Battle of Leyte Gulf

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Leyte Gulf, fought from the 23rd to the 26th of October 1944, pulled more than 200,000 naval personnel into a single sprawling confrontation in the waters of the Philippines. By some criteria it was the largest naval battle in history, and it settled nothing less than the fate of Japan's remaining naval power. Four separate engagements unfolded nearly simultaneously across hundreds of miles of open water, linked by a Japanese plan of breathtaking complexity and an American command structure fractured by divided loyalties. A crucial message arrived with three extra words attached. A fleet admiral wept on his flagship. Destroyers charged battleships to buy time the escort carriers desperately needed. And in the waters off Surigao Strait, a battleship fired what would prove to be the last salvo one warship would ever direct at another. How did the mightiest naval force Japan could assemble come so close to unraveling the American invasion of the Philippines? And how did a fatal misunderstanding between two U.S. admirals nearly hand Japan a catastrophic victory? The answers stretch from the highest levels of American strategic planning all the way down to a submarine captain who spotted the enemy at 01:16 on a dark October morning.

• 2. A Navy Running Out of Time

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  After the catastrophic Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, the Imperial Japanese Navy had no realistic path to a strategic victory. The U.S. Navy had shot down approximately 600 Japanese aircraft in that single engagement, leaving Japan with little carrier-borne air power and few experienced pilots. Japan's fleet now contained fewer capital ships than the Allies had aircraft carriers in the Pacific alone.

  Senior Japanese military leaders understood the arithmetic clearly. What kept them fighting at sea was a strategic calculation rather than any expectation of winning. The general staff believed that contesting Allied offensives could deter an invasion of Japan's home islands and give the navy one last chance to use its remaining strength. The alternative, allowing Allied forces to seize the Philippines unopposed, would sever Japan's supply lines to Southeast Asia entirely. As one Japanese officer framed the dilemma: if the Philippines fell, there would be no sense saving the fleet, because it could obtain neither fuel nor ammunition regardless of where it was.

  Combined Fleet Chief Soemu Toyoda prepared four plans, labeled Shō-Gō 1 through 4, each targeting a different axis of Allied attack. Shō-Gō 1 was the Philippines plan. When American forces landed at Leyte, Toyoda mobilized nearly every major warship Japan still possessed.

• 3. The Question of Where to Strike

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  Before a single shot was fired at Leyte, a strategic argument consumed months of Allied planning time. Admiral Ernest J. King and Admiral Chester Nimitz favored bypassing the Philippines and striking Formosa, cutting Japan's supply lines from a different angle. U.S. Army General Douglas MacArthur, who had pledged in 1942 to "return" to the Philippines, argued for Leyte. The debate was more than personal. Formosa was estimated to require roughly 12 divisions from the Army and Marines, manpower that could not be released from the European theater until Germany was defeated. The Australian Army, stretched across fighting in New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Dutch East Indies and other Pacific islands, could spare no troops at all.

  A meeting between MacArthur, Nimitz, and President Roosevelt helped settle the Philippines as the target, though it did not immediately resolve the debate. Nimitz eventually changed his mind and supported MacArthur's plan. MacArthur's ground forces would invade Leyte, with amphibious and close naval support provided by Seventh Fleet under Vice Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid. More distant air cover would come from Admiral William F. Halsey Jr.'s Third Fleet and its Fast Carrier Task Force under Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher.

  The plan carried a structural flaw from the start. Kinkaid fell under MacArthur's command as Supreme Allied Commander Southwest Pacific Area, while Halsey reported to Nimitz as Commander-in-Chief Pacific Ocean Areas. No single American admiral commanded both fleets. That gap would nearly prove fatal.

• 4. Submarines in the Dark

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  At 01:16 on the 23rd of October, the American submarine Darter detected Kurita's Center Force entering Palawan Passage on radar at a range of 30,000 yards. Kurita's column was the most powerful of the three Japanese forces, built around five battleships including Yamato and Musashi, each displacing more than 60,000 tons, the largest warships in service at the time. Together, the force counted ten heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and fifteen destroyers. A radio operator on Yamato intercepted at least one of Darter's contact reports, but Kurita failed to take appropriate antisubmarine precautions.

