JUST BEFORE sunset on the previous evening of the twenty-fourth, Admiral Kurita’s fleet had turned once more towards the San Bernardino Strait, goaded by a signal from commander-in-chief Admiral Soemu Toyoda: “All forces will resume the attack284, having faith in divine providence.” A staff officer muttered cynically: “All forces will resume the attack, having faith in annihilation.” Through the darkness, the Japanese pressed on eastwards, at every moment expecting to encounter American submarines. At first light, as they passed into open sea east of the Philippines, they waited grimly for a sighting of planes or ships from Halsey’s Third Fleet, which would signal their doom. After intercepting a signal from a surviving destroyer, they knew that Nishimura’s squadron had been destroyed: “All ships except Shigure lost to gunfire and torpedoes.” Yet the minutes passed, and the horizon ahead of Kurita remained empty. Halsey’s ships, the greatest assembly of naval might in the world, were not there. The American admiral had committed one of the most astonishing blunders of the war at sea.
Kurita has been so fiercely criticised for faintheartedness on the afternoon of 24 October, when he turned back, that the obvious point is sometimes missed: had the Japanese admiral maintained his course into the San Bernardino Strait, Halsey’s aircraft would have renewed their assaults at dawn. American battleships would have awaited him as he approached the eastern exit. His fleet’s destruction would have been inevitable. As it was, luck and American rashness offered Kurita a remarkable opportunity.
William “Bull” Halsey was the sixty-one-year-old son of a naval officer, a man of fierce passions whom wartime propaganda, a talent for quotable bombast and an unfailing eagerness to engage the enemy had made a national hero. Classmates at Annapolis used to say that he looked like a figurehead of Neptune, with his big head, heavy jaw and customary scowl. Single-mindedly devoted to the sea, he had no hobbies and no apparent interest in personal matters. Though he was obsessively neat and immaculately dressed afloat, ashore his wife found him clumsy: “If a man has a nervous wife285 he wants to get rid of, all he has to do is send for you. Five minutes after you’ve come in, bumping into sofas and knocking over chairs, she’ll be dead of heart failure.” His domestic life was notably dysfunctional. Like MacArthur, though in a very different, cruder fashion, Halsey acted and talked the warrior’s part: “I never trust a fighting man who doesn’t drink or smoke!” He cherished in his cabin a magnificent western saddle presented by an admirer, to assist fulfilment of the admiral’s promise that he would one day ride Hirohito’s white horse through Tokyo. Nimitz remarked that when he sent Spruance out with the fleet, “he was always sure286 he would bring it home; when he sent Halsey out, he did not know precisely what was going to happen.” Halsey’s boldness was in doubt seldom, his judgement and intellect often.
For four days, Vice-Admiral Jizaburo Ozawa had been flaunting his presence more than two hundred miles north of the U.S. Third Fleet. His carriers had only 116 aircraft, half their complement. On the morning of the twenty-fourth he launched seventy-six of these on a notably ineffectual strike against Halsey’s ships. The surviving planes landed on Luzon, having achieved their only serious purpose, that of attracting American attention. Late in the afternoon, a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft at last sighted Ozawa’s squadron. Halsey’s reaction perfectly fulfilled Japanese hopes. He turned north to engage the empty carriers with every unit at his disposal. “As it seemed childish to me to guard statically San Bernardino Strait,” he told Nimitz and MacArthur afterwards, attempting to justify his decision, “I concentrated TF 38 during the night and steamed north to attack the North Force at dawn. I believed that [Kurita’s] Center Force had been so heavily damaged in the Sibuyan Sea that it could no longer be considered a serious menace to Seventh Fleet.”
To the day of his death, Halsey never acknowledged that he had allowed himself to be fooled. On the map of the Leyte Gulf battle in his post-war memoirs, Ozawa’s carriers are unequivocally identified as “Japanese main force.” Halsey considered that Kurita’s squadron had been crippled and repulsed by his aircraft on the twenty-fourth. American pilots’ reports suggested that four battleships were sailing with Ozawa’s carriers. Halsey chose wilfully to ignore overnight reports that Kurita was once again heading into San Bernardino. He wrote later, in self-exculpation: “It was not my job to protect287 the Seventh Fleet. My job was offensive, and we were even then rushing to intercept a force which gravely threatened not only Kinkaid and myself, but the whole Pacific strategy.” Rear-Admiral Robert Carney, Halsey’s chief of staff, said: “With the conviction that Center Force288 had been so heavily damaged that although they could still steam and float they could not fight to best advantage, it was decided to turn full attention to the still untouched and very dangerous carrier force to the north.”
Halsey could argue that some intelligence assessments still credited the Japanese carrier force with far more formidable air capability than it possessed. Yet this does not explain his most culpable error of all: failure to ensure that Kinkaid and Nimitz understood that he was steaming away from Leyte with everything he had, soon putting the Philippines battlefield beyond range of his aircraft or battleship guns. Claims have been made that he believed a signal had been sent to San Pedro and Pearl, and that fault for its non-transmission lay with his staff. This is unconvincing. It is much easier to believe that Halsey simply acted recklessly, in pursuit of glory and a decisive victory. In almost three years of war, both sides had become obsessed with the importance of carriers, decisive units of Pacific combat. Shrewd intelligence analysts at Pearl had reported that, almost stripped of aircraft and deck-qualified pilots, Ozawa’s ships were now mere hulks. They even suggested that these might be sacrificed as decoys.
