Lieutenant Edwin John Weil, flying a Curtiss SB2C from the carrier Franklin, dove on the light carrier Zuiho. Pushing over at 14,000 feet, he descended through “unbelievable” antiaircraft fire, the hands on his altimeter spinning counterclockwise, and fought the stick to keep the flight deck’s red disk in the center of his bombsight. He dropped his bomb from 600 feet above the target, well below standard release altitude. As he pulled out of the dive, his rear gunner shouted over the intercom, confirming a direct hit. The Curtiss dropped to low altitude, 100 feet above the sea. Jinking his airplane, flak bursting all around him, Weil flew directly alongside a heavy warship, noting that “its pagoda masks and varieties of firepower were awesome.”55
The antiaircraft fire thrown up by Ozawa’s fleet was the most intense the American pilots had ever seen. Bill Davis, flying a Hellcat from the Lexington, dove through a storm of flak so dense that he could not see the sea beneath him. “At 10,000 feet there was a black cloud of bursting shells from the 40mm and 5-inch guns . . . a second deadly cloud was forming at 4,000 feet from the exploding 20mm shells.”56 Knowing that velocity was his friend, Davis firewalled the throttle. Pulling out of the dive, he estimated that he was flying more than 500 miles per hour, significantly faster than Grumman’s recommended maximum. He was low over the sea, and a Japanese heavy cruiser loomed ahead. Rapidly it grew larger in his windshield; he did not have time to turn away. Davis pulled up and banked hard to the right, passing between the superstructure and the forward gun turret. “I was perhaps three feet from the windows on the bridge and could see the Japanese officers and enlisted men commanding the ship,” he said. “There was an admiral in dress whites, complete with sword. The other officers and men were also in dress whites. I was going 530 miles an hour, and I only got a glimpse, but that image is impressed on my mind forever.”57
The first wave of attackers scored against the Chitose, Chiyoda, Zuiho, and Zuikaku. The Zuikaku, Ozawa’s flagship, was the sole surviving aircraft carrier of the six that had hit Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the Americans were especially determined to send her to the bottom. She was crippled by the first wave, and Ozawa was forced to transfer his flag to the cruiser Oyodo.58 The Chitose was pulverized by three torpedo hits and several 1,000-lb bomb hits; she was left burning out of control and dead in the water, and sank at 9:37 a.m.59
Halsey did not learn of the situation off Samar until 8:22 a.m., when he received the first of several urgent dispatches from Kinkaid: “CTU 77.4.3 [Ziggy Sprague] reports enemy battleships and cruiser 15 miles astern his unit and firing on him.”60
Halsey later wrote that he was “not alarmed” by the news, assuming that the escort carriers could hold the enemy at bay long enough for Oldendorf’s heavy ships to come up and join the battle.61 But that has an unmistakable whiff of false bravado. Intelligence officer Carl Solberg recorded that Halsey’s face was “ashen,” and that he seemed “pretty dashed.”62 Whatever he thought of Taffy 3’s chances, Halsey must have realized that Kurita’s surprise appearance cast doubt on the wisdom of his earlier decisions. At a minimum, it meant that he had exaggerated the damage inflicted by his planes in the Sibuyan Sea the previous day.
Eight minutes later came Kinkaid’s next salvo, a blunt demand: “Fast battleships are urgently needed immediately at Leyte Gulf.”63 Halsey claimed to be “surprised” by this suggestion. In his reading of his operational orders, it was not his job to protect Kinkaid’s fleet; it was Kinkaid’s job to protect Kinkaid’s fleet. However, he radioed Admiral McCain, whose Task Group 1 was refueling at sea east of the Philippines, to “strike as practicable.”64
Ziggy Sprague now butted directly into the conversation, by adding “COM3RDFLT” (Halsey) and “CINCPAC” (Nimitz) as coaddressees on several urgent dispatches to Kinkaid.65 Strictly speaking, this was a breach of protocol, as Halsey and Nimitz were outside Sprague’s chain of command. Given extenuating circumstances, no one objected.
