and rewarding maturity - close though it was for the Samuel B. Roberts - lay far in the future for Bob Copeland's two small children. His wife of four and a half years, Harriet, had been there when all three of his previous ships had been commissioned, from his first command aboard the coal-burning tug, the Pawtucket, to his most recent tour aboard an older destroyer escort, the Wyman. He wanted her there in Houston for the commissioning of the Roberts, and he let her know it, cajoling her in letter after letter to make the long trip from Tacoma. But his efforts at persuasion could not overcome the imperatives of new motherhood. Though she wanted to be there for her husband, Harriet Copeland had an infant daughter and toddler son to care for. And so on the day the Samuel B. Roberts became a Navy warship, Bob Copeland took command of her without the comfort of family. Copeland would continue to chide his wife for missing the commissioning. "I think I overdid it," he later acknowledged. He finally relented when Harriet wrote him, saying, "There's an old saying that one picture is worth ten thousand words, and the enclosed picture will perhaps explain why I wasn't there." Tucked inside the envelope was the front cover of the Saturday Evening Post. It depicted the inside of a firehouse, firemen clambering aboard an engine as it raced out of the station. Their mascot, a Dalmatian, was left sitting on a large red pillow, suckling a litter of puppies as the pumper zoomed off to battle the flames. As Copeland raced off to his own four-alarm fire in the Pacific, he could not be sure he would ever see Harriet and their children again.

Whereas the big ships' bulk was their best insurance against heavy seas, destroyer escorts lived at nature's fickle mercy. As the seas went so went the DEs. In an unpublished 1945 dispatch sent shortly before he was killed by machine-gun fire on Okinawa, Ernie Pyle evoked the precarious seaworthiness of the tiny vessels: "They are rough and tumble little ships. They roll and they plunge. They buck and they twist. They shudder and they fall through space. They are in the air half the time, and under water half the time. Their sailors say they should have flight pay and submarine pay both."

From the gun deck on the fantail of the Fanshaw Bay, situated on the northwest edge of the circular pod of fleeing escort carriers, ship's cook Harold Kight had a front-row seat from which to observe the destroyer screen forming into line for their torpedo run. His battle station was in the handling from below the ship's lone five-inch gun. When the gun was firing he, Jack Frisch, and Warren Whitaker fed projectile and powder cases into the hoist that supplied the crew on the open-mounted "stinger" or "peashooter." Until the enemy got closer the crew that Kight supplied did not have anything to shoot at. But with a clear 180-degree vista off the stern, there was certainly a lot to watch.

Back at the raft Jack Moore, watching the strange ship approach, turned to his shipmates and said, "Men, it looks as if we're going to be picked up by the Japs. We're covered with fuel oil, and they won't be able to tell we're Americans until they get right upon us. They may fire upon us. If they do, act as if you've been hit quickly." The super-structures looked all wrong for an American ship; they sloped to the rear "like an airflow Chrysler."

I am proud to acknowledge the cooperation and friendship that so many veterans of the Battle off Samar offered to me during the several years of research and writing that produced this book. Unfailingly gracious and generous, they made it possible to breath life into events nearly sixty years old. Without their support, this book couldn't have been written.