Halsey spurned such assessments. He displayed a hubris unsurprising, perhaps, in a navy that now dominated the Pacific theatre. He ignored the fact that Kurita’s ships, wherever they were, represented the most formidable naval force left to the enemy. Victory at Midway in 1942 had been achieved when Halsey was sick, and the much more measured Spruance commanded the U.S. fleet. Now, Spruance was ashore, and Halsey enjoyed full scope to blunder. Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet, essentially an amphibious support force, was left unshielded and oblivious in the path of Kurita. Even had Oldendorf’s old battleships been in sight east of Leyte, rather than in the Surigao Strait, Seventh Fleet would have been dangerously outgunned by the Japanese.
The morning of 25 October found Rear-Admiral Thomas Sprague’s sixteen escort carriers, mustered in three task groups designated as Task Forces—“Taffies”—1, 2 and 3, cruising in their usual operating areas, some forty miles apart and about the same distance east of Leyte. For the ships’ crews, service with Seventh Fleet offered none of the glamour of offensive action under Halsey or Spruance. When one of the carriers’ escorting destroyers, Johnston, was commissioned twelve months earlier, only 7 of its 331 officers and men had previous sea experience. The crew had since learned much about working their ship, but enjoyed precious little glory. “Well, Hagen,” sighed Ernest Evans, Johnston’s captain, to his gunnery officer, “it’s been an uneventful year.” He was bitterly disappointed to have missed the Surigao Strait action, which his excited radio operators had eavesdropped on.
Escort carriers, workhorses of the war at sea, were crude floating runways, most converted from tankers and merchantmen. Their class acronym, CVE, was alleged by cynics to stand for “Combustible, Vulnerable, Expendable.” They lacked the defensive armament, aircraft capacity and speed of purpose-built fleet carriers four times their tonnage. They were intended only to provide local air support, in this case for the Leyte Gulf amphibious armada and MacArthur’s soldiers ashore. Each carried twelve to eighteen obsolescent Wildcat fighters and eleven or twelve Avenger torpedo and bomber aircraft. The previous day, the fighters had accounted for some twenty-four Japanese aircraft over Leyte.
That morning, Taffy 3’s five carriers, three destroyers and four destroyer escorts had just secured from routine pre-dawn general quarters. It was the midst of the most unpopular watch of the day, 4 to 8 a.m., when, in the words of a jaundiced Pacific sailor, “the morning sun289 would be looking like a bloody bubble in a peepot.” Most crews had gone to breakfast as the ships turned into the north-east wind and prepared to fly off the first sorties of the day. Lookouts suddenly reported anti-aircraft fire north-westwards, and radio rooms a gabble of Japanese voices flooding the ether. At 0647, in what one captain called “a rather frantic voice transmission,” an anti-submarine-patrol pilot announced that four Japanese battleships, eight cruisers and accompanying destroyers were just twenty miles from Taffy 3. Momentarily, its commander, Rear-Admiral Clifton “Ziggy” Sprague—confusingly, two unrelated Admiral Spragues were off Leyte that day—believed these must be Halsey’s ships. Then the Americans saw pagoda masts, and at 0658 the Japanese opened fire.
It was one of the great surprise attacks of the war. Despite all the technological might of the U.S. Navy, Kurita’s ships had been able to sail almost 150 miles in seven hours, unnoticed by the Americans. Human eyes detected them before radar did. Admiral King, in Washington, blamed Kinkaid for failing to watch Kurita’s movements. It can certainly be suggested that the admiral could have spared a few search planes of his own to monitor Kurita’s movements alongside Halsey’s aircraft. Richard Frank persuasively argues that, with the Japanese known to be at sea, Kinkaid should also have moved his Taffies further from San Bernardino.
Yet it seems impossible to dispute the fundamental point, that dealing with Kurita was Halsey’s responsibility. Seventh Fleet was nicknamed, somewhat derisively, “MacArthur’s private navy.” Kinkaid’s mission was to support Sixth Army. “Halsey’s job290,” said Kinkaid later, “was to keep the Japanese fleet off of our necks while we were doing this.” Halsey had already engaged Kurita, and possessed overwhelming firepower for the purpose. Kinkaid knew that Halsey had gone in pursuit of Ozawa, but it never occurred to him that he had taken his entire force. Given the strength of Third Fleet, there were ample heavy units for some to have guarded against the Japanese battle squadron—yet none was left behind. This, although on the night of the twenty-fourth Halsey was told that Kurita had turned back towards San Bernardino. Here were the painful consequences of divided command. Halsey was answerable to Nimitz, Kinkaid to MacArthur. At Leyte Gulf, failure to appoint an overall supreme commander for the Pacific theatre came closer than at any other time to inflicting a disaster on American arms.
