Another wave of kamikazes arrived three hours later, soon after Kurita’s Center Force had broken off their pursuit and turned north. As if Ziggy Sprague’s group had not had a rough enough morning already, this deadly swarm fell directly on Taffy 3. The crews had just secured from general quarters and were celebrating their unexpected reprieve when many bogeys appeared on radar scopes, approaching from the north. At 10:40 a.m., the sky filled with flak as six Japanese planes winged in from astern. Two struck the Kalinin Bay, which erupted in blossoms of flame: the explosions and fires killed five of her crew and wounded fifty. Another aimed for the Fanshaw Bay but was poleaxed by antiaircraft fire, crashing alongside the ship. The White Plains’s gunners likewise destroyed an attacker at point-blank range, but the aircraft’s bomb detonated near enough to the ship that men were wounded by debris raining down over her flight deck. A Zero narrowly missed the bridge of the Kitkun Bay and crashed into her forward port catwalk; fires sprung up, but they were quickly subdued.
On all but one of the stricken carriers, damage control teams managed to contain the fires and the ships could at least withdraw from the battle under their own steam. The exception was the St. Lo, which was hit at 10:53 a.m. A Zero banked sharply away from a wall of flak thrown up by the White Plains and flew over the bow of the St. Lo. The kamikaze nosed down directly above the flight deck and crashed the centerline amidships. The attacker’s 250-kilogram bomb exploded in the hangar, starting an aggressive fire that quickly swallowed up the ready bomb and torpedo stowage magazines. Torn apart by a series of blasts, the lightly built ship began rolling to port. Though the St. Lo still had normal two-engine propulsion, the captain stopped the engines and ordered abandon ship, and men began going over the side. Listing heavily to port, the ship suddenly righted and then kept rolling over to starboard. She capsized and went down at 11:25 a.m. The screening ships, which had just finished their heroic action against Kurita’s battleships and cruisers, moved in close to rescue survivors. Most of the crew, 754 of 800, were saved.
This attack had been led by Lieutenant Yukio Seki, the pilot anointed by Admiral Onishi to head the first dedicated “Shimpu” suicide unit based at Mabalacat on Luzon. The observer planes were led by Chief Warrant Officer Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, one of the most renowned Zero aces in the Japanese navy. Nishizawa returned with a thrilling report: four of Seki’s suicide planes had scored, sinking one carrier and a light cruiser, and damaging another carrier. The news was radioed to Tokyo, and a public communiqué reported those same results.
For once, the public reports were not exaggerated. No cruiser was in the vicinity, but Seki’s planes had hit three carriers, not two, destroying one and damaging the others badly enough that they had to be withdrawn to rear bases for major repairs.
This small cadre of suicide airplanes, whose attack came as an addendum to the great naval battle that was just winding down, presented a baleful foretaste of what was to come. The lesson was taken to heart on both sides: if Japanese pilots were willing to trade their lives for sure hits on Allied ships, they could draw blood.
HALSEY’S DETACHED WARSHIPS RACED SOUTH through the night, but arrived too late to catch the retreating Kurita. The admiral and his staff waited with drawn breath for news that the enemy fleet had entered Leyte Gulf, and for a time Kinkaid’s dispatches gave conflicting indications. A confusing run of radio updates flowed into flag plot on the New Jersey. Tommy Sprague first allowed “situation looks better,” but forty-five minutes later added, “Enemy surface forces returning to attack CVEs.”104 When it was clear that Kurita really had broken off the attack, Halsey decided to make flank speed for the mouth of San Bernardino Strait, hoping to head him off at the pass. He subdivided his forces again, sending his fastest ships ahead. The chase group included his own flagship New Jersey and her sister Iowa, with light cruisers and destroyers; they worked up to 30 knots and shaped course for San Bernardino. Kurita got there first, and was safely through to the other side two hours before Halsey’s force arrived shortly after at 1:00 a.m. A single straggler was in range of the American guns, a crippled destroyer, the Nowaki. The cripple was too piddling a target for the New Jersey’s 16-inchers, so Halsey sent one of his destroyers ahead to finish her. That was the only action directly witnessed by the Third Fleet staff in the course of the battle. The mighty New Jersey had chased 300 miles north, turned around, and chased 300 miles south. Her part in the battle was finished, and her guns were cold. “And the rat got back to his hole before the cat could get there,” Carney ruefully concluded, “and all we could do was make a quick scratch at his tail as he went through.”105
