Battle of Leyte Gulf, 1944: the largest naval battle ever

In October 1944 the largest naval battle in history was fought in the waters around the Philippines. To stop the American return to the islands, Japan sent almost its entire remaining fleet in one enormous throw. What followed was not one battle but four, spread across a vast stretch of sea, from a night duel of battleship lines to the stand of a handful of small ships against giants. By the end the Imperial Japanese Navy had ceased to exist as an offensive force.³

Part of The greatest battles of the Pacific War · Before: The Battle of Peleliu · Next: Battle of Iwo Jima

Background: the road back to the Philippines

By the autumn of 1944 the American high command was divided over the next step. Admiral Ernest King favored striking at Formosa and bypassing the Philippines, and both Admiral Chester Nimitz and General George Marshall at first leaned the same way. General Douglas MacArthur pressed for the liberation of the Philippines, to which he had promised to return, and he prevailed.⁴ › Douglas MacArthur

The way was prepared from the air. In October Admiral William Halsey's carriers struck Okinawa, Formosa and Luzon, and in the air battles that followed hundreds of Japanese aircraft were destroyed, losses that would leave the Japanese fleet with little air cover in the battle to come. Japanese aircraft did manage to torpedo two American cruisers, which were towed to safety.⁵

On 20 October American troops went ashore on the east coast of Leyte. The first landings were almost unopposed, because the Japanese had chosen to defend farther inland, and MacArthur himself waded ashore the same day.⁶

Armies and commanders

The American naval forces were split between two commanders with no single superior on the spot. Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid's Seventh Fleet, which carried and supported the landing, answered to MacArthur and included six old battleships and 18 escort carriers. Halsey's Third Fleet, with 17 fast carriers and six fast battleships, answered to Nimitz. Its task was to cover the landing, but its orders also said that if the chance to destroy the main Japanese fleet arose, that was to be its primary task.⁷

Japan answered with Sho-1, its plan for a decisive battle in the Philippines, which aimed not at the American fleet but at the transports off the beaches. The main force, under Vice Admiral Kurita Takeo with the giant battleships Yamato and Musashi, would cross the central Philippines and come down on Leyte Gulf from the north through the San Bernardino Strait. A smaller force under Vice Admiral Nishimura Shoji, with two battleships, would come in from the south through the Surigao Strait, followed by Vice Admiral Shima Kiyohide's cruisers.⁸

The last part of the plan was a sacrifice. Vice Admiral Ozawa Jisaburo would bring four aircraft carriers down from Japan to the northeast of Luzon, to lure Halsey's fast carriers away from Leyte. The Japanese carrier air groups had been destroyed in earlier battles, and Ozawa's ships carried only about a hundred aircraft between them.⁹

The battle in phases

The plan began to go wrong before the battle opened. In the early hours of 23 October the American submarines Darter and Dace found Kurita's force off Palawan and attacked at dawn. Darter sank Kurita's flagship, the heavy cruiser Atago, and badly damaged the Takao, and Dace sank the Maya. Darter later ran aground, and her crew was taken off by Dace.¹⁰

On 24 October Halsey's aircraft found Kurita in the Sibuyan Sea and attacked wave after wave. They concentrated on the Musashi, which absorbed bomb after bomb and torpedo after torpedo before she sank. Japanese land-based aircraft struck back at the American carriers, and a single bomb set the light carrier Princeton on fire. As the cruiser Birmingham lay alongside to help, a huge explosion tore through the carrier and killed hundreds of men on the cruiser's decks.¹¹

Late that afternoon Kurita turned west, as if in retreat, and at about the same time American aircraft found Ozawa's carriers far to the north. Halsey took the whole Third Fleet north after them. Historians have pointed to his ambiguous orders, his wish to sink Japanese carriers, the belief that Kurita was beaten and a lack of intelligence on how few aircraft the Japanese carriers had left. Whatever the reason, the San Bernardino Strait was left unguarded, and Kurita turned back east toward it in the night.¹²