Sprague and his officers, confronted by an array of impossibly mighty enemy ships, almost twice as fast as their own carriers, believed they faced a massacre as surely as any wagon train surprised by Sioux: “That sonofabitch Halsey has left us bare-assed!” exclaimed the admiral. “Our captain announced291 on the PA that the whole Japanese fleet was attacking Taffy 3,” wrote Walter Burrell, a medical officer on Suwanee with Taffy 1. “I looked out on the forecastle and sure enough it looked like there were a hundred ships on the horizon.” The nearest American heavy units were those of Jesse Oldendorf, sixty-five miles south. This represented almost three hours’ steaming, an eternity in such circumstances. It was vividly apparent that the fate of Taffy 3 would be settled long before American big ships could reach the scene.
Yet Kurita, in his turn, was shocked—and wildly deceived. He had supposed that no significant American naval force lay between himself and Leyte Gulf, that his course was open to ravage Kinkaid’s amphibious armada. A first glimpse of Sprague’s ships persuaded him that he faced Halsey’s Third Fleet and its huge carriers. Rather than organise a concerted movement led by his destroyers, he ordered a general attack, every Japanese ship for itself. In four columns, Kurita’s squadron began to close on Sprague’s task group, firing as they came. A cluster of pilots in a carrier ready room was broken up by the entry of an officer who said: “The Jap fleet’s after us.” This was received with disbelief. “Everybody was laughing and joking, couldn’t believe it,” said an aviator whose plane was unserviceable. “We went up on the flightdeck292 and about half an hour later, we began to hear things whistling and dropping astern of us, which turned out to be sixteen-inch shells. It was a kind of funny feeling to be on deck when you’re under attack and don’t have anything to fly.”
Sprague’s ships laboured to increase speed to 171/2 knots and open the range, making smoke while sustaining an easterly course so that they could fly off aircraft. Rear-Admiral Felix Stump of Taffy 2 tried to reassure Sprague on voice radio: “Don’t be alarmed, Ziggy—remember, we’re back of you—don’t get excited—don’t do anything rash!” Yet Stump’s tone conveyed his own dismay, and his words were unconvincing. Taffy 2 possessed no more firepower than Taffy 3. Sprague’s six carriers were arrayed in a rough circle, with the destroyers beyond. In the first four minutes of action, White Plains was straddled four times by fifteen-inch gunfire. Her crew were fascinated by the vari-dyed water plumes, designed to enable Japanese gunners to distinguish each ship’s salvoes: “They’re shooting at us in Technicolor!” By a twist of fortune, a heavy rain squall now swept across the sea. For fifteen important minutes this masked the American ships from the Japanese, who were obliged to resort to radar-directed fire. Kurita signalled triumphantly home that his squadron had sunk a heavy cruiser. Yet so poor was Japanese fire control that at this stage their guns had hit nothing at all.
Here was one of the strangest melodramas of the Second World War. After more than two years of Pacific combat dominated by clashes between ships and aircraft whose parent fleets were often hundreds of miles apart, American seamen now watched with naked eyes as some of the largest warships in the world fired upon them at almost point-blank range, in the manner of the navies of Nelson and Decatur. Fevered activity on the carriers launched one by one into the air every plane that could fly, carrying whatever ordnance chanced to be fitted, to fulfil a simple mission: hit the Japanese. On Gambier Bay, Captain William Vieweg ordered the crew out of a plane already on the catapult, then deliberately fired it into the sea, for his ship was generating too little wind speed to launch. With only a few torpedoes and bombs loaded, many planes which did get off were reduced to strafing the Japanese waraship decks with machine-gun fire.
Rationally, this was as useful as belabouring an armoured knight with a walking stick. Yet, from beginning to end of the Leyte battle, perverse psychological forces were in play. The Japanese had embarked on the Shogo operation anticipating the worst. At every turn they behaved with the fatalism of doomed men, convinced of their own inferiority to the enemy. Kurita and his captains expected to be attacked and sunk by carrier aircraft, and here indeed were carrier aircraft. They anticipated a disastrous encounter with the U.S. Third Fleet, and here it seemed to be. A weak and vulnerable American force, Taffy 3, was under assault by one of the most powerful battle squadrons in the world. Yet Kurita and his captains assumed that they faced defeat. It remains an enigma how by October 1944 the fighting seamen of the Japanese navy had been reduced to such poverty of thought, will and action. This was the force which conceived and executed the attack on Pearl Harbor, which destroyed the British capital ships Prince of Wales and Repulse, which performed miracles of skill and daring in the early years of war. Yet now the commanders of Japan’s greatest warships revealed stunning ineptitude. On 25 October their ship recognition was inept, their tactics primitive, their gunnery woeful, their spirit feeble. None of this diminishes the American achievement that day, but it invites the bewilderment of history.
Besides the carrier pilots who threw themselves at Kurita’s ships, the heroes of the morning were the U.S. destroyer crews. With an unflinching aggression that further alarmed the Japanese, they raced towards the enemy’s battle line. “Prepare to attack major portion of Japanese fleet!” Ernest Evans of Johnston told his crew, in a pardonably histrionic moment. Evans, a short, barrel-chested, half-Cherokee Native American, steamed into action with all his five-inch guns firing. This was the gesture of an urchin pummelling a giant. Yet when he launched torpedoes, one struck the heavy cruiser Kumano, which fell out of line. An American cruiser officer described the experience of suffering a torpedo hit as “about the same as driving293 a car at high speed when you hit a pile of logs. You’d be knocked up in the air, probably sideways, and you’d come down on the concrete on the other side with all wheels flat.”
