At dawn on October 25, 1944, sailors on a handful of small American escort carriers off the island of Samar in the central Philippines watched towering columns of seawater, stained red, green, and yellow, rise around their ships. On the horizon stood the pagoda masts of Japanese battleships, in a place they had been assured such a fleet could not exist. These were escort carriers and destroyer screens built to hunt submarines and support troops ashore, not to trade fire with an enemy battle line. Bearing down on them from the north was the most powerful surface force the Imperial Japanese Navy could still send to sea, and it had arrived undetected directly behind the American invasion fleet.
How it got there began with a Japanese plan put into motion after American forces landed on Leyte on October 20, 1944, opening the campaign to retake the Philippines. The plan, called Sho-Go 1, or Operation Victory One, gathered nearly everything Japan had left for a single decisive blow. It called for the fleet to converge on Leyte Gulf from three directions and destroy the American landing force before it could establish itself on the beach. A southern force would push through Surigao Strait from the south.
A central force would come through the islands and attack from the north. A fourth group would play a completely different role. The heart of the plan was deception. Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa commanded what was called the Northern Force, built around four carriers, including the Zuikaku, the last carrier survivor of the Pearl Harbor attack, along with the Zuiho, Chiyoda, and Chitose.
By the fall of 1944 those carriers were nearly empty of trained air groups, drained by two years of steady losses. Their mission was not to win a battle. Their mission was to be seen. Ozawa’s ships were bait, sent to draw the powerful American Third Fleet north.
Commanding that fleet was Admiral William Halsey, an officer known in both navies for his aggressive instincts. Ozawa counted on that reputation, deliberately breaking radio silence and launching his few aircraft to attract attention. On the night of October 24, convinced that the Japanese carriers were the primary threat and that the enemy’s battle force had already been checked, Halsey took the entire Third Fleet north to chase Ozawa. In doing so, he left San Bernardino Strait, the northern passage leading to Samar, completely unguarded.
No American battleships or fleet carriers remained to cover that approach. The door to the invasion area was open, and behind it a Japanese battle fleet was already on its way. The southern arm of the Japanese plan had already met disaster. Through the night of October 24 and into the early hours of October 25, Vice Admiral Shoji Nishimura’s southern force attempted to force Surigao Strait and was destroyed almost entirely by the American battleships and destroyers waiting there.
That battle pulled the Seventh Fleet’s heavy battleships far to the south, leaving them short of armor-piercing ammunition. With first light, the only major Japanese force still in the field was Kurita’s force, slipping through the one passage no one was watching. That fleet followed Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, who had reached the strait after a hard and violent day. His ordeal had begun two days earlier when his flagship, the heavy cruiser Atago, was torpedoed and sunk by an American submarine in the early hours of October 23.
Pulled from the water, he transferred his flag to the battleship Yamato. He was not the only victim of that ambush. In the same operation off Palawan Passage, American submarines sank a second heavy cruiser, the Maya, and badly damaged a third, the Takao, forcing it to turn back. Kurita entered the decisive phase already missing three cruisers and suffering from lack of sleep.
On October 24, while his central force crossed the Sibuyan Sea toward San Bernardino Strait, it came under repeated attack from Halsey’s carrier aircraft. The heaviest blows fell on the giant battleship Musashi, one of the two largest warships ever built. Hit by an estimated ten or more torpedoes and successive bombs, Musashi lost her fight to stay afloat and capsized that evening, taking more than a thousand of her crew of roughly 2,400 men with her. Under that pressure, Kurita made a decision that shaped everything that followed.
In the afternoon he reversed course to the west, moving his ships out of range of the bombing rather than absorbing more daylight losses. From above, American pilots reported the Japanese force withdrawing, a report that reinforced Halsey’s belief that the central force was no longer a threat. But when the air attacks slackened in the late afternoon, Kurita turned a second time and resumed his advance. He passed through the strait in the darkness near midnight, his ships in line, gun crews alert.