In the south, Nishimura's force entered the Surigao Strait in the dark of 25 October and ran a gauntlet of American PT boats and destroyers. Their torpedoes sank the battleship Fuso and three destroyers before the Japanese came within range of Rear Admiral Jesse Oldendorf's battle line. Six old American battleships, five of them survivors of Pearl Harbor, were waiting across the end of the strait; they crossed the Japanese T and opened fire with all their guns. The battleship Yamashiro went down with Nishimura aboard. Shima, following behind, had his flagship damaged in a collision with the crippled cruiser Mogami and turned back.¹³

Turning point: off Samar

At dawn on 25 October Kurita came out of the San Bernardino Strait and south along the coast of Samar. With Halsey far to the north and Kinkaid's battleships in the Surigao Strait, the only American force in his way was Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague's task unit known by its call sign as Taffy 3: six escort carriers, three destroyers and four destroyer escorts. Against them came four battleships, Yamato among them, with heavy and light cruisers and destroyers.¹⁴

The small ships attacked. The destroyer Johnston, under Commander Ernest Evans, led a torpedo attack on the Japanese line, followed by the Hoel, the Heerman and the destroyer escorts. The escort carriers flew off every aircraft they had, joined by planes from the neighboring group, Taffy 2. Johnston, Hoel and the destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts were sunk, and so was the escort carrier Gambier Bay. Evans was awarded the Medal of Honor after his death.¹⁵

The Japanese suffered as well. Three of Kurita's heavy cruisers, the Chokai, the Chikuma and the Suzuya, were sunk and the Kumano was badly damaged, mostly by the carrier aircraft. Without reconnaissance of his own and unaware that the decoy had worked, Kurita believed he was facing a large part of Halsey's fleet, with fleet carriers rather than escort carriers. With his ships scattered, he broke off and turned back north. Why he did so, when the transports lay within reach, has been argued over ever since.¹⁶

The same morning brought a new weapon. Japanese pilots made the first organized suicide attacks of the war on the escort carriers of Taffy 1, hitting the Santee and the Suwannee, and later that morning a kamikaze sank the St. Lo of Taffy 3, the first American warship lost to such an attack.¹⁷

Aftermath

Far to the north, off Cape Engaño, Halsey's aircraft sank all four of Ozawa's carriers, among them the Zuikaku, the last of the carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor. Kinkaid's calls for help reached Halsey only slowly. At about ten in the morning Nimitz sent his famous message, "Where is Task Force 34? The world wonders," and Halsey turned his fast battleships south. It was too late: Kurita had already gone back through the San Bernardino Strait, and the race north and south became known as "Bull's Run."¹⁸

The sources count the Japanese losses a little differently. Britannica lists 3 battleships, 1 large and 3 light carriers, 6 heavy and 4 light cruisers and 11 destroyers; the National WWII Museum counts 26 ships, including three battleships and four carriers. The United States lost the light carrier Princeton, two escort carriers, two destroyers and a destroyer escort.¹⁹

Japan could not replace what it had lost, and its navy never again fought as a fleet. The Leyte landings went on, and the way was open for the reconquest of the rest of the Philippines.²⁰

Legacy and memory

The battle left two great arguments. Halsey's run north after an almost empty decoy was debated from the moment it ended and still is; the National WWII Museum adds that the lack of a single commander over both fleets hindered coordination, a point the Naval History and Heritage Command also makes. Kurita's decision to turn back off Samar, when he was closer to success than he knew, is just as disputed.²¹

For the US Navy, the stand of Taffy 3 became one of its proudest stories. The Naval History and Heritage Command calls the fight put up by its destroyers and destroyer escorts one of the most heroic actions in the Navy's history, and Britannica calls Samar perhaps the unlikeliest naval victory of the Pacific War.²² › The greatest naval battles in history