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By Root 1087 0

the worst. At every turn they behaved with the fatalism of doomed men, convinced of their own inferiority to the enemy. Kurita and his captains expected to be attacked and sunk by carrier aircraft, and here indeed were carrier aircraft. They anticipated a disastrous encounter with the U.S. Third Fleet, and here it seemed to be. A weak and vulnerable American force, Taffy 3, was under assault by one of the most powerful battle squadrons in the world. Yet Kurita and his captains assumed that they faced defeat. It remains an enigma how by October 1944 the fighting seamen of the Japanese navy had been reduced to such poverty of thought, will and action. This was the force which conceived and executed the attack on Pearl Harbor, which destroyed the British capital ships Prince of Wales and Repulse, which performed miracles of skill and daring in the early years of war. Yet now the commanders of Japan’s greatest warships revealed stunning ineptitude. On 25 October their ship recognition was inept, their tactics primitive, their gunnery woeful, their spirit feeble. None of this diminishes the American achievement that day, but it invites the bewilderment of history.

Besides the carrier pilots who threw themselves at Kurita’s ships, the heroes of the morning were the U.S. destroyer crews. With an unflinching aggression that further alarmed the Japanese, they raced towards the enemy’s battle line. “Prepare to attack major portion of Japanese fleet!” Ernest Evans of Johnston told his crew, in a pardonably histrionic moment. Evans, a short, barrel-chested, half-Cherokee Native American, steamed into action with all his five-inch guns firing. This was the gesture of an urchin pummelling a giant. Yet when he launched torpedoes, one struck the heavy cruiser Kumano, which fell out of line. An American cruiser officer described the experience of suffering a torpedo hit as “about the same as driving293 a car at high speed when you hit a pile of logs. You’d be knocked up in the air, probably sideways, and you’d come down on the concrete on the other side with all wheels flat.”

At 0730, three fourteen-inch shells hit Johnston, which seemed to one of its officers “like a puppy being smacked by a truck.” The ship’s radar array collapsed onto the bridge, killing three officers. Evans lost his shirt and three fingers of one hand; scores of men below were killed or wounded. Johnston’s speed fell away to seventeen knots. Cmdr. Leon Kintenburger of Hoel had only skippered his ship for a fortnight. Its guns fired ten salvoes at the Japanese before incoming shells knocked out the directors. The ship received more than forty heavy-calibre hits, and stayed afloat as long as it did only because many huge armour-piercing rounds passed through the hull without exploding. Cmdr. Amos Hathaway of Heermann at first could not see the Japanese either visually or on radar, and merely obeyed Sprague’s directional order. Confused about what was going on, “I told the crew294 this was either going to be the bloodiest, worst thing we had ever seen—or nothing. That is always an easy and good prediction to make.”

When water spouts began to rise out of the surrounding sea, at first Hathaway scanned the sky in search of bombers, before realising he was being shelled. His ship dashed between the fleeing escort carriers, the bridge crew almost blinded when the rain squall struck. Then the sky cleared and Japanese ships loomed huge before them. Hathaway belatedly realised that he must do the unthinkable—launch a daylight torpedo attack on enemy heavy units. He turned to his navigator, Lieutenant Newcome: “‘Buck, what we need is a bugler295 to sound the charge.’ He looked at me as if I was a little crazy, and said ‘What do you mean, Captain?’ I said that we were going to make a torpedo attack. Buck gulped.” It is an important truth about war that soldiers on shore, and pilots aloft, almost always have some personal choice about whether to be brave. By contrast, sailors crewing a warship are prisoners of the sole will of their captain. On 25 October 1944, it is no libel