Finding the passage empty, he rounded the coast and steamed south along the eastern shore of Samar, heading directly for Leyte Gulf and the transports still unloading there. The force he led was overwhelming. It centered on four battleships. The Yamato was the largest, displacing about 65,000 tons and carrying nine 18.
1-inch guns, the heaviest ever mounted on a warship, capable of firing shells weighing more than 3,000 pounds over 25 miles. With her sailed the battleships Nagato, Kongo, and Haruna. Around them moved six heavy cruisers, the Chokai, Haguro, Kumano, Suzuka, Chikuma, and Tone, two light cruisers, the Noshiro and Yahagi, and eleven destroyers. Compared with what awaited them, the Yamato alone displaced as much as all the American ships in her path combined, and her guns could strike from ranges far beyond what the defenders could answer.
The American ships in her way were known as Taffy 3, commanded by Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague. Taffy 3 was one of three similar units supporting the ground landings from the sea. At its core were six escort carriers, the Fanshaw Bay, Sprague’s flagship, along with the St. Lo, White Plains, Kalinin Bay, Kitkun Bay, and Gambier Bay.
An escort carrier was far more modest than a fleet carrier, built quickly and cheaply, often on a merchant hull, carrying a small air group, nearly unarmored, with a top speed of only 18 knots. For defense against surface ships, it carried a single 5-inch gun aft. Their aircraft, Wildcat fighters and Avenger torpedo bombers, had been launched that morning armed for the missions these ships were designed for, close support of troops and antisubmarine patrols. Many carried depth charges or light bombs instead of weapons meant to penetrate warship armor.
Protecting the carriers was a thin screen of smaller ships, three Fletcher-class destroyers, the Johnston, Hoel, and Heermann, and four smaller destroyer escorts, the Samuel B. Roberts, Dennis, John C. Butler, and Raymond. The destroyer carried 5-inch guns and torpedoes.
The destroyer escort was smaller still, with just two 5-inch guns and a single torpedo mount. The men who commanded them would decide the coming hours. The Johnston was commanded by Commander Ernest Evans, an Oklahoman of Cherokee and Muscogee Creek ancestry and a Naval Academy graduate. When the Johnston was commissioned in late October 1943, Evans told his crew plainly that she would be a fighting ship, that he intended to take her into danger, and that anyone unwilling to go along should get off at once.
The Hoel was commanded by Commander Leon Kintberger, the Heermann by Commander Amos Hathaway, and the destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts by Lieutenant Commander Robert Copeland, a reservist who had been a lawyer in civilian life. The balance of force was obvious. The heaviest weapon in the American group was the 5-inch gun, effective against aircraft and small ships but nearly useless against battleship armor, while the Japanese ships carried 18, 16, 14, and 8-inch guns.
In that moment, these carriers and their escorts were the only ships standing between Kurita’s fleet and the transports in Leyte Gulf. The two forces met in the early morning light of October 25. Just past 6:20 a. m.
, radar on the Yamato detected American aircraft, and Japanese lookouts soon made out masts on the horizon. At nearly the same moment, an Avenger from the St. Lo on routine antisubmarine patrol spotted the unmistakable pagoda masts of Japanese warships to the northwest. Her pilot, Lieutenant William Brooks, sent a report that initially seemed impossible to those who heard it, then confirmed what he had seen.
Around 6:59, the Yamato opened fire, one of the rare occasions in naval history when battleships turned their heaviest guns directly on carriers at sea. The Japanese armor-piercing shells were filled with colored dyes so each ship could distinguish its own shell splashes, and the first near misses threw up towering columns of red, green, yellow, and pink water around the American carriers. Both sides were surprised, and the Japanese paid more heavily for it. Kurita’s ships were steaming in night formation and were still shifting to a circular daytime disposition when the enemy appeared.
