The Battle off Samar

Shortly before 7 a.m. on 25 October 1944 the pilot of an anti-submarine aircraft from the escort carrier St. Lo, patrolling the waters east of Samar, reported a force of ships that he took to be part of Admiral William Halsey’s fleet. A moment later he made out Japanese ensigns on their masts. A quarter of an hour later the first shells from the guns of the world’s largest battleship were falling around Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague’s six small escort carriers. Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita’s force, written off the day before as beaten and retreating, had passed unseen through the San Bernardino Strait during the night and now stood on the road to Leyte Gulf, where American troops had been landing for five days.

25 October was the climax of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, which had begun two days earlier. The often repeated description of the day – that three separate air battles were fought in which aircraft from American carriers destroyed many Japanese ships – needs qualifying. Three separate battles were indeed fought, hundreds of kilometres apart, but only one of them, off Cape Engaño, was purely an air action. The night action in the Surigao Strait was decided by destroyers’ torpedoes and battleships’ guns, and off Samar American destroyers played a key role alongside the aircraft from the escort carriers. The same day also brought the first organised suicide attacks by Japanese airmen.

The Surigao Strait

The first action was fought during the night of 24–25 October. Vice Admiral Shōji Nishimura’s force – two old battleships, Yamashiro and Fusō, the heavy cruiser Mogami and four destroyers – entered the Surigao Strait from the south, intending to break into Leyte Gulf at dawn. The commander of the Seventh Fleet, Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, had known about it since the previous day and set against it almost all the landing’s fire-support forces under Rear Admiral Jesse Oldendorf: six old battleships, eight cruisers – among them the Australian HMAS Shropshire – and nearly thirty destroyers, with several dozen PT boats out in front.

The PT boats attacked the Japanese for several hours without much success, but reported their position. At about 3 a.m. destroyers struck from both sides of the strait. Their torpedoes hit Fusō, which fell out of line and sank, and three Japanese destroyers. Nishimura pressed on with Yamashiro, Mogami and one destroyer – straight towards the line of American battleships drawn up across the strait. At about 3.50 a.m. West Virginia opened fire, followed by the other battleships and the cruisers. Five of Oldendorf’s six battleships were victims of the attack on Pearl Harbor – sunk or damaged in December 1941 and returned to service.

After a quarter of an hour Yamashiro, hit by many shells and torpedoes, capsized and sank; almost her entire crew died, Nishimura among them. The burning Mogami turned back. Of the whole force only the destroyer Shigure survived. Vice Admiral Kiyohide Shima, who had entered the strait behind Nishimura, fired torpedoes at presumed targets, and his flagship, the cruiser Nachi, collided with the fleeing Mogami; Shima judged a further attack hopeless and withdrew. Mogami, finished off by aircraft in the morning, was scuttled by a Japanese destroyer. On the American side only the destroyer Albert W. Grant was seriously damaged, hit partly by her own side’s cruisers.

The Battle of the Surigao Strait was the last action in history in which battleships fought battleships. It took place less than two years after the battleship duel off Guadalcanal and closed the era in which command of the sea was decided by the guns of capital ships.

Off Samar

A few hours later, at 6.45 a.m., Kurita ran into Task Unit 77.4.3, known by its radio call sign “Taffy 3”: six escort carriers – small, slow ships built on merchant hulls, intended to support troops ashore and hunt submarines – screened by three destroyers and four destroyer escorts. Against them came four battleships, among them Yamato, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and more than a dozen destroyers. For the first time in her career Yamato turned her 460 mm guns on surface ships.

The encounter took both sides by surprise. The Americans were convinced that the way through the San Bernardino Strait was guarded by Halsey’s fast battleships, Task Force 34, which in reality had never been detached and was steaming north with the carriers. Kurita, for his part, mistook the escort carriers for fleet carriers and, instead of an orderly attack, ordered a general chase, in which his ships scattered and acted without coordination.

Sprague laid a smokescreen, ducked into a rain squall and launched all his aircraft, calling on the two other escort carrier groups for help. The aircraft, often without armour-piercing bombs or torpedoes, attacked the Japanese ships with fragmentation bombs and machine-gun fire, and when their ammunition ran out, with dummy runs. The destroyer USS Johnston, under Commander Ernest E. Evans, charged the Japanese cruisers on her own initiative, without orders, and hit the heavy cruiser Kumano with a torpedo; Hoel, Heermann and the destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts followed her into the attack. Their torpedoes forced Yamato into a turn that took her out of the fight for a quarter of an hour or so.

The price was high. Hoel, Johnston and Samuel B. Roberts were sunk by gunfire, and Evans was killed and posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. The Japanese cruisers caught the escort carrier Gambier Bay, which sank at about 9.10 a.m. – the only American carrier sunk by surface gunfire during the war. The Japanese, however, lost three heavy cruisers – Chikuma, Chōkai and Suzuya – sunk or fatally damaged, mainly by aircraft.

At about 9.20 a.m., when the escort carriers seemed to be within reach of his guns, Kurita ordered his ships to regroup to the north. He circled for several hours, then finally abandoned the entry into Leyte Gulf and in the evening withdrew through the San Bernardino Strait. The reasons for this decision have been debated for decades. In his few post-war statements Kurita said that he had been convinced he was fighting Halsey’s carriers, knew of the destruction of Nishimura’s force, feared further air attacks and a shortage of fuel, and had also received a report – later shown to be false – of American carriers to the north, which he decided to engage. Some historians add the extreme exhaustion of three days of fighting and the sinking of his flagship; others believe that even entering the gulf would have changed little, as most of the transports had already been unloaded. The fact remains that Kurita had the objective of the whole Shō-Gō operation within reach and turned away from it.