  Darter and her sister submarine Dace raced on the surface at full power through the night, gaining position ahead of the Japanese column to attack at first light. At 05:24, Darter fired six torpedoes at Kurita's flagship, the heavy cruiser Atago; at least four struck home. Atago sank so quickly that Kurita was forced to swim for his life before being rescued by a Japanese destroyer and transferred to the battleship Yamato. Ten minutes after the first salvo, Darter put two more torpedoes into Atago's sister ship Takao. Dace then struck the heavy cruiser Maya with four torpedo hits. Atago and Maya both went down rapidly. Takao limped back to Brunei.

  The American success came at a cost. On the 24th of October, while shadowing the damaged Takao, Darter ran aground on the Bombay Shoal. All efforts to free her failed, and her crew was evacuated aboard Dace. Repeated attempts to destroy the stranded submarine over the following week failed; the commander of the submarine Nautilus determined on the 31st of October that the equipment aboard Darter was fit only for scrap and left her on the reef. She was the price the Americans paid for eliminating three Japanese cruisers before the main engagement even began.

• 5. The Unguarded Strait

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  At 15:12 on the 24th of October, Halsey sent a radio message to his task group commanders laying out a contingency plan: a powerful surface force, Task Force 34, would be assembled under Vice Admiral Willis A. Lee to cover San Bernardino Strait if needed. The message used the phrase "will be formed" as future tense, but Halsey neglected to specify when or under what circumstances. Admiral Kinkaid of Seventh Fleet, reading the message, understood it as present tense. He concluded that TF 34 was already deployed off San Bernardino Strait, protecting his northern flank. Admiral Nimitz in Pearl Harbor reached exactly the same conclusion.

  Halsey sent a clarifying message at 17:10, but he sent it by voice radio rather than telegraph. At the range involved, Seventh Fleet's voice radio networks could not receive it. Neither Kinkaid, Nimitz, nor King received the clarification. Meanwhile, Third Fleet's aircraft had failed to locate Ozawa's Northern Force until 16:40. Ozawa's carriers were a decoy deliberately designed to be found, equipped with only 108 aircraft and virtually no trained aircrew. Yet it was the one Japanese force the Americans had not located all day.

  On the evening of the 24th, Halsey fell for the deception completely. Believing that Kurita's Center Force had been neutralized by air strikes in the Sibuyan Sea, he took all three available carrier groups northward to destroy Ozawa's carriers at dawn. Lee's six battleships went with them. As naval historian Woodward later observed: "Everything was pulled out from San Bernardino Strait. Not so much as a picket destroyer was left." Kurita's Center Force, still formidable despite its losses, emerged from the strait unopposed at 03:00 on the 25th and steamed south along the coast of Samar toward the invasion fleet.

• 6. Small Boys Attack

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  What Kurita found off Samar was not the fleet carriers he expected. Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague's Task Unit 77.4.3, call sign Taffy 3, comprised sixteen small, slow, unarmored escort carriers screened by destroyers and destroyer escorts. Kurita, unaware that Ozawa's decoy plan had succeeded, assumed he had stumbled onto a carrier group from Halsey's Third Fleet. He immediately ordered a "General Attack," which sent his ships splitting into independent divisions.

  The destroyer Johnston, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Ernest E. Evans, was closest to the Japanese column. Evans steered his outclassed ship directly at the Japanese fleet at flank speed and fired torpedoes at the heavy cruiser Kumano, damaging her and forcing her out of line. Sprague then gave the order "small boys attack," sending the rest of Taffy 3's screening ships into the fight. Lieutenant Commander Robert Copeland of the destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts told his crew over the bullhorn that this would be "a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival could not be expected." Hoel and Roberts were hit multiple times and sank. Johnston kept fighting with its 5-inch guns after expending all its torpedoes until a group of Japanese destroyers finally sank her.