Instead of taking time to form a coordinated line, Kurita signaled a general attack, leaving each division, and practically each ship, free to advance and engage on its own. His chief of staff, Rear Admiral Tomiji Koyanagi, later wrote that no order or coordination was observed. Those individual orders wasted much of the Japanese advantage. Instead of concentrating their firepower as one mass, Kurita’s battleships and cruisers lunged forward in an uncoordinated chase, strung out across miles of sea, their strength fragmented.
That confusion alone was not enough to save Taffy 3, but it gave the Americans something they had not expected. For Sprague, there was no time yet to see any of this as an opportunity. What he saw was a wall of heavy ships approaching his slow carriers at nearly twice their speed, their guns already ranging in, with the transports he was assigned to protect behind him. He had minutes to decide.
He turned his six carriers away from the enemy to the east, then south, and ordered every ship to maximum speed. He called for smoke, both the thick black smoke from his ships’ stacks and the white chemical smoke laid by destroyers to hide the carriers behind a screen the Japanese gunners could not see through. He ordered every aircraft still aboard to launch immediately, armed with whatever munitions were available. He sent a distress call in plain language, uncoded, so anyone listening across the gulf would understand instantly that Taffy 3 was under attack by battleships and needed help at once.
A rain squall in his path to the south gave him a few minutes of concealment while Japanese shells continued falling around them. Sprague knew his carriers could not outrun their pursuers for long. If the escort carriers were to survive at all, the destroyers and escorts would have to buy time by attacking, throwing themselves at the advancing battle line to force it to turn and evade torpedoes. He ordered the screen to attack.
Commander Evans had already turned the Johnston toward the enemy on his own initiative before any signal reached him. The Johnston, a Fletcher-class destroyer of about 2,100 tons armed with 5-inch guns and ten torpedo tubes, charged directly at the nearest heavy cruiser, the Kumano, at the head of the Japanese column. Closing under fire, the Johnston’s 5-inch guns hammered the cruiser’s upper works with dozens of hits. At about 10,000 yards, Evans fired all ten of the Johnston’s torpedoes, then turned away behind his smoke screen.
One torpedo hit was confirmed, striking the Kumano in her bow, tearing off her stern, and slowing her. Two heavy cruisers dropped out of the direct chase within minutes. But the Johnston did not escape unharmed. While turning, she was hit by three heavy shells, believed to be from the battleship Kongo, followed immediately by three smaller ones.
The heavy shells gutted her hull, knocked out power to the after engine room, slowed her, and destroyed the after gun director, which had to be hand-operated from then on. Evans himself was wounded, losing fingers on his left hand and suffering wounds to his neck and shoulder, but he remained on his feet and in command. The same rain squall that sheltered the carriers briefly covered the Johnston while her crew fought fires and made what repairs they could before she returned to the fight. Now the rest of the screen went in.
The Hoel drove at the battleship Kongo, fired five torpedoes at her, forcing her to turn away, then shifted toward the heavy cruiser Haguro and fired the rest. Under crossfire from several directions, the Hoel was hit again and again. One by one her guns were silenced, her engine rooms flooded, and she slowed to a near stop in the water, but she had drawn the concentrated attention of a battleship and a heavy cruiser. While they poured fire into her, they stopped firing at the carriers.
The Heermann executed the most aggressive torpedo attack of all. She fired seven torpedoes at the Haguro, then headed straight for the battle line. Coming out of the smoke, she found herself facing the heavy ships at close range and fired her remaining torpedoes at the battleship Haruna, which turned to evade. In the midst of the torpedo tracks, the Yamato herself suddenly found herself between two torpedoes running parallel on either side, trapped and unable to turn safely.
She was forced to turn away and head north, steaming ahead of the torpedoes, keeping her course for minutes until they ran out and sank. During those minutes, the most powerful warship in the world was forced out of the battle, sailing in the wrong direction, and took Kurita with her. The commander of the entire central force was carried away from the battle he was supposed to be directing, out of position at the moment his orders mattered most. The Heermann returned to the fight and engaged the heavy cruisers directly, trading fire with the Chikuma and later the Tone at ranges close enough that even her 5-inch guns could damage the enemy.