Off Cape Engano, meanwhile, the two Third Fleet carrier task groups that had remained (38.3 and 38.4) continued to fly strikes against the retreating remnants of Ozawa’s fleet. Four Japanese aircraft carriers were sent to the bottom, including the Zuikaku, the sixth and last surviving carrier that had attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. With a spirit of friendly competition, the various air units singled her out for special attention; all wanted the honor of delivering the killing blow. As Admiral Frederick C. Sherman recalled, the third strike launched from his Task Group 38.3 flight decks “put the finishing touches on the Zuikaku with nine direct 1000 and 2000-pound bomb hits.” Previously she had been hit by an estimated seven aerial torpedoes. The burning wreck listed heavily to port, then rolled over and sank bow-first at 2:14. The target coordinator, watching from altitude, pronounced it “a very gratifying sight.”106
That afternoon, a cruiser-destroyer squadron under Rear Admiral Laurance T. DuBose was sent ahead to sink enemy cripples with naval gunfire. DuBose’s ships caught up to the Chiyoda and fired into her until she was gone. A fighter pilot overhead relayed a report back to the task force: “Splash one CVL at 1701—4 down and none to go.”107 Three hours later, the same force sank the destroyer Hatsuzuki. At nightfall, however, Dubose was summoned back, and the two carrier groups turned south to fall in with Halsey the next day.
Now all remaining Japanese naval forces were in headlong retreat. Carrier planes chased the fugitives into the Mindanao Sea, the Sulu Sea, and the Sibuyan Sea. The Taffy carriers launched pursuing airstrikes on the last of Nishimura and Shima’s retreating ships, finally putting an end to the Mogami on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth. The Abukuma, which did not have sufficient propulsion to maneuver effectively, was hit by a tight pattern of 500-pound bombs dropped by army B-24 Liberators; she went down off Negros Island. Kurita’s retiring survivors were attacked repeatedly from the air throughout the day of October 26; many suffered serious additional damage, including the Nagato, the Haruna, the Kumano, and the Yamato. The cruiser Noshiro was sunk at 11:37 a.m. in Tablas Strait. Of Nishimura’s Southern Force, only the Shigure survived; she returned alone to Brunei Bay, and her captain was the only surviving commanding officer of that force. The U.S. submarine Jallao knocked off the retreating cruiser Tama, lately of Ozawa’s force, northeast of Luzon. By outpacing his own cripples, Admiral Shima managed to get away from Surigao Strait in the Nachi—but she was later set upon by Task Force 38 planes in Manila Bay and sent to the bottom. The carrier planes strafed survivors in the water; 807 of her crew perished.
Some of those later mopping-up actions fell outside the time boundary set by historians to mark the end of the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Even so curtailed, however, the sprawling contest had been the largest naval battle in history. It had involved nearly three hundred ships with combined displacement of about 3 million tons. The contending fleets were manned by about 200,000 men, enough to populate a midsized city. Combined losses were thirty-four ships, more than five hundred airplanes, and more than 16,000 casualties. The contest had included every conceivable variety of naval fighting, by every kind of vessel—carrier strikes, gunnery and torpedo duels between surface warships, submarine attacks, swarming PT-boat attacks, and suicide air attacks. The action included history’s last “battle line” at Surigao Strait, the consummate David versus Goliath fight of the “tin can” sailors
at Samar, and the official opening blow of the kamikaze campaign. Lasting four days, the “battle” was really a series of widely separated actions fought over a theater covering 100,000 square miles. Four were large enough to qualify as major battles in their own right, and named accordingly: the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea, the Battle of Surigao Strait, the Battle off Cape Engano, and the Battle off Samar. No fighting (except air attacks) occurred in Leyte Gulf, so the name given to the whole battle was really a misnomer. At first the navy called it the “Second Battle of the Philippine Sea,” and some early histories actually used that name. MacArthur preferred “Leyte Gulf,” which emphasized his beachhead as the enemy’s intended point of convergence, and the name stuck. (Better than either would have been the “Naval Battle of the Philippines,” but the issue was settled long ago.)