Kinkaid’s next dispatch reached the New Jersey half an hour later, at 9:00 a.m. Now the Seventh Fleet boss was repeating himself, but in a more agitated tone: “My situation is critical. Fast battleships and support by air strike may be able [to] prevent enemy from destroying CVEs and entering Leyte.”66 But Halsey believed he had already done all that he could do. He radioed McCain again, this time ordering him to make best possible speed to intercept Kurita. Then he let Kinkaid know that McCain was on the way.67
Twenty-two minutes later, a message from Kinkaid reported that the enemy fleet “evidently came through San Bernardino during the night. Request immediate air strike. Also request support from heavy ships. My old battleships low in ammunition.”68
This last bit of information was a new factor, said Halsey, “so astonishing that I could hardly accept it.” He wondered why Kinkaid had not told him earlier. Then he read the time-date stamps, and realized that he had been receiving Kinkaid’s dispatches out of order. The last message was the third to be sent by Kinkaid, but the sixth received. It had been sent almost two hours earlier, at 7:25 a.m. During that two-hour interval, the New Jersey had traveled about 40 miles farther from the scene of action off Samar. The overloaded radio net was playing havoc with communications between the two fleets. A coding officer later explained that all messages were transmitted on the “Fox broadcast schedule” based on Oahu, and a spike in volume “imposed a terrific burden on that schedule because it was transmitted at a fairly low rate of words per minute, because all of the ships in the fleet were expected to copy most of the messages, or at least be able to copy them.”69 Various originators, frustrated by backed-up radio circuits, had resorted to sending ordinary communications with “high priority” designations. This practice tended to spread like a contagion, inevitably slowing the pace of genuinely urgent radio traffic.
Halsey replied: “Am now engaging enemy carrier force. TG 38.1 with 5 carriers and 4 cruisers has been ordered to assist you immediately.”70 He added his Lat-Long position, which showed that the issue was moot. The Third Fleet was almost 400 miles away, too far north to help the Seventh Fleet even if Halsey had wanted to do so.
Several of Kinkaid’s prior messages had been sent “in the clear”—that is, in plain language, without encryption. That laid them bare for the enemy to intercept, but it also tended to hurry them through the coding rooms and reach their recipients faster. In this instance, the transmissions were delayed nonetheless, but Kinkaid told a colleague that he had radioed in plain language for another reason—“to give it an electrifying effect, which it certainly did have.”71
In the eyes of at least one subordinate on the New Jersey’s bridge, Halsey’s famous bravado appeared to be waning. The admiral sat alone on a leather transom, brooding silently. He was overheard to mutter, “When I get my teeth into something, I hate to let go.”72
The dialogue between Kinkaid and Halsey was being monitored in real time at military headquarters throughout the Pacific, and even on the U.S. mainland. Admirals King and Nimitz were copied as “information addressees” on several messages in the thread. Even when they were not, they were generally privy to all transmissions, because their communications departments eavesdropped on the radio net. Enlisted men plotted each updated Lat-Long position on charts laid out on tables, allowing the admirals to visualize the locations of various fleet elements. In Pearl Harbor and Washington, therefore, Halsey’s only two direct superiors were paying close attention to the unfolding drama, and rendering spot judgments upon his every move. Neither was pleased.
Jocko Clark, the once and future carrier task group commander, was visiting the Navy Department on Constitution Avenue in Washington. Stepping into Admiral King’s office, he found the CNO in a towering fury. King was pacing the floor “like a tiger,” and cursing Halsey for leaving San Bernardino Strait unguarded. “I’ve never seen Ernie King madder in my whole life,” Clark recalled, “and I’ve seen him mad a good many times, and I’ve seen him awfully mad, but this was one that was for the storybooks. He was pacing up and down and the air was blue wit
h what he had to say about Halsey.”73
At Pacific Fleet headquarters in Hawaii, meanwhile, Nimitz was pacing the floor of his office. That was strange, said Bernard Austin, the assistant chief of staff, because “Admiral Nimitz was not one to pace the floor. He faced many problems calmly and without any outward manifestation of the difficulties that he was having mentally coping with the situation. But on this occasion, he was pacing up and down. So I knew that this was an index of a very high order of perturbation on the part of the Fleet Admiral.”74
Nimitz would later say that he spent most of this period on the horseshoe court behind his house on Makalapa Hill. “I was on pins and needles, but couldn’t show it. So I went to my quarters to pitch horseshoes, telling my staff, ‘if word comes, you can reach me there.’ Most of the dispatches from that great battle in which the Japanese fleet was destroyed reached me on the horseshoe court.”75 That was undoubtedly true, but according to several staff officers, Nimitz was in his headquarters during the critical hours of Halsey’s run north to Cape Engano. He repeatedly pressed a buzzer to summon Austin into his office, each time asking whether any incoming radio dispatches indicated whether Halsey had left his heavy ships guarding San Bernardino Strait. Austin combed through the dispatches, finding nothing to shed light on the question. He suggested that Admiral Nimitz simply ask for confirmation that the strait was guarded. Nimitz refused, avowing that “he did not wish to send any dispatch which would directly or indirectly influence the responsible tactical commander in the tactical use of his forces.”76
Several other senior staff officers were in and out of Nimitz’s office during this interval, including Forrest Sherman and Truman Hedding. When Kinkaid reported that Taffy 3 was under fire, they raised the question again. Should Nimitz ask for the location of Task Force 34?