She was hit repeatedly, her bow torn open until seawater flooded her forward guns, and still she stayed in the fight. Of Taffy 3’s three destroyers, the Heermann was the only one still afloat at the end of the morning. Now came the turn of the smallest ships in the screen. The destroyer escort Samuel B.
Roberts, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Robert Copeland, displaced only about 1,400 tons and carried two 5-inch guns and three torpedo tubes. Copeland addressed his crew over the intercom, telling them plainly that they were going into a fight against impossible odds, from which survival was not expected, and that they should inflict as much damage as possible. In the engine rooms, his men tied down the safety valves and pushed the boilers far beyond their rated capacity, driving the little ship to 28 knots, well above her designed speed. The Roberts closed on the heavy cruiser Chikuma to about 4,000 yards, close enough that the Japanese 8-inch guns could not depress low enough to hit her, and fired all three torpedoes, scoring one hit.
Then she turned to fight with her guns. What followed was one of the most extraordinary single engagements of the day. The Roberts stayed among the heavy ships and fought them with her two 5-inch guns at very close range, firing as fast as her crews could load. Over the course of the battle she fired more than 600 rounds.
Gunners worked until the ammunition hoists could not keep up, then moved shells by hand. The after gun, under gunner’s mate third class Paul Carr, kept firing in local control. The small destroyer escort raked the superstructures and bridges of cruisers many times her size, adding to the damage piling up on the Japanese heavy ships, while shells fell around her and, increasingly, into her. For a time, she seemed to lead a charmed life among the giants.
The odds against her could not hold forever. While the screen fought, the carriers were not idle. Their aircraft, launched in haste, armed with whatever was at hand, attacked the Japanese ships wave after wave. Avengers made torpedo attacks where torpedoes were available and dropped bombs and depth charges where they were not.
The Wildcat fighters, stripped of heavy weapons, made strafing runs over the decks and bridges of cruisers and battleships, forcing Japanese gun crews to take cover and spoiling their aim. When their ammunition ran out, some pilots made dummy runs, diving at enemy ships with empty guns just to draw fire away from the ships and men still fighting on the surface. Aircraft from the neighboring Taffy 2 joined the attack, coming up from the south. The cumulative weight of these attacks, however uncoordinated, pressed increasingly on Kurita’s ships and fed his impression that he was facing a much larger force than a handful of escort carriers.
The carriers were now taking hits. All six came under fire at different points in the battle. Many of the Japanese shells were armor-piercing, designed to penetrate the thick belt and deck armor of large warships before exploding. The thin, unarmored hulls of the escort carriers offered no resistance to arm those fuses, and a number of shells passed clean through the ships without exploding, leaving neat holes on either side instead of detonating inside.
That luck could not protect them forever. The Gambier Bay, at the rear of the American formation on the side closest to the enemy, was most exposed. Japanese cruisers closed on her and began hitting her, slowing her and then knocking out an engine room. As her speed fell, she dropped behind the protective smoke and out of formation.
Under continuous shelling, the ship stopped, listed heavily, and the order was given to abandon her. She capsized and sank around 9:10 a. m. , the only American carrier sunk by naval gunfire in the war.
The Hoel was dying as well, reduced to wreckage and stationary under continuous fire. The order was given to abandon ship, and she capsized and sank around 8:55 a. m. after taking more than 40 heavy-caliber hits.
Only a few of her crew were pulled alive from the water. The Samuel B. Roberts, still fighting after her torpedoes were gone, took two heavy-caliber shells, again believed to be from a Kongo-class battleship, into her port side below the waterline, opening a gap 30 to 40 feet wide, destroying the engine room and cutting all power. The little ship lost speed and stopped, her guns silent.
On the after gun platform, Paul Carr was found mortally wounded, still trying to load one last shell by hand. The Roberts was abandoned as water rose around her and sank around 10:05 a. m. About 90 of her crew were killed.
