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What else could the Japanese conceivably have expected? The action’s outcome reflected strategic folly, technological weakness and tactical incompetence. The Americans deployed overwhelming firepower under almost ideal circumstances. They were able to array their big ships broadside so that every gun could bear. The obliging enemy, who could use only his forward turrets, headed into the crossbar of Oldendorf’s T. As dawn came on 25 October, America’s veteran battleships could retire from the history of fleet warfare, having written a last memorable page. Yet the most bizarre action of Leyte Gulf was still to come.

2. The Ordeal of Taffy 3

JUST BEFORE sunset on the previous evening of the twenty-fourth, Admiral Kurita’s fleet had turned once more towards the San Bernardino Strait, goaded by a signal from commander-in-chief Admiral Soemu Toyoda: “All forces will resume the attack284, having faith in divine providence.” A staff officer muttered cynically: “All forces will resume the attack, having faith in annihilation.” Through the darkness, the Japanese pressed on eastwards, at every moment expecting to encounter American submarines. At first light, as they passed into open sea east of the Philippines, they waited grimly for a sighting of planes or ships from Halsey’s Third Fleet, which would signal their doom. After intercepting a signal from a surviving destroyer, they knew that Nishimura’s squadron had been destroyed: “All ships except Shigure lost to gunfire and torpedoes.” Yet the minutes passed, and the horizon ahead of Kurita remained empty. Halsey’s ships, the greatest assembly of naval might in the world, were not there. The American admiral had committed one of the most astonishing blunders of the war at sea.

Kurita has been so fiercely criticised for faintheartedness on the afternoon of 24 October, when he turned back, that the obvious point is sometimes missed: had the Japanese admiral maintained his course into the San Bernardino Strait, Halsey’s aircraft would have renewed their assaults at dawn. American battleships would have awaited him as he approached the eastern exit. His fleet’s destruction would have been inevitable. As it was, luck and American rashness offered Kurita a remarkable opportunity.

William “Bull” Halsey was the sixty-one-year-old son of a naval officer, a man of fierce passions whom wartime propaganda, a talent for quotable bombast and an unfailing eagerness to engage the enemy had made a national hero. Classmates at Annapolis used to say that he looked like a figurehead of Neptune, with his big head, heavy jaw and customary scowl. Single-mindedly devoted to the sea, he had no hobbies and no apparent interest in personal matters. Though he was obsessively neat and immaculately dressed afloat, ashore his wife found him clumsy: “If a man has a nervous wife285 he wants to get rid of, all he has to do is send for you. Five minutes after you’ve come in, bumping into sofas and knocking over chairs, she’ll be dead of heart failure.” His domestic life was notably dysfunctional. Like MacArthur, though in a very different, cruder fashion, Halsey acted and talked the warrior’s part: “I never trust a fighting man who doesn’t drink or smoke!” He cherished in his cabin a magnificent western saddle presented by an admirer, to assist fulfilment of the admiral’s promise that he would one day ride Hirohito’s white horse through Tokyo. Nimitz remarked that when he sent Spruance out with the fleet, “he was always sure286 he would bring it home; when he sent Halsey out, he did not know precisely what was going to happen.” Halsey’s boldness was in doubt seldom, his judgement and intellect often.

For four days, Vice-Admiral Jizaburo Ozawa had been flaunting his presence more than two hundred miles north of the U.S. Third Fleet. His carriers had only 116 aircraft, half their complement. On the morning of the twenty-fourth he launched seventy-six of these on a notably ineffectual strike against Halsey’s ships.