Eighteen thousand feet down, two hundred miles from Christmas Island, a destroyer sits upright on the floor of the Indian Ocean, most of her still in one piece. Near the stern there is a dark hole where the fatal bomb went in. In the late summer of twenty twenty-three, an Australian Navy support ship called Stoker passed a sonar beam across that patch of seabed, and found her. Nobody had seen her in eighty-one years. No American saw her sink. The United States Navy declared every man aboard presumed dead on the twenty-fifth of November nineteen forty-five without knowing where she lay, how she died, or who had killed her. The only film of her last minutes was shot by the enemy, and for more than twenty-five years the record credited the wrong Japanese cruiser.

Her name was USS Edsall. She was a Clemson class four-piper, launched in Philadelphia in nineteen twenty, and in January nineteen forty-two her own navy had rated her unfit for combat. On the afternoon of Sunday, the first of March nineteen forty-two, two Japanese battleships and two heavy cruisers, the same four ships that had escorted the carriers to Pearl Harbor, chased her for the better part of ninety minutes. They fired two hundred ninety-seven fourteen inch shells, one hundred thirty-two six inch, eight hundred forty-four eight inch and sixty-two five inch. One thousand three hundred and thirty-five rounds. The Japanese records allow for perhaps one hit during the chase, and the Navy's own historian calls even that one doubtful. It took twenty-six carrier dive bombers to stop her. This is the clock of that afternoon, and what it took to kill a ship the Japanese remembered as the dancing mouse.

Oh four thirty, Sunday, the first of March. Two hundred miles south of Christmas Island, in the dark, the seas have finally dropped enough for boat work. The oiler USS Pecos makes a lee with her long hull, and the destroyers Whipple and Edsall begin passing across the survivors of USS Langley, the Navy's first aircraft carrier, bombed and abandoned two days earlier while trying to deliver thirty-two P forty fighters to Java. Edsall has one hundred seventy-seven of Langley's men aboard, Whipple three hundred eight. Before the boats go over the side, Edsall buries one of them at sea: Lieutenant Walter Bailey, Langley's gunnery officer, who had taken bomb fragments in the chest and never woke up.

Why a twenty-one year old destroyer was doing this in the dark takes eleven weeks to explain. In December nineteen forty-one the United States Asiatic Fleet had one heavy cruiser, Houston, one elderly light cruiser, Marblehead, and thirteen destroyers, all of them Clemson class four-pipers. Edsall spent the first two months of the war escorting convoys between Australia and Java. On the twenty-third of January she attacked a submarine contact in the Howard Channel outside Darwin, in forty-eight feet of water, and one of her own depth charges detonated early, under her stern. The blast damaged a shaft, a screw and the rudder. Her stern leaked. Her top speed dropped from thirty-five knots to about twenty-seven, and the Navy rated her unfit for combat and put her on escort duty out of Tjilatjap, the one port on the south coast of Java that could take a ship the size of Langley. That rating kept her out of the Battle of the Java Sea. It also made her available to meet Langley, which turned out to be worse.

Langley came up from Australia with thirty-two P forty E fighters on deck, thirty-three Army pilots and twelve crew chiefs, and garbled orders put her off Java in broad daylight with no air cover, screened by two destroyers with one three inch anti-aircraft gun each. At eleven forty on the twenty-seventh of February, sixteen Mitsubishi G four M bombers from Bali found her. Commander Robert McConnell dodged two bombing runs. On the third the Japanese bracketed every direction he could turn, and Langley took five hits and three near misses. She burned, went dead in the water, and was abandoned at thirteen thirty-two. The destroyers left her burning and ran south with nearly five hundred rescued men between them. Rear Admiral William Glassford, the senior American naval officer on Java, would not let them carry the wounded on to Australia, because he did not want the Navy accused of abandoning the Dutch. The survivors were to go across to Pecos at Christmas Island instead, and when Japanese bombers appeared over the island on the twenty-eighth, the transfer was pushed out to sea, into heavy weather, and into the small hours of the first of March.