  Rear Admiral Thomas Sprague, commanding all three Taffy units, ordered all sixteen escort carriers to launch every aircraft they had, totaling 450 planes, armed with whatever was available including machine guns and depth charges suited for anti-submarine work rather than anti-ship combat. The absence of any Japanese air cover meant these planes attacked unopposed. The ferocity of the air and torpedo assault, combined with the confusion of the "General Attack" order, convinced Kurita he was fighting a much larger force than he actually was. At 09:07 the escort carrier Gambier Bay capsized after sustaining multiple hits from Yamato's main battery. But Kurita broke off the fight and turned north, believing he had received a report of American carriers approaching from that direction. He had never been informed that only a handful of escort carriers and destroyers stood between his battleships and the vulnerable transports of the invasion fleet.

• 7. The Last Battleship Battle

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  While Kurita's ships were bearing down on Taffy 3, Rear Admiral Jesse Oldendorf had already sprung a trap in Surigao Strait. Nishimura's Southern Force, two old battleships, one heavy cruiser and four destroyers, steamed northward through the strait in the early hours of the 25th, threading through a gauntlet of PT boats and destroyers before running into a line of six American battleships deployed across the mouth of the strait. Five of those six battleships had been sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor and subsequently repaired or rebuilt.

  At 03:53, the West Virginia's radar found Yamashiro at a range of 22,800 yards. She fired her eight 16-inch guns and struck with her first salvo. She went on to fire 93 shells. California and Tennessee joined in at 03:55, firing 63 and 69 shells respectively from their 14-inch guns. The Japanese battleships, with inferior fire control systems, could not return fire effectively at those distances. Yamashiro was struck by a torpedo from the destroyer Newcomb at 04:05 and sank at about 04:20, with Nishimura on board.

  One of the three American battleships with less advanced gunnery radar, Mississippi, fired only once in the battle-line action: a full salvo of twelve 14-inch shells. That salvo, fired sometime in the early morning hours of the 25th of October 1944, was the last ever directed by a battleship at another battleship in history. Farther south, Vice Admiral Shima's trailing Second Striking Force arrived too late to help Nishimura and retreated after Shima's flagship Nachi collided with the crippled Mogami in the confusion. Of Nishimura's seven ships, only the destroyer Shigure escaped the strait; it was eventually sunk by an American submarine on the 24th of January 1945, off Kota Bharu, Malaya.

• 8. The Message and Its Aftermath

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  At around 08:00 on the morning of the 25th, desperate messages from Seventh Fleet began reaching Halsey. One from Kinkaid, sent in plain language, read: "My situation is critical. Fast battleships and support by air strikes may be able to keep enemy from destroying CVEs and entering Leyte." Halsey later recalled receiving this around 10:00 due to a backlog in his signals office. He claimed he did not grasp the severity of the crisis, and even a message reporting that Seventh Fleet's battleships were critically low on ammunition failed to move him to send immediate help.

  From Pearl Harbor, Admiral Nimitz sent Halsey a terse signal. The true message asked: "WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR." It was sandwiched between padding phrases used to confuse enemy cryptanalysis, with the terminal padding reading "THE WORLD WONDERS." A communications officer at Nimitz's headquarters had possibly drawn those words from Tennyson's poem on the Charge of the Light Brigade, since the 25th of October was the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Balaclava. Halsey's staff correctly stripped the opening padding but left the final words attached. Halsey read "THE WORLD WONDERS" as a biting rebuke from Nimitz, threw his cap to the deck and broke into what his own chief of staff, Rear Admiral Robert Carney, described as "sobs of rage." Carney confronted him: "Stop it! What the hell's the matter with you? Pull yourself together."

  At 11:15, more than three hours after the first distress messages arrived, Halsey finally ordered TF 34 to turn south. Two and a half hours were then spent refueling the accompanying destroyers. Lee's battleships arrived too late to intercept Kurita, and TF 34's formal action report recorded with notable brevity: "No battle damage was incurred nor inflicted on the enemy by vessels while operating as Task Force Thirty-Four." Lieutenant Commander Kent Coleman later argued in a thesis submitted to the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College that the divided command structure between Halsey reporting to Nimitz and Kinkaid reporting to MacArthur was the primary contributor to the near-success of Kurita's attack, more important even than any individual tactical decision Halsey made.