At around 12:20 on October 25, 1944, Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita turned his entire fleet north, away from the entrance to Leyte Gulf he had been ordered to destroy. He had sailed through the night expecting to arrive at dawn and annihilate the American ships anchored there. A year later, he told his interrogators in Tokyo that he had expected to lose more than half his fleet in the process, and that the most he hoped to gain was a two or three-day delay in the American landings at Leyte, not a victory. He believed he would find roughly 200 transports in the gulf, protected by about seven battleships with their cruisers and destroyers.
He was wrong about that too, though not by a wide margin. But on that morning, he saw nothing at all. Nothing remained in sight for a long time, and the documents explaining why he changed course are extensive. In October 1945, an American team interrogated three officers who had served on the same command bridge with Kurita, analyzing the performance of the Japanese Navy.
Their answers were recorded as they were given. Kurita himself was Interrogation File No. 9, questioned on October 16 and 17. His operations officer, Commander Tonosuke Otani, was No.
41. The most detailed answer to the central question came from his chief of staff, Rear Admiral Tomiji Koyanagi, in File No. 35. Start where the firing began.
At 6:40 a. m. Tokyo time, lookouts on Kurita’s ships spotted one or two aircraft, then masts, then the shapes of ships to the southeast. The target was spotted by eye at roughly 35,000 meters.
Kurita’s ships had radar, but it was not radar that revealed the enemy that morning. It was a man with binoculars. Koyanagi’s account describes what the fleet command believed it was seeing, and it is the most useful passage in all three files. They thought it was an American task force built around five or six fleet carriers, plus a few battleships and cruisers, based purely on visual observation, with no reconnaissance to confirm it.
Some men on board even said they were Japanese ships. What was actually there was Task Unit 77. 4. 3: six escort carriers built on merchant hulls, protected by three destroyers and four destroyer escorts.
Its call sign was Taffy 3. The carriers’ top speed was 17. 5 knots. The heaviest gun in the entire formation was a single 5-inch gun mounted on the stern of each carrier, intended for shooting at submarines.
Kurita opened fire from the Yamato at a range of 32,000 to 33,000 meters, then changed course to 110 degrees, taking him away from the shortest line to his enemy. The wind was blowing from the northeast, and he wanted to stay upwind where the Americans could not turn into the wind and launch their aircraft. The reasoning was sound. But it also gave up the range he had just gained and slowed his advance.
The Haruna could not exceed 25 knots. The Nagato could not exceed 24. The Yamato made 26 knots but was already trimmed forward because of water that had entered the ship the previous day. Kurita was also short of destroyers, having sent several the previous afternoon to escort damaged cruisers back to Brunei.
He had six or eight destroyers on one flank and four on the other, in a fleet that had begun with far more. The Americans then seized control of the morning. Clifton Sprague, commander of Taffy 3, sent his escorts to the rear to lay heavy smoke, then turned his carriers into a rain squall. At 7:01 he called for help in plain language over a voice circuit audible to everyone, giving his position and the enemy’s.
Sprague stayed in the squall for about ten minutes, and the Japanese guns fell silent for lack of targets. The first air attack of the battle had already been made by an antisubmarine patrol plane carrying depth charges which bounced off a cruiser. Then the escort carriers launched everything they had on their racks that morning, which in some cases was rockets, in others machine guns, in others depth charges, and in some cases nothing at all. Even the unarmed planes made their attacks.
These details are not just description; they are the mechanism of the battle. A captain watching a plane approach low and straight must assume a torpedo, and the solution to a torpedo is to turn the ship sideways, presenting the narrowest profile. Every turn degrades the accuracy of the ship’s own gunnery. Kurita told his interrogators that his ships were moving at maximum speed, swinging their rudders by as much as 45 degrees to throw off the bombers, and that each captain was doing this on his own without any signal from him.