She had closed on the heavy cruisers, fired her torpedoes at them, and stayed fighting them with her guns until she was destroyed. Her stand gave rise to the saying that the destroyer escort had fought like a battleship. The Johnston had returned to the fight after her early damage and became the last screen ship still in action. Evans fought her to the end.
With half her power gone and her guns in manual control, she engaged the Japanese cruisers, then turned to face a division of enemy destroyers advancing to launch torpedoes at the carriers. The Johnston fought this action almost alone, trading fire with ships far heavier than herself, forcing the enemy destroyers to launch their torpedoes early and from long range, allowing her to evade. But she was now caught, taking fire from several directions. One by one her guns and engines were destroyed.
Finally, stopped and burning, the order was given to abandon the Johnston. She capsized and sank around 10:10 a. m. Evans left his ship but was never seen again.
He did not survive the battle. For his actions that morning he received the Medal of Honor, awarded posthumously, the first Native American in the United States Navy to receive the honor. The sacrifice of the screen and the continuous air attacks were having an effect far out of proportion to the size of the American force. Three of Kurita’s heavy cruisers fell that morning.
The Chokai, damaged by gunfire then air attack, was knocked out and lost. The Chikuma, which had contributed to sinking the Gambier Bay, was paralyzed by aircraft and screen fire and sank. The Suzuka, which had dropped out of formation earlier, was attacked from the air and a bomb exploding near her detonated her own torpedoes, tearing her apart. Kurita had passed through San Bernardino Strait with a striking force of cruisers, and within a few hours off Samar he had lost three heavy cruisers while sinking only a handful of small ships and one escort carrier.
He still had overwhelming firepower, more than enough to destroy what was in front of him, and yet it was the stronger side that began to hesitate. Around 9:11 a. m. , with the surface battle still raging and the last ships of the screen still fighting, Kurita signaled his scattered ships to break off the chase and reform to the north.
His fleet had dispersed during the pursuit, spread across vast stretches of sea, individual battleships and cruisers steaming on separate courses. Assembling them back into a coherent formation took time, and that time lifted the pressure on the Americans. Aboard the escort carriers, men who had believed they were going to die watched the masts of the Japanese ships on the horizon turn away instead of closing. One signalman on the Fanshaw Bay, seeing the Japanese ships turn, shouted that they were running.
For the men of Taffy 3, the sight made no sense. The enemy had beaten them, yet he chose to withdraw. Kurita spent the next hours steaming north, then wandering over the battle area, changing course again and again as he tried to understand a situation he no longer recognized. Several pressures converged on him at once.
His force had lost cohesion, and reassembling it took most of the next two hours. He had already lost three heavy cruisers. Other ships were damaged. His flagship had been forced north out of the fight at the critical moment, obscuring his view of events when his direction was most needed.
The sheer violence of the American resistance, the close-range torpedo attacks, and the aircraft that hammered his ships without pause convinced him he was facing a far larger and more dangerous enemy than was actually before him. From the bridge of the Yamato, the ferocity of the destroyers and the weight of the air attacks suggested a force of massive fleet carriers, not the slow escort carriers he was actually fighting. His chief of staff later admitted they had greatly overestimated the force they faced, believing the escort carriers were large fleet carriers and the escorts were full cruisers and destroyers. Near 9:45 a.
m. , Kurita received a radio report locating an American carrier task force to the north, a report that later proved false but matched what he already believed. It offered him a target that seemed to promise the decisive fleet battle his operation had always been meant to achieve, out in the open sea. He preferred it to the confined waters ahead of him.
Advancing into Leyte Gulf carried its own fears. There he would be trapped in narrow waters, exposed to air attack from the escort carriers he could not shake, with little room to maneuver his remaining fleet. Adding to all this was the exhaustion of a man who had been fighting for three days with almost no rest, whose flagship had been sunk in the first hours of the operation, and who had watched the greatest battleship in his fleet sink in the Sibuyan Sea the day before. Around noon, Kurita reported to his superiors that he intended to move toward Leyte Gulf.
