All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [360]
Admiral Kurita, commanding the Japanese squadron, was offered an easy opportunity to annihilate the small, pathetically weak American force. Sprague’s destroyers and planes lunged repeatedly and with extraordinary courage at the enemy, but they lacked numbers and armour-piercing bombs. Kinkaid’s battleships were away to the south, many hours’ steaming, after fighting their night duel in the Surigao Strait. The escort carriers and aircrew knew that they alone must fight off the enemy battlefleet. Many pilots displayed prodigies of valour, though a few cracked under the strain of making repeated attacks: one man who landed back on Manila Bay proved reluctant to take off again, to make his third torpedo attack of the morning. Captain Fitzhugh Lee summoned the young man to his bridge. ‘He was pretty shaken up because he had watched his pals get shot down … We had just one torpedo left … We didn’t have any other pilot on board – ours were all flying. So we loaded him up and I gave him a fight talk on the bridge and patted him on the back and said, “Go out and do your best.” He did make a third run, and survived.’
Overwhelming Japanese fire sank three American escorts and one carrier of Taffy 3 in a succession of mêlées at point-blank range; some fifty American aircraft were lost as they pummelled the Combined Fleet. But the cruisers Chokai, Suzuya and Chikuma sank under air attack, and Kurita’s nerve broke. Dismayed by the energy of American resistance, convinced that he was in the presence of elements of Third Fleet, whose big ships would soon engage and overwhelm him, 143 minutes after the first shells were fired he broke off the action and turned for home. Taffy 3’s heroics had repulsed a battlefleet in a fashion which bewildered thousands of American sailors, who earlier that morning thought themselves doomed men.
The Americans lost one further escort carrier sunk and two seriously damaged when Philippines-based Japanese planes delivered the first suicide strikes of the campaign. Halsey’s aircraft duly attacked Ozawa’s decoy squadron, sinking all four carriers, a light cruiser and two destroyers. Third Fleet then turned south, to face bitter recriminations about its desertion of the Leyte squadrons. Halsey’s recklessness merited his dismissal. But, given the scale of the American triumph in what became known to history as the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval clash in history, his folly was overlooked. The Japanese had committed sixty-four ships against 216 American and two Australian vessels. They lost 285,000 tons of warships, the Americans just 29,000 tons; only 2,803 Americans died, against more than 11,000 Japanese. Operation Sho-Go ended with the Imperial Navy shorn of four carriers, three battleships, ten cruisers and nine destroyers. The Americans lost three small carriers, two destroyers and a destroyer escort. Several other vessels were badly hit, and would have sunk but for the energy and courage of American damage-control teams amid blazing fuel, bursting steam pipes and exploding munitions.
Leyte Gulf vividly demonstrated the collapse of Japanese naval skills: gunnery, seamanship, ship identification – and nerve. Japan’s admirals conducted Sho-Go as if they expected to lose. They seemed more ready to die than to fight, a strange transition for men who, in 1941–42, showed themselves ardent and effective warriors. In many of the earlier Pacific battles, signals intelligence gave the Americans a critical edge, which they were denied in the Leyte Gulf actions. Thanks to Halsey’s blunders, the