Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [111]
Meanwhile, aircraft had hit and slowed another Japanese ship—the heavy cruiser Suzuya. Bombs and aerial torpedoes sank the cruiser Chikuma. One Taffy 3 pilot, Ed Huxtable, maintained passes at the Japanese battleships for two hours after expending his ammunition. “It takes a lot to go in there298 carrying nothing,” said a profoundly admiring comrade. Some fliers expended their ammunition, rearmed ashore at Tacloban and returned to the charge. Captain John Whitney of Kitgun Bay felt pity for his 20mm and 40mm crews who had nothing to do but watch, impotent, while the ship’s single five-inch gun lobbed shells at the enemy and Japanese projectiles straddled the carrier. Captain William Vieweg of Gambier Bay was baffled to see each Japanese ship firing slow salvoes alternately from forward and rear turrets, rather than in unison. He swung his carrier after glimpsing each set of gun flashes, then watched shells land where Gambier Bay would have been, had she not turned: “This process lasted299, believe it or not, a half-hour during which the enemy was closing constantly.” The enemy’s first hit on the carrier at 0825 slowed its speed from 191/2 knots to eleven. Thereafter, Gambier Bay was hit steadily for an hour, until it lay dead in the water. When a passing Japanese cruiser fired on the hulk from 2,000 yards, to the Americans’ amazement its shells missed. The carrier was doomed, however. After it capsized and sank at 0907, Vieweg and his fellow survivors spent two days in the water.
Kurita’s destroyers launched torpedo attacks from too long range to be effective, but one of his captains blithely claimed that “three enemy carriers and one cruiser were enveloped in black smoke and observed to sink one after another.” Such fantasising was commonplace among junior aircrew on both sides, but becomes hard to excuse in ranking officers. By 0925, this extraordinary encounter had lasted 143 minutes. American aircraft were still hitting the Japanese with whatever they had. The planes of Taffy 2 launched forty-nine torpedoes and claimed several hits on battleships and heavy cruisers for the loss of twenty-three Wildcats and Avengers, slightly fewer than Taffy 3’s aircraft casualties. When their fuel became exhausted, most American pilots landed ashore on Leyte. Halsey, at last grudgingly acknowledging the plight of Kinkaid’s ships, had dispatched battleships and a carrier group southwards, but it would be many hours before these appeared. It is a measure of the chaos prevailing in the American high command that only at 0953 was Jesse Oldendorf ordered to start northwards with his battleships, desperately short of ammunition. There still seemed nothing to stop the Japanese ships destroying Taffy 3, possibly the other escort-carrier groups also.
Yet suddenly, Sprague and his stunned crews saw the Japanese do the unthinkable. They ceased fire, turned, broke off the engagement. “Goddammit, boys, they’re getting away!” cried a signalman in comic disbelief. “At the end of two hours300 and twenty-three minutes under continuous fire, to my utter amazement and that of all aboard, the Japanese fleet turned around,” said Whitney of Kitgun Bay. “We were within effective gun range for another fifteen minutes, but they did not fire another shot at us.” Kurita claimed to have decided that the American carriers were too fast for him to catch. Two floatplanes catapulted from the Japanese ships to reconnoitre Leyte Gulf had failed to return. There was no word from Ozawa. Nishimura’s squadron