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By Root 1111 0

The surviving planes landed on Luzon, having achieved their only serious purpose, that of attracting American attention. Late in the afternoon, a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft at last sighted Ozawa’s squadron. Halsey’s reaction perfectly fulfilled Japanese hopes. He turned north to engage the empty carriers with every unit at his disposal. “As it seemed childish to me to guard statically San Bernardino Strait,” he told Nimitz and MacArthur afterwards, attempting to justify his decision, “I concentrated TF 38 during the night and steamed north to attack the North Force at dawn. I believed that [Kurita’s] Center Force had been so heavily damaged in the Sibuyan Sea that it could no longer be considered a serious menace to Seventh Fleet.”

To the day of his death, Halsey never acknowledged that he had allowed himself to be fooled. On the map of the Leyte Gulf battle in his post-war memoirs, Ozawa’s carriers are unequivocally identified as “Japanese main force.” Halsey considered that Kurita’s squadron had been crippled and repulsed by his aircraft on the twenty-fourth. American pilots’ reports suggested that four battleships were sailing with Ozawa’s carriers. Halsey chose wilfully to ignore overnight reports that Kurita was once again heading into San Bernardino. He wrote later, in self-exculpation: “It was not my job to protect287 the Seventh Fleet. My job was offensive, and we were even then rushing to intercept a force which gravely threatened not only Kinkaid and myself, but the whole Pacific strategy.” Rear-Admiral Robert Carney, Halsey’s chief of staff, said: “With the conviction that Center Force288 had been so heavily damaged that although they could still steam and float they could not fight to best advantage, it was decided to turn full attention to the still untouched and very dangerous carrier force to the north.”

Halsey could argue that some intelligence assessments still credited the Japanese carrier force with far more formidable air capability than it possessed. Yet this does not explain his most culpable error of all: failure to ensure that Kinkaid and Nimitz understood that he was steaming away from Leyte with everything he had, soon putting the Philippines battlefield beyond range of his aircraft or battleship guns. Claims have been made that he believed a signal had been sent to San Pedro and Pearl, and that fault for its non-transmission lay with his staff. This is unconvincing. It is much easier to believe that Halsey simply acted recklessly, in pursuit of glory and a decisive victory. In almost three years of war, both sides had become obsessed with the importance of carriers, decisive units of Pacific combat. Shrewd intelligence analysts at Pearl had reported that, almost stripped of aircraft and deck-qualified pilots, Ozawa’s ships were now mere hulks. They even suggested that these might be sacrificed as decoys.

Halsey spurned such assessments. He displayed a hubris unsurprising, perhaps, in a navy that now dominated the Pacific theatre. He ignored the fact that Kurita’s ships, wherever they were, represented the most formidable naval force left to the enemy. Victory at Midway in 1942 had been achieved when Halsey was sick, and the much more measured Spruance commanded the U.S. fleet. Now, Spruance was ashore, and Halsey enjoyed full scope to blunder. Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet, essentially an amphibious support force, was left unshielded and oblivious in the path of Kurita. Even had Oldendorf’s old battleships been in sight east of Leyte, rather than in the Surigao Strait, Seventh Fleet would have been dangerously outgunned by the Japanese.

The morning of 25 October found Rear-Admiral Thomas Sprague’s sixteen escort carriers, mustered in three task groups designated as Task Forces—“Taffies”—1, 2 and 3, cruising in their usual operating areas, some forty miles apart and about the same distance east of Leyte. For the ships’ crews, service with Seventh Fleet offered none of the glamour of offensive action under Halsey or Spruance. When one of the carriers’ escorting destroyers, Johnston, was commissioned