Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [187]
With the Battle of Surigao Strait fought and won, it was Halsey’s turn. Dawn of the 25th found him to the north, east of the island of Luzon, and his search planes picked up the Japanese Main Body. In what became known as the Battle of Cape Engano, the nearest point on Luzon, Halsey’s planes caught and sank four Japanese carriers—all but planeless and able to serve only as sacrificial decoys—and a destroyer. Halsey was on the verge of making surface contact and closing in for the kill when he received a chilling message. With Kincaid busy in the south, and Halsey busy in the north, Kurita had suddenly appeared out of the mouth of San Bernardino Strait and was striking at the light carriers and their escorts supporting the landing; the wolf was in among the fold at last.
It was a David and Goliath fight; the Japanese still had their four surviving battleships plus several cruisers and destroyers, while the American admiral Clifton Sprague had only six escort carriers and half a dozen destroyers and destroyer-escorts. His whole force mounted nothing heavier than a five-inch gun. The Americans raced off to the southward, while the destroyers popped away at the giants, and the fighter-bombers leaped off the little carriers to plaster the battleships with the light fragmentation bombs they had been using against shore targets—roughly equivalent to throwing pebbles at a charging rhinoceros. Sprague yelled for help; planes came screaming in from all points of the compass. Halsey turned back from his near-triumph, Kincaid came dashing back from Surigao Strait. Still it was only a matter of time before the “jeep” carriers would be overwhelmed. Gambier Bay went down; so did three of the gallant little escorts. What probably saved the rest of them was the fact that the Japanese were firing heavy armor-piercing shells, and the carriers were so lightly built that many shells went right through them without encountering enough resistance to make them explode. After two hours it looked as if the Americans were on the point of annihilation, when suddenly Kurita turned away, back where he had come from. On the verge of contact with the amphibious ships that were the target of the whole endeavor, Kurita became convinced he was sailing into a trap and broke off the action, reputedly prompting the oft-quoted remark from a sailor on one of the escort carriers, “Hell, they got away….”
In fact they did not quite get away. As they fled, carrier planes caught them in the Sulu Sea and sank another cruiser. The end result of the battle was the destruction of the Imperial Japanese Navy as a fighting force. They lost three battleships, four carriers, ten cruisers, and nine destroyers—more than 300,000 tons of combat ships, as against 37,000 tons for the Americans. Only one recourse lay open to them now. During the battle several Japanese pilots deliberately crashed their planes into American ships: the time of the suicide plane—the kamikaze—had arrived.
Concentrated naval battles tend to be relatively short, compared with land campaigns. The Battle of Leyte Gulf lasted in its entirety but a few days. The land campaign to secure the Philippines went on until the end of the war and really involved three interrelated operations: the drive to secure Leyte itself, the northern advance into Luzon and the fight for that main island, and the southern advance to clear the islands south of Leyte.
MacArthur and his planners had regarded the taking of Leyte as largely a preliminary operation, designed to gain them bases for their air power, which they would then use in the main battle for Luzon. Initially, Yamashita agreed with them: the island was lightly garrisoned, and the Japanese commander