Oh eight fifteen. The last boat is hoisted in. Pecos now carries close to seven hundred men. Edsall keeps thirty-one of Langley's pilots and ten ground crew, because her orders are to take them back to Tjilatjap to meet twenty-seven crated P forties arriving on the freighter Sea Witch. Donald Kehn, who has spent more than thirty years on this ship and whose book A Blue Sea of Blood is the standard account of her, calls it the most dangerous assignment of the three and the most foolish. Pecos is sent south to Australia. Edsall turns north, toward an island that would surrender eight days later. Later that morning Glassford's order for every American ship to clear Java reached her, and she reversed course to the south.

The enemy had already logged her. At oh seven hundred the Japanese heavy cruisers Tone and Chikuma had each launched a floatplane to search around Christmas Island, and Chikuma's aircraft reported a third enemy ship, seventy-three miles from the force, steering three four zero at eight knots. A lone ship crawling toward Java at economical speed. That was Edsall. The force those floatplanes came from was the Kido Butai, the carrier striking force of the Imperial Japanese Navy, under Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, the man who had led the attack on Pearl Harbor. That morning it held four of the six Pearl Harbor carriers, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu and Hiryu, the fast battleships Hiei and Kirishima, the heavy cruisers Tone and Chikuma, and their escorts. Now it was steaming across the sea lane between Java and Australia to kill anything trying to get out.

Shortly after noon the first dive bombers found Pecos. She fought four separate attacks between noon and half past three, and her gunners holed seventeen Japanese aircraft with everything from five inch guns to, by one account, thrown potatoes. The oiler took a bomb hit in the first wave, four in the second, and a near miss in the last that opened her hull, and she sank at about fifteen forty-eight. Whipple, less than a hundred miles away, heard the distress calls and turned back, timing her arrival for after dark. Edsall probably heard them too. Kehn's reconstruction, and the Navy's, is that she turned north toward the oiler, and by the middle of the afternoon she was within a few dozen miles of where Pecos had gone down, in daylight, with the entire Kido Butai between her and the men she was looking for.

Fifteen fifty. A fighter from Akagi sights a ship about sixteen miles astern of the force and reports a light cruiser of the Marblehead type, apparently shadowing the fleet. The mistake was the funnels. Marblehead had four stacks and so did Edsall, but a Marblehead class cruiser displaced seven thousand five hundred tons and carried twelve six inch guns. The ship behind Nagumo displaced eleven hundred ninety tons. Nagumo was reported to be furious that anything had closed to sixteen miles of his carriers unseen. At fifteen fifty-two his order went out to the Support Force: attack and sink the enemy light cruiser tracking the task force from behind.

Four ships peeled away. Gunichi Mikawa, who would win the Battle of Savo Island five months later, took tactical command in Hiei, with Kirishima in her wake. Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe followed in Tone, with Chikuma on the other flank. Here is what was chasing what.

Hiei and Kirishima were Kongo class ships, a British design from nineteen ten, rebuilt between nineteen thirty-seven and nineteen forty with new boilers, geared turbines, lengthened sterns and thicker armor. They came out of the yards good for thirty and a half knots, which is why these two were the battleships chosen to run with the carriers. Each carried eight fourteen inch guns in four twin turrets, firing a Type ninety-one armor piercing shell of one thousand four hundred eighty-five pounds out to thirty-eight thousand seven hundred seventy yards, two rounds per gun per minute, with fourteen six inch guns beneath them. Tone and Chikuma were the newest heavy cruisers in Japan, commissioned in nineteen thirty-eight and nineteen thirty-nine, over fifteen thousand tons loaded, one hundred fifty-two thousand shaft horsepower, thirty-five knots, with all eight of their eight inch guns forward in four twin turrets. The eight inch shell weighed two hundred seventy-seven pounds, three to four rounds a minute per gun. Nothing in that force carried radar, because in March nineteen forty-two no Japanese warship did. Every correction depended on seeing where the last salvo landed.