It was a sensitive question. Nearly three years into the war, Nimitz had never inserted himself into a battle by demanding information or prodding a fleet commander to act. Often he had been tempted to do it, or was lobbied to do it by members of his staff—during the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Battle of Midway, several of the naval battles around Guadalcanal in late 1942, and most recently at the Battle of the Philippine Sea the previous June. In each instance, Nimitz had refrained from needling his fleet commanders, preferring to trust their tactical judgment.
Pearl Harbor had not copied Halsey’s message to Kinkaid reporting that the battleships were up north, with the rest of the Third Fleet. So the question was put to the chief again, for a third time, by Sherman, Hedding, and Austin. Why not simply ask Halsey for the location of Task Force 34? At last Nimitz relented.
The brief dispatch was composed by either Sherman or Austin—the accounts vary—and approved by Nimitz for transmission: “Where is Task Force 34?”77 King and Kinkaid were copied as “for your information” addressees.
Down the message went, with a whoosh of the pneumatic tube, to the coding room in the CINCPAC headquarters basement, where occurred the most notorious snafu in the history of encrypted radio communications. When an outgoing dispatch was enciphered, it was standard procedure to add a few nonsensical words to the beginning and end of the text. This gibberish was called “padding,” and its purpose was to confound enemy codebreakers. Padding was separated from the message text by a two-letter “null,” and the receiving communications officer was supposed to remove it before passing it to its recipient. A short message was considered more vulnerable to cryptanalysis, so it was common practice to repeat part of the text solely in order to lengthen it. In this instance, the outgoing dispatch was transmitted as:
TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG FROM CINCPAC [Nimitz] ACTION COM THIRD FLEET [Halsey] INFO COMINCH [King] CTF SEVENTY SEVEN [Kinkaid] X WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR RR THE WORLD WONDERS.78
On the other side of the Pacific, the dots and dashes were gathered out of the atmosphere by the New Jersey’s towering radio masts. In the coding room below, a teleprinter spat out a short tape with the decrypted text. In normal circumstances the communications staff would copy out the message on a dispatch form. But when a message was urgent, as this one plainly was, they tore off the padding and rushed the raw decode tape directly up to flag plot. Lieutenant Charles Fox, a communications officer, recognized the initial padding as obvious gibberish, and tore it off. But the final three words presented a dilemma. Though they were separated from the prior text by a two-letter null, it was at least possible that “RR” was garble. In cases of confusion or ambiguity, if there were any doubt whether a phrase constituted padding or message text, the standard practice was to leave it on the tape and let the recipient judge whether it belonged.79
Fox handed the decode tape to a subordinate, who placed it into a cartridge and inserted it into the pneumatic tube, which took it with another whoosh three decks up to flag plot. A communications officer removed it from the tube, saw that it was from Nimitz, and handed it directly to Halsey, who glanced down and read what he took to be a sarcastic mock-question: “Where is, repeat, where is Task Force 34, the world wonders?”
Halsey erupted. According to various eyewitnesses, he turned purple with rage, threw his cap to the deck, crumpled the dispatch, threw it down, and trampled it. By some accounts, tears welled up in his eyes and he let out a plaintive bleat, akin to a sob. “I was as stunned as if I had been struck in the face,” he later wrote.80 He shouted: “What right has Chester to send me a goddamn message like that?”81
Mick Carney, alarmed by the specter of a four-star meltdown in full view of the Third Fleet staff, moved quickly to confront Halsey: “Stop it! What the hell’s the matter with you? Pull yourself together!”82
Halsey stormed off the bridge and down to his quarters, Carney on his heels. The two men remained sequestered there, behind a closed door, for nearly an hour. During that time, the Third Fleet continued north at high speed, toward Ozawa’s stricken force and away from the desperate fight off Samar.