At 0730, three fourteen-inch shells hit Johnston, which seemed to one of its officers “like a puppy being smacked by a truck.” The ship’s radar array collapsed onto the bridge, killing three officers. Evans lost his shirt and three fingers of one hand; scores of men below were killed or wounded. Johnston’s speed fell away to seventeen knots. Cmdr. Leon Kintenburger of Hoel had only skippered his ship for a fortnight. Its guns fired ten salvoes at the Japanese before incoming shells knocked out the directors. The ship received more than forty heavy-calibre hits, and stayed afloat as long as it did only because many huge armour-piercing rounds passed through the hull without exploding. Cmdr. Amos Hathaway of Heermann at first could not see the Japanese either visually or on radar, and merely obeyed Sprague’s directional order. Confused about what was going on, “I told the crew294 this was either going to be the bloodiest, worst thing we had ever seen—or nothing. That is always an easy and good prediction to make.”
When water spouts began to rise out of the surrounding sea, at first Hathaway scanned the sky in search of bombers, before realising he was being shelled. His ship dashed between the fleeing escort carriers, the bridge crew almost blinded when the rain squall struck. Then the sky cleared and Japanese ships loomed huge before them. Hathaway belatedly realised that he must do the unthinkable—launch a daylight torpedo attack on enemy heavy units. He turned to his navigator, Lieutenant Newcome: “‘Buck, what we need is a bugler295 to sound the charge.’ He looked at me as if I was a little crazy, and said ‘What do you mean, Captain?’ I said that we were going to make a torpedo attack. Buck gulped.” It is an important truth about war that soldiers on shore, and pilots aloft, almost always have some personal choice about whether to be brave. By contrast, sailors crewing a warship are prisoners of the sole will of their captain. On 25 October 1944, it is no libel upon the crews of Taffy 3’s escorts to suggest that some must have been appalled. They were conscripted as heroes, borne at high speed towards an overwhelmingly powerful enemy.
Amid smoke and shifting squalls, even now Hathaway knew little of what was happening, nor that Heermann’s sister ships Hoel and Johnston were damaged. He simply fired seven torpedoes at the heavy cruiser Chikuma from a range of 9,000 yards, as Japanese shells began to straddle Heermann: “You could hear the express-train roar of the fourteen-inchers going over us.” Then a Japanese eight-inch shell exploded on the bridge, leaving a shambles of fallen antennae, twisted steel and bloodied men. The helmsman, together with an aviator rescued the previous night and three other men, lay dead. Hathaway survived only because he had climbed to the higher fire-control position to get a better view of the battle. Quartermaster Jack Woolworth was badly hit in the buttocks, but said nothing and kept his post. Heermann suffered eight-inch hits in the engine uptakes, sonar dome and keel—and survived. Red, yellow, green splashes continued to land all around her. Hathaway marvelled that so many could miss: “Why they didn’t get more hits than they did I don’t understand.” The Americans were also bemused that the Japanese ships seemed to be advancing so slowly, some making as little as ten knots.
Heermann’s five-inch guns fired at the battleship Kongo’s fire-control tower, but as soon as the ship’s last three torpedoes were spent, Hathaway ducked into the pilothouse and radioed Sprague in plain language: “Exercise completed.” He said later: “I don’t know why I used these words. I had an idea the Japanese might be listening on the circuit, and I didn’t want them to know I didn’t have any more torpedoes.” Heermann retired in such haste that Hathaway avoided ramming the carrier Fanshaw Bay only by giving an emergency full astern order. The destroyer likewise missed by inches the damaged Johnston. “As we cleared each other296, a spontaneous cheer went up from each ship.” When Commander Evans perceived that Hoel was hit, though his own ship was crippled, men were throwing body parts over the side and just two guns remained operational, he swung Johnston back into the fray. The destroyer could make only fifteen knots: “We were weaving back and forth297,” said gunnery officer Robert Hagen, “taking on whatever ship seemed to be closing the carriers the fastest, and we still stayed up with the Japanese cruisers, destroyers, while the Japanese battleships dropped aft…The captain fought that ship as no other man has ever fought a ship.”
The American destroyers’ attacks were uncoordinated, indeed chaotic. Almost all their torpedoes were launched from ranges too long to be effective. But Yamato chose to swing away sharply to avoid them, and so wide was the vast ship’s turning radius that it fell far behind the rest of Kurita’s line. The Japanese were alarmed by American aggression, even if Sprague’s warship guns inflicted little damage. Hoel, hit repeatedly just before 0800, stayed afloat for a further hour, until sunk by Japanese battleships as they passed the hulk at close range. The destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts lost 3 officers and 86 men, out of a crew of 178. Her captain told his men as they steamed into battle that the ship could not expect to survive, and he was right. By 0820 the Americans had expended all their torpedoes, and the survivors retired towards Sprague’s carriers. Except one. The Johnston continued to fire on the enemy at close range until at 0945 its crew abandoned ship under a hail of Japanese shells. Of 327 men only 141 were saved, not including Evans, its fine captain.