Edsall was one of one hundred fifty-six Clemson class destroyers, designed in the First World War to escort battleships and finished too late for it. William Cramp and Sons of Philadelphia commissioned her in November nineteen twenty. Eleven hundred ninety tons. Three hundred fourteen feet long and not quite thirty-two wide. Four boilers, two geared turbines, twenty-six thousand five hundred shaft horsepower, thirty-five knots when new. Four single four inch guns, one forward, one on each side amidships, one aft, each throwing a thirty-three pound shell to a maximum of fifteen thousand nine hundred twenty yards. One three inch anti-aircraft gun on the fantail. Four triple torpedo mounts for twelve Mark eight torpedoes, with no reloads. On this afternoon she had nine torpedoes left, a damaged shaft, screw and rudder, about twenty-seven knots on a good day, and, by the best count anyone has managed since, somewhere around two hundred men aboard.

Put the two columns side by side and the arithmetic has no exit. Her four inch guns could not reach the Japanese ships. Her torpedoes had less range than the six inch guns firing at her. She could not outrun a thirty knot battleship, let alone a thirty-five knot cruiser. Samuel Cox, the director of the Naval History and Heritage Command, who wrote the Navy's own account of this action, put it in four words. Nix's position was hopeless. What she had was time and motion. At twenty-five thousand meters a fourteen inch shell spends at least forty-five seconds in the air. A muzzle flash on the horizon arrives long before the shell does. A twelve hundred ton hull answers her helm in seconds, and four boilers can make a wall of black smoke on demand. And she had nine torpedoes, which meant that every time she turned toward her pursuers, four heavy ships had to take her seriously. Whether that was enough is what the next eighty-eight minutes decided.

Sixteen oh two. Chikuma's lookouts find Edsall sixteen miles off, heading north. Sixteen oh three. Chikuma opens fire with her eight inch battery at twenty-one thousand meters, about eleven nautical miles. The first thing Lieutenant Joshua James Nix did was make smoke, and the Japanese afterwards described the screen as skillfully laid. The second thing he did was begin changing course and speed, and he did not stop for an hour and a half. Around sixteen oh eight Abe ordered his cruisers to charge.

Nix was thirty-three, from Memphis, Naval Academy class of nineteen thirty, three hundred fourth in a class of four hundred five. His classmates called him Nickth because of a lisp. He had been Edsall's executive officer since October nineteen forty and her captain since the thirteenth of October nineteen forty-one, believed to be the youngest destroyer skipper in the Navy, and he had last seen his wife and two sons when Admiral Thomas Hart sent the fleet's dependents home the year before.

Sixteen sixteen. Hiei opens fire with her forward turrets, on Mikawa's order to use the forward guns only, at twenty-seven thousand nine hundred yards. Her first salvo straddles. On Tone, further off, someone with a hand held camera starts filming. Sixteen nineteen. Hiei begins launching all five of her floatplanes to spot the fall of shot. Sixteen twenty. Mikawa signals the force: all forces, charge. About now the Japanese finally recognize the shape in the smoke as a destroyer, and it changes nothing. Tone needs almost forty minutes from the first sighting to find the target in the smoke and open fire at all. By the end, Hiei would fire two hundred ten fourteen inch rounds. Kirishima, astern of her with the same guns and the same target, would fire eighty-seven.

What the gunners were looking at, when they could see it, was a ship that altered course about once a minute, ran her speed from flank to full stop and back, and turned whenever the flashes showed on the horizon. The Japanese records say so explicitly: she appeared to alter course whenever she saw their guns fire. Some of her turns were full circles, and in those loops she fired torpedoes. On Chikuma the young sailors posted as aircraft lookouts kept dropping their eyes to the water to watch for tracks, and were reprimanded for it. Ninety-nine miles away, the radio operator of the Dutch merchant ship Siantar copied a message from the destroyer: surprised by two enemy battleships. No Allied warship heard it.