The fleet dissolved into individual ships fighting alone. Sprague ordered torpedo attacks at 7:04 and again at 7:06, then once more at 7:42. The Johnston charged in first, alone, firing all ten of her torpedo tubes at the cruiser Kumano and hitting her. The Hoel and Heermann followed through the same waters.
Then the Samuel B. Roberts, Dennis, Raymond, and John C. Butler, none displacing more than 1,300 tons, went out to face a formation of cruisers and most of the Japanese destroyers. From the Yamato, the scene looked like this.
Aircraft tracks emerged from the smoke, almost parallel. They were slow, and easy to avoid. But avoiding them was also what destroyed any chance of a coordinated battle. Kurita expressed it plainly: “I left it to each ship to fight for itself.
” That sentence is the essence of the battle. There was no place on any Japanese ship where sightings, distances, radio intercepts, and damage reports came together into one picture. There was a bridge and one man standing on it who could see smoke. Three men answered these questions in a room in Tokyo, and the texts of the answers have been public ever since.
Now, consider the number that does not add up. Koyanagi was asked what speed he believed the Americans were making. He said about 30 knots. The escort carriers were making 17.
5 knots. He gave that as a reason for abandoning the pursuit: the distance was not closing, and the enemy was too fast. A fleet that cannot close range on a target moving at 17 knots is not defeated by speed. It is distracted, ordered turn after turn, by aircraft and torpedoes it cannot keep track of.
There is a line in Koyanagi’s file unrelated to this argument, included simply because it was true. Before the operation, every heavy ship had been given additional anti-aircraft guns: about 120 extra 25mm guns on each battleship, roughly 90 on each heavy cruiser, and 30 or 40 on each destroyer. Not a single heavier gun had been added. At about 10:09, Kurita ordered his ships to disengage and reform.
Koyanagi said the next two hours were spent collecting information, studying it, and assessing the situation, including fuel. They were supposed to reach Leyte Gulf at 11:00 a. m. , but they were nowhere near it.
They also had no idea what had happened to the south. Kurita had received a brief signal from Shoji Nishimura the day before saying his plan was not going well, another saying he was under attack by torpedo boats, and then contact was lost. Kurita sent two reconnaissance planes from the Yamato, one toward Surigao Strait and one north. The northern plane reported seeing nothing at all.
The plane sent south never reported. Neither returned to the ship. They landed ashore somewhere, and that was the end of them. What the fleet command believed it had achieved was its own answer to the question.
Koyanagi said they saw one carrier sinking and believed a cruiser and a destroyer had gone down with her, and by compiling later reports they arrived at four carriers, two or three cruisers, and two or three destroyers. He was certain about the one carrier. The other two carriers he had heard about from his crew. Kurita had his own method for correcting such numbers.
He told his interrogators that when official reports of American losses reached him during the war, he would add them together and divide by two. Then a new piece of information appeared, from a source no one could identify. Kurita said that at some point that day he received radio intelligence that Jisaburo Ozawa’s carriers to the north had been attacked and damaged, that Ozawa intended to launch a night attack, and that he was in the process of changing position. When asked where this information came from, he said he did not know.
When asked whether it had reached him before or after his decision to turn north, he said it had arrived after. The message often credited with pulling Kurita’s fleet away from Leyte, by his own testimony, arrived far too late to do so, and its source cannot be traced. The reason he himself gave is less dramatic and stranger than the popular account. The question, as he framed it, was never whether his ships would be destroyed.
It was what use he could accomplish inside the gulf under air attack in narrow waters where he could not use the only advantage a ship has: room to maneuver. With the landings already complete and his timetable hours behind, he believed the decision was entirely his own, that he had received no orders from Soemu Toyoda, and that it was made on the spot, not according to any plan. He cited fuel as the decisive factor in returning through San Bernardino Strait before dark, because avoiding air attacks around the islands the next day would have consumed more fuel than he could conserve. This is the account of a man given through an interpreter in his second session, thirteen months after the event.