Kurita dispatched four heavy cruisers to move fast around the Americans and cut them off. Sprague, perceiving this force, ordered that every plane should concentrate against it. It was a day for rhetoric and wisecracks which passed into legend, such as the chief’s cry from his quad mount on White Plains: “Hold on a little longer, boys! We’re sucking them into 40mm range!” White Plains scored hits on the cruiser Chokai with her single five-inch gun. After American dive-bomber attacks, Chokai blew up at 0930. The carrier Kallin Bay scored a hit on another cruiser’s turret, just before she herself was struck at 0750, after flying off her aircraft. The frail ship survived thirteen eight-inch shell impacts and Fanshaw Bay a further four, partly because Japanese armour-piercing ammunition failed to detonate against the thin decks. Below, men laboured amid smoke and bursting steam pipes, plugging holes to keep out the sea, and sealing fractured mains.
Meanwhile, aircraft had hit and slowed another Japanese ship—the heavy cruiser Suzuya. Bombs and aerial torpedoes sank the cruiser Chikuma. One Taffy 3 pilot, Ed Huxtable, maintained passes at the Japanese battleships for two hours after expending his ammunition. “It takes a lot to go in there298 carrying nothing,” said a profoundly admiring comrade. Some fliers expended their ammunition, rearmed ashore at Tacloban and returned to the charge. Captain John Whitney of Kitgun Bay felt pity for his 20mm and 40mm crews who had nothing to do but watch, impotent, while the ship’s single five-inch gun lobbed shells at the enemy and Japanese projectiles straddled the carrier. Captain William Vieweg of Gambier Bay was baffled to see each Japanese ship firing slow salvoes alternately from forward and rear turrets, rather than in unison. He swung his carrier after glimpsing each set of gun flashes, then watched shells land where Gambier Bay would have been, had she not turned: “This process lasted299, believe it or not, a half-hour during which the enemy was closing constantly.” The enemy’s first hit on the carrier at 0825 slowed its speed from 191/2 knots to eleven. Thereafter, Gambier Bay was hit steadily for an hour, until it lay dead in the water. When a passing Japanese cruiser fired on the hulk from 2,000 yards, to the Americans’ amazement its shells missed. The carrier was doomed, however. After it capsized and sank at 0907, Vieweg and his fellow survivors spent two days in the water.
Kurita’s destroyers launched torpedo attacks from too long range to be effective, but one of his captains blithely claimed that “three enemy carriers and one cruiser were enveloped in black smoke and observed to sink one after another.” Such fantasising was commonplace among junior aircrew on both sides, but becomes hard to excuse in ranking officers. By 0925, this extraordinary encounter had lasted 143 minutes. American aircraft were still hitting the Japanese with whatever they had. The planes of Taffy 2 launched forty-nine torpedoes and claimed several hits on battleships and heavy cruisers for the loss of twenty-three Wildcats and Avengers, slightly fewer than Taffy 3’s aircraft casualties. When their fuel became exhausted, most American pilots landed ashore on Leyte. Halsey, at last grudgingly acknowledging the plight of Kinkaid’s ships, had dispatched battleships and a carrier group southwards, but it would be many hours before these appeared. It is a measure of the chaos prevailing in the American high command that only at 0953 was Jesse Oldendorf ordered to start northwards with his battleships, desperately short of ammunition. There still seemed nothing to stop the Japanese ships destroying Taffy 3, possibly the other escort-carrier groups also.
Yet suddenly, Sprague and his stunned crews saw the Japanese do the unthinkable. They ceased fire, turned, broke off the engagement. “Goddammit, boys, they’re getting away!” cried a signalman in comic disbelief. “At the end of two hours300 and twenty-three minutes under continuous fire, to my utter amazement and that of all aboard, the Japanese fleet turned around,” said Whitney of Kitgun Bay. “We were within effective gun range for another fifteen minutes, but they did not fire another shot at us.” Kurita claimed to have decided that the American carriers were too fast for him to catch. Two floatplanes catapulted from the Japanese ships to reconnoitre Leyte Gulf had failed to return. There was no word from Ozawa. Nishimura’s squadron was known to be lost. Kurita’s radio operators had heard Kinkaid call in plain language for fast battleships. “Japan was showing signs not only301 of fatigue, but of decay as well, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the fields of communications and intelligence,” in the words of a Japanese historian. On 25 October 1944, such “decay” was startlingly displayed on the flag bridge of Yamato.
Kurita later produced a range of excuses for his disengagement decision: after three days and nights without sleep, “my mind was extremely fatigued302. It should probably be called ‘a judgement of exhaustion.’” He talked unconvincingly about a signal, of which no record was ever found, reporting American warships to the north, in his rear. He claims to have decided to regroup his diminished forces and resume his original mission—an assault on the amphibious shipping in Leyte Gulf. In reality, he havered for more than three hours, then set course for retirement through the San Bernardino Strait. Sprague watched the huge Japanese superstructures fade from the horizon. “I could not get the fact into my battle-numbed brain,” he wrote later. “At best, I had expected to be swimming by this time.” His command of six escort carriers, three destroyers and four escorts, supported by a job lot of aircraft, had mauled and frightened off most of the surviving Japanese battle fleet.