Sixteen thirty-nine. Mikawa orders flank speed. The range comes down. Edsall turns and charges the battle line, weaving, and the Japanese are startled to see torpedoes run past Chikuma, narrowly missing. The battleships' floatplanes, circling to spot, drop their own small sixty kilogram bombs on her. Those miss as well.

Sixteen fifty. The four ships have fired more than a thousand rounds of fourteen inch and eight inch ammunition and have no confirmed hit. Nagumo, whose carriers are still steaming south while his heavy ships chase a four-piper north, orders the carriers to launch. Sixteen fifty-five. Hiei and the cruisers check fire. The Japanese record for that moment reads: without having scored a single direct hit.

Twenty-six Aichi Type ninety-nine dive bombers come north, eight from Kaga, nine from Soryu, nine from Hiryu, each with one two hundred fifty kilogram bomb. A Hiryu pilot later wrote that they found the battleships and cruisers still shooting at the destroyer from twenty-four thousand meters, that it was too dangerous to dive through that, and that they waited above the clouds. From up there he watched the chase and wrote the line the Japanese side has kept: it looked like four adults running after a little brat, having a hard time with him.

Sixteen fifty-seven to seventeen twenty. The dive bombers attack. Kaga's first section overshoots and has to come around for a second pass. The rest come down on a ship with one three inch gun to answer them. Nix dodged most of the bombs. He could not dodge all of them. Several hits and a string of near misses took her steering, cut her speed and started fires, and the big slow clockwise turn she settled into carried her back toward the ships that had been chasing her. Cox's account records that as she lost way, Nix pointed her bow at the Japanese surface ships. Observers on Chikuma watched an officer they took to be the captain supervise an orderly abandonment, and then watched him climb back to the bridge. He was not seen again.

Seventeen eighteen. Kirishima opens fire with her main battery at seventeen thousand seven hundred meters, on a ship that is now dead in the water. Four minutes later she switches to her six inch guns, and keeps them firing as the range falls to twelve thousand five hundred meters. The cruisers add sixty-two five inch rounds. Chikuma closes from the opposite side. The cameraman on Tone is filming again, and this is the ninety seconds that survives: a small dark ship with four funnels, straddled, hit, and, in the Navy historian's phrase, blown out of the water, probably by a fourteen inch shell from Kirishima.

Seventeen thirty-one. Edsall rolls onto her starboard side. A junior officer on Hiei, Lieutenant Motegi Meiji, remembered seeing her red bottom as the battleship steamed up. She goes down by the stern at thirteen degrees forty-five minutes south, one hundred six degrees forty-seven minutes east, into more than three miles of water.

Eighty-eight minutes from Chikuma's first salvo to the sinking. And one effect nobody on Edsall could have known about: for the whole time she was dancing, the Support Force was being drawn north, away from the carriers, and the attention of the Kido Butai was on her. Cox's judgment is that Whipple was able to creep back after dark and lift two hundred thirty-two survivors of Pecos and Langley out of the water that night, largely because of that.

The Japanese gunnery that afternoon was not bad gunnery. Those four ships had been built and rebuilt to hit a line of enemy capital ships at extreme range in a daylight fleet action, and their fire control assumed a target that held course long enough for a forty-five second time of flight to mean something. It did not assume a twelve hundred ton ship that changed course every minute, threw her speed from twenty-seven knots to zero, hid in her own smoke, and turned toward the guns to fire torpedoes whenever the range came down. The hidden capability here is a nineteen twenty hull that still answered the helm, a captain who understood that a muzzle flash is a forty-five second warning, and a crew that kept the boilers, the smoke and the guns working while fourteen inch shells walked across the water around them. That is what the unfit for combat rating had no way to measure.

