My high school chemistry teacher died a couple of weeks ago. When I had his class, he looked much older than his 63 years and had multiple sores on his head from skin cancer thanks days in a rubber raft in 1944. He happened to be the officer on deck (a lieutenant junior grade) of the destroyer USS Johnston which was part of a carrier task group left behind to guard the Leyte, Phillipines beachhead as MacArthur made his famous return to the Phillipines.

My chemistry teacher spotted the mast of the Yamato (biggest battleship ever) sticking up above the horizon and realized that a big Japanese battlegroup had slipped into the Leyte Gulf and was moving in to destroy the landing forces. The Johnston and other small American warships known afterward as the "tin can fleet" immediately started laying smoke to cover a group of slow American escort carriers supporting the landing.

The Yamato lobbed 18" armor piercing shells that went right through the Johnston without detonating. The Johnston managed to sink a cruiser with its 5" guns and damage a battleship with a torpedo run before several 14" shells from the battleship Kongo and many other smaller shells crippled the Johnston to the point the crew was forced to abandon ship. By that point, the ship had been perforated bow to stern with shrapnel. Many documentaries have bee made about this battle. My teacher ran around tossing body parts into the water and jabbing morphine syringes into sailors with missing limbs to "keep the morale up".

About half the crew went into the water and after three days of shark attacks, only about a third of the crew survived to be rescued. The exposure led to skin cancer that he battled the rest of his life. Hard to imagine how bad that was, but he was a fun chemistry teacher with a great dry sense of humor.