Sprague’s subsequent report to Nimitz said that but for “the very poor decision303 of breaking off the action…the Jap main body could have, and should have, waded through and completed the destruction of this task unit, and continuing to the south would have found our naval opposition very low.” Sprague found the enemy’s poor gunnery “unexplainable,” and attributed his force’s survival to the “definite partiality of Almighty God.” Kinkaid signalled to MacArthur ashore: “Our situation has again turned rosy from black, black, black.”
THE NAVAL ACTION around the Philippines on 25 October was not confined to the attacks of Kurita’s battle fleet. While recovering its own planes Taffy 1 was surprised by six Japanese aircraft and a submarine which damaged the carriers Santee and Suwanee. At 1050, while Taffy 3 was still recovering from the early-morning drama, a Zero crashed into the flight deck of St. Lo, setting off a series of bomb explosions which caused the ship to blow up at 1125. Some 754 survivors were rescued. Soon after noon next day, another plane hit Suwanee, inflicting 245 casualties and doing terrible damage. “The second explosion304…buckled our bulkheads and ruptured water mains…so that we began to flood,” wrote medical officer Walter Burrell.
As the water rose to knee height in our compartment, the ship was listing uncomfortably and lying dead in the water without steerage because of destruction of the bridge and wheelhouse. Isolated from the rest of the ship with only the reflection from the gasoline fires above and a few flickering battle lamps for light, I saw my wounded partially covered with wreckage and already awash…with my corpsmen and stretcher bearers, we were able to move out wounded through the hatches from one compartment to the next…A sailor, apparently in panic, came running along the passageway screaming: “Everyone’s going over the side! The captain’s dead! Everyone on the bridge has been killed! Everyone’s abandoning ship.” Now, contagious panic and cold fear! The wounded…began struggling to get out, screaming hysterically, “Where’s my lifejacket? Who took my lifejacket? Turn that loose! Gimme that! No, it’s mine!” Some were shoving towards the entrance, fighting and scrambling over one another.
Burrell checked the panic, conspicuously taking off his own life jacket and hanging it on a hook. Small-arms ammunition began to explode, ignited by a gasoline fire, and prompting frightened men to jump overboard—a common occurrence when carriers were hit, cause of many needless deaths. The medical officer struggled to aid wounded lying on the forecastle, most “severely burned beyond recognition305 and hope. All that could be done for the obviously dying was to give the most rudimentary first aid consisting of morphine, a few swallows of water, and some words of companionship.” Thanks to brilliant damage control, within an hour Suwanee’s fires were out, power and steerage restored, ruptured mains shut off. The ship survived, to limp home for repairs. Yet a submarine and a handful of suicidal pilots had inflicted on the Americans greater loss than the whole of Kurita’s fleet had accomplished. Here was an ominous portent.
THE BADLY BOMBED CRUISER Suzuya sank at 1322 on the twenty-fifth. At about the same time, operating at extreme range, 335 miles, one of Halsey’s carrier groups at last reached Kurita’s ships. Of 147 aircraft which attacked, 14 were lost. Neither this mission nor another strike from Taffy 2 inflicted significant damage. Early on the morning of the twenty-sixth, three more American aircraft sorties sunk a light cruiser, Noshiro, and damaged the heavy cruiser Kumano, which limped into Manila. The crews of forty-seven USAAF Liberators which attacked Kurita’s units claimed much, but accomplished nothing. The battered, forlorn, humiliated Japanese fleet regained Brunei Bay at 2130 on 28 October, most of its ships leaking oil and taking in water from near misses. Survival was its only significant achievement.
HALSEY began his dash north, after the sighting of Ozawa’s carriers, at 2022 on the night of 24 October. Commander Dahl, the popular executive officer of the carrier Belleau Wood, broadcast to its crew: “Attention all hands306. We are steaming north to intercept the Jap fleet which is coming out to fight. When the gong rings, move in a hurry. Be prepared for anything. That is all.” Yet twenty-two minutes earlier, Ozawa had himself turned away north, on hearing of Kurita’s retirement from the San Bernardino Strait. He assumed that Shogo was aborted. Only when naval high command insisted upon resuming the operation did Ozawa again set course towards the Americans who he was so eager should find him.
Most of Halsey’s subordinates were amazed by his decision to take north every element of Third Fleet, leaving not a single destroyer to watch San Bernardino. Admiral “Ching” Lee in the battleship Washington signalled Halsey that he believed Ozawa’s force to be a decoy. He received in response a perfunctory “Roger” from the flagship. Lee later sent another message to Halsey, asserting his conviction that Kurita would reappear. This was unanswered. More extraordinary yet, during the night Halsey ignored a new sighting report of Kurita’s ships, heading east once more. Third Fleet’s carrier commander, the famously taciturn Marc Mitscher, was woken with the news by staff officers, who urged him to speak to the fleet commander. Mitscher demanded briefly:
“Does Admiral Halsey have that report?”
“Yes.”
“If he wants my advice, he’ll ask for it.”
Mitscher went back to sleep, and thus sixty-five American ships continued steaming north at sixteen knots, to engage just seventeen Japanese vessels of Ozawa’s command. Halsey’s task forces rendezvoused just before midnight: four Essex-class carriers and the old Enterprise, five light carriers, six battleships, two heavy cruisers, six light cruisers, forty-one destroyers. Halsey even recalled aircraft which had been shadowing Kurita’s force. Not surprisingly, in view of Japanese contrariness, Third Fleet lost Ozawa for some hours during the night, then located his ships again at 0710 on the twenty-fifth, when Sprague’s escort carriers were already in flight from Kurita, hundreds of miles to the south.