According to Charles Fox, the message was broken and rebroken, several times, and the specious inclusion of “the world wonders” was quickly corrected.83 Given its importance, the error and correction would have been brought to Halsey’s attention right away. Soon after his initial shock, therefore—if not while in his sea cabin with Carney, then immediately upon returning to flag plot—Halsey learned that he had misconstrued the last part of the message. Neither Halsey nor Carney disclosed details of their hour-long private discussion, but as long-serving sailors they could deduce that the “Where is, repeat, where is” wording was a coding convention, and not intended to lend the message a peremptory tone. Halsey knew Nimitz well enough to be sure that the Pacific Fleet chief was not capable of sarcasm, certainly not in this context. “I was infuriated by what appeared to be an insulting message,” he told a historian years later. “After my rage had cooled off and I had time to think, I realized that something was wrong. I also realized that Admiral Nimitz could not possibly have sent me a message such as this.”84 It is reasonable, therefore, to infer that the initial misunderstanding was short-lived.†
That last point deserves emphasis, because it has often been obscured. However mundane the phrasing, even stripped of the errant padding, Nimitz’s query amounted to a humiliating reprimand that undercut Halsey’s authority. Never before had the CINCPAC intervened while a battle was in progress. Even if “Where is Task Force 34?” was taken as a simple question, rather than as a prod to action, it implicitly faulted Halsey for failing to report his movements clearly and unambiguously. If Nimitz could not make sense of Halsey’s prior dispatches, how could Kinkaid be expected to have done so? In effect, Nimitz was fixing blame on Halsey for letting the Japanese sneak up on the Seventh Fleet. The inclusion of King and Kinkaid as addressees was a twist of the knife.
Under the circumstances, Nimitz’s dispatch was not really an inquiry at all. It was an order, politely phrased as an inquiry. The CINCPAC no longer doubted the whereabouts of Task Force 34; he could easily deduce that it was up north with t
he rest of the Third Fleet. Halsey’s flagship New Jersey was herself a component of Task Force 34. In other words, the task force was wherever Halsey was—and the admiral had employed the first person in several messages to Kinkaid, as in “Am proceeding north with three groups,” and “Am now engaging enemy carrier force.” Halsey would not have left his battlewagons without air cover, but he had clearly stated that all three carrier groups had gone north; therefore, the battleships must have gone too. More directly to the point, Kurita was now known to have traversed San Bernardino Strait and traveled far enough south to shoot at the Seventh Fleet. Since Task Force 34 had not been there to intercept it, and no reasonable third alternative existed, it must have gone north. Years after the war, Nimitz told his biographer, “I knew perfectly well where Task Force 34 was.”85
Returning to flag plot shortly before 11:00 a.m., Halsey and Carney wore brave faces. Carney began issuing orders. Task Force 34 was to reverse course and race south at peak speed to relieve the Seventh Fleet. One carrier group, Bogan’s Group 2, would come along; the two others would be left behind to finish off the Northern Force. When the big ships began turning around, they were only 42 nautical miles from the nearest cripples of Ozawa’s fleet, almost close enough to see them on the horizon. It was a woeful anticlimax. Halsey later wrote, “I turned my back on the opportunity I had dreamed of since my days as a cadet.”86 But Nimitz had forced his hand. He notified Kinkaid, “Am proceeding toward Leyte with Task Group 38.2 and six fast battleships.”87 He added that he did not expect to arrive before eight the following morning.
“A STERN CHASE IS A LONG CHASE,” was an old sailor’s maxim—and in the running battle off Samar that morning, the principle held. Kurita’s Center Force battleships and cruisers were about ten knots faster than Taffy 3’s escort carriers, but Sprague maneuvered his ships deftly, altering course to keep his pursuers astern, and making good use of smokescreens and wet weather. For twenty minutes he hid his six baby flattops in a rainstorm, and while they were so hidden he turned south, and then southwest. The Japanese did not cut across the arc of his turn, as he had feared, but kept turning behind him, traveling a longer distance. Kurita’s loose echelon formation was continually harassed from the air, by Taffy 3’s own aircraft and by those of the neighboring Taffy groups to the south. Most unforgettably, the little “tin cans” of the Taffy 3 screen—a handful of destroyers and destroyer escorts—fought a ferocious and desperate rearguard action, buying precious time for the carriers by forcing the Japanese ships to dodge torpedoes.
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