The battle effectively brought the naval war for the Pacific to an end. Given the much-weakened state of the Imperial Navy before the battle, its losses at Leyte Gulf were ruinous: four aircraft carriers, three battleships, ten cruisers, and twelve destroyers. Aircraft losses had been heavy in the weeks before the battle, but the Japanese managed to lose some five hundred more. It would take many weeks to count up the losses in officers and sailors, but the figure would eventually surpass 12,000. Surviving remnants of the Japanese fleet limped away, but they would never again sortie in force. As both sides had foreseen, an American foothold in the Philippines rendered Japan’s north-south sea links untenable, which meant that its remaining heavy warships were starved of fuel and thus largely immobilized. According to Admiral Ozawa, the fleet’s survivors “became strictly auxiliary . . . there was no further use assigned to surface vessels, with the exception of some special ships.”108 What little remained of the carrier air corps was deployed to terrestrial airfields, and most remaining airmen and airplanes were merged into kamikaze units.
The U.S. and Allied side had suffered as well. The Americans had lost one light carrier (Princeton), two escort carriers (Gambier Bay and St. Lo), two destroyers, and a destroyer escort. Many other ships were seriously damaged and had to be sent back to Manus, Hawaii, or North America for major repairs. The Americans suffered casualties of about 1,500 men killed or missing and twice that number wounded. Those losses were not inordinate relative to the scale of the victory, but they left a sour aftertaste in the mouths of the victors. A tone of recrimination could be detected in radio messages between the Third and Seventh Fleets. The near-debacle off Samar was exacerbated by a botched air-sea rescue response, which left more than a thousand Taffy 3 survivors adrift at sea for almost two days after the Japanese fleet left the scene. As a result of mistaken position reports, the initial rescue efforts covered an area too far south. Late on October 26, a squadron of LCI landing craft picked up 700 Gambier Bay survivors, then found the last survivors of the Johnston, Roberts, and Hoel the next morning. Many of their shipmates had drowned, died of exposure, or been taken by sharks. Commander Evans of the Johnston was among those who had perished during the long delay; he would receive a posthumous Medal of Honor.
In the immediate aftermath of their victory, the victors seemed frustrated, embittered, and exhausted. After arriving off San Bernardino to find that Kurita had already made his escape, Halsey radioed a victory cry to all commands: “It can be announced with assurance that the Japanese Navy has been beaten, routed, and broken by the Third and Seventh Fleets.”109 Although that was true, it was a dollop of bravado to salve a festering wound. In a heated and defensive 480-word message composed in the small hours of October 26, and radioed that morning to King, Nimitz, MacArthur, and Kinkaid, the Third Fleet commander set out to explain and justify his decision to take his entire fleet north. The harangue included some passages that could only be explained as the product of acute mental and emotional fatigue. “To statically guard San Bernardino Straits until enemy surface and carrier air attacks could be coordinated would have been childish,” Halsey wrote. Kurita’s Center Force had been “crippled” by his carrier airstrikes in the Sibuyan Sea on October 24, and was “so badly damaged that [it] constituted no serious threat to Kinkaid.” By turning away from the fight off Engano, Halsey complained, he had missed “my golden opportunity” to wipe out the enemy’s northern carrier force.110
This was the first of Halsey’s post hoc rationalizations for his decisions at Leyte Gulf. They would continue, adamant and unyielding, until his death in 1959. Allowances should be made for clumsy phrasing in a message hastily dashed off at the end of a grueling three-day battle. But the word “childish” seemed especially ill-chosen, and prompted concern among Halsey’s colleagues. Deploying the battleships to guard San Bernardino Strait would not have been “static,” much less “childish,” but rather active and manful. The idea that Kurita’s force had been “crippled” in the Sibuyan Sea, and thus presented no threat to Kinkaid, had already been resoundingly debunked by that morning’s Battle off Samar. “My golden opportunity” did not sit right, either. It cut against the navy’s team-before-player ethos, and hinted at a MacArthuresque longing on Halsey’s part to secure his place in history.