Around 0800, American Avengers which were orbiting a holding position some seventy miles from Ozawa were vectored onto their first attack of the day. With negligible interference from Japanese fighters, they launched torpedoes at point-blank range. Chitose was hit by a succession of bombs, three of which caused damage below the waterline, and sank at 0937. Zuikaku was crippled by a torpedo; a destroyer was sunk; nine Japanese aircraft shot down. The next wave of Americans arrived at 0945 to behold “a picture of wild confusion” on the sea below, with Japanese ships manoeuvring desperately. Chiyoda was soon hit, blazing and abandoned. A third wave struck the Japanese at 1310, most of its two hundred aircraft flown by crews on their second mission of the day. Zuikaku and Zuiho suffered multiple hits and caught fire.
Cmdr. Ted Winters, CO of Lexington’s Air Group 19, was a fascinated airborne spectator: “There wasn’t any of this307 having the carriers blow up and roll over like I had thought when I went out. They took the first [hits] like somebody getting a slug in the stomach and then fires broke out…when a fish hits one of those ships it doesn’t look like a big explosion like a bomb; it looks like someone running over a fire plug—a spurt straight up in the air. The fires didn’t consume the entire ship, though. Finally after about three hours the carriers rolled slowly, finally rolled over and went down.” Fourth and fifth waves of American aircraft failed to sink Ise. A sixth strike at 1810, delivered by tired aircrews, accomplished little. Four carriers and a destroyer had thus been destroyed by 527 bomb and torpedo sorties, supported by 201 fighters. Masanori Ito wrote with justice that Ozawa’s “mission was to be defeated308, and in being defeated he accomplished that mission.”
Halsey had reluctantly ordered his battleships south at 1115, to support Seventh Fleet. He would have preferred to keep Lee’s squadron to finish off the Japanese cripples. Captain Lewis Dow, Halsey’s communications officer, afterwards adopted a contemptuous tone about Sprague’s appeals for help: “We had frantic screams309 from the Seventh Fleet that they were being annihilated…” Only late that afternoon were American submarines alerted to concentrate on Ozawa’s force, and their sole prey was the light cruiser Tama.
Ted Winters was flying back to Lexington when he saw the stricken Japanese carriers below him, “still smoking a little. Going back past this other Jap carrier dead in the water, I found a bunch of our cruisers steaming in a north-westerly direction. I thought at first they were Japs because they were so near. I called on the VHF: ‘If you will change course forty-five degrees to the right, you will find a Jap carrier dead in the water with no destroyers or battleships around.’” The cruisers asked Winters to sweep north and check that no Japanese heavy units were in range. After reporting the sea clear, he spotted fall of shot for the cruisers, watching the alternating green, yellow and red splashes. With futile courage, a few Japanese gunners were still firing from the hulk. “It wasn’t five minutes310 after they opened fire, and it looked like she just rolled over and went down in a cloud of smoke leaving her fanny sticking up in the air…The coordinator’s job is a lot of fun.”
Halsey described in characteristic terms the moment at which his fleet overran the scene of the Japanese sinkings: “We found no Jap ships, but Jap swimmers were as thick as water bugs. I was having breakfast when Bill Kitchell burst in and cried: ‘My God Almighty, Admiral, the little bastards are all over the place! Are we going to stop and pick them up?’” Halsey replied: “Not until we’ve picked up our own boys”—downed American pilots. He signalled his destroyers not to be over-zealous about their rescue activities: “Bring in cooperative flotsam for an intelligence sample. Non-cooperators would probably like to join their ancestors, and should be accommodated.”
Eleven of Ozawa’s original seventeen ships were able to sail home. Halsey afterwards made much of the importance of his action off Cape Engano, in writing off the last of Japanese carrier capability. Yet it was Japanese, and not Americans, who scripted Halsey’s battle, and he conformed to their design with embarrassing exactitude. The enemy had accepted that their carriers were no longer useful as aircraft platforms, but could serve one last function in luring Third Fleet from the path of Kurita’s advance. Halsey accepted the bait. Only Kurita’s feebleness prevented the Combined Fleet from inflicting serious destruction upon the Americans around Leyte Gulf. Had he lingered long enough to do so, his own ships would almost certainly have gone to the bottom, because Halsey and Oldendorf would have been given time to intercept their escape. But the Japanese could have inflicted a humiliation on the U.S. Navy before meeting their fate.
American victory in the battles of Leyte Gulf was overwhelming. The Japanese lost 285,000 tons of warships, their opponents just 29,000 tons. American casualties of 2,803 were no more than the Red Army lost every four hours of the war. Japanese losses were far greater than at Midway in 1942. Yet this was, of course, a much less critical encounter. Midway changed the course of the war, arresting the Japanese advance across the Pacific. Whatever might have befallen at Leyte Gulf, Japan’s fate was sealed. Even if Kurita had broken through to MacArthur’s anchorage, there were sufficient supplies and munitions ashore to ensure that loss of shipping need not threaten Sixth Army. Even if the Japanese had destroyed Taffy 3—or indeed all three Taffys—the Americans would have suffered embarrassment rather than disaster, as they had almost a hundred carriers in commission. In short, no course of action by Kurita would have altered the strategic balance around the Philippines.
