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of Oldendorf’s battleships, cruisers, destroyers and PT-boats in the Surigao Strait was a set piece in the best traditions of the U.S. Navy. Less spectacular, yet at least as significant, was the achievement of American damage-control parties. “Prosecute damage control311 measures with utmost diligence and tenacity. Don’t give up the ship!” decreed the navy’s 1944 Tactical Orders and Doctrine. The men of the USN fulfilled this injunction with extraordinary devotion and sacrifice. On ship after ship at Leyte, they achieved miracles amidst flaming fuel and twisted wreckage, dying men and choking smoke. Damage control was an outstanding aspect of U.S. naval performance, enabling vessels to be saved from destruction which, in other navies or at an earlier phase of the war, would have been doomed.

Only for the Japanese were the Leyte Gulf actions unredeemed by any morsel of glory. Their commanders had been ordered to seek “flowers of death.” Yet the officers of the Combined Fleet displayed stoicism and passivity, rather than the verve and determination which their orders demanded. Even in the simplest battle manoeuvres, again and again on 24 and 25 October Japanese captains were found wanting. Contrast the development of the American and Japanese navies in the course of the Pacific conflict: the U.S. Navy expanded its strength tenfold, so that it was overwhelmingly officered and manned by amateur sailors. Yet the performance of these men proved remarkable. The Japanese navy, which at the start of the war displayed notable superiority in seamanship and gunnery as well as technology, by the end lagged hopelessly in these skills. Japanese officers and men who perished were replaced by newcomers of steadily diminishing competence. Between 23 and 26 October, the Japanese lost four carriers, three battleships, ten cruisers and nine destroyers. The Americans lost three small carriers, two destroyers and a destroyer escort. Some 13,000 sailors perished, most Japanese.

There might have been fewer U.S. fatalities but for an extraordinary failure of omission, for which blame attaches to Kinkaid. Amazingly, for a nation that devoted greater resources than any other combatant to rescue, in the confusion that followed Leyte Gulf, hundreds of American sailors—notably survivors from lost ships of Taffy 3—were left in the water for up to two days and nights before those who remained were located. They had suffered terribly, not least from sharks. “Fifty hours in the water312,” one of the destroyer Johnston’s survivors, Lt. Robert Hagen, reflected disbelievingly. “That’s too long to wait before you’re picked up!” It was a sorry postscript to the battle. Those men had deserved better from the commanders they had served so well.

Admiral James Clark returned from leave shortly after Leyte Gulf, and reported to Nimitz on Hawaii. “I guess I missed the best battle313 of the war,” said Clark, in some chagrin. “Oh, no,” replied Nimitz with a quiet grin. “The best battle will be the last battle.”

3. KAMIKAZE

BY A CHARACTERISTIC irony of war, American victory at Leyte Gulf exercised far less influence upon the last phase of the struggle than another, at first apparently marginal, series of events. On 15 October 1944, five days before MacArthur landed on Leyte, Rear-Admiral Masafumi Arima removed his badges of rank and clambered into the cockpit of a plane at Clark Field on Luzon. He then took off at the head of his fliers to attack Halsey’s fleet off Formosa. The commander of 26th Naval Air Flotilla, Arima was an impeccably dignified figure who defied the clammy Philippine heat to wear full uniform at all times. A slender, gentle, soft-spoken warrior, he came from a family of Confucian scholars. He cherished a book on tactics written by his own grandfather, which had become a minor military classic. That morning of the fifteenth, he sought to make a personal contribution to the art of war by crashing his plane into an American aircraft carrier. He left Clark untroubled by the apprehension, common to most pilots, that he might not come back. He