AS THE LAST, LARGEST, and most closely studied naval battle in history, Leyte Gulf is a subgenre unto itself. Generations of scholars have had their say, but pioneering new contributions appear year after year, and various controversies remain the subject of vigorous debate. This is particularly true of the two controversial decisions by Halsey and Kurita—the former to take his entire force north on the night of October 24, and the latter to break off his attack on the morning of October 25. C. Vann Woodward, author of the first major history of the battle, judged that “the two colossal failures at Leyte Gulf are reasonably attributable to an American Hotspur and a Japanese Hamlet.”111 In the American view, Kurita’s decision to turn back providentially neutralized Halsey’s failure to cover San Bernardino Strait. Like corresponding terms in an algebra equation, the two blunders cancelled each other out.
After breaking off pursuit of the escort carriers at 9:25 a.m., Kurita had summoned his ships to regroup in circular battle formation. This was more easily ordered than accomplished. Visibility remained deplorable, radio communications were spotty, and relentless air attacks continued to fall upon the Center Force. Reassembling into fleet formation took a full two hours, during which time a flood of new contact reports and radio intercepts only added to the impression of chaos. Persistent reports of another American task force to the north left the Japanese with the sense that they were surrounded, but no enemy ships materialized in that direction. At 11:20, Kurita set course to the southwest, momentarily intending to break into Leyte Gulf. Half an hour later, lookouts reported seeing the masts of a Pennsylvania-class battleship and four other ships hull-down to the south at an estimated range of 39 kilometers. This could not have been Oldendorf, who was still south of Leyte Gulf, and no other battleships were in the vicinity—evidently, it must have been another apparition. (Kurita dispatched a Yamato floatplane to investigate, but it was apparently shot down.) At 1:13 p.m., Kurita again changed his mind and reversed course to the north, this time intending to run up the coast of Samar in hopes of finding another American carrier group, whose presence was surmised by Kinkaid’s intercepted plain-language transmissions. For several hours the Center Force headed north, fighting off several more waves of airstrikes while underway. Kurita had expected to make contact with the enemy task force within two hours, but as masthead lookouts scanned the horizon in every direction, no enemy ships were to be seen. Fuel considerations began to weigh more heavily on his mind. Soon he would not have enough fuel to make Colon Bay, or even to maneuver against American airstrikes. If he was going to withdraw, it was now or never. At 6:30 p.m., with dusk looming, he decided to call it a battle and head for San Bernardino Strait.
Kurita had been directly ordered, in no uncertain terms, to charge into Leyte Gulf and attack the American transport fleet and beachhead. He had been expressly instructed to press on even at the risk of complete annihilation. Why had he ch
osen not to do so? The various explanations and justifications given by the admiral and his acolytes were confusing and incongruous from the start. He said he believed the air attacks upon his ships were growing in intensity and effectiveness, and “In the narrow confines of Leyte Gulf I couldn’t use the advantage that ships have of maneuvering, whereas I would be a more useful force under the same attack with the advantage of maneuver in the open sea.”112 His communications team had intercepted American transmissions calling for air support, so he expected the airstrikes to grow fiercer and more numerous. Moreover, he had not budgeted fuel to get home: “Therefore, the fuel was a very important consideration; the basic one.”113 Kurita added that he believed most of the American amphibious fleet had probably already pulled out of the gulf, “and I therefore considered it not so important as it would have been before.”114 The Yamato had received a mysterious report placing an American task force 113 miles north of the Sulutan lighthouse. Kurita thought it better to steer toward this contact, which he presumed to be another Third Fleet carrier group, in hopes of bringing it under his guns before it could launch an airstrike against him.
Western histories of the battle have leaned heavily on postwar interrogations of Kurita and his senior staff officers. In the months after the surrender, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, working with the U.S. Navy, rounded up leading Japanese officers and questioned them closely about their major decisions in this and other battles. The result was an invaluable resource for historians. Not surprisingly, however, not all of the Japanese were equally forthcoming under interrogation. Whenever sensitive or potentially embarrassing topics were raised, evasion, misdirection, and outright lies were to be expected. Naturally, these proud men did not wish to air their dirty laundry in the conqueror’s presence. After a long interview with Kurita in November 1945, USSBS interrogators described the admiral as “somewhat on the defensive, giving only the briefest of replies. . . . In some instances his memory for details such as times, cruising dispositions, etc. appeared to be inaccurate.”115
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