Admiral Chester Nimitz later wrote that the survival of Sprague’s force was a special act of Providence. Yet the losses of Taffy 3 and the escort carriers’ aircraft that day were enormous for so small a force – according to American figures, more than a thousand sailors and airmen were killed or missing in the whole action off Samar, including the victims of the suicide attacks (some sources give more than 1,500). Many survivors of the sunk ships drifted in the water for two days before they were found, because the report of their position gave the wrong coordinates.

Cape Engaño and “Where is Task Force 34”

At the same time, several hundred kilometres to the north, off Cape Engaño at the north-eastern tip of Luzon, Halsey reaped the fruits of his decision of the previous evening. From 8 a.m. aircraft from Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 38 carriers attacked the force of Vice Admiral Jisaburō Ozawa, which had almost no aircraft of its own left. In six waves totalling more than 500 sorties they sank the carriers Zuikaku – the last of those that had attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 – Zuihō and Chitose, and the destroyer Akizuki. The badly damaged Chiyoda was finished off in the afternoon by American cruisers, which in the evening also sank the destroyer Hatsuzuki, and during the night the submarine Jallao torpedoed the light cruiser Tama. Ozawa shifted his flag to the light cruiser Ōyodo and led out the rest of his force, including the battleship-carriers Ise and Hyūga. He had fulfilled his task as a decoy – at the cost of all his carriers.

From early morning Kinkaid had been calling on Halsey for help, in the end in plain language. At about 10 a.m. a signal from Nimitz at Pearl Harbor reached the battleship New Jersey: “Where is, repeat, where is Task Force 34”. In accordance with the practice of the time, the cipher clerks had added random words at the end to make the code harder to break – on this occasion they were “the world wonders”. They were not removed on receipt, and Halsey read them as a taunt. At 11.15 a.m. he turned Lee’s battleships south, but it was too late: when they reached the San Bernardino Strait during the night, Kurita had passed through it a few hours earlier, and their only prize was a straggler, the destroyer Nowaki. To the end of his life Halsey defended his decision to pursue Ozawa’s carriers; in his memoirs he counted as his greatest mistake rather the turning of the battleships south when they were already close to the Japanese force.

The first kamikaze attacks

25 October was also the day on which the Japanese carried out organised suicide attacks for the first time. A few days earlier Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi, the new commander of the First Air Fleet in the Philippines, who had only a few dozen serviceable aircraft, had proposed to air officers at Mabalacat on Luzon the formation of a Special Attack Corps. Pilots of Mitsubishi A6M fighters armed with 250-kilogram bombs were to crash onto the decks of American carriers. The first group, named Shikishima, was led by Lieutenant Yukio Seki. For several days they failed to find a target.

On the morning of 25 October aircraft from other groups struck the escort carriers of “Taffy 1” south of Samar, damaging Santee and Suwannee. At about 10.50 a.m. Seki’s group attacked the carriers of Taffy 3, which had barely broken off the fight with Kurita. Several aircraft hit Kalinin Bay, Kitkun Bay and White Plains, and one – Seki’s, according to most accounts – smashed through the deck of St. Lo. Exploding bombs and torpedoes in the hangar tore the ship apart, and she sank in less than half an hour; more than a hundred men were killed. She was the first large ship sunk by a kamikaze attack. Japanese propaganda immediately turned the dead pilots into national heroes. So began a tactic that in the following months cost the lives of several thousand Japanese airmen, often very young and barely trained, and inflicted on the American fleet, especially off Okinawa in the spring of 1945, its heaviest losses in men of the whole war.

The pursuit on 26 October

The next day aircraft from Halsey’s and Kinkaid’s carriers, as well as army bombers from Morotai and New Guinea, attacked the retreating Japanese forces. They sank the light cruiser Noshiro from Kurita’s force, the light cruiser Abukuma from Shima’s force, already damaged in the Surigao Strait, as well as the light cruiser Kinu and destroyers carrying reinforcements to Leyte. The suicide attacks continued – on 26 October Suwannee was hit again. With that the Battle of Leyte Gulf came to an end.

Place in the war

In four days the Japanese fleet lost four carriers, three battleships, about ten cruisers and more than a dozen destroyers and, by the most commonly cited estimates, some 10,000 men. It never again put to sea in a strength capable of fighting a battle; its last great sortie, Yamato’s voyage towards Okinawa in April 1945, was a one-way mission from the start. From then on the Americans could carry out landings in the Philippines – on Mindoro in December, in Lingayen Gulf on Luzon in January 1945 – without fear of Japanese warships, and Japan’s links with the East Indies and their oil were practically severed.

25 October also left two lasting legacies. The first was the dispute over command: the division of the fleet between two commanders answering to MacArthur and Nimitz, together with Halsey’s ambiguous signal about Task Force 34, allowed the strongest Japanese force to come within an ace of its objective. The second was the kamikaze tactic. Seeing that a few suicide aircraft had achieved more than the entire carrier air arm in earlier battles, the Japanese command made it the principal method of fighting at sea until the end of the war – in the Philippines, off Iwo Jima and off Okinawa.

The victory off Samar became a legend in the United States: Taffy 3 received the Presidential Unit Citation, and the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison described the fight of Sprague’s destroyers as one of the most heroic episodes in the history of the US Navy. In Japan the conviction long prevailed that “Kurita’s turn-back” had thrown away the only chance the Shō-Gō plan offered. Kurita himself, until his death in 1977, spoke about it rarely and reluctantly.