Koyanagi, questioned on October 24, 1945 in his own session, gave six reasons, none of them Kurita’s. Among them: the destruction of Nishimura’s forces to the south, the failure of timing coordination between the two parts of the plan, the interception of an American voice message requesting reinforcements with the reply that planes would take two hours, meaning they would arrive at the same time as the fleet, and the interception of another message asking American aircraft to land on Leyte’s airfields. There was speculation that another American task force was coming from the north and might be met in open water. Oil was available, he noted, because there were no tankers nearby.
File No. 41, from Otani, mentions the reinforcement intercept and adds a fact neither of the others gave: that turning north would surprise the Americans, who expected them in the gulf. One reason given by the admiral on October 17, six reasons given by his chief of staff on October 24, from the same bridge within about two hours of each other. The two senior men could not even agree on why their communications were so poor.
Kurita said his communications crew had been split between two destroyers when the Atago was torpedoed beneath him on October 23, and that one of those destroyers had to escort the damaged Takao back to Brunei, so half the communications crew went with it. Koyanagi said half the communications crew aboard the old flagship had been killed in the torpedo attack. These are different events with the same result, and neither text reconciles them. Captain Toshikazu Ohmae, who attended the second day of Kurita’s hearing, added that Ozawa’s fleet had sent four messages to Tokyo and to the Second Fleet on the 24th, and that none of them arrived.
He said he believed the entire operation failed because of that. There is a detail in the file unrelated to any of this. The interrogation was run by Rear Admiral Ralph Ofstie and Lieutenant James Field, and in the room were an Army brigadier general, a Navy captain, and a commander named Thomas Moorer, who became Chief of Naval Operations before his career was over. The single document that might settle the debate is the one no one produced.
Japanese accounts refer to a signal placing an American task force 113 miles from Suluan light at 10:45 a. m. That is the position toward which Kurita turned. There was no American force there.
Halsey was hundreds of miles away. None of the three files identifies who issued the report, or whether it was an error in plotting or transmission. The men asking the questions, it seems, were not well enough informed on the matter. Kurita steamed north for the rest of the day looking for it.
He was attacked by about eleven air raids on the way, 40 or 50 planes per raid. The attacks penetrated his torpedo defense blisters and destroyed every heavy ship. He never found anyone. As evening fell, he gave up and headed for the strait.
He had been receiving false information for three days and had been demanding better information since Brunei. That is true, but it does not settle the argument, because what lay before him at nine o’clock that morning was an unidentified naval formation moving away from him at a speed he could not measure, and he chose to stop chasing it. The price of those two and a half hours off Samar was paid on the American side. Taffy 3 lost the escort carriers Gambier Bay and St.
Lo, the destroyers Hoel and Johnston, and the destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts. More than a thousand men were killed or missing. Ernest Evans, the commander of the Johnston, who attacked his ship on his own initiative against a formation of cruisers, was awarded the Medal of Honor, but he did not survive to hear of it.
Three Japanese heavy cruisers, Chokai, Chikuma, and Suzuya, were sunk by air attack that morning. Suzuya was destroyed when her own torpedoes exploded in the fires. The Kumano went home bearing the dent from the Johnston. At the end of his second day of interrogation, Kurita was asked about the true caliber of the Yamato’s main guns.
He said he had never been told it was a great secret, and he believed it was about 45 centimeters. He also said he did not know her maximum speed. There is one exchange in File No. 35 that sums up the entire morning.
The interrogator asked Koyanagi if he had known aboard the Yamato that his two main cruisers had come within 10 kilometers of the surviving American ships. He answered no, saying, “That was the first time I learned those two cruisers had been within 10 kilometers. ” He explained that the squall and smoke had blocked visibility, and that the only information reaching him was a report from the Tenth Destroyer Squadron saying it had attacked, without giving its position.
The chief of staff of the Second Fleet learned how close his own ships had come that morning, one year after the battle, in a room in Tokyo, from the American officer asking him questions.