Chikuma turned back for survivors. Her junior officers recorded one man pulled aboard forward and seven aft. Eight. Many others were alive on rafts and floats, in plain sight, when Chikuma's sound gear reported a submarine and she rang up speed and left them. Twenty or thirty miles to the south, the men from Pecos clinging to debris heard the explosions and saw smoke on the northern horizon. One of them, Lieutenant Gerald Dix, a wounded P forty pilot, had been aboard Edsall until the boats took him across that morning, and he would be the only man who had been on Edsall that day to survive the war. Whipple reached the Pecos survivors at nineteen fifteen, pulled two hundred thirty-two men out, and left at twenty-two hundred when a submarine was detected twice at close range. About five hundred men were still in the water when she left, and none of them was ever found.

The eight men from Edsall spent ten days aboard Chikuma and, by the accounts of her officers, were treated decently. On the eleventh of March the Kido Butai anchored in Staring Bay, near Kendari in the Celebes, and the prisoners went ashore to the Special Naval Landing Force under Kunizo Mori, and from there to the naval military police. They were held in the old Dutch jail in Kendari town with the twenty-six survivors of Modjokerto, a Dutch freighter the same force had sunk the same morning. Early on the twenty-fourth of March nineteen forty-two, trucks carried thirty-four blindfolded Western prisoners out to the Kendari Two airfield, and in the afternoon on to pits that captured Dutch colonial soldiers had been forced to dig. An Ambonese soldier named Johan Tomasowa was one of the men with the shovels. The prisoners were made to kneel and were beheaded, and the soldiers filled in the graves.

On the twenty-first of September nineteen forty-six Allied search teams opened those graves. Thirty-four decapitated bodies lay in the two largest pits, Dutch, Javanese and Chinese seamen from Modjokerto and ten men in American clothing. Five still wore dog tags: Sidney Amory, Horace Andrus, J. R. Cameron, Larry Vandiver and Donald Watters. Five more could not be identified and are believed to be Langley's Army pilots. A sixth sailor lay in another pit with the Modjokerto crew, Fireman Second Class Loren Stanford Myers. In the last photograph of Edsall's crew, taken at Shanghai in September nineteen forty, Myers is the man holding the ship's life ring. The remains were reburied at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery outside Saint Louis in December nineteen forty-nine, where the five identified men and the five unknowns share one grave. Mori was hanged by the Dutch in April nineteen forty-nine for other crimes in the East Indies. Kehn records that the sword he surrendered now hangs at the Naval Academy in Annapolis.

The Navy learned how she died by accident. In March nineteen fifty-two, ten years on almost to the day, a lieutenant junior grade named Donald Morris was screening fifty million feet of captured enemy film at Anacostia for the television series Victory at Sea when a prewar Japanese documentary about the cruiser Ashigara cut without warning to grainy footage of a four funneled ship under heavy shellfire at sea. For more than twenty-five years the record held that Ashigara had sunk Edsall, when the film had simply been spliced onto the wrong documentary. The correct answer was published in Japan in nineteen sixty-nine, in volume twenty-six of the official war history. The Royal Australian Navy told the Naval History and Heritage Command what Stoker had found in May twenty twenty-four. It took the Navy's archaeologists until the sixth of November to rule out Edsall's sister Pillsbury, sunk the next night, and on the eleventh of November, Veterans Day, the two navies announced her. The United States ambassador in Canberra, Caroline Kennedy, said the families of the men who died there could now know their loved ones rest in peace.

Nix was awarded the Legion of Merit while listed as missing. No ship has been named for him. Cox wrote that because there were no living American witnesses to her last fight, there are no Medals of Honor, no Navy Crosses and no Presidential Unit Citation for what he calls one of the most gallant and valorous actions in the history of the United States Navy. Eight men got off her alive, and the Japanese Navy made sure none of them lived to describe it. What survives is the enemy's own ledger, one thousand three hundred thirty-five shells, twenty-six dive bombers, eighty-eight minutes, and a name the Japanese wrote down in their own script, E-do-so-ru, the old destroyer that would not hold still.