For a short time he turned back in that direction. Then at 12:36 p. m. he made the decision that ended the battle.
He turned north for good, away from the gulf and the transports, setting course to withdraw by the way he had come. A floatplane from one of his battleships reported only a few dozen transports remaining in the gulf, a prize that no longer seemed worth the destruction he believed awaited him. The most powerful surface force Japan sent to sea in the entire operation withdrew within reach of its objective and sailed away. On the American side, the help that never arrived had its own reason, far to the north.
Admiral William Halsey, drawn by Ozawa’s decoy carriers exactly as the Japanese had intended, had taken his battleships and fast carriers north through the night. When the plain-language distress calls from Taffy 3 reached the fleet, the powerful surface force that could have closed San Bernardino Strait was hours to the north, engaging Ozawa’s empty carriers off Cape Engano. Halsey eventually sent part of his force south, but by the time those battleships were steaming back toward the strait, the battle off Samar was long over and Kurita was already withdrawing. The ships that saved the invasion fleet that morning were the ones there all along, the escort carriers and the thin screen of destroyers and destroyer escorts that refused to let the Japanese pass.
The battle was not quite over for Taffy 3. Late in the morning, with the surface fight fading, a new kind of attack came from the air. Japanese planes launched from land bases, organized into special attack units, came not to bomb but to crash deliberately into American ships. One dove into the escort carrier St.
Lo. Her bomb exploded in the hangar deck among fueled and armed aircraft. The explosions tore the ship apart, and the St. Lo sank within about half an hour, the first major warship in history sunk by a deliberate suicide attack.
Several other escort carriers were hit and damaged in the same attack, a grim sign of the tactics the final year of the Pacific war would bring. Tallying the losses, Taffy 3 had paid a heavy price. The unit lost two escort carriers, the Gambier Bay to gunfire and the St. Lo to suicide attack, along with two destroyers, the Johnston and the Hoel, and the destroyer escort Samuel B.
Roberts. More than a thousand American sailors were killed or missing, and hundreds more wounded. Many survivors spent hours in the water before being found, some not rescued for more than two days, and men were lost to injuries and exposure after surviving the battle itself. In return, the escort carriers and their screen, along with the aircraft of Taffy 3 and Taffy 2, sank three Japanese heavy cruisers and forced a fleet built around four battleships to retreat.
Commander Ernest Evans of the Johnston received the Medal of Honor posthumously. Lieutenant Commander Robert Copeland of the Samuel B. Roberts received the Navy Cross and survived the battle. The entire task unit received a Presidential Unit Citation for its stand.
The essential question of the battle can be answered clearly. Kurita withdrew not because his fleet had been physically defeated, for it had not been. He withdrew because a handful of small ships and their aircraft, fighting with a ferocity he found inexplicable, convinced him he was facing a stronger enemy than he thought, broke up his formations, cost him three heavy cruisers, pulled his flagship out of the battle at the decisive moment, and weakened his will to advance into waters he feared. The slaughter that the odds of that morning seemed to promise, the rapid destruction of the vastly outmatched American group, was the outcome everyone expected.
What actually happened was that the intended victims resisted so hard that the stronger force turned and withdrew. The consequences reached beyond that single morning. Kurita’s withdrawal ended the last real chance the Japanese plan had to reach the transports and disrupt the landings at Leyte. The invasion went forward, and with it the liberation of the Philippines and the severing of Japan’s link to the resources of the south.
The larger battle of which Samar was a part, fought across Surigao Strait, off Cape Engano, and in the Sibuyan Sea, cost the Imperial Japanese Navy the battleship Musashi, four carriers including the Zuikaku, and a long list of cruisers and destroyers. After it, the Japanese fleet never again went to sea as a coordinated striking force capable of opposing an American landing. Off Samar, six escort carriers and seven small escorts stood in the way of a battle fleet that should have destroyed them in an hour.
By refusing to retreat, they helped break the offensive power of the Imperial Japanese Navy for good.