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By Root 1263 0

bombardment battleships, together with cruisers, destroyers and PT boats. A remarkable action followed. In darkness soon illuminated by eruptions of flame, the American mosquito craft inflicted little damage on the column of Japanese warships. But just before 4:00 a.m. destroyer torpedoes and radar-guided fire from the 14-inch and 16-inch main armament of Kinkaid’s big ships sank the Japanese battleships Yamashiro and Fuso, together with three of their escorts. The heavy cruiser Mogami and the light cruiser Abukuma were also hit, and later sunk by U.S. aircraft. The surviving elements of the Japanese task force turned for home; only two heavy cruisers and five destroyers escaped. American ships suffered only thirty-nine men killed, most of these victims of friendly fire in the confusion of darkness. It had been a slaughter: the Japanese performance reflected not only inferior technology and gunnery, but resignation to sacrifice. The battle squadron had no realistic prospect of traversing the narrow waters of the Surigao Strait and achieving useful results unless it had the benefit of surprise, and unless the Americans responded as feebly as they had done two years earlier, in similar circumstances off Savo Island. This was never likely. The Japanese sailed to meet death, and duly did so.

But the most remarkable action of the battle, and indeed one of the strangest naval encounters in history, was still to come. During the night, the Japanese battle fleet mauled by Halsey’s planes once more about-turned; after steaming eastward through the San Bernardino Strait, it steered south towards Leyte Gulf, undetected even when daylight came, and meeting no opposition. Just before 7:00 a.m., the five small escort carriers and seven escorts of Rear Adm. Clifton Sprague’s Task Force 77.4.3—immortalised by its radio call sign Taffy 3—had just secured from predawn general quarters when a panic-stricken voice transmission from an antisubmarine patrol aircraft reported four Japanese battleships, eight cruisers and escorting destroyers less than twenty miles away and closing fast. Sprague exclaimed with understandable intemperance, “That sonofabitch Halsey has left us bare-assed!” His ships, slow floating platforms providing air support for MacArthur’s troops ashore, strove desperately to open the range, while flying off such planes as they could muster. The Japanese, however, were soon firing hard and fast into Taffy 3.

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 airmen knew that they alone must fight off the enemy battle fleet. Many pilots displayed prodigies of valour, through a few cracked under the stain of making repeated attacks: one man who landed back on the Manila Bay proved reluctant to take off again, to make his third torpedo attack of the morning. Capt. 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 the Third Fleet, whose big ships would soon engage and overwhelm him, 143 minutes after the first shells were fired he