How Japan’s Biggest Guns Met Six Escort Carriers and Turned Around

At 0659 on the morning of 25 October 1944, the battleship Yamato fired her main battery at an aircraft carrier. It was the first time in history that a battleship had done that and the last. The range was 34,000 yd. Nine guns, each 18.1 in across, each throwing a shell that weighed 3,219 pounds.

The shells fell around a ship named White Plains, 10,000 tons, one gun larger than 5 in, a top speed of 19 knots. The splashes came up colored. Japanese battleships dyed their shells so that gunnery officers could tell one ship’s fall of shot from anothers. Pink for Yamato, red, yellow, and green for the ships behind her.

The men on white planes watched colored water climb higher than their own flight deck, and understood without being told what was standing over the horizon. 16 mi east of the island of Samar, six escort carriers, three destroyers and four destroyer escorts had walked into the gun range of the largest surface force the Imperial Japanese Navy had put to sea in 2 years.

Four battleships, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, 11 destroyers, 23 warships against 13. Not one American ship carried belt armor. Not one American ship carried a gun that could reach the Japanese line. 2 hours and 12 minutes later, that Japanese force turned north and left. It left three heavy cruisers on the bottom of the Philippine Sea.

It left the invasion beaches at Lady 40, 5 mi away, untouched, and the surface battle line of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The fleet Japan had spent 20 years and the larger part of its naval budget building for exactly this morning would never attack an American force again. The engagement is filed in the records as the battle of Samar.

It lasted less than one working morning. It decided the largest naval battle ever fought, and it decided it in a direction that every planner on both sides would have called impossible at dawn. understand what was actually at stake. 16 mi to the west, inside Lady Gulf sat the amphibious shipping of the United States Sixth Army, transports, landing ships, ammunition hulls, roughly 420 vessels, most of them unarmored, most of them slow, many of them still unloading.

General MacArthur had been ashore for 5 days. The beach head was 3 days old and had not yet been consolidated. Between that beach head and curator’s battleships stood nothing but task unit 77.43 call sign Taffy 3. And Taffy 3 was not a fighting force. It was an air support unit.

Its job was to fly ground support sorties over the beach and hunt submarines. Its carriers were built on merchant hulls. Its escorts were built to shepherd convoys. The American fleet that was supposed to be standing in that gap, Admiral How’s third fleet, was 300 mi to the north, chasing a Japanese carrier force that had been sent north for the express purpose of being chased.

So the situation at 0659 was this. The single strongest surface force remaining to Japan had reached open water inside torpedo range of the invasion it had been sent to destroy. And the only thing between it and that invasion was 13 ships that had been designed on the assumption that they would never see a Japanese warship at all.

The Japanese did not win. That is the fact this entire account has to explain. They did not run out of ammunition. They were not driven off by a superior force because no superior force arrived. They were not sunk in numbers that would compel a withdrawal. They turned around while they were still winning.

There is a version of this morning that gets told as a miracle. And the miracle framing is the reason the mechanism gets lost. Nothing supernatural happened off Samar. Two navies arrived at the same square of ocean carrying 20 years of decisions each and one set of decisions turned out to be answering the war that was actually being fought.

What follows is the record of why. It is not a story about courage. Although courage is thick on every page of it, courage is not a mechanism. Courage does not make a fleet commander with four battleships break off an attack against unarmored targets at pointblank range. Something else did that and that something was built into steel and doctrine years before anybody involved had heard the name Samar.

But this did not begin off Samar. It began two years earlier and 8,000 mi away on a mudflat on the Colombia River with a decision that no naval historian recorded as important at the time. In the winter of 1942, a roadbuilder named Henry Kaiser went to Washington with a proposal that the United States Navy did not want.

Kaiser had never built a warship. He had built dams and he had built merchant hulls and he was at that moment turning out Liberty ships at a rate that had made the ship building establishment openly hostile to him. His proposal was simple. Take the standard tanker hull already in mass production.

Put a flat deck on it. Build 100 of them. The Navy’s general board reviewed the idea and rejected the reasoning behind it. A carrier built on a merchant hull would have no armor, no torpedo protection, no compartmentation worth the name, and no speed. It could not steam with the fleet. It could not absorb damage. Placed in a surface action, it would burn.

The professional judgment was that such a ship was not a warship at all. Every part of that judgment was correct. It was also beside the point and President Roosevelt overruled it. The order that came out of that argument was for 50 ships of what became the Casablanca class to be built at a single yard in Vancouver, Washington. The first was laid down in November 1942.