Leyte Gulf, however, commands the awe of posterity. At Jutland in 1916, 99 German ships engaged 151 British; at Leyte, 216 American and 2 Australian ships met 64 Japanese. 143,668 American sailors and fliers—more than the combined strengths of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps in 1938—met 42,800 Japanese. This was the last great clash between rival surface fleets. American setbacks reflected astonishing failures of command and control. Several critical messages between Third and Seventh Fleets and Pearl were two hours in transmission, via relay on Manus. Nimitz, a great commander, must share with Admiral King blame for the systemic failure which permitted Halsey to abandon the San Bernardino Strait and embark upon an adventure which carried risks of such magnitude.
Halsey blundered by dispatching one carrier task force, holding 40 percent of his huge air strength, to rest and rearm at Ulithi even after he knew that the Japanese were at sea. Richard Frank suggests that if he had left his battleships to cover the San Bernardino exit when he set off to chase Ozawa, prudence would have made it essential also to leave some carriers to provide air cover for them. Third Fleet’s air component would have been dangerously depleted, when it sought to address the Japanese carriers. This seems a significant point. Yet the fundamental remains: Halsey critically misjudged the relative threats posed by Kurita and Ozawa.
The U.S. admiral’s impulsive behaviour reflected the mood of a navy which had grown accustomed to overwhelming superiority. His defenders stress the fact that, at Leyte Gulf, Halsey was anxious to ensure that he would not face the charge of over-caution levelled at Spruance four months earlier, following the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Fifth Fleet’s commander was alleged then to have allowed the Japanese carriers to escape destruction, by declining to pursue them. Rivalry with Spruance certainly influenced Halsey’s decisions on 24–25 October, but these overwhelmingly reflected his temperament, together with a habitual carelessness about planning and staffwork. Had Third Fleet’s commander not possessed such fame, he might have been relieved for his misjudgement at Leyte. The war was in its last phase, however. The Japanese navy was beaten. Though MacArthur privately believed that Halsey should be sacked, there was no appetite in the U.S. Navy for the humiliation of a celebrated admiral.
Among sailors, Halsey incurred much heavier criticism for another blunder two months later, when he kept his fleet at sea after a typhoon was forecast. When this came, it sank three destroyers, crippled many other ships, and drowned almost eight hundred men. By contrast, Halsey’s Leyte Gulf blunder was redeemed by the follies of Kurita. The night action of Oldendorf’s battleships, cruisers, destroyers and PT-boats in the Surigao Strait was a set piece in the best traditions of the U.S. Navy. Less spectacular, yet at least as significant, was the achievement of American damage-control parties. “Prosecute damage control311 measures with utmost diligence and tenacity. Don’t give up the ship!” decreed the navy’s 1944 Tactical Orders and Doctrine. The men of the USN fulfilled this injunction with extraordinary devotion and sacrifice. On ship after ship at Leyte, they achieved miracles amidst flaming fuel and twisted wreckage, dying men and choking smoke. Damage control was an outstanding aspect of U.S. naval performance, enabling vessels to be saved from destruction which, in other navies or at an earlier phase of the war, would have been doomed.
Only for the Japanese were the Leyte Gulf actions unredeemed by any morsel of glory. Their commanders had been ordered to seek “flowers of death.” Yet the officers of the Combined Fleet displayed stoicism and passivity, rather than the verve and determination which their orders demanded. Even in the simplest battle manoeuvres, again and again on 24 and 25 October Japanese captains were found wanting. Contrast the development of the American and Japanese navies in the course of the Pacific conflict: the U.S. Navy expanded its strength tenfold, so that it was overwhelmingly officered and manned by amateur sailors. Yet the performance of these men proved remarkable. The Japanese navy, which at the start of the war displayed notable superiority in seamanship and gunnery as well as technology, by the end lagged hopelessly in these skills. Japanese officers and men who perished were replaced by newcomers of steadily diminishing competence. Between 23 and 26 October, the Japanese lost four carriers, three battleships, ten cruisers and nine destroyers. The Americans lost three small carriers, two destroyers and a destroyer escort. Some 13,000 sailors perished, most Japanese.
There might have been fewer U.S. fatalities but for an extraordinary failure of omission, for which blame attaches to Kinkaid. Amazingly, for a nation that devoted greater resources than any other combatant to rescue, in the confusion that followed Leyte Gulf, hundreds of American sailors—notably survivors from lost ships of Taffy 3—were left in the water for up to two days and nights before those who remained were located. They had suffered terribly, not least from sharks. “Fifty hours in the water312,” one of the destroyer Johnston’s survivors, Lt. Robert Hagen, reflected disbelievingly. “That’s too long to wait before you’re picked up!” It was a sorry postscript to the battle. Those men had deserved better from the commanders they had served so well.
Admiral James Clark returned from leave shortly after Leyte Gulf, and reported to Nimitz on Hawaii. “I guess I missed the best battle313 of the war,” said Clark, in some chagrin. “Oh, no,” replied Nimitz with a quiet grin. “The best battle will be the last battle.”