The 50th was delivered in July 1944. 50 aircraft carriers in 20 months from one yard from a company that had never built a warship before. By the end of the run, the yard was launching one every week. Average construction time fell to 101 days. Keel to commissioning in a season. Nobody wrote that down as a turning point in the Pacific War.

It reads as a production statistic. But what Kaiser had actually done was change the meaning of the word carrier. Before 1942, a carrier was a national asset, a ship a country owned four or six of a ship whose loss was a strategic event. After 1942, on the American side only, a carrier could be a consumable, something you could spend.

Japan built no ship of any kind on that principle because Japan could not. And on the morning of 25 October 1944, six of Kaiser’s consumables were the only thing standing in front of the Imperial Japanese Navy. To understand what they were standing in front of, start with the ship at the head of the line. Yamato was the largest battleship ever built, and Japan had built her in secret.

The design work began in 1934 under the designation A140 and it began from an admission Japan could not match American shipyards ship for ship. Japan had accepted a treaty ratio of 3:5 and understood exactly what that meant. So the naval staff chose a different equation. If Japan could not build more ships, Japan would build ships that no American ship could fight.

The result displaced 65,000 tons standard and over 72,000 tons at full load. She was 863 ft long. Her main belt was over 16 in of face hardened armor. Her turret faces 26 in, the thickest armor ever fitted to a warship. She carried nine 46 cm guns 18.1 in in three triple turrets and each of those turrets weighed more than a destroyer.

The maximum range of those guns was slightly over 26 mi. The Type 91 armor-piercing shell they fired was designed with a detachable cap so that a near miss would not skip off the water, but would continue underwater and strike a hull below its armor belt. She had been built to sink American battleships. She had never been given the chance.

Behind her that morning came Nagato, 46,000 tons, 86in guns. the ship that had been Admiral Yamamoto’s flagship at Pearl Harbor. Then the fast battleships Congo and Haruna, 36,000 tons each, eight 14-in guns each, capable of 30 knots. Then the heavy cruisers, Chokai and Hagaro, Chikuma and Tone, Kumano and Suzuya.

Each of them carried 10 20 cm guns, 8-in rifles firing a 250lb shell, and each of them carried the type 93 torpedo, the oxygen-driven weapon the Americans would later call the Longlance with a range of 22 mi and a warhead of 1,80. No Allied torpedo of the war came close to it. The specification is worth restating in the terms that mattered that morning.

A type 93 could be fired from beyond visual range in daylight and left almost no wake because it ran on compressed oxygen rather than compressed air. American commanders spent the first two years of the war attributing its hits to submarines because they refused to believe a surface ship had launched from 12 m away.

and the crews had been trained to use all of it in the dark. Japanese night gunnery and night torpedo practice through the 1930s was conducted without lights at high speed in weather that peaceime navies do not train in and men were killed doing it. That training had produced Tsavo Island where a Japanese cruiser force destroyed four Allied heavy cruisers in 32 minutes and withdrew without losing a ship. This was not a paper fleet.

It was the most dangerous surface force in the world at close range. And at 0659, it was at close range. Then two light cruisers and 11 destroyers, most of them capable of 35 knots. This was the first striking force and the doctrine behind it was older than any ship in it. The Imperial Japanese Navy had organized itself since the 1920s around a concept called Kai Kessan, the decisive battle.

The theory held that a Pacific war would be settled by one great gunnery action between battle lines, and that Japan’s smaller fleet could win that action if it was armed with heavier guns. longer torpedoes and better night training. Every yen spent on Yamato was spent on that theory. By October 1944, the theory had never been tested.

The war had been decided by aircraft at Coral Sea at Midway at Guadal Canal in the Philippine Sea. The Great Gunline had been held in reserve, moved from Anchorage to Anchorage, and never committed. Shugo 1 was the plan that finally committed it. And at 0645 on 25th October from the bridge of White Plains, a lookout reported Pagoda Masts on the northern horizon now set against that force.

What Rear Admiral Clifton Sprag actually had. Six escort carriers, Fanshaw Bay, White Plains, Kalinin Bay, Kitkun Bay, Gambia Bay, and St. Low. Every one of them a Casablanca, 512 ft long, 10,900 tons at full load. One shaftdriven pair of reciprocating steam engines producing a maximum of 19 12 knots. 19 12 knots. The slowest ship in the Japanese line could make 30. Armor? None.

Not a plate of it. The hull was mild steel of merchant scantling. The flight deck was wood over a thin plating and the hanger deck sat directly above the machinery spaces and the aviation gasoline. Torpedo protection none. Compartmentation minimal because the hull had been drawn for cargo. Armament one 5 in 38 caliber gun mounted aft for use against submarines and aircraft.

The ready ammunition for that gun was anti-aircraft common, a thinwalled shell built to burst, not to penetrate. There was no armor-piercing shell aboard any of the six carriers because nobody had ever imagined a reason to load one. The men who served in them had a name for the designation CV.

They said it stood for combustible, vulnerable, and expendable. It was a joke that had been arrived at honestly. The escorts were better ships and still hopelessly outmatched. Three Fletcherclass destroyers, Hull, Heman, and Johnston. 2,100 tons. Five 5-in guns. 10 torpedo tubes, 35 knots, and no armor worth the word.

Four destroyer escorts, Dennis, John C. Butler, Raymond and Samuel B. Roberts, 1,350 tons, two 5-in guns, three torpedo tubes, 24 knots. The heaviest projectile in Taffy 3 weighed 55 lb. The heaviest projectile in the Japanese line weighed 3,219. That is a ratio of 58:1 per round. before you count how many rounds each side could put in the air.

Speed decided everything else. 19 12 knots against 30 means the enemy closes at 10 knots or better whenever he chooses to. Which means the range shortens by 1,000 yd every 3 minutes, which means that from 34,000 yd, a pursuit ends in slightly over an hour and a half. There was no course Sprag could steer that would have prevented that.

There was no formation he could adopt. Arithmetic had already written the outcome of a straight chase, and everyone on the bridge of Fansaw Bay could do the arithmetic. The aircraft made it worse rather than better. Taffy 3 carried FM2 Wildcats and TBM Avengers. And the Avengers had been armed the night before for the day’s assigned mission, which was infantry support over the late Beachhead and submarine patrol.

That meant depth charges. It meant 100 fragmentation bombs meant for troops in the open. Across the whole unit, there were fewer torpedoes available than there were aircraft to carry them. Sprag’s force was, in every measurable respect, an auxiliary formation that had been caught in the open by a battle fleet. On paper, the engagement should have lasted 40 minutes and ended with 13 wrecks.

So, look at the decision that made the difference because it was not a decision made that morning. And the man who made it never saw Samar. Sometime in 1942, in an argument about a ship class nobody was excited by, the United States Navy insisted on putting torpedo tubes on the destroyer escort. The destroyer escort existed to kill submarines and shepherd convoys across the Atlantic.

Torpedoes are useless against a submarine. The British equivalents carried none. weight, cost, deck space, and topside stability all argued against them, and the argument that a convoy escort might one day need to make a torpedo attack on a capital ship was dismissed by serious officers as a fantasy.

The tubes went on anyway, three of them on the center line, on the John C. Butler class. That one stubborn line item is a fair summary of the entire American approach to naval construction. And it is worth stating plainly because it is the mechanism of the whole battle. In the United States Navy of 1944, the singlepurpose warship had ceased to exist.

Every hull, no matter how humble its designed role, went to sea with a gun director, a radar, a smoke generator, and a torpedo. The auxiliary was armed as though it might have to fight a real action because the men writing the specifications assumed that eventually one of them would. Japan built the opposite way and had to.

Scar steel and scarse yard capacity forced specialization. The escort was an escort. The battleship was a battleship. Every ton went where doctrine said the decisive battle would be won. Set those two philosophies against each other and you get an outcome that no ledger of tonnage will predict. Because on 25 October, 13 American auxiliaries could each do something the Japanese did not expect an auxiliary to be capable of.

They could make smoke that hid a formation. They could shoot accurately with radar directed guns at ranges where their shells could not penetrate anything. and they could threaten a battleship with a torpedo. The torpedoes did not have to hit. That is the thing to hold on to for the next hour of this account. A torpedo that misses still forces a 60,000 ton ship to turn.

And a battleship that turns away from a torpedo track cannot shoot at what it turned away from. And it cannot close the range while it is turning. Every minute a Japanese capital ship spent turning was a minute the American beach head stayed alive. There is a second half to the same habit and it is the smoke.

Every American destroyer and destroyer escort carried chemical smoke generators as standard fit, and every crew drilled with them because United States doctrine assumed that a screening ship would one day have to hide something larger than itself. Japanese destroyers of 1944 carried far less smoke capability and trained with it far less because in the doctrine of the decisive battle, the destroyer’s job was to attack, not to conceal.

One navy had equipped itself to be seen. The other had equipped itself to disappear. Nobody in Vancouver or Washington wrote that down as a plan. It fell out of an industrial habit and a specification argument, and it was waiting on the deck of the Samuel B. Roberts on the morning it was needed. The Japanese force did not arrive off Samar untouched.

It arrived off Samar as a survivor, and what it had already survived is the reason its commander behaved the way he did. Shugo won was an all or nothing plan. Japan had lost its carrier pilots at the Philippine Sea in June, 400 aircraft in 2 days, and had not been able to replace them. So, the plan discarded the carriers as a fighting arm and used them as bait.

Admiral Ozawa would take four flight decks and a token air group north of Lusen and let the Americans find him. Hal’s third fleet would chase. San Bernardino Strait would open. Karita’s battleships would come through it in the dark and be inside Lady Gulf at dawn on the 25th, killing the invasion where it lay. The first contact came on 23 October in Palawan Passage at 0632 and it was made by two American submarines.

Data and Dace had been trailing Cura for hours. Data fired six torpedoes at the heavy cruiser Atarago and hit four. At Targetgo was the flagship. She sank in 19 minutes. Data then hit Takao twice and crippled her. Dace fired at the heavy cruiser Maya and hit four times. Maya blew up and went down in less than 5 minutes.

Vice Admiral Takio Curita went into the water and was pulled out of it by a destroyer. He transferred his flag to Yamato and continued east, having lost two heavy cruisers and the use of a third before he had cighted an enemy surface ship. The second contact came on 24 October in the Cibuan Sea, and it came from the air.

Housey’s carriers put up 259 sorties against the force in a running attack that lasted most of the day. The aircraft concentrated on the battleship Mousashi, Yamato’s sister, and they concentrated on her for the simple reason that she was the largest target visible. Mousashi took an estimated 19 torpedoes and 17 bombs. She stayed afloat for hours, listing further with each wave, her speed falling away until she could not keep station.

She capsized at 1936 with over a thousand of her crew aboard. Here is what that day proved, and it is not what the Americans concluded from it. It took 259 sorties, most of a day of clear weather and unopposed air superiority, and 19 torpedo hits to sink one Japanese battleship. Air power had not stopped the force.

It had killed one ship out of a formation that still numbered more than 20, and it had done so at a cost in flying hours that no fleet could pay twice in a week. At 15:30, Curita turned west away from the straight. American pilots saw the turn and reported it, and the report was read as a retreat. It was not a retreat.

It was a 2-hour maneuver to get out from under the strikes. At 1714, Curita turned east again and drove for San Bernardino straight at speed. The Americans did not see that second turn because by then they were looking somewhere else. At 1640, Hal’s search aircraft found Ozawa’s decoy carriers to the north.

At 20 Dulo, Haly took the entire third fleet north to attack them. every carrier and every fast battleship, including the surface force that had been organized specifically to guard the straight. He left no picket. He sent a signal that was read by his subordinates as meaning a force would be left behind, and no force was left behind.

At Nolo 37 on 25 October, Curita’s 23 ships passed through San Bernardino Straight in the dark in column with running lights showing and found the exit unguarded. They turned south along the coast of Samar at 20 knots. At 02, they were still undetected. At 040, the same. At 06:30 the light came up on a hazy morning with scattered rain squalls and lookouts on Yamato began reporting masts to the southeast.

The cost of that night is easy to state and was paid in full. Hal’s decision put the strongest force in the Pacific 300 m from the only place it was needed. Ozawa’s decoy worked exactly as designed and cost Japan four carriers to work. And the American air attacks in the Cibuan Sea, which had felt like a victory to everyone who flew them, had removed one battleship from a fleet that was still at first light on the 25th, entirely capable of doing what it had been sent to do.

It took 8 hours to get every name and number in this segment right. The afteraction reports, the loss tables, the squadron rosters. If that work is worth something to you, hit the like button. It’s the only signal that tells us to keep doing it this way instead of the fast way. At 0637, a pilot from Kadashian Bay reported a Japanese surface force to the northwest.

Sprag ordered him to check again because the report was impossible. At 0646, the pilot reported pagoda masts and confirmed battleships. At the same moment, the radio men aboard Fanshaw Bay began picking up Japanese voice traffic on their own frequencies. Traffic so strong it could only be coming from ships within a few miles.

At 0659, Yamato’s first salvo landed. What Sprag did in the next 4 minutes is the rule change that this entire battle turns on. And it looks like nothing on paper. He turned east into the wind and launched everything. He did not turn away and run, which was the instinctive move and which would have kept him under fire on a steady bearing with no aircraft in the air.

He turned toward the wind so his carriers could get their aircraft off the deck. Accepting that this course closed the range with the Japanese line for several minutes. Every flyable machine went up, armed with whatever was already hanging under it. Some Avengers carried torpedoes.

Most carried depth charges or fragmentation bombs. Some carried nothing at all. Then he ordered smoke. And then he ran his carriers for a rain squall to the southeast. And at 0716, he ordered his three destroyers to attack. Three destroyers were ordered to make a torpedo attack on four battleships and six heavy cruisers in daylight.

That order is where American doctrine quietly inverted itself. A destroyer torpedo attack in the classical understanding is an attempt to sink something. Sprag was not attempting to sink anything. He had 13 ships and no possibility of winning a gunnery action. And so he stopped fighting for tonnage and started fighting for time.

Understand the arithmetic of the situation and the order stops looking suicidal and starts looking like engineering. Curator needed to close roughly 16 mi to be certain of killing six carriers. At a closing speed of 10 or 11 knots, that was well over an hour of steady pursuit. But a battleship that detects torpedo tracks must comb them, turn hard, present the narrowest possible target, and hold that turn until the tracks pass.

During that turn, her main battery loses its firing solution. Her speed of advance toward the target drops to almost nothing, and her position in the formation breaks. Every torpedo fired at a Japanese capital ship that morning was therefore worth something whether it hit or not. A misbought minutes.

Minutes were the only currency Taffy 3 had and they were spending them to keep 400 transports alive 16 mi away. The same logic was handed to the aircraft. Pilots who had nothing left to drop kept making runs anyway, diving on cruiser bridges, flying the length of a battleship at mast head height with empty bomb bays, forcing anti-aircraft crews to their stations, and forcing captains to maneuver.

Some pilots made 10 or more dry passes. One Avenger crew reported firing their machine guns at a battleship’s bridge windows for lack of anything else to do. The second half of the rule change was atmospheric and nobody planned it. Taffy 3’s chemical smoke generators and funnel smoke laid down in the humid heavy air of a tropical morning produced a screen that hung in a wall instead of dispersing.

At 0715, the rain squall closed over the American formation and held for nearly 15 minutes. Japanese gunnery in 1944 was optical gunnery. Their radar sets were primitive and few of their ships had a fire control set worth the name. American gunnery was radar gunnery. Inside the smoke and rain, Taffy 3 could still shoot.

The Japanese line could not see what it was shooting at, and its salvos began to fall in the wrong places entirely. The result was not a fair fight. It was a fight in which the weaker side had located a narrow band of conditions where its weakness stopped mattering and had driven straight into it.

Now the two hours themselves. At 0706 the destroyer Johnston under commander Ernest Evans turned out of the formation without orders and ran toward the Japanese line alone. She closed to 10,000 yds, opened fire with her 5-in guns, and put an estimated 45 rounds into the heavy cruiser Kumano’s superructure. At 0720, she fired all 10 torpedoes and turned away.

Two or three of them struck Kumano and blew her bow off. Kumano fell out of the line and out of the battle, and she took Suzuya with her when Suzuya stopped to assist. At 0730, Johnston was hit by three 14-in shells from a Congo class battleship and three 6-in shells from a light cruiser. The hits took out one engine room, cut her speed to 17 knots, destroyed her after gun mounts, and killed men across the length of the ship.

She went into the squall, patched what she could, and came back out. At 0735, Sprag ordered the remaining destroyers and the destroyer escorts in. Hull went for the battleship Congo, close to 9,000 yards under continuous fire and fired five torpedoes. Congo turned hard to comb the tracks and lost her firing position.

Pull then turned on the heavy cruiser Hugaro and fired her remaining five. She was hit more than 40 times. She lost her engines at 0830, went dead in the water, and sank at 0855. Herman fired seven torpedoes at Haguro, then three more at Yamato herself. Yamato saw the tracks and turned north to comb them, directly away from the American carriers, and she held that turn for roughly 10 minutes.

That detail matters more than any other single event of the morning. For those 10 minutes, the Japanese fleet commander was on a ship steaming away from the battle, unable to see the engagement, unable to command it in any coherent way. His force was already spreading out. The turn removed him from it. Hman’s mourning is worth following on its own, because it shows what the smoke actually did.

She came out of the screen so blind that she nearly rammed whole, backed emergency full to avoid her, and then almost collided with the carrier Fanshaw Bay. A few minutes later, she engaged the battleship Haruna, took a 14-in hit forward that went clean through her bow above the waterline, and finished the action down by the head with her anchors dragging in the sea, and her forward magazine flooded.

And she survived. She was the only one of the three destroyers that did. Something else was happening to the American ships that nobody had planned for and that the Japanese never diagnosed. Curita’s battleships were firing armor-piercing shells because they had been loaded for a fleet action against armored ships.

An armor-piercing shell is fused to detonate after it has punched through steel plate, fired into an unarmored merchant hull. A great many of them went in one side and out the other without arming at all. Khenan Bay took somewhere between 13 and 15 major caliber hits and stayed afloat and underway. White planes was straddled repeatedly, took splinter damage and kept launching aircraft.

The escort carriers were being hit by the heaviest naval artillery in existence and were in a number of cases being punctured rather than destroyed. White planes even scored with her single 5-in stern gun, putting several rounds into Chokey at short range. The armor they did not have was in a narrow and grotesque sense protecting them. The destroyer escort Samuel B.

Roberts closed to within 5,300 yards of the heavy cruiser Choy, point blank range for an 8-in gun, fired her three torpedoes, and then simply stayed there, firing her two 5-in guns at Chokai’s superructure. She fired 608 rounds. Toward the end, her gun crews were loading by hand without power in a mount that had been ordered abandoned.

At 09 duro, a 14-in salvo from Congo hit Roberts and opened her side. She sank at 10:05. Meanwhile, the carriers were running for their lives at 19 knots, and one of them did not make it. Gambia Bay came under accurate fire from the heavy cruiser Chukuma at around 0810. Without armor, every hit went through her.

She lost power, fell out of formation, and rolled over at 0907. The only American aircraft carrier of the war to be sunk by naval gunfire. Johnston, by then barely underway, put herself between Gambia Bay and the Japanese destroyer Flotilla, making its own torpedo run. She engaged the light cruiser Yahagi and four destroyers alone.

The Japanese flotilla fired its torpedoes early at long range and every one of them missed. Johnston was surrounded and sunk at 10:10. And then at 0911, with the American carriers still in sight, still unarmored, still making 19 knots, and with nothing standing between his guns and Lee Gulf, Kurita signaled his fleet to break off the action and reassemble to the north.

What happens in the next 12 minutes is the part most documentaries skip entirely. If you want the rest of this war told the same way from the records, not the legends, subscribe before it starts. Curator turned north for reasons that were assembled out of bad information, and the assembly had been going on since dawn.

He believed he was fighting fleet carriers. The escort carriers were reported to him as Essexclass ships and their aircraft coming from every direction in continuous small groups from decks he could not see supported that reading. He believed the destroyers were cruisers because nothing smaller should have been attacking him. He believed the American formation was making 30 knots because Taffy 3 was drawing away from him in the smoke and a 19 kn formation should not have been able to do that.

He had no air search of his own. Every carrier in the Japanese Navy was 300 m north being sunk as bait. The landbased air support promised under Shugo 1 had already been spent. So, a fleet commander who had lost his flagship 2 days earlier, been in the water, gone without sleep for three nights, and been under air attack for most of a day, was reading a battle entirely through voice reports from ships that could not see through smoke.

Then his own ships began dying, and the pattern of the losses told him something worse than the truth. Chokai took a bomb from a Taffy 3 Avenger in the vicinity of her torpedo mounts. Her own Type 93s, the oxygen weapon that was Japan’s greatest technical achievement of the war, went up on deck.

She was abandoned and scuttled. Chikuma, the cruiser that had killed Gambia Bay, was hit by torpedo aircraft and lost her steering. She was left behind and went down with almost her entire crew. Suzuya stopped to assist Kumano was caught by a near miss that detonated her own torpedoes in their tubes. She burned for 2 hours and sank at 1322.

Kumano, bow blown off by Johnston’s torpedoes, limped away and never fought again. That is four heavy cruisers removed from the Japanese order of battle in a single morning. three of them permanently by a force that was supposed to have been annihilated in 40 minutes. To the man reading the reports on Yamato’s bridge, an engagement in which he was losing heavy cruisers to unarmored targets did not look like a victory in progress.

It looked like the leading edge of something larger arriving. Add the last piece at O9. Doro Curita’s radio room handed him intercepted American transmissions. Sprag’s plain language calls for help which had been broadcast in the clear because there was no time to encode them. Those messages named a rendevous and requested strikes.

Curita read them as evidence that a fast carrier force was closing on him from the east. There was no such force. Haly was still 300 m north, but the man with four battleships and 45 mi of open water between him and the invasion fleet concluded that he was about to be trapped in a confined gulf with no air cover, and he broke off.

He was at the moment he made that signal roughly 45 mi from the entrance to Lady Gulf with a clear run, no opposition of any consequence, and the invasion shipping of an entire American field army waiting inside it. He spent the next 3 hours reassembling his scattered ships, made one indecisive movement toward Lady Gulf, and then turned for San Bernardino Straight, and went home.

Count what Japan actually lost in those 2 hours and 12 minutes and count it in ships that could not be replaced. Three heavy cruisers sunk, a fourth crippled. Japan had launched its last new heavy cruiser in 1938. There was no yard capacity, no steel allocation, and no fuel to build another.

And everyone in the naval general staff knew it. But the real loss was not tonnage. It was the doctrine. For 20 years, the Imperial Japanese Navy had told itself that the decisive battle would come, that the gunline would be there when it came, and that heavier guns and longer torpedoes would settle the Pacific in an afternoon.

On 25 October 1944, the decisive battle came. The gunline was there in strength, in position, with surprise against an enemy that could not fight back. And it turned around after Samar, the surface fleet of Japan, never again attacked an American force at sea. Yamato went back to the inland sea and sat at anchor for 5 months. On 6th April 1945, she was sent out toward Okinawa with enough fuel for a one-way trip and no air cover at all.

American carrier aircraft found her the next afternoon and sank her in 2 hours along with the light cruiser Yahagi and four destroyers. 3,055 men went down with her. The largest battleship ever built fired her guns at an enemy warship exactly once in her career. She fired them off Samar at 10,000 ton merchant conversions and she did not sink one of them.

3,55 men. That is more than the entire crew strength of the six escort carriers she had failed to sink off Samar. Now the American ledger because it was not cheap and the men who paid it are owed the count. The destroyer Johnston was sunk at 1010 after fighting for 3 hours with one engine, no after guns and no working bridge.

Of her crew of 327, 186 were lost. Commander Ernest Evans, a Cherokee from Oklahoma, was last seen on the Fantale directing what was left of his ship by shouting to the men at the rudder in hand steering. He was never found. He received the Medal of Honor. The destroyer Hull was hit more than 40 times and sank at 855.

Of 336 men, 253 did not survive. The destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts sank at 10:05, having fired every torpedo she carried, and 68 rounds of 5 in. 89 of her 224 men were lost. The escort carrier Gambia Bay rolled over at 0907. The escort carrier St. Low was gone by noon. Across Taffy 3, 1,161 Americans were killed and roughly 913 wounded in one morning.

It was among the costliest single actions the United States Navy fought in the entire war. And the men in the water were not picked up that day or the next through a series of failures in reporting and positioning. The survivors of Hull Johnston Roberts and Gambia Bay drifted in the Philippine Sea for over two days.

They were found on 27 October. Men died of wounds, exposure, and sharks, while rafts within sight of each other lost count of their own numbers. More than a thousand men were pulled out alive. Several hundred who had survived the shelling did not survive the weight. Lay the whole ark out by date because the shape of it only appears in sequence.

November 1942, the keel of the first Casablanca class escort carrier is laid at Vancouver, Washington on a hull design the general board had judged unfit for combat. July 1944, the 50th is delivered. 50 aircraft carriers from one yard in 20 months. 19 to 20 June 1944, at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, Japanese naval aviation loses roughly 600 aircraft and three carriers.

The carrier arm ceases to exist as a striking force. The gunline becomes the only weapon Japan has left. Early October 1944, Shugo 1 is finalized. The surviving carriers are assigned as decoys. Kurita’s first striking force is assigned the kill. 20 October 1944, American forces land at Lee. 420 vessels enter the Gulf. 23 October0632.

Dart and Dace ambush the first striking force in Palawan Passage. At Targetgo and Maya are sunk, Takao crippled. Kurita is pulled from the water and shifts his flag to Yamato. 24th October. The Crian Sea. 259 American sorties concentrate on Mousashi. She sinks at 1936 after 19 torpedoes and 17 bombs.

Karita turns west at 1530, then east again at 1714. 24th October 1640, Ozawa’s decoy carriers are located to the north. 24th October 20, Haly takes the entire third fleet north. San Bernardino Strait is left unguarded. 25 October 037 23 Japanese warships pass through the straight in the dark unopposed 25 October 0646 Pagod Mast cighted from Taffy 3 0659 Yamato opens fire at 34,000 yd 0706 Johnston turns out of formation and attacks alone 0720 Johnston’s torpedoes blow the bow off Kumano 0735 general torpedo attack ordered

Hull and Herman and the destroyer escorts go in. Roughly 0750, Herman’s torpedoes force Yamato to turn north. She holds the turn for about 10 minutes with the fleet commander aboard. 0855 Hole sinks. 0907 Gambia Bay capsizes. 0911 Karita signals to break off. 10:05 Samuel B. Roberts sinks. 1010 Johnston sinks. 25 October roughly 1050.

The first organized kamicazi attack of the war strikes Taffy 3. 27th October, the survivors are found in the water more than 2 days after the action. 6 to 7 April 1945, Yamato is sunk on a one-way mission to Okinawa. 3,55 men are lost. Four things decided the morning off Samar and they are worth naming separately because each one arrived from a different direction and none of them was courage.

The first was the replacement ratio. Japan lost three heavy cruisers and could not build another because the last one had been laid down before the war and the yards were now committed to what little else could be finished. America lost two escort carriers out of a class of 50 from a single yard that had at one point been delivering one a week.

Both fleets took losses that morning. Only one fleet could absorb them. The industrial decision to treat the aircraft carrier as a consumable, made in an argument Kaiser nearly lost, meant that a trade of two American carriers for three Japanese cruisers was a trade the United States could make every week and Japan could not make once.

The second was the torpedo as a time weapon. Not one American torpedo sank a Japanese capital ship at Samar. It did not matter. Every salvo fired at a battleship forced a turn and every turn cost the Japanese line speed of advance gunnery solution and formation. The single most consequential torpedo of the day was one of which missed Yamato and took the Japanese fleet commander 10 mi in the wrong direction at the moment he most needed to see the battle.

A destroyer escort with three tubes that nobody thought it needed could impose a course change on the largest warship ever built. That is what the specification argument of 1942 actually bought. The third was the broken picture. Curita fought the entire action blind. He had no air search, no functional surface search radar picture, no reconnaissance, and no reliable way to identify what he was shooting at.

So he built a battle in his head out of misidentified silhouettes, exaggerated speed estimates, plain language American radio traffic he read as a trap, and the fact that his heavy cruisers were dying. Japanese doctrine had spent 20 years perfecting the gunnery of the decisive battle and had never solved the problem of seeing.

On the one morning the gunline got its chance, it could not tell an escort carrier from an Essex. The fourth was the empty aircraft. Taffy 3 and the neighboring Taffy groups flew hundreds of sorties that morning and a large share of them carried depth charges, fragmentation bombs or nothing at all. Pilots made dry runs at battleships for the sole purpose of forcing them to maneuver and keeping their anti-aircraft crews looking up.

It worked because the effect of an air attack on a ship without air cover is not measured only in hits. Continuous pressure from an unknown number of aircraft arriving from every bearing told Cura that he was inside the range of a fleet carrier force. There was no fleet carrier force. The illusion did the work.

Set the four side by side and the pattern is consistent. Not one of them is a weapon. The replacement ratio is a production decision. The torpedo as a time weapon is a specification argument. The broken picture is a doctrinal blind spot 20 years old. The empty aircraft are an accident of the previous night’s loading orders. Used correctly.

Japan lost the morning off Samar in factories in design offices and in staff colleges years before the first salvo. And the men who fired that salvo could not have won it back with any amount of skill or nerve. Strip away the maps, the tonnage and the flag planting, and what remains of Samar is a single reversal.

The most powerful surface fleet Japan ever assembled met the weakest ships the United States could put in front of it. And the weakest ships were the ones that could not afford to lose. The Japanese battle line had everything the theory of the decisive battle demanded. surprise, position, weight of shell, and an enemy that could not shoot back.

And it discovered in the space of two hours that the theory had been answering a question the war had stopped asking. Unfolded inside that reversal was a second one, quieter, that nobody noticed until it was already finished. At roughly 10:50 that same morning, 90 minutes after the guns turned away, five Japanese aircraft came in low over the same six escort carriers.

They did not release ordinance. They flew into the ships. One of them went through the flight deck of St. Low, detonated in her hanger among the fueled and armed aircraft, and sank her in half an hour. It was the first organized kamicazi attack of the war. The escort carrier that had survived the largest naval guns ever built was destroyed by a single engineed aircraft carrying one bomb and one man.

In the space of 4 hours, Japan had abandoned the weapon it had spent 20 years building and adopted the one it would use until the end. and the exchange was made on the same patch of water against the same six ships. Samuel B. Roberts lay undisturbed for 78 years. In June 2022, a submersible reached her on the floor of the Philippine Sea at 22,916 ft, the deepest shipwreck ever located.

She is sitting upright, broken at the stern, her two 5-in mounts still trained out toward where the Japanese line had been. If you want to understand how America actually won its war, not the version in the highlight reels, subscribe